The Missing Concert

Mrs THC and I had tickets tonight to see the Outlaw Tour with Sierra Hull, Billy Strings, Bob Dylan, and 92-year old Willie Nelson.  Unfortunately, I've got a bit of a condition that makes us unable to attend but the THC Daughter and friend will use our tickets.

In lieu of that, here's a mini-concert I put together.

Boom by Sierra Hull from her new album, A Tip Toe High Wire. 

Two from the Billy Strings album, Highway Prayers, released last fall, and hitting #1 on the charts (or whatever they call it nowadays).  An instrumental, Escanaba, named after a town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula that the Mrs and I passed through a few years ago, and Gild the Lily.

 

 

A couple from Dylan.  My Own Version of You from 2020's Rough and Rowdy Ways.  Dylan's voice is shot but that he could produce an album with such amazing lyrics, nearly 60 years after his first recording, is remarkable.  And Mississippi from 201's Love and Theft.

Finally, from Willie, an unusual choice.  This is Willie performing a Brian Wilson song, The Warmth of the Sun, with the Beach Boys harmonizing behind him.  Willie has an immediately recognizable voice.

Sparks

Live At Leeds, the only live album by the original lineup of The Who, was released on this date 55 years ago.  Recorded at Leeds, UK in February 1970.  This is the incredibly dynamic instrumental Sparks.  Starts to get interesting at 0:58 with major theme and Entwhistle's bass and then Moon's drums kick in - catch the syncopation at about 2:35, and then Townshend's monster crash chord at 2:58.  Best listened to at the highest possible volume.

Genius

 Willie Mays was born 94 years ago on this date.  He passed last year, but we'll still remember him here.

"There have been only two authentic geniuses in the world, William Shakespeare and Willie Mays."

Tallulah Bankhead

April 1945: Germany's End

 On the 80th anniversary, a republish of a post from ten years ago.

On April 25, 1945 American and Soviet troops met near the town of Torgau on the Elbe River, cutting the remaining and rapidly shrinking Nazi held lands in half.  Two weeks later the war in Europe would be over.


The path to that historic meeting began in an April twenty eight years before.  On April 6, 1917 the United States declared war on Germany and entered World War One, while three days later Vladimir Ilyich Lenin began his journey via a sealed railcar from exile in Switzerland across Germany to Russia.  Both events were massive miscalculations by German military leadership.  In the first instance it was the unleashing of unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping to Great Britain, including that of the neutral United States, the Germans understanding it would trigger American entry into the war but gambling they could starve England out of the war before the United States could bring its military to Europe in any meaningful numbers.

In the case of Lenin, the German strategy was to insert a virus into the ongoing chaos of revolution in Russia following the abdication of the Czar in March 1917 and thus knock Russia out of the war.  In the short-term the strategy worked; under Lenin's direction the Bolsheviks outmaneuvered their fellow, more moderate revolutionaries, who were reluctant to use force against the violent Bolsheviks.  Lenin, perfectly willing to use force against his enemies, organized a coup, and took over the reigns of government, dismissing the Constituent Assembly (the first popularly elected legislative body in Russian history), establishing the Bolsheviks as the revolutionary vanguard of the communist dictatorship, and within a year of taking power setting up the first prison camps for political prisoners that later became known as the Gulag.  By March 1918, the Bolsheviks had accepted a humiliating peace treaty with the Germans.  But it was too late for Germany.  The submarines failed to starve the British, the last German offensives in France ground to a halt, the Allies (including the Americans) counterattacked, German army morale collapsed and the German High Command panicked, beseeching the Kaiser and politicians to seek a truce.  And longer term, the new Soviet Union was to arise as a much more formidable opponent than the old Russian Empire.

In 1941, Germany's Fuhrer, Adolph Hitler, made his own miscalculations about the same two countries.  On June 22, 1941 he launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Germany's ally since August 1939, confident that his armies could easily overwhelm the Soviet military before the onset of winter but, along with his military commanders, drastically underestimating the resiliency of the Red military, the ruthlessness of Joseph Stalin and Soviet leadership in their conduct of the war, and indifferent to how the atrocious Nazi occupation policies would alienate many potential supporters in the recently occupied borderlands and Ukraine.  The result was the largest and most murderous military campaign in human history leading to the deaths of up to thirty million soldiers and civilians.(1)

Later that year, Hitler compounded his mistake when he declared war on the United States only four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an attack of which he had no prior knowledge, and an action he was not required to take under his loose alliance with Japan.  The reasons for his decision remain unclear and controversial among historians but what is true is that it rescued President Franklin Roosevelt and U.S. military leaders from a dilemma.  They viewed war with Germany and Japan as inevitable but saw Germany as by far the bigger threat, and had already agreed that in the event of war with both countries the United States would direct 85% of its resources against Germany.  During those four days when Japan, but not Germany, was at war with the U.S., Roosevelt and his military commanders knew that public opinion would require all efforts to be directed against the Japanese, taking away from American military capabilities for what they believed was the inevitable war against Germany.  With Hitler's decision, the bulk of the American war effort was directed against Germany and the opening of a Second Front landing in Western Europe became a possibility, something that Britain alone could never have done (it's also the most effective practical rebuttal to continuing conspiracy theories that FDR knew in advance of the Japanese attack and wanted the war; in reality it complicated his foreign policy).

June of 1944 again saw critical miscalculations by Hitler regarding the U.S. and the Soviet Union.  In the West, he was convinced that the long-anticipated Allied landing would take place at the Pas de Calais region of France where he concentrated his best armored and infantry units but the invasion instead took place in Normandy against weaker German opposition and the Allies gained a foothold from which they could not be dislodged.

That same month, the Germans were anticipating a large Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front.  They believed the attack would come either in the Baltic region or in Ukraine and made their dispositions accordingly.  Instead the massive assault, begun on June 22 (the third anniversary of Hitler's surprise attack), took place against the undermanned Army Group Center, in what is now Belarus, resulting in a catastrophic defeat for the Nazis with Soviet armies advancing hundreds of miles into Poland and reaching the outskirts of Warsaw, where Stalin cynically ordered a halt (for more as to why, read Warsaw Does Not Cry).

By late March 1945, American, British and Canadian armies were crossing the Rhine and moving into the heart of Germany against crumbling, but occasionally fanatical, resistance (particularly from SS units).  To the east, the Soviets began their final assault on Berlin on April 16, still desperately defended by the German army.  Though the war was clearly lost Hitler felt that Germany was not worthy of him and, rather than surrendering, deserved total destruction in a final orgy of bloodletting.  It took three days for Soviet armies to encircle the German capital and launch their final assault to capture the city.

Hitler emerged from his bunker in Berlin on April 20 making his last appearance above-ground to award Iron Crosses to members of the Hitler Youth. 

Two days later Hitler was advised by his military staff that his plan to have Berlin relieved by an Army Group under General Steiner had failed or, to be more accurate, his fantasy that there ever was a Steiner Army Group capable of relieving the Nazi capital was finally punctured.

The failure of the Steiner attack was the basis for one of the most memorable scenes in the 2004 German film Downfall, which recounts the final days in the bunker, much of it told from the perspective of Traudl Junge, a young secretary to the Fuhrer.  The film is stunning in its grim account of the end of an evil era and Bruno Granz, in the role of Hitler, is astonishing.  Ian Kershaw, the author of an excellent two-volume biography of Hitler (Hubris and Nemesis) wrote of the performance:

Of all the screen depictions of the Führer, even by famous actors, such as Alec Guinness or Anthony Hopkins, this is the only one which to me is compelling. Part of this is the voice. Ganz has Hitler's voice to near perfection. It is chillingly authentic.

You can watch the scene by clicking here; it's well worth your time.  In the room with Hitler at one point we see two men standing, one thin and odd looking in a brown uniform. The figure in brown is Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda.  Next to him is Martin Bormann, the Fuhrer's Chief Secretary and nominal head of the Nazi Party - they are the primary political figures left in the bunker as both Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering had fled the city.  Outside the room are two women standing next to each other.  The taller one on the right is Traudl Junge.  Towards the end of the scene another woman moves forward in the crowd; Eva Braun, Hitler's long-time mistress. 

The fighting for the city ground on day after day with the Soviets inching forward towards the Reichstag and Chancellery, under which the Fuhrer's command bunker was located.  This video contains footage of the street fighting as recorded by Soviet cameramen.

Hitler and Eva Braun were married on April 29 and killed themselves the following day.  Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda arranged for their doctor to inject their six young children with morphine and then crush cyanide capsules between their teeth.  Goebbels and his wife then committed suicide.

The burned remains of Hitler, Braun, and the Goebbels were discovered and identified by the Russians (though they did not inform the British or Americans), reburied and reexcavated several times, winding up at a Soviet security base in Magdeburg, East Germany.  In 1970 the KGB conducted a final excavation, smashing and burning the remains and scattering them in a river (though part of Hitler's skull may have been preserved in the Moscow archives of the KGB).

Martin Bormann attempted to escape the bunker on the night of May 1-2 but committed suicide or was killed by Russian patrols.  His fate remained uncertain for many years until remains were found at a West Berlin site in 1972 and identified as his (later confirmed by genetic testing in 1998).  Himmler committed suicide on May 23 after being captured by the British, and Goering killed himself the following year at Nuremburg, just hours before his scheduled hanging.

The formal German surrender of the city took place on May 2, 1945 while the overall capitulation of Germany took place on May 7 (US and British front) and May 8 (Russian front) though severe fighting continued in the area around Prague, Czechoslovakia until May 11.

Stalin ordered the Soviet military commanders to take Berlin as quickly as possible and not be concerned about casualties (not that the Soviet leaders ever appeared to be concerned about casualties).  The cost was about 350,000 Soviet soldiers killed or wounded in the Battle of Berlin (for comparison, American losses for the entire war were about one million) along with an indeterminable but probably similar number of German soldiers and civilians.  The city, already heavily damaged by British and American bombing raids, was reduced to rubble and significant reconstruction did not begin  until after the Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948-9 and the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949.  For more on the Blockade read Berlin Divides.

Traudl Junge was among those that left the bunker on the night of May 1-2, one of the few who escaped death or Russian captivity.  Just before her death in 2002 she gave an interview, parts of which are included at the beginning and end of Downfall.  This excerpt from the close of the movie shows her speaking about her actions and responsibility.

For the returning Russian soldiers, of whom 8 to 9 million had died in the war, the hopes of many for a better life and less arbitrary cruelty by their rulers were destroyed by Stalin's suspicion as told in the greatest and most factually accurate of rock/pop history songs, Roads To Moscow by Al Stewart, of which THC has written before, with its haunting closing verse.

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(1)  Strangely, both Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and Hitler's in 1941 were prompted by the same analysis - Russia needed to be defeated in order for Britain to be defeated.  For more read Bonapartaroo Barbarossa.

Veteran Pitching

Patriots Day in Boston, April 19, 1948.  The Philadelphia Athletics are in town to play an opening day doubleheader against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park.  

Connie Mack, the 85 year old Athletics team owner and manager, would start two veteran pitchers that day.  And by veterans, I mean World War Two veterans, Phil Marchildon and Lou Brissie.  The unusual part was not that the two were veterans, after all, of the 21 players on both teams who started at least one of the games that day, 19 had been in military service during the war.  What was different about for these pitchers was their wartime experience, Marchildon surviving being shot down on a bombing raid and eight months as a German prisoner of war, while Brissie had been so badly wounded in Italy, no one thought he'd pitch again.

(Lou Brissie)(Phil Marchildon)

Phil Marchildon was Canadian, born in rural Ontario in 1913.  Phil got a late start, not  playing baseball until he was 18 or 19, but showed enough promise to be signed by the Athletics in 1940, becoming a starter for the downtrodden A's in 1941 and 1942, going 10-15 and 17-14, in the latter season being the top pitcher for a team which went 55-99.

After the '42 season, Phil joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, becoming a tail gunner on a Halifax bomber.  On his 26th mission on August 17, 1944 Marchidon, along with a buddy, bailed out of his damaged bomber, plunged into the North Sea, and after being rescued by Danish fishermen, was captured by the Germans.  Phil and his crewmate were the only survivors.

He was sent to Stalag Luft III, where the events depicted in the movie The Great Escape, took place, and was there until the end of the war.  Marchildon lost 40 pounds as a POW, and witnessed some of his fellow prisoners executed for petty infractions.

Phil returned to Canada very depressed and showing symptoms of what we now call PTSD.  He rejoined the A's but according to his SABR biography:

"A fairly open, friendly enough person before the war, Marchildon came back a different, guarded man. As teammate George Kell said, 'Phil really changed after his war experiences; he was very serious and rarely spoke about what he had gone through.'

Returning as a full time starter in 1946, Marchildon went 13-16 and then had an outstanding '47 season, going 19-9 and finishing 9th in the MVP balloting.

On April 19, the A's hurler started out easily setting down the first three Red Sox hitters, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky and Ted Williams, but seemed to briefly lose it in the bottom of the 2nd when Stan Spence, Vern Stephens, and Bobby Doerr hit back to back to back solo home runs. 

The A's scored one in the 5th and two in the 8th to tie the game, which went into extra innings.  In the top of the 11th, the A's added two more runs and while the Sox scored an unearned run in the bottom of the frame, Phil Marchidon came away with a 5-4 victory.  Over the last nine innings, Phil gave up only 4 hits and no earned runs.

Unlike Marchildon, Lou Brissie had no pre-war major league experience.  A South Carolina boy, born in 1924, Lou signed with the A's right out of high school in 1941.  The plan was for him to attend college and then join the club.  The world had other plans for Lou.

Brissie enlisted in 1942 and ended up in the 88th Infantry Division which saw a year of combat in Italy during 1944 and 1945.  It was hard fighting.  A WW2 US infantry division had about 15,000 soldiers and during its time in Italy, the 88th suffered 12,464 dead, wounding, and missing (excluding captured).  Lou, by then a squad leader, was one of the casualties.

In the Apennine Mountains, near Florence, on December 7, 1944 Lou's unit came under heavy German artillery fire, which killed eight enlisted men and killed or wounded three of the company's officers. The shell that got Lou broke both his feet, shattered his left tibia and shinbone, inflicting shrapnel wounds to his right shoulder, both hands and both thighs.  Knocked unconscious he was found several hours later and taken to a hospital where he successfully pleaded with the surgeons not to amputate his leg.

Lou wrote Connie Mack from the hospital and according to Brissie:

"He told me that my duty now was to try to get well, and whenever I felt I was ready to play, he would see I got the opportunity. That meant an awful lot to me. It was a tremendous motivator.”  

After two years, 23 operations, and with a metal plate in his left leg, Lou was to get his opportunity.  In 1947, pitching for the A's Savannah Indians farm team, Brissie went 23-5 and made his major league debut in late September against the Yankees who hammered him.  His second start was against the Red Sox on April 19, 1948.

Brissie retired the first 6 Red Sox batters before a double and single scored a run in the 3rd, knotting the game at 1-1.  The A's added three runs in the 4th on two hits, including a Brissie single, a walk, and an error, to take a 4-1 lead into the 6th.

In the 6th, after a Dom DiMaggio double, Ted Williams hit a line drive that ricocheted off Brissie's metal leg with DiMaggio scoring.  Williams stopped at first, called time, and went to the mound to check on the prone Brissie.  According to Brissie:

"When Ted leaned down, I said, ‘Damn it, Ted! Why don’t you pull the ball?’” 

The score would remain 4-2, with Brissie tossing a 4-hitter and striking out seven.  He'd go on to compile a 14-10 record and finish 4th in Rookie of the Year voting.

Marchildon and Brissie went on different paths after that day.  For Phil, the opening day victory was the highlight of the season as he finished 9-15 with a sore arm.  He would only pitch 17 more innings in 1949 and 1950 before his baseball career ended.  Marchildon continued to have adjustment problems, sitting around the house and drinking beer according to his SABR bio.  With the help of his wife and friends he eventually pulled himself out of the depths, passing in 1997 at the age of 83.

In 1949, Lou Brissie went 16-11 and pitched in the All-Star game.  His major league career ended in 1953.  After retiring he became Commissioner of the American Legion Junior Baseball Program, and then worked as a scout for the Dodgers and Braves.  Later he served on the South Carolina State Board of Technical Education.  Throughout the years his damaged leg required treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals every four to six weeks.  Lou Brissie died in 2013 at the age of 89.

My thanks to the Society for American Baseball Research biography project which made this piece possible.  I came across a reference to Phil Marchildon, looked up his biography, and while doing further research realized he and Brissie pitched on the same day.

The Road Back

(The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Grant Wood, 1931)

Today is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride to warn of the British army advance into the countryside around Boston.  He set out late on the evening of April 18 to warn the countryside, was captured by the British, and released in time to appear on the Lexington Green the following morning. This is a repost from several years ago:

 

"During the whole affair, the rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance and resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body.  Indeed they knew too well what was proper, to do so.  Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself very much mistaken.

"For my part, I never believed, I confess, that they would have attacked the king's troops, or have had the perseverance I found in them yesterday."

- Lord Percy, April 20, 1775

The quote is from Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer, which I recently reread, and Lord Percy is referring to the final part of the British retreat from Lexington to Charlestown, along what is now known as Battle Road, on April 19, 1775.  Percy led a relief column out of Boston that morning to support the British force sent late the prior evening to seize Patriot arms stored in Concord.

When Lord Percy arrived in Lexington at mid-day he found a panicked British force hastening back from Concord in disarray, stunned by the resistance and the number of casualties inflicted upon them by the locals, whom, until that day, they held in contempt.  If Percy had not shown up it is doubtful any of the original British force would have made it back to Boston.  Under the direction of Lord Perc,y the combined force fought its way back with the most violent action of the day taking place in Menotomy (now Arlington).

Lord Percy's observation was perceptive.  For the most part he was not encountering local farmers spontaneously taking positions behind walls to shot at his soldiers.  These were regiments organized by local Massachusetts towns and under the direction of William Heath, a Roxbury farmer who had taught himself the rudiments of military strategy, and thought deeply in advance how to deal with British regulars.  The local regiments did not fight the British from fixed positions but rather formed a moving circle of skirmishers around the entire enemy column during this last phase of the British retreat.

Learning about the little-known Heath and the patriot military strategy is one of the joys of reading Fischer's book.  While it reclaims the legacy of Paul Revere it also tells the entire story of April 19 in great, and very readable detail.  Revere was much more than the man who made his famous ride.  He was instrumental in the years leading up to the events of April 19, becoming the key link between the artisans and tradesmen of Boston and the elite businessmen and lawyers like John Hancock, Joseph Warren, and Sam Adams.  He is seemingly everywhere, involved in every key event.

On the night of April 18-19 Revere was captured by the British on the road between Lexington and Concord.  Released later that evening he made his way to Lexington, where he had previously stopped to warn Hancock and Adams, who were staying at a house next to the Town Green, of the British expedition.  On his return he helped relocate the two patriot leaders to a more remote location and then learned they had left a large chest full of sensitive documents at a tavern on the Green!  Recruiting an assistant they removed the chest and carted it across the Green as dawn broke passing through the Lexington militiamen assembling there and seeing the approaching British troops.  As Revere reached the nearby woods he heard the first shots of the American Revolution.

Fischer is one of our great narrative historians and while Paul Revere's Ride is scholarly and full of fascinating footnotes at the end, it is also a rollicking and exciting tale as told by the author.  Washington's Crossing, about the darkest days of the Revolution in late 1776, is another narrative masterpiece by Fischer.  

In his introduction, Fischer explains his continued belief in the power of the narrative even as other approaches have come to dominate historical scholarship:

Pathbreaking scholarship in the 20th century has dealt mainly with social structures, intellectual systems, and material processes.  Much has been gained by this enlargement of the historian's task, but something important has been lost.  An entire generation of academic historiography has tended to lose sense of the causal power of particular actions and contingent events.  

An important key here is the idea of contingency - not in the sense of chance, but rather of 'something that may or may not happen' . . . An organizing assumption of this work is that contingency is central to any historical process, and vital to the success of our narrative strategies about the past.

To that end, this inquiry studies the coming of the American Revolution as a series of contingent happenings, shaped by the choices of individual actors with the context of large cultural processes.

Fischer's first book, originally his doctoral thesis, is Albion's Seed, the most important book ever written about the cultural differences between the British groups that settled America and their impact on the strands of American culture that powered this country throughout its history, at least until recent decades.

While modern academic theory has reduced all those of European origin into a faceless, indistinguishable blob of white supremacy, Albion's Seed reminds us of the strikingly different cultures from different geographical areas within England that settled in various parts of the New World - Puritans in New England, Quakers in the mid-Atlantic, Cavaliers in the South and the Scots-Irish in the backcountry.  Cultural and religious traditions in these groups varied tremendously and those differences carried over into America.

In the introduction to Paul Revere's Ride, Fischer speaks to the cultural traditions he identified in Albion's Seed writing:

Paul Revere's idea of liberty was not the same as our modern conception of individual autonomy and personal entitlement.  It was not a form of "classical Republicanism", or "English Opposition Ideology", or "Lockean Liberalism", or any of the learned anachronisms that scholars have invented to explain a way of thought that is alien to their own world.

He believed deeply in New England's inherited tradition of ordered freedom, which gave heavy weight to collective rights and individual responsibilities - more so than is given by our modern calculus of individual rights and collective responsibilities.

His genius was to promote collective action in the cause of freedom - a paradox that lies closer to the heart of the American experience than the legendary historical loners we love to celebrate.

And then there is Samuel Whittemore.  Read Tough Guy.