Books – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Book review: The Siege

April 3, 2025March 26, 2025 by philg

If you’re looking for a new book to read that provides some historical context for current events, The Siege (Ben Macintyre, 2024) might be a reasonable choice. It’s about a spring 1980 takeover of the Iranian embassy in London. Why did an Iranian Arab (more on that below) and his Palestinian friends decide that was rational to take hostages?

The plan was undoubtedly risky, but terrorist hostage-taking could yield spectacular results, and there was a precedent. Five years earlier, the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, led a group of pro-Palestinian militants, the Arm of the Arab Revolution, in an assault on a meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna. They took more than sixty hostages and killed three people. Ramírez Sánchez threatened to kill a hostage every fifteen minutes unless the Austrian authorities read a communiqué on the radio and television networks every two hours. After complex negotiations and a two-day standoff, the authorities agreed to broadcast the terrorists’ statement, and allowed the gunmen to fly to sanctuary in Algeria and Libya, having secured a large ransom and global publicity for the Palestinian cause. All the terrorists and hostages walked away. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons subsequently forbade granting safe passage to anyone killing, kidnapping, or attacking a diplomatic official, but, in practice, governments were prepared to negotiate. The assault on the Iranian Embassy was directly modeled on the OPEC siege. For reasons both symbolic and practical, London was selected as the ideal target. Many Iranian Arabs held Britain responsible for their plight: the British government had supported the semi-independent sheikhdom of Arabistan before switching allegiance to Reza Shah in 1925. The group would pass unnoticed among London’s large Middle Eastern population. “British police are not armed,” the Fox assured Towfiq. “They will not attack you.” London was packed with journalists and other members of media organizations, domestic and international, who were not controlled by the government. News coverage would be huge. With his command of English, Towfiq would manage negotiations with the police and the press.

In other words, the West’s previous accommodation of hostage-takers led to additional hostage taking. (Towfiq and the Palestinians circa 1980 probably never imagined that hostage takers would become the most celebrated folks on Ivy League campuses, though!)

The root cause of the 1980 siege seems to be that much of Iran’s oil is underneath a part of a Iran that traditionally contained no Iranians.

The region abutting the Persian Gulf known to its Arab inhabitants as Arabistan, or Ahwaz (which is also the name of the region’s capital), was once the center of an ancient civilization. The majority of its inhabitants are Arabs, Shia Muslims, but they are ethnically distinct from the Aryans of Iran, or Persia, as it was traditionally known (“Iran” is the Farsi word for “Land of the Aryans”). By the mid-nineteenth century, the region had been absorbed into Persia, but its sheikhs enjoyed semi-independence from Tehran. When the shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, took power (with British backing) in 1925, he set about “Persianizing” the region, a policy his son intensified: Farsi replaced Arabic as the official language, Iranian nationalists settled in the thousands, and senior official positions were filled by Farsi-speaking Persian Iranians. The province was renamed Khuzestan, an Iranian name. Arab opposition was suppressed. This Persianizing policy was motivated by power politics and ethnic prejudice but mostly by greed: for beneath the region’s desert sands bubbled a vast ocean of oil. Had fate dealt differently with the region, it might have become another Gulf oil state, like Qatar or Kuwait, with a small Arab population, and a lot of money. Instead, its oil riches bankrolled the shahs, exploited in concert with the British, then with the Americans. The expensive rugs and chandeliers in Iran’s London embassy were paid for with Khuzestan’s oil. At the height of the shah’s power, some five million barrels were being exported from the province daily, about one-tenth of the world’s entire oil trade.

The Arabs of Arabistan supported the replacement of the Shah by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the establishment of an Islamic Republic, but ended up disappointed.

Most of his fellow Arabs were illiterate, Towfiq complained, workhorses made to toil for their Iranian bosses: “We are very rich in resources, but it is taken away from Arabistan.” Only a handful of Arabs worked in the Iranian civil service; no Arab rose above the rank of captain in the armed forces. Fascinated by foreign culture, hungry for learning, Towfiq won a place to study English language and literature at the University of Tehran. “I am a rare case,” he said. “Out of four million people, we are only four thousand university graduates.” There he eagerly joined the students demonstrating against the shah.

But the ayatollah was no more willing than the shah to countenance self-government for oil-rich Khuzestan. Arabs were not the only ethnic minority agitating for greater self-determination. Kurds, Turkmens, Azeris, and Baluchis all sought to loosen Tehran’s grip, some by democratic means, others through violence. If the Arabs won autonomy, other groups would demand the same, threatening the very integrity of the country. “The new leaders forgot all their promises,” said Towfiq. The ayatollah clamped down on the Arabs, just as the shah had done.

Saddam Hussein, de facto ruler of Iraq since 1968 and president since 1979, spotted an opportunity in the unrest. A secular nationalist with pretensions to lead the Arab world, Saddam saw Iran’s aggressive new theocracy as a threat to his power and ambitions. Inciting rebellion among the Arabs of neighboring Khuzestan was an easy and cheap way to undermine the ayatollah and destabilize Iran, while also demonstrating Saddam’s credentials as an Arab champion. Bands of Iranian Arabs were trained in Iraq, armed, and sent back across the border to attack police stations, military checkpoints, roads, bridges, and above all the oil pipelines carrying Iran’s economic lifeblood. These Arab guerrillas saw themselves as fighters for independence, but they were dependent on Saddam Hussein, pawns cynically manipulated by the Iraqi leader for his own ends.

The conflict was racial as well as political, an ethnic confrontation between indigenous Arabs and Farsi-speaking Iranians introduced by the shahs to Persianize the region. Iranian militiamen flown in from Tehran roamed the streets in search of insurgents. Some fought back. Armed Arabs attacked a naval base, the central police station, government buildings, and shops. Three days of street fighting left 220 people dead and 600 wounded. The ayatollah’s secret police, the successors to SAVAK and no less vicious, set about hunting down Arab activists, many of whom were tried in hastily convened Revolutionary Courts and summarily executed. Ayatollah Sheikh Muhammad-Taher al-Khaqani, spiritual leader of the region’s Arabs and Khomeini’s former teacher, was arrested, along with hundreds of others. Those who escaped fled to Iraq or went into hiding.

The British have to figure out what to do, difficult since they didn’t have a significant stake in the fight and the European track record of dealing with Arab/Muslim terrorists wasn’t great:

In 1972, Palestinian terrorists of the Black September group seized Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympic Games. The West German handling of that incident had been a disaster, ending in the deaths of all the hostages and most of the terrorists.

Looking at the UK today, it’s tough to imagine that Margaret Thatcher ever existed, but of course she did.

As always, Thatcher made her opinions abundantly clear: she had “no intention of allowing terrorists to succeed in their hostage-taking,” as she wrote in her memoirs. “This was no less an attempt to exploit perceived Western weakness than was the hostage-taking of the American Embassy personnel in Tehran.” The Iron Lady was not for turning, in this or any other way, and her mind was already made up. “My policy would be to do everything possible to resolve the crisis peacefully, without unnecessarily risking the lives of the hostages, but above all that terrorism should be—and should be seen to be—defeated.” In any case, the gunmen were demanding something she could not deliver: the release of political prisoners in another, hostile country. The terrorists, whoever they were and whatever the eventual outcome, had committed a crime on British soil, and would be tried under English law.

Thatcher is just the sort of person to call in the SAS (Special Air Service) and a lot of the book covers the glorious history, training, and capabilities of the SAS (tough to imagine today given that the UK has been conquered without a shot having been fired).

The book goes into a lot of detail about the evolution of the relationship among five groups of people (1) hostage takers, (2) Iranian diplomats, (3) Iranian employees of the embassy who weren’t necessarily passionate about the Islamic regime, (4) visitors to the embassy, e.g., from Syria and Pakistan, (5) a few white British people. Most of them can find common ground in shared hatred of Israel/Jews and the hostage takers begin to soften when they realize that, with a couple of exceptions, the hostages aren’t tightly coupled to the new Islamic government in Iran.

Without giving too much of the story away, let me highlight that at least one of the hostage takers survived and was imprisoned.

Nejad was finally released in 2008, having served twenty-seven years. In Iran, he still faced murder charges for the deaths of Lavasani and Samadzadeh. Tehran gave no assurances he would not be tortured and executed if repatriated. He was therefore allowed to remain in the UK, a decision described by Iran as “condemnable and indefensible.” Fowzi Nejad now lives in the UK.

In other words, British law requires that the British welcome as a neighbor a foreigner who was convicted of one of the most spectacular crimes in modern British history. Prior to the siege of the embassy, he had never been to the UK. He traveled to the UK only to commit the crime of taking hostages. He never claimed to have any affinity for British culture, other than its perceived softness on terrorists, or the British people.

More: Read The Siege.

Arabistan/Kuzestan:

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Lionel Shriver imagines the next logical step in DEI

October 27, 2024October 27, 2024 by philg

A report to friends after testifying at a trial:

Our team of 25+ included a fresh-from-law-school white guy who was suffused with progressive values. He tried to engage a Black paralegal who lives in California and is about 60 years old on the beautiful paradise that awaits when we elect Kamala Harris. The noble Black man responded, “I’m voting for Trump.” The young lawyer was incredulous. Why?!!? “Because Harris is an idiot.”

(If the government didn’t assure us that we live in an inflation-free economy it might be alarming to learn that this Big Law firm has recently raised its rates on first-year associates to $1,000 per hour.)

Lionel Shriver, the creative mind behind The Mandibles, imagines a world in which it would be career-ending to note that Kamala Harris appears to have a lower level of intelligence than some other person or group of persons. I wish that her new novel were titled Cognitive Equality, a phrase that occurs in the book, rather than Mania. But who am I to criticize the marketing folks at HarperCollins for being… “otherwise”.

Chapter 1, set in 2011, will feel familiar to anyone who lived through the rise of BLM in Maskachusetts:

Last fall, this leafy neighborhood had signs planted in nearly every yard, “Morons” welcome here!—the same sign that businesses in strip malls all taped hastily to their windows. But overt usage of such terms of opprobrium even in quotation marks rapidly morphed from declassé to crude to deadly, so the current crop of yard signs was more sedate: We support cognitive neutrality.

Yet as the drive for intellectual leveling gathered steam, it was the sharpest tacks among that elect who jumped on the fashionable bandwagon first.

How did we get to Queers for Palestine and gender-affirming surgery on teenagers?

social hysterias do not stand still. If they are not yet losing steam, they are getting worse. And this one was getting worse. Radical movements keep ratcheting up their demands, because nothing enervates a cause more than success. Crusaders resent having their purpose stolen out from under them by the fulfillment of their quest; reaching the promised land leaves seekers bereft. There’s little to do in a utopian oasis but sip coconut water. So the journey must never be completed. The goal must remain out of reach. To preserve the perfect impossibility of getting there, the desired end point becomes ever more extreme.

In Shriver’s alternative 2012, the world’s best leader is shunned:

the Democratic Party’s apparatchiks had concurred by January that Barack Obama had become a liability. The president was aloof, snooty, and supercilious. Never having gotten the memo about suppressing that silver tongue, he still deliberately rubbed the popular nose in his own articulacy. Either he was failing to track the national mood or he just didn’t like the mood. Frantic advice from his press secretary notwithstanding, he continued to convey the impression that he thought he was smarter than the average bear.

Joe Biden is considered to be “was impressively unimpressive” and is put forward as the new candidate. He wins the election and proceeds to appoint cabinet members according to the new and improved version of DEI:

It was proudly shouted from the rafters by a fawning media and Biden’s own press secretary that the president was purposefully seeking out the “historically marginalized,” i.e., stupid people.

(Biden was eventually not considered dumb enough so the Democrats turned to someone even dumber, at least in the author’s mind, for 2016… Donald Trump.)

The protagonist’s friend catches the wave and rises to prominence on CNN:

As far as I could ascertain, she was making a name for herself as the intelligent face of idiocy. The formula seemed to be not form following content but form clashing wildly with content. She was smooth, alluring, and sexy, but most of all she came across as blatantly bright. Thus she flattered her viewers, who, if everyone was as smart as everyone else, were also as smart as this silver-tongued broadcaster.

A literature professor struggles to adapt:

“The point is,” David said, “in my courses, I’m now meant to celebrate all the historical figures we’ve customarily overlooked.” “You mean the people who never achieved dick,” Felicity said. “Now, that’s much too harsh a way of putting it,” David abjured with a shut up glare at his younger daughter. “Yes,” Kelly said. “And a more rounded version of the past, one that tries to include all those people who weren’t singled out as special—it’s much more equitable.” “But there are . . . logistical problems with following this rubric,” David said. “We simply don’t have records of all these otherwise folks who were callously dismissed in their time. I can explain to students why a host of erstwhile distinguished figures have been acclaimed unjustly, but I’ve no idea how to go about digging up biographies of, you know—” “Nineteenth-century knuckleheads,” Felicity filled in. “Honey, you know we don’t talk like that in this house,” Kelly said.

Doctors are admitted to medical school without discrimination according to cognitive ability and the result is that the elite fly to India for hip replacements. Another phrase for the turbocharged DEI bureaucracy in the book is “mental parity”. A conversation between two former friends:

But landing on opposite sides of Mental Parity is too fundamental. It is about character. I’m sorry to sound sappy or preachy, but it’s about primitive right and wrong. MP is about how we treat other people, and how we think about other people, and even how we regard ourselves—about what we think makes us valuable.

Followers of Fauci will be pleased to learn that Science is drafted into confirming the political hypothesis that all human brains are equally good. MRI images are cited. Speaking of coronapanic, that also happens in Mania‘s alternative history:

Unfortunately, the spread of a novel but, it turned out, not especially lethal virus for the vast majority of the healthy, non-elderly population prevented me from reuniting any time soon with D&Z, since the morons in control of the country had panicked and shut down the entire economy for an initial pause of three weeks that evolved grindingly into two years. Deer Abby was obliged to close. Like the rest of the citizenry, we all lived on government handouts of fabricated money whose overproduction, the more economically clued-up members of the hate group assured us, would in due course perilously devalue the dollar—as if the U.S. needed any more problems.

Sinovac and Sputnik weren’t very effective against Covid in the end, but at least they were relatively harmless. You could hardly say the same about the snake oil from Pfizer, which had long since jettisoned all the company’s skilled personnel like Felicity, who knew the difference between monobasic potassium phosphate and household drain cleaner. So this mR2D2 concoction was stirred up by trick-or-treaters in mad-scientist costumes waving beakers of dry ice, like twelve-year-old Darwin on Halloween. Me, I bought a fake vaccination certificate on the black market; I assume if you’re perky enough to read this, you did the same. But far too many of our compatriots were credulous. I’ve lost track of the underreported mortality count, but at the minimum it’s in the tens of millions. By the time all the long-term side effects have taken their toll, the international death count could come to hundreds of millions. I don’t care for hyperbole, but I don’t believe this is an overstatement: the Pfizer “miscalculation” marked the start of a full-blown emergency.

The global meritocracies are the big winners from the American push to take DEI to its logical conclusion:

Having fallen hypnotically in love with its own virtue, the West has ceded South and Central America, Africa, and the Middle East to the de facto control of the Chinese (thanks to whom the oceans are nearly dead; with no other nation willing to constrain the practice, their supertrawlers have raked the ocean beds bare, and a single eighteen-ounce bass can now sell for three hundred dollars).

(Europe, Canada, and Australia follow the American lead.)

If you’re wondering how the beliefs of the Democrats could be so different from what they’d expressed twenty years ago:

the public at large bought into this improbable ideology virtually overnight and in no time forgot that they had ever believed anything else.

The satire is too broad, in my opinion, compared to in The Mandibles and when the pendulum swings back the results also seem improbable:

Still whizzing through the last of our state legislatures, the constitutional amendment requiring all registered voters and all candidates for state and federal office to have a minimum IQ of 115 will eliminate 84 percent of the population from participating in the democratic process.

(I would just like to see eight years of W-2 or 1099 income before an American is eligible to vote, more or less the situation we had when the country was young. Men started to work at age 13 and started to vote at 21. Of course, in today’s environment of 74+ gender IDs it wouldn’t make sense to restrict voting to just one gender.)

The former friend who profited from the rise of mental parity tries to cash in on the pendulum swing back:

“Hold it,” I said to Emory. “You’re defending the Fitness Proviso? And all this singeing of IQ into everybody’s forehead with a branding iron?” “A tiny, tiny number on the inside of the wrist,” Emory brushed off. “Totally discreet. And conditioning enfranchisement on high IQ beats only letting people vote who own property. Or just men, or just white people. I only draw the line at nitwits.”

Conclusion: Not a great book, but kind of a fun book if you’re interested in how language evolves with political fashion.

KAMALA: "We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements, that we will convene to work together. We will work together."

🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/VpxHw1odnA
— Cillian (@CilComLFC) October 24, 2024

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Guilty Creatures: a book about how to have fun in Florida

August 18, 2024August 10, 2024 by philg

For your Florida bookshelf: Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida by Mikita Brottman (British-born, resident in Manhattan, and a professor in Maryland so I’m not sure how she researched this book).

The characters in this true-crime drama have a Florida lifestyle that is 100 percent opposite mine. Instead of fighting with their HVAC equipment they’re out at clubs, concerts, fishing, hunting, mountain biking, etc. When there is nothing great to watch on TV, strippers and prostitutes can add zest to an evening. Things get a little complicated when a woman figures out that the best way to extend and enhance her lifestyle is for her husband to die. The author reminds us that fewer than half of murders in the U.S. are ever solved (about half of reported murders are “cleared” (state-sponsored NPR), but you have to consider that murders successfully disguised as accidents (“alligator involvement” in this case) aren’t part of the statistic).

I want to read some more books by Professor Dr. Brottman, D. Phil. Maybe I should start with this one:

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The Coast Guard helicopter pilot lifestyle

August 6, 2024July 12, 2024 by philg

Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival by Tristram Korten offers us a window into an unusual lifestyle.

Ben Cournia, aviation survival technician (“rescue swimmer”), flight mechanic Joshua Andrews, and pilots Rick Post and Dave McCarthy show up to mosquito-infested Great Inagua Island (Bahamas) in September 2015 to be ready with a MH-60 Jayhawk in case undocumented importers need to be followed or people need to be pulled off ships or out of the water. They work two weeks on and two weeks off.

Here’s the machine, parked on the ramp in Portland, Maine in fall 2020 (see Maine/NH coast video)

This won’t be a story about diversity being our strength:

The four men made up a pretty good snapshot of the Coast Guard in terms of demographics (the service is overwhelmingly white) and disposition.

If there’s no racial diversity, maybe there is gender ID diversity?

Today there are 360 rescue swimmers spread out among twenty-six Coast Guard air stations. Three of them are women.

It also won’t be a story about the depredations of climate change. The deadliest hurricane season on record was almost 250 years ago:

Three back-to-back hurricanes in October 1780 killed tens of thousands of people and sank dozens of ships throughout the Caribbean and United States. The storms severely weakened the British Navy as it fought the American revolutionaries. The first storm struck Jamaica and then tore through Cuba, sinking British warships and collapsing whole towns, killing an estimated 3,000 people, half of them sailors. The second storm sped from Barbados to Bermuda, claiming roughly 4,300 lives. On the island of St. Vincent, a twenty-foot storm surge washed villages out to sea. On St. Lucia, the storm killed 6,000 people. About 9,000 more died in Martinique. Fifteen Dutch ships sank off Grenada. All told, this was the deadliest storm on record in the Western Hemisphere. Incredibly, another storm picked up within days and ripped through the region, smashing sixty-four Spanish warships sailing to take back the Florida panhandle from the British. Nearly 2,000 men died.

The Coast Guard was an early adopter of the helicopter, despite having missed out on Hanna Reitsch’s pioneering flights:

As soon as Coast Guard brass saw the public flight of Russian-born Igor Sikorsky’s prototype in 1940, they put in an order. In 1944, the Coast Guard conducted the first helicopter landings on a ship. The service’s first helicopter pilot, Frank Erickson, conducted the first helo rescue mission later that same year. Erickson and the Coast Guard’s helicopter detachment were stationed at the Sikorsky Aircraft plant in Connecticut to get trained by and work with the famed helicopter designer. Erickson collaborated with Sikorsky to develop power hoists for helicopter rescue missions and pioneered the idea of using stretchers to evacuate the injured.

Let’s leave the El Faro story and look at another ship, the Minouche. This one was also old (35 years), but not because of American protectionism. The Minouche went back and forth to Haiti with low-value cargo. She had a crew of 11 Haitians and a Filipino captain, Renelo Gelera. They didn’t make any obvious mistakes, according to the author, but Hurricane Joaquin still snuck up on them and sunk their ship from a distance of more than 100 miles (moderate winds, big waves, and an old engine that couldn’t be restarted after an automatic shutdown when the screw lifted out of the water).

The eye was now about one hundred miles north of Great Inagua. Tropical storm–force winds easily stretched over the rescue site. McCarthy mustered the helicopter and ground crews in the big hangar for a briefing. He explained the mission: cargo ship down, forty miles southeast, crew abandoning ship. He ran down a list of known risks. The main one, of course, was the weather—driving rain, high winds, extensive cloud cover. Then he asked if anyone had reservations. Silence. They may have assessed themselves as ready, but the truth was, this was virgin territory for the helicopter crew. None had flown in conditions this extreme before, except maybe Cournia during his tour in Alaska, much less conducted a search and rescue operation in a hurricane—at night. Most civilian helicopters won’t take off in 20-knot winds. The MH-60 has a wind limitation of 60 knots off the nose and 45 from any other direction for takeoff. The Coasties were heading out in 35-to-40-knot winds with gusts up to 60.

(Tech correction: 20 knots was our wind limit for doing sightseeing tours over Boston in the Robinson R44. A good practical limit for lessons at the flight school was 30 knots (not for a beginner student, though). I remember a successful photo mission with winds of 35 knots. We landed with surface winds gusting to about 30 knots on the last leg of the helicopter trip from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts. There is no wind limitation for the R44, but I would say that you’d need a good reason to operate with surface winds over 30 knots if there were any nearby hills (a formula for turbulence). The Jayhawk is 10X heavier than an R44 and should be much more stable.)

Not to spoil the suspense, but Ben Cournia was able to get the sailors out of their life raft and into the basket for hoisting. He was in the water for hours. The first trip to the stricken vessel involved about four hours of hovering over the raft. The second trip involves some ugliness and a save by a technology:

Post, who couldn’t see anything out the windshield, was flying almost entirely by his instrument panel. His altitude was good, but his hover bar showed him moving even though he felt as if the aircraft was stationary. His mind couldn’t reconcile how his body felt with what the instruments said. This was a dangerous sensation for a pilot. Vertigo could set in and the pilot could think up was down, and try to fly accordingly. He needed to reestablish some frame of reference. Post alerted his crewmates that he was having trouble staying oriented. He hit the “auto depart” button, which takes control of the Jayhawk and lifts it three hundred feet in the air, then reestablishes an even longitudinal hover. It’s a reset, a way for the pilot to start over and try again. From there, Post knew which way was up.

I’m not sure what the author means by a “hover bar” instrument and I haven’t heard of an “auto depart” button, though I know that the various versions of the Blackhawk have some advanced automation, e.g., to approach to a point in space or fly a predefined search pattern.

After some instability combined with a big wave grabbing the basket, the winch cable gets damaged and they return to base to check out a second helicopter and make a third visit to the life raft. There was a whole second crew available to fly that second helicopter, so I don’t understand why the exhausted first crew went out yet again (“you have to go out, but you don’t have to come back” surely doesn’t mean that one crew relaxes in the ready room while the first crew goes out three times, does it?). Obviously there was some learning that had happened on the first two trips, but a member of the first crew could have gone out with the fresh/rested second crew as an advisor.

Just when you think that the weather and waves are bad, Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s equations zap you:

As the basket was hoisted, Cournia hung on to minimize swing, and as he was lifted out of the water he felt a sudden jolt pass through his entire body. It was so strong that it locked his arms in a spasm of convulsed muscle. He tried to free his grip but couldn’t. Eventually the jolt passed and Cournia was able to drop back into the water. A special static discharge cable—which had been attached to the basket to siphon excess electricity generated by the helicopter’s blades cutting through the air—had somehow ripped off, and a current of electricity had passed from the helicopter’s metal frame down the cable to the basket. This meant Cournia had to be extra careful to make sure the basket was in contact with the water whenever he touched it, in order to provide a ground for the electricity.

In case you were wondering, I love Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival almost as much as I love the Coast Guard (and who doesn’t love the Coast Guard?). Just don’t start reading it before bedtime because it’s tough to put down.

the book will inspire you to carry a PLB or EPIRB even if you’re just heading out to the grocery store!

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Hanna Reitsch after Germany was defeated (including her work with Amnesty International)

August 2, 2024July 6, 2024 by philg

A fourth post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg.

Although both of these women were awarded Iron Crosses by Adolf Hitler, only Hanna was an enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism. The aeronautical engineer and disciplined test pilot Melitta survived until just three weeks before the end of the war so we’ll never know what she would have accomplished in the world of civilian aviation. Much of her work was on instruments and systems for flying at night and in bad weather, so she likely would have done valuable work in the Jet Age.

During the war, Hanna had lost her nerve only once. This was during a morale-boosting visit to the Russian Front:

No sooner had she reached the first German ack-ack position than the Russians started a heavy bombardment. ‘Automatically everyone vanished into the ground, while all around us the air whistled and shuddered and crashed,’ she wrote. After their own guns had pounded out their reply, a formation of enemy planes began to bomb the Wehrmacht position. ‘I felt, in my terror, as though I wanted to creep right in on myself,’ Hanna continued. ‘When finally to this inferno were added the most horrible sounds of all, the yells of the wounded, I felt certain that not one of us would emerge alive. Cowering in a hole in the ground, it was in vain that I tried to stop the persistent knocking of my knees.’

(The above suggests that Israel could have brought the Gaza fighting to a swift conclusion if it had used 155mm artillery to attack Hamas-held positions rather than high-tech drones and other precision munitions that have convinced Palestinians that war with the IDF is a manageable lifestyle (in a June 2024 poll, the majority of Palestinians wanted to continue fighting against Israel (Reuters)). The initial death toll among civilians would have been higher, but the long-term death toll might have been lower if the IDF fought intensively enough to motivate Gazans to surrender, release their hostages, and rat out Hamas members.)

Hanna had friends with direct knowledge of the German death camp system and had seen photographs, taken by Russians, of the Majdanek extermination camp (captured in July 1944). The reports and the photos, however, did not change her views regarding the overall merits of the Nazi system. Regarding the concentration camps, the book covers another “breaking the glass ceiling” angle:

Buchenwald covered an immense site, but its hundreds of barracks were overflowing with thousands of starving prisoners. The camp was ‘indescribably filthy’, one Stauffenberg cousin noted, and ‘there was always an air of abject misery and cruelty’. Female SS guards carried sticks and whips with which they frequently beat prisoners, especially if orders – given solely in German – were not obeyed immediately.

While the concentration and extermination camps were being overrun, Hanna was one of the last Germans to spend time with Hitler, flying into Berlin in April 1945 and landing a Fieseler Storch right next to the bunker.

In that instant Hanna decided that, if Greim stayed, she would also ask Hitler for the ultimate privilege of remaining with him. Some accounts even have her grasping Hitler’s hands and begging to be allowed to stay so that her sacrifice might help redeem the honour of the Luftwaffe, tarnished by Göring’s betrayal, and even ‘guarantee’ the honour of her country in the eyes of the world.49 But Hanna may have been motivated by more than blind honour. She had worked hard to support the Nazi regime through propaganda as well as her test work for the Luftwaffe, and there is no doubt that both she and Greim identified with Hitler’s anti-Semitic world view and supported his aggressive, expansionist policies. Hanna ‘adored Hitler unconditionally, without reservations’, Traudl Junge, one of the female secretaries in the bunker, later wrote. ‘She sparkled with her fanatical, obsessive readiness to die for the Führer and his ideals.’

In another example of how the Israelis might have defeated Hamas, the author notes that even a German-built underground bunker isn’t a practical refuge against sustained shelling.

Over the next few days, the Soviet army pushed through Berlin until they were within artillery range of the Chancellery. Hanna spent much of her time in Greim’s sickroom. Sometimes she dozed on the stretcher that had carried him in, but essentially she was a full-time nurse, washing and disinfecting his wound every hour, and shifting his weight to help reduce the pain. Any sustained sleep was now impossible as the bunker shook, lights flickered and even on the lower floor, fifty feet below ground, mortar fell from the eighteen-inch-thick walls.

Hanna escaped at the end of April 1945, flying as a passenger with Robert Ritter von Greim and his personal pilot. Hanna was captured by the Allies and interrogated by Eric Brown, a British pilot, and Americans interested in Germany’s advanced weapons.

‘Although she was reluctant to admit this,’ [Eric Brown] later wrote, it soon became evident that Hanna had never flown the plane under power, but only ‘to make production test flights from towed glides’.

To Eric it was clear that Hanna’s ‘devotion for Hitler was total devotion’. ‘He represented the Germany that I love,’ she told him. Hanna also denied the Holocaust. When Eric told her that he had been at the liberation of Belsen, and had seen the starving inmates and piles of the dead for himself, ‘she pooh-poohed all this. She didn’t believe it … She didn’t want to believe any of it.’ Such denial was painful for them both, but Eric found that ‘nothing could convince her that the Holocaust took place’. Hanna was, he concluded, a ‘fanatical aviator, fervent German nationalist and ardent Nazi’. Above all, he later wrote, ‘the fanaticism she displayed in her attitude to Hitler, made my blood run cold’.

When the Americans organized a press conference for her to publicly repeat her denunciation of Hitler’s military and strategic leadership, she instead defiantly asserted that she had willingly supported him, and claimed she would do the same again.

The only woman among the leaders awaiting trial, she was soon particularly close to Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the regime’s former finance minister. Having enjoyed long conversations ‘about everything’, she told him she could ‘feel your thoughts steadily in me, stronger than any words’. When she learnt that her brother Kurt had survived the war, she proudly wrote to him that for many months she had been ‘sitting behind barbed wire, surrounded by the most worthy German men, leaders in so many fields. The enemy have no idea what riches they are giving me.’

The Americans seemed unsure how to classify Hanna. In December 1945 they had recorded that she was ‘not an ardent Nazi, nor even a Party member’. Other memos listed her optimistically as a potential goodwill ambassador or even ‘possible espionage worker’. Hanna’s celebrity, and close connections with former Luftwaffe staff and others once high up in Nazi circles, made her a potentially valuable asset ‘with the power to influence thousands’. But her stated desire to promote ‘the truth’ was never translated into action. Eventually they decided to keep her under surveillance in an intelligence operation code-named ‘Skylark’. The hope was that she might inadvertently lead them to former members of the Luftwaffe still wanted for trial. Hanna started receiving her ‘highly nationalistic and idealistic’ friends as soon as she was released. To pre-empt criticism, she cast herself as a victim. She ‘had a worse time [in US captivity] than the people in concentration camps!’ the pilot Rudi Storck wrote in a letter that was intercepted.

Hanna knew about this surveillance and even asked US intelligence to give her a new car when her Fiat sports car broke down (we did give her the car!). It’s a little unfair to blame Hanna for thinking that the main thing that the Nazis did wrong was to lose the war:

Among the national surveys that followed in West Germany, one from 1951 found that only 5 per cent of respondents admitted any feeling of guilt concerning the Jews, and only one in three was positive about the assassination plot.

How effective are trained psychologists?

Although acquitted in 1947, [SS officer] Skorzeny had been kept at Darmstadt internment camp to go through what he called ‘the denazification mill’.52 Hanna had been the first person he visited while on parole. Skorzeny escaped the following summer, eventually arriving in Madrid where he founded a Spanish neo-Nazi group.

Hanna’s two-month visit to India in 1959:

She loved the warmth of her reception, gave frequent talks on the spiritual experience of silent flight, and developed proposals for glider training with the Indian air force. She was also thrilled with what she called ‘the lively interest in Hitler and his achievements’ that she claimed to receive ‘all over India’.68 The cherry on the cake came when the ‘wise Indian Prime Minister’, Jawaharlal Nehru, requested she take him soaring. Hanna and Nehru stayed airborne for over two hours, Nehru at times taking the controls. It was a huge PR coup, widely reported across the Indian press. The next morning Hanna received an invitation to lunch with Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi.

She was also warmly received in the U.S.:

In 1961 Hanna returned to the USA at the suggestion of her old friend, the aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, who was now working at NASA. She often claimed to have refused post-war work with the American aeronautics programme on the basis that it would have been the ultimate betrayal of her country.† Braun felt differently, and occasionally tried to persuade Hanna to change her mind. ‘We live in times of worldwide problems,’ he had written to her in 1947. ‘If one does not wish to remain on the outside, looking in, one has to take a stand – even if sentimental reasons may stand in the way of coming clean. Do give it some thought!’

While in the States, Hanna also took the opportunity to join glider pilots soaring over the Sierra Nevada, and to meet the ‘Whirly Girls’, an international association of female helicopter pilots. As the first woman to fly such a machine, she found she had the honour of being ‘Whirly Girl Number One’. It was with the Whirly Girls that Hanna was invited to the White House, meeting President Kennedy in the Oval Office. A group photo on the lawn shows her in an enveloping cream coat with matching hat and clutch, standing slightly in front of her taller peers. Her smile is once again dazzling; she felt validated. In interviews she revealed that Kennedy had told her she was a ‘paradigm’, and should ‘never give up on bringing flying closer to people’.

She came back to the U.S. in the 1970s:

She tactfully did not attend the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, and does not seem to have commented on the murder of the eleven Israeli athletes. The highlight of that year for her was a return to America, where she was honoured in Arizona, and installed as the first female member of the prestigious international Society of Experimental Test Pilots. She could hardly have been happier, sitting in a hall of 2,000 people, discussing a possible new ‘Hanna Reitsch Cup’ with Baron Hilton. Back in Germany, she was now receiving hundreds of letters and parcels from schoolchildren as well as veterans, and even became an ambassador for the German section of Amnesty International. ‘There are millions in Germany who love me,’ she claimed, before adding, ‘it is only the German press which has been told to hate me. It is propaganda helped by the government … They are afraid I might say something good about Adolf Hitler. But why not?’

What’s Amnesty International up to lately? Since October 7, 2023, at least, tweeting out a continuous stream of support for one side in the Gaza fighting. Example:

Like so

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Book about the world’s most successful art thieves

July 30, 2024July 8, 2024 by philg

Let me recommend The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, a book about a French couple who stole roughly $2 billion (in pre-Biden dollars). Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus hit smaller museums over a 7-year period and hauled everything back to their apartment to enjoy. Since they didn’t try to sell anything, they were tough to catch, but of course they eventually were which is why we have the book (guess which one went to prison and which one successfully escaped by claiming to have been a victim under the control of the other).

Here’s the kind of thing that they might have stolen. I saw it at the North Carolina Museum of Art while I was reading the book and thought that it would look great in the glass display cabinet of any Indiana Jones fan:

(Raleigh-Durham has become an Islamic area, but the museum has a sizable collection of Judaica.)

Breitweiser had a Swiss Army knife and Anne-Catherine had a huge purse. This was sufficient equipment for all of the thefts (which occurred perhaps just a few years before it would have been straightforward to attach an RFID tag to everything in a museum and then put sensors at all of the exits).

Breitweiser points out that art in a museum, rather than a private home, is unnatural:

He takes only works that stir him emotionally, and seldom the most valuable piece in a place. He feels no remorse when he steals because museums, in his deviant view, are really just prisons for art. They’re often crowded and noisy, with limited visiting hours and uncomfortable seats, offering no calm place to reflect or recline. Guided tour groups armed with selfie-stick shanks seem to rumble through rooms like chain gangs. Everything you want to do in the presence of a compelling piece is forbidden in a museum, says Breitwieser. What you first want to do, he advises, is relax, pillowed in a sofa or armchair. Sip a drink, if you desire. Eat a snack. Reach out and caress the work whenever you wish. Then you’ll see art in a new way.

The scale and pace of the thefts:

In the spring and summer of 1995, only a year after their first museum theft together, Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine find an incredible rhythm. They steal at a pace as fast as any known art-crime spree has been committed, outside of wartime. They hop between Switzerland and France, trying to keep at least an hour’s drive, and preferably two or three, between any places they hit. Even if they have to visit a couple of spots, museums are everywhere in Europe. And about three out of every four weekends, they successfully steal—a seventeenth-century oil painting of a war scene, an engraved battle-ax, a decorative hatchet, another crossbow. A sixteenth-century portrait of a bearded man. A floral-patterned serving dish. A brass pharmacy scale with little brass weights.

My favorite individual theft described in the book is a crime within a crime:

“Thief!” A word that no thief ever wants to hear shouted at him—shrieked—cuts through the bubbly conversations of the art-buying crowd at the European Fine Art Fair in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht. “Thief!” Even though he’s not stealing at the moment, Breitwieser flinches before realizing that the shouts are not directed at him. He watches as security officers rumble down the carpeted lane between booths. Heads in the exhibition hall turn. A thudding tackle and muffled blows bring even the owners out of their lounge-like areas. Richard Green, the iconic London dealer who is always granted prime placement at the fair, looks on, cigar in his mouth, as the thief is subdued and escorted away, the stolen item recovered. Entertainment over, Green returns to his stand, Renaissance oils arranged on pedestals, prices climbing from a million dollars. The dealer then discovers that one of his pedestals has a large empty space. Breitwieser’s giddy thought, as he and Anne-Catherine pull out of the parking lot a few minutes later, is that his car is currently worth more than the Lamborghinis they pass, if you include the souvenir in their trunk. The frame’s still attached, despite his stealing requirement; freak situations have their own set of rules. The artwork, an innovative 1676 unstill still life by Jan van Kessel the Elder, butterflies flitting around a bouquet of flowers, had hooked Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine from the art-show aisle, well outside Green’s booth. He’d never seen anything like it. The colors were incandescent. The work reeled them into the booth, through a mirage of shimmering hues that seemed impossible until they realized, up close, that the piece had been painted on a thin sheet of copper.

The European Fine Art Fair is a good place to covet items, though not to steal. The security unit is professional, with some undercover, Breitwieser says. Also, a potential deal breaker for Breitwieser, attendees are often searched at the exit, sales documents required. The copper painting sang to him and Green’s comeuppance felt ordained, but attempting a theft with almost zero chance of success is only the act of a fool. Providentially, a fool appeared as if on cue. With two piercing shouts, the fair shifted. The booths nearly emptied as the rubbernecking crested. Breitwieser was as surprised as anyone. Yet in the commotion that followed, he ascended into a sort of art-stealing nirvana, seemingly able to visualize the whole crime from above. The guards at the exit, he intuited, would abandon their post to assist the arrest. He’d bet a prison term on it.

The book says that there are roughly 50,000 art thefts per year, worldwide, with a total value in the single-digit $billions.

If you’d wondered about the veracity of Les Miserables…

In Switzerland, the guards had called him “Mr. Breitwieser.” In France, they shout his inmate number.

Within months of his arrest, the girlfriend has moved on. She’s pregnant with another man’s child and testifies against Breitwieser:

Anne-Catherine, dressed in a long black skirt, is called to testify after his mother, and she doubles down on total denial. She testifies, in a timid voice that Breitwieser says he’s never before heard, that she had not noticed any Renaissance works in the attic. She wasn’t present on his road trips. She never saw any art in his car. The two of them barely dated, she says. They were more like acquaintances. “He scared me,” says Anne-Catherine. Every day she was with him, she felt like his hostage. “He tormented me.”

(The hostage drove away from the apartment most mornings in a car and returned in the evening.)

More: Read The Art Thief.

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Hanna Reitsch’s kamikaze dream

July 29, 2024July 5, 2024 by philg

A third post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg.

The Germans were great at innovation, but the Allies built so many old tech bombers and escort fighters that it was tough for the Germans to exploit their innovations. Regarding 1943:

The Peenemünde facility had been established in the 1930s by Wernher von Braun. A political conformist brought up with right-wing, nationalist values, Braun had joined the Party in 1937, and the SS three years later. After graduating with degrees in mechanical engineering and applied physics, he persuaded the military to fund a development centre at Peenemünde: a location his mother had recommended, knowing it from her husband’s duck-shooting holidays.*

By April 1943 the threat of V-weapons had been prioritized [by the English], and the ‘Bodyline’ organization was convened to develop a response. Peenemünde was now identified as the principal research facility. Working in shifts around the clock, and largely sustained by Spam sandwiches and coffee, Constance Babington Smith’s team was on alert to look out for anything ‘queer’ that might be a long-range gun, a remotely controlled rocket aircraft, or ‘some sort of tube … out of which a rocket could be squirted’.

Peenemünde was [raided in August 1943] with wave after wave of bombers passing over the site without any aerial counter-attack. … British Bomber Command had sent a massive assault force of 597 aircraft to drop between 1,500 and 2,000 tons of high explosives on Peenemünde in Operation Hydra. This was almost the entire bomber fleet – an enormous risk for one mission. Surprise was paramount to mitigate that risk. Once fed and briefed, the RAF pilots had been sworn to secrecy and locked into their hangars. Regular bombing raids on Berlin had been undertaken in the weeks before, in the hope that the Germans would assume this was still the target. A ‘spoof attack’ on the capital by British Mosquitoes was also planned; and fine strips of metal ‘window’ were dropped to blind the German radar.

Five days before Christmas [1943], the US Eighth Air Force started to bomb the V-1 launch sites in northern France, to prevent a winter attack. Eventually they would obliterate every one. ‘The first round of the battle against the flying bomb was an overwhelming victory for the Allies,’ Babington Smith wrote with some flourish.

Without the P-51 Mustang to provide long-range escort, these types of raids required incredible bravery. Forty British aircraft were shot down after the Germans figured out what was going on and sent fighters from Berlin. The bombings made the typical German understand that continued armed conflict wasn’t going to be effective. Hanna came to the same conclusion, but responded differently:

… as the aerial bombing of Germany intensified, civilian morale plummeted and the regime had to apply increasing oppression and compulsion to maintain order. Over the course of 1943, the German courts passed more than a hundred death sentences every week on citizens deemed guilty of defeatism or sabotage.

Unlike Melitta, Hanna had never doubted the aims of the Nazi regime. Even she, however, had now lost faith in the promised certain victory. ‘One after another, towns and cities were crumpling under the Allied air attacks,’ she wrote. ‘The transport system and the production centres were being systematically destroyed … the death toll continually mounted.’

Hanna knew that the precision of these air attacks was critical to the success of her plan. Melitta’s work with dive-sights and dive-bombing techniques had greatly improved accuracy, but Hanna had something more radical in mind. She wanted pilots, potentially including herself, to guide their missiles right down to the point of impact – without pulling out. With shipping targets, one paper outlined, ‘the plane was expected to shatter upon impact with the water, killing the pilot instantly and allowing the bomb to tear loose from the plane to continue under the keel of the vessel, where it would explode’.9 Although the pilots ‘would be volunteering for certain death’, Hanna added, ‘it would be no task for mere dare-devils … nor for blind fanatics, nor for the disenchanted and the life-weary who might see here a chance to make a theatrical exit …’ What was needed, she felt, were measured and honourable men, ‘ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved’.

Why everyone needs a marketing expert:

[Hanna] named the fledgling plan ‘Operation Suicide’.

It seems that having a wife and kids drove at least some men to think of suicide…

Nevertheless, as word of Hanna’s proposed suicide squadron spread, she began to receive discreet enquiries from other zealous pilots, enthused by the thought of sacrificing their lives for Hitler’s Germany. Encouraged, Hanna sought out more volunteers. ‘We found them everywhere,’ she wrote with satisfaction. Most ‘were married and fathers of families and were robust, uncomplicated individuals. As they saw it, the sacrifice of their lives would be as nothing compared with the millions, both soldiers and civilians, who would die if the war was allowed to continue.’

Adolf Hitler was a moderate compared to Hanna Reitsch and pointed out that “There was no precedent in German history and the German public would not stand for it.” Hanna eventually wore him down, however, and she was allowed to work on her pet project. The suicide machine was going to be an air-launched V-1:

Various test and training versions of the manned V-1 had now been developed. Some had twin seats and dual controls for instructor and student, while others were single-seaters. Most had power units and all had landing skids, but landing even an unarmed V-1 remained extremely hazardous. ‘Pilots of an average ability could never be certain of surviving the attempt,’ Hanna wrote bluntly.

By the time that Hanna and Skorzeny reached Rechlin, a prototype V-1 was already ‘nestled’, as Skorzeny described it, under the wing of a Heinkel He 111 bomber, ready for take-off. All went well as the Heinkel lifted from the ground and began its ascent. When the V-1 pilot detached his machine from the bomber, Hanna watched it ‘drop away … like some small, swift bird’. The V-1 flew at twice the speed of its Heinkel mother-plane, tearing away through the sky. After a few wide circles it began a smooth descent. Suddenly the pilot lost control. Moments later the V-1 crashed to earth, its point of impact marked by ‘a column of black smoke rising in the summer air’. While most of the observers still stood watching in horror, Skorzeny impatiently called for another test pilot, before striding off. ‘Always a gentleman …’ Hanna later defended him: Skorzeny ‘demanded more from himself than from his men … [and] won the hearts of the soldiers committed to his care’. Incredibly, although badly injured, the V-1 pilot had survived. The crash was blamed on manual error. A second attempt, the next day, brought a similar result. According to Skorzeny, when the Air Ministry ordered an end to the programme, Hanna ‘could scarcely hold back her tears’.

Hanna persuaded the SS hero Skorzeny to let her fly the machine herself:

Despite her rubber-lined leather helmet, Hanna must have been deafened by the noise of the Heinkel’s engine and the battering of the slipstream on the V-1 as she was dragged into the air. Nevertheless, her release was perfect. As the V-1 engine began to stutter, Hanna dropped from her host and pushed the tiny missile to its cruising speed of around 375 mph. ‘The handling of the machine and its beautiful circles soon showed what an amazing pilot this girl was,’ Skorzeny noted in admiration. Nevertheless he still broke into a cold sweat as Hanna brought the V-1 spiralling down. Since the missile was not designed to land, once the engine cut out she found it cumbersome, gliding down steeply, ‘like a piano’. Moments later she managed a fast but smooth touchdown on her skids, blowing up clouds of dust across the tarmac. ‘Nothing wrong with it at all,’ she proudly told the engineers who rushed up to meet her. Milch reportedly ‘turned pale’ when told of the unauthorized test but, as Skorzeny emphasized, ‘both the idea and the machine had been vindicated’. ‘Passed without incident,’ Hanna recorded simply in her flight report. She and Skorzeny were jubilant, and the project was given clearance to proceed.

The Normandy invasion rendered the project moot because Germany needed all of her pilots for defense.

The Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg:

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Hanna Reitsch flying helicopters and jets

July 24, 2024July 5, 2024 by philg

A second post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg. This supplies some detail about Hanna Reitsch’s pioneer flights in the world’s first practical helicopter.

One day [in September 1937], however, Karl Franke asked Hanna to fly him over to the Focke-Wulf factory at Bremen where he was due to take up one of the world’s first helicopters, the precarious-looking Focke-Wulf Fw 61, for a test flight. Professor Henrich Focke’s pioneering machine had overcome the two fundamental problems facing autogyro and helicopter designers: the asymmetric lift caused by the imbalance of power between the advancing and retreating ‘air-listing screws’, or rotor blades, and the tendency for the helicopter’s body to rotate in the opposite direction to its rotors. The solution was to use two three-bladed rotors, turning in opposite directions, which were fixed up on outriggers, like small scaffolding towers, in place of wings. An open cockpit sat below. It was not an elegant design; some papers described it as looking ‘like a cross between a windmill and a bicycle’, but it worked. According to Hanna, when she landed at Bremen with Karl Franke, Focke wrongly assumed that she was there to give him a second opinion. Seeing that she was ‘brimming with joy’ at the thought of taking the helicopter up, Franke was generous enough not to disabuse the great designer. Franke flew the machine first, as a precaution keeping it tethered to the ground by a few yards of rope. Unfortunately this also trapped him in reflected turbulence, buffeting the helicopter about. Such an anchor did not appeal to Hanna. Before she took her turn she had the rope disconnected and a simple white circle painted on the ground around the machine to guide her. As Hanna later recounted the story, with typical lack of false modesty, ‘within three minutes, I had it’. From now on Franke would argue that, in Germany, Hanna and Udet were the ‘only two people who were divinely gifted flyers’. The Fw 61’s vertical ascent to 300 feet, ‘like an express elevator’, with its noisy mechanical rotors literally pulling the machine up through the air, was completely different from the long tows needed by gliders, or even the shorter runs required to generate lift by engine-powered planes. To Hanna it was like flying in a new dimension. Despite the heavy vibrations that shook the whole airframe as she slowly opened the throttle, the revolutionary control of her position in the airspace at once fascinated and thrilled her, while the machine’s sensitivity and manoeuvrability was ‘intoxicating!’ ‘I thought of the lark,’ she wrote, ‘so light and small of wing, hovering over the summer fields.’ Hanna had become the first woman in the world to fly a helicopter.

(the above section is extensively referenced)

That February [1938], Germany was showcasing a range of Mercedes-Benz sports cars as well as revealing plans for the forthcoming ‘Volkswagen’ to an international audience at the prestigious Berlin Motor Show. ‘The story of the Berlin exhibition since National Socialism came to power,’ the national press fawned, ‘has been an uninterrupted triumph.’ Hitler wanted to use the 1938 show as more than a trade fair. It was to be a demonstration of German engineering excellence for unprecedented numbers of visitors. For this he needed a star attraction. Hanna was booked to head the programme: she was to be the first person in the world to fly a helicopter inside a building. The theme of the motor show was Germany’s lost colonies: ‘at that time a much ventilated grievance’, Hanna noted. In preparation, the great Deutschlandhalle sports stadium, then the world’s largest arena, had been furnished with palm trees, flamingos, a carpet of sand and, in Hanna’s words, ‘a Negro village and other exotic paraphernalia’. This was the scene she was to rise above in the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 helicopter: a symbol of German power and control. At first Hanna was scheduled to make only the inaugural flight, after which the chief Focke-Wulf pilot, Karl Bode, was to take over. During a demonstration for Luftwaffe generals, however, knowing that the helicopter’s sensitivity meant any slight miscalculation could take him sweeping into the audience, Bode refused to risk rising more than a few feet above the ground. It was safe, but hardly impressive enough for the crowds who would be looking down from the galleries of steeply tiered seating. Then, through no fault of Bode’s, one of the propellers broke. ‘It was dreadful,’ Hanna told Elly. ‘There were splinters from the rotor blade flying around and the flamingos were all creating.’9 Once the blades had been replaced, Hanna took her turn. With typical insouciance, she lifted the helicopter well above the recommended height and hovered in the gods. Göring quickly ordered that she was to make all the motor show flights. Bode never forgave her.

It turns out that the public back then didn’t love watching helicopters any more than they do now:

But when Hanna revved up the rotors [inside the stadium] she was horrified to discover that the machine refused to lift. The reputation of the Reich, her own career and, Hanna must have realized, possibly even her liberty, hung stuttering in the spotlights just a few inches above the floor. Surrounding her, watching every manoeuvre of both machine and pilot through a growing cloud of dirt and sand, were some 8,000 spectators, including many representatives of the international press. Hanna was certain that the problem was caused by the helicopter’s normally aspirated engine being starved of air by the breathing of the vast audience. Painful minutes passed while the technicians debated, but then the great hall’s doors were opened. Hanna and the Deutschland immediately ‘shot up to about twenty feet’ and slowly rotated on the spot. At first ‘the audience followed the flight intently’, but such a controlled display held little drama and the applause grew desultory. At the end of the demonstration Hanna neatly lowered the machine with her head held high, executed a perfectly timed, stiff-armed Nazi salute, and landed safely on her mark. She had practised this countless times for Udet while he sat comfortably ensconced in an armchair, puffing at a cigar.

(Maybe opening the doors reduced the temperature and, therefore, the density altitude?)

I had always thought that Hanna was the world’s first female jet pilot, but the book says that she likely never flew the Me 163 under power. (It’s actually a rocket-powered plane, but that’s close enough.) Her job was to test fly it in glider mode, which was how every flight in the plane ended. Nazi leadership did not want their star female pilot to be killed by the Me 163:

… the famous Me 163b Komet, was powered by extremely combustible twin fuels kept in tanks behind, and on either side of, the pilot’s seat. The fuels were a mixture of methanol alcohol, known as C-Stoff, and a hydrogen peroxide mixture, or T-Stoff. Just a few drops together could cause a violent reaction, so they were automatically injected into the plane’s combustion chamber through nozzles, where they ignited spontaneously producing a temperature of 1,800°C. Several test planes with unspent fuel blew up on touchdown. ‘If it had as much as half a cup of fuel left in its tank,’ one pilot reported, ‘it would blow itself into confetti, and the pilot with it.’ Several simply exploded in the air. Hydrogen peroxide alone was capable of spontaneous combustion when it came into contact with any organic material such as clothing, or a pilot. To protect themselves, test pilots wore specially developed white suits made from acid-resistant material, along with fur-lined boots, gauntlets and a helmet. Nevertheless, at least one pilot would be dissolved alive, after the T-Stoff feed-line became dislodged and the murderous fuels leaked into the cockpit where they seeped through the seams of his protective overalls. ‘His entire right arm had been dissolved by T-Agent. It just simply wasn’t there. There was nothing more left in the sleeve,’ the chief flight engineer reported. ‘The other arm, as well as the head, was nothing more than a mass of soft jelly.’

Hanna wasn’t scared by these deaths and injuries and tried to get into the powered test program. She was seriously injured even without the deadly fuel/engine:

Her Me 163b V5, carrying water ballast in place of fuel, was towed into the air behind a heavy twin-engined Me 110 fighter. But when Hanna came to release the undercarriage, the whole plane started to shudder violently. To make matters worse, her radio connection was also ‘kaput’.83 Red Very lights curving up towards her from below warned her something was seriously wrong. Unable to contact her tow-plane, she saw the observer signalling urgently with a white cloth, and noticed the pilot repeatedly dropping and raising his machine’s undercarriage. Clearly her own undercarriage had failed to jettison.

Hanna could have bailed out, but chose to try to preserve the airplane. She paid for this decision:

Hanna had fractured her skull in four places, broken both cheekbones, split her upper jaw, severely bruised her brain and, as one pilot put it, ‘completely wiped her nose off her face’.87 She had also broken several vertebrae. She was rushed to surgery but, knowing her arrival would cause a sensation, she insisted on travelling by car rather than ambulance, and on walking into the hospital through the quieter back entrance and up a flight of stairs before any members of staff were alerted.

In case you were tempted to complain about your own health woes:

Hanna spent five long months in hospital. After her condition stabilized, a series of pioneering operations included surgery to give her a new nose. Although she would always have a faint scar, and people who met her noted it was ‘evident something had happened there’, the reconstruction work was excellent.

Still suffering from headaches and severe giddiness, her first priority was to recover her sense of balance, without which she knew she could not fly. The summerhouse had a flight of narrow steps running from the ground up to the steep, gabled roof. Hanna climbed them cautiously until she could sit astride the ridge of the roof with her arms firmly clinging to the chimneystack, and look around without losing her balance. After a few weeks her vertigo began to ebb and she risked letting go of the chimney. Within a month, through pure determination, she could ease herself along the entire length of the ridge without feeling giddy. She built up her strength by walking, then hiking, through the forest. Despite setbacks and some despondency, in time she began to climb the pines, branch by branch, ruefully recalling the days of her childhood when ‘no tree had been too high’.

She was cleared to return to flying.

More: Read The Women Who Flew for Hitler.

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Celebrating Women in Aviation on the First Day of Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture)

July 22, 2024July 22, 2024 by philg

It’s the first day of EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the world’s largest fly-in and general celebration of aviation. In particular, there tends to be a lot of official celebration of women in aviation. Thus, today’s blog post is about the greatest female pilots in history, chronicled in the book The Women Who Flew for Hitler. Hanna Reitsch, who taught herself to fly a helicopter, is already well-known, but the book also covers Melitta von Stauffenberg whose career was actually far more impressive. While Hannah was a great stick-and-rudder pilot, Melitta was one of Germany’s most important aeronautical engineers and a far more disciplined test pilot (the author refers to both women by their first names). As Melitta isn’t as well-known, a few excerpts

In October [shortly after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering Melitta] was interviewed by the head of the aerodynamics department at the prestigious German Research Institute for Aeronautics, better known as DVL,* at Berlin-Adlershof airbase. Having temporarily closed its doors during the war, the institute was now aiming to restore Germany’s international reputation in technology, and was keen to employ the brightest graduates. Invited to watch a test flight, Melitta was deep in conversation when the plane she was there to observe plummeted from the sky to crash only a hundred metres away from her. The entire crew was killed on impact. Although she was shaken, Melitta’s resolve did not falter. The following year, aged twenty-five, she received her diploma and started work at DVL as a flight mechanic and mathematician in experimental aerodynamics research. Her initial brief was the operation of propellers, then known as ‘airscrews’, with particular focus on the sound and drag caused by high altitudes.

Adolf Hitler was an early adopter of aviation and a big proponent of the industry as well as women within it.

‘Hitler wanted the Germans to become a nation of aviators,’ the wife of Hanna’s friend Karl Baur, a Messerschmitt test pilot, later wrote. ‘If there was some kind of celebration in a city, an air show was a must.’

‘Women have always been among my staunchest supporters,’ Hitler told the New York Times in July 1933. ‘They feel my victory is their victory.’ While working to return women to their rightful and respected role, as he saw it, of hausfrau, Hitler had been keen to exploit any support for his National Socialist Party. At times this required rising above a tide of female fan mail and enduring more than one public display of adoration. ‘He was often embarrassed’ by such women, his friend and official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann later remembered, but he ‘had no option but to accept their veneration’.

Hitler ended up supporting and decorating both of the women whose careers are chronicled in the book and, famously, admitted Hanna Reitsch to his inner circle.

[It is interesting to compare the book’s description of Hitler’s platform to what today’s politicians promise: “[Hitler] promised a higher standard of living with a car for everyone, beautiful homes, affordable holidays, marriage loans, respect for mothers and a defence against Bolshevism.” Is it fair to say that Democrats promise to take cars away, move people into apartments in 15-minute cities, give women money if they don’t get married, and, instead of defending against Bolshevism, to deliver the best aspects of Bolshevism adapted for domestic use.]

Some recent books describe aviators, including German fighter pilots, as anti-Nazi. A Higher Call is one prominent example. Pilots find themselves accidentally wearing swastikas and doing whatever Hitler tells them to do. The Women Who Flew for Hitler points out that German aviators were early enthusiasts for Hitler:

Organized by the meteorologist Walter Georgii, the first Rhön gliding competitions had been held on the Wasserkuppe mountain in 1920. Every summer since, thousands of sightseers had journeyed by train and foot up to the annual rallies held on the bare summit of the Wasserkuppe, the Rhön valley’s highest point. According to contemporary German flight magazines, by the late 1920s the highest slopes of the mountain hosted a glider camp with its own water and electricity supply, hotels, bars and restaurants, a post office with special-edition stamps, and indeed everything, ‘like in the big cities. Even dancing. Even bobbed hair!’

By the 1930s, over 20,000 people regularly travelled to the Rhön valley at weekends. On the day of the 1932 Reichstag elections, a temporary voting station had even been set up on the mountain, and Walter Georgii called on the people of Germany to ‘do as the gliders have’. His message was clear – it was time to recognize the forces of nature and embrace a brave new future characterized by technical prowess, a love of freedom and a deep sense of national pride. With the Nazis securing over 50 per cent of the mountaintop vote, the Wasserkuppe fraternity’s support for Hitler was considerably above the national average.

If you think that motion sickness will prevent you from achieving greatness in the air:

Hanna quickly proved her capabilities and was accepted by her peers. Most of the flying suits were too large, and she needed cushions to boost her height in the cockpit, but she learned to fly loops, turns and rolls in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44, a two-seat open biplane known as the Stieglitz, or Goldfinch, and carefully concealed her initial sickness by throwing up neatly into one of her gloves.

Americans loved Hanna Reitsch before and after World War II and she loved Americans. Here’s an interesting quote from 1938:

Nevertheless, although she favourably compared the USA to a Europe ‘intellectually overburdened with centuries-old cultural legacy’, she still had some reservations. ‘The American’s uncomplicated acceptance of life-as-it-comes,’ she decided, ‘exposes him to the dangers of absorbing uncritically the opinions served up to him by press and radio.’

While Hanna was celebrated for winning gliding competitions, Melitta was doing a combination of aeronautical engineering and test piloting her own creations:

Melitta’s new assignment was to perfect the aircraft technically, to eliminate as much risk as possible. The main task was to evaluate and improve the targeting devices, and in particular the dive-sights for the two-man Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, with its distinctive gull-wing shape, and the popular four-man Ju 88 dive-bomber developed for larger-scale strategic air war. This involved registering the continuously changing angle of the dive, speed and dropping altitude, all without modern instruments. She also worked on developing dive-visors, ensuring that the autopilot levelled off the aircraft automatically when a bomb had left its cradle so as not to put too much strain on the machine’s airframe, and that the automatic pullout sequence functioned at 6G – the point at which most pilots suffered G-force-induced loss of consciousness.

Every morning Melitta cycled across the airfield from her dorm on her heavy-framed pushbike, before swapping her beret for her leather flying cap, donning her overalls and clambering into a Junkers’ cockpit. She would take her machine up to 4,000 metres before rolling sideways and tearing down again at speeds of up to 350 mph, the engines howling and the surfaces of the plane whistling as the dive angle steepened until it was at least seventy-five to eighty degrees – not far from vertical. As Melitta plunged towards earth, her gloved hands tightly gripping the steering column, the whole frame of her plane would be shaking with the mounting pressure. The vibrations made it difficult to read her instruments accurately, so many of her dives were filmed to provide the detailed information required to enable incremental improvements to the targeting devices. Sometimes she would also release between four and ten cylindrical cement bombs to test her work. At between 150 and 200 metres, just as correction seemed impossible, Melitta would lift her plane’s nose and skim low across the fields before circling back to land. After several such tests over the course of a morning, her colleagues would heave her from her cockpit, unclip her parachute harness and help her out of her flying suit, so that she could return to her engineering role. Over desk and drawing board she would now conduct a precise evaluation of the dives, often working late into the night ‘without making any fuss about it’, her colleagues noted, to calculate the alterations required before testing could begin again.6 Undertaking a few such dives without any of the engineering work had been enough to exhaust Udet some years earlier. Even with automatic dive-brakes, trainee Stuka pilots were often sick, and sometimes plunged into the sea. Yet Melitta might complete fifteen such test dives in one day: a performance unmatched by any pilot in history.

… As an engineer–pilot, Melitta already had all the qualifications needed for a technical general staff officer so she now started work on a PhD. Her new work was focused on the development of a special night-landing device for single-engined night fighters. She was ‘testing landings with fighter planes for unlit, improvised emergency airfields’, and ‘blind-flying’ without any electrical landing systems, Jutta explained.

Melitta ended up doing more than 2,000 test-dives and had a full staff of men working for her. By contrast…

Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot was Heini Dittmar, the gliding champion who had travelled to South America with Hanna before the war to study thermal winds. Unfortunately he and Hanna had since fallen out. Hanna now had a reputation for demanding access to whichever aircraft she chose, sometimes delaying desperately needed trials. Furthermore, when she undertook test flights her reports were not always conclusive. ‘She flies with her heart and not with her brains,’ one pilot complained, or ‘at least without critical understanding of her work’.39 More than once, deficiencies were found in aircraft that Hanna had signed off.

The other huge contrast was that Melitta was actually part-Jewish and, though immensely useful to the Nazi war effort, was at best ambivalent about National Socialism. Hanna Reitsch, of course, was an ardent admirer of Hitler before, during, and decades after World War II.

More about this book and these women in a follow-up post…

Melitta:

Hanna:

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Baltimore bridge destruction reading: a biography of Rudolf Diesel

May 6, 2024May 6, 2024 by philg

As we wait for someone to explain how the Dali lost power from its 55,000 hp (or 0!) German diesel engine, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I (2023) may be worth a read. In addition to a biography of the man who created the efficient reliable (except sometimes) high-torque engines, the book has some interesting stuff about

the rapid industrialization of Russia circa 1900 (I’ve read in other places that it was the world’s fastest growing economy prior to the revolution)
the development of Standard Oil
the utopian dreams of rich industrialists, including Diesel, circa 1900 (see also Andrew Carnegie!)

Who else would like this book? Greta Thunberg! Diesel predicted that we would completely trash the earth from burning fossil fuel (not an unreasonable prediction at the time given that cities were already horribly polluted from coal smoke), that we would run out of fossil fuel, and that solar energy would ultimately be our primary source of power. Diesel also loved the U.S., predicted that it would become and remain the world’s dominant industrial power, and was very impressed by our passenger train system(!). He thought that the U.S. was guaranteed to stay ahead of the Europeans in passenger rail because we weren’t constrained by old cities (i.e., California high-speed rail should be easy, quick, and cheap to construct!).

MAN was a leader in diesel technology 100+ years ago and remains a leader today, an interesting story in corporate continuity right through to making the Dali‘s engine.

Let’s have a look at the engine family… (for scale, check the staircases and handrails; source)

Mark Zuckerberg also chose German-made (MTU) diesel engines for his climate-saving yacht:

Mark Zuckerberg, known for his Climate Change activism, shows off his new $300 million mega yacht.

Zuck's 287-foot mega yacht is powered by four MTU diesel engines and can reach a top speed of 24 knots.

America's elites are laughing right in our faces.pic.twitter.com/u5n3hicRNf
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) May 6, 2024

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