Is it not a good general rule that Great Powers, once they had finally and formally declared war on another Great Power (as opposed to simply invading and gobbling up various small powers ) do not withdrawn from that fight until they themselves were either defeated or successful ?
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Friday, June 14, 2013
Henry Dawson, Leo Durochers and The Virile Age
In 1939, the fiery new manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers set the tone for his famous tenure at the beleaguered team.
The Dodgers, Leo Durochers thought, were nice guys.
However, the Thirties were a Virile Age, with no time for tortoises or 97 pound weaklings.
The Dodgers, Leo Durochers thought, were nice guys.
However, the Thirties were a Virile Age, with no time for tortoises or 97 pound weaklings.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
What would the Commensal Story of WWII look like ?
Can the entire story of WWII ever be accurately and exhaustingly told, except from the point of view of the winning Great Powers like the USA, the UK and the USSR ?
Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?
Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?
Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?
Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?
Monday, June 10, 2013
It was the very ORTHODOXY of their economic theories that doomed Hitler,Tojo and Mussolini
Devotedly orthodox economist Robert Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize basically for just one very famous 1974 quote, taken a bit out of context:
But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.
However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.
In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.
But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.
So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.
But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.
Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.
Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.
Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg, orthodox economics still daily proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.
So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?
May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .
Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....
"If it is very easy to substitute other things for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world, in effect, can get along without natural resources."
But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.
However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.
In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.
But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.
So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.
But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.
Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.
Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.
Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg, orthodox economics still daily proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.
So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?
May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .
Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Dawson's commensality supplies Modernity's "Missing Middle"
Seventy five years on, WWII (conventionally 1939-1945 but actually lasting much longer) looks like nothing more than two great grist stones, Reification and Reductionism, relentlessly grinding up all humanity between them .
For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.
The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.
Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.
But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.
However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.
No wonder his view was ignored.
However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.
And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .
The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector : AND .
Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.
Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND 4F civilians , on both sides of the war
But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.
For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....
For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.
The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.
Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.
But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.
However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.
No wonder his view was ignored.
However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.
And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .
The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector : AND .
Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.
Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND 4F civilians , on both sides of the war
But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.
For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually live
Thirties Reductionism said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the Protons that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.
Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.
But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.
The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of a heterogeneous aggregate.
Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.
And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.
What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.
However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....
Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.
But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.
The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of a heterogeneous aggregate.
Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.
And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.
What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.
However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Modernity : CONCRETE Dams vs ABSTRACT Delusions ...
When was Chopin born, when did he die, where did Chopin end and his brother begin ?
All concrete questions we can definitively answer.
That's the terrible thing about individuals, the thing that made modernists from all camps hate them so : if forces one to take the coke out of one's nose and actually deal with hard facts and numbers and dates.
But imagined communities - those hallucinations shared by tenured professors and certified lunatics in the 1930s , now that was their preferred cup of tea.
One man justifies murdering foreigners because he was told to by voices coming out of the radio, the other justifies because he hears voices coming out of the national volk.
What volk ? - all of them ? - did you ask all of them ?
And what nation ? - what are its boundaries ? and when was it born exactly ?
Part of the disadvantages of a free public education is that you can now think ( supposedly) in abstractions.
Before that, country people called a cape "Burnt Head" because , well, it looked like a burnt head.
Obviously too bloody concrete-minded by half.
Instead, middle class chatterers flocked to hundreds of housing estates that were prettily named "Forest Hills" but were neither forested or hilled and these modernists don't even see the incongruity of it all.
In the 1930s these chatterers resented party politics and all its arguing over what government projects went to what specific classes and specific areas and specific industries.
"Let us have a single strong man , well supplied with scientific experts, who will supply us with the one scientifically correct answer that will serve the 'national interest' ", they cried.
It would be nice to interview this national interest, in the way one can interview an individual person or key members of an individual industry, but one can't.
It's a virtual bogus reality, like bad acid, it doesn't exist and can't exist : a distracting abstraction.
My family can rarely agree, any more than your family can : and an entire nation of 75 million Germans are even less likely to all agree about something of supposedly common interest.
But abstract groups of differing individuals into vapourous reifications* and their Holocaust is practically done for.
* To reify is to take a bunch of heatedly bickering individuals ( all the people in the world who are in some way seen by others and themselves as Jewish or part Jewish or formerly Jewish or newly Jewish for example) , turn them into an abstraction, "The Jew", and then turn that abstraction into a solid lump of concrete "all Jews in Europe are EVIL and all must DIE this year".
All moderns didn't plan Holocausts but almost all moderns mentally divided people into abstract lumps, with such thinking as 'The French Canadian' isn't fundamentally capable of handling modern machinery" etc, etc.
Remind yourself of that 'fact' as you board your next Bombardier-built jet or train in perfect expectation you will arrive in one piece.
Because an individual French Canadian called Joseph-Armand Bombardier set out to refute that abstract claim in 1941, at the height of the Modernists' war.
I think he has succeeded, don't you ?
All concrete questions we can definitively answer.
That's the terrible thing about individuals, the thing that made modernists from all camps hate them so : if forces one to take the coke out of one's nose and actually deal with hard facts and numbers and dates.
But imagined communities - those hallucinations shared by tenured professors and certified lunatics in the 1930s , now that was their preferred cup of tea.
One man justifies murdering foreigners because he was told to by voices coming out of the radio, the other justifies because he hears voices coming out of the national volk.
What volk ? - all of them ? - did you ask all of them ?
And what nation ? - what are its boundaries ? and when was it born exactly ?
Part of the disadvantages of a free public education is that you can now think ( supposedly) in abstractions.
Before that, country people called a cape "Burnt Head" because , well, it looked like a burnt head.
Obviously too bloody concrete-minded by half.
Instead, middle class chatterers flocked to hundreds of housing estates that were prettily named "Forest Hills" but were neither forested or hilled and these modernists don't even see the incongruity of it all.
In the 1930s these chatterers resented party politics and all its arguing over what government projects went to what specific classes and specific areas and specific industries.
"Let us have a single strong man , well supplied with scientific experts, who will supply us with the one scientifically correct answer that will serve the 'national interest' ", they cried.
It would be nice to interview this national interest, in the way one can interview an individual person or key members of an individual industry, but one can't.
It's a virtual bogus reality, like bad acid, it doesn't exist and can't exist : a distracting abstraction.
My family can rarely agree, any more than your family can : and an entire nation of 75 million Germans are even less likely to all agree about something of supposedly common interest.
But abstract groups of differing individuals into vapourous reifications* and their Holocaust is practically done for.
* To reify is to take a bunch of heatedly bickering individuals ( all the people in the world who are in some way seen by others and themselves as Jewish or part Jewish or formerly Jewish or newly Jewish for example) , turn them into an abstraction, "The Jew", and then turn that abstraction into a solid lump of concrete "all Jews in Europe are EVIL and all must DIE this year".
All moderns didn't plan Holocausts but almost all moderns mentally divided people into abstract lumps, with such thinking as 'The French Canadian' isn't fundamentally capable of handling modern machinery" etc, etc.
Remind yourself of that 'fact' as you board your next Bombardier-built jet or train in perfect expectation you will arrive in one piece.
Because an individual French Canadian called Joseph-Armand Bombardier set out to refute that abstract claim in 1941, at the height of the Modernists' war.
I think he has succeeded, don't you ?
Not from our war : "Second Front in the Soviet Far East , NOW !"
Dream on.
Shamefully, there was no public Western pressure put on Stalin to open any sort of Second Front on Japan from the North, during the desperate days of mid 1942 or ever after.
Ever after, as in : no major postwar historical school has ever focused on this baneful fact.
Instead Japan and Germany successfully held back, retreating very slowly, while being attacked on only two major fronts at a time.
(They themselves succeeded best when they only attacked on one major front at a time.)
Yet Germany and Japan rapidly fell apart when they were under attack on three major fronts all at once.
In 1944, Germany fell apart the moment it had to supply artillery shells to three major battle zones : in the East, in the West after D-Day in France and in the South as the twenty nation Allied army continued its push into Vienna and Munich via Italy.
In August 1945, Japan also suddenly fell apart when it was under attack on three fronts : in the Pacific from the USA, in the East by the Chinese and British Burmese Army, and now in the North from the USSR.
The Russians only fought Germans and were so carefully neutral towards Japan they won't allow US flights over Soviet airspace en route to Japan ---- even the Swedes and Swiss were far far less neutral than that, to the German war machine.
The British basically only fought Germany and Italy, on land.
The USA fought Japan, Germany and Italy full out, on land, from the Fall of 1942 --- but not decisively, until late 1944, because they lacked support from their other major allies and faced a divided American military brass and public.
Both Germany and Japan needed to face three major land battles at a time to lose, though one major battle front and two minor battle fronts all at the same time might also have spelt a faster doom.
Interesting to imagine the combined effect of a major American landing in the South of France at the same time as a minor British Commonwealth landing in Sicily and a huge Russian offensive against Germany, if tied simultaneously to a major Burmese Army/Chinese offensive and a small Russian advance into Manchuria via Mongolia, coupled with an American bomber campaign from the Aleutians and a land attack on an Japanese island very near to the Japanese main islands.......
Shamefully, there was no public Western pressure put on Stalin to open any sort of Second Front on Japan from the North, during the desperate days of mid 1942 or ever after.
Ever after, as in : no major postwar historical school has ever focused on this baneful fact.
Instead Japan and Germany successfully held back, retreating very slowly, while being attacked on only two major fronts at a time.
(They themselves succeeded best when they only attacked on one major front at a time.)
Yet Germany and Japan rapidly fell apart when they were under attack on three major fronts all at once.
In 1944, Germany fell apart the moment it had to supply artillery shells to three major battle zones : in the East, in the West after D-Day in France and in the South as the twenty nation Allied army continued its push into Vienna and Munich via Italy.
In August 1945, Japan also suddenly fell apart when it was under attack on three fronts : in the Pacific from the USA, in the East by the Chinese and British Burmese Army, and now in the North from the USSR.
The Russians only fought Germans and were so carefully neutral towards Japan they won't allow US flights over Soviet airspace en route to Japan ---- even the Swedes and Swiss were far far less neutral than that, to the German war machine.
The British basically only fought Germany and Italy, on land.
The USA fought Japan, Germany and Italy full out, on land, from the Fall of 1942 --- but not decisively, until late 1944, because they lacked support from their other major allies and faced a divided American military brass and public.
Churchill (Italy) and MacArthur (Philippines) share the blame with Stalin
Both Germany and Japan needed to face three major land battles at a time to lose, though one major battle front and two minor battle fronts all at the same time might also have spelt a faster doom.
Interesting to imagine the combined effect of a major American landing in the South of France at the same time as a minor British Commonwealth landing in Sicily and a huge Russian offensive against Germany, if tied simultaneously to a major Burmese Army/Chinese offensive and a small Russian advance into Manchuria via Mongolia, coupled with an American bomber campaign from the Aleutians and a land attack on an Japanese island very near to the Japanese main islands.......
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Could "Small is Beautiful" have topped 1930s bestseller lists ?
He is a brilliant young economist, regarded as one of the best of his generation--- educated at Berlin and Bonn and at the London School of Economics, given a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford and Columbia University, where he is hired as a lecturer.
He also has real world experience as an international investment banker.
No wonder then that this wunderkind's PhD, "Small is Beautiful", is quickly published in 1938 upon his graduation at age 27, and soon climbs the bestseller lists and is translated into many languages and is regarded as a timeless classic and an epoch-making book.
Because most historians credit it for ending the then real possibility of a world-wide European War.
But alas, it is not to be : E F Schumacher had to wait 30 years and his retirement to begin writing the essays that made his 1973 publication the Bible of our Green Age.
His book or any book* like it, simply won't have become a bestseller in the 1930s.
(* Scott Nearing's "Must We Starve?" written from a back-to-the-land farm in northern New England in 1932, might be an example of a similar book, published in the 1930s that was largely un-read in the 1930s.)
The ordinary middle class members of the world of the 1930s (the grandparents and parents of the people who did eventually buy it) were simply opposed to the main ideas of "Small Is Beautiful".
Simply knew - in their heart of hearts - that while Schumacher's ideas were well intentioned, they were also quite simply, naturally wrong --- proven wrong by Nature.
Science had proved it so : sorry, end of story.
The origins of WWII come down, in the end, to the fact that the general public's belief in the "Progress is inevitably Bigger and Better" meta-ideology was just as strong as that of Stalin and FDR and Hitler.
Only the public's achingly slow post-war assessment of the sad lessons of WWII (when that meta-ideology was given its wings to fly) led them to the position where they could come to see the value of "Small Is Beautiful" .....
He also has real world experience as an international investment banker.
No wonder then that this wunderkind's PhD, "Small is Beautiful", is quickly published in 1938 upon his graduation at age 27, and soon climbs the bestseller lists and is translated into many languages and is regarded as a timeless classic and an epoch-making book.
Because most historians credit it for ending the then real possibility of a world-wide European War.
But alas, it is not to be : E F Schumacher had to wait 30 years and his retirement to begin writing the essays that made his 1973 publication the Bible of our Green Age.
His book or any book* like it, simply won't have become a bestseller in the 1930s.
(* Scott Nearing's "Must We Starve?" written from a back-to-the-land farm in northern New England in 1932, might be an example of a similar book, published in the 1930s that was largely un-read in the 1930s.)
The ordinary middle class members of the world of the 1930s (the grandparents and parents of the people who did eventually buy it) were simply opposed to the main ideas of "Small Is Beautiful".
Simply knew - in their heart of hearts - that while Schumacher's ideas were well intentioned, they were also quite simply, naturally wrong --- proven wrong by Nature.
Science had proved it so : sorry, end of story.
The origins of WWII come down, in the end, to the fact that the general public's belief in the "Progress is inevitably Bigger and Better" meta-ideology was just as strong as that of Stalin and FDR and Hitler.
Only the public's achingly slow post-war assessment of the sad lessons of WWII (when that meta-ideology was given its wings to fly) led them to the position where they could come to see the value of "Small Is Beautiful" .....
Must Progress inevitably get mightier and wiser ?
During the truly horrible and nasty 1930s and early 1940s, at the apogee of Reductionist Modernity, this idea was the overall global "meta-ideology".
So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.
Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.
Hydro dams and buildings of all sorts, from all ideology zones, got bigger, wider, taller, heavier --- planes and ships and land vehicles got steadily bigger, faster, longer, more long-lunged : mightier.
Streamlined, smooth,sleek, aerodynamic : more athlete-like, more bullet-like.
Fit, very fit.
Business, government and military bureaucracies, from all ideology zones, got bigger and more complex with a lot more specialized and professional subsections : wiser.
During the Great Depression, the idea that Big is Good and Bigger is even Better temporarily replaced even the claim that Greed is Good.
Was this true ?
At least one prominent scientist didn't think so and wrote a popular-styled essay to demonstrate the limits to the idea that bigger was always and inevitably better.
Google "haldane" and "size" and there it pops up, as truly profound and as eye-opening as ever : a still-useful essay on science that was written more than 85 years ago !
This, despite the best possible definition of a professional scientist being 'someone who wouldn't be caught dead reading a science article in their field that is more than eight and half months old' .
Nevertheless, you and I are not science "pros" and we'll read anything useful : J B S Haldane , "On Being The Right Size".
If you are worried at all that our globe is hurling towards an environmental disaster that will make WWII look like pikers, then please, please read this essay.
You'll need it as you fight the DENIERS, who deny there are any limits on the size of a problem that Man's mental powers can beat.....
So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.
Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.
Hydro dams and buildings of all sorts, from all ideology zones, got bigger, wider, taller, heavier --- planes and ships and land vehicles got steadily bigger, faster, longer, more long-lunged : mightier.
Streamlined, smooth,sleek, aerodynamic : more athlete-like, more bullet-like.
Fit, very fit.
Business, government and military bureaucracies, from all ideology zones, got bigger and more complex with a lot more specialized and professional subsections : wiser.
During the Great Depression, the idea that Big is Good and Bigger is even Better temporarily replaced even the claim that Greed is Good.
Was this true ?
At least one prominent scientist didn't think so and wrote a popular-styled essay to demonstrate the limits to the idea that bigger was always and inevitably better.
Google "haldane" and "size" and there it pops up, as truly profound and as eye-opening as ever : a still-useful essay on science that was written more than 85 years ago !
This, despite the best possible definition of a professional scientist being 'someone who wouldn't be caught dead reading a science article in their field that is more than eight and half months old' .
Nevertheless, you and I are not science "pros" and we'll read anything useful : J B S Haldane , "On Being The Right Size".
If you are worried at all that our globe is hurling towards an environmental disaster that will make WWII look like pikers, then please, please read this essay.
You'll need it as you fight the DENIERS, who deny there are any limits on the size of a problem that Man's mental powers can beat.....
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Islands and WWII : did anything else important happen (yawn) ?
For hundreds of millions of avid newspaper readers during WWII, an atlas was essential to follow the conflict's global course.
Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, most of the battles - took place over, around and on islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.
(The battle for Tarawa Atoll saw almost 10,000 casualties spread over its meagre 500 acres.)
An atlas (and a magnifying glass) was essential to make sense of it all.
Admittedly, the Eastern Front can be understood completely without once referencing a single island but no other major war front can say the same.
Consider, just for one example, why bombers were based in Yorkshire to bomb Hamburg.
It was because this maximized the amount of "Flak-free" water between the bomber base on the island of Britain and its target on the coastline of the mainland.
So, a war decided by actions involving hundreds of strategic but tiny islands scattered all over the globe in the most unlikely of places.
That isn't something easy to blend with the popular view of WWII was holds it was all about the clash of a few Titans going at it, head to head.
Only a commensal history of 1939-1945 can blend the story of the Great Powers with the stories of the tiniest of powers, to make a truly coherent account of those years.....
Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, most of the battles - took place over, around and on islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.
(The battle for Tarawa Atoll saw almost 10,000 casualties spread over its meagre 500 acres.)
An atlas (and a magnifying glass) was essential to make sense of it all.
Admittedly, the Eastern Front can be understood completely without once referencing a single island but no other major war front can say the same.
Consider, just for one example, why bombers were based in Yorkshire to bomb Hamburg.
It was because this maximized the amount of "Flak-free" water between the bomber base on the island of Britain and its target on the coastline of the mainland.
So, a war decided by actions involving hundreds of strategic but tiny islands scattered all over the globe in the most unlikely of places.
That isn't something easy to blend with the popular view of WWII was holds it was all about the clash of a few Titans going at it, head to head.
Only a commensal history of 1939-1945 can blend the story of the Great Powers with the stories of the tiniest of powers, to make a truly coherent account of those years.....
a Commensal history of WWII includes the small and the great, the hubristic and the nimble
To render the sprawling activities of WWII palatable to digestion (because even the most devoted of readers have their limits) the tendency of authors is to show the war as seen through the eyes of the Great Powers and the Great Men.
And as seen through the eyes of those wisest of Wise Men, the scientists.
A commensal history of 1939-1945 should also start with a war between a handful of Great Men and Great Powers, because that is the way it all began.
But, to be fully accurate, it should also end in a confused co-mingling of the actions of the decisive small as well as those of the chastened great.
It should end, in other words, as a salient shock to the majority of the world who, in 1939 , were reluctantly convinced it was simple a natural fact that Bigger was always Better and that Might was always ultimately Right.
It should even shock at least some of the youngest of the scientists, those not yet set in their ways , to look again at the supposed science behind the claim Bigger is Better....
And as seen through the eyes of those wisest of Wise Men, the scientists.
A commensal history of 1939-1945 should also start with a war between a handful of Great Men and Great Powers, because that is the way it all began.
But, to be fully accurate, it should also end in a confused co-mingling of the actions of the decisive small as well as those of the chastened great.
It should end, in other words, as a salient shock to the majority of the world who, in 1939 , were reluctantly convinced it was simple a natural fact that Bigger was always Better and that Might was always ultimately Right.
It should even shock at least some of the youngest of the scientists, those not yet set in their ways , to look again at the supposed science behind the claim Bigger is Better....
Monday, May 27, 2013
Coalitions, not Combat, lost and won WWII
England and pre-1937 Germany definitely started and then attempted to direct World War Two throughout , but they certainly didn't win or lose this truly world-wide war, not all on their tiny , tiny own.
Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.
Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.
In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.
In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.
If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.
Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".
The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.
But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.
Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.
They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.
Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.
But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.
Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.
Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.
The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.
Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.
And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.
Who would have won WWII then ?
Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.
Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.
In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.
In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.
If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.
Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".
The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.
But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.
Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.
They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.
Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.
But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.
Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.
Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.
The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.
Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.
And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.
Who would have won WWII then ?
Friday, May 24, 2013
WWII's the Mighty and the Wise "confounded" by bacteria and bazooka Resistance Movements
It is clear now that WWII's twin defeats of Sulfa drugs and Armoured tanks by the bacterial and bazooka "Resistance Movements" spelt the beginning of the end for prewar Reductionist cum Constructionist Modernity.
(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the commensality of reality till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.
Sir Edward Mellanby , mentor of Dawson's rival Sir Howard Florey and head of Britain's agenda-setting MRC (Medical Research Council) from 1933 to 1949, famously claimed in the late 1930s that the synthesis of the sulfa drugs meant we could soon close all our infectious hospitals and kiss infection deaths goodbye.
But by 1943, Bacterial Resistance rendered the sulfa drugs almost useless and allowed penicillin's vast family of antibiotics to become the first port of call for the never ending new strains of bacterial death , though we are still racing very hard to produce new antibiotics to match ever new bacterial resistance.
And always will : that is the way of Commensality Modernity , the way of real reality.
The armoured tank, immune to mere infantry weapons and the indirect fire of artillery, was widely proclaimed as the major reason why the Great Powers would always quickly and easily overrun small powers, particularly those small powers without natural barriers to easy tank passage.
But by 1943 the Bazooka Resistance, today represented by the soviet-era RPG 7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade seen in every revolution and insurrection, transformed that certitude.
The light, man-carriable , easily concealed bazooka-style anti-tank weapons ensures that an invading Great Power would now have a very tough time invading and successfully occupying a small power.
Tanks would now have a tough time evading the lethal bazooka --- particularly in rocky hilly mountain valley roads, in muddy swamps and while making their way along narrow forests and jungle trails.
Above all the tank was now incredibly vulnerable to hand-held anti-tank weapons while threading their way through the built-up urban areas found in even the flattest, smallest and barest of small powers.
Reductionist/Constructionist Modernity held that effectively reality was binary, with Particle Physicists at one end and Plasma Particles at the other, and everything else in between being basically useless mouths or useless molecules.
But the medium sized stuff in between had proved unwilling to just go away and had gummed up the works of both the Axis and Allied great powers during WWII, again and again.
I rather doubt that commensal expert and infantry veteran Henry Dawson was truly surprised.....
(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the commensality of reality till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.
Sir Edward Mellanby , mentor of Dawson's rival Sir Howard Florey and head of Britain's agenda-setting MRC (Medical Research Council) from 1933 to 1949, famously claimed in the late 1930s that the synthesis of the sulfa drugs meant we could soon close all our infectious hospitals and kiss infection deaths goodbye.
But by 1943, Bacterial Resistance rendered the sulfa drugs almost useless and allowed penicillin's vast family of antibiotics to become the first port of call for the never ending new strains of bacterial death , though we are still racing very hard to produce new antibiotics to match ever new bacterial resistance.
And always will : that is the way of Commensality Modernity , the way of real reality.
The armoured tank, immune to mere infantry weapons and the indirect fire of artillery, was widely proclaimed as the major reason why the Great Powers would always quickly and easily overrun small powers, particularly those small powers without natural barriers to easy tank passage.
But by 1943 the Bazooka Resistance, today represented by the soviet-era RPG 7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade seen in every revolution and insurrection, transformed that certitude.
The light, man-carriable , easily concealed bazooka-style anti-tank weapons ensures that an invading Great Power would now have a very tough time invading and successfully occupying a small power.
Tanks would now have a tough time evading the lethal bazooka --- particularly in rocky hilly mountain valley roads, in muddy swamps and while making their way along narrow forests and jungle trails.
Above all the tank was now incredibly vulnerable to hand-held anti-tank weapons while threading their way through the built-up urban areas found in even the flattest, smallest and barest of small powers.
Reductionist/Constructionist Modernity held that effectively reality was binary, with Particle Physicists at one end and Plasma Particles at the other, and everything else in between being basically useless mouths or useless molecules.
But the medium sized stuff in between had proved unwilling to just go away and had gummed up the works of both the Axis and Allied great powers during WWII, again and again.
I rather doubt that commensal expert and infantry veteran Henry Dawson was truly surprised.....
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
WWII : Constructionists vs Commensalists
Reductionism, still the philosophy of today's Popular Science, has admittedly had a lot of glass-half-filled success in the last few centuries.
It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.
But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.
It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.
What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.
To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.
A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.
But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.
But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.
But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.
Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.
The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.
Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)
This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.
Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.
But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.
Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.
Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.
Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.
In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).
I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.
Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma), with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....
It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.
But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.
It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.
What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.
To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.
A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.
But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.
But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.
But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.
Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.
The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.
Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)
This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.
Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.
But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.
Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.
Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.
Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.
In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).
I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.
Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma), with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....
WWII Brooklyn to be home to war's biggest killing machine or war's smallest life-saver ?
In the end, the Borough of Brooklyn (NYC) became home to both : the Iowa class of battleships and the home of most of the war's penicillin.
But it had been a near run thing ; this battle over the moral soul of Brooklyn.
After all, from the beginning of the war, the leaders of the Great Powers (Churchill, FDR,Tojo,Stalin and Hitler) were determined to show the world what the greatest entities on Earth could do, if they set their mind to it.
WWII is proof that they succeeded in spades .
Opposing them, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was also determined to show the world something too.
In this case, just what the world's smallest,weakest entities (cells of penicillium fungi) were also capable of.
So, as part of that Great Power display of massive size and killing force, the USA had commissioned the last series of battleships it ever built : heavily gunned, heavily armoured and extremely fast.
No war machine has ever been built that was better at going in, taking huge punishment, and still delivering lethal blows in return.
If the editors of machine-porn publications like Popular Mechanics are capable of having wet dreams, the Iowa class battleships were what they (and their mostly male readers) had wet dreams over.
The Iowa class was an extremely potent blend of what a battleship needs to shine and the design (now 75 years old) must have worked because WWII-built ships of that class remain to this day , still in reserve, ready to go back in action.
The Brooklyn Naval Yard built the two most famous, the USS Iowa itself and the USS Missouri ("Big Mo") --- they took 70,000 people in the huge yard several years to do so, working around the clock.
It was the war-related work that the Borough of Brooklyn liked best to be remembered for.
But in a small discarded ice-making plant in another less well known part of the Borough, another item of war was made and shipped all over the world - spreading the good word about Brooklyn in places the USS Iowa class couldn't even think of going.
On a corner of Marcy Avenue was a improvised plant that the then tiny Charles Pfizer Company cobbled together to make naturally-made penicillin (penicillin made by Dawson's little fungi cells) as fast as Pfizer could, as hard as Pfizer could, starting in March 1944.
By June 6th of that same year, natural penicillin underwent its first mass clinical trials : a baptism literally of fire.
Because 80% of the penicillin that came ashore on the Normandy beaches that day was made in the Pfizer Marcy Avenue ice plant.
And Pfizer's naturally-made penicillin continued to be the largest single source of that life saving medicine, around the world, for the remainder of the war.
It doesn't take much natural penicillin to save a life in 1944 - a gram will do nicely - and a tiny glass ampoule, the world's smallest lifesaver, will easily hold it.
By contrast, a full loaded USS Iowa weighed 25 billion grams.
From his luxury apartment high above the exclusive Prospect Slopes area of Brooklyn, the manufacturing head of Pfizer, John L Smith, could easily see the building of the USS Iowa and USS Missouri .
Perhaps as a result he felt that Brooklyn was pulling more than its weight in the effort to stop Hitler and Tojo.
A cautious, frugal man, he wasn't about to bet the shop against the best brains in the world drug industry by producing massive amounts of natural penicillin when the smart money said cheaper synthetic penicillin was only another test tube away.
Sure Henry Dawson was always on his case, urging him to mass produce natural penicillin now, because a ampoule in the doctor's hand was worth a million in the mind of some drug company chemist.
"People are dying needlessly, daily, all over the world because the sulfa drugs are meeting more and more bacterial resistance and there will never be anymore new sulfas in the pipeline."
But John L long resisted (even if his wife was perhaps more open to Dawson's appeal) .
Maybe Smith was feeling that Pfizer had already done enough for the boys overseas, because didn't the firm's exclusive citric acid fuel the cold soda pops that all the overseas GIs, wounded or healthy, craved so avidly?
Soda pops hit the spot for sure, but to a GI dying of blood poisoning, only penicillin could really save their lives.
What if Smith's sole surviving daughter shipped out as a nurse and got seriously ill ?
Would she be grateful to her dad for providing the cold soda pop that eased her dying moments or would she have preferred the penicillin that could have saved her life, if only her father had been more decisive?
But nothing Dawson said seemed to have cut much ice with Smith.
Not until the plight of a dying two year old , saved by penicillin, touched Smith's heart, along with the rest of the world, in mid-August 1943.
Perhaps the crisis for the two parents of young Patty Malone reminded Mr and Mrs Smith all too vividly of the similar agony they went through a dozen years earlier with their first daughter, who died from a disease that penicillin could have saved her from.
Something must have clicked in the soul of John L, because despite strong reports that synthetic penicillin actually was 'just around the corner' this time, Smith suddenly committed Pfizer to an all out effort to mass produce natural penicillin both for the boys overseas by D-Day and for those dying back home for lack of it.
Smith's beloved Dodgers went on to chokedlike never before, during that summer of 1944, but Brooklyn (the Borough) scored big in its own extended road trip.
'Knocked them alive' in fact, in places like Omaha, Utah, Juno, Silver and Gold ....
But it had been a near run thing ; this battle over the moral soul of Brooklyn.
After all, from the beginning of the war, the leaders of the Great Powers (Churchill, FDR,Tojo,Stalin and Hitler) were determined to show the world what the greatest entities on Earth could do, if they set their mind to it.
WWII is proof that they succeeded in spades .
Opposing them, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was also determined to show the world something too.
In this case, just what the world's smallest,weakest entities (cells of penicillium fungi) were also capable of.
So, as part of that Great Power display of massive size and killing force, the USA had commissioned the last series of battleships it ever built : heavily gunned, heavily armoured and extremely fast.
No war machine has ever been built that was better at going in, taking huge punishment, and still delivering lethal blows in return.
If the editors of machine-porn publications like Popular Mechanics are capable of having wet dreams, the Iowa class battleships were what they (and their mostly male readers) had wet dreams over.
The Iowa class was an extremely potent blend of what a battleship needs to shine and the design (now 75 years old) must have worked because WWII-built ships of that class remain to this day , still in reserve, ready to go back in action.
The Brooklyn Naval Yard built the two most famous, the USS Iowa itself and the USS Missouri ("Big Mo") --- they took 70,000 people in the huge yard several years to do so, working around the clock.
It was the war-related work that the Borough of Brooklyn liked best to be remembered for.
But in a small discarded ice-making plant in another less well known part of the Borough, another item of war was made and shipped all over the world - spreading the good word about Brooklyn in places the USS Iowa class couldn't even think of going.
On a corner of Marcy Avenue was a improvised plant that the then tiny Charles Pfizer Company cobbled together to make naturally-made penicillin (penicillin made by Dawson's little fungi cells) as fast as Pfizer could, as hard as Pfizer could, starting in March 1944.
By June 6th of that same year, natural penicillin underwent its first mass clinical trials : a baptism literally of fire.
Because 80% of the penicillin that came ashore on the Normandy beaches that day was made in the Pfizer Marcy Avenue ice plant.
And Pfizer's naturally-made penicillin continued to be the largest single source of that life saving medicine, around the world, for the remainder of the war.
It doesn't take much natural penicillin to save a life in 1944 - a gram will do nicely - and a tiny glass ampoule, the world's smallest lifesaver, will easily hold it.
By contrast, a full loaded USS Iowa weighed 25 billion grams.
From his luxury apartment high above the exclusive Prospect Slopes area of Brooklyn, the manufacturing head of Pfizer, John L Smith, could easily see the building of the USS Iowa and USS Missouri .
Perhaps as a result he felt that Brooklyn was pulling more than its weight in the effort to stop Hitler and Tojo.
A cautious, frugal man, he wasn't about to bet the shop against the best brains in the world drug industry by producing massive amounts of natural penicillin when the smart money said cheaper synthetic penicillin was only another test tube away.
Sure Henry Dawson was always on his case, urging him to mass produce natural penicillin now, because a ampoule in the doctor's hand was worth a million in the mind of some drug company chemist.
"People are dying needlessly, daily, all over the world because the sulfa drugs are meeting more and more bacterial resistance and there will never be anymore new sulfas in the pipeline."
But John L long resisted (even if his wife was perhaps more open to Dawson's appeal) .
Maybe Smith was feeling that Pfizer had already done enough for the boys overseas, because didn't the firm's exclusive citric acid fuel the cold soda pops that all the overseas GIs, wounded or healthy, craved so avidly?
Soda pops hit the spot for sure, but to a GI dying of blood poisoning, only penicillin could really save their lives.
What if Smith's sole surviving daughter shipped out as a nurse and got seriously ill ?
Would she be grateful to her dad for providing the cold soda pop that eased her dying moments or would she have preferred the penicillin that could have saved her life, if only her father had been more decisive?
But nothing Dawson said seemed to have cut much ice with Smith.
Not until the plight of a dying two year old , saved by penicillin, touched Smith's heart, along with the rest of the world, in mid-August 1943.
Perhaps the crisis for the two parents of young Patty Malone reminded Mr and Mrs Smith all too vividly of the similar agony they went through a dozen years earlier with their first daughter, who died from a disease that penicillin could have saved her from.
Something must have clicked in the soul of John L, because despite strong reports that synthetic penicillin actually was 'just around the corner' this time, Smith suddenly committed Pfizer to an all out effort to mass produce natural penicillin both for the boys overseas by D-Day and for those dying back home for lack of it.
Smith's beloved Dodgers went on to chokedlike never before, during that summer of 1944, but Brooklyn (the Borough) scored big in its own extended road trip.
'Knocked them alive' in fact, in places like Omaha, Utah, Juno, Silver and Gold ....
Thursday, May 16, 2013
BAZOOKA, not A-Bomb or V-2, most important new weapon of WWII
Because the Great Imperial Powers who began and fought WWII had done so under the mantra that "bigger is better", they were hardly shaken by the emergence (near the war's end) of the A-Bomb and the V-2, surely two of the biggest, most expensive and complex weapons systems ever built up to then.
For the emergence of these style of weapons merely supported their post-1945 expectations of eternal dominance over other smaller nations and over their own colonies and subservient satellites.
With 20/20 hindsight, they should have been much more worried about other much smaller, much cheaper, much simpler weapons that emerged out of WWII : like the bazooka , above all.
Before discussing this counter-intuitive supposition, let us briefly mention some other "weapons" that surfaced during WWII.
Weapons like the art of successful low-tech microfilming, the development of inflatable rubber boats and of reliable parachutes, and the arrival of long distance radio transmitters of very small (concealable) sizes.
These all sound more like the art of spies and they are.
All that and more, much more.
Spies, Saboteurs,Resistance, Fifth Columnists,Quislings, Partisans, Guerrillas, National Liberation Armies, Commandos, Coast Watchers, Assassins, Double Agents, Governments-In-Exile.
All words we grew to hear often in WWII, most of them creations encouraged (fools !) by the Great Imperial Powers.
And a concept much in use during WWII, but not described in these terms : Technicals.
(The word means the use of essential hence widely available civilian technology to wage military combat --- such as using civilian trucks and cars to mount heavy infantry weapons.)
But it should also include, for example, the use of cell phones to set off remote bombs, the use of common diesel fuel and farm fertilizer to make those bombs and much more besides.
For its use in WWII, I am thinking about our normally incredibly complex civilian telephone systems.
So in places like the Netherlands they were successfully used, right under the noses of the bewildered Germans, by the Resistance.
The miniaturization of civilian (and sometimes military) technology, promoted mostly by the Great Imperial Powers, came back to bite them in the rear during and after WWII.
Asymmetrical warfare has actually been around forever but had almost always been a top-down affair, with bigger imperial powers easily beating smaller colonial forces.
In the air and on the High Seas, the top still basically dominates the bottom.
But unlike birds and fishes, none of us humans actually lives in the air or on the High Seas.
On land, asymmetrical warfare now swings both ways and the smaller forces can often best - in the long run - a bigger more sophisticated force intent on occupying their land.
There are many reasons why but they all come down to the fact that the ordinary foot soldier - dismissed by all sides in 1940 in favour of the mechanized army - is back and he/she is as small, mobile and elusive as ever but is now armed to destroy the big and the mechanical.
WWII saw the development of 'heavy' machine guns that weren't actually that heavy or expensive or required large crews to move and operate but actually kicked an even bigger punch, despite all that.
The infamous MG 42 of Germany being the parent of them all.
The Stokes mortar, (today best know in the 81 mm mortar version) was invented in WWI by an complete amateur and eventually replaced a 1000 years of very heavy ,very useless mortars.
It gave the infantry an extremely lethal artillery piece that was well suited for untrained soldiers and infantry fighting conditions and was cheap and light enough to carry around by a crew of three.
(Or less - the smallest 50 mm size - the forerunner of today's shotgun style grenade launcher, was easily carried about and operated by one person).
Improved optics, together with better bullets and propellant powders has made the bolt action/ single shot anti-personnel and anti-material rifle, together with the sniper pair operating it, about the best return on investment of any weapon known.
Nothing can appear to be more simple and crude and yet more effective.
But none of this cut any ice in 1940-1941 , not after the world's best military minds digested the response of the best regular (professional) infantry forces in the world to the tiny Panzer I and Japanese Ha-Go 95s, both regarded (even then) as light (ie small) tanks, yet the actual tanks that won the Blitzkrieg and the Japanese's early shock triumphs in places like Malaysia.
Put simply, over and over again the regular infantry panicked and ran at the mere sight of these tiny tanks (about the weight of a pick up truck and some not even as tall as an ordinary man) , with their ordinary machine gun as main gun and half inch cheap steel armour for protection.
If the infantry had had even the American Browning .50 cal machine guns, their half inch bullets would have torn through both tanks, but the infantry did not.
Like the Stokes mortar, the Browning 50 cal is about 100 years old in design and still the frontline weapon of choice in its class.
By the by , this type of situation common in infantry cum asymmetrical warfare, is unheard of in all other parts of military weaponry : proof that in this type of warfare, public domain designs and low tech weapons can still rule the day.
The awkward to use and move heavy anti-tank rifles of 1940 (the British Boys rifle is typical of all of them) could penetrate a light tank hull, if lucky, but generally couldn't do so fast enough to stop a major attack by more than a small handful of tanks .
Let's switch to 1944-1945.
Now even amateur infantry (like the young teenagers and elderly men of the German volk troops) were unlikely to bolt on the sight of masses of Tiger II tanks, or Russian IS-2 tanks, advancing towards them, if they were occupying infantry-friendly ground.
Yet these 70 year old tank designs remain formidable main battle tanks even today, still un-defeatable except by the very newest main tanks designs.
So what gives : why should professional soldiers run from tiny toy tanks, while amateur troops boldly faced top quality main battle tanks undaunted ?
The difference was the development of the Bazooka and its ilk, the forerunner of all of today's rocket propelled grenades (RPGs).
That and the discovering that tanks are best fought by infantry in locations where the terrain greatly favours infantry and hurts tanks.
Ultimately these deadly RPG tank killers ( killers at least in infantry friendly places) can be as short as two foot long and very light (five pound), easily carried on the back of even a child soldier, quickly put to the shoulder, fired once and the launcher tube thrown away.
In 1940, the thin, cheap armour on the Panzer I tanks could be defeated, usually, by a 25 pound Boys style anti-tank rifle but to do so the Boys needed an inordinately long heavy barrel and packed a terrific recoil, all to successfully fire a tiny but very fast and very dense bullet.
But as tank armour went up and up in thickness and in improved shape and strength, it took a very big dense shell, together with a very long gun ( ie very heavy) barrel and a very large sturdy (ie very heavy) gun carriage to destroy it before the tank destroyed (or simply outran) the now effectively immobile anti-tank gun and crew.
Right to the end of the war and beyond, a top of the line anti-tank gun like the German 88mm or the British 17 pounder, in an entrenched (out of sight) position could destroy the world's best tanks coming side-on to it , in broad daylight and in an an open field.
Ie it could destroy tanks in the typical conditions found in a military proving grounds.
Oh, you wanna talk about real world war conditions ?
Not so good.
By 1943, a successful anti tank gun was way too big and way too heavy to hide or move about quickly. It was easy to see and hit and it couldn't handle being outflanked by fast moving tank columns.
Tank success meant breaking through and past dug-in anti-tank positions, not engaging them one to one.
But using the technology of very fast, very dense small shells to fly very quickly and accurately to a (rapidly moving) target a mile away with still enough energy left to punch its way through seven to ten inches of excellent armour is still the best way to destroy tanks in open field combat.
But to do so and survive, you need to take the anti-tank gun out of its gun carriage and to fit into a tank ( ie the combo becomes a tank) because only a big ,well armoured, fast main battle tank can take on other main battle tanks in open field combat without being out-manoevered.
But tank to tank fighting is not a slugfest, because the first shot to hit a tank is usually enough to destroy it and its crew : so a bigger, longer gun can destroy a tank from further away , which is the effective real world equivalent of hitting it first before it hits you.
Ever bigger anti tank guns, ever better anti-gun tank armour : main battle tank development never stops, with most tanks out of date by the time they go into production, so the cycle starts over again.
It is deadly serious, expensive, sophisticated game that only a very few Great Imperial Powers can play.
But in urban areas, in jungles, forests, mountains, hills and rivers, in soft mud or sand and in deep snow (ie in infantry friendly areas) , masses of rapidly advancing tanks must slow to a crawl and proceed single file.
Now small,light,cheap, low tech, close-up ,hand-held, anti-tank weapons of the infantry can destroy these tanks --- or at least hobble their tracks and render them immobile and then destroy them on the second or third shot.
The secret of this amazingly asymmetrical combat success was actually known for about 65 years before it was first put to work in the famous bazooka.
So the best method to destroy armoured vehicles was actually known well before the first tank was even invented and well before the Blitzkrieg.
If this weapon had been in common use in the 1930s, there might have been no quick tank-led victories for Hitler and WWII might have ended almost before it began - and 70 million lives saved.
The effect is called the Munroe Effect or shaped charge or hollow charge.
Like most science, it was discovered by accident.
If an explosive charge is shaped to implode inwards (ironically
somewhat the way nuclear weapons work) into a hollow cone shaped void it is more effective -- this was known even in the 18th century.
Munroe happened to line that cone shaped void with a thin metal liner which, it was discovered, did some very interesting things once it moved into the void pushed by the explosives behind it.
Now all the normally dispersed ( in a 360 degree sphere) energy of an explosion is highly concentrated into a thin linear jet of plasma - the liner had become a white hot bullet of molten metal moving right into whatever was straight ahead.
The plasma does not melt its way through the armour - but it is moving so fast, it is breaking through the armour just as the anti-tank shell does - by sheer bull force concentrated on a very near front.
So who cares, one might ask ? The tank is destroyed equally well by a dense small solid bullet or a small light liquid bullet.
One cares, because the first bullet needs a very large and very heavy gun to use low energy propellant powder to send a high speed bullet one mile to destroy a tank.
By contrast, the Munroe bullet can consist of a three pound hand grenade which can be tenderly laid on the tank armour by an eight year old kid : the explosive acts as an ultra high speed anti-tank gun, albeit over the distance of mere inches!
Attaching such a grenade (using an adhesive or by magnets) did occasionally work, even in real combat in WWII, but it was really a suicide mission to get that close to a tank.
(The actual explosion wasn't necessarily dangerous.)
What was needed as some way to gently propel that three pound grenade towards the tank from a more practical infantry survival distance.
Gently because force wasn't need for this anti-tank weapon to be effective and because force came at far too heavy price : it meant a big (visible) heavy (immobile) artillery piece like the German 88mm that ultimately was only safe from itself being destroyed when encased in a big mobile, heavily armoured vehicle called "a tank".
Now a rocket, recoilless rifle or a special kind of spigot mortar can easily and gently (slowly) propel a three pound grenade more than a half kilometre away without being too big (not exactly hand-held size but still under a fifty pound size for the launcher).
However to save size and weight, the propulsion method must be gentle and the grenade travels slowly.
(Roughly 30 meters a second for the slowest Panzerfaust models versus roughly 1000 meters a second for the gun style 88 mm type anti-tank weapons .)
Even with a relatively slow moving tank (remember the infantry is best at destroying tanks when they have slowed to a single file crawl), the slow moving grenade is still likely to miss the target aimed at, by the time it arrives 600 metres away.
(Neither the infantry soldier-aimer nor the rocket itself are very accurate in any case.)
So while a conventional anti-tank gun is highly accurate out to one thousand metres, the time its shell travels in one second , the slowest anti tank grenade moving only 30 metres a second is highly accurate out to 30 metres, the distance it travels in one second.)
But at distances of say 100 metres, there is a nice balance between increased survivability for the infantry soldier, a smaller, lighter,cheaper grenade and launcher, and insufficient time between firing and hitting to make the aim inaccurate.
They can be incredibly low tech : WWII versions were made of wood and tin plate for launcher and used black powder for propellant : they have been successfully made by avid amateurs in small machine shops.
And by the world's biggest powers too , the best known one is still made of wood, tin plate and black powder.
The cheap, reliable, hand-held RPG 7 has been used all over the world by terrorists and national liberation forces : it still can destroy tanks, bunkers, helicopters and aircraft taking off or landing and wreck the command and control of warships if they hit the bridge.
A single untrained soldier with a cheap RPG 7 is not the easiest target for the high tech weapons to hit : too small, too mobile, too easily blended back into the civilian population.
And in any case, hit the soldier and RPG and many more are still left to fight on.
This combo of foot soldier and RPG has become the biggest single reason why Great Imperial Powers can no longer be sure they can push their weight around in other people's countries.
One best sees this by looking at the most published WWII photos of cities being occupied or re-captured or liberated.
The incoming victorious column is always, always, led by a long line of tanks covered in troops.
The tanks make a thunderous mechanical, unearthly roar, cowing the watching civilian population, but are really merely there to provide a photo op for people not in the actual city.
If the city was actually being defended no one would send in a long line of closely spaced tanks into its main street : the defending forces would quickly hit the first and last tank and leisurely destroy all the rest trapped in between.
Photographs of mechanical tanks cowing humans in cities became essential mental eye candy for propagandists to convey the idea that the small are inevitably helpless before the steeled might of the Big.
The real truth is that it was tanks that lost WWII, not won it, and lost it in the big city streets of place like Stalingrad.
Truer , more accurate pictures would show burnt out tanks in wrecked city streets if they wanted to tell us what really happened over the course of WWII and the Big began falling before the small....
For the emergence of these style of weapons merely supported their post-1945 expectations of eternal dominance over other smaller nations and over their own colonies and subservient satellites.
With 20/20 hindsight, they should have been much more worried about other much smaller, much cheaper, much simpler weapons that emerged out of WWII : like the bazooka , above all.
Before discussing this counter-intuitive supposition, let us briefly mention some other "weapons" that surfaced during WWII.
Weapons like the art of successful low-tech microfilming, the development of inflatable rubber boats and of reliable parachutes, and the arrival of long distance radio transmitters of very small (concealable) sizes.
These all sound more like the art of spies and they are.
All that and more, much more.
Spies, Saboteurs,Resistance, Fifth Columnists,Quislings, Partisans, Guerrillas, National Liberation Armies, Commandos, Coast Watchers, Assassins, Double Agents, Governments-In-Exile.
All words we grew to hear often in WWII, most of them creations encouraged (fools !) by the Great Imperial Powers.
And a concept much in use during WWII, but not described in these terms : Technicals.
(The word means the use of essential hence widely available civilian technology to wage military combat --- such as using civilian trucks and cars to mount heavy infantry weapons.)
But it should also include, for example, the use of cell phones to set off remote bombs, the use of common diesel fuel and farm fertilizer to make those bombs and much more besides.
For its use in WWII, I am thinking about our normally incredibly complex civilian telephone systems.
So in places like the Netherlands they were successfully used, right under the noses of the bewildered Germans, by the Resistance.
The miniaturization of civilian (and sometimes military) technology, promoted mostly by the Great Imperial Powers, came back to bite them in the rear during and after WWII.
Asymmetrical warfare has actually been around forever but had almost always been a top-down affair, with bigger imperial powers easily beating smaller colonial forces.
In the air and on the High Seas, the top still basically dominates the bottom.
But unlike birds and fishes, none of us humans actually lives in the air or on the High Seas.
On land, asymmetrical warfare now swings both ways and the smaller forces can often best - in the long run - a bigger more sophisticated force intent on occupying their land.
There are many reasons why but they all come down to the fact that the ordinary foot soldier - dismissed by all sides in 1940 in favour of the mechanized army - is back and he/she is as small, mobile and elusive as ever but is now armed to destroy the big and the mechanical.
WWII saw the development of 'heavy' machine guns that weren't actually that heavy or expensive or required large crews to move and operate but actually kicked an even bigger punch, despite all that.
The infamous MG 42 of Germany being the parent of them all.
The Stokes mortar, (today best know in the 81 mm mortar version) was invented in WWI by an complete amateur and eventually replaced a 1000 years of very heavy ,very useless mortars.
It gave the infantry an extremely lethal artillery piece that was well suited for untrained soldiers and infantry fighting conditions and was cheap and light enough to carry around by a crew of three.
(Or less - the smallest 50 mm size - the forerunner of today's shotgun style grenade launcher, was easily carried about and operated by one person).
Improved optics, together with better bullets and propellant powders has made the bolt action/ single shot anti-personnel and anti-material rifle, together with the sniper pair operating it, about the best return on investment of any weapon known.
Nothing can appear to be more simple and crude and yet more effective.
But none of this cut any ice in 1940-1941 , not after the world's best military minds digested the response of the best regular (professional) infantry forces in the world to the tiny Panzer I and Japanese Ha-Go 95s, both regarded (even then) as light (ie small) tanks, yet the actual tanks that won the Blitzkrieg and the Japanese's early shock triumphs in places like Malaysia.
Put simply, over and over again the regular infantry panicked and ran at the mere sight of these tiny tanks (about the weight of a pick up truck and some not even as tall as an ordinary man) , with their ordinary machine gun as main gun and half inch cheap steel armour for protection.
If the infantry had had even the American Browning .50 cal machine guns, their half inch bullets would have torn through both tanks, but the infantry did not.
Like the Stokes mortar, the Browning 50 cal is about 100 years old in design and still the frontline weapon of choice in its class.
By the by , this type of situation common in infantry cum asymmetrical warfare, is unheard of in all other parts of military weaponry : proof that in this type of warfare, public domain designs and low tech weapons can still rule the day.
The awkward to use and move heavy anti-tank rifles of 1940 (the British Boys rifle is typical of all of them) could penetrate a light tank hull, if lucky, but generally couldn't do so fast enough to stop a major attack by more than a small handful of tanks .
Let's switch to 1944-1945.
Now even amateur infantry (like the young teenagers and elderly men of the German volk troops) were unlikely to bolt on the sight of masses of Tiger II tanks, or Russian IS-2 tanks, advancing towards them, if they were occupying infantry-friendly ground.
Yet these 70 year old tank designs remain formidable main battle tanks even today, still un-defeatable except by the very newest main tanks designs.
So what gives : why should professional soldiers run from tiny toy tanks, while amateur troops boldly faced top quality main battle tanks undaunted ?
The difference was the development of the Bazooka and its ilk, the forerunner of all of today's rocket propelled grenades (RPGs).
That and the discovering that tanks are best fought by infantry in locations where the terrain greatly favours infantry and hurts tanks.
Ultimately these deadly RPG tank killers ( killers at least in infantry friendly places) can be as short as two foot long and very light (five pound), easily carried on the back of even a child soldier, quickly put to the shoulder, fired once and the launcher tube thrown away.
In 1940, the thin, cheap armour on the Panzer I tanks could be defeated, usually, by a 25 pound Boys style anti-tank rifle but to do so the Boys needed an inordinately long heavy barrel and packed a terrific recoil, all to successfully fire a tiny but very fast and very dense bullet.
But as tank armour went up and up in thickness and in improved shape and strength, it took a very big dense shell, together with a very long gun ( ie very heavy) barrel and a very large sturdy (ie very heavy) gun carriage to destroy it before the tank destroyed (or simply outran) the now effectively immobile anti-tank gun and crew.
Right to the end of the war and beyond, a top of the line anti-tank gun like the German 88mm or the British 17 pounder, in an entrenched (out of sight) position could destroy the world's best tanks coming side-on to it , in broad daylight and in an an open field.
Ie it could destroy tanks in the typical conditions found in a military proving grounds.
Oh, you wanna talk about real world war conditions ?
Not so good.
By 1943, a successful anti tank gun was way too big and way too heavy to hide or move about quickly. It was easy to see and hit and it couldn't handle being outflanked by fast moving tank columns.
Tank success meant breaking through and past dug-in anti-tank positions, not engaging them one to one.
But using the technology of very fast, very dense small shells to fly very quickly and accurately to a (rapidly moving) target a mile away with still enough energy left to punch its way through seven to ten inches of excellent armour is still the best way to destroy tanks in open field combat.
But to do so and survive, you need to take the anti-tank gun out of its gun carriage and to fit into a tank ( ie the combo becomes a tank) because only a big ,well armoured, fast main battle tank can take on other main battle tanks in open field combat without being out-manoevered.
But tank to tank fighting is not a slugfest, because the first shot to hit a tank is usually enough to destroy it and its crew : so a bigger, longer gun can destroy a tank from further away , which is the effective real world equivalent of hitting it first before it hits you.
Ever bigger anti tank guns, ever better anti-gun tank armour : main battle tank development never stops, with most tanks out of date by the time they go into production, so the cycle starts over again.
It is deadly serious, expensive, sophisticated game that only a very few Great Imperial Powers can play.
But in urban areas, in jungles, forests, mountains, hills and rivers, in soft mud or sand and in deep snow (ie in infantry friendly areas) , masses of rapidly advancing tanks must slow to a crawl and proceed single file.
Now small,light,cheap, low tech, close-up ,hand-held, anti-tank weapons of the infantry can destroy these tanks --- or at least hobble their tracks and render them immobile and then destroy them on the second or third shot.
The secret of this amazingly asymmetrical combat success was actually known for about 65 years before it was first put to work in the famous bazooka.
So the best method to destroy armoured vehicles was actually known well before the first tank was even invented and well before the Blitzkrieg.
If this weapon had been in common use in the 1930s, there might have been no quick tank-led victories for Hitler and WWII might have ended almost before it began - and 70 million lives saved.
The effect is called the Munroe Effect or shaped charge or hollow charge.
Like most science, it was discovered by accident.
If an explosive charge is shaped to implode inwards (ironically
somewhat the way nuclear weapons work) into a hollow cone shaped void it is more effective -- this was known even in the 18th century.
Munroe happened to line that cone shaped void with a thin metal liner which, it was discovered, did some very interesting things once it moved into the void pushed by the explosives behind it.
Now all the normally dispersed ( in a 360 degree sphere) energy of an explosion is highly concentrated into a thin linear jet of plasma - the liner had become a white hot bullet of molten metal moving right into whatever was straight ahead.
The plasma does not melt its way through the armour - but it is moving so fast, it is breaking through the armour just as the anti-tank shell does - by sheer bull force concentrated on a very near front.
So who cares, one might ask ? The tank is destroyed equally well by a dense small solid bullet or a small light liquid bullet.
One cares, because the first bullet needs a very large and very heavy gun to use low energy propellant powder to send a high speed bullet one mile to destroy a tank.
By contrast, the Munroe bullet can consist of a three pound hand grenade which can be tenderly laid on the tank armour by an eight year old kid : the explosive acts as an ultra high speed anti-tank gun, albeit over the distance of mere inches!
Attaching such a grenade (using an adhesive or by magnets) did occasionally work, even in real combat in WWII, but it was really a suicide mission to get that close to a tank.
(The actual explosion wasn't necessarily dangerous.)
What was needed as some way to gently propel that three pound grenade towards the tank from a more practical infantry survival distance.
Gently because force wasn't need for this anti-tank weapon to be effective and because force came at far too heavy price : it meant a big (visible) heavy (immobile) artillery piece like the German 88mm that ultimately was only safe from itself being destroyed when encased in a big mobile, heavily armoured vehicle called "a tank".
Now a rocket, recoilless rifle or a special kind of spigot mortar can easily and gently (slowly) propel a three pound grenade more than a half kilometre away without being too big (not exactly hand-held size but still under a fifty pound size for the launcher).
However to save size and weight, the propulsion method must be gentle and the grenade travels slowly.
(Roughly 30 meters a second for the slowest Panzerfaust models versus roughly 1000 meters a second for the gun style 88 mm type anti-tank weapons .)
Even with a relatively slow moving tank (remember the infantry is best at destroying tanks when they have slowed to a single file crawl), the slow moving grenade is still likely to miss the target aimed at, by the time it arrives 600 metres away.
(Neither the infantry soldier-aimer nor the rocket itself are very accurate in any case.)
So while a conventional anti-tank gun is highly accurate out to one thousand metres, the time its shell travels in one second , the slowest anti tank grenade moving only 30 metres a second is highly accurate out to 30 metres, the distance it travels in one second.)
But at distances of say 100 metres, there is a nice balance between increased survivability for the infantry soldier, a smaller, lighter,cheaper grenade and launcher, and insufficient time between firing and hitting to make the aim inaccurate.
They can be incredibly low tech : WWII versions were made of wood and tin plate for launcher and used black powder for propellant : they have been successfully made by avid amateurs in small machine shops.
And by the world's biggest powers too , the best known one is still made of wood, tin plate and black powder.
The cheap, reliable, hand-held RPG 7 has been used all over the world by terrorists and national liberation forces : it still can destroy tanks, bunkers, helicopters and aircraft taking off or landing and wreck the command and control of warships if they hit the bridge.
A single untrained soldier with a cheap RPG 7 is not the easiest target for the high tech weapons to hit : too small, too mobile, too easily blended back into the civilian population.
And in any case, hit the soldier and RPG and many more are still left to fight on.
This combo of foot soldier and RPG has become the biggest single reason why Great Imperial Powers can no longer be sure they can push their weight around in other people's countries.
One best sees this by looking at the most published WWII photos of cities being occupied or re-captured or liberated.
The incoming victorious column is always, always, led by a long line of tanks covered in troops.
The tanks make a thunderous mechanical, unearthly roar, cowing the watching civilian population, but are really merely there to provide a photo op for people not in the actual city.
If the city was actually being defended no one would send in a long line of closely spaced tanks into its main street : the defending forces would quickly hit the first and last tank and leisurely destroy all the rest trapped in between.
Photographs of mechanical tanks cowing humans in cities became essential mental eye candy for propagandists to convey the idea that the small are inevitably helpless before the steeled might of the Big.
The real truth is that it was tanks that lost WWII, not won it, and lost it in the big city streets of place like Stalingrad.
Truer , more accurate pictures would show burnt out tanks in wrecked city streets if they wanted to tell us what really happened over the course of WWII and the Big began falling before the small....
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
'A warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' : still the best medicine
"The hyssop and The Cedars" is a book about health during our past most recent man-made Apocalypse : occasionally it is about doctors and pharmaceuticals, but mostly it is not.
For the truth is that *food* was the only medicine in really desperate short supply during WWII.
Truth is that 'a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' is all most of us ever need to reach our three score and ten.
After that, we generally do need the help of hospital beds and the pharmaceutical firms.
But let us also never forget the warm smile.
I believe that any civilization that truly claims to be a civilization must first see to it that all its citizens have that warm meal, warm bed and warm smile - everyone, from grandmother to granddaughter.
After that our civilizations are free to build all the Castles in Spain that they wish.
But that warm meal must come first.
Now we are about to be engulfed in another man-made Apocalypse , only unlike the last time , this is one in which no nations will be able to remain Neutral, aloof and above the fray.
We still have time to learn the lessons - both good and bad - from the last Apocalypse, because 1939-1945 gave us a very full dress rehearsal.
As a very active , very political , Green Party member I feel I must explain my own reasons for appearing to have gone AWOL the last half dozen years - for myself appearing to remain Neutral, aloof and above the environmental fray.
It is because I believe this book (and the lessons for us today that it contains within) is the best possible contribution I could ever make towards slowing our death march forward into overwhelming hubris-induced disaster....
For the truth is that *food* was the only medicine in really desperate short supply during WWII.
Truth is that 'a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' is all most of us ever need to reach our three score and ten.
After that, we generally do need the help of hospital beds and the pharmaceutical firms.
But let us also never forget the warm smile.
I believe that any civilization that truly claims to be a civilization must first see to it that all its citizens have that warm meal, warm bed and warm smile - everyone, from grandmother to granddaughter.
After that our civilizations are free to build all the Castles in Spain that they wish.
But that warm meal must come first.
Now we are about to be engulfed in another man-made Apocalypse , only unlike the last time , this is one in which no nations will be able to remain Neutral, aloof and above the fray.
We still have time to learn the lessons - both good and bad - from the last Apocalypse, because 1939-1945 gave us a very full dress rehearsal.
As a very active , very political , Green Party member I feel I must explain my own reasons for appearing to have gone AWOL the last half dozen years - for myself appearing to remain Neutral, aloof and above the environmental fray.
It is because I believe this book (and the lessons for us today that it contains within) is the best possible contribution I could ever make towards slowing our death march forward into overwhelming hubris-induced disaster....
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
High School Science : 'Home of the Hubris' , STILL
Science (the resulting name for the 150 year old victory of Natural Philosophy over Natural History) is widely accepted to be primarily pedagogical in nature.
It exists as a subdivision of Philosophy and is designed primarily to do nothing more that to teach students (and the adult laity) formal and informal lessons in metaphysics and ethics, 'Drawn from Nature' as Science understands it.
Natural History has had to retreat to those vast areas of useful if messy , applied technology : areas like engineering, industrial processes and clinical medicine, where much 'trial and error' is required to align classroom theory to the reality at hand.
By contrast, parents can rest assured that all real reality has been carefully airbrushed away from intro University undergraduate science courses, which together with their bigger and older brothers in the High School sciences, continue to supply the world with most of its Popular Hubris.
High School Science continues to be the 'Home of the Half-Filled Glass Science', the place of Panglossian Science, where Mid Victorian Optimism burns as brightly as ever.
High School Science syllabus setters claim that setting real world problems for lessons and exams would be too tough for young people to answer correctly.
'Let them wait till they are adult engineers and doctors to have to struggle to figure out the actual solutions, out in a real world where Ceteris Paribus never applies'.
But of course the vast percentage of students never go on to be professional scientists or engineers and doctors and get a chance to learn to wrestle daily with the difference between idealized high school science theory and messy reality .
Instead they grow up to become voters and politicians, generals and soldiers, CEOs and machine operators.
All of them, as a result of formal education (together with the drip-drip media pronouncements from the High School's fellow travellers, the science journalists, sic ) remain as deluded as 16 year old High School kids.
Deluded into believing that because Newtonian science can more or less successfully predict the paths of a half dozen placid , near-by, large planets that this means it can also predict the paths of smaller and more dangerous objects.
Like darkly invisible, tiny, unpredictable asteroids, or ballistic shells fired off twenty miles away, or incoming raindrops.
My idea of an ideal High School science course would be one where the children know less, for absolutely certain, than they did before they came in, where they fail to correctly answer the exam questions but give it as good a first try as any working engineer might do.
Because out in the real Universe,out beyond Newton and Galileo, there is no real absolute vacuum for objects to move through, and so those objects are always affected by the arbitrarily accumulated (not cross-cancelling) effects of other forces and objects---- and kids today might as well know that from day one.
The real reason why High Schools continue to focus on teaching Newton,Dalton and Darwin, more than a century after they stopped being cutting edge science, is that they impart to the students a hugely self-confident scientific sense of imperialism ; that out there is a world and a universe just waiting to be easily and safely exploited by Man's Science.
In a world where mining company executives continue to hold far more sway than do their environmentally concerned critics, High School Science teachers are going to continue to be compelled to teach self-preening, self-esteem and 'uplift'.
And it won't stop until environmentalists back off attacking mining executives and focus instead on questioning Popular Scientific Hubris at its fount : High School....
It exists as a subdivision of Philosophy and is designed primarily to do nothing more that to teach students (and the adult laity) formal and informal lessons in metaphysics and ethics, 'Drawn from Nature' as Science understands it.
Natural History has had to retreat to those vast areas of useful if messy , applied technology : areas like engineering, industrial processes and clinical medicine, where much 'trial and error' is required to align classroom theory to the reality at hand.
By contrast, parents can rest assured that all real reality has been carefully airbrushed away from intro University undergraduate science courses, which together with their bigger and older brothers in the High School sciences, continue to supply the world with most of its Popular Hubris.
High School Science continues to be the 'Home of the Half-Filled Glass Science', the place of Panglossian Science, where Mid Victorian Optimism burns as brightly as ever.
High School Science syllabus setters claim that setting real world problems for lessons and exams would be too tough for young people to answer correctly.
'Let them wait till they are adult engineers and doctors to have to struggle to figure out the actual solutions, out in a real world where Ceteris Paribus never applies'.
But of course the vast percentage of students never go on to be professional scientists or engineers and doctors and get a chance to learn to wrestle daily with the difference between idealized high school science theory and messy reality .
Instead they grow up to become voters and politicians, generals and soldiers, CEOs and machine operators.
All of them, as a result of formal education (together with the drip-drip media pronouncements from the High School's fellow travellers, the science journalists, sic ) remain as deluded as 16 year old High School kids.
Deluded into believing that because Newtonian science can more or less successfully predict the paths of a half dozen placid , near-by, large planets that this means it can also predict the paths of smaller and more dangerous objects.
Like darkly invisible, tiny, unpredictable asteroids, or ballistic shells fired off twenty miles away, or incoming raindrops.
My idea of an ideal High School science course would be one where the children know less, for absolutely certain, than they did before they came in, where they fail to correctly answer the exam questions but give it as good a first try as any working engineer might do.
Because out in the real Universe,out beyond Newton and Galileo, there is no real absolute vacuum for objects to move through, and so those objects are always affected by the arbitrarily accumulated (not cross-cancelling) effects of other forces and objects---- and kids today might as well know that from day one.
The real reason why High Schools continue to focus on teaching Newton,Dalton and Darwin, more than a century after they stopped being cutting edge science, is that they impart to the students a hugely self-confident scientific sense of imperialism ; that out there is a world and a universe just waiting to be easily and safely exploited by Man's Science.
In a world where mining company executives continue to hold far more sway than do their environmentally concerned critics, High School Science teachers are going to continue to be compelled to teach self-preening, self-esteem and 'uplift'.
And it won't stop until environmentalists back off attacking mining executives and focus instead on questioning Popular Scientific Hubris at its fount : High School....
Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...
During his brief life, (Martin) Henry Dawson managed to have three seemingly wildly different careers : in the Military during WWI, in Academic Science in the interwar years, and in Popular Science during WWII.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
And his support for the ultimately successful Naturally-produced Penicillin highlighted the spectacular failure of Daltonian Chemistry's claim to be able to synthesize anything and everything, including Penicillin.
Hubris is a terribly addictive drug and WWII turned out to be its largest, longest and most brutal clinical trial to date.
Only to date, because with Global Warming we appear headed to a rematch between Hubris and Reality, only with this time much worse than the last.
There are lessons - lessons unlearned - both good and bad - we can apply from WWII to the current rematch that might help us avoid the worst of it.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
Henry Dawson can certainly give us some of the good lessons , while his many opponents can provide us with all the bad lessons, in spades.....
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