Day 631/176 - 12/8/21
I’ve discounted my old printer to free and still no takers. I have gotten rid of the first batch of Christmas items and I will be posting the second batch later today. I figured they would be easy to unload.
The weather is also changing, finally. I’ve been running my space heater after 8pm of late and even reversed my ceiling fan. It is supposed to get colder with rain this weekend -- kind of looking forward to that. Much of my time is now taken up reviewing this blog and reformatting previous blogs into a edited down, paper format. For whom am I doing this? Not sure. Myself mostly. It would be interesting to see it all in something like manuscript format.
Day 636/181 - 12/13/21
I’ve been looking at the current pandemic numbers in SF compared to last year at this time. Quite a change. Now that we are several weeks after Thanksgiving I think the numbers are significant and they are quite reassuring. The most important number -- intensive care hospitalizations is currently one fourth what it was a year ago and isn’t even in a clear upward trend. The case numbers are in an upward trend, but it is only a fraction of last year: 79 now compared to 272 last year. I think the hospitalization numbers even include some patients from the dumb as dirt counties where the hospitals are over-filled. Why is it so much better given that we have not one but two more infectious variants than last year? The main factor is that we are mostly mask-wearing sheeple. The other factor, especially when it comes to hospitalizations, is that most of us are vaccinated.
I know that many people are not being as careful as I am, but on the whole we seem to be being careful enough. I remain optimistic that the omicron variant will be our ticket back to normalcy, but until that is confirmed, I’m being overly cautious and only lusting in my heart for meals at my two favorite restaurants.
Day 653/198 - 12/30/21
It’s been a while. The latest Omicron phase of the pandemic is now going exponential here. The numbers are astonishing considering how careful we’ve been all this time. We are now looking at daily new case numbers that are about double our previous highest numbers. I even now know someone who has had it -- they were vaxxed so it was like a mild cold with a bad headache. The news from South Africa is that this version of the virus spreads so quickly it burns through the population in only a few weeks. And that certainly is the way it looks now.
I’m being even more careful -- what I’m calling defcon 2 -- but I’m still working at the Bank Cafe as much as I can because it is also very cold and the air here is both filtered and heated.
We are not locking down to the extent you might expect, but that is because SF is highly vaxxed so we think we can get by with a lot of cases without overwhelming the hospitals. Unfortunately, the numbers we have are so delayed, and hospitalization is itself so delayed following infection, that we won’t know if we are making a big mistake until it is far too late. Just today the hospitalization numbers finally turned up noticeably and our numbers are still from before Christmas. I think the Mayor is playing this right, but we won’t know for sure until two weeks to a month from now.
The "Other" Battle of the Bulge
Recently I ran into an interesting piece about WW2 in Europe history on Medium. The author was the son of a soldier in the US Army’s 42nd Infantry Division -- while I’m the son of a platoon sergeant in the 40th Infantry Division -- so I wanted to be supportive, but the account he gave was deficient in a number of ways.
At the end of 1944 the divisions that had lead the breakout from Normandy and the race to the West Wall were largely spent. The fighting at Normandy, during Market Garden, and especially when the Allies reached the West Wall resulted in substantial casualties. Fresh divisions were flowing into France and Belgium and Luxembourg, but it would take time to fully activate and train these units. The 42nd Division is an interesting example of this.
At the time of the 2nd WW, the US Army’s primary fighting unit was the “Regimental Combat Team.” This consisted of an infantry regiment supported by Divisional assets like artillery, tank destroyer units, cavalry, and the like. When (Wacht am Rhein) the German offensive in the Ardennes started, reinforcements from 3rd and 7th Armies to the south were rushed north to counter the German attack that started the Battle of the Bulge. Units like the 101st and 82nd Airborne had been regrouping following Market Garden, so they were readily available -- though unprepared. Other divisions had to be pulled out of the line and replaced with whatever units were at hand. Near Strasbourg, the 42nd Division had not yet been formed, but the three infantry regiments were on the scene, so they were thrown into a quiet sector in the hope that not much would happen and they would gain a little experience before the rest of their Division arrived. It was a reasonable thing to try, but the Germans had other plans. Wacht am Rhein was the main but not the only German offensive planned for the winter of ‘44-’45. Operation Nordwind was a follow up operation to attack a similar Allied “bulge” in Alsace. It would prevent the Allies from sending additional units to the Bulge while giving the German’s a second shot at penetrating the Allied lines and disrupting their plans for 1945. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was actually in command in this sector.
Now I need to reference “Band of Brothers.” Many people are familiar with the series and or the book, which is wonderful, but it gives a misleading view of what a normal infantry battalion was capable of. Parachute infantry are specially trained to act independently and the assumption is that they will usually be surrounded by the enemy. Here’s a very telling example of the difference between parachute infantry and regular infantry: My father was the platoon sergeant for a weapons’ platoon in the Pacific Theater (40th Infantry Division). The assumption was that his company would be fighting as a group and if they needed mortar or machine gun support they could call on the weapon’s platoon. With parachute infantry you couldn’t make that assumption so each platoon included a weapons section. It wasn’t as powerful as my dad’s platoon, but it would give the platoon some degree of support. The 101st was always delighted to get artillery or armor support, but they never counted on it. A regular infantry division did. So when the unsupported regiments -- that were not yet the 42nd Division -- were hit by the German attack at the beginning of 1945 they fell back in some confusion. In some cases, their losses were heavy. But they did manage to fall back and contain the German attack. One of the regiments -- the 222nd -- fought the final delaying action before the 7th Army units returned from helping save the day in the Ardennes and proceeded to drive the Germans out of the positions they had gained in January.
By the time the Allied attack into Germany started, the 42nd Division fully existed and its regiments had even been tested in battle. The “other” Battle of the Bulge achieved nothing in the end.
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