Incident At Bari

(Bari, Italy)

"On the afternoon of 2 December [1943], Air Marshal 'Mary' Cunningham held a press conference in Bari, in which he told reporters that the Luftwaffe had lost the air war in Italy.  'I would consider it a personal insult', he told them, 'if the enemy should send so much as one plane over the city'.  Cunningham was a brilliant and inspired air commander, yet there was a touch of hubris about his comments because that same afternoon a lone Messerschmitt Me 210 twin-engine reconnaissance aircraft flew over Bari, spotting a mass of Allied merchant vessels crammed into the harbour."

- The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 by James Holland

The Allies had invaded Italy in early September, the British Eighth Army landing on the toe and advancing north, while the Fifth Army, containing both American and British divisions, came ashore at Salerno, south of Naples (the Americans landing by the ancient Greek temples of Paestum). By the beginning of December, the Allied advance slowed to a bloody crawl north of Naples, and along the Adriatic coast.  However, the important ports on the Italian heel, Taranto, Brindisi, and Bari had been captured and were handling the massive amount of supplies required to support the armies and the new air force bases around Foggia.  Cunningham was correct in his assertion that the Allied air forces dominated the sky.  But that was almost all, but not all, of the time. 

In this instance, the reconnaissance report prompted the Luftwaffe commander in Italy to send 105 bombers to the port that very evening.  They were able to foil radar, no fighter defense was scrambled, and anti-aircraft fire was ineffective.  The result was disaster for the tightly packed merchant ships.  Twenty seven merchant ships were sunk and another twelve damaged.  One of the first hit was an ammunition ship which resulted in a massive explosion breaking windows seven miles away.  A thousand seamen and another thousand civilians were killed.  The port was not back in full operation until February 1944. As bad as the toll in ships, supplies, and people, there was another aspect of the raid initially covered up by the Allies.

Among the ships sunk was the John Harvey, an American vessel carrying 2,000 mustard gas mortar bombs.  The Allies always maintained a supply of chemical weapons to be used in retaliation if the Germans used such weapons first.  Tight security was maintained regarding the cargo and neither the Bari harbormaster and any local military personnel knew about the presence of the mustard gas (the ship's captain and those of its crew who knew about the contents were killed in the explosion).  American Heritage gives this account of the dramatic explosion:

"The explosion of the John Harvey shook the entire harbor. Clouds of smoke, tinted every color of the rainbow, shot thousands of feet into the air. Meteoric sheets of metal rocketed in all directions, carrying incendiary torches to other ships and setting off a series of explosions that made the harbor a holocaust. Jimmy Doolittle, still standing by the shattered window of his office, was staggered by the terrific blast. Huddled on the east jetty, Heitmann and other survivors from the ships in the harbor were bathed in the bright light momentarily and then bombarded by debris, oil, and dirty water. The inhabitants of old Bari who had rushed to the harbor to escape the flames within the walls of the ancient section were gathered along the shore when the John Harvey exploded. There was no time to run, no time to hide, no time for anything. One moment they were rejoicing in their good fortune in escaping from the flames of the old city; the next they were struck by the unbearable concussion of the blast. Some were blown upward, their broken bodies flying twenty-five to thirty feet high. Some were hurtled straight back the way they had come. "

  James Holland reports what followed:

". . . as the John Harvey was hit a large amount of these mustard gas mortar shells leaked liquid sulphur mustard into water already slick with oil.  A number of sailors leaping from stricken vessels then found themselves in the sea and exposed to the poison, much of which mixed with the oil, caught fire, and produced noxious fumes.  Within a day, 628 patients fished out the harbour were suffering from blindness and chemical burns."

Hundreds of Italian civilians, injured by the cloud of mustard sulphur vapor that spread over the city, also presented themselves to medical facilities.  Baffled medical personnel had no clue as to the source of the injuries.  By the end of the month 83 of the military patients had died along with an unknown number of civilians and others permanently injured.  If medical personnel had known at the time about the presence of mustard gas, many injuries caused by prolonged exposure to low concentrations of mustard might have been reduced by bathing or a change of clothes.  Instead the initial victims were only thought to be suffering from shock and immersion, wrapped in blankets, and left for 12 to 24 hours to recover.

Within a few days, the mysterious symptoms caused Lt Colonel Stewart Francis Alexander, a doctor with experience in chemical warfare, to be sent to Bari. Alexander quickly concluded that mustard gas was the source, although the military command refused to confirm, and convinced medics to treat for those symptoms which saved many lives. 

In February 1944, the U.S. issued a short statement acknowledging the presence of mustard gas in Bari, but the entire incident received little attention at the time.  General Eisenhower approved Dr Alexander's report and the U.S. declassified documents related to the incident in 1959.  However, the British destroyed many documents and did not acknowledge the presence of mustard gas until 1988, at which time it amended the pension payments of those still living.

Tissue samples taken by Dr Alexander were later used in the development of the initial type of chemotherapy based on a mustard derivative.

The quote that begins this post is from James Holland's recently published account of the first four months of the Italian campaign.  Holland, co-host of the popular WW2 podcast We Have Ways Of Making You Talk, gives us a well written account of that misbegotten campaign, which the Allies began with too high expectations and too little logistical support and infantry, ending up mired in the mountains of south Italy from November 1943 until well into May 1944.  A miserable and deadly time for soldiers on both sides and a horror for the civilians caught in the middle.  Holland provides plenty of strategic overview and background but the strength of the book are the contemporaneous accounts taken from letters and diaries of American, British, Canadian, and German soldiers and of Italian civilians.  They provide an immediacy to the account.  Holland does not use later interviews or memoirs.  His approach provides an immediacy, as we see human reactions at the time of the events when no one knew what the outcome would be.

Memorial in Bari to those killed and injured in the air raid

The Gulag Archipelago At 50

 Fifty years ago today The Gulag Archipelago was published by a French outlet.

On February 12, 1974 KGB agents came to the Moscow apartment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and took him to the notorious Lefortorvo prison where he was strip-searched and interrogated.  The next day, he was bundled onto a plane and sent to Frankfort, West Germany.  The day after that he was charged with treason and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

These events were triggered by the French publishing house issuance on December 28, 1973 of The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation.  The publication was an electrifying event in the West and set off a panicked reaction by the Soviet government.

While some memoirs of prisoners of the Gulag had previously been published, including by Solzhenitsyn during the Khrushchev-era thaw in the early 1960s (which ended with his overthrow in 1964), and Khrushchev himself had given his famous secret speech in 1956 (the text of which was obtained by Israeli intelligence and disseminated in the West) denouncing Stalin's excesses, there was still no comprehensive picture of what had happened in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, while Vasily Grossman's towering novelistic portrayal and comparison of Communism and Nazism, Life and Fate, had not yet been smuggled to the West.  In the West, Robert Conquest had published his seminal work, The Great Terror, on the purges of the late 1930s but he, and the book, came under sustained attack from American academic "experts" on the Soviet Union.  It was not until the Soviet archives became available in the 1990s that Conquest's view was proved accurate, prompting the mocking suggestion that the next edition of The Great Terror should be retitled I Told You So, You F**k**g Fools (this has been inaccurately attributed to Conquest himself; the British author Kingsley Amis was the real perpetrator).

Even Khrushchev's 1956 speech was only the Soviet version of a "modified limited hang out".  It attributed all crimes to Stalin, focusing on his persecution of fellow Communist Party members, and did not provide an accounting of the sufferings of millions of designated "class enemies".

What was stunning about The Gulag Archipelago was its definitive linking of the creation of the terror state to Lenin and his henchmen like Nikolai Krylenko, Chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal (1918-22) and later Chief State Prosecutor at innumerable show-trials, who stated "in regard to convicted hostile-class elements . . . correction is impotent and purposeless" and in a more recent book by another author, is quoted exclaiming "We must execute not only the guilty.  Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more!" (in 1938, Krylenko was arrested in one of Stalin's purges and after a 20-minute trial was immediately shot; no one was impressed).  Stalin merely inherited and then perfected what Lenin created.  And the book contained voluminous documentation along with witness testimony.  The American diplomat, George Kennan, called it:

"the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times"

The author, a decorated WWII veteran, had been imprisoned in the Gulag in 1945 for making disparaging remarks about Stalin in a letter.  Released in 1956 (Stalin died in 1953 and over the next three years the Gulag camps were mostly emptied), he secretly, and at great personal risk, set to compiling his history of the Gulag, completing it in 1968. Because of the danger of discovery and confiscation he never worked on the entire manuscript at once, storing it in sections with trusted friends at various locations in and around Moscow.  The manuscript was eventually copied onto microfilm and was smuggled to France.  Meanwhile, the KGB became aware of the book and began frantic attempts to seize it to prevent publication (not yet being aware that the microfilm version had already reached the West).   There were still three typewritten versions of the manuscript in the Soviet Union and in the summer of 1973 the KGB found one of them after interrogating one of Solzhenitsyn's trusted typists.  The distraught typist hung herself a few days after being released.

For the Soviet leadership, Solzhenitsyn's book questioned the very legitimacy of the Soviet state and its founding, but one thing had changed by 1974.  Under Stalin and Lenin, Solzhenitsyn would have been quickly imprisoned and then shot. By the 1970s the choices were mostly reduced to imprisonment, internal exile or expulsion (though untraceable murder was still occasionally employed on dissidents).  Solzhenitsyn posed a difficult dilemma.  In 1970 he had received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, an account of life in a Gulag camp published during the Khrushchev thaw.  Deciding that imprisonment or internal exile would turn him into a martyr and constant source of Western pressure for his release, the regime decided expulsion was the better course.

The Gulag Archipelago is not a dry history.  It is brimming with passion, anger, contempt, caustic wit and acerbic asides.  The accretion of detail on person after person, on trial after trial, on lawless and arbitrary decrees and on the squalid dehumanizing world of the camps is relentless and overwhelming and the translation by Thomas P Whitney captures it all.

To give you a flavor for its power, below is an excerpt  from The Gulag Archipelago Two (in the U.S the book was published in two volumes, each about 700 pages).  It's from a chapter is entitled "The Archipelago Metastasizes", which tells the sorrowful tale of the building of the White Sea-Baltic canal in the early 1930s.  Stalin demanded the building of a canal that would allow the passage of Soviet naval vessels from one sea to the other in order to avoid the Arctic Ocean, setting a 20-month deadline for completion.  Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were assigned to its construction.  The canal was dug by hand without any mechanical equipment under terrible physical conditions and brutal oversight from abusive guards. 250,000 prisoners died during its construction.  The canal was poorly designed and never functioned as planned. Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in his portrayal of this debacle, near the end of the chapter recounting a visit he made to the canal in 1966 and of the official tour he took:

"It's so shallow", complained the chief of the guard, "that not even submarines can pass through it under their own power, they have to be loaded on barges, and only then can they be hauled through."

And what about the cruisers?  Oh, you hermit-tyrant!  You nighttime lunatic!  In what nightmare did you dream up all this?

And where, cursed one, were you hurrying to?  What was it that burned and pricked you - to set a deadline of twenty months?  For those quarter-million men could have remained alive.  Well, so the Esperantists stuck in your throat, but think how much work those peasant lads could have done for you!  How many times you could have roused them to attack - for the Motherland, for Stalin!

"It was very costly", I said to the guard.

"But it was built very quickly!", he answered me with self-assurance.

Your bones should be in it!

The chapter ends with this summing of accounts:

My Lord!  What canal is there deep enough for us to drown that past in?

(Building the canal)
From West Germany, Solzhenitsyn emigrated to the United States moving to Vermont where he lived for many years.  In the summer of 1975 he was invited to speak by George Meany, President of the AFL-CIO, to speak at the organization's dinner in Washington DC where he said:

I have tried to convey to your countrymen the constrained breathing of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe in these weeks when an amicable agreement of diplomatic shovels will inter in a common grave bodies that are still breathing. I have tried to explain to Americans that 1973, the tender dawn of détente, was precisely the year when the starvation rations in Soviet prisons and concentration camps were reduced even further. And in recent months, when more and more Western speechmakers have pointed to the beneficial consequences of détente, the Soviet Union has adopted a novel and important improvement in its system of punishment: to retain their glorious supremacy in the invention of forced-labor camps, Soviet prison specialists have now established a new form of solitary confinement -- forced labor in solitary cells. That means cold, hunger, lack of fresh air, insufficient light, and impossible work norms; the failure to fulfill these norms is punished by confinement under even more brutal conditions.  

While in DC,  Meany and others tried to arrange a meeting between Solzhenitsyn and President Gerald Ford. Ford, with the concurrence of Henry Kissinger, refused to invited the author to the White House, for fear of endangering the emerging detente with the Soviet Union.

In 1990, Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship was restored in the waning days of that country's existence and he returned to Russia in 1994, dying in 2008 at the age of 89. 

 

The Gulag Archipelago is both a factual and rhetorical attack on Soviet communism.  It is also a tract of powerful moral reflection on humanity.  The author reflected on what he learned during his decade in the Gulag:

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts.  This line shifts.  Inside us, it oscillates with the years.  And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained."

Recent Reading: Non Fiction

 Alamo In The Ardennes by John McManus

The story of the Battle of the Bulge usually centers on the 101st Airborne Division and its defense of the besieged and surrounded town of Bastogne until rescued by Patton's Third Army, and it is indeed a memorable event.  Years ago, while noted WW2 historian John McManus was interviewing veterans of the 101st, some of them mentioned that the unsung heroes of the Bulge were the soldiers of the 28th Infantry Division, which prompted McManus to do the research and tell their previously untold story.

The German plan for their winter offensive, which began on December 16, 1944, was to capture the key road hub of Bastogne by mid-day on December 17 and then pivot northwest and cross the Meuse River.  The entire offensive was a desperate gamble with very little chance of success, but failing to seize Bastogne would doom even that small chance.

The 28th Division had just been through a brutal struggle in the Hurtgen Forest and was sent to a quiet section of the front in north Luxembourg to recuperate.  Instead they found themselves taking the main blow of the surprise German offensive.  What followed were a series of small scale engagements; company and squad size, in which the American infantry, usually outnumbered 5 or 10 to 1 and facing German Panzer divisions, were able to slow down the planned advance while sacrificing themselves in the process.  The hardest-hit regiment of the 28th lost all but 400 of its 3,250 soldiers.  Not to be forgotten was the assistance from from Combat Commands of the 9th and 10th Armored Divisions which were rushed to the scene with directions to slow down the Germans and suffered terribly in accomplishing that task.

The result was that German forces only began their approach to Bastogne late on December 19, which gave time for the 101st to reach the town and hold it.  By the next day, when the Germans reached the area in force, it was too late to launch a direct assault on the town.  Though the siege now began, the German strategic gamble had failed.

McManus does a great job in the book balancing the big picture with the details on these small-scale engagements.  He tells the stories of individual soldiers and, at times, provides almost a shell by shell narrative.  A compelling book providing well-deserved recognition for these brave Americans.

The Widowed Ones by Chris Enss

When George Armstrong Custer died at the Little Bighorn in 1876, he did so along with two of his younger brothers, a nephew, and a brother-in-law.  The Widowed Ones is about the seven officer wives left as widows and what happened to them in the years after.  George's widow, Libby served as the center for trying to keep them together and sane in dealing with the aftermath.  It is a fascinating story but I was disappointed with the book which was not well-written and not particularly insightful about the women.

One Damn Thing After Another by William Barr

An autobiography of the two-time Attorney General and a rollicking read because the last three quarters are about his tumultuous 22 months as AG in the Trump administration.  He defends the President when he did things that are defensible, he criticizes him freely for things that weren't, and is very insightful about Trump's personality.  Worth a read.  Some of the content is captured in an interview Barr gave to Bari Weiss last year about which I wrote (see Unbarred).  I may write about the book in a separate post.

Napoleon In Egypt by Paul Strathern

Napoleon's expedition to conquer Egypt in 1798 is extraordinary.  Leaving Europe and revolutionary France on what seemed a quixotic adventure and one, as Paul Strathern explains, understandable in the context of an extraordinary man.  The author tells the story in an effortless way.  A pleasure to read. 

Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M Scott

The subtitle tells it all.  The author provides a more sympathetic, or at least more understandable, portrait of LeMay than seen in most recent books on the subject.  We learn of the debates around the logistic, technological, political, and military considerations that led to the decision to firebomb Japanese cities.  Along the way, Scott also exposes the reader to the brutal reality of the horror in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945, as we follow the fate of some of those caught in the firestorm which killed more than 100,000 residents.  Highly recommended.

Moral Capital by Christopher Leslie Brown

The history of British abolitionism.  A scholarly book on the origins of British sentiment on abolishing slavery, beginning in the early 18th century and exploring why that sentiment did not coalesce into an effective political program until the latter part of the 1780s.  It is very interesting but heavy going for a casual reader.  Brown emphasizes the key role played by the American Revolution in spurring British abolitionism to become a political force.  Contra to the argument made by the 1619 Project that the abolition movement started in Britain and the threat of ending slavery was a significant motivator in the revolution, Brown argues the opposite.  Brown points out that similar abolitionist sentiment began in the colonies earlier in the century and that, for British who supported the revolutionaries, the ending of slavery in several of the newly independent states, served as an inspiration.  For those opposed to the colonists who enjoyed pointing out the hypocrisy of those proclaiming liberty while enslaving others, they, in turn, were forced to face their own hypocrisy because of the existence of large-scale slavery in the Caribbean sugar islands.

Gentleman Revolutionary by Richard Brookhiser

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Those words were written by Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), who also "wrote" or assembled the rest of the Constitution, stitching it together from the various resolutions passed at the Constitutional Convention.  Morris later served as Minister to France during the Revolution and Terror and late in life was responsible for the street grid pattern of Manhattan and instrumental in the construction of the Erie Canal.

Brookhiser has written a series of brief biographies of the Founders.  This one is fine, but more like a sketch of an interesting life, and it's not as good as some of his others.

The War On Heresy by R.I. Moore

Learned of this book while listening to a three-part The Rest Is History podcast on the Albigensian Crusade (honest, I really did).  The first part addressed the nonsense in the Dan Brown books, while the final episodes were on what really happened and why.  Moore is a well-known medieval scholar who, based on his more recent research, completely revised his views on the origins of the Albigensians and the reasons for the Crusade declared by the Church against the people of Languedoc.  According to Moore, there was not a secret church based on ancient beliefs.  Rather, unsophisticated people in the region had various versions of beliefs that were consistent with different strands of Christianity.  Unfortunately, they ran into a series of Pope's determined to regularize doctrine and bureaucratize belief.  There's a lot more to the book and it's another one I plan to write about in a separate post.

The Soviet Century: Archaeology Of A Lost World by Karl Schlogel

I've only read bits and pieces of this book, because it is 900 pages and not meant to be read all the way through in one burst.  The author is a German scholar of Eastern Europe and the book is a tour of the Soviet world, examining the artifacts of that lost civilization, exploring what it was really like to live in that unique place.  We have chapters on the queues that formed every day; on doorbells, nameplates and signals; communal apartments; on the management of libraries and publications; Stalin's cookbook; the Beryozka shops; and prison camp tattoos.  A great read in small doses.  In its strangeness and weirdness it reminds me of the best book on the post-Stalin Soviet Union, Red Plenty. 

I'm also nearing the end of the two volume journal of Lafayette's 1824-25 return to America of which I've written about recently and to which I will return once completing.

Recent Reading

Notes on books I've read and enjoyed over the past few months and which have not been previously mentioned on THC.

Non-Fiction

Roman republic and empire history is one of my favorite subjects and The War The Made The Roman Empire by Barry Strauss was a good read.  The story of the rivalry and then war between Octavian (Augustus) and Antony and Cleopatra is well told.

It was during the time of the empire that Christianity arose and in Dominion, Tom Holland explains why the viewpoint of the new religion was so fundamentally different from the mindset of Classical times and how, even today, even for those of different religions or no religion, the ethos of Christianity still has such an impact.  Fascinating read and fodder for good discussion.

The fourth century saw the triumph of Christianity in the empire.  In The Final Pagan Generation by Edward J Watt, we learn from the perspective of four leading pagan politicians, authors, and philosophers born near the beginning of the century and dying near its end what it was like.  We know what happened during that century, but it was not evident to those living then what would happen and none of them seem to have foreseen the course of events.  It is a reminder to all of us, that it is only looking back that things appear to arrange themselves in a pattern (see the sidebar to this blog for some wisdom from Joe Walsh on this subject).  It also prompts the reader to wonder whether we are in a similar situation in this century.

The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance and Forty Years That Shook the World (1490-1530) by Patrick Wyman tells the story of the pivotal figures in the ending of the medieval era and of setting us on the path to the modern world.  Very insightful.  It also fits with the three part THC series, Ten Years After (1519-29) on six important events during that decade and which you can read here, here, and here.

Not covered in Wyman's book, but occurring during the same period is The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee, the story of Christopher Columbus and his illegitimate, but recognized son, Hernando Colon, who accompanied him on his last voyage to the Americas, and created the greatest collection of books in the world at this time.  A story I'd had no clue about until stumbling across an article about it recently (see Book of Lost Books).

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas by David Eltis is a detailed study of the early days of the Atlantic slave trade before the mid-18th century.  It covers the economics and logistics of the trade.  Eltis includes a lengthy discussion of how and why the coastal African states engaged in the trade and how they were able to keep European powers from gaining footholds in their territories during this period. 

Colin Calloway's book, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis & Clark recounts the history of Indians from their entry into North America during the Ice Age until the beginning of the 19th century, focusing on what is now the United States west of the Mississippi.  A vast temporal and geographical scope which the author handles well.  The book gives the reader an appreciation for the culture, struggles, and conflicts over that timespan.

I had the pleasure of interviewing U of Virginia professor and head of its Civil War Center, Caroline Janney via Zoom for our Civil War Roundtable and we hope to have her back in person.  Her recent book, Ends of War, has received glowing reviews and contained a lot that was new to me.  The usual tale of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, was his army disbanded and went home.  It turns out it was not as simple as that as a large portion of his army was not at Appomattox so how to effect its surrender raised questions as did many other aspects of the surrender even for those there on April 9.

Carrying the story further is Gregory Downs, After Appomattox, the story of the military occupation of the South after the end of the Civil War.  Downs recounts the struggle the rapidly shrinking army faced in trying to maintain order, particularly in light of the massive violence unleashed by white southerners against blacks and those whites seen as their allies.

When Michael Collins, who remained alone in the Apollo Command Module, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, passed last year, it reminded me I'd never read his book Carrying the Fire, reputed to be one of the finest astronaut memoirs.  I've now read it and concur.  Written in the 1970s, after he'd left NASA, Collins provides amazing and interesting detail on what it was like to train as an astronaut, how relatively primitive the technology was, and how astonishing it was that from start to finish the moon landing project took only eight years.  Collins also seems to be more self-reflective than many of those early astronauts and his portrayal of himself and his fellow astronauts is fascinating. 

San Francisco has always been somewhat offbeat, but in the 1970s it was going completely off the rails.  Cult City by Daniel J Flynn is the tale of Jim Jones and his People's Temple that began in the Bay Area and ended with murder and mass suicide in Guyana.  Flynn has a chilling story of how a charlatan like Jones succeeded by drawing in vulnerable people with the active assistance of local and state political figures.

San Francisco may not be any better today, at least according to San Fransicko by Michael Shellenberger.  Shellenberger, a progressive who recently announced his candidacy for governor, taking on the incumbent Gavin Newsom, writes of the city's, and the state's botched efforts to deal with the mentally ill and addicted overrunning its streets, park, and sidewalks.  Constricted by the dictates of ideology enormous amounts of monies have been spent to little effect.  This is a sensitive issue for me, due to issues in my own family going back a half-century and it is frustrating and infuriating to see the same false arguments still trotted out by mental health "advocates" decades later.  While the problems they created remain unsolved, many of these advocates make a nice living from all the monies flowing in to supposedly solve the problem.

The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski is a feast for fans who love the sport and great writing.  Joe can make anything interesting and his ranking of baseball's 100 greatest players provides him great material to work with.  I really didn't care about the specific ranking for any player, I just wanted to enjoy the writing and getting there. I did.

Fiction

Ridgeline by Michael Punke (author of The Revenant) is a fictionalized telling of the events leading up to the Fetterman Fight in December 1866, in which Crazy Horse and a tribal alliance wiped out eighty U.S. soldiers.  Told from the soldier and Indian perspectives.  Excellent.

It starts in Hawaii just before Pearl Harbor and takes us to Hong Kong and Japan during the war.  Five Decembers by James Kestrel begins with murders and the investigation by a Honolulu detective.  Intrigue on an epic scale over a five year period.

The fate of Jews under German occupation during WW2 varied greatly.  In The Invisible Bridge, Julie Orringer describes the little known story of Hungarian Jews, alternately persecuted and protected by their own government, until late in the war when the Nazis occupied the country.  A sprawling, moving book.

I love Michael Connelly's books, particularly those featuring detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch.  As Harry, a Vietnam War vet, is aging out, Connelly has introduced a new detective, Renee Ballard.  I had not found her as interesting but in The Dark Horse, they join forces and the partnership and Ballard's character finally take off.

And in August, we'll get the latest in Martin Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police series, set in the Dordogne region of France.  I can't wait.

I'm updating this to include a series of five crime novels I completed reading about a year ago.  The unusual setting is Constantinople in the second quarter of the 19th century, and the main character is Yashim, a eunuch and detective, at the service of the Sultan.  It's a time of reform, turmoil, and intrigue in the failing Ottoman Empire.  Great characters and detail to give the reader a flavor of an unfamiliar world.  The first novel in the series is The Janissary Tree.  The author is Jason Goodwin, who wrote a fabulous rumination on Ottoman history in Lords Of The Horizon, which I quoted from in Part 2 of The Song Of Jan Sobieski.

Churchill & Tolkien

(from Daily Express)
(from The Guardian)

And odd pairing at first glance but with striking similarities in their views of history and human action:

From Winston Churchill's eulogy for Neville Chamberlain, November 1940

It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour. 

From The Return Of The King by JRR Tolkien; the final debate at Gondor, remarks of Gandalf:

Other evils there are that may come . . . Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.  What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Churchill spoke during the darkest days of World War Two, when Britain stood alone against the Hitler and Mussolini.  Tolkien, a veteran of the trenches in World War One, began work on The Return of the King during the Second World War.

Both convey the idea of uncertainty, the inability of humans to control events and of there being no endpoint to human history in which we permanently reside in the "broad, sunlit uplands" Churchill refers to in his Finest Hour speech of June 1940.  There is a slight difference in emphasis between the two.  Even in the short run, Churchill admits one can make the wrong choice and fail to identify evil, while Tolkien seems to say one can, or should, identify evil though the consequences of dealing with that immediate evil are unknowable in the long-run.

In another sense there is a great similarity between Churchill and Tolkien which, while representative of their age, would be viewed differently by many, particularly academics and literary critics, today.   Take a look at this sentence from Churchill:

The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.

Post-modernists would reject what they see as Churchill's fixed, non-contextual value-laden meaning of conscience and respond "Well, Hitler was sincere in his actions and acted according to his conscience so (to paraphrase a former American Secretary of State) what difference does it make?".  In Churchill's world conscience represents absolute values of honor, righteousness and humanity and by definition a Hitler-type character could not have a conscience.  Tolkien's writings make clear he held the same view as Churchill.