The Crater

By July of 1864, the Union and Confederate armies had settled into stagnant lines around the railhead of Petersburg, about 30 miles south of Richmond. In an attempt to break the stalemate, a plan was developed to tunnel under the Army of Northern Virginia, detonate a mine and exploit the resulting hole in the line and confusion among the defenders. The idea was that a break-through would enable them to pour enough troops through to drive on to Petersburg. And taking Petersburg would cut Richmond’s lines of communications.

Well, that was the idea, although George G. Meade, CG of the Army of the Potomac, and Ulysses Grant, general-in-chief, didn’t rate it much. The miners, from the 4^th Pennsylvania began digging the shaft in late June, but they were operating under the handicaps of improvised supports and tools.

Our old pal Ambrose Burnside, now a mere corps commander, had allocated a division of African-American troops, who were trained pretty well by the standards of the day for their part in the operation. However, on the day before the attack, Meade (who lacked confidence in black men’s combat capabilities) ordered Burnside to use white troops, who had had no training, and weren’t even given clear objectives and expectations by their commander. Who, as it turns out, was both drunk and way behind the lines when the battle commenced.

On 30 July, the mine was detonated after some initial problems, blowing a 200-foot crater in the Rebel line. (The materials for the explosives were as defective as everything else given the 4^th Pennsylvania.) Nearly 280 Confederate soldiers were killed in the initial explosion, and their comrades were rendered stupefied for some minutes.

But so were the attacking troops, who had no notion of what they were supposed to be doing, much less how they should be doing it. They actually rushed into the crater left by the explosion, thinking to take cover there. Instead they were the fish in a rain barrel, being decimated by Confederate fire. 

Only now did Burnside send in the black troops, but they were going into a meat grinder and they, too, were cut down. Many of them were bayoneted after surrendering; it was a dangerous business, being a black man in the Union Army.

The end result was 3800 Union casualties (including 504 dead) and 1500 Confederate (with 361 killed).

Oh—and no change in the lines around Petersburg. The two armies would face each other over the rest of the summer, fall, winter and early spring of 1865.

Which exit?

This story came around recently—about the motel in New Jersey where a body lay undiscovered and undisturbed for five years… Pretty gripping, really, and a testament to the power of Febreze.

Sadly, it’s a hoax, people. Although I admit that the New Jersey setting gave it quite the weight of verisimilitude.

Apparently I need to file Empire News along with The Onion when it comes to weird Internet stuff. The challenge, as always, is that even though these sites make up their “news”, I’m pretty sure that somewhere, somehow, everything they write about is in fact happening in some form or another.

Especially in New Jersey.

Danse macabre

One month after Bosnian Serbs murdered the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo, Austria got around to declaring war on Serbia, 100 years ago today.

As I’ve mentioned, there was this convoluted Gordian Knot of alliances and expectations from the major powers of Europe and Serbia, with no country looking past the nose of its own interests to consider in any meaningful way what the hell they were putting into motion.

(Kind of like what we’re seeing right now in a couple of hotspots in Europe and the Middle East.)

During this 30-day period there was a whole lot of diplomatic back-channel consultation between Austria-Hungary and Germany, and between Russia and Serbia and Russia and France, with the British kind of flapping about in the background hoping everyone would just calm down.

There were a couple of places where an individual country might have thrown enough cold water on another to possibly engender some reconsideration. Primarily if Britain had made it extremely clear to Germany that she would indeed go to war if there was a violation of Belgian sovereignty; or if Germany had made even the most cursory reality check to Austria’s war-making capabilities.

But those moments were lost, and on 28 July, 1914 the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on Serbia. Russia began partial mobilization (against Austria) the next day, but after Kaiser Wilhelm II warned his cousin Tsar Nicholas II that Germany wouldn’t stand for this sort of thing, Nicholas ordered general mobilization, to include facing Germany.

And there they were. The Germans began preparing to implement their strategy for a two-front war, which depended upon invading Belgium to give France a knock-out blow and…

Well, you know. No short, localized, profitable war could come out of that mess.

Gratitude Monday: I get by...

I checked my mail this morning and found a package of CDs sent by a friend in Virginia. Seeing it in my mailbox made me cry a little, because the gift was such a kindness and because it could not have come at a time when I could use a bit of that any more than I do at the moment.

I have not been looking forward to this week, for a lot of reasons, mostly to do with unpleasant tasks and uncomfortable realities that I cannot turn away from any longer. Oh—and enough fear and loathing to keep Hunter S. Thompson in pharmaceuticals for at least16 months.

The CDs are theme music from some classic western films, the Band of the Royal Irish Regiment and a Tannahill Weavers disc. The range should just about cover whatever crap I have to deal with this week, and if I factor in just the wee splash of single malt to look forward to on Friday I just might make it through the next few days.

As the man said, with a little help from my friends. For whom I am grateful every day.

Strategic my ass

Ah, there's the story originally reported by the NY Times Wednesday that the thesis that Senator John Walsh (D-Mont.) submitted to the Army War College in 2007 to earn his Master of Strategic Studies degree was not, uh, entirely original thought. In fact, about a third of the 14-page paper was plagiarized—entire passages from other sources used without source citation, either unchanged or altered by the odd word here and there.

Oh—and this includes all six of the recommendations Walsh put forth as his very own conclusions at the end of the paper.

So far, in the first couple of days since the Times story, Walsh and his spinpersons have told reporters that filling his master’s thesis (which has helped both his military and political career) with other people's uncredited work was:

"A mistake", and “completely unintentional.”

Not actual plagiarism, although no alternative designation has been put forward.

And if it turns out that it was plagiarism (which I would ordinarily refer to as intellectual theft, except I'm not sure of Walsh's claim to intellect), it was probably the result of PTSD. (What he said was, “I don’t want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor.”)

Oh—also, he was on medication at the time and dealing with the suicide of a friend. There may be more alternative theories coming; look out for the Cigarette-Smoking Man and Twinkies.

(Walsh is an Iraq war veteran, and he was awarded the Bronze Star. He was not actually elected to office by the people of Montana; he was appointed to serve out the term of Max Baucus.)

Well, I have a couple of thoughts about all this. (Oh—like this surprises you?)

1) It’s unclear to me how stealing someone else’s work—in fact, a bunch of someone else’s work—can be “unintentional”. In the Internet age, when you’re not recording your research and your hypotheses on 3x5 notecards before organizing them all into ideas in your paper, highlighting whole sections of online documents, copying and pasting them into your “thesis” is pretty intentional. Especially if the copy-and-paste also includes all the conclusions/recommendations you’re presenting as your own original thought.

2) The “PTSD made me do it” defense seems equally lame. Especially when you’re toggling back and forth between that and trying to pretend it never happened, or if it did it was unintentional. Or the meds—yeah, it was the meds.

3) I’m interested in any academic institution that awards any kind of master’s degree where the thesis requirement can be met in 14 pages. Of course, I guess you don’t run to as many pages when you don’t have any footnotes and your bibliography is three sources. And you’re all tired out from that copy-and-paste drudgery.

4) Not sure I want someone making strategic policy decisions who got there by virtue of a thesis basically stolen from the heads of people who actually did some cogitation on the matter. Not that I know what "Strategic Studies" are, exactly; but strategic thinking involves, you know, thought processes. And the only arena in which I'm seeing Walsh exercise his little grey cells is in obfuscating, denial and excuse-making.

5) It’s curious that the Army War College, which awarded Walsh his degree, didn’t catch the plagiarism. When I was at William & Mary, I took a lecture class from the visiting Big Gun from Rutgers. He advised the undergraduates not to consider plagiarizing, because “if it’s any good, I’ll recognize the source; if it’s not any good you’re not doing yourself any favors.” I hate to keep banging on about this, but this was in the last century. There have been software applications available to professors for at least a decade to screen student papers for passages lifted directly from sources. It’s not that hard to check this stuff out if you’re to any degree conscientious about academic standards. Could they not afford the software? Isn’t there a government discount?

6) If they’re not that rigorous about vetting the provenance of their students’ research, do the degrees issued by the War College come in or affixed to the box of Cracker Jacks?

7) Actually, I'm a little worried about who else might have been awarded degrees from the War College, and then been promoted on the basis of them. And are, you know, now in positions where they can operate dangerous equipment and order men and women into harm's way. Euw.

8) Again, back in the last century, my undergraduate school (one of the Claremont Colleges) had a student honor code, which included upholding honesty and integrity both academically and personally. I’d have thought that a military institution would have some version of that kind of thing that students must acknowledge and adhere to. Was everyone on Walsh’s committee also suffering from PTSD or on medications during his stint at the War College?

Having said all this, I do need to note that a moral compass fixed on cheating, stealing, lying and self-aggrandizement is practically a prerequisite for election to public office these days. So Walsh is probably being high-fived by most of the denizens of the Capitol.

For the birds, Part 2

Okay, do you see what I mean about needing Nyjer seed in 20-lb chunks?

Here’s my bird feeder as of 1600 Tuesday:

And here it was at 1445 yesterday:

Whoever coined the phrase “s/he eats like a bird” obviously never maintained a bird feeder for finches.

For the birds

Well, I thought this was interesting. The finches, goldfinches and juncos go through the seed in my feeder on the balcony so fast that I decided to order a 20-lb bag from Amazon.

  

Not so much because it’s cheaper than at PetsMart, but because this way the UPS guy schlepps it up to the third floor walk-up, not me.

(You would not believe how rapacious those little birds are. I stopped filling the feeder to the top because that would only result in 20 of them seething all over the exterior, pushing each other off and throwing seeds onto the ground. Even so, I have to replenish it once a day.)

Well, I got an order confirmation PDQ, and then a couple of hours later, confirmation that the order had shipped. Fine.

What was interesting to me was that the order confirmation gave me a guaranteed delivery date:

By shipping confirmation time, however, it had changed to expected delivery date:

Um.

To protect and serve

I came across this sight driving along Central Expressway (or, as my sat-nav insists on calling it, “Central Ex-pwee”) in Mountain View.

(Oh, hold your horses—I was parked at the stoplight and my camera was right there.)

I have to say that I spent some time wondering how a cop car, with a cop driving it, could be “Out of Service”. No doughnut shops anywhere near there. Not even a Starbucks (which I know you’ll hardly credit, but it’s true).

I also wondered what would happen if that cop came across any situation that required police response—traffic accident, 7-Eleven robbery in progress, alien landing? Would he call 911?

STOP PRESS: The Mountain View PD tweeted me that this is their fleet attendant (not a sworn officer), who shuttles vehicles headed to and from maintenance. So I'm guessing that the 911 call would be the appropriate action for alien-sightings. 

I'll stand down, now.

Gratitude Monday: Friends with fireworks

For Gratitude Monday today, I’m grateful for friends who support me when I get thrown crap like that system-generated email from the company looking for employees with empathy.

In particular, for the friend who sent me incredibly beautiful Chinese fireworks:

She also assured me that any company that could send such an email in the circumstances is unlikely to provide a salubrious work environment. (Not her words, exactly, but essentially the drift.)

It was an unexpected act of consolation from someone I basically know virtually, and it made a really nice change from people who said, “Well—at least [company] told you… That’s something.”

So I’m sharing it with you. At the least, if you’re feeling fine it will expand on that; at the most, if you’re down it’ll lift your spirits.

Light in the dark night

Seventy years ago today, officers of the Wehrmacht attempted to seize the German government from the Nazis by assassinating Hitler. They did not succeed, and the reprisals against them, their families and anyone who might have been connected with them redefined the concept of savagery.

There were 7000 arrests and nearly 5000 executions, although of course (as with the Night of the Long Knives, which had been carried out ten years earlier) there were a lot of unrelated scores being settled in all the bloodletting.

Nonetheless, the attempt was an extraordinary act of courage and honor, all the more remarkable when you consider that every member of the Wehrmacht swore an oath of personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler—not to the German government (or, as US armed forces do, to uphold the Constitution). And officers, in particular, took things like oaths seriously. To decide that there was a higher loyalty than that of their professional, soldierly oath was huge.

Moreover, although the July Conspiracy, as it’s come to be known, is most often referred to as an assassination attempt, that was only part of the plan. Killing Hitler—or even killing him and his top henchmen, Himmler and Goering—without replacing the Nazis with another government would have done nothing more than set off a power struggle and result in more lunatics running the asylum. Which would make no difference in dealing with their external enemies.

No, Claus von Stauffenberg, Henning von Tresckow, Friedrich Olbricht, Ludwig Beck and the rest wanted to find a way to seize control of Germany to negotiate some kind of peace (or at least an agreement) with the Western Allies, which would prevent the total destruction of the country, and perhaps enable a continued fight against the Soviet Union. They basically wanted to find a way to get around the Allies’ stated policy of accepting nothing less than unconditional surrender from Germany.

It was much more ambitious and complicated than a simple assassination—even one of a figure like Hitler, and I wonder whether there was any realistic possibility of achieving the ultimate objective (seizing military and political control). But perhaps what matters is not so much that they succeeded as that they tried. Someone—a small group of principled men and women—tried to turn their country away from the path of nihilism.

As I said, their failure had serious consequences not only for them and their own loved ones, but for the Nazis’ prosecution of the war. It’s hard to imagine them prosecuting a more vicious war than they had in the East, but it was as though any thought of restraint or accountability had been blown up with the Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg.

It took a long time for the Germans to acknowledge that the Walküre conspirators were one of the good things of 1933-45. For years they were considered the worst sort of traitors, soldiers—officers—who broke their sacred oaths and betrayed Germany.

It took a generation for Germans people to accept some responsibility for the starting and prosecution of the Second World War. Even with their nation in ruins and evidence of atrocities clear in front of them, they were sorry not that they’d started the war, but that it had had a bad outcome for them. They viewed Stauffenberg and the others s having contributed to that bad outcome.

However, slowly they began to acknowledge that maybe the July Conspirators upheld values higher than those of mindless order-following and national arrogance, and that they were in fact exemplars of the notion that not all Germans were active or even passive Nazis.

The Bendlerblock building—a center of German military planning from the time of the Second Reich—was from which the Walküre group had hoped to run the transition from the Nazi government to their own. Instead, late on the 20^th, forces loyal to Hitler stormed the building and arrested the conspirators. Stauffenberg and a couple others were taken out to the courtyard and executed in the early hours of 21 July.

It is now the home of the German Resistance Memorial Centre. And this is how it is represented in the courtyard:

I think that, considering the kinds of militarized madness we’ve been seeing in our world just in the past week, it’s good to remember that even in the worst situations, there are some people who step up to the plate (however imperfectly) and proclaim, “Hey—let’s try to stop this.”