November 30, 2004

Don't Blame Me, I Voted For P.P. Christensen

Stolen* from author William Gibson’s not very lively weblog (like I'm one to talk), a prescient quote from H.L. Mencken, who was always happy to dump on the democratic process, but probably thought he was talking about Warren Harding:

In small areas, before small electorates, the first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide...the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre... The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people... On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a moron.
—H.L. Mencken, writing in the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

*In standard weblog parlance, I should really say this post was yoinked, or ganked, rather than stolen. Both words mean “lifted from somewhere else.” Yoink is, like a good one-third of all communication between Generation Xers, a Simpsons reference. I don’t know the etymology of gank, though the handy Urban Dictionary confirms the definition and offers a few variants.

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November 22, 2004

World War, Too

I’ve put up a list of my old papers and articles on the Research section of this site. Abstracts for many of them are on line, and I’ll get the others up soon. (If you're looking for beach reading, all of the papers, even my dissertation, are available on request.)

I have to get some new content into the weblog part of this site too so it doesn’t turn into the “my grandfather died in World War II” website. But my mother and one of my cousins sent me a few more things about the story I posted for Remembrance Day, and I couldn’t help but mention them.

(Had it occurred to me that my parents would share the link to this entry with a bunch of our relatives, I might have left out the bit about Hitler’s lost testicle. Doesn't seem like the most respectful digression. It could be worse, mind you: I could have linked to the picture from Garth Ennis’ off-color war comic, Operation Bollock, where the titular testicle, swollen with occult power, blots out the sun. Actually, who am I kidding? Most of my family would have loved that. The only real reason I’m not linking to that picture is that I can’t find it.)

The earlier post told the story of my grandfather in Italy during World War II. A book called The Canadians in Italy gave the following terse account of the attack where Mac was killed:

Promptly at half-past five on the morning of the 17th the artillery barrage opened and the Perths began their attack. … But the enemy, aroused by the barrage, was quick to reply. In preceding weeks the Germans had had ample opportunity to survey the valley and register their targets, and now from their artillery and from well-sited mortars on the Arielli side of the Fendo ridge shells began to burst with deadly accuracy about the river crossings, and fire from heavy and light machine-guns swept down the hillside. The main body of the Perths’ “C” Company was stopped at the second ford, and thus deprived of the support of the barrage. Since the most damaging fire was coming from a large white house about 200 yards up the hill, the company commander, Major R.A. MacDougall, led a party of seven in a gallant effort to storm it. The entire group was wiped out. The remainder of the company, unable to advance, took cover in the tall rushes about the ford.

What is most depressing is the book’s conclusion that the Arielli attack was little more than a diversion, and an unsuccessful and apparently poorly planned one at that:

In spite of General Leese’s injunction not to incur heavy casualties, the “Arielli Show” had cost the Canadians eight officers and 177 other ranks. Worst sufferers were the Perths, who lost three officers and 44 men killed … Not only had the brigade failed to take and hold its ground objectives, but from evidence in German documents it would appear that the enemy had not been deceived as to the intention behind the attack.

Various reasons may be advanced for the 11th Brigade’s lack of success. Reference has already been made to the breakdown of communications which resulted in a very imperfect picture of the situation reaching Brigade Headquarters. Contributing to the obscurity was the inadequacy of the maps in use… Poor flying conditions on the 17th had cancelled the air programme… The brigade plan of delivering successive punches by single battalions has been criticized as enabling the enemy to meet each attack in turn with all his fire power concentrated in one spot; whereas, with the tremendous artillery support available to the Canadians, a joint assault with both battalions simultaneously would have dissipated the German fire and brought the attackers greater chance of success. Above all the Canadian troops, unpracticed in battle, were opposed, battalion for battalion, by seasoned veterans of a formation unequalled among the German armies in Italy for its fighting skill and tenacity, and on ground decidedly favourable to the defenders.

Mom reports that it was surprisingly easy, given the map in the book, for her and Dad to locate exactly where Mac and his group of volunteers were killed. She writes:

The fields around are vineyards now and I imagine they were then too. In any case, you can see there was not much cover against machine gun fire. The chilling thing is that I can just imagine your Dad in the same situation saying, “Machine guns? No cover? Right, let's go!”

Yeah, I can easily imagine that too. My cousin Ian, who did most of the work for us of reconstructing the story of Mac’s company and the Arielli attack, upped the emotional ante by sending me copies of two letters: one from Mac to Helen (his wife, our grandmother), written the night before he was killed, and one from his commanding officer to Helen expressing his condolences after the attack. I won’t repost the bulk of the letters. But it's emotional stuff, even this far removed. I don’t know which gets to me more: Mac’s stiff upper lip optimism (“Will close now Helen dear, and keep your chin up. Worry will not help anything. Love and kisses, Mac xxx”) or his CO’s fairly inadequate efforts at consolation (“What I particularly want you to know, Mrs. MacDougall, is that he more than held his end up till he was hit. When one of his officers and several men were hit he made up his mind that it was his personal responsibility to put a stop to it. He tried with great gallantry.”)

The theme of gallant sacrifice in unnecessary diversion from the main campaign is distressingly common in Canadian military history. And in military history in general, I suppose. My Mom concludes,

It all seems such a tragic waste. So much of the Canadians' support and equipment was withdrawn to other more glamorous theatres throughout the Italian campaign, and even this attack was meant primarily to keep the Germans distracted from the American landings on the west coast. Useful in the long run, I guess, but hard to accept as a compelling reason for Granny to spend her life alone and for her children to grow up without a father.

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November 11, 2004

For Remembrance Day

Sometimes the story of a historical source is more interesting than the actual information it contains. Here are two little eight-page booklets, yellowed with age, that my parents received in the mail in January 2001. (Click on the booklets to see their contents.)

You’ll learn from the service book on the left that my grandfather’s name was Robert MacDougall, that he was born in September 1908, and that he joined the Canadian Armed Forces on September 6th, 1939. That was five days after the German invasion of Poland and four days before Canada’s official declaration of war. That Robert MacDougall, who went by “Mac,” was thirty years old, a teacher, just recently married, a graduate of Queen’s University. The booklet lists the courses he took, the inoculations he received, his appointment as a company commander and his promotion from Captain to Major in July 1943. From the equipment book, you can learn that he was issued a pistol, binoculars, and two tins of anti-gas ointment. You can also see the size clothing he was issued. I see that Major Robert MacDougall’s jacket would probably fit me but his trousers would be too short. I also note that the first item of clothing on the sizing list is described as “battle dress, blouse,” followed by “cap or bonnet,” neither of which sound nearly manly enough.

But as is so often the case with historical sources, the booklets don’t answer any of the questions you really want them to. What was Major Robert MacDougall like? What did he think about the war? How did he feel when the Perth Regiment sailed for Europe in October 1941, leaving his pregnant wife and infant daughter behind? Obviously, these two little booklets are mute on those subjects. Nor do they offer any details of their own sixty-year journey, and how they came back into my parents’ hands.

Mac’s regiment trained at Camp Borden—aka “Camp Boredom”—near Barrie, Ontario, for nearly two years before sailing for England. In England, the Perths spent another two years as coastal defense and training as motorized infantry. But the motorized part of their equipment never really arrived—other than what their regimental newspaper dryly called “some ancient and honourable vehicles” that had given “long and distinguished service” in the North African campaign. When Operation Timberwolf started in 1943, the venerable vehicles were abandoned and the Perths reverted to regular infantry. (Here's the regimental history of the Perths.)

The Perth Regiment saw its first real combat in the invasion of Italy in late 1943 and early 1944. Half of the Canadians killed in World War II died in Italy. The Battle of Ortona, eight days of brutal house-to-house fighting around Christmas 1943, was Canada’s bloodiest battle of the Italian campaign. Canadian newspapers insisted on calling it “Little Stalingrad.” Scroll down on that page to see a vintage Battle of Ortona newsreel in Quicktime format. And here is a Battle of Ortona wargame, of all things, including the following advice:

To be successful you [the Canadian player] must think like a Commonwealth troop. You do not have men to burn like the Russians or an over-abundance of equipment like the Americans.

Three weeks after the fall of Ortona, the Perth Regiment was ordered to cross the Arielli River north of the city. But the area was heavily fortified by the 1st German Parachute Division, and after a day and night of formidable fighting, the Perths were driven back. Major MacDougall’s company was decimated; he and at least thirty of his men were killed in the attack.

Major MacDougall and his men are buried in the Moro River Canadian War Cemetery near Ortona. My parents visited there for the first time last month. They were, in fact, mistaken by the locals for Canadian dignitaries. The Governor-General was due to arrive for a memorial ceremony the following day. So Mom and Dad got an extremely warm welcome.

That's where Mac’s story ends. But the story of the little booklets continues, and from here on we have only fragments of the tale. Because the Perths were driven back, the bodies from my grandfather’s company could not immediately be recovered. By the time they were, they had been searched and stripped by the Germans, and, probably because Mac was an officer, his papers and personal effects were taken for intelligence purposes.

You’ve seen the booklets. It’s hard to imagine what use the Nazi brain trust could get out of Major MacDougall’s “cap or bonnet” size. But we have German meticulousness to thank for this story, so let’s not look a gift Nazi in the mouth. The Germans sent the booklets to Berlin, where I suppose Enigma cryptographers were working feverishly to decode them when the Reich fell in 1945.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a quote I and my friend Sean really like from the novel Cryptonomicon:

Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in. Ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.

We can also thank the Red Army for this story. After the Allies took Berlin, the Soviets confiscated all the German documents they found, and hauled them back to Mother Russia. And apparently the Soviets cannot bear to throw away a single scrap of paper, because those two little booklets then spent the entirety of the Cold War in Russia somewhere, on some dusty shelf, or in a hanging file, or a good proletarian cardboard box. Maybe they were filed in a giant Siberian warehouse next to the Tunguska meteor, the Russian Ark of the Covenant, and Hitler’s lost testicle. Don't laugh: didn't fragments of Hitler’s skull recently turn up at the back of a desk drawer full of pencils or floppy disks or something?

Fast forward almost sixty years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the thawing of the Cold War, whatever Russian bureaucracy had inherited these old wartime documents decided it was time to do a little spring cleaning. In 1999, Boris Yeltsin ceremonially returned all the documents taken from British and Commonwealth soldiers to Tony Blair. In London, they were sorted out and shipped back to the respective colonies. By October 2000, effects and documents from twenty-five Canadian soldiers killed in action arrived in Ottawa, and the Department of Veterans Affairs set about tracking down next-of-kin.

My grandmother Helen, named on the first page of Mac's service booklet, kept his surname and never remarried after his death. She passed away in 1996. My father, who was two years old when his father died in Italy, retired in 2000. He and my Mom moved back to the little town Dad grew up in and built a new house there on the site of the house where he had been born. Which made it quite easy for Veterans Affairs to find them. Had Mom and Dad not been living there, I expect it still would have been possible to track them down. But the story of these two little booklets would not have had the same circularity—a sixty-year journey, in my grandfather’s pocket from this little village in Ontario to England, to Sicily, to a muddy riverbank in a vinyard on the east coast of Italy, and then, in hands unknown from Ortona, to the heart of the Reich, to the heart of Stalin's Russia, and then finally in our time back to London, to Ottawa, and into my father’s hands at the very same address in the same little village where Major MacDougall said goodbye to his family so many years before.

Sometimes history is something you study—an intellectual interest, a puzzle, a spectacle. And sometimes history comes home to you.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
—Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen”

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November 01, 2004

OGTD, Original Gangsta

As you might have guessed from the subtitle of this weblog, I am amused by declarations of the form “X is the new Y.” I have lately been informed, for example, that organic is the new kosher, Google is the new Netscape, quiet is the new loud, Clarendon font is the new Helvetica, chili fries are the new onion rings (Lisa rendered this verdict, but neglected to provide a link), Thursday is the new Friday, but Friday, once the new Saturday, is now the new Tuesday, and everything you can possibly think of, from anal sex to zombies, is the new black.

I was less amused to learn that, according to the Boston Globe, “getting organized is the new dieting.” I am pretty much immune to the siren song of dieting fads and gurus. But I cannot say the same thing about my resistance to the peddlers of organizational devices and schemes.

I write To Do list upon To Do list, with sublists nested within master lists detailing all the To Do lists I have yet to write. I watch “Clean Sweep” on TLC when L is out of town. I drool over the “Hold Everything” catalog, pure tidiness porn with its gleaming magazine butlers and Swedish media storage units and stackable Hapao baskets—all unspeakably beautiful because, in the catalog, they contain no unsightly magazines or Swedish media. I dream that there exists some secret wisdom of tickler folders and contextual To Do lists that will transform me from a flailing Pig-Pen of Post-It notes into a prolific academic superstar. In other words: I’m an easy mark.

The big name in organization porn today is David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Getting Things Done is a system of time-saving and time-organizing tips known to its many devotees as “GTD.” (See how they save time by saying that?)

The best introduction I've seen to GTD is at a weblog called 43 Folders. 43 Folders is a great resource for all manner of life hacks and time-saving tips in general, GTD-flavored and otherwise. (Though you'd think the very first time management tip any sane person might offer would be, “Don’t keep a weblog.”)

GTD obviously has a lot of appeal for people who like systems, for people who like thinking about how they think, and for people who want to preserve those non-renewable, zero-sum resources: their attention and their time. (Again, “Don’t go starting a weblog” comes to mind.) GTD has, not surprisingly, taken the geek world by storm. And I know I’m on the verge of drinking the Kool-Aid myself too. But I have so far resisted buying David Allen's GTD. I'm reluctant to buy a glossy corporate-style self-help book with a picture of the author on the cover—there's a very real danger such books will choke all other forms of literature out of the bookstore ecosystem entirely. So I did what I always do in these situations: I went to the library.

(That reminds me: 43 Folders also turned me on to a nifty-looking bookmarklet that lets you jump with one click from any book page on Amazon to the listing for it, if it exists, at your local library. This would be huge for me, if I could only get it to work for Hollis.)

What I found at the library was not David Allen’s GTD, but another book on exactly the same subject, with exactly the same title, published in 1938: Getting Things Done, or G.T.D., by Captain P.R. Creed. Rock! Now I can get organized and read a musty old library book—two of my favorite activities—at the same time. How's that for GTD?

The Golden Age GTD was written (and autographed) by, as I say, a Briton named P.R. Creed. He won me over with his author bio on page one, which begins with this crucial information: “Educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College, Cambridge, England. Made 211 runs at Cricket at Lord’s Ground in London. This score holds the schoolboy record.” Can David Allen say that? From there on in, Creed sounds a little like a character in somebody’s Edwardian-era role-playing game. He joined the Rifle Brigade and won a place in the Regimental Polo Team, leading his squad to the all Army championship in India. (War is hell.) He then organized the Ministry of Munitions for Lords Kitchener and Asquith, but also found time to be the Polo Correspondent for the Times of London from 1909 to 1921. (See above, re: war, hell.)

I don't know if this version of GTD is going to change my life, but I have enjoyed reading it. A lot of it is basic midcentury self-improvement advice: keep a healthy diet, "early to bed, early to rise," avoid gypsies and the Irish… But Creed does have a number of eccentricities that keep things lively. First, his tendency to Capitalize important Nouns (generally a good sign that you are approaching Crankville):

In my view Capital Letters were made for the Author and not the Author for Capital Letters. So I use them at my own discretion … in order to catch the Eye of the Reader’s Mind, and in the hope that the word dressed in Capital Letters … may make a dent in the Mind which will stay put.

Then, there's his cheerful dismissal of democracy as “bunk”—the world, Creed says, is run by hidden “Wire-pullers”:

The world is run by the Wire-pullers. When Mr. Henry Ford said that “history is bunk”—he probably had drawn the same conclusion ... As regards the inner workings of how and why things are made to happen the Historians are in the dark. The Wire-pullers do not keep diaries in which they exhibit their art to the public gaze. ... It is nonsense to babble about “Democracy” and to tell the people that they govern themselves because they have votes.

Finally, there's his judgment that the ultimate key to getting things done lies in tensing your abdominal muscles.

STAND AND SIT TALL is an excellent Slogan. You will accomplish this by the simple procedure of the firm drawing up of the Abdominal Muscles, in other words a firm and constant Belly Up.

Belly Up! Join the B.U. Brigade, an honorable but anonymous circle of Kindred Spirits who are out for G.T.D. and Victory. No Committees, No Program, No Red Tape, No Yardsticks, No Gadgets—not even a button by which you might know the Elect! Here is one pie into which poor old Stereotype cannot stick his destroying finger. The Game is between YOU and your Abdominal Muscles and no man can see what you are doing to each other. … Atta Boy!—or Girl! GO TO IT! The Winged Victory beckons and where she leads nothing can turn you back.

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