194. TURKEY TROTS TO WATER

The World Wonder'd

There's a new book out about one of my favorite Pacific War battles titled The World Wonder'd: What Really Happened Off Samar. This title is designed to appeal to people who already know something about the battle, and to keep Admiral Halsey spinning in his grave.

I've written about the battle before, but, I can't recall if I've written about the radio message. Nelson's flag message before Trafalgar may be more famous, but no radio message is more famous in the history of the U.S. Navy. 

At the time, coded messages were padded at both ends with more-or-less nonsense phrases. In this case, the phrase at the beginning of the message was TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG. Followed by the actual message FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR. Now, at the time, the part in bold was enough to upset Halsey, as Nimitz (CINCPAC) was questioning where the task force he wanted covering San Bernardino Straight was, and Halsey hadn't dispatched it. But then came the final padding phrase, that seemed so relevant that the people decrypting the message had not removed it, but sent it to Halsey along with the message, THE WORLD WONDERS. This drove Halsey into a rage as it sounded like Nimitz was very openly questioning his conduct of the battle -- which he was, but THE WORLD WONDERS was just a freak accident on the worst day of Halsey's life. (There's actually a Wiki entry for this message, HERE.)


There are two famous "action" tropes, one of which goes back to Homer. There's the scene where the protagonist puts on all his armor and weapons, at the end of The Odyssey, Ulysses, together with his son and father, armor up with Athena to assist them. In Predator 2, Danny Glover's character does the same thing, out of the trunk of his car, before going into the meat locker building for the big fight. The other trope is that the hero loses his main weapon or weapons and has to overcome while at a disadvantage. In Predator, Arnold Schwarzenegger's character has to improvise explosive arrows in that final fight after losing all his commando gear. 

The events leading up to the sending of the message above, demonstrated that Halsey lacked the intuition (which Spruance, at that moment Nimitz's Chief of Staff, had in spades) of knowing where he should be on the battle field and what he should be doing. As a result, we get the battle I've written about before, with the escort carriers, destroyers and destroyer escorts, the sub-junior varsity, facing off against the cream of the Imperial Japanese Navy off Samar. A U.S. force intended and trained for anti-submarine and landing air support, took on and fought off -- arguable defeated, when you consider the loses on each side and who ended up in control of the battle field -- the Japanese in the battle that came closest to being the Decisive Battle both navies had planned on for decades. (The Battle of the Philippine Sea, won by Spruance, was actually more "decisive" but it looked nothing like what everyone had expected, as it was fought entirely by aircraft and submarines).

Had the battle been fought the way Nimitz and Lee (the U.S. battle force commander) would have preferred, the Japanese battleships and cruisers would have been confronted by a similar array of U.S. Navy ships. That would have been the battle everyone had long imagined. Instead, thanks to Halsey, we get the action movie trope which is far more interesting. Though, to this day, the world still wonders and speculates about how that other battle, between USN and IJN battleships, would have played out.


The YouTube series "The Great War" is currently covering the Third Battle of Ypres and has just explained how British general Plumer has noticed a way to counter Ludendorf's new defensive in depth approach on the Western Front. After three years of unimaginably bloody fighting, Ludendorf noticed that it was better to hold the front with lighter forces, but in depth, and counter-attack any advance. Plumer noticed that this meant the Germans would give up the first lines of their positions with very little fight. By taking only what the Germans were willing to give up, over time the British could make substantial gains a little at a time. This is not Patton's rock soup, but it is related to rock soup. 

I mention this, along with what I've said above about Halsey and Spruance, because it shows how long it can take -- three years during the Great War -- before commanders with a knack for noticing the crucial weakness of the enemy under new circumstances can work themselves into positions where they can achieve something. 

In retrospect, the First Battle of Verdun (we've just started the Second Battle) looks like madness, because the French seem to have been acting as though it was Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War. It would have made so much more sense to have treated Verdun like it was the same as anywhere else along the front. The value of that position, in 1916, was not worth the price paid to defend it. 

Stalingrad, thanks to its position on the river, might have been worth the price paid on both sides to capture and to defend it, though I'm not at all sure of that. But Verdun, if lost, could easily have turned into a dangerous bulge in the German lines, especially if the French had thrown their forces on its flanks rather into its teeth. Just speculation, of course.

The European armies viewed the American Civil War as an amateur show, and since the troops were almost entirely militia, there's some truth to that. But the lack of a large standing army, with an entrenched officer corps, made it easier for junior (and retired) officers like Grant and Sherman and Sheridan to rise to positions of command. I think Grant (and Lee) have reputations as field commanders that are better than they deserve, but Grant could have schooled the Entente Powers on how to go about winning their war. (The main difference being that, at the end, all the Union armies were under Grant's command, whereas the Entente was herding cats with five distinct major national armies in the field.)

A Failure To Thrive

I've collected a list of potential book titles including A Failure To Thrive. Has anyone ever started out with a title and then written a book to fit? And what would this book be about? Ignoring the non-fiction options, I suppose this would be about a person who passes through childhood and adolescence and into young adulthood so damaged that there is no future for him or her. The only question is how will the person destroy him or herself. Lucy Barton and Renee, from The Elegance of the Hedgehog, turn out to be surprisingly resilient, to thrive despite their early circumstances. 

It would probably be more striking, and even more believable, if the protagonist came from a more generous background. Of my young online acquaintances, the one most likely to fit this title is the one with, in many ways, the most going for her. (Actually there would be a tie here, with a guy with pretty stereotypical issues.) 

But why would anyone want to read this book? It could well turn out like Hunger (the one by Knut Hamsun -- it turns out there are several books with that title) -- and that book was a pretty complete waste of my reading time. Though I do like to tell the story of reading that and pleading with the character, by the end, to finally fucking die. In a way this is the ultimate anti-hero. 

Next time, Paper Bullets of the Brain (from Much Ado About Nothing). 

191. America, Britain, and Canada

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On the streets

I knew that pattern of only loud, crazy women couldn't hold up forever. This afternoon I ran into a shouting crazy person who was male. Balance returns to the city.


Continued from last time...

We Could All Have Been Canadian

There follows a review about how nasty the Revolution was. It was after all, at the time, a civil war, and there is nothing more vicious. From that, Gopnik moves on to comparing the Revolution to the American Civil War.

Had the British won, we might now be taught about a fight between brave British emancipators and indigenous slaveholders, with the black slaves who defected to the British-loyalist side [and were returned to their owners after Yorktown] seen as self-emancipaters, as the blacks who defected to the Union Army are now, and with Washington's and Jefferson's [some of the owners who got their slaves back] rhetoric of liberty shown the same disdain we have for the not-very-different libertarian and individualist rhetoric of their heirs in the Confederacy. We would perhaps wonder, far more than we are allowed to, how radical Whigs like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine ever allowed themselves to betray their own Enlightenment principles by making the tragic error of entering into a compact with slaveholders.

Yes, I did hope they would eventually get around to integrating "Tory" into these party definitions, but no such luck. I presume Tory describes the party that both of these parties were struggling against, though he also says that they were in opposition to the "regular" Whigs.

...Three decades ago, Gordon Wood, in "The Radicalism of the American Revolution." asked us to see the Revolution in the broadest historical scale, and to realize that, whatever its failings and brutalities and hypocrisies, it represented a decisive break with doctrines of inherited power and monarchical rule, and a move toward democracy that had scarcely been so dramatically accomplished since very ancient times. Jonathan Israel's forthcoming book "The Expanding Blaze" promises to make a similar case: that the revolution was the great radical act of its day, responsible directly and indirectly, for the onset of the modern age. Abolitionism rose from the promise of the Revolution more than the Revolution sustained slavery.

Indeed, that abolitionism burned brighter in Britain than in the independent States, as historians have argued, has at least something to do with America's triumph: Britain could demonstrate that it was better, more honorable, than its former colonies at a time when such a demonstration was urgently sought. Then, too, the separation of the Southern plantation owners from the West Indian ones weakened a formidable lobbying force within the Empire...
...

The authoritarian reformers -- the empire, in other words -- have something to be said for them; and what is to be said for them is, well, Canada. Our northern neighbor's relative lack of violence, its peaceful continuity, its ability to allow double and triple identities and to build a country successfully out of two languages and radically different national pasts: all these Canadian virtues are, counterintuitively, far more the legacy of those eighteenth-century authoritarian reformers than of the radical Whigs. This is literally the case; the United Empire Loyalists, as they were called, the "Tories" who fled from the States, did much to make Canada. More than that, Canada is the model liberal country because it did not have an American-style revolution, accepting instead the reformers' values of a strong centralized, if symbolic, monarchy... a largely faceless political class; a cautiously parlimentary tradition; a professional and noncharismatic military; a governing elite -- an establishment.

The Canadian experience was not free of sin -- as the indefensible treatment of the First Nations demonstrates... Still, there is something to be said, however small, for government by an efficient elected elite devoted to compromise. The logic of Whig radicalism, in whatever form it takes, always allows charismatic figures undue play; there's a reason that the big Whigs remain known today while the authoritarian reformers mostly sink into specialists' memories of committees and cabinets. 

The first modern charismatic politician, John Wilkes, was among the greatest Whig heroes of the American radicals. Nor is it entirely accidental that he would give his name to the charismatic actor who killed Lincoln. The red thread of theatrical violence, violence as show and spectacle and self-definition, links the violence implicit in all cults of great men...

A couple times here I started thinking of Christian Tiejen's Toryism as being part of this "authoritarian reform" tradition, especially if you think of him as first presented in Some Do Not. And perhaps this is so, but I would have to know more about how this story played out in Britain after the Revolution, and Gopnik doesn't indicate if du Rivere goes into that.

I still want more, but this was so much what I needed to read that I'm still shocked that I should have stumbled upon it. And he doesn't really go back on the position laid out at the start. The position I can't argue with. And I'm glad he invoked the libertarian tradition, even if it was only applied to the Confederacy. The core libertarian values (free rein to exploit everything and everyone) are the most consistent American values from Colonial days to now. "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" was in part political, sure, but also signaled the rise of the middle class. This is why America was the Great Satan to Dostoevsky.

The Reichs

Yesterday I was thinking, as one does, about America now and Germany in the 1930's. The thing to remember about the Third Reich is the extent to which it was an after effect of the Second Reich. The House of Hohenzollern had been breeding a docile, leader craving population for a century. To expect that population to seize it's own agency was simply unrealistic. (The same goes for the Arab world today). The American population may be just as racists as the Germans were in the 30's, but they are as un-docile as can be imagined. I think it's easier to imagine the U.S. slipping into a chaos like Syria than into anything like the Third Reich.

Or to go back to my previous view, I can still see us going the way of Rome starting with Marius. That the population seems to be nearly balanced between the Blue and Red, supports this and the Roman history of alternating terrors. 

172. George, the 3rd time

Previous - 171. George Marshall

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Randolf & Rustin

p138 Brooks makes a point of mentioning how important The Last Puritan by Santayana was to Rustin so I had to look it up. Definitely interesting. And what does it mean that I keep focusing on forms of Protestantism? (First Methodism for Faulkner and now Puritanism.) 

George Eliot

The notable thing about this chapter, as I noted before, is Brooks's description of romantic love. Here's the key passage again,

p173 ...love opens up the facility for spiritual awareness. It is an altered stated of consciousness that is intense and overwhelming but at the same time effervescent. In that state, many people are likely to have mystical moments when they feel an awareness of some wordless mystery beyond the human plane. Their love gives them little glimmerings of pure love, love detached from this or that particular person but emanating from some transcendent realm...

This is the subjective experience of love, but an objective description would have to include the chemistry going on in the brain. The way our conscious self is being manipulated by the bodily OS that has it's own agenda. As I'm sure I've said before, I'm not doubting that you can spot your "soul mate" on the other side of a crowded dance floor, I'm merely questioning the objective nature of this "true love" that can be established with so little information being transmitted. 

Now if, as Brooks is suggesting here, the most spiritual, pure love, aspect of religion is inspired by the effect of neuro-chemistry intended to get us to breed with appropriate mates, that is interesting. This puts my endorphin dependent capsaicin addiction in the shade. No wonder people find this aspect of religion both attractive and hard to give up.

Though with that in mind, it is odd that George Eliot abandoned religion for intellectual reasons. And at a time when you would have thought she would have been most sensitive to the consolations it brought.

I don't think Brooks intended this, but he includes a passage that may be the perfect indication of true love,

p179 ... One morning... [before Mary Anne became George] she was fantasizing about writing fiction when a title popped into her hear: The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton. Lewes was immediately enthusiastic. "Oh what a capital title!" he blurted.

And apropos of nothing, there's this about their mostly happy life together,

p180 ...Their frequent periods of ill health and depression were marked by migraines and dizzy spells...

Knowing what we do now of the toxic -- actually poisonous -- character of Victorian paints and wallpapers and the like, one wonders to what extent they were poisoned by their environment.

p183 ...The best reform... is tied to the here and now, directed by honest feelings for this or that individual rather than for humanity as a whole. There's power in the particular and suspicion of the general. For Eliot, holiness isn't in the next world but is embedded in a mundane thing like a marriage, which ties one down but gives one concrete and daily opportunities for self-sacrifice and service. Holiness is inspired by work, the daily task of doing some job well...

p184 There are limits, she teaches, in how much we can change other people or how quickly we can change ourselves. So much of life is lived in a state of tolerance -- tolerating other people's weaknesses and our own sins... "These fellow mortals, every one," she wrote in Adam Bede, "must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses nor brighten their wit nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people -- amongst whom your life is passed -- that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movement of goodness you should be able to admire -- for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience." This posture is at the essence of her morality... She loved but she also judged.

It's perfect for where I want to go with this, that Adam Bede was published in 1859, two years before the start of the American Civil War. You can see something of Eliot's "morality" in the position of the Methodist church in the American South. Miss Rosa's father may have been right (along with the Methodist church in the North), but can you reasonably expect average people to transcend their own context and see the immorality of the neighborhood culture they grew up with? 

And if we agree with the position Brooks attributes to Southern blacks during the Civil Rights movement -- that despite the hopes of Liberal Northerners, education and PR is not going to kumbaya racists into changing their colors -- then how do you get people to change? Force doesn't work, Southerners doubled-down after they lost the War of Northern Aggression and we got the KKK and Jim Crow laws. Maybe some brilliantly devious person could have united the White and Black Southern churches is a holly war against Jews or Catholics. Brought together at last under a banner of hate. It would almost be worth the carnage.

Advisory

Tomorrow is the 4th of July here and I will be working late and not posting. I am also almost caught up with my re-reading of the book, so I might take a day or so off before wrapping up The Road to Character. Happy Independence Day!

Next - 173. Augustine, not a Cynic