Lead-pipe Cinch

Thinking about Latin lead me to Rome, and that, in turn, lead me to remembering this oddiment of historical trivia; did you know that most Roman public water systems ran through lead pipes?

Seriously. In fact, the Romans used a LOT of lead in their daily lives; pipes, roof tiles, glazes, stoppers on wine jars...you name it, the Romans could and would make it out of lead. In particular it was used in the white cosmetic paint used by well-to-do women (and not just Roman women - the whiteface Elizabeth Tudor is often shown wearing later in life had a hell of a lot of lead in it...)

You can sort of see why they used it; it's a fairly common metal. It's really easy to work. You can use it in paints, glazes, or cast objects from it. It doesn't rust or otherwise deteriorate. there's really only one significant problem with it;

If you ingest it, it's a poison.

In fact, some historians have suggested that as such it may have played a role in the problems in the later Roman period:

"S. Columba Gilfillan proposed a theory for Roman decay in 1965 that involved "poisons esteemed as delicious by the ancient well-to-do." Spoilage was a problem in ancient Rome, and vintners discovered that wine tasted better and lasted longer if it was mixed with a concentrated grape syrup called sapa. The best sapa was boiled in lead pots, allowing lead to leach into the syrup. When sapa was mixed with wine, it sweetened it and also poisoned the microorganisms that cause fermentation and souring. Sapa was also used in fruit and honey drinks, and as a food preservative.

Josef Eisinger estimated a Roman consuming a liter of wine a day would ingest about 20 mg of lead per day, which he said was more than enough to produce chronic lead poisoning.

A cultural shift at the height of the Roman Empire made it socially acceptable for wives to drink wine, to which Gilfillan attributed a declining birth rate and a low rate of surviving children among the wealthy. Today, the reproductive effects of lead are well established, as are the effects on childhood development and learning disabilities.

Gilfillan hypothesized that the diet of the poor was not so badly poisoned as that of the rich. Although they drank the same water, they lacked the luxuries of cosmetics, lead paint, wine, fruit and honey drinks, or preserved foods."

It's difficult to say whether all this lead was a genuine problem; there were enough other problems to make things interesting long before the lead got in there - untreatable epidemic disease, widespread poverty and slavery, poor hygiene, bad diet.

But, still...interesting tidbit of history.

Thirsty?

Via Appia

I spent much of last week on the east side of the mountains. It was a long and somewhat difficult week, and so I chose to take the slow way home, along the Historic Columbia River Highway - the old Highway 30 - from The Dalles to the little town of Mosier.This road is an artifact from the pre-freeway era; narrow and winding. It runs through some of the prettiest country in Oregon, the lower slopes of the Columbia River Gorge.It is an extraordinarily pleasant drive on a sunny day. But I can see why it was bypassed by the extraordinarily unpleasant, ugly, boring I-84; anything larger than a milk float would have to creep through the many tight, off-camber turns that make the road so pretty to dawdle along.The early spring blooms were emerging, and the contrast between the rich purples and yellows and the gray basalt drew my eye. I was pleased by the contrast between the springtime at the base of the high south wall and the lingering winter at the top.I think that sometimes we are deceived by the artifacts of the past. We compare the speed and size of our creations with those of earlier times and think of the people who built them as pastoral romantics, living a more picturesque life at an intentionally slower pace.And that gets a certain type of person all soppy and nostalgic for that that life at that pace.I don't think those vanished people were that much different from us. I think they wanted as much as they could as quickly as they could get it; I don't think they enjoyed a long, slow trip from Portland to Pendleton any more than we do.I think that if they could have built a road that was ugly but swift, they would have.But they couldn't, and so they built the one they left behind. And it's a very lovely road. But I think it leads us astray.I think it's a very human trait to assume that we the living are living in the most frantic, most hectic, most confusing, most dangerous times ever. And to look behind us and get a little weepy about the Good Old Days. And forget that to those people, their times were the most frantic, most hectic, most confusing, most dangerous times ever.And given things like the Black Death and the Mongol invasions, they might well have been correct.But now that those times are safely encased in the amber of memory they simply look peaceful and pretty like a small winding backroad on a slow, sleepy, languid sunny day.

To the Mountains of Madness

The Germans used to tell a story about the occupation of Alsace, back in the late Eighteen-hundreds.Now the local Alsatians, part-German though they were, liked having a bunch of foreign soldiers living on top of them about as much as you'd think. And the soldiers probably didn't like it any better, being young, bored, and far from home amid a population that didn't much care for them.

And, unfortunately, some of them might not have behaved as they would have back in those homes. So come the day an Alsatian father, bolder or perhaps just more reckless than the rest, drags his shrinking daughter into the German commandant's office to rage about the goddamn soldier who had raped his sweet, demure, virginal little girl.Now I'll bet that Hauptmann probably looked at the bedraggled little Franconian farm wench and thought "Was im ficknamen haben Wir hier jetzt..?" I'll bet he vaguely remembered her hanging around the garrison, possibly even flirting with the junge in their natty uniforms. A trooper with a steady job, even a foreigner, might not have seemed like a bad catch for an ambitious girl from a boring little scheißloch farm town.

And I'll bet he sighed, thinking that he really needed this like a case of the piles; some goddamn troop that couldn't keep it in his pants until he visited Mdme. Villebois down at the town brothel, and some little local wench who was probably more pissed off about the lack of an engagement ring than the actual ravishing.

And about how impossible it would be to try and figure out which one of his guys had actually done the damn deed.I can picture him drumming his fingers on the desk in irritation before shouting for his Stabsfeldwebel.

And I'll bet the Stabs had his guesses; if he was any good he'd know who had been on the prowl for the farmgirls in town. But he had a couple of hundred men, and the nights were dark, and the lanes were shadowy, and who the hell knew, anyway?

But whatever had happened, the two soldiers knew this; there would be hell to pay if they didn't do something.

The locals were quiet because they knew that to raise their hand against the occupation was to get crushed. And because the troops were usually reasonably polite, and didn't get in people's way without reason.

But...if this got around, and suddenly the local people began to think that their women, or anyone else, might be attacked, well...the officer and the sergeant both knew how many of the locals had been armed by the French government back in the last war...and how many of them probably had a Chassepot shoved up in the eaves somewhere. And they probably grimaced uneasily, remembering the damn franc-tireurs - the "free shooters" - who had made the countryside so unpleasant for them on the way to Paris a couple of years ago.

So the Stabs paraded the garrison, and the Hauptmann addressed them quietly, and the men drew lots out of a helmet. And the unlucky winner was marched out the following morning to the wall outside, neatly shot, and buried in the churchyard that evening. Personally, the Stabs suspected that Kirchen probably hadn't done it - Kirchen was a shy kid, really, and he suspected Knabe, the dirty hound; he'd been sniffing around that girl for the past week.

And with the weary rue old soldiers feel when they think about the things they're told to do or asked to do by the feckless people they work for the first shirt probably regretted having to shoot one of his own for a damn cheap little tart who'd likely be fat and blowsy by forty, married to some local yokel with mud up his backside, who both in five years would have forgotten all about the damn business.

How a good man had been killed because of someone's damn stupidity. About the fucking waste and misery and pointlessness of it all.

And how the Stabs would shoot another man just as quickly if it happened again.

Because the important thing is that the village remained quiet.

One soldier had died as soldiers have always died; to save his friends, and to serve his country's purpose.I have no doubt that the sergeant that killed a slew of Afghans this past week was off his nut. Shell-shocked, battle-fatigued, PTSD'd...call it whatever you want. The man was on his, what, fourth? combat tour in probably six or seven years. That's a hell of a lot of time for a young man to spend doing the dirty work of imperial policing in some of the shittier parts of the world.And, honestly - I don't think that his insane slaughter says anything of any value about the "Afghanistan mission", or whatever the sweet hell the U.S. Army was doing in that town, or the province, or in A-stan, or southwest Asia, for that matter. It's just a tale told by semiautomatic fire, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. To take this tale of one man's journey into the mountains of madness is madness itself, trying to read the scribblings of a soul tormented to insanity by the peering in the abyss for too long.What tells me something very sad and sorry, though, is the general reaction I'm hearing and reading here in the U.S.

Which varies between much speculation about the very things this horror means nothing about - the Great Game that sergeant's country and mine is playing in the Afghan highlands, the "mission" he was supposed to be there for, or anything else having to do with the larger whys and wherefores that the United States has spent more than a decade farkling about doing in the hinterlands of central Asia - and personal hand-wringing about the trooper who seems to have gone bloodily nuts on the night of 11 MAR.

There are troubling, difficult problems there, there are difficult questions to ask about all of those things, but this particular incident touches on none of them.

Instead, what it drives home to me is how utterly, completely cluelessly disengaged the entire U.S. - from the public through the civilians in the federal government to the U.S. Army - is to whatever the fiddle-fuck we're doing there.Because the Hauptmann and the Stabsfeldwebel could tell everyone involved what needs to happen now.

Because if whatever the fiddle-fuck we're doing there means anything that soldier - regardless of how tortured his mind is, regardless of the demands of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, regardless of his rights, or the opinions of the gormless American public - needs to have a quick drumhead court-martial there at his post, be given a kind word and a good meal, and then taken out to the wall outside the FOB and shot.Because the important thing is that the village remained quiet.We just don't seem to get it.

Imperial occupations are damn deadly difficult things. They don't have a fucking thing to do with Goodness, or Rightness, or Freedom, or whatever bullshit pablum gets fed to the ignorant masses. They're about figuring out how to keep the locals quiet and as happy as possible.

Anything that makes that happen is what needs to happen.

And if you can't live with that - you need to get the fuck out of the business of imperial wars.Because we seem to have chosen to treat this like we'd treat a domestic murder rampage. Which makes perfect sense - because it was a murder rampage - except that in the context in which it happened is utterly mad. Other good men will die because of it.

Because people here and our media keep repeating that this man's madness says nothing about the tens of thousands of other GIs in the country that, while perfectly true, is perfectly meaninglessly mad.

Because while talking about combat stress, and giving this trooper his Article 31 rights, and a fair court-martial, and a long sentence in a military prison makes perfect sense to the world of the United States and the people comfortably here, or in their offices in Kabul, or in the quiet briefing rooms alongside the Potomac, in terms of what it will mean in the mountains of Afghanistan... ...is a perfect wilderness of madness.

Luftschiffe

One thing that one of the regular commentors here noticed that I hadn't - at least consciously - was the regular appearance of the image of a rigid airship, a zeppelin, in the cartoon doodlings from the past week.He asked if I'd been reading steampunk fiction lately, and while I enjoy the genre the answer is no; I've always been a sort of zeppelin crank.They just seem sort of dangerously cool to me, and I love the idea of this massive thing floating along nearly silently, like a cloud only with several tons of bombs inside, over an enemy landscape as a sort of aerial assassin. Scary cool, if you will.Mind you, if I was on the ground the scary would have it all over the cool.

And even in the air - the rigid airships seem to have been fiendishly dangerous for their crew and passengers. Certainly the German zeps got hammered by constantly improving antiaircraft and fighter defenses. The statistics tell the story; 53 destroyed and 24 damaged to the point of being non-mission capable out of an total of 115 airships. Crew loss rate of 40%. Cost about five times the total damage inflicted.Still. Call the zeppelins a personal quirk, an indulgence, one of my hidden passions, an odd devotion to a vestigial past.Airships are still just freaking cool.

Anybody else out there have one of these odd, trivial passions?

A look back from overhead

The photo below is of the neighborhood I live in taken from an Army Air Corps aircraft recording the conditions of the Willamette River channel and Swan Island in 1936.One of the things I get paid for is looking at these old photographs. I'm usually looking for evidence of past landslides, or long-lost grading. But this was pure indulgence, culled from the files of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers files during a long day of researching a nearby site.

Our little house is under the orange circle. Here's the same neighborhood today:Stop for a moment and compare the two images. That's okay, I'll wait a while.

The modern image is just what you'd expect; little brick (or in our case, wood) houses for you and me, right? That's my University Park neighborhood in a sentence, no different from any other urban Portland neighborhood. The big white-roofed building to the east? That's Astor Elementary, where the kiddos go to school. Go, Astor Eagles!

But look at the top image for a bit. Here; I'll give you a little bigger view of a portion of the southwest corner of the same photo:Our house (built only about fourteen years before the photo was flown) is still under the orange circle. We understand that the little building at the corner to the west was some sort of mom-and-pop corner store, selling Coke in bottles, and penny soap to the good working-class folks of Depression-era North Portland. And note a couple of other things; the big pale farm fields down a block to the west, with some sort of long white barn or shed along McKenna Street at the southeast corner. And notice all the little footpaths and tracks that meander through the center of the blocks; in a lot of ways this part of NoPo was still pretty rural in '36 - rural enough for folks to follow the old cowpaths rather than stay on the sidewalks.

OK, now here's an enlargement of the next Corps photo flown, from 1940:One thing I picked out here was the garage - that's inside the orange box. See it? The thing is, Portland City code requires you have a garage. No shit. Seriously. If you park your car on the street more than 48 hours you can be cited for something called "in lieu of garage" and that's a fineable offense.

Really.

So back in the day all Portland houses had garages. Ours did. But at some point prior to the 1960's the thing either burnt or rotted away and fell over. I've found bits of it under the backyard sod. But there it is in 1940, keeping the summer sun off someone's 1938 Ford Twodoor.

Here's the larger 1940 image. One thing - look at the color of the streets. See how dark they are? Now look back at 1936. See the difference?The thing is that the 1936 sidewalks look about the same color as the streets, and the streets themselves look too regular to be unpaved. See that curvy line above the farm field in both 1936 and 1940? That's N. Yale Street between McKenna and Wall, dirt then and dirt now. But the regular street grid looks paved - just not paved with asphalt. Y'know what I think happened?

I think the streets were paved in the late Teens and Twenties (when this portion of U-Park was first really developed) with concrete.That's surprisingly common for Portland; in many of the older neighborhoods in the inner East side you can still find some of those old concrete pavements exposed. But they're brittle, and usually end up covered with asphalt before too long. I think by 1940 the City had decided that they weren't going to pay for any more concrete and laid down the macadam on top.The funny thing is that when I started doing this sort of overhead window-peeping in the early Nineties there really wasn't any other way to do it; the information was either in the files at places like the Corps or proprietary to private aerial photo companies. But Google Earth and similar applications have changed all that dramatically. The image above is a larger-scale view of my home from GE, circa 1952.

Note that you can barely see Astor School, the larger H-shaped dark block east of the circle that marks our house, but the long arc of Mock's (or Waud's) Bluff, the steep cut bank of the old meander of the Willamette River that encloses Swan Island is easily seen.In the old photo you can see the "island" - the rectangular peninsula that projects up to the northwest. This had been used as Portland's airport in the earlies, and was just then beginning to be developed as the industrial area it is today - here it is in 1925, probably not long after Lindbergh visited.Note that in the aerial photo the Union Pacific line running towards the long tunnel under North Portland is still an embankment surrounded by wetlands. And here is the same view today;A little busier, isn't it?

The wetlands are gone, the swans are gone, the concrete streets are gone, the old farm fields, the cowpaths, the garages...all gone but where they remain crystallized forever in silver salts and black.

Потерянный мир

This is Pinkhus Karlinskii, the supervisor of the Chernigov floodgate, who was 84 years old in 1909, which would make him 187 years old today.He lived and worked the width of Asia away from these unfortunateslocked in their zindan, a hole in the ground with a door and a adobe roof over it, described as a "traditional Central Asian prison" in the Library of Congress website devoted to the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who roamed pre-Revolutionary Russia in the first decade of the Twentieth Century.And none of them were aware of these people, a family-mining operation in the Urals.

Fascinating, lovely images more than a hundred years old, of a place and a time as unrecognizable and vanished as the dark side of the Moon. And yet, the same roof in Bukhara probably still roosts the same stork, or another so like it that the picture might have been taken yesterday rather than one hundred and three years ago.Lovely, fascinating exhibit; well worth a moment to look.

(h/t to Ed at Gin and Tacos for the link...)

Infamy

So I called my parents today, just because I was thinking that it was the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day and I happened to know two people who actually remembered it.

Well, sort of.

My pop freely admitted that he didn't remember what he was doing that Sunday. He was 15 and in high school, so he thought he might have been hanging around with his pals. But he didn't remember being very excited, or even particularly worried. "We were a long way from the West Coast," the Master Chief recalled, "...and it didn't seem likely that Tojo would be coming ashore that day." and that it wasn't really a big fat hairy deal.

But the Master Chief is an engineer and he's always been that way, I think.

My mother was on the West Coast, though, and remembers that at 13 she thought it was a big deal - she was worried that the Japanese would invade San Francisco. She didn't remember many specifics, either, and perhaps after seventy years that's not surprising.

At any rate, that's their Pearl Harbor Day stories.

Four years later the Master Chief was an Ensign in the U.S. Navy and in the last stages of primary flight training on the way to the Fleet as an aviator.

(I don't know why I've always assumed that he would have been a dive bomber pilot; he doesn't seem the sort of cocky sort that fly in fighters but he has a sort of bounce that seems a little too impatient for a low, slow torpedo-bomber driver. But he and I will never know; the bombs of August 1945 ended his trajectory to the deck of a carrier and ensured my arrival twelve years later.)Meanwhile my mother spent a good part of her war in California; long enough to see her parents' Japanese-American friends and fellow Salvation Army officers the Kobiyashis off to Manzanar, anyway. In the Sixties and Seventies I recall her telling me about working with her father, who was the West Coast Salvation Army commander, at railroad stations and embarkation ports and the long trains full of tired soldiers spilling onto the platforms hopeful for a last treat and a friendly face before the long journey resumed that would end, for some at least, in a grave on some crappy little island or in some southwest Pacific jungle.

So I don't get anything from my family other than the long-dimmed sense of duty done and done well.

And I don't see any real reason to write up today's battle. It's been discussed, analyzed, hashed and re-hashed to death. I certainly don't have anything new to add to what smarter and better historians than I have written.

But I do have some thoughts on the events of the Sunday seventy years gone by, as general observations and for what it can tell us about ourselves and the lessons we have learned - or not - from the day that lived in infamy.First, I think the single salient fact of Pearl Harbor is how it shows how individual military success can be - and often is - meaningless in securing political victory.

Which is something we seem to have a hard time comprehending.

By the military calculus of 1941 Japan beat hell out of the U.S. Navy that day. Mind you, there will always be the open question of why Nagumo Chūichi didn't rearm his aircraft and return to finish the job, which would have included destroying the sub docks, the fuel tank farm, and the drydocks and other repair facilities as well as hunting for the U.S. carriers. But the battleship was still considered the naval arm of decision in '41, and Nagumo's force had pretty well hammered the Battleship Divisions of the U.S. Fleet. The USN of '41 was crafted like most of the other navies of its day, to bring its enemies within the big-gun range of its battleships and destroy them, and Pearl Harbor meant that wasn't going to happen.

But...

As we all know, the Pearl attack forced the brown-shoe Navy to lead the counterattack over the next year. And the battles of '42 - Coral Sea and Midway - proved that naval war had moved into a new era and that the Japanese Navy wasn't ready for it. Technically, yes; it had good aircraft, good pilots, and a solid carrier force. But many of the officers who lead it were, like Nagumo, cruiser and battleship guys. They were outguessed and outplanned by their USN counterparts who also had considerable access to the Japanese codes - the tremendous success of Allied decryption was the great secret of WW2 - and the IJN also proved fatally unable to adapt to the rapid changes of modern war.

Which brings us to my next observation; if you think you can design your military for the "next war" you're kidding yourself.

The combatants of Pearl Harbor couldn't even design their armed forces in 1941 for the war they were fighting three years later. And the Japanese industrial capacities of the Forties were completely inadequate, a fact Japan had no clue about until they dragged the U.S. into their war.

Look at the Japanese aircraft in the sky that day; A6M "Zero" fighter, D3A "Val" divebombers, and B5N "Kate" torpedo bombers. Good aircraft, well employed. But in the hangers of the U.S. carriers that Sunday you'd have found F3F "Wildcat" fighters, SBD "Dauntless" divebombers, and TBD "Devastator" torpedo bombers. The Grumman fighter and Douglas bombers were comparable to their Japanese counterparts

(the poor reputation of the Devastator seems to have developed after the massacre of the torpedo squadrons at Midway, an event caused largely by misfortune (the torpedo squadrons got separated from rest of the USN stroke force, arrived alone and were swarmed by the Japanese fighter cover) and the problems inherent in torpedo-bombing tactics (flying low, slow, and straight - the way you had to to deliver an aerial torpedo - turned out to be - surprise! - fatal when your enemy had decent AAA and fighter protection. Go figure)

but had been completely replaced three years later.By 1944 the F6F and F4U were better than the A6M, the SB2C at least no worse than the D3A (though the American aviators called it the "Sonuvabitch 2nd Class" and generally disliked it) and the TBF faster and more maneuverable than the B5N.

And the IJN?

Well, the real problem for the Japanese at this point was death.

Seriously.

The Japanese pilot training system was never efficient and by 1944 it was completely broken. The IJN never developed the equivalent of the USN V-12 program that took in the Master Chief back in his day. Combat losses and the inevitable attrition of a high-risk profession combined with slow training meant that experienced pilots were irreplaceable. So when their fleet air arm guys started coming down with a bad case of death it didn't matter so much that poor industrial capacity meant that the D4Y "Judy" divebomber couldn't fully replace the Val or the B6N "Jill" torpedo bomber the Kate.

But they didn't, and even if the IJN had managed to produce enough decent pilots the USA/USN would have just shot them down as well. It just would have taken a little more work but the Hellcats and Corsairs (and Lightnings and Mustangs) were just that much better; in three years the military situations had changed that much.

Within three years the strike force, and entire the Japanese Naval Air Service, that had been so violently successful over Pearl Harbor was dead, maimed, and destroyed.

Anyone who thinks they can outguess war is an utter fool.

My other thought is that Petroleum will Fuck You Up.

Pearl Harbor and the Great Pacific War in general was as much about Blood for Oil as it was about anything. The Japanese wanted the petroleum then being produced in the South China Sea area, particularly in the then-Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). But the Dutch had cut a deal; Japan had to buy Dutch oil from us. And after the Dutch took their cut and we took ours the Japanese were paying a pretty steep price to kill all those Chinese they were killing.Because the real objective of Japan's foreign policy in 1941 had nothing to do with the U.S.; it wanted pieces of China and the Asian mainland. We were just in the way.

But we WERE in the way. The U.S. forces in the Philippines were a constant threat to the Japanese moves to the southwest into south China and French Indochina. In September 1940 Japanese forces attacked Vichy troops around the northern province of Indochina, Tonkin. In return the U.S. froze Japanese assets and - more devastating - on 26 JUL 1941 we embargoed all that lovely Indonesian and West Texas crude.

Without petroleum the Japanese conquest of China was going to grind to a stop.

And you know the rest: the military men who ran the Japanese government needed that fuel. They were going to get it from Indonesia. And to get it they were going to have to take a slap at the United States.

So the slapping commenced.
And we're still in the slapping business today.

Not slapping the Japanese, though. They came looking for trouble that Sunday morning and found all they could handle. After the millions they killed, and the million of their own people who died the nation of Japan now sits quietly as the western edge of the Pacific still mired in their second decade of economic depression.

So that leads me to my final thought on the anniversary just past; that war makes you do stupid things.

Not because it makes you stupid, but because you don't have the time or the inclination to look your options over, because war demands you make decisions NOW regardless of how much you know, or what you think you know that's wrong, or whether you really know anything at all.

So you make dumb choices. If you're Japan in 1941, you attack the Americans instead of taking that Dutch oil and then making them decide to fight you. You fight them in the mid-Pacific instead of making them come all the way to you at the end of a 3,000-mile supply chain. You risk everything on a throw of the iron dice...and then you fail, because of little stupidities like not returning to destroy the submarine pens, or the drydocks, or the fuel tanks outside Pearl City.

The Japanese appear to have learned the lesson of December 7th and are unwilling to revisit their dumb choices...but we seem to be demanding to be everything they were in 1941.

We're throwing the iron dice all over the world but especially in the Middle East, because petroleum and our craving for it.

We're powerful enough to take on the world, without wondering if taking on the world is the smartest thing to do, the enduring lesson of Pearl Harbor.We seem to still collectively remember December 7th, 1941, and one would think we'd remember these lessons as well.

But one has to wonder if we understand what they are.