Just for fun - Friday palate cleanser

Given the dire and dreary doings of the Second Fraudulency Administration, I've been trying to actively avoid all their bullshit in the news - it just makes be want to kill people and break shit, which at this point is still somewhere between "treason" and revolution" - and instead I've been trying to find things to enjoy.

Like this; "The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland" from Bret Devereaux's wonderful A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog.  

Besides the pure entertainment value of a serious discussion of the mechanized combat of the "Mad Max" world (and related/similar movies or video games) it introduced me to this insane IRL thing; the "Toyota War" in Chad.

Now there's a fun subject for a "battles" piece! Toyota Hilux versus T-55! I could see doing either the January 1987 Battle of Fada, or the larger and more critical engagement where the Chadians took the Libyan post at Ouadi Doum in March...any interest in either or both? 

What's not to like?

I think I need to get my hands on a copy of Ken Pollack's Armies of Sand first, though. It's supposed to have the best account of the Toyota War, and I'll take a look and see.

But if you've got a moment or two, go read up on Devereaux's take on the Road Warriors:

"All of that is a kind of warfare that actually supports the fractionalization of power, producing the sort of smaller-scale warlordism that the fiction tends to want in these settings. But rather than display their power with massive (but very vulnerable) war rigs, such warlords would likely attempt to overawe foes with impressive displays of their large stock of technicals. And, this being a Mad Max themed setting, by large spikes placed on everything."

Make sure you read the footnote that I've omitted from the end of the final sentence in the above quote to learn more about the "armored codpiece". 

Which reminds me of...

..."Ironlily's" cute take on 14th Century religious orders of knighthood, girly Gothic armor (including armored codpieces) and (okay, yeah, a lot of...) cartoon cheesecake in general. 

Nothing serious, but kind of adorable (in a sort of smutty way...)

OTOH here's cartoon "adorable" without the smutty: Carol Cao and her delightful "little life in the woods" artwork:

(I apologize for the Muskrat link, but Cao doesn't seem to be posting anywhere else...). I love both the sweet feeling of her art and the attention to detail of the things like the rebounding raindrops on the little temple roof, or the suggestion of the kitty hanboks.

I've also been trying to find kind, soothing, happy reads. These have included the very "cozy" little adventure story The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong as well as several more chapters in Kashiki Takuo's series ハクメイとミコチ, Hakumei to Mikochi. 

Not all of this effort has been successful; I'm presently struggling with Axie Oh's The Floating World. 

I love the idea - Korean folklore meets science-fantasy (think a sort of Ghibli-world-building only without the aircraft...) and hero's quest fiction - but the writing just plods. It's not gross or face-smacking, it's a slow drip of little stuff, like this:

"...they waited for the guards to pass, their bright lanterns giving away their positions."

I don't know any other kind of lanterns, do you? I mean, if the guards had something dim, something like little chemlights, that only hinted at their passage, sure, that would be worth detailing. But "bright" is kind of a default "lantern", innit?

Or this, just a couple of sentences later, when one of these random NPC guards stumbles into our heroes:

"Sighting Sunho, he lashed out at him with a concealed dagger."

Not really "concealed", is it now, seeing as how the guy "lashed out" with it? And how do you "lash" with a dagger? Did the author mean "slashed"? Then why not say that? Mind you, slashing with a dagger - unless it's made on the lines of a full-size bowie or a pesh-kabz (a "Khyber knife" for you Great Game/Kipling fans...) is kind of a mug's game, especially given that the Macguffin of this part of the story is that these aren't random rent-a-cops but "Sareniyan soldiers", the regular army of the Evil Warlord dude of the story.

I mean, I get what the author was trying to say; this troop pops out of a door and immediately attacks our heroes who are very obviously not supposed to be where he finds them. Presumably because he's not on guard at the moment he lacks his issue weapon - probably a spear or sword, based on the worldbuilding - so he whips out his sidearm knife to take them out.

So that seems pretty easy to me:

"They stared at the guard and the guard stared back - for only a moment before drawing his belt knife and stabbing (slashing?) at Sunho, the closest of the three intruders."

Fixed.

I've got a couple of almost-sure-winners on hold at the library; Chris Moore's Anima Rising, more inspired wierdness from the Dirty Jobs guy, and a local author (Mark Pomeroy)'s Tigers of Lents, a semifictional story about soccer and our local Felony Flats, the southeast Portland neighborhood once famed for the New Copper Penny and now the home of the ridiculous Portland Pickles amateur baseball outfit.

Portland being Portland you knew there'd be a homegrown reaction to the feeling of being mulcted by big-time pro sports outfits like the Trailblazers and Timbers. This "Pickles" ballclub is one.

(The other is a nonleague soccer team run by the Pickles people called the "Bangers".

I've never seen the Bangers but if the Pickles level of play is anything to go by, well... let's say that I was a Cubs fan back in the day so I've seen some pretty bad baseball, but...

Then you realize that these are college dudes who aren't getting paid, so. 

 One last "fun thing" - Adult High School.

 This little chanbara/bad girl/school comic is just 100%, no-holds-barred, pure fun.

 

 Like BIG fun.

 

If you have a moment and a spare dime. go kick Alexis Flower a buck or three.

That's all I got. 

Decoration Day 2025

 As usual this past Monday I spent part of the morning down among the dead men.

This time I sort of bogued on my Army brothers and instead of heading east to the big Willamette National Cemetery on Mt. Scott traveled only as far as the little burying ground at the old Vancouver Barracks, right across the river in Washington state.

It's an odd sort of place befitting the long and patchwork history of the old post along the Big River; frontier fort, trading post, white settlement and Indian agency, river port town, early aerodrome, and in the end neglected, largely forgotten, and finally abandoned.

The burials reflect this, both in style and content.

Unlike the green and shining uniformity of the flat headstones on the Willamette cemetery hill, Vancouver's green lawn is broken by many what I think of as the older "standard" above-ground stone markers you see in Arlington (so difficult to mow around!) as well as even older, non-spec markers like LT Watson's here:

 

The silent community includes not just soldiers but wives and children - so many infants and young kids from what I assume was the garrison of the 19th and early 20th Centuries! - and even a trio of former enemies; two German POWs and an Italian - though if I was SGT Dioguardi I'd have come bolting out of my grave in an undead fury:

"Wassafuck' a matta fo you!? You thinka this a flag Italiano? Tha fuck? You gotta Tedeschi flags for the fuckin' Tedeschi but notta Italiano fo' me? Betta nothing at-a all than this! You thinka Imma fuckin' Russian?!?! Fangool, tu bastardo!"

The sheer heterogeneity of the Vancouver burials kept me surprisingly entertained, so I wandered the little cemetery for a while with my dram of whisky in my pocket, bundled against the late May chill, until I ran across these two:

Army 1SG Carlisle and Marine 1SG Martin; the former possibly a First Shirt from one of the infantry companies posted here before the 1940s, the latter undoubtedly retired locally from his bootneck days.

Both seemed likely to at least tolerate an old platoon sergeant, so I shared out the fine peaty draft, hoping that they'd had a laugh or two and come home sound from their service days. I found my little cars and joined the traffic drifting back across the River of the West to my new home in my old St. Johns.

That afternoon I completed my memorial obligations by finishing the "Murph", the Memorial Day workout dedicated specifically to a Navy SOF-type officer but to the war dead of the 21st Century in general. I did this last year and wrote about it here.

This year I rucked lighter -10kg instead of the EFMB standard 35lbs - but I hit a personal record for repetitions; 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, so hooah, me.

Last year I came away from the day somewhat bitter and dissatisfied with my country and the way it has memory-holed the wars and the dead of my generation. 

I wrote:

"I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead."

 Oddly, at the end of yesterday I didn't feel quite so angry and bitter.

Yes, my country is going to Hell (or Republican Christopathic oligarchic MAGAt fascism, which is arguably worse).

Yes, I have lost the home and wife and family I worked for for twenty-five years.

Yes, I'm old, and alone, and dying slowly of Parkinson's Disease.

But I'm still here.

In George McDonald Fraser's memoirs he remembers his uncle toasting himself and his former mates of the 92nd Infantry Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, with the pledge "Ninety-twa, no' deid yet!"

That always seemed to me an absolutely perfect soldierly sort of toast. Not a boast or a brag of great deeds done, not a promise of noble actions to come, but a simple declaration; I'm still here, still standing; I'm not dead yet.

And so I am. Sixty-seven, not dead yet. 

So here's to you, my brothers, on this Decoration Day 0f 2025.

Let the dead lie in honor and the living fight the good fight, to the end not dead. 

Yet. 

As always today: this.

Am I Blue..?

One of the Portland newsweeklies is doing a worthwhile civic service; turning the paper over to members of Portland's Black community to talk about The Oregon Problem Which Dare Not Speak It's Name; systemic i.e. "institutional" racism.

Of all the places in this country I've lived Portland (and Oregon) is the whitest place I can think of. The racism is baked in, going back to the original Oregon Constitution of 1857. Here's the Oregon Encyclopedia on the subject:

"Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution."

Hell, I wrote a whole post about it a decade or so ago. 

Oh, and I love the part about the Oregon Bill of "Rights" being clear that while you had rights to trial by jury, free speech, and from not having GIs in your guest bedroom, you didn't have a right to be Black and Oregonian.

Nice.

One of the most visible, and intractable, pieces of this racist history that isn't just history is the Portland coppers.

They were lethally racist fucks then, and by and large they are now.

We've gone through a covered-wagonload of schemes to change that and it hasn't worked. Portland's Thin Blue Line is both racist and lethal to people of all colors; as the first linked article points out, they killed 78 people over the past four years up from 51 between 2014 and 2018.

But mostly Black.

So I'm with Mr. Smiff, the goatherder of the Mercury piece; the problem is the cops, and the problem is bred into the whole outfit's bones. It's not "reformable", it's not "redeemable". The only real solution is to burn the fucker hull and sticks, break up the ashes, and start again from scratch.

Call it "defund the police"? Fine. The point is that this blue village has to be destroyed in order to save it.

Then...what do you do?

And there's the big question. Because here's my theory: Portland police aren't bad just because they're lethal racist fucks. they're lethal racist fucks because of policing.

At least the way we here in Portland (and much of this country) do policing. And that, to a massive extent, is because of who we Americans are.

 

Specifically, the "occupation" model of policing - a relatively small number of coppers racing around in cars responding to emergency calls - means that the cops themselves typically only work with:
1) drunks and dopers,
2) belligerent assholes, and
3) poor people.

And many of these people are armed; indeed, the number of guns lying around means that if you have to try and deal with whatever fucking thing they're doing you kind of have to start from the assumption that they're strapped.

That's kind of it. 

People don't call 9-1-1 when they're having a nice day. They don't need cops when they're being friendly, or happy, or peaceful, or content. The cops only get involved when somebody's mad, or whacked out, or scary, mean, violent, or some other form of assholery, and as often as not with a deadly weapon.

Lots of these people are poor, and lots of them are Black because it's way more likely that you're poor when you're Black; that's how we roll here in the Land of the Free. And poor people don't have the options that better-off people do, especially if they're on the street, but just in general it's harder not to end up breaking the law which forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread if you're poor.

And there, told to enforce that law, on "those people", are the cops.

Think of how you'd feel about your work, and your co-workers, if it meant constant irritation and aggravation dealing with assholes?

After not too long you'd probably conclude that most people are assholes, many are dangerous assholes, and that almost all poor, Black, and poor Black people are dangerous assholes that you'd need to shoot first to stay alive. 

In other words, you'd be a lethal racist asshole.

Even if you didn't start that way, the way the United States works now goes a long way to ensuring you'd end up that way.

So how do you change that?

My only thought is that you'd effectively have to change 1) U.S. society, and 2) how we police it.

You'd have to get rid of the fucking guns, for one thing.

If any interaction with an asshole, or even just someone having a bad day - angry, depressed, even suicidal, argumentative, irrational, out of control - might involve a firearm? Then anyone whose job involved stopping that bad day would have to have lethal force, if not in hand at least at hand, and be mentally prepared to use it.

That's the kind of hypervigilance that produces "combat stress" and PTSD  in soldiers. Until the cops don't have to start from there? Every cop incident is going to have the potential to go lethal pretty quick smart. With the expected consequence of the cop starting every incident halfway to drawing down on someone.

Then you'd almost have to have a cop living, or at least walking around, in every street in every neighborhood.

Because the other part of this is the "working with nonstop assholes" thing, remember?

To change that the cops would have to interact with other kinds of people; happy, peaceful, friendly, non-asshole people. They'd have to see the good side of the people around them, instead of seeing them as random "civilians", randos they jump out of the car on, who are either useless NPCs, or assholes that need a beatdown.

Remember "Officer Friendly"? Yeah, well, it's kind of hard to be friends when you only drive in once or twice a year to thump some asshole and haul them off to Detox. 

And then there's the whole "right of the people to peaceably assemble" thing...

...yeah, that. 

This is a long way around to get to the part where I say "I don't see any simple, easy, straightforward way to fix the cops".

Do we need some sort of police? Yes.

Do we need the police we have now? As I think I've made clear; no. The current cop model is broken. It doesn't prevent crime. It doesn't solve crimes, not very often, and often not correctly, given the number of people whose convictions turn out to be mistaken or, worse, deliberate frame-ups.

But ISTM that "fixing" that involves "fixing" a huge chunk of modern American life; society, economy,  politics...and we can't even agree to get a fucking ketamine-addled Afrikaaner's fucking long nose out of our collective governmental pocket, or send a corrupt and predatory grifter and former real estate slumlord to the pokey instead of the Oval Office.

WASF.

Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 5c (Interlude) SIGINT

 

On the last Frontiers post commentor Carsten reminded me (Thanks, Carstens!) of another August 1914-thing that changed how armies fought; "Signals Intelligence", or in the term the U.S. Army uses, SIGINT.

Now you could say that SIGINT wasn't exactly a new 1914-thing. Enemies had been trying to steal each others' secrets and communications since, well, probably the Late Stone Age. After all, when you know what your enemy is going to do, and when and where, you can be there (or not be there...) sooner, in greater force, and with surprise.

And both battles and campaigns before the 20th Century were affected by the loss (or gain) of communications, obviously in the form of things like written orders. Back in 2008 we discussed the 1862 Battle of Antietam, where the accidental discovery of the Confederate operations orders ("Special Order 191") should have resulted in a crushing U.S. victory.

The big difference between 1862 SIGINT and 1914 SIGINT was the invention of "wireless telegraphy" (principally) by Guglielmo Marconi around 1895.

Of course the use of electrical power - which the new "WT" or "Radio" depended on - to send signals was as old as the mid-19th Century, when the electrical telegraph had replace the "optical" telegraph (stuff like this thing, a signal station with movable panels or arms to send semaphore signals...)...

...and telegraph wires were strung all over the world.

The problem with wires - and all the armies of 1914 still strung and used miles and miles of wire, mind! - were multifarious. First you had to string them, which took people and time, since existing wires often didn't run where the armies needed them.

Then you had to protect them, particularly from artillery fire, which as you can imagine was a very "1914" kind of problem.

And third, the wires literally tied you in place. If you moved away from the existing wires you'd be voiceless and deaf until you reached (or ran) a new set of wires,

So the ideal way to use electricity would be to power some sort of equipment capable of sending and receiving electrical pulses (since that's all the telegraph was; turning "on" the current for a signal, turning it off for a gap or pause) through the air, without the wires.

Marconi did that, building on the work Hertz had done, using a form of electromagnetic radiation; "radio waves".

Here's the thing about those early radio sets, though.

They were big and heavy. They were also fairly fragile, and didn't like rough handling which, as you can imagine, is kind of a "war thing". And they required a steady supply of electricity, meaning if you couldn't just plug into the wall socket (not a "war thing", either) you needed a generator, also big, heavy, and fragile (or two guys riding a stationary bike...

...which is kind of weird when you think of it as "war", but, then, war is fucking weird.)

Which is why the first radio SIGINT was by navies and directed at warships.

Which is where we talked about this in our 2013 discussion of the Scarborough Raid and the activities of the British "Room 40" naval SIGINT people involved.

By the time the first rounds went downrange in 1914 the armies of all the major combatants had radio, though, and were developing their own SIGINT capabilities. The U.S. Naval Institute has a good little summary of early radio warfare, including the drawbacks, including that...

"...its use alone might reveal one’s presence and position to the enemy. (T)he very presence of wireless messages in the air will enable the enemy to guess that something is happening. By the time World War I broke, radio-direction-finders were coming into existence, which would enable the enemy to pinpoint one’s forces."

What didn't help was the crudity of the early radio transmitters:

"(I)n the early days of radio...any time one sent a message over the air, practically any one with a set could pick it up. (W)ith the spark system and the primitive receivers, there was no selectivity of stations...as late as 1914 the equipment in use emitted a signal many kilocycles wide, one signal covering perhaps the whole of the present broadcast band."

To a former GI used to the frequency-hopping sophistication of modern military commo gear that's utterly horrifying, the COMSEC equivalent of adorning your foxhole with flags and streamers and ginormous speakers blaring Bohemian Rhapsody whilst you prance around it in a pink tulle' tutu. 

Why not just paste a sticker on the front of your helmet reading Just Shoot Me Now!?

The SIGINT people of 1914 kind of had to figure this out for themselves, though. 

Famously the German radio intel people were reading Russian e-mails in August that provided extremely useful intelligence about the Russian offensive in East Prussia that led to the thumping win in the Battle of Tannenberg, but as noted in this NSA briefing,

"When the war broke out...there was no fixed organization in either the German or Austrian side for intercepting foreign radio traffic...field regulations for German telegraph troops did foresee the the possibility of listening in...when their own was dormant.

At the time there were two rather large fortress radio stations in eastern Germany which had relatively little traffic of their own and were consequently in a position to listen to the enemy...(e)ntirely on their own initiative a few operators (at the fortresses of Konigsburg and Thorn (Note: this 19th Century fortification was located near the current Polish city of Toruń), and the former civilian station at Breslau) attempted...to listen to Russian army traffic as a sporting proposition, so to speak; it was not long before the first messages were intercepted but no one knew quite what to do with them..."

Fortunately for 8. Feldarmee commander GEN von Hindenburg the fortress CO at Thorn decided to send these intercepts on to Army HQ on his own hook. 

But you get the idea; this was an ad hoc sort of thing for the German Army.

It sounds like the French were a bit better organized. Here's what the WarHistory.org article about SIGINT on the Western Front says:

"The French Deuxième Bureau on the Western Front was well prepared for the signals war...even though they did not have the benefit of the plain text messages that Hindenburg enjoyed reading during his campaign in the east. However, they were able to decipher the German messages quite easily."

Some of the French SIGINT was simplified by sloppiness in German COMSEC brought on by the stress and pace of the "right wing sweep".

"(German 1. Feldarmee commander) Von Kluck’s rapid advance...used radio extensively to co-ordinate the units of his army according to plan. German radio operators...sent transmissions correctly in cipher to begin with, but as the heat of battle increased, messages were sometimes sent in plain text and security procedures began to flag."

Apparently the German Höheres Kavallerie-Kommandos (the HKKs) were the big problem:

"The Cabinet Noir was the cryptographic department of the Deuxième Bureau (French Military Intelligence) and intercepted over 350 radiograms transmitted by the German cavalry corps over a two-week period during the campaign. Radio station staff had no clear instruction on wireless security so the call-signs of each station in the army invariably started with the same letter and remained unchanged as their advance progressed, nor was there any change in wavelength of the broadcasts. 

Cavalry units were the worst offenders, probably due to stress of their fast-moving formations...Each German cavalry control station, for instance, had an identifying letter: ‘S’ was the designation of units in Belgium, ‘G’ in Luxembourg, ‘L’ in the Woëvre and ‘D’ in Lorraine. Confirmation from some messages came in plain text and could even be clearly signed by the sender with their rank and name"

I'm not an intel weenie but even I can figure out that's not good. 

As you can imagine, the Eiffel Tower made a terrific radio listening post

It's difficult for me at this distance to tell how each element affected the course of the Battle of the Frontiers. Certainly reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance on the ground made differences, both from what the aviators and cavalrymen discovered...and what they probably should have and didn't.

Certainly SIGINT (and it's "opponent", COMSEC) made differences, too. The author of the War History piece certainly thinks that French SIGINT was crucial:

"Von der Marwitz’s cavalry were ordered by radio to provide a thin screen of lancers to cover the widening gap between First and Second armies. The French identified this as a weak spot in the German front that began to stretch for miles as the two armies advanced at an uneven pace. Using signals intelligence gleaned by the Deuxième Bureau on 8 September, the French general struck at the critical point between the two German armies’ line of advance. They soon began to threaten the German First Army with encirclement and outflank von Bulow’s Second Army in the process, causing both German armies to retreat...the German Army retreating in the face of a desperate French resistance became known as ‘The Miracle’ in public parlance. The French High Command and the Deuxième Bureau, however, knew better."

As we'll see in the next several parts, reconnaissance troops on the ground and in the air played a big part in the "Miracle" as well as the engagements leading up to it, so...is there a definitive "answer"?

No. Like much of modern warfare - indeed, like much of warfare, period - the real effects and impacts of all the various factors; physical, emotional, intellectual, as well as things like weather, terrain, organizations and equipment, doctrine...are all related and interacting with each other.

All we can do from a distance is try and tease out how and why each affected the outcomes.

Certainly the radios, both as part of each side's "C3I" (command, control, communications, and intelligence) as well as the SIGINT people's use of them as enemy intelligence sources, played a role. Befitting the relative unfamiliarity all the armies had with radio, though? My guess is that those roles varied significantly, from critical to marginal to overlooked entirely.

Anyway...I thought the SIGINT part of the story was worth discussing. Thanks again, Carstens, and we'll be back later in May with the "big story" of the Frontiers; the critical Battle of the Ardennes that kicked off in the third week of August 1914.

Is there a doctor in the house? (Hint: No.)

 Here's National Public Radio:

Shall we do a bit of "fact-checking" as the Kidz Today call it? First stop, Wikipedia:

"Means graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine in 2014 but dropped out of her surgical residency four years later and subsequently chose to practice functional medicine, a form of alternative medicine. Her medical license has been inactive since 2024."

Meaning "no, not an actual "medical doctor". Failed the OJT that is a critical piece of becoming a board-certified MD. 

I'm a "certified engineering geologist" because I 1) have a degree (two, actually, baccalaureate and masters) in geology, 2) passed my boards (two, actually, the state RG and CEG examinations), AND 3) worked under a licensed CEG for a period of five years to learn the important practical aspects of my profession.

Part 3 is not "optional"; it's considered an essential part of my licensure just as internship and residency is essential to medical board certification. "Doctor" Means couldn't hack it and fucked off into some sort of woo-woo bullshit at that point, which would be like me doing my CEG training as a sales clerk at Ed's House of Gems.

Wait. "Woo-woo bullshit"?

Here's Wiki on "functional medicine":

"Functional medicine (FM) is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses many unproven and disproven methods and treatments.^[1][2][3] At its essence, it is a rebranding of complementary and alternative medicine,^[4] and as such is pseudoscientific,^[5] and has been described as a form of quackery"

So, yeah; woo-woo bullshit and "not an actual medical doctor".

So what does this not-an-actual-doctor-woo-woo-bullshit-artist "believe"?

Hang on; shit gets deep here. From the first Wiki piece:

"Means and her brother, Calley, co-wrote Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health in 2024.

(T)he book's central claim is that a single mechanism, which the authors call "Bad Energy", described as a common form of mitochondrial dysfunction caused by improper lifestyles...cause(s) disorders as diverse as depression, anxiety, acne, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, as well as "most other conditions"...

The book asserts that the underlying causes of this dysfunction are rooted in unhealthy modern lifestyles: "too much sugar, too much stress, too much sitting, too much pollution, too many pills, too many pesticides, too many screens, too little sleep, and too little micronutrients. These trends-with trillions of dollars behind them-are causing epidemic levels of mitochondrial dysfunction and underpowered, sick, inflamed bodies."

The authors also assert that diseases such schizophrenia and depression are caused by..."leaky gut syndrome", and...claim that "researchers can identify a person with depression or schizophrenia just by analyzing their gut bacteria composition".

Oh, horseshit.

Also; fuck off, NPR. "medical degree from Stanford"? That's some real fucking sanewashing right there, you nimrods. Don't think that's gonna save you from Big Ballz and the DOGE Pounders.

"Bad Energy"? "Leaky Gut Syndrome"?

Why not "Demon Sperm"? Remember that weird Trump shit? Ohhellyeah. He's totally like that, and when you look at it that way his tapping this gimp for Surgeon General makes total sense. She's in the "wellness" grift just like he's on the "wealth" grift. Game recognize game.

This whacko has no more business being Surgeon General than I do claiming to be the fucking Dragon King of Bhutan.

There's a lot of "unhealthy modern lifestyles", yes.

None of them cause cancer. Or Parkinson's. Or acne. Or cure them.

Anymore than this freak can.

 

But she's a skinny sorta-blonde white chick that Trump would totally rage-fuck, so she's right in his ten-ring.

What a completely fucked-up country we live in.

 

Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 5b: First Encounters

We're a week or so into the Great War - 7 AUG or so - and the German Imperial forces and those of the Republic of France and the Kingdom of Belgium have fought the first encounters of the opening moves of that war, the so-called "Battle of the Frontiers".

Recall in the previous post we divided the timespan of this opening engagement into four parts:
1. "Preparations" (1 AUG - 7/8 AUG) - covered in Part 5a,
2. "First Encounters" (8 AUG - 21 AUG) - which is covered in this post,
3. "The Crisis" (21-24 AUG), and
4. "The Great Retreat" (24 AUG - 5 SEP)

And the geographic space into three areas:
1. "Northwest" - primarily central and eastern Belgium (and, later, northern France)
2. "Center" - southeastern Belgium, Luxembourg, and north-central France, and
3. "Southeast" - the Franco-German border between roughly Nancy and the Swiss frontier.

In the previous post we discussed:

The German invasion of Belgium that centered on the assault on the Belgian fortress city of Liege (in the Northwest area) as well as the small engagement west of that city where reconnaissance elements of the German 4te Kavalriedivision found out the hard way that mounted fighting for intelligence was a non-starter in 1914, and

The initial French assault around the town of Mulhouse in Alsace (in the Southeast), which gained back some ground lost in 1870 and, seemingly, validated the concept of GEN Joffre's Plan XVII.

In the center the opposing forces had not yet collided. The primary activity we discussed was the long ride of Sordet's Cavalry Corps, which pushed into Belgium as far as just south of Liege but found no major German units there, suggesting to Joffre that his attack plan for 3eme and 4eme Armee was workable in driving into the flank of the German drive into Belgium and dislocating the "hinge" of the big Schlieffen right wing.

Now we're going to try and quickly review the actions over the next two weeks - between the end of the first week and the beginning of the third week of August 1914 - because they involve a lot of moving and searching and not a whole lot of fighting across the general frontier.

Oh, there was fighting, but largely at the ends of the lines. The middle of August was largely a time of movement and maneuver as the two (and, later in the month, the British becoming the third) powers pushed through their operational plans.

Remember that the principal focus of this series of posts is on the contributions to the operations along the frontiers of the elements tasked with reconnaissance (and counter-reconnaissance), which in 1914 largely meant the traditional horse cavalry but now included aviation, both heavier- and lighter-than-air; aircraft and dirigibles.

Let's look first at the places where actual fighting was going on.

First Encounters - Northwest (8 AUG - 21/22 AUG)

It's not really correct to call the operations in this and the Southeast areas as "First Encounters"; both sectors had seen action in the first week of the war. 

In the Northwest the German Maasarmee - a reinforced armeekorps - had invested Liege, and the strategic reconnaissance elements of Höhere Kavallerie-Kommando (HKK) 2 pushed into east-central Belgium.

In the Southeast a reinforced French corps - VII Corps d'Armee (VII CA) - pushed into the German marches around the Alsatian town of Mulhouse. This attack succeeded in pushing the advance units of the German 7. Feldarmee back, but good recon by both ground and air elements discovered vulnerabilities in the French deployment that Generaloberst von Heeringen, commander of 7. Feldarmee, planned to use to give the impudent Frogs their conge'.

Let's start in the northwest.

The city of Liege itself was occupied on 8 AUG - the Belgian 3rd Army (along with assorted maneuver elements defending the city proper) had pulled out to safety in the west - but the ring forts around it held out. Between 8 and 12 AUG the true siege train including the superheavy 350mm/420mm artillery and two additional armeekorps, arrived and started hammering the Belgian fortresses.

Finally on 8 AUG the aviation unit attached to the German X. Armeekorps - Feldfliegerabteilung (FFA) 9 - began operations over Liege. These expanded on 11 AUG when the FFA's attached to the arriving armeekorps began operating. 

Two of these; FFA 1 (attached to the Gardekorps), and FFA 9, were tasked with strategic reconnaissance deep into central Belgium. According to Bowden (2017) these flights were generally successful; the German fliers located the bulk of the Belgian field army as well as determining that the French maneuver forces had not crossed the Belgian frontier in strength.

The remaining fixed-wing units were tasked with local reconnaissance over Liege, which Bowden (2017) says:

"...often saved the siege batteries from needlessly wasting their valuable armor-piercing ammunition on an already neutralized target."

So well done, flyboys.

Meanwhile, things weren't going so well for German recon troopers on the ground.

On 11 AUG elements of HKK 2 were pushing northwest towards the line of the Gette River towards the Belgian left and the main roads to Brussels. To hold down this flank the Belgian Cavalry Division posted the crossings of the Gette, including the most dangerous avenue of approach that led northwest from the town of Diest through the town of Halen (sometimes spelled Haelen), about 47km northwest of Liege.

The Belgian engineers failed to drop the bridge at Halen and four cavalry regiments of 4te Kavalriedivision from HKK 2, attached jäger infantry from 2te and 4te Kavalriedivisionen, and two battalions of horse artillery got across the Gette the following day.

Then, however, the German cavalry learned the hard lesson their counterparts had learned earlier at Waremme; that dismounted rifle and machinegun fire made mounted reconnaissance both unenlightening and lethal. 

Apparently the German cavalry - dragoons, cuirassiers, and uhlans - made as many as eight mounted attacks on the Belgian troops - cyclist infantry and dismounted Guide and lancer cavalry, with regular infantry arriving later in the day - and were shot to pieces.

The Belgians were roughly handled but the attackers lost some 500 troopers and over 800 horses (effectively ruining the four cavalry regiments involved), learned nothing they hadn't known before, and had to leave the Belgians in temporary possession of the ground.

It was turning out that mounted operations were pretty dangerous in the presence of 20th Century munitions. The setback ended what might have developed into a turning maneuver of the Belgian field army's left by HKK 2.

But in the big picture German operations in the Northwest weren't really going anywhere until Liege was reduced. That meant a German major-operational pause between 8 AUG and 16 AUG, when the siege was closed out and the German right wing forces released to push into central Belgium.

As Bowden (2017) notes, "...as of August 17th the German leadership was entirely unaware of where the allied forces opposite their right wing were located. Only the Belgian Army, standing opposite (German) First Army along the Gette River, was known..."

The map below gives you an idea of the progress of the German cavalry between 16 and 24 AUG. HKK 2 (operating in concert with 1. Feldarmee) is to the north of the green line, HKK 1 (with 2. Feldarmee) to the south. 

The Bowden (2017) assessment continues:

 "...in order for the German right wing's grand enveloping attack..to be successful, it was absolutely critical that the...allied left wing (was) located as quickly as possible. (W)hile the position of the French left could be safely assumed to be in the vicinity of Namur, the location of the BEF was a complete mystery."

The possibilities ranged from far to the west, to threaten 1. Feldarmee's "open" right flank, to tucked in next to the French 5eme Armee, or even hovering offshore to land behind the German advance. Bowden (2017) concludes:

"Only after the BEF was located could (1. Feldarmee commander) Kluck begin to concentrate his widely dispersed forces and take the offensive. Thus, with the success of the right wing's offensive at stake, it was imperative for the Fliegertruppe to locate the BEF as well as French Fifth Army as quickly as possible."

As you can see, this was a task for the fliers; it would take almost a week for the weary horse soldiers just to get to where the French and British might be.

 

 We'll discuss what happened when these forces met in the next part of this series. In between the fall of Liege and the end of the third week of August;

The Belgian Army eluded German encirclement to fort up in Antwerp. This was annoying for the OHL because it meant having to drop off a full armeekorps to mask the Belgians and prevent raids on German supply lines. 

German air recon units searched to the west, south, and southwest...but were largely confined to the immediate front of the 1. and 2. Feldarmee. This meant that while 2. Feldarmee aviation located advance elements of the French defenses around Dinant and Charleroi, 1. Feldarmee's fliers weren't far enough forward to find the British. 

French reconnaissance appears to have been either absent - the Armee de l'Air doesn't appear to have been very active over the German operational areas - or timid, in the case of the Sordet unit. As we mentioned earlier, the French cavalry reached the southern outskirts of Liege late on 8 AUG. The lead elements bumped into German lines, and rather than attempt to fight through them, pulled back to the southwest.

The worst part of that operation was the weather conditions - extremely hot and dry - and the distance covered, as much as 100km or more that day. Most of the cavalry mounts got little fodder and no water that day, and the long, hot march was hard on the relatively fragile troop horses.

Worse, Sordet's units got little rest after that; by 12 AUG the corps had retired southwest to Neufchateau. Still no Germans, so by 15 AUG Sordet's command had re-crossed the French border to fall in with 5eme Armee.

Interlude: Horses and Industrial War

One thing worth noting about the anabasis of Sordet's cavalrymen; the scope of war in 1914 was becoming too big, and the pace too demanding, for the most vulnerable piece of the recon elements, the animals that made cavalrymen what they were. Not just the French cavalry. All cavalry, and the horse-drawn armies it supported.

European cavalry (as opposed to the sort of horse-nomad riders of the Asian steppes) depended on big, "warm-blooded" horses bred to the work. These had to be strong enough to carry the heavily-equipped trooper, and sturdy enough to stand up to the hard riding of campaigning.

But horses are surprisingly fragile. Their legs and hooves didn't evolve to stand up to long plodding road marches, and the wear of even the best saddlery and tack caused galls and similar injuries. Cavalry mounts were also raised on grains - primarily oats - and couldn't and didn't stay healthy on browse alone. The war diary of HKK 2 noted that:

 "...nothing (from logistical support) happened to supply enough oats. Repeatedly it was asked for help...and finally, when we were told that there would be no oat supplies for three days, (we were directed to) slow down movement, if necessary..."

All the major combatants on the Western Front had similar problems with their mounts even before encountering enemy fire at places like Waremme and Halen. The problem with 1914 logistics was that once away from the railheads supplies had to be transported primarily by horse-drawn wagons; none of the armies had enough trucks (and France and Belgium largely lacked truck-passable roads) to move significant supplies.

That meant that the draft horses were under much the same constraints as the cavalry mounts; they needed water, fodder, and rest that the relentless pace and brutal marches demanded of 20th Century warfare just didn't allow. 

(The always-invaluable Bret Devereaux describes this as "the tyranny of the wagon" and does a terrific job explaining it here).

The opening month of the Great War showed how hard modern war was on the recon vehicle of the pre-industrial era. Horses were lamed, broken, and killed by more than bullets and shells; simply moving at the pace and over the distances required of operations in 1914 was debilitating, crippling, or lethal to the cavalry mounts if not their riders.

The track of the armies was signposted with the bodies of dead animals as well as people.

The BEF landed in the second week of August. This included the Cavalry Division as well as the four squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps. These air reconnaissance units assembled in Amiens on 11-13 AUG and from there transferred northeast to forward airfields around Maubeuge between 16-19 AUG. The first reconnaissance flights began after 19 AUG to find German troop units approaching the BEF position around the town of Mons.

Keep your eyes on this part of the front, because we'll be back here in the next post.

First Encounters - The Center (8 AUG - 21/22 AUG)

The real story of the central area was, in the words of Conan Doyle's detective, the dog in the nighttime.

French planning assumed that German mobilization would put maneuver units along the LD sometime around 13 AUG. That was the premise behind the Sordet reconnaissance; to find and surveil these troops.

Instead, the French cavalry found nothing because there wasn't anything there yet to find. As this little article notes:

"In order to find the German 3rd, 4th and 5th Armies, the French cavalry would have had to advance across the Belgian Ardennes to the border with Germany and Luxembourg; it was unable to do so. The German deployment was not completed until 17 August and the German 5th and 4th Armies did not begin their advance until 18 August. The French had great difficulty understanding why the Germans were not as far to the west as they expected them to be."

The other difficulty with the Central area was the terrain; little developed, heavily wooded, badly broken with hill-and-valley topography, the Ardennes was a reconnaissance nightmare. The tree cover meant that troop movement or bivouac areas were nearly invisible to aerial observation, while the topography meant that sightlines were lethally short; a cavalry patrol could easily find itself practically on top of an enemy unit before hearing or seeing it. 

But if the cavalry didn't bump into that enemy, it was unlikely to hear or see it at all.

Terence Zuber's 2007 Ardennes 1914 does a good job of describing the issues that piled up at Joffre's GQG to precipitate the eventual disaster in the forests, a combination of tactical misallocation or mistakes and strategic fixation.

The strategic part was influenced by where the fighting was; it looked obvious that German forces were active - meaning, probably, concentrated - at the "ends" of the frontier lines; in Belgium around Liege, and in Lorraine near Mulhousen.

Zuber (2007) says that the French intelligence estimate on 16 AUG placed a total of seven German AKs - armeekorps - along the Meuse in two feldarmees, three AKs (one army) in the Belgian Ardennes, three more AKs (one army) in Luxembourg, and seven AKs (two armies) in the southeast around Alsace and Lorraine. Five AKs were assumed to be in the East, and one AK (Guard Reserve) couldn't be found.

This conformed to the apparent actions along the frontiers; weighted up in northwest and southeast, thin in the center. So for the French higher, GEN Joffre at GQG, the German Army dog was doing nothing in the Central area night (and day) time.

In fact, the estimate was off by a full three armeekorps in a whole army - 5. Armee - in the center near Metz along with the six AKs known to be there in 3. and 4. Armee. 

And, worse, that the mass of troops known to be in the central area was thought to be intended to reinforce the German right wing attack through Belgium:

"The French assumed that VIII AK and XVIII AK (that is, two of the three AKs in 4.Armee) were covering the movement of the German mass of maneuver from the area of Luxembourg and the rear of Metz to the northwest. (Zuber, 2007, p.95)"

The French central area maneuver units did themselves no favors tactically, either:

"General Arbonneau, with the 4th and 9th divisions of cavalry, was sent forward on 17 August to the area of Virton and Neufchateau and in 18 August pushed back the German 3. KD (kavalriedivision). No attempt at deep reconnaissance was made by either 4 DC or 9 DC, which stationed themselves a safe 10km in front of the French infantry corps." (Zuber, 2007, loc. cit.)

Again, the problem wasn't that there were no German maneuver units in the central front area; the problem was that the German units weren't where the French reconnaissance elements thought they should be;

"French cavalry and aerial reconnaissance could find no German units in the area of Longuyon-Virton-Tintingny-Arlon...which was essentially correct." (Zuber, 2007, loc. cit.)

You can kind of understand this. GQG was being carpet-bombed by paperwork; status reports, requests for orders (or amplification/explanation of earlier orders), intelligence reports. And the immediate attention of the higher was drawn to where the fighting was already; eastern central Belgium - the "Northwest" - and the Southeast in Lorraine and Alsace.

So if the Central area was quiet? Fine! Let's assume that the damned Boche are holding there to load up the northwestern attacks and southeastern defenses. We've got enough to do there without haring our recon troops after a corporal's guard holding down the lines in Luxembourg.

That was the French situation. What about the Germans?

Showalter (2020) notes that while the cavalry was struggling with dead, dying, and stricken horses the aviators were working hard; FFA 9 and other aviation units were doing good service tracking the Belgian main army west of Liege.

But the same short-range focus was affecting the Imperial commanders.

"While effective at the close reconnaissance, the airmen did nothing to extend out long-range and find the BEF or the left wing of the French Army. Due to the structural lack of an aviation staff officer, aviation reports, messages, and intelligence...frequently did not find their way to the army intelligence staff officer. It is claimed that (the German) First Army was never made aware of about fifty percent of the air reports."

This was true for the other armeekorps and feldarmee as well. So it's here that we should discuss headquarters staff organization and how that affected the reconnaissance operations of August 1914.

The Life of The Staff: One Long Loaf.

Let's take a random German armeekorps as an example.

The corps commander - an O-9/three-star generalleutnant, usually - had what a U.S. Army corps would call the "headquarters and headquarters company (HHC)" of about 300 all ranks. This included everyone, from the privates assigned as runners and guard-post rotations to the chief of the corps staff, probably a senior colonel/O-6.

Below the stabschef were three (or four) "operational" staff sections, presumably run by O-5 oberstleutnants;
Section Ia ("operations and tactics" - the equivalent of a U.S. ops section, or G-3); this was run by an officer designated the 1.GSO, who was considered the "senior staff" officer,
Section Ib ("affairs behind the lines" - seems to be sort of a combined G-1/G-4/G-5 position, personnel/supply and civil affairs)
Section Ic ("intelligence" - the G-2 equivalent)
Section Id ("assistant to Ic" - the source I have for this doesn't explain the duplication here. My guess is that this was a blank file activated in wartime if needed.

The problem here is two-fold.

In principle what a modern U.S. operation would call the "air-tasking order" would be generated by the Stabs Ia, operations staff from the corps commander's intent. 

Then the intelligence gathered by those aerial operations would be forwarded from the forward airfield to the Armeekorps Ic, intelligence, for use in preparation of the next operations order.

But both phases were complicated by the inadequate staff training and preconditions of 1914.

As reported in Bowdon, 2007:

"On many occasions the various HQ staffs failed to dispatch instructions to their flying sections. As a result, the airmen remained grounded during decisive moments in the fighting. In other cases...flying sections dispatched critically important intelligence that never reached...the army commander." (p. 123)

So overworked staffs - unfamiliar with the aviation branch and it's needs, capabilities, and limitations, failed to use it effectively - an operational failure - or collect the information it provided when it was well-used, an intelligence failure.

The same limitations would have affected the FFAs flying for the feldarmees.

This was largely remedied by the creation of an "aviation staff officer" (Stabsoffizier der Flieger, Stofl) at the feldarmee level in the spring of 1915, as well as presumably similar staff positions at the armeekorps.

But that didn't help our German - and, very likely, French and British - staff officers in August, 1914.

First Encounters - The Southwest (8 AUG - 21/22 AUG)

When we last looked at the activities in and around the Alsace/Lorraine vicinity these included:
1) a French offensive which pushed a portion of the 1er Armee - VII Corps (14re, and 41er Divisions de Infantrie (DI) and one brigade from 57eme Reserve DI) and 8eme Division de Cavalerie (DC) - across the border into the valley of the river Ill around Mulhouse, driving back the defenders from the 7.Feldarmee, and
2) German aerial and cavalry recon efforts that identified soft sectors in the French final advance lines that offered opportunities for counterattack.

This succeeded; the initial French incursion was successfully shoved bloodily back on 9-10 AUG.

That's where the two sides paused until French deployment was completed on 13 AUG when, in accordance with Plan XVII and GEN Joffre's intent, the French 1er and 2eme Armees pushed across the German frontier.

Opposing this move were the 6. and 7. Feldarmee; notionally separate commands the two had been combined under the commander of 6.Feldarmee to ensure prompt coordination before the anticipated French offensive.

That commander was perhaps the most Imperial of all Imperial commanders, GEN Rupprecht Maria Luitpold Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Bavaria, Duke of Bavaria, Franconia and in Swabia, Count Palatine by the Rhine.

This boyo wasn't just an idle royal body, though. He's still considered one of the best of the Imperial general officers. He'd been instructed to fight a delaying action on the German left to suck the French maneuver forces into the kill sack for the "strong right wing" to encircle, and did.

From 14 AUG to 16 AUG the two German armies did just that. 

By 16 AUG, however, German reconnaissance (mostly aerial, augmented by cavalry patrols and ground contact reporting) had determined that the French strength attacking into Lorraine was much smaller that anticipated; seven corps d'armee rather than fifteen. Bowdon (2017) says that:

"It was at this moment that the mentally weak Moltke started to lose control over his subordinates and the overall situation. Instead of firmly ordering Rupprecht to continue the withdrawal and take up a defensive position...he dispatched a cryptic message that allowed Sixth Army HQ to...launch a counter-offensive whenever the opportunity presented itself." (p.76-77)

Bowdon (2017) notes that poor weather and the press of retrograde displacements had limited air activity between 15 and 17 AUG, but that on 18 AUG a patrol from FFA 20 (the XIV.Armeekorps flying detachment) found an untenanted gap in the French FLOT. The 1er Armee was still attacking to the east towards Strassburg, while 2eme Armee had turned north to envelop Metz.

After a day to prepare the counterattack, now known as the "Battle of Morhange-Sarrebourg", kicked off on 20 AUG.

(This site, crafted by "Pierre Grande Guerre" in 2019, provides a terrific little tour of the Lorraine engagement sites and history of the actions here, if you want to take a look. I've stolen the little snapshot of the Oron Memorial above from him. Go; it's worth it.)

Bowdon (2017) notes that "(h)aving had plans to renew their advance...the French troops neglected to establish defensive positions during the evening of the 19th." so that when the 6.Feldarmee artillery prep began at 0400 20 AUG the surprised fantassins were hammered even before the German and Bavarian infantry tore into them.

By 21 AUG the French right was in headlong retreat. This would continue until the front stabilized inside French territory.

Summary: First Encounters - Reconnaissance Operations

Northwest: German air operations were locally quite successful, both spotting and directing artillery fire. The German cavalry was discovering how lethal modern weapons were for ginormous targets who couldn't low-crawl. French air operations were still nonexistent and Sordet's cavalry wandered around aimlessly. Belgian cavalry and aircraft appear to have, like the Germans, had local value but (unsurprisingly given their small numbers) little insight into the bigger grand tactical and strategic picture.

Center: The important things were the things that weren't happening; the French recon elements - air and particularly Sordet's Cavalry Corps - not looking hard enough for, and not finding, the German 3., 4. and 5. Feldarmee in the Ardennes sector, giving Joffre and GQG the confirmation they sought that German strength was meager and German operations largely confined to linking the left and right.

Southeast: Air recon, much the same as we saw in the preparation phase: German fliers kicking ass, the French aviators nonexistent. 

The German cavalry seems to have been doing what it could within the sort of tactical limitations we've discussed.

But here the French cavalry really began to show it's problems. There's no way the counter-offensive of 20 AUG should have been undetected until the moment the German howitzer rounds began to impact. Some sort of aggressive patrolling should have revealed the buildup of German and Bavarian infantry. You can ding the German horsemen for stuff like Waremme and Halen, but at least they were trying to follow their doctrine. We'll discuss this in detail in the next chapter, but the French cavalry seems to have been defeated before they mounted up.

Next: The Moment of Decision: 21-24 AUG