Month: November 2020

There are many bricks in the veterans memorial plaza where I live in Texas each with a different name and a different story. The brick I want to talk about looks a bit different than the rest and I hope to explain why, and why it sits with all the others.

It all started with a trip to Hawaii to celebrate our 40th anniversary. My wife and I flew to Honolulu a day early so that we could visit the USS Arizona Memorial before we headed off on a seven day islands cruise. We got on the coach to Pearl Harbor early in the morning and were entertained by our driver with multiple tales of the islands and tourists like ourselves. When he asked for questions one of our numbers asked him why so many Japanese visited the Arizona Memorial. I must admit to a moment of apprehension anticipating his answer but when it came it was quite unlike my unworthy expectations. He asked us all to think about how our world was changed by the Pearl Harbor attack and how the world was changed for the Japanese too. As I thought about his question I thought about my father and his circumstances on December 7th 1941.

In December 1941 my mother and father were not yet engaged, far less married and I was not yet born. In fact I was not even a twinkle since I was not born until 1949. On Pearl Harbor day my father was in a German Army POW camp in Torun, Poland (Camp 17 of Stalag_XX_A as I recall). Absent the attack his prospects of ever returning home to Scotland alive were vanishingly remote. It goes without saying that such a failure to return home would have seen my parents unmarried and me unborn.

The story of how he finished up as a POW is a tragic one, quite embarrassing to Winston Churchill’s reputation and greatly forgotten by military historians of WWII both in the USA and UK. He volunteered for the army in September 1939 the week that war was declared in the UK. He was inducted into the Seaforth Regiment and sent to Fort George, near Inverness in Scotland. After only 3 months training he was issued a Lee Enfield bolt action rifle and 100 rounds of .303 ammunition and shipped out to France in January 1940 in the 4th Battalion Seaforths, part of the 51st Highland Division. The division was eventually stationed at the northern end of the Maginot Line near Metz, quite separate from the rest of the British Army. Those readers who are military historians will realize that the 51st HD location was a precarious one, although they didn’t know that at the time but soon would.

When the Phony War ended and the real shooting started around May 10th 1940 the main German armored thrust landed north of the 51st HD, went through Sedan and onward to the English Channel coast near Calais, cutting the 51st off from the rest of the British Army. Elements of the 51st division did take part in supporting French armor assaults northward into the flank of the German penetration but without air support and after the German anti-tank forces worked out how to disable the heavily armored French tanks, these all failed.

The rest of the British Army was famously evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk between May 27th and June 4th leaving the 51st HD the only British division left fighting in France (the 50th division was in the process of landing at Cherbourg but were soon turned around and sent back to the UK). The 51st, including my father, fell back along the line of the river Somme arriving near St Valery sur Somme on the English Channel coast by May 28th. They were soon engaged by strong mechanized and infantry forces. The danger of being outflanked by German armor on the right drove them slowly back toward their bases of supply at Le-Havre and Rouen. When these bases were cut off they fell back to St Valery-en-Caux on the channel coast where they attempted to hold a perimeter while awaiting to be rescued by sea. But rescue became impossible when the beaches came under direct artillery fire. They might have been saved if earlier action had been taken but Churchill had delayed efforts to rescue the 51st and to keep them in the fight as a political bargaining tool with the French to keep them from capitulating; now it was too late.

On June 12th 1940 the French forces supporting them surrendered and, absent food, fuel, ammunition and medical supplies, and with no embarkation possible the 51st was surrendered to the famous German general Erwin Rommel. The 10,000 men of the division, mostly Scottish, were marched off as POWs to an uncertain future. At the time of this surrender the 51st Highland Division was surrounded by the 5th and 7th armored divisions, the 2nd motorized division, the 11th motorized brigade, the 57th, 31st, 12th, and 32nd infantry divisions of the German Army. A small force did escape through German lines to Le-Havre and returned to the UK but my father was not one of the fortunate ones.

He and his buddies were stripped of all that was valuable the marched eastward toward Germany. Besides marching they were carried in coal barges, in trucks and finally by train in cattle cars to Torun, Poland which is near Gdansk, or Danzig as it was called in those days. Here they entered into the German camp system, in his case as a private soldier. They were organized by service, rank and nationality. The British were treated better than most, albeit not all that well. They were issued rations of 1/5th of a loaf of black bread and a bowl of soup per day. Why 1/5th of a loaf is a mystery that only the Germans knew the answer to. At the beginning the bread was okay and the soup had recognizable vegetables and some protein in it. As time passed the ‘bread’ became sweepings and the soup became warm water.

As a private soldier my father was obliged to work in either the coal mines or on local farms. He volunteered to be a farm worker because it allowed him access to foodstuffs not available in camp that he could trade for. The POWs were sustained by Red Cross parcels, actually boxes, many supplied from the USA through Switzerland. They were supposed to receive one parcel per week but got far fewer, and sometimes none for months. The parcels contained cans of coffee, cans containing American cigarettes, cans of butter, chocolate, candies and other highly desirable products that were rarely consumed by the POWs but used as trade goods to swap for potatoes, carrots, eggs and other staples from local farmers. It was these staples that kept them alive through the next five years.

He escaped a few times; well he walked away from the farm he was working on, but with little success. When recaptured, prisoners were yelled at, perhaps hit with a rifle butt a few times, and then they were sentenced to 21 days solitary in the camp prison, the cooler. His most successful escape attempt reached the docks at Gdansk where he and his buddy were caught climbing the dockyard fence next to a Swedish cargo ship. So he was returned to the camp and his 21 day penance before heading out on the next work party to another farm. To my father it was all an adventure to escape the monotony of camp life. His family circumstances before he volunteered was pretty rough so I don’t think POW life was too unsettling for him, early on at least. He sent a postcard home to his sweetheart, my mother to be, consisting of a photograph of his hut and its residents and telling her that he was alive (I still have it). They corresponded by letter throughout his captivity maintaining their romance from afar. There is a family story that towards the end of the war, while he was again in solitary, he was informed by the guards that his older brother was in camp looking for him. Having been captured in Tobruk in North Africa and having had many adventures before pitching up in Poland his older brother, my uncle Jim got back to Scotland the same week as my dad.

In December 1941 my father had been a POW for over a year and a half. Although the Germans had attacked the Soviet Union in June that year the POWs had little hope of an end to the war in circumstances that would see them return home victorious. Then Pearl Harbor happened and when Churchill was informed of the attack wrote that he “…went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful”. I suspect that the POWs had a similar reaction when they found out than America had entered the war on their side.

Towards the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945 the camps in Poland were emptied and the POWs were rounded up and driven west to escape the advancing Soviet forces. This little known episode is called “The March” by those who took part in it. Over a period of about four months from January to April, they were marched about back and forth across Poland and Germany for more than 500 miles in some of the most brutally cold conditions. There was very little food and those who fell out of line to raid a farmer’s field for some potatoes were often shot. Estimates vary but between 100,000 to 200,000 allied POWs took part with between 2000 and 3000 that died on the way. One morning in late April or early May 1945 my father woke in a field near Hamburg. The guards had gone and soon allied forces arrived – he was free!

My dad returned home to Scotland and soon persuaded my mother to marry him. They settled down in central Scotland and raised two boys, my elder brother and me. Although he worked pretty much every day of his life my father’s health was affected by his time as a POW. He died young, not quite 55, and a little over a year after my mom died. She was barely in her 50’s when she died having been seriously ill since her early 30’s.

So what has all this to do with a brick in our Veterans Memorial Garden? Well, I was telling a neighbor this tale a number of years back. He is a Vietnam veteran who was seriously wounded flying helicopters in the 1st Cavalry. He was interested in my Dad’s story and my experience on the bus heading to the Arizona memorial. It was he who suggested the brick. So that is why the brick is there, not just to memorialize my father but to remind folks of what the others memorialized there have done to rescue freedom, and to place my dad’s name in a country he loved and among those who saved his life and who gave me mine. But for America and Americans, my dad would not have survived and I would not have been born and would never have emigrated to the United States of America and become one of its citizens – and I would never then have placed the brick.

Pfizer on Friday became the first company to seek emergency authorization for a coronavirus vaccine in the United States, a landmark moment and a signal that a powerful tool to help control the pandemic could begin to be available by late December.

Once upon a time I was doing research as a physicist on the military applications of lasers and electro-optic systems. As a consequence of world events the military became wary of having their anti-aircraft radar systems attacked by anti-radar missiles. Better they thought to look at methods of detecting aircraft by passive means to avoid emitting radar signals that could be detected and attacked. As a result we built an infra-red system that scanned the sky through 360 degrees and detected aircraft by their heat signatures. It was all very high tech and clever. It determined the direction and elevation to a detected aircraft with great precision but it did have a drawback; it didn’t determine the target’s range. That was where my group came in. All we had to do was to integrate a laser rangefinder into the infra-red surveillance system.

To design and integrate a laser rangefinder for aircraft we had first to work out the mathematics of how a laser rangefinder works. This calculation involves the power of the laser, sensitivity of the laser detector, transmission of the atmosphere, and the reflectivity of the aircraft to lasers. We could determine all the other factors but we had no idea how much laser light would be reflected off an aircraft; so we had to find out.

In the radar world the reflectivity of a target object to radar illumination is called the Radar Cross Section or RCS. The RCS of objects have been closely studied since radar got invented, particularly how the RCS changes with target structure, materials and orientation. This is an essential study when developing stealthy platforms or when estimating the operational performance of weapon systems. In the case of the equivalent RCS for laser illuminations, at that time nothing was known.

We set about determining the laser RCS of military aircraft and missiles by shining lasers at them when parked on the ground or flying controlled flight patterns in front of our equipment. We were particularly interested in how the reflectance changed as the orientation of the aircraft changed. We gave pilots all the fuel they could burn to fly aerobatic patterns in our test area.

After making some of the first measurements of the laser RCS of aircraft we moved on to design our laser rangefinder system. It was at this point that the folks developing the surveillance system  came to us with a problem; could we tell the difference between an aircraft a long way away and a large bird a few hundred feet away. It turns out that the infra-red signal from each of these cases is indistinguishable and as a result a closely flying bird looks very much like a distant aircraft until it lands in a tree. We set out to measure the laser RCS of large birds.

Since birds were not as cooperative as aircraft we had to encourage them to position themselves in front of our lasers. We tried putting bird seed on a fence post trying to illuminate the birds as the landed to peck at the seed.  It didn’t work because it seems that the birds objected to being whacked by laser pulses which they seemed to detect a lot easier than us humans in similar circumstances.

We tried lots of variations of the bird seed solution without getting any cooperation from the birds. It was obvious that we needed to force the birds to cooperate so we had to shoot a few of them to get their cooperation. We tried to mount the bird on top of a pole, but being dead it just flopped and didn’t look very bird-like. So we cut up a wire coat hanger and made the birds fly right with the application of wire and duct tape. But we were still not happy. It seemed that the pole that we taped the bird to was generating as much of a return as the bird. There was only one solution left, we had to get the birds to be free flying or as close as we could.

We constructed an arrangement using a large helium balloon, fishing line and a tether and a suitably wired and taped bird. One of our junior engineers was sent out with the balloon borne flying bird and we got down to measuring the bird’s laser RCS. As I was staring through the alignment scope I started to notice that I was having a harder and harder time tracking the bird. It seemed to be rising quickly into the air. I looked around the scope and noticed our young engineer running across the airfield while gesticulating up into the air. He had let go of the tether and the balloon, with bird attached, was rapidly rising into the air and disappearing downwind and a prodigious rate. This was very annoying. WE had to prepare another balloon and bird and recover our engineer to try again.

I have often wondered who found our balloon after in lost its helium and came down to earth, I wonder what they made of the bird with the wire braced wings and duct taped head. Maybe they thought that the birds were evolving a new method of flight. I’m glad to say that my phone never rang with an irate non-combatant complaining about strange experiments in places long ago and far away.

In an old blog post I described my dilemma in voting for a presidential candidate in the 2016 election. I described the dilemma as like Hobson’s choice but modified that description because Hobson had the choice of something or nothing; a bad horse or no horse at all. My dilemma was one of choosing between Stalin in a pantsuit (HRH Clinton) or for Mussolini with hair (Trump). I chose neither, making no choice for President – perhaps Hobson after all

Four years later Trump has been defeated in the most recent election, although he keeps insisting that he didn’t lose but was cheated by the Democrats, who from now on I shall refer to as the Socialists for a more accurate description of them. He is to be replaced, temporarily at least, by Joe Biden a 50 year underachieving political lightweight who was recently Obama’s vice president.

Last year at this time Trump’s economy was booming. During his administration unemployment was at its lowest in fifty years, particularly among women, African Americans and Hispanics. Real take-home pay was rising faster than it had in decades and the ‘smart’ opinion was that he would be re-elected in a landslide. Then COVID happened.

The virus came from China, although we were immediately scolded by the Socialists not to mention that fact. How humans got infected by this virus remains unknown. Like the Benghazi terrorist attacks that were blamed on a video, we have been told by the media ‘experts’ that the virus originated in bats from a meat market. Others have pointed out that the meat market bats are not the kind that carry this virus. They claim that the bats that carry COVID viruses reside hundreds of miles away from the meat market and are not available for purchase there.

An alternative explanation for the infection is that it was born in a Chinese bio-lab where they were (legitimately) investigating bat viruses and how the come to infect humans. According to this explanation the virus escaped from this lab, probably in an accidentally infected lab worker who then spread it within the local population.

We just don’t know the truth about how this virus infected humans and we are unlikely to ever find out with certainty. What we do know for certain is that within the space of a few weeks this virus was out of China and with the assistance of global travel, was infecting the world. Shutting down travel from China and other seriously affected nations was hailed by the Socialists as jingoistic and racist. Nancy ‘Antoinette’ Pelosi urged us to hug a Chinaman to show our non-racist qualifications.  Suffice it to say that actions proposed to limit the spread of the virus were vigorously denounced by the Socialists until later in the year when the administration was denounced for not implementing them earlier.

As the virus spread the only methods recommended for curtailing the spread were to stay at home, stay at least 6 feet away from another, and to wear a mask to prevent breathing out infected droplets. The mask recommendation is the most interesting one since early on in the anti-virus fight we were told that masks were ineffective. That recommendation then morphed into one that claimed that masks would prevent the wearer from infecting others but would not prevent the wearer from catching the infection. Now we are being told that self-protection can be achieved by wearing a mask. It seems to me that political objectives drove these recommendations more than health considerations. I can think of no other reason that they can't keep their story straight.

We are now told that the panacea of protection from the virus is the impending vaccines. I do hope that this is so but I do have concerns. Firstly, in general there are no cures for virus infections. I believe that so far only one virus has a developed cure, the rest need prevention, usually by a vaccine. If the virus mutates then the vaccine will become less effective. Perhaps we can follow the influenza route and produce a new vaccine every year based on our best guess about next year’s virus mutation.

The virus closed our economy with millions thrown out of work. In addition the Trump administration was heckled continuously by a press compliant to the wishes and instructions of the power crazed Socialists. Unable to get his message out through the filter of press distortions, Trump continued to Tweet and to ramble during daily COVID conferences. The result is that he lost reelection to a Pandemic from China and to a Socialist rabble who hated him for winning in 2016 and giving lie to their worldview.

The next administration is to be led by a lifelong politician of no significant achievements who is raddled by his dementia and completely lacking in any political vision. His vice president, who is widely expected to replace him in a 24^th Amendment coup-d’état, is a woman of mixed Caribbean and Indian heritage who seems to have climbed to the top much like a courtesan in the courts of Europe in previous centuries.

Only God can save the American experiment in government now.