“Justice Had Overtaken Evil.”

The words of Robert Rosenthal about the guilty verdicts at the Nuremberg trials. Mr. Rosenthal helped prosecute the Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg. After he had accomplished 54 missions over Germany flying a B-17. Mr. Rosenthal was awarded 16 medals, including the Distinguished Servive Cross. Mr. Rosenthal passed away at age 89 on April 20, 2007.

Rosenthal served in the 8th Air Force, the bomber command created a month after Pearl Harbor to bring Germany's war machine to a halt through high-altitude strategic bombing. The idea was that long-range, fast-moving bombers could fly unescorted into enemy territory in daylight and rain down destruction with impunity.

But there were too few support planes, among other unforeseen difficulties, and the bombers proved to be a fat target for German fighters and antiaircraft guns. Casualties were enormous; only submarine crews in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate.  

Rosenthal, a 25-year-old newly minted lawyer, had sought out the challenge. He enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor and, when offered noncombat duties, insisted that he be sent to fight.

"I couldn't wait to get over there," he said in an interview with Donald L. Miller for the book "Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany" (2006).

"When I finally arrived, I thought I was at the center of the world, the place where the democracies were gathering to defeat the Nazis," he continued. "I was right where I wanted to be."

Robert Rosenthal was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 11, 1917, and went to school in the borough's Flatbush neighborhood. He was captain of the football and baseball teams at Brooklyn College, from which he graduated in 1938. He graduated summa cum laude from Brooklyn Law School. He had a job at a law firm in Manhattan when World War II started.

After his flight training, Rosenthal was assigned to the 8th Air Force's 100th Bomb Group, later known as "The Bloody Hundredth." He was stationed at a base in East Anglia in England.

Miller wrote that Rosenthal never talked about his passion to risk everything to fight Nazis. A rumor arose that he had relatives in German concentration camps. When asked directly, he replied, "That was a lot of hooey."

He said: "I have no personal reasons. Everything I've done or hope to do is because I hate persecution. A human being has to look out for other human beings or there's no civilization."

Mr. Rosenthal, thank you for your service.

Barukh Atah Adonai, Eloheinu, Melekh HaOlam, Dayan HaEmet.

Spring

Sulfide Of Lead

This month's Smithsonian magazine is devoted to "Destination America". There are a raft of interesting articles about a number of places in the US. I've been to a couple of these. Cajun country down in Louisiana (Lafayette and points West. Mud bugs and amazing music.) and Galena, Illinois. If you haven't been to either, I recommend both. But Galena was a particular favorite (even though there was a very memorable jam session in Lafayette involving carbon composite guitars and a woman vocalist who could turn Little Feat's Sailing Shoes into  even more than it already is - that's another story.) But I have had a very special place in my heart for the study of the American Civil War and Ulysses S. Grant for many years. My visit to Galena was a personal high point, even though the town represented a low point for Grant himself. I use a coffee mug I got there depicting Grant's home (presented to him by the town after the war) quite frequently. The article in the magazine is worth a read.

A concentration of 19th-century architecture, from Federal-style storefronts to Italianate mansions, has earned the town the sobriquet "outdoor museum of the Victorian Midwest." It attracts more than a million visitors annually.

Fox and Sauk Indians first mined the area's rich lead deposits (processing the soft, grayish metal into body paint). White settlers, who arrived as early as 1690, named the town after the Latin word for lead ore, galena. As miners flocked there in the 1820s, the rural outpost grew into a busy river port; steamboats the size of football fields hauled its ore down the Mississippi. By the 1830s, Galena's population (1,000) had surpassed Chicago's (100). Civic elders believed their thriving port would soon become the Midwest's leading city.

In the closing decades of the 19th century, however, Galena spiraled into decay as lead, used in everything from ammunition to industrial pipes, gave way to steel, and steamboats yielded to trains. By the 1950s, its downtown was filled with dilapidated taverns, diners and boarded-up buildings.

Then, in the 1970s, Chicago-area artists began seeing potential in the fine lines and handcrafted detail of Main Street's storefronts; soon they were transforming the Federal-style buildings into art galleries and studios. Today, with more than 1,000 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, 85 percent of Galena has been declared a national historic district. "This is the real thing," says local historian Steve Repp. "There have been only cosmetic changes, nothing more, since the 1860s."

The National Register list includes the two-story, brick structure that once housed the Grants' leather-goods store, in which the future general also failed to distinguish himself as a salesman: "He would rather talk about the Mexican War than wait upon the best customer in the world," local jeweler John Smith would later recall of his friend.

The town's major architectural landmarks, however, lie beyond Main Street. On steep bluffs overlooking the Galena River, steamboat captains and mine owners built imposing mansions. The houses sit on wide, grassy lawns, surrounded by towering oaks and maples, affording panoramic views. Built between 1840 and 1890, many combine elements of various styles—pointed arches paired with ornate turrets, for instance. Others offer unadulterated examples of a distinct style: some of the nation's finest Greek Revival architecture is here.

Worth the read and worth the visit if you can manage it. It is a very nice town with a lot of surprises. Galena (according to my coffee mug) means sulfide of lead in Latin. And they mined a lot of lead there before the mines finally closed.

UPDATE: Lars Walker, proprietor of Brandywine Books, point out that Grant's memoirs are a classic. So they are.

Pool Harbor, Revisited

Last year, I told the story of my Father's Day "present." I titled that post Pool Harbor, because my present was the wife and kids surprising me with the information that she had bought an above-ground swimming pool. Yahoo. Pools are a lot of work, if you have never owned one or are lucky enough to be able to afford someone to take care of it for you. Oh, once you get the chemistry right, it's not really hard work. But it is constant. The pool always needs something. Pools are a lot like cats.

So today, it is a bright, sunny and really warm day here, so the wife and I went on what constitutes a date for us these days. We went shopping for some things we needed, including pool supplies. We trundled off with three main missions: Pool stuff, tree food stuff and the one thing I needed: a nipple wrench. Now, don't get your hopes up or fear for my wife (trust me, she can take care of herself). Despite the interesting name, these nipple wrenches aren't something you buy at that place with the three giant Xs you can read from the interstate. No, a nipple wrench is something used to remove the thing you place a percussion cap on on a black powder pistol or rifle. The nipple. For some reason, when they were selling me the accessories for the howitzer, they missed that one.

Logistically, the sporting goods shop was first on the list. So we went in search of the nipple wrench. Which was fairly easy to find since they put all the black powder accessories in one place. There, that was easy. Hey, we need targets, too. And look over here….. Well, $100 later, we escaped that store. I'm not buying anymore nipple wrenches. They are apparently bad for your wallet.

Off then to the pool store. We had intended to get enough chemicals to get the pool opened up and maybe for a month or two. But the young man who practically tackled us when we walked in the door informed us that they were having a sale and it was a good time to buy the chemicals for the entire season. Aren't bargains great? So we ended up with more than we'd planned in the back of the Subaru. My wife, who was driving, said she could feel the difference in the way the car handled. Damn that nipple wrench.

So, off in search of tree stuff. We wanted to make sure the Red Sunset maples get off to a good start. We thought the local stores would have all that, so we went back to our town. This, it turns out, was a mistake. Apparently, the local store, despite an enormous annual seasonal greenhouse and plants and outdoor stuff piled all over the parking lot, doesn't much like trees. There were no tree fertilizer spikes, no Mir-Acid (for some pines), no nothing. Well, as Meatloaf so angst-fully observed, two out of three ain't bad.

Back home, I locked my nipple wrench away before it could make me spend again and changed. My wife and I then proceeded to start readying the pool. Set up the pump, fill the filter housing with the new sand from the pool store. Go to assemble. Send the wife to town to try to find nuts to replace the ones she stored in a safe place last fall. Because that safe place is so safe it will never be found and the filter can't be assembled without those two nuts. (Or with the two working on it, apparently). Meanwhile continue getting all the other myriad things together and assembled. Hoses, clamps, fittings. Um, which hose goes where?

Find manual. Find hose connection diagram. Hoses, clamps, fittings. Then find helpful markings on filter housing that tells you what goes where. Learn new and interesting word combination. Wife returns with nuts. Nipple wrench still safely locked away; she only bought nuts. Put everything together Remove covers over intake and outlet into pool. Find out pool is over filled with spring precipitation when geyser makes appearance. Learn another new and interesting word combination. Get pump started and try to reduce geyser more quickly even though it is doing its level best to take care of the problem by itself. Begin unfastening rest of pool cover.

Check hose connections. Find leaks, Tighten fittings. Check hose connections. Find leaks. Tighten fittings again. Check hose connections. Discover you know words you never even knew you knew. Tighten fittings. Decide you need plumbing supplies you can't get at this time of day on a Sunday. Give up. We haven't even started fooling with chemicals.

I told you. They hate me.

UPDATE: Well, thank you, Memeorandum for picking this up as a featured post.

No Mercy

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.

William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to Mayor James M. Calhoun of Atlanta.

The Telegraph reports on new orders that the American commander in Helmand province, Afghanistan has given to use relentless airpower against Taliban elements. There is no mercy and a relentless pursuit each and every time the Taliban launches an attack. And it has stunned the Taliban and completely disrupted their plans for a spring offensive.

Aircrews say they have been told to show no mercy, but to press home their advantage until all their targets have been destroyed. The Apache attack was one of five in three days in -Helmand, where British troops operate alongside a much smaller contingent of American infantry and special forces.

Capt Staley, the commander of the Apache unit based at Kandahar airfield, described how his helicopters had arrived just after an ambush by Taliban fighters with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns, on a detachment of American special forces and an infantry unit. In the second Apache, 1st Lt Jack Denton, 26, was in radio contact with the special forces unit, Scorpion 36, on the ground.

The soldiers said they had information that the Taliban were escaping across the river. "Look out for any boats," they said. He spotted a small aluminium fishing boat pushing out from the eastern shore of the 200-yard-wide river. In it were six or seven people. When they caught sight of the Apaches, they started to paddle back towards shore.

The aircrew hesitated. "It seemed a little premature," said Lt Denton. "We didn't have hostile intent or a positive ID from the ground commander." But the special forces soldiers were adamant that, although they could not themselves see the men on the boat, they must be the Taliban who had attacked them. That, said Lt Denton, was good enough for the Apache crews.

By then, most of the men were ashore, walking quickly towards the tree line. They appeared to be pulling clothing over their heads - burqas, Capt Staley thought, and Lt Denton concurred. As the helicopters came in to attack, Lt Denton said, one of the men turned to face him and dropped to his knees. "I think he knew that there was no hope," he said. "He was making his peace."

Capt Staley's helicopter hit them with its rockets while Lt Denton, the gunner in the other helicopter, opened up with his 30mm cannon. Three or four of the Taliban died where they stood and the rest made a dash for the trees. "They were trying to get to their bunkers," Capt Staley said. "We started a diving run and destroyed four of the six people we could see, including the Taliban commander."

War is a terrible, terrible thing. But when you are in it, you must win it. And the sooner you win it, the less the suffering all around will be. I think Sherman has it exactly right. You cannot refine it, you can not make it easier and you have to get it over as quickly as possible. There appears to be an American commander in Afghanistan who understand that. The war will be ultimately shorter as a result.

(Somewhere around the Crabitat I have a first edition copy of Lloyd Lewis' Sherman: Fighting Prophet, a biography of Sherman. It is actually still available, Amazon has it. Highly recommended.)

Riding Out The Typhoon

Or rather, riding IN the Typhoon. Telegraph reporter Adam Lusher draws the assignment of taking a ride in the newest British fighter aircraft, the Typhoon (aka Eurofighter). The long-delayed joint project by Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain is almost ready to go operational. That is, if they can get a gun for it. Or rather, get a way to load the gun. There is a 27mm cannon in the Typhoon. As ballast. There is no loading mechanism or ammunition. The RAF, understandably, wants that fixed.

Some joker has got his hands on of one of our aircraft. Unfortunately, that joker is me. I am at 36,000ft in an RAF Typhoon (aka the Eurofighter, cost £66.7 million), "flying" the result of Britain's most expensive and probably most controversial weapons project at almost the speed of sound above an unsuspecting part of Lincolnshire.

What is truly alarming is not the speed or the altitude or the cost, or even that I have just been asked to execute a turn, but the fact that to grip the control column, I have to detach at least one hand from the sick bag I am clutching to my chest.

My single-handed wobbling of the stick isn't the "right stuff" either. "Normally," muses Group Captain Al Mackay from the seat in front of me, "we would pull more than 1.1G - given that 1G is what pilots experience when they are sitting on the ground."

The head of 29 Squadron retakes control for another "gentle turn". An invisible hand clamps me to my seat, then hurls me through the sky. Resistance is useless. Because I can't lift my arms. And there's insufficient air in my lungs to beg for mercy. An alarmingly calm voice promises: "That was about 3.5G. Of course, we regularly use 7 to 8G."

I knew I risked a rough ride with this aircraft, but then the Typhoon has had a pretty rough ride itself. Even when it was still just the "The Eurofighter", it was being derided as a "Cold War relic" - useful if the Soviet Union were to rise from the dead and send MiGs swarming into air-to-air dogfights over central Europe, but useless for supporting ground troops in today's battle against insurgents in the Afghan mountains.

Lusher has an amusing, self-depreciating writing style that makes the article quite fun to read. For example: "Quite why The Sunday Telegraph's most fearful flyer was chosen to be "informed" is another matter. Suffice to say that newsroom politics can get quite brutal." The article does provide a lot of background on the issue and is admittedly an attempt by the RAF to educate the public on the Typhoon. But next time, pick me to ride in the plane! I promise I'll write a very nice review. After I finish with the sick bag.

Hoo’s On First

Writer John Preston has an interesting article in the Telegraph today detailing a bit of his family's connection to the discovery of the Sutton Hoo trove. If you aren't familiar with Sutton Hoo, this was an enormous (and enormously important) archaeological find made in Britain just before the Second World War broke out. A complete ship had been buried under a mound, along with many fabulous objects. The burial site dates from the Anglo-Saxon period and is believed to have been the tomb of one of the Anglo-Saxon kings. It turns out that Preston's aunt was the first person to find many of these artifacts.

Not only that, the Sutton Hoo treasure had been discovered just as Britain – and the world – stood on the brink of war. As my aunt said later, ‘It was extraordinary to be uncovering the remains of this lost civilisation at a time when our own seemed about to be blown to smithereens.’

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a seed began to take root. Here, surely, was a terrific subject for a novel – one that would try to recreate the excitement of the dig while examining the relationships between the people concerned.

Over the next few days, I started reading everything I could about the 1939 excavation. A trip to the London Library revealed that several of the main players had left diaries and there were also exhaustive analyses of the discoveries.

The next week I went up to Sutton Hoo. On a bank above the Deben estuary stood a group of burial mounds. At first glance, they looked disappointingly like bunkers on a golf course. And yet it was here, beneath the largest of the mounds, that the treasure had been found. Two or three hundred yards away is a large white Edwardian house with views out over the water and, on the opposite bank, the town of Woodbridge.

In 1939, the house was occupied by a 56-year-old widow called Edith Pretty and her nine-year-old son, Robert. Mrs Pretty, it soon became apparent, was a woman of considerable abilities. A keen traveller, she had visited the Pyramids in her youth and she later became one of the first women magistrates.

She had also given birth to her only child at the then almost unheard-of age of 47. Four years later, her husband died, leaving her and Robert alone in the 15-bedroom mansion.

Edith Pretty was a keen spiritualist and made regular trips to London to see a medium. There, it’s thought, she tried to make contact with her dead husband. It also seems likely that her interest in spiritualism had some bearing on her decision to start excavating the mounds in the summer of 1938. According to some accounts, ghostly figures had been seen there, along with a man on a white horse.

When she approached Ipswich Museum for advice, they recommended a local archaeologist called Basil Brown. Socially, at least, Basil Brown was Edith Pretty’s polar opposite. He’d left school at 12 to become a farm labourer, and had later worked as a milkman and a wood-cutter.

His great interest, however, was archeology. He read voraciously, taught himself four languages and proved to have a remarkable flair for sniffing out antiquities. A colleague wrote of him later: ‘His method was to locate a feature and then pursue it wherever it led, in doing so becoming just like a terrier after a rat.’

Preston has written a fictionalized account of the events at Sutton Hoo that will be published next month (ironically, by Viking). But his article is well worth reading. It puts a human face on the archaeological discovery. I've also found a few worthwhile links that discuss the Sutton Hoo site and the trove of objects. The Sutton Hoo Society has an interactive tour of the site itself. Wikipedia entry here. Pictures and history here, here, here and here.

The discovery of Sutton Hoo changed the way historians viewed the Dark Ages. At the time, it was thought that most of civilization had fallen into outright barbarity and isolation. But the trove contained objects from the Byzantine Empire proving that some trade routes were still operating even then.

Fading Light

Mark Steyn has a must read column today in the Chicago Sun-Times. He takes a look at the Democrat's behavior recently and reminds us that there are other people in the world making decisions, plots and plans. Those schemes take into account what they see on the global news networks. They can draw their conclusions on what America is willing to do based what CNN is beaming out 24/7. And the Democrats are not sending out a pretty picture.

Everything's difficult, isn't it? In the Democratic presidential candidates' debate, Sen. Barack Obama was asked what he personally was doing to save the environment, and replied that his family was "working on" changing their light bulbs.

Is this the new version of the old joke? How many senators does it take to "work on" changing a light bulb? One to propose a bipartisan commission. One to threaten to de-fund the light bulbs. One to demand the impeachment of Bush and Cheney for keeping us all in the dark. One to vote to pull out the first of the light bulbs by fall of this year with a view to getting them all pulled out by the end of 2008.

In 1914, on the eve of the Great War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey observed, "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Whether he was proposing a solution to global warming is unclear. But he would be impressed to hear that nine decades later the lights are going out all over Washington.

This week, both the House and the Senate voted for defeat in Iraq. That's to say, Congress got tired of waiting for deadbeat insurgents to get their act together and inflict devastating military humiliation on U.S. forces. So America's legislators have voted to mandate the certainty of defeat. They want the withdrawal of American forces to begin this October, which is a faintly surreal concept: Watching CNN International around the world, many viewers unversed in America's constitutional arrangements will have been puzzled by the spectacle of a nation giving six months' notice of surrender. But the cannier types in the presidential palaces will have drawn their own conclusions.

For example, as Congress was voting, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would withdraw from the post-Cold War arrangements of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty in protest at American plans to install missile defense systems on the Continent.

The damage of all of this to the US is real and will have real consequences. Hillary Clinton wants to tell us that the role of the US in the world is diminished because of the current administration. I'd say it is diminished by the behavior of the Democratic-led US Congress. It is not all about the US. There are others watching. And they are seeing weakness and a lack of will. They make their decisions based on what they are seeing. The lights are going out, alright.

Nothing To See

The lawyer for one of the men arrested in Alabama on weapons charges last week says that the arrests of his client was a big deal about nothing. Ok, he's a defense lawyer, that's his job. It's rather unlikely that he is going to give an interview to the media and say something along the lines of, "Heck, this is nothing, you should have seen what else they were hiding out in the rental unit on route 45." But, face it, 2,500 rounds of ammunition is small potatoes, the hand grenades are not.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Raids that resulted in the arrests of six alleged militia members and the seizure of hundreds of hand grenades and bullets were "much ado about nothing," a defense lawyer said Friday.

A cache of ammunition that was confiscated _ 2,500 rounds _ wasn't that large, and the scores of homemade hand grenades that agents seized could be made with powder from fireworks and components readily available in military surplus stores, attorney Scott Boudreaux said.

Even prosecutors say the ragtag group called the Alabama Free Militia had no intended target and was simply stockpiling munitions, said Boudreaux, who plans to meet this weekend with his client, Raymond Kirk Dillard, 46, of Collinsville, a supposed major in the paramilitary group…..

…..A court document indicates Dillard, unknowingly met with an ATF informant at a flea market in Collinsville about four months ago, told him he was organizing a militia and later accepted him into the group as a sergeant major.

The informant was at the home of Cole, an alleged militia lieutenant, about two months ago when he saw grenades, according to the document, a sworn statement by ATF agent Adam Nesmith. Investigators found more weapons as they monitored the group through the informant and with video and audio surveillance, Nesmith said.

During the raid, agents recovered 130 hand grenades, a grenade launcher, about 70 hand grenades rigged to be fired from a rifle, a machine gun, a short-barrel shotgun, 2,500 rounds of ammunition, explosives components, stolen fireworks and other items.

Sifting through all that based on media reporting isn't a precise science. If they are declaring one of the weapons to be a real machine gun - that is an automatic go to jail offense unless you have the proper Federal license. If the weapon is not capable of full-automatic, then it isn't a machine gun. But there's no way to tell which it is given the description. If the "short-barrel" shotgun was sawed off, that's usually a go to jail. (If it just had a plain old short barrel, you can buy those quite legally). The grenades will really get them sent to jail, though. There is no reason to have grenades and that should get these guys serious jail time. These guys sound more like idiots than a serious threat, but it's much better that they are off the streets before they did get dangerous.