Don't ask me

We lost one of the icons of my youth earlier this week. Country Joe McDonald died from complications of Parkinson’s Disease in his hometown of Berkeley, Calif. He was 84.

McDonald—with and without his band, The Fish—was anti-war all his life. His big Woodstock moment started with him shouting, “Gimme an F,” and exhorting the audience to fill the somewhat weedy air with “FUCK!” Then he segued into the “I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag”.

This song is particularly apt this week, as it turns out. You could substitute “Tehran” for “Vietnam”, while the “be the first one on the block to have your boy come home in a box” line is as true as it was in 1969.

This makes me very tired, that nearly 60 years after Joe asked for that F, we’ve still got leaders who think that a “short, victorious war” is what will settle domestic unrest. Only this time it's so much more unhinged.

Crank up the volume.

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

VE Plus 80

At 0241 local time on Monday 7 May 1945, General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) signed the unconditional surrender document at Supreme Allied Command HQ in Reims, France, effectively ending the war in Europe. With Adolf Hitler dead by suicide and his top lieutenants either dead or in flight, with Germany in ruins and with no resources (much less the long-promised “super weapons” that would save the master race), they were running out of options.

Hitler’s heirs had been equivocating for a few days with the Western Allies over the unconditional surrender requirement, largely to delay the inevitable so as allow tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians to flee westward and not be in Soviet-held territory at the moment that everything was officially frozen. They were also laboring under the pipe dream that they could somehow convince the Anglo-Americans to team up with them and drive eastward to take on their natural and mutual enemy, the Soviet Union.

Because the representatives were all old-school military, they expected to treat soldier-to-soldier with the Allies, with all courtesy attendant upon their rank. I don’t know whether they’d thought that clean uniforms would somehow cause SHAEF command to disassociate them from (among other things) the previously unimaginable horrors of places like Dachau, Bergen-Belsen or Mauthausen. But Eisenhower had visited Ordruf, part of the Buchenwald installation, and he refused to set eyes on Jodl and his entourage until after they’d signed the unconditional surrender.

Whereupon he curtly informed Jodl, "You will, officially and personally, be held responsible if the terms of this surrender are violated, including its provisions for German commanders to appear in Berlin at the moment set by the Russian high command to accomplish formal surrender to that government. That is all."

He refused to salute the Germans.

(They were rather like the German representatives to the Versailles Conference of 1919, who—by the time they arrived—had convinced themselves that Germany was no more culpable for the outbreak of war than everyone else, that the other nations at the conference recognized that and that they would therefore be engaged in a somewhat technical exercise in diplomat-speak for a while, after which everything would return to status quo ante bellum. It never ceases to astonish me how delusional people can be, or how predictable their subsequent disastrous mistakes can therefore be.)

Later that day, German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov and American, British and French representatives signed an identical document in Berlin, drawing a very final line under German resistance.

(And in less than two years, both Jodl and Keitel would be hanged as war criminals at Nuremberg. Their membership in the comrades-in-arms club hadn’t saved them from accountability for their actions while in Nazi service.)

By that time, word was seeping out that Germany was kaput, and—despite Stalin wanting to delay the announcement—Churchill proclaimed the surrender to a Britain that was already half-delirious with relief and hope, and the Western world partied like it was 1918.

In almost six years of war in Europe, 40 million people had died, half of them civilians. Millions were homeless, hundreds of thousands stateless. Pretty much everyone was somewhere on the hunger-to-starvation spectrum. Entire cities had been razed, libraries and museums burnt and looted. Nations had been bankrupted.

And they still faced the continuing war in the Pacific against Japan, which would go on for another four months.

But for a few hours on 8 May there was literally dancing in the streets; laughing, kissing, comradery. In London, Buckingham Palace was lit by floodlights for the first time since 1939, and two searchlights shone a huge “V” above Saint Paul’s Cathedral. For a city that had spent almost six years in blackout, this was proof that people would once again be able to sleep through the night.

Just not that one.

Eisenhower’s message to his troops included these words:

"Let us have no part in the profitless quarrels in which other men will inevitably engage as to what country, what service, won the European war. Every man, every woman, of every nation here represented has served to the outcome. This we shall remember—and in doing so we shall be revering each honored grave, and be sending comfort to the loved ones of comrades who could not live to see this day.":

Naturally, on VE-Day + 80, Cadet Bonespurs (coming, as he does, from generations of draft dodgers, and ignorant as a slug) has latched onto the notion that the United States alone “won the war that ended in May.” And he and his minions are scurrying about federal archives and websites to reshape history to their outlook. I assure you that—while our commitment was total and we prevailed in two theatres of operation—we were deplorably late to the fight because entire swathes of Americans favored isolation and followed the America First movement. And we had so much ground to make up.

We really need to learn from history.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Lord, don't they help themselves

You can count me among the tens of millions of people—Americans and others—who are revolted and disgusted by the Kleptocrat’s antics at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday. In what was solely a campaign stunt supposedly marking the third anniversary of the deaths of 13 US service members at Kabul Airport, he sashayed up at the Tomb of the Unknown to lay wreaths, as though he’s a fucking dignitary, and then hied himself over to Section 60 to really piss on people he believes are “suckers” and “losers” because they served in the military.

(If you’re at all in doubt about the sole purpose, tell me why he didn’t show up last year or the year before to commemorate the anniversaries. I’ll wait.)

All military cemeteries have policies prohibiting the use of hallowed ground for commercial or political purposes—for reasons that are obvious for those who are not malignant sociopaths. Section 60, which is where the most recently fallen are buried, absolutely prohibits photos and videos not taken by authorized personnel. In a vast land of the dead, Section 60 is still an open wound and the military takes this seriously. ANC staff reached out to the Kleptocrat’s team well before his visit explaining this—probably in words of one syllable and possibly using sock puppets. But they, of course, ignored the regulations.

Cadet Bonespurs—the scion of parvenu NYC real estate developers, who received four student draft deferments while he was registered in various colleges and then got a fifth deferment on medical grounds when a doctor who rented office space from Daddy Klepto swore that junior had the foot impairment—dropped a gas station bouquet of flowers on the grave of one of the 13 killed at Abbey Gate and then posed for photos with some family members, in his campaign rictus grin and right thumb up. (His left hand was not visible; my money’s on him copping a feel on the woman posing next to him.)

An ANC employee tried to stop the desecration; Bonespurs’ staff got aggressive; MPs were called and a report filed. But the staffer is unwilling to press charges, because if her name gets out she’ll start getting death threats, like every single other person who tries to impose limits of decent behavior on this asshole. His spokesthug, Steven Cheung, declared that the ANC employee was “suffering from a mental health episode” and threatened to unleash “footage” if anyone filed “defamatory” stories about the incident. Big campaign adviser Chris LaCivita weighed in: “For a despicable individual to physically prevent [the Kleptocrat’s] team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hollowed [sic] grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”

So—they agree that the cemetery is sacred. But they get to do whatever they want there, just like they do anywhere else.

They claim that some family members invited them to visit the graves. That’s possible, although I’m betting it was more along the lines of someone on the campaign reaching out to anyone related to any of the 13 until they got one or more willing to be part of a photo op, which is precisely what this was. Also, families—no matter how bereaved—do not have the power to override the restrictions at any military cemetery or to authorize filming or photography that violates the law.

Oh—and as a chef’s kiss on this: on Wednesday a reporter asked couch afficionado, doughnut orderer extraordinaire and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance about the ANC incident. Here’s what he said: “You’re acting like [Cadet Bonespurs] filmed a TV commercial at a gravesite. He was there providing emotional support to brave Americans who lost loved ones and there happened to be a camera there.”

First of all: “happened” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Second: “film[ing] a TV commercial at a gravesite” is exactly what was going on; the campaign video they shot out onto TikTok on Thursday. And third: the Kleptocrat couldn’t provide emotional support to anyone in any situation. The man is devoid of all emotions except greed, fear and hate. The families would have got more emotional support out of a moss-covered rock.

Vance followed that by falsely claiming that Kamala Harris slammed his boss for his antics (she hasn’t mentioned it at all) and then finished by exclaiming, “She can go to hell!”

I think he might have stamped his little foot, too, but the video I’ve seen only shows his upper body.

(The story may actually be infinitely worse. There’s a report that the Kleptocrat’s campaign intended to frame the stunt as a Memorial Day-like holiday commemorating the 13 deaths; he would release video of him “solemnly” placing three wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown like he’s a sitting president. They would claim the video as “proof” that he showed up to honor the “holiday” while Harris wasn't there: she declined because she hates the military. How they intended to pull that one off I do not know, but—like the story of Vance and the couch—this does seem to lie within the radius of their capacity for delusion. And, who knows—their followers might well believe it, right down to affirming that they got the holiday off from work, so QED.)

House Speaker Mike "Moses" Johnson is apparently involved; he tried to pull strings at ANC to smooth the way for Team Bonespurs to piss on the dead. Excuse me for a moment while I projectile vomit.

Well, anyhow. Today is earworm day, so we’re getting Creedance Clearwater Revival’s take on John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son”, which is all about the difference between those who end up in the front lines and those who get deferments and joke that their personal Vietnam was avoiding STDs in the Manhattan dating scene.

God give me fucking strength. They need to burn sage over the entire 400,000 graves to cleanse the air of his foulness.

©2024 Bas Bleu

Some flaming, fatal climax

I confess that—even as a military historian—I am finding some of the images and video coming out of Ukraine difficult to process. My specialty is New Military History, meaning I focus on the human environment and costs of war. And what we are all seeing is a monumentally high cost.

Poets have talked about that cost for millennia. In general, poets have been known to talk up war; soldier-poets not so much. At least not after they’ve been blooded. The challenge has always been how to communicate the truth to the folks away from the front without driving everyone insane. Or be accused of LMF (lack of moral fiber).

The poets of World War I took a major step forward, and Siegfried Sassoon was one of the best known of them. In “Dreamers” he captures some of the disconnect, as well as some of the constants.

But of course, we never learn, do we?

“Dreamers”

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.   
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.   
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win   
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,   
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain   
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: honoring service

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns of the War to End All Wars fell silent. The survivors crawled out of their trenches, scraped caked mud off their uniforms and tried to understand how to live normal lives again.

Well—that was a pipe dream; societies always try to return to normal after cataclysms, but the fact is, “normal” is one of the first casualties of wartime service. Along with truth.

I thought a lot about that as I visited the military cemeteries of the Western Front—French, British, German, American. More than other graveyards, military cemeteries display the true democracy of death: the uniformity of the headstones; regular rows; whatever the rank, no one more elaborate than any other. But that’s the dead: the living (more or less) returned to their homes to find that their governments wanted them to resume their pre-war stations on pre-war terms, and their families wanted them to pretend they hadn’t been through what they had.

We still do that—send men and women out to do the worst things imaginable and then ignore the human consequences, pretending that being a sapper or a tanker is just like being a plumber or a marketer. The fact that our longest-war-ever is not even a national effort, the way the World Wars were, keeps the blood-and-treasure costs out of mind for most Americans. If you’re not serving or know someone who is, it’s easy to ignore the price of policy.

Well, it’s Veterans Day here in the US, one of two days that we pay lip service to the sacrifices made by those who serve in our defense. Who take their oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and pay a steep price for it. I am grateful for all of them, all the generations of them. And I’m grateful to be working with many of them who continue their service by protecting our cybersecurity.

Brioche and whisky

We made inroads into the uncertainties of my Project Brioche today. My colleague MG and I basically pulled the “we aren’t leaving this web page until we’ve collected all the requirements”, and I feel heaps better about it.

Well, as the meeting ended and we were leaving the conference room, I said I was glad that my terror at seeing all those empty spaces in MG’s requirements matrix helped spur this. My manager replied—intending to be encouraging, I know—“No, you’re leading Pickett’s gallant charge up the hill.”

I stopped in my tracks, goggled at him and stuttered, “Wut? WUT? That charge did not end well.”

(Actually, I’m trying to think of a charge that did end well, and I’m coming up short. The Light Brigade at Balaklava? Custer at Little Bighorn? Flaminius at Trasimene? D’Albret at Agincourt? Huh.)

Well, he recognized his error, so that’s okay.

Also—we spent about half of our weekly 1:1 catch-up talking whisky. And not only does he have no time for Laphroaig, his “spirit animal” is Highland Park 18.

I can forgive such a person much.

Check your speed

You know, we are awash with individual and collective criminality, incompetence and downright dumbfuckery in our government, and I just can’t with it. So I’m digging into my archives and sharing a story told by Brian Shul, Maj. USAF (Ret), of his days as a pilot of the world’s fastest jet, the SR-71.

Shul flew 212 missions during the Vietnam War. He was shot down and crash-landed in the jungle, hid for days before he was rescued and suffered such severe burns that he was first told he wouldn’t survive, and then that he’d never fly again. After months in hospital, he passed his flight qualification and went on to fly a variety of aircraft until he retired in 1990.

Among those craft was the SR-71 Blackbird, which was in service from the 60s through the 80s; it was retired and briefly reactivated in the 90s. The SR stood for strategic reconnaissance, and the Blackbird was outfitted with a shedload of cool tech to accomplish that. In addition, it flew at speeds exceeding Mach 3, and could outrun just about everything, including missiles.

Shul’s story isn’t really about any of that, except for the speed. What it is about is that fighter-pilot willie-waving that I saw a lot of on the fringes of an F-14 Tomcat fighter squadron. It’s a great story, and Shul does it justice. Settle back and crank up the volume.

You’re welcome.

The flower of our youth

There’s a lot of coverage—rightly so—of the 75^th anniversary of the D-Day landings, that spectacular operation that drove a stake through the wall of Hitler’s Festung Europa and began the 11-month slog to Germany. The ranks of the veterans of Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah are thinning and growing frail; they are, after all, in their 90s.

There was a ceremony yesterday at Portsmouth, one of the embarkation points in England, to mark that side of the operation, and there’s another one today at Juno Beach, near Courseulles-sur-Mer, one of the two British landing sites. Most of the heads of state understand the solemnity and importance of remembering these long-ago events; sadly, the one representing the United States does not.

I don’t know what’s on the agenda, but it would be a good thing if the pols visited one of the three military cemeteries within a few kilometers of one another near Omaha Beach: Colleville-sur-mer, American; Bayeux, British; and La Cambe, German. I’ve walked them all, several times.

The American cemetery is situated on the bluff above Omaha Beach. You can stand at the edge and look down on the scene of the slaughter. And wonder how the hell they ever made it up to where you are. The graves are marked with white marble crosses, with the occasional Star of David interspersed. It’s quiet, usually, except for the wind. More than 9300 men lie there—not all fallen at Normandy, but congregated there in the fellowship of death.

The British cemetery, run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, is in the heart of Bayeux, the town they took on 7 June. The headstones are like those at all CWGC graveyards—identically-sized slabs of white marble engraved with the soldier’s name, regiment and date of death (if known; otherwise a cross and “known but to God” inscribed); a centrally-located Cross of Sacrifice (tall marble cross with a sword inset), and a Stone of Remembrance, inscribed “Their Name Liveth Forevermore”. More than 4000 Brits, Commonwealth, Poles, French and others lie there.

La Cambe is outside Bayeux; you get to it down a quiet road that seems to have no other purpose but to lead you to the dead. The cemetery is maintained by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the German counterpart to the CWGC. It’s not as large space-wise as the two Allied graveyards. That’s because when you look at the inscriptions on the black metal markers set into the earth, you see there are often two to five men buried in a single spot. Plus, there are the nearly 300 known and unknown under the central mound. More than 21,000 men lie there.

The thing that struck me almost from the first in these three cemeteries was the ages on the markers—you almost never see anyone who’d reached 24. Most were in the 19-22-year age range. When you’d expect them to be in college, or working their first jobs.

I’ve often wondered what the world lost through those early deaths. What music never was composed? What scientific breakthroughs never made? What civic gains, feats of sportsmanship, family enrichment just disappeared from the future in June 1944?

That, of course, is in addition to the anguish and sorrow that engulfed their families. Parents, siblings, wives, children—bereft and left alone to sort out a world gone mad. No one to repair the gutter or fix the bike; to guide a grandchild’s hands tying a bow knot; to comfort a friend; to surprise a lover with flowers.

It had to be done—it always seems to need doing. Especially since we see the resurgence of fascism and totalitarianism all around us. But take a few moments this week to think on those 30,000 lives cut short in Normandy 75 years ago. The boys of D-Day who put their lives on the line for their generation and those that followed.

Gratitude Monday: On duty

Last Thursday afternoon in the District They Call Columbia, we had a tornado warning. Our COO sent round an email telling everyone to get away from outside windows, which is probably good advice, because I’d have been the one glued to a window, shooting photos. As it happens, I was WFH in the People’s Republic, where it got so dark around 1530 that my solar-powered garden butterfly lights came on. Sometime after that, the skies opened up and all the water in the world came right down on us.

(A few weeks ago a tornado actually touched down about a mile from me, although thankfully there was no loss of life.)

Well, during a staged event that afternoon for yet another farm bailout to offset the fallout from his tariff wars, as the Chaos Monkey was peddling porkies about him being calm—the calmest ever, dammit—when throwing a wobbly at Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer the day before, and was calling on his toady aides to—one by one—swear to the assembled media that his account of the encounter was true, and calm…soldiers of The Old Guard were carrying out their duty at the Tomb of the Unknowns across the river at Arlington National Cemetery. Including placing flags at the Tomb in honor of Memorial Day.

And on Friday morning, as Cadet Bonespurs (proud descendant of a long line of military service dodgers) hauled off for a state visit to Japan and golfing with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, The Old Guard tweeted photos of what real devotion to duty looks like. Viz:

Today I am grateful for the generations of men and women of our armed services who have made great sacrifices for the survival of our nation and our democracy. And I’m grateful for The Old Guard for their dedication to honoring those sacrifices. And I’m grateful for social media, which enabled America’s Regiment to disseminate these photos that silently remind us of what duty looks like.

Day at the museum

One of my three must-dos for Paris was to revisit the Musée de l’Armée, the museum of French military history, to see what they did to mark the centenary of the First World War. I’d not been to it since the turn of the century, so it was time. (I don’t much care about the previous centuries of French military might; after a while, one suit of armor looks remarkably like all the rest in line, so…)

They had some very well-designed multimedia displays, but they really hadn’t done much to incorporate recent historiography. (There was a temporary exhibit, in another part of Les Invalides, on the continuation of World War I in the East, meaning the combat in Eastern Europe and the Middle East from 1918-1923, titled appropriately “À l’Est, Guerre sans Fin”—In the East, War without End. I whizzed through that, but it’s not my area of focus.) But not particularly illuminating.

But here are a few bits and bobs from my visit:

First of all, they concatenate both world wars into a single exhibit—fair enough—which they start in 1871:

  

In other words, they date the world wars of the 20^th Century from the defeat of the French by the Prussians in the war of 1870-71. Which, I suppose, is valid, from a nationalistic perspective. (If you go to the Imperial War Museum in London, you’ll discover that Britain and her Empire pretty much won both world wars with its stiff upper lip, and maybe a bit of assistance from, you know, everyone else. I haven’t been to any US military museum—if we even have any—but I well recall all the retrospectives on D-Day 50^th, 60^th and 70^th anniversaries that showed how Americans totally kicked German ass, and there were a few Brits, Canadians and French guys scattered about the beaches. We all have our historical lenses.)

The Franco-Prussian War ended with the humiliating defeat of French armies at Sedan, the capture of the French emperor, the ceding of Alsace and much of Lorraine to the Prussians, extraction of a ruinous indemnity and the declaration of the Second German Empire via the coronation of King Wilhelm of Prussia as Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany…in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.

That seriously bites. I don’t think it’s accidental at all that the post-WWI treaty that dismantled the Second Reich, took back Alsace and Lorraine, imposed ruinous reparations on Germany and placed guilt for causing the war squarely on Germany and her allies (among other humiliations) was concluded in that very same Galerie des Glaces. These things are like high school: they’re never over.

(The display notes the signing of the Armistice and effective surrender of the Germans in Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne on 11 November 1918. It refrains, later on in the World War II part of the exhibition, from mentioning that Hitler dredged up that very car, hauled it to that very spot in Compiègne and forced the French to capitulate on 22 June 1940 in it.)

One thing I had not previously known about was that there was a Russian Expeditionary Force deployed along the Western Front, in Champagne.

Following the February 1917 revolution in Russia, as well as their participation in the catastrophic Nivelle offensive, the soldiers mutinied in France; the brigade was disbanded by the end of the year.

As I moved into the Second World War part of the exhibition, I came across film clips of some of the concentration and extermination camps as discovered by liberating Allied forces. The films were not new. But I thought this warning caught my eye:

:

This is what PBS should display before docus that deal with difficult subjects and tell uncomfortable truths—they might be too much for you if you’re utterly pig-ignorant fuckwits.

Okay, I did not go to any other parts of Les Invalides, but I got a bit of a chuckle out of a few things I saw on the way to the exhibit I wanted to see.

First, this row of probably 17^th Century cannon:

Yawn, right? But here’s some detail:

That was pretty. But what caught my attention was this:

What do you suppose the royal porcupine is all about?

Also, the larger topiary in the background is actually the home of a rather robust rabbit, which I saw bolt across the lawn (too fast—despite his size—for me to get a shot):

And then there were these two ladies at the top of a staircase:

I have no idea who they were meant to be, but the one on the right looked like she’s checking Twitter on her mobile. I guess not:

I really am a culture vulture, non?

"Your service is important to us; please wait..."

One of the major social and economic stimulus programs that were implemented after the Second World War was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I. Bill. It was the country’s way of saying thank you to veterans returning from the war by giving them access to academic and vocational education (through tuition payments and living expense allowances), low-cost mortgages and low-interest business loans.

The G.I. Bill (although not without its inequities) was one of the true wonders of the post-war world. For many vets, it was their ticket into the middle class for themselves and their children.

In 2008, Congress passed another bill, the Post-9/11 Veterans Education Assistance Act, which was meant to update the G.I. Bill for the 21^st Century, with a focus on college education. But perhaps that bill should have had some provision for also updating the Veterans Administration computer system, because monies that should have been paid to veterans pursuing higher education are not getting to them.

Because the 50-year-old computer system…broke. The VA rejigged the formulas for payment calculations, and the system couldn’t deal. There’s a lot of congressional and VA hand-flapping going on. But no solutions.

Great way to close out the week of Veterans Day, eh?

Veterans' voices

As a New Military historian, I’m a big proponent of oral histories; they flesh out the statistics, government documents and other components of learned monographs. The Imperial War Museum in the UK has done an excellent job of interviewing survivors of the First and Second World Wars, which means we now have an invaluable repository of first-person accounts of experiences from men and women who have since died.

In the United States, we have…the Veterans’ Voices project from NPR’s StoryCorps.

I love listening to StoryCorps on Friday mornings—a couple of minutes of two people chatting about some aspect of their lives. A mother and son; two friends; survivors of a school shooting—it’s a microcosm of life. VeteransVoices is a subset of StoryCorps, focused on life filtered through military service.

One of my all-time favorites is the one from February this year (around Valentine’s Day): Vietnam vet Jerry Nadeau and WWII vet John Banvard, who were flying a little under the radar when eight years ago they moved as a couple into a veterans’ home in Chula Vista. It’s just wonderful.

On Veterans Day this year the Google Doodle connected to five #VeteransVoices stories. Turns out Google, YouTube and StoryCorps are teaming up to help expand the collection of veterans’ stories. You can download the #VeteransVoices app for iOS, Android and Kindle, and use the native prompts to guide you in your interview.

Here’s an example:

StoryCorps recordings are archived with the Library of Congress, where anyone can access them. That means that the stories of these vets are available to everyone. I hope that—as with the IWM’s archive—these interviews can help future generations understand the humanity of military services.

Veteran driver

Seems appropriate that as I was driving around this weekend—of all weekends—in the Military District of Washington, I found myself behind this car:

A long way

As I mentioned yesterday, there’s been an International Women’s Day since 1908, but the reasons for considering the contributions women make to society have often been forgotten. I mean, aside from providing generations of men with socially acceptable sex and making sandwiches.

For some time after the Soviet Union led the way in extending the vote to women (in 1917), the notion of an entire day to celebrate women-in-the-world (as opposed to the little lady hidden away in domesticity) manifested itself predominantly in socialist countries until what you might call Women’s Movement 2.0—Women’s Liberation—inspired the United Nations to affirm it in 1975.

That would have been around the time that products and advertising were trying to capitalize on the new-fangled idea of the independent woman (kind of a 1970’s flapper) with more than an allowance from a husband to spend. So you got this campaign:

(Interestingly, only when I when hunting for images of these ads did I realize that all the models are anorectic. Way to drive home the brand, Phillip Morris.)

What that slogan trivialized was how much women had earned the right to more than a lady-cigarette that’s thinner than what the blokes smoke. (You’d think Pepsico might have taken that aboard when they announced their plans earlier this year to market lady-chips—Doritos that don’t make that oh-so masculine crunching sound. But that would be ascribing more perspicacity to junk food manufacturers.)

Since I’m a New Military historian, I’m going to skip over contributions like business acumen, scientific research and sandwich making, and consider how they supported the defeat of Germany and her allies in World War I, and the fight against global fascism in World War II.

The 1914-18 war saw them entering factories and taking over farm work in astonishing numbers. Women’s labor not only freed men to enter the meat-grinder of trench warfare, it provided them with the armaments, the equipment and the provisions to carry it on. And while they for the most part stayed away from the front lines (some extraordinary women did serve in field dressing stations, and many more drove ambulances, were nurses and even ran military hospitals) their work was not without danger.

Munitions workers were not only killed in factory explosions; they also died from inhaling the toxic fumes that surrounded them during their long shifts.

Uniformed services in the First World War dipped their feet into accepting women into their ranks (in addition to nursing), in very limited and strictly temporary programs. The instant the Armistice was declared, they were chucked out, although, in fairness, the services demobbed the men almost as quickly.

Come about 20 years later, we had to do it all over again. This time, women went into the offices, the farms and the factories in much greater numbers.

In the United States, women pilots weren’t allowed to join the uniformed services, so they performed “lesser” tasks—they ferried planes around the country and across the Atlantic, test flew new aircraft, performed training. One particularly dangerous job was towing targets behind them across the sky for anti-aircraft gunner training.

Think about that one.

(Women in the Soviet Union did not face those kinds of restrictions. They served in combat both on the ground and in the air.)

Women who did join our armed services mostly did administrative work here in the states. Except for nurses, they were forbidden to leave the continental United States; naturally there was no question of combat for them.

Some numbers were recruited from women’s and teachers’ colleges for incredibly stressful and very critical work in secret squirrel activities here in the District: they were instrumental in breaking German and Japanese military and diplomatic codes, both as civilians and in the Army and the Navy. Their work contributed to turning the progress of the war in both theatres.

The government chose women for cryptanalysis for a number of reasons: with very few exceptions, all able-bodied men were needed for combat; it was grueling, tedious attention-to-detail labor that people thought women excelled at; the education at the Seven Sisters and similar schools turned out intelligent women across a range of disciplines—mathematicians, scientists, linguists, logicians—that were all key to breaking codes; graduates of teaching colleges—i.e., teachers—were used to backbreaking work for low pay.

After V-J Day, once again the women in the factories were sent home and their jobs given to returning GIs. Those in the military were told to resign and the female units were reduced to barely-there numbers.

These days, we’ve got women flying combat missions, performing critical functions on warships and serving in combat units on the ground, with many more in support functions so close to the fighting that they’re getting shot at regardless of their designation. And—as of a year ago there’s a woman in the Rangers. Much more of this and we’ll catch up to the Soviets of 75 years ago.

You have come a long way, baby

Comma gain?

Whether the world ends in a bang or a whimper, I’m beginning to think that the cause will be an argument over the Oxford comma that gets out of hand.

I see cases made for either side passing on my social feeds, and I laugh them off because I’m firmly in the AP Style camp, and whatever anyone else does I know I’m getting into heaven.

However, this one rather struck my fancy, as someone pointed out something untoward in the Royal Navy’s profile, and who might find it disturbing.

When horses fly

Quick one today—this came across my Twitter feed, and tickled my fancy, as it did the poster and many of those who commented on it.

It illustrates the push-pull that goes on in technological advances, particularly in institutions like the military. Nothing ever progresses in a straight line, there’s thrust, pushback, feint…kind of like dialectical materialism.

Anyway, you can see Colonel Hoffman’s point, can’t you?