This week in the War, 6–12 January 1941: Lord Baden-Powell

Posted on January 12, 2013 by secondbysecond

Robert Baden-Powell, in uniform [Attr: Public domain, wikimedia]

Robert Baden-Powell, in uniform [Attr: Public domain, wikimedia]

Youth hostelling taught me the ins and outs of making beds, cooking a modest meal (eggs and bacon!), and how to use a map to find one’s way around the countryside. Scouting was similar but broader: camping in tents during the summer, and the annual bob-a-job week when scouts and guides would go knocking, door to door, offering to perform such menial chores as cleaning windows, mowing the lawn, or putting a shine on the family car. One ‘bob’ = one shilling = one twentieth of a pound. It wouldn’t break the bank.

This week in the war, on 8 January 1941, the hero of Mafeking, Lord Robert Baden-Powell died in Kenya.

Princess Mary with girl guides, 1922 [Attr: Public domain, wikimedia]

Princess Mary with girl guides, 1922 [Attr: Public domain, wikimedia]

He had founded the boy scouts movement in 1907 to encourage community service and physical fitness in boys from all classes and religions. His sister, Agnes, founded the girl guides soon after.

With their motto of ‘Be prepared’, the scouts were ready for anything. I once owned a scout knife. It had blades that folded into the handle and a pointy gadget specially designed, I was told, to remove stones from horses hooves. I dreamed of finding an obliging horse.

Alas, I never did. The horses were gradually replaced by cars and disappeared before I had chance to help them out.

Boy scouts in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2011 [Attr: author: Stacey Haga, isamedia]

Boy scouts in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2011 [Attr: author: Stacey Haga, isamedia]

Posted in World War II | Tagged , , | Comments Off on This week in the War, 6–12 January 1941: Lord Baden-Powell

In the news: Monopoly

Posted on January 10, 2013 by secondbysecond

Player tokens from the US deluxe edition [Public domain, wikimedia commons]

Player tokens from the US deluxe edition [Public domain, wikimedia commons]

Everyone who has played Monopoly has their preferred player token. Ever since I can remember, mine has been the car—not the flashy gold one shown in the above deluxe version of the game, but the little red cardboard car of the original version, mounted upright in a tiny wooden stand. Sometimes, I would settle for the train, or even the ship—but my all-time favourite was the car.

WWII Monopoly spinner [Attr: wikimedia commons GNU free documentation license, author: Bornintheguz]

WWII Monopoly spinner [Attr: wikimedia commons GNU free documentation license, author: Bornintheguz]

The actual game I played with was the British version, made by Waddington’s, and sporting luxury locations such as Bond Street, Mayfair, and Pall Mall; and those wonderful stations—Fenchurch Street, Liverpool Street, Marylebone, and King’s Cross—as exotic and faraway-sounding to an eight-year-old as any South Sea island.

My version of Monopoly was likely identical to those of World War II that were shipped by Waddington’s, via the Swiss Red Cross, to British prisoners-of-war, to help brighten their captivity. I should add that my version of the game (purchased postwar) did have real dice, made of bone, and not the wartime substitute shown here.

A recent article in The Guardian newspaper has now revealed that the wily Brits printed maps of Germany on silk and concealed them inside each of the game boards. Helpful for the chaps who escaped under the wire and needed to find their way back home.

Looking back, I’m wondering whether my own game might have been surplus stock. If I’d ripped it apart, maybe I would have found a silk map inside.

Posted in In the news | Tagged , | Comments Off on In the news: Monopoly

This week in the War, 30 Dec 1940–5 Jan 1941: Death of Henri Bergson

Posted on January 1, 2013 by secondbysecond

No food, no fuel, no freedom—and precious little to laugh about in the Nazi Paris of 1941.

Santa was dead—maybe the Boches had shot him!—and the lump of coal in the stocking of anyone more naughty than nice would have been a pleasant treat, given the goings-on.

Maybe Henri Bergson would have enjoyed that joke. France’s greatest living philosopher, famous for his theory of comedy, laid it all out in a rib-tickling treatise titled Le Rire: un essai sur la signification du comique (Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic). Alas he died, this week in the war.

His father was Polish, his mother English, and both were Jews. The opportunities for Polish-British-Jewish humour would have boggled the mind. His overly-serious math professor had little patience with his pupil’s choice of career, famous remarking: “You could have been a mathematician; you will be a mere philosopher.”

The quote above appears in the Soulez and Worms book Bergson (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2002). For an equally serious tome that gives Bergson his due as one of France’s most influential philosophers, see Bergsonism by Gilles Deleuze. Its publication in 1966 signalled a renaissance in the study of Bergson’s work.

Henri Bergson died in Paris, 4 January 1941.

Posted in Book, World War II | Tagged | Comments Off on This week in the War, 30 Dec 1940–5 Jan 1941: Death of Henri Bergson

This week in the War, 23–29 December 1940: Christmas 1940

Posted on December 25, 2012 by secondbysecond

No two men were as different as King George VI of England and Rudolf Hess.

They had nothing at all in common,

—except that both were largely of German descent (George through George I of Hanover and through Queen Victoria’s Prince Albert; and Rudolf through his regular mum and dad);

—and except that both were, at one time, deputy rulers of their respective countries (George originally being second to his brother, Edward, who briefly ruled as Edward VIII; and Rudi being Deputy-Fuehrer, second in line after Hitler);

—and except for the fact that both had mind-boggling changes in destiny (George, against all expectations, becoming king after an unprecedented abdication by his brother; and Rudolf gambling everything on an ill-fated flight to Scotland, resulting in his being locked away in prison for the remainder of his life [which was rather English, come to think of it; Richard III would have totally approved]);

—and except for the fact that in 1940 both men broadcast Christmas messages to the people of their respective nations.

Deputy-Fuehrer Hess’s broadcast was on 24 December, Christmas Eve/Heiliger Abend which, in Germany, figures significantly in the Christmas celebrations. A traditional meal of carp and potato salad forms part of the festivities.

Hess told the people of the Third Reich that God had turned against England and that, since the Almighty had created Germany, it followed that serving Germany was equivalent to service to God, Himself.

One day later, on the roast chicken (as opposed to carp and potato salad) side of the English Channel, King George VI spoke bluntly but with cautious optimism. He told his people that the future would be hard, but that their feet were planted on the path to victory. He did not share Hess’s take on God’s view of the war, but maintained that it was the British who would be the beneficiaries of the Almighty’s help.

Anyone who has seen the 2010 movie The King’s Speech knows that King George VI had a chronic stammer that made public speaking extremely difficult. The movie describes how the King  (played by Colin Firth) hired an Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush) to help control the impediment.

To hear one of the King’s speeches from earlier in the year, check the following Pathe News recording.

Posted in Movie, World War II | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on This week in the War, 23–29 December 1940: Christmas 1940

This week in the War, 16–22 December 1940: Death of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Posted on December 20, 2012 by secondbysecond

 


 

 

 

 

Read any book on creative writing or, better still, spend time and money on a course. It’s Dallas to doughnuts your prof will thumb through a dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby to illustrate a point:

Care in selection of the narrator. (Why did Fitzgerald choose Nick Carraway to tell Gatsby’s story?).

Importance of setting. (Long Island in the 20s, fast cars, and wild goings-on).

Symbolism, inevitability, the warning signs…

And, an aspect of TGG that I have always taken to: the revelation of a character, not all at once, but bit by bit, slowly throughout the novel. (Before Gatsby even appears, he is discussed and much anticipated).

Gatsby and his obsession with the fictionally beautiful Daisy is modelled—your creative writing prof will tell you—on Fitzgerald, himself, and his stormy relationship with his wife, Zelda. Both couples enjoyed the wilder side of life.

Scott and Zelda have surpassed their fictional counterparts, and surely made them jealous, with an ability to fascinate us even now. Books and movies that mention them abound. My personal favourites: Ernest Hemingway’s nonfictional A Moveable Feast and Paula McLain’s fictional follow-up The Paris Wife. The latter sums up Zelda in a single wonderful sentence, uttered by Hemingway’s wife after the two women meet in a Paris bar: “Her edges were already blurred when she stood to shake our hands, and she looked as if she cultivated that—a fine blurriness.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald died, 21 December 1940.

His books still uplift and enchant us with a by-gone age of glamour, and of style.

I say: Beam me up, Scotty.

Posted in Book, World War II | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on This week in the War, 16–22 December 1940: Death of F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the news: The pigeon who tried to save England

Posted on December 17, 2012 by secondbysecond

Garry McCafferty’s whimsically titled They had no Choice—Racing Pigeons at War (Tempus Publishing: Charleston, SC, and Stroud,Gloucester, UK, 2002) rekindled interest in the homing pigeons of World War II.

Interested rekindled once again—veritably caught fire—when news sources throughout Britain (see The Guardian video, and also the Daly History blog) reported that a dead pigeon had been discovered down a chimney in Surrey. Its message, an unintelligible AOAKNHVPKD…, had remained undelivered for some seventy years, and remains undecoded to this day.

During WWII, some pigeons were carried by the RAF in bombers, to be released in case of mishap. (See picture above, and for ‘mishap’, read ‘crash-landing in enemy territory’ or ‘perilous descent into the North Sea’). But our trusty chimney pigeon, it is thought, was charged with bringing messages from France.

Picture the poor bird, flying through darkness, wind, and rain, across the choppy English Channel. At break of dawn, he spies the chimney-pots of Surrey. He touches down and gratefully flaps his feathers in the warm air rising from the hearth. Then a sudden gust of wind and… swoosh. He plunges helplessly into the sooty hell below.

Please. No more sad thoughts. Instead of mourning our long-dead friend, I’ll suggest a fitting tribute to this pigeon hero: We should decode his message. AOAKNHVPKD… It isn’t as simple as pigeon English, but I’ll have a go.

My first tries (guesses, really):

‘Do not land in Normandy. The Germans are waiting for you.’

‘From Carrier Pigeon 41.BA.1167: German hawk on my tail since Calais. Shall safeguard message, regardless of cost to self.’

‘Sources close to enemy high command believe German Fuehrer to wed in New Year. Honeymoon unlikely. No gifts, please.’

‘Urgent. Stranded in France with only Frenchy stuff to eat. Please send good English food, ASAP. Tins OK.—signed Bunty Carstairs, Flt. Lt.’

‘Greetings. My name is Percival. I bring a message of peace and goodwill from the pigeons of France.’

‘This is our last pigeon. Imperative you send more birds.—signed Brown Rabbit, Gaullist Resistance Leader, Banyuls-sur-Mer.’

‘Ignore request for pigeons from Brown Rabbit. Those Gaullist pigs are eating your birds.—signed Grey Rabbit, Communist Resistance Leader, Banyuls-sur-Mer.’

Posted in Book, In the news | Tagged , , | Comments Off on In the news: The pigeon who tried to save England

This week in the War, 16–22 December 1940: The Garden Hose

Posted on December 16, 2012 by secondbysecond

At a press conference on 17 December 1940, President Roosevelt attempted to lead American opinion away from strict neutrality with the idea of lending ones garden hose to a neighbour whose house is on fire.

It was a first step towards the introduction of the Lend-Lease bill to supply aid to Britain (and China).

He wouldn’t want his neighbour to pay for the hose, Roosevelt said—but merely to return it when the fire was extinguished.

The analogy was shaky from the point of view that the hose might be wrecked (Lend-Lease materials, planes, tanks, and so forth, were likely to be destroyed in battle), but bang on the money in the sense that lending the hose to save a neighbour’s house might stop the fire from spreading to ones own property. Americans were increasingly coming to regard Britain as their ‘front line of defence’ against totalitarianism.

The picture above shows FDR signing the Lend-Lease bill into law, 11 March 1941.

Roosevelt’s made his well-known ‘arsenal of democracy’ comment a week or so later, during one of his famous fireside chats.

Posted in World War II | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on This week in the War, 16–22 December 1940: The Garden Hose

This week in the War, 9–15 December 1940: “I purred like six cats.”

Posted on December 12, 2012 by secondbysecond

“I purred like six cats,” Churchill writes in his autobiographical The Second World War.

He was describing his reaction to General Wavell’s plans for a North African offensive. Archibald Wavell was C-in-C for the Middle East and then some—from Iraq to the Zambezi River. It would be left to one of his field commanders to carry out Operation Compass.

It was launched this week in the war: On 9 December 1940, the British Western Desert Force, commanded by General Richard O’Connor, attacked Italian positions around Sidi Barrani.

The enemy were caught completely by surprise. Two British divisions, the 4th Indian and the 7th Armoured, attacking Nibeiwa—a strongpoint in the Italian defensive ring. Nibeiwa fell, and 4,000 prisoners, and scores of tanks and trucks and guns were captured by the British.

There is no denying Wavell’s brilliance. His responsibilities were immense. British forces triumphed under his leadership, not only in North Africa, but throughout the Middle East and Eritrea and Abyssinia. He imagined a five-day raid. Attack Sidi Barrani and then withdraw. That was before he saw the chance of a major victory.

Even so, the plan for Compass was O’Connor’s. Equipment was in short supply—compared to later years—and O’Connor had to establish secret dumps of fuel and food. He had to move his troops unobserved across the open desert to the Italian lines some sixty miles away.

O’Connor’s forces not only captured Sidi Barrani but took 38,000 prisoners and drove the Italians completely out of Egypt. The 4th Indian Division, and the 7th Armoured (the Desert Rats) with their heavily armoured Matilda I tanks, had proved their worth.

O’Connor went on to capture Tobruk, deep inside Libya, and then Benghazi and beyond. But the completeness of his victory would lead to his destruction: Hitler had taken notice and decided to send the Afrika Korps to aid his allies; Churchill had taken notice and decided that North Africa could be safely neglected and troops and planes sent, instead, to help the Greeks.

For a time, O’Connor’s victory amazed the world. American reporters hurried to Cairo, convinced once more that the British Lion had teeth.

In his book The Desert Generals (George Allen & Unwin, 1960), Correlli Barnett describes O’Connor as a “…self-effacing man with the shy and gentle air of a scholar… He was as small and neat as a bird.”

O’Connor remains one of World War II’s most forgotten generals. He was captured by the Germans in early 1941 and spent more than two years as prisoner-of-war in Italy. He made two escape attempts, the second of which succeeded. After returning to England, he was appointed as a Corps commander for the Normandy invasion.

Posted in Book, World War II | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This week in the War, 9–15 December 1940: “I purred like six cats.”

This week in the War, 9–15 December 1940: Laval dismissed

Posted on December 9, 2012 by secondbysecond

On 13 December 1940, Pétain fired vice-président du Conseil Pierre Laval from the number 2 spot in Vichy France. (They are pictured to the left).

It served the scruffy 80-a-day chain-smoking anti-Semitic Laval right for blowing smoke in the Maréchal’s face once too often.

No one in Vichy’s upper echelons (e.g. Maxime Weygand or the Maréchal himself) liked Laval too much. Perhaps he was too collaborationist. (He is shown in the picture to the right with Nazi Police Chief, Carl Oberg).

Closer to the truth: Laval was a collaborationist who had failed to deliver. French prisoners-of-war still languished in German POW camps. A peace treaty had not been signed, only an armistice.

Hitler, at the Montoire meeting, preferred Pétain—relating to the old soldier ahead of the sleazy politician. (Lucky for Laval he didn’t blow smoke on the Fuehrer). Even so, Hitler was not pleased at Laval’s fall from grace. The German ambassador and a contingent of SS were dispatched to free Laval, who was under arrest in Vichy, and to bring him back to Paris.

In April 1942, Hitler insisted that Laval get his old job back.

He was fired permanently after the war, being tried and shot for treason, 15 October 1945. Even de Gaulle admitted that Laval died bravely.

Posted in World War II | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on This week in the War, 9–15 December 1940: Laval dismissed

Vignette: Pearl Harbour Day

Posted on December 7, 2012 by secondbysecond

“A DATE WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY.”

Today, Friday 7 December 2012, is Pearl Harbour Day—time to remember those who died exactly seventy-one years ago, and to remember the dramatic event which brought the USA into World War II.

“A date which will live in infamy,” Roosevelt called it, in his speech to Congress in which he asked for a declaration of war. Congress obliged.

Britain had suddenly acquired a new enemy (Japan) and a new ally (the USA). Churchill’s worry was that the USA was still not at war with Germany.

He needn’t have worried. Hitler declared war on the USA four days after the Pearl Harbour attack. (Was the man crazy—or what?!).

Posted in Vignette | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Vignette: Pearl Harbour Day