Monthly Archives: October 2022

by | 31 October 2022 · 5:55 am

Destroying Truk, February 1944

From Ultra in the Pacific: How Breaking Japanese Codes and Ciphers Affected Naval Operations Against Japan, 1941-45 (The Secret War), by John Winton (Sapere Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 225-227:

Known as the ‘Gibraltar of the Pacific’, Truk was in fact not nearly as strongly defended as legend had it, but it was the best fleet anchorage anywhere in the Japanese mandated islands and had been the regular base for the Combined Fleet since July, 1942.

Truk’s geographical layout, of scattered volcanic islands inside a triangular-shaped coral reef, made it virtually impregnable to surface attack from outside its perimeter. But it was open to the air. After the same FRUPAC analysis of air search patterns from Truk as from Kwajalein, a powerful task force including six fleet and four light carriers in three groups under Mitscher (who had relieved Pownall in January) made a fast and undetected run towards Truk in the night of 16/17 February, 1944, to carry out Operation HAILSTONE.

Spruance himself was present, flying his flag in the battleship New Jersey (the fleet commander had also been present during the Marshalls landings, ready to take over command if the Combined Fleet sallied out). But there was no chance of that. Truk was just within bombing range of Kwajalein and Bougainville, and its supply route from the Empire was constantly beset by US submarines. Thus, Truk was no longer the safe base it had once been.

Photo-reconnaissance of Truk on 4 February showed plenty of targets, but the same reconnaissance flight had given the game away to Admiral Koga, who sent most of his warships to Palau and went back to Japan himself in the giant battleship Musashi.

The last cruiser, Agano, left Truk on 16 February and was torpedoed and sunk by the submarine Skate the next day. But the fleet auxiliaries, the oilers, seaplane carriers, submarine tenders and many Marus of the support force were due to leave later and were still in Truk when the first fighter sweep, launched from a point 90 miles north of Truk before dawn on 17 February, caught the defenders by surprise.

Seventy-two fighters followed by eighteen Avengers with incendiaries found some fifty merchant ships in the harbour and 365 aircraft ranged on the airfields. The strike put all but a hundred of the aircraft out of action. The carriers then mounted more or less continuous strikes of fighters, bombers and torpedo-bombers to work over the airstrips and attack shipping. That evening the Japanese made their only reply, a torpedo attack by Kates who scored a hit on the carrier Intrepid (a somewhat unlucky ship, nicknamed ‘The Evil I’), putting her out of action for some months.

In the meantime Spruance in New Jersey with another battleship, Iowa, two heavy cruisers, four destroyers and the light carrier Cowpens to give air cover, made one anti-clockwise sweep round Truk to catch any would-be escapers. They sank the light cruiser and Sixth Fleet submarine flagship Katori and the destroyer Maikaze.

That night a strike of Avengers, specially equipped and trained for night bombing, attacked shipping in the lagoon. It was the first time in the war such a raid had been made and it was a signal success: one-third of the total tonnage destroyed at Truk was sunk by these Avengers.

Strikes resumed the next day, 18 February. Everything that moved or floated had now been sunk or strafed and the aircraft turned their attention to fixed fittings — hangars, fuel tanks, storage dumps, buildings and vehicles. When the carriers retired at noon their aircraft had flown 1,250 sorties, dropped 400 tons of bombs and torpedoes on shipping and 94 tons on airfields and shore installations. They had sunk the cruiser Naka, auxiliary cruisers Aikoku Maru and Kiyosumi Maru, destroyers Oite, Fumizuki and Tachikaze, the armed merchant cruiser Akagi Maru, two submarine tenders, an aircraft ferry, six tankers and seventeen other ships — a total of about 200,000 tons. This was a crushing blow to the Japanese Navy. The loss of so many fleet supply and support vessels was as grave an operational defeat as the loss of capital ships. Truk was never the same again.

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by | 30 October 2022 · 5:31 am

U.S. vs. Japanese Submarine Warfare

From Ultra in the Pacific: How Breaking Japanese Codes and Ciphers Affected Naval Operations Against Japan, 1941-45 (The Secret War), by John Winton (Sapere Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 190-193:

‘PRESS home all attacks,’ wrote Rear Admiral James Fife USN, Commander Submarines South-West Pacific, in his standing orders. ‘Pursue relentlessly, remembering that the mission is to destroy every possible enemy ship. Do not let cripples escape or leave them to sink — make sure that they do sink.’

The American submariners in the Far East, very ably assisted by the British and the Dutch, put Admiral Fife’s orders faithfully into effect and achieved devastating results. By VJ Day, 1945, Allied submarines in the Far East were actually running out of targets. By that time, although submarines still constituted only 2 per cent of the American war effort on the Pacific, American submarines had sunk two-thirds of the total Japanese merchant ship tonnage sunk during the war, and had also sunk one out of every three of the Japanese warships sunk.

The United States and the Imperial Japanese Navies were roughly equal in submarine strength in the Pacific at the outset of the war. Neither navy had had any operational experience of submarines in the First World War. Both had prepared for submarine warfare on a long-range scale, and primarily for use against enemy warships. The crucial difference in the Second World War lay in the US Navy’s technological advances, its readiness to profit by tactical experience, and its proper strategic deployment of its submarines. In all three areas the Americans were superior.

…

The one advantage the Japanese submarines had was the quality of their formidable 40-knot, oxygen-powered, longer ranged torpedoes, with twice the explosive charge of the American torpedoes. American torpedoes were frequently defective and, incredibly, it was nearly two years before the US Navy established the causes of the defects and remedied them. Under operational patrol conditions American torpedoes nearly always ran eight to ten feet below their proper depth, so that their magnetic detonators, designed to be activated by the target ship’s metal hull, failed to work properly. Similarly, the contact detonators only worked best after an oblique impact, thus, ironically, penalizing the very submarine captains who aimed best and hit their targets broadside on.

Design faults were compounded by bureaucratic obstruction: shorebound officers and bureaucrats continued to insist that the whole fault lay with incompetent submarine captains who could not aim properly, and refused to believe submarine captains who said they had heard their torpedoes hitting the target and failing to explode.

For the first months of the war Japanese submarines had considerable success in sinking Allied warships, especially in ‘Torpedo Junction’ in the summer of 1942. But the fatal Japanese tendency to indulge in non-profitable peripheral activities soon began to drain away their submarine patrol strength.

The Japanese diverted their submarines to carry midget submarines, to no tactical purpose, or to act as communication links, or to wait at rendezvous to refuel flying-boats, or to carry out unimportant surface bombardments, which had no more than pinprick nuisance value, of Midway, or Canton Island or Johnston Island, or (in 1942) the coasts of Vancouver and Oregon.

The largest Japanese submarines carried aircraft — requiring an hour after surfacing to assemble and launch — which they transported thousands of miles for valueless reconnaissance flights. One submarine, I-25, launched her aircraft loaded with incendiaries with the serious intention of setting light to the forests of North America. As the war progressed more and more Japanese submarines were taken off patrols and used to carry men, ammunition and food to beleaguered Japanese island garrisons bypassed and left to ‘wither on the vine’ by the Allied advance.

Unquestionably the best strategic use the Japanese could have made of their submarines would have been to make a determined effort to cut the supply lines from Pearl Harbor to Micronesia and Australia. They made no such effort. There was never any submarine war in the Pacific remotely comparable with the struggle against the Atlantic U-boat. The US Navy began by escorting their ships in convoys in the Pacific, but by the end of 1943 there was so little enemy submarine activity that single ships were steaming across the Pacific unescorted.

To misuse of submarines in exotic sideshows the Japanese Navy added an almost complete failure to safeguard their own surface ships against submarines. The Japanese were obsessed by the idea of an ‘offensive’ war. Like the British in the First World War, they regarded convoys as ‘defensive’ and therefore somehow demeaning and unworthy of a warrior nation. Convoy did not appeal to the Samurai spirit.

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by | 29 October 2022 · 6:22 am

Growth of U.S. Intelligence Staff, WW2

From Ultra in the Pacific: How Breaking Japanese Codes and Ciphers Affected Naval Operations Against Japan, 1941-45 (The Secret War), by John Winton (Sapere Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 182-183:

Radio intelligence had also improved (although ‘Joe’ Rochefort had left Pearl Harbor in October, 1942, the victim of Washington intrigues). The Allies had begun to realize the full potential of communications intelligence. ‘In my opinion, the value of Radio Intelligence has been demonstrated to the extent that we can never again afford to neglect it as we did before the war,’ said Commander (later Rear Admiral) Joseph N. Wenger, a member of OP-20-G, in a lecture on ‘Future Co-operation between Army and Navy’ on 1 June, 1943. ‘Furthermore, the difficulties of obtaining Intelligence have increased so greatly that we shall have to maintain an organization constantly at work on high-speed electronic equipment if we are to be prepared for any future wars. The equipment necessary to obtain Radio Intelligence is growing so complicated that we cannot wait until war comes to provide it. Certainly we cannot afford to risk another Pearl Harbor.’

By 1943 the Allies were also coming to realize the scale of resources needed for communications intelligence. For instance, the number of personnel involved, both US Navy and Army — 300 in 1939 — had risen to 37,000 by the end of the war in 1945. There was an enormous expansion, in the United States and in the United Kingdom, in courses to train large numbers of people, many of them university students, to speak or read Japanese; classicists and students in dead languages usually learned to read Japanese, while modern language students learned to speak it.

Techniques had improved in every respect of intelligence, from the interrogation of prisoners-of-war to the evaluation of aerial reconnaissance photographs (colour-blind men and women were recruited because their disability enabled them to ‘see through’ camouflage).

By 1943 the Allies began to sense they were really winning the radio intelligence war against the Japanese. As more codes were decrypted, over longer periods, the cryptanalysts believed they were at last beginning to feel their way into the Japanese mind. As the Japanese suffered defeats on land and retreated, there were more opportunities to capture documents, such as diaries, operational orders and, as from [beached submarine] I-1, actual code books.

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by | 28 October 2022 · 5:32 am

ULTRA Protocols in the Pacific

From Ultra in the Pacific: How Breaking Japanese Codes and Ciphers Affected Naval Operations Against Japan, 1941-45 (The Secret War), by John Winton (Sapere Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 16-18:

As the war went on, the flow of ULTRA swelled like some great tidal wave, giving accurate and timely information on every aspect of the Japanese war effort, from the strategic to the domestic — not only Japanese war intentions, but individual ships’ machinery defects and junior officers’ promotions. The number of signals involved was enormous: the National Archives and Research Administration (NARA) in Washington DC has 290,908 decrypts of Japanese Navy signals on file, as well as many more thousands of naval attaché signal decrypts, intelligence summaries and daily digests.

ULTRA provided information broadly in four main categories. There was information of critical operational value, such as convoy sailings, warship movements, impending attacks, tactics and battle orders for on-going operations, which was directly applicable to current operations and provided in time for action to be taken on it. There was information of strategic value, such as intelligence of future operations, supplies, reserves, reinforcements and current strategy; on orders of battle, including the strengths, equipment and disposition of ships, aircraft and troops; and on Japanese intelligence, such as the results of Japanese spy activity, interrogations of Allied prisoners-of-war, captures of Allied documents, and the Japanese’ own traffic analysis, reconnaissance, and interceptions and decrypts of Allied signals.

Special arrangements were made for handling ULTRA. It was revealed only to certain Flag and Senior Officers and selected members of their staffs who had been ‘indoctrinated’ into the secret. When Arleigh (‘Thirty-one Knot’) Burke was Chief of Staff to Admiral Mitscher in the carrier Lexington in 1944, he was at first curious and finally angered by the mysterious behaviour of a junior naval reserve Lt (jg) who, alone of everyone on board, was allowed private and privileged access to the Admiral. Burke would see the two talking in low voices on the wing of the Admiral’s bridge, or sometimes withdrawing into the privacy of the Admiral’s sea cabin.

The officer was Charles Sims, Mitscher’s ULTRA intelligence officer, a Japanese language specialist trained in codebreaking, who gave Mitscher highly classified intelligence available through ULTRA. Burke himself was eventually admitted into the ULTRA secret, despite Sims’ protests, but not until special permission had been sought from CincPac.

The US Navy, unlike the Royal Navy, permitted the use of the word ULTRA in the text of signals. They regularly used some phrase such as ‘This is ULTRA’, but not habitually at the beginning of a signal, which would render it vulnerable to cryptanalytical attack, but always somewhere in the body of the text.

When information from an ULTRA source was passed on in another signal, that signal had to be paraphrased and so worded that, if captured or intercepted by the enemy, any reference to enemy intelligence could not be traced back to ULTRA. Any reference to the name of an enemy ship was to be avoided and any positions taken from an ULTRA signal had to be given in a different way.

ULTRA was so powerful a weapon that it often could not be used. Much of the information it provided could not be acted upon. Too many U-boats sunk at their remote fuelling rendezvous, for instance, would arouse enemy suspicions and imperil the ULTRA secret. Any operation undertaken as a result of ULTRA therefore had to have a ‘cover story’ — some corroboration from another source, such as naval or air reconnaissance, to account for the presence of Allied forces on the scene and at the time of the action. It was very easy, through an excess of zeal, especially in the Pacific, to make mistakes over this vital requirement.

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by | 27 October 2022 · 6:31 am

Sources of (Mis)information After Pearl Harbor

From Ultra in the Pacific: How Breaking Japanese Codes and Ciphers Affected Naval Operations Against Japan, 1941-45 (The Secret War), by John Winton (Sapere Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 11-14:

In the first forty-eight hours after Pearl Harbor the CIC [Commander in Chief] had a flood of misinformation which left them ever afterwards with a healthy mistrust of ‘eyewitness’ accounts, not only from excited civilians but also from experienced Service personnel, both Allied and enemy. Japanese parachute troops were reported to have landed and to be engaged in a fierce pitched battle with US Marines. The uniforms worn by these mythical Japanese were described in the most minute sartorial detail. Strange vessels were reported arriving offshore, a large enemy fleet had been seen south of the islands and at least one Direction/Finding bearing (later judged to be ambiguous and inconclusive) was obtained. One officer sighted a dirigible over Honolulu, two degrees to the right of the moon and three degrees below it. To make matters more confusing, there were seemingly improbable reports of submarines in Pearl Harbor — but Japanese submarines did indeed take part in the attack.

In the earliest, defensive, stages of the war in the Central Pacific, radio intelligence was not just the most important source of intelligence; it was, for all practical purposes, the only source. There were no photographs of enemy-held positions. There were very few captured enemy documents and even fewer enemy prisoners-of-war. Apart from the Solomons and New Britain, spies and coast-watchers supplied no important intelligence.

Radio Intelligence embraced the interception and exploitation of all enemy radio transmissions which might yield intelligence, including the decryption of coded enemy messages; direction finding (D/F); navigational beacons and aids; enemy radar and infra-red transmissions; traffic analysis, which was the study of communications networks and the procedures, signals, callsigns and plain language messages passing over them; the monitoring of enemy radio broadcasts to the civilian population; and such refinements as the study of the types and peculiarities of particular transmitters and of the idiosyncratic morse characteristics of individual operators.

Fortunately for the Allies, distances in the Pacific were vast — by 1942 the perimeter of the area Japan had conquered was between 3000 and 4000 miles from Tokyo and overland or undersea communications, such as cable, telephones and telex, were scarce or non-existent. Thus the Imperial Japanese Navy routinely generated a huge amount of radio traffic. Again because of the distances involved, much of it was transmitted by High Frequency which was detectable at long ranges by a ring of listening stations down the west coast of the United States, in the Aleutians and Australia and, before the war, at Cavite, Guam, Shanghai and Peking.

The most valuable radio intelligence was obtained from the interception and decryption of encoded or encyphered enemy messages. The Japanese themselves regarded their language as a sacred mystery, not to be vouchsafed to outsiders. Japanese hearing for the first time a Westerner speak their language were known to shake their heads dis-believingly. Such a thing was not possible; they must be dreaming.

Learning to speak or read Japanese was in itself a formidable challenge to western minds. To unravel Japanese in code would seem a virtually impossible mental obstacle. In fact, many Allied cryptanalysts found that decyphering Japanese was a matter of persistence, of ‘quantity and time rather than difficulty’. It was, if anything, tedious rather than difficult.

That is not to say that the task was easy. Whereas the Germans used versions of the Enigma machine for encyphering virtually all Kriegsmarine, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, SS, police and diplomatic signal traffic, the Japanese used many different crypto systems. An operational history of Japanese naval communications from December, 1941–August, 1945, compiled under Allied direction by former Japanese officers who had served during the war, lists three naval code books for strategic and administrative use; six naval code books, a joint Army-Navy code book and a Combined Fleet special code book, for tactical use; for intelligence, an overseas secret telegraph code book, two more naval code books, and five variations of a code distributed to naval officers appointed pre-war as intelligence agents stationed in Europe, the Americas and all over the Far East, and a ‘New Code Book’ for naval officers stationed on the west coast of the USA; five code books for communications with service branches outside the Japanese Navy, such as merchant ships over 1,000 tons and fishing vessels, and a standard code book used by the Navy, Army and Foreign Ministries, distributed to diplomatic officials stationed in East Asia and principal Navy and Army headquarters. There were also other publications such as books of abbreviations, address codes and call signs, and books of visual signals.

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by | 25 October 2022 · 4:51 pm

Romania’s Anti-Hoarding Laws, 1985

From The New York Review of Books, 23 October 1986, by “a writer who frequently travels in Eastern Europe and whose name must be withheld”:

One of my friends said to understand current developments I must first consult a decree by the Council of State of the Romanian Socialist Republic issued on October 10, 1981. The exact text ran as follows:

“It shall constitute illegal trading activities and, in accordance with the terms set down in the Penal Code, shall be punishable by up to six months to five years in prison, to purchase from any state commercial center or cooperative store, either with a view to hoarding or in any quantity that exceeds the requirements of a family for a period of a month, oil, sugar, wheat or corn flour, rice, coffee and all other foodstuffs the hoarding of which might affect the interests of other consumers and proper provisioning of the population.”

Since then, he said, the situation has changed drastically. Coffee can no longer be bought by private citizens and has been replaced by an ersatz substance disapproved of by physicians, which the public, guessing at the ingredients, has nicknamed “henna.” Meat, buttermilk, and bread are rationed in most districts, sugar and cooking oil throughout the country—and the ration is much more generous than the shops charged with distributing them can supply.

Since 1968, it should be explained, Romania has been divided into more than forty districts, each with a Party secretary, who is its supreme head. He is responsible for delivering a quota of food from his district to the central government—a task that must give him bad dreams. For it poses an insoluble problem: if he distributes locally less food than is called for by the plan—as he is virtually obliged to do—he will be popular with the authorities but held in contempt by the people of the district; and if he tries to help the population get more food, he will be unpopular with the authorities. Everyone has a different approach to the same dilemma—for even in the CP no district secretary is quite like another—and this psychological diversity makes for diversity in the distribution of food shortages throughout the country. In Cluj or Pitesti the situation, I was told, is frankly horrible; in Sibiu or Vilcea it is merely wretched. Thousands go from district to district on shopping excursions from which they often return empty-handed.

Romania seems unique in many ways. It is the only European country in which one can be sentenced to five years in prison for buying excessive quantities of food that is generally unavailable to the public. It is also, in my experience, the only such country in which the legal work week is forty-six hours and the urban population often spends three to four hours a day shopping for groceries. In Romania, President Ceausescu takes upon himself to compose lyrics for a new national anthem, rather than entrusting the task to a poet. And in spite of a republican form of government of which he is the constitutional head, the president carries a scepter and is grooming his son as his successor.

Workers often spend entire days waiting for raw materials that their factory cannot obtain. If they leave the premises without permission or bring alcoholic beverages, or cigarettes, or lighters, or matches onto the shop floor, they are regarded as having broken the law and can receive prison sentences from three months up to two years (Decree 400 of December 29, 1981, Article 18).

The average wage, according to experts I talked to, is less than one fifth of the average Common Market wage, while the minimum wage is ignored. The state each month withholds a percentage of wages that can be returned at the end of the year only if the government’s economic goals have been met—something that rarely happens.

Virtually every business establishment has (in addition to spies) a member of the Secret Police with a permanent desk, who reports to his superiors on the proper running of the business. All typewriters must be registered and presented for inspection at the police station every year to show that the keys have not been tampered with.

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by | 23 October 2022 · 7:52 am

Romania’s Energy Crisis, 1984-85

From The New York Review of Books, 23 October 1986, by “a writer who frequently travels in Eastern Europe and whose name must be withheld”:

When it comes to political independence, the Romanians find out about it through rumors. They can judge the country’s energy independence from what they see. When darkness falls, the cities are plunged into shadow—paradise for burglars—and in the daytime, in some cities, buses run only between 6-8 AM and 3-5 PM. Electric energy and water services are interrupted daily, at irregular intervals and for periods that can exceed four hours. As a result, refrigerators defrost in the summer and in every season residents of Bucharest avoid using elevators so they won’t be caught between floors: elderly people laden with packages old grandmothers crying babies prepare for the return to their homes on the tenth or eleventh floors as though for a mountain climb. The strongest light bulb is forty watts, and it is illegal to use more than one lamp per room; television programming has been cut back to two hours during the working day; each official organization is allowed to use only a limited number of the cars assigned to it (of course, there are exceptions, but not in favor of emergency hospital ambulances).

The private use of cars is now banned for the winter months and during the remaining nine months the lines to buy limited amounts of gasoline can last from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The procession that crosses the city four times a day as the president moves between the presidential palace and the one in which he works is made up of nine cars, not to mention the unknown number of automobiles not officially part of the retinue but assigned to protect it. (A doctor I talked to said that if the presidential cortege were to be cut back to four automobiles and the gasoline thereby saved turned over to ambulances, dozens of people might be spared death each week.)

Some bolder citizens, I was told, began to complain and to say that the vaunted energy independence had gone far enough. They were wrong. The proof came with the polar temperatures of the winter of 1984-1985, when heat was virtually cut off in every city. At twenty below zero people were freezing at home and in theaters, and, most of all, in hospitals. Schools were closed; women who had to go to work in the morning learned to do their cooking after midnight, when the power would occasionally be turned back on for one or two hours, on forbidden electric plates: the fine for doing so is five thousand lei, equivalent to the average salary for two months.

The regime tried to alleviate the situation. By the late 1970s it had become clear that the replacement of the easygoing Shah by the inflexible Ayatollah in Iran would require, in Romania, the replacement of the easy flow of Iranian oil by something more dependable. Here the president’s philosophy—that history cannot really be changed without also changing geography—came into play. Ceausescu had earlier ordered construction of the canal from the Danube to the Black Sea, which soaked up immense sums of money but which foreign ships still refuse to use. He ordered the demolition of a third of Bucharest in order to build a new presidential palace flanked by a triumphal boulevard cutting across the entire city (2.5 million inhabitants). Now, in the same intrepid spirit, he issued the order that Romania was to become a great coal producer. In the country’s principal coal-producing region more than thirty thousand miners went on strike.

A new decree announced that henceforth the principal coal-producing regions would be elsewhere, nearer the president’s native village, where the local coal, according to experts I talked to, had a caloric-energy content below the economically or technologically tolerable limits. Although they did not go out on strike, the new miners did not prove to be up to the tasks assigned them. Thus the first version of the plan had called for a production level of 86 million tons of coal by 1985, its second version set a goal of 64 million, whereas the reported actual production was 44 million. In the end, energy independence based on Romanian coal turned out to be not all that different from energy independence based on Iranian oil.

One might think that the Romanian energy shortage is the worst on the Continent. Nothing could be more erroneous. During the late 1970s, when they were still obtainable, official statistical data showed that at that time Romania’s electrical energy output—2,764 kilowatt hours—was nearly equal to that of Italy, greater than that of Hungary (2,196 kilowatt hours), Spain, and Yugoslavia, twice that of Portugal, etc. If, notwithstanding, such signs of extreme energy shortage were not being observed in Lisbon, but were all-too-evident in Bucharest, this is because Romania, instead of squandering its electrical energy on the needs of its people, was allocating it to industries that consume large amounts of energy.

Given its mineral resources, Romania’s iron and steel industry had never been very efficient. ln 1965, when Ceausescu came to power, it already had the remarkable steel-production rate of 180 kilos per capita, each year. Under the new leader, that figure in fifteen years took a jump that few economies have ever managed to duplicate: over 600 kilos of steel per capita in 1980—in other words, more than France, Great Britain, East Germany, or the United States.

Unfortunately, however, the rapid expansion of the Romanian steel industry occurred at a time when established Western iron and steel industries were sharply cutting their production and the international steel market was collapsing. As a result, today Romania is suffering from an imbalance between its capacity to produce steel and its ability to make use of it. A newcomer has a hard time finding out a place for itself on the market when even old-timers are overproducing. To do so successfully, there is not much choice: one either relies on technology to improve the quality of the product or one relies on economic measures to bring about a substantial reduction in price. Thus it was hardly surprising to see Romanian producers being accused of dumping steel on the market, and the American market at that. The Romanian iron and steel industry went right on producing mountains of steel that its domestic industries were unable to digest and that the international market did not seem keen to acquire.

The Far Outliers spent the grim winter of 1983-84 in Romania, and that was bad enough. We had a 4-burner gas stove that only supplied enough gas to keep one burner lit at a time. Hot water hours were limited to two in the evening and one in the morning. And our radiators were barely warm. Romania seems only to have gotten worse after we left.

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by | 21 October 2022 · 6:20 am

Breaking the Ice in the Himalayas

From Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artemis Cooper (New York Review Books, 2013), Kindle loc. 6152ff.

The Himalayan party consisted of Robin and Renée Fedden, her friend Rosie Peto, Myles Hildyard, Carl Natar and Peter Lloyd, and Paddy. They flew north from Delhi, assembled a team of six Ladakhi porters and began their climb in mid-October. They were following the Beas river upstream, which marks the easternmost point of Alexander’s conquests in 326 BC. Their goal was Malana: one of the most isolated villages in the world, which lay to the north-east of the Kulu valley, dominated by the great peaks of Chanderkhani and Deo Tibba.

The people of this village worship an ancient god called Jamlu, and believe that even the sight of a foreigner, let alone his touch, risks pollution and defilement. The travellers spent their first night outside the village, waiting for permission to enter, and this permission was granted only on condition that they touch nothing, not even the walls. They also had to remove their watches, boots and belts, for leather is an abomination to Jamlu. As they entered the village ‘Men averted their gaze, children ran off as though ogres were coming down the street and the women at the spring . . . stood transfixed, and after a long disbelieving glance, turned away in a rictus of bewilderment and pain. Nearly all the village was out of bounds . . . and even along the permitted ways a flutter of anxious hands herded us innocuously into the middle.’

The holiest spot in the village was an open space, where a slab of stone lay embedded in the grass. One of the villagers, a kind man called Sangat, had made himself their guide and mentor. Under his direction the party made offerings, joined their hands in prayer and prostrated themselves before the stone. ‘Our pious homage to Jamlu had made a good impression, it seemed; and here, bit by bit, linguistic curiosity began to break the ice.’ Exchanging words was one of Paddy’s favourite games, and as usual his enthusiasm flung bridges over the chasms of fear, shyness and suspicion that separated the strangers and the local people. Soon sherpas, foreigners and villagers were swapping words in Tibetan, the Hindi dialect of Kulu, English, and Kanishta, the language spoken by the Malanis. ‘By now we were among friends.’

Malana was every bit as strange and mysterious as the travellers had hoped, but the whole expedition was overshadowed by the fact that Robin was becoming increasingly ill. He was diagnosed with cancer on his return to England, and within three months he was dead. The article that Paddy wrote about his last journey appeared two years later as ‘Paradox in the Himalayas’, in the London Magazine. It was dedicated to Robin’s memory, though neither Robin, nor Renée, nor any other member of the group was mentioned by name in the piece.

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by | 19 October 2022 · 5:59 pm

Fate of Romania’s Cantacuzenes, 1965

From Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artemis Cooper (New York Review Books, 2013), Kindle locs. 5580ff & 6120ff.

Rumania in 1965 was just beginning to open up to the non-Communist world, although a meeting with the Cantacuzene sisters would involve considerable risks. As Paddy put it, ‘Mixing with foreigners incurred severe punishment, but harbouring them indoors was much worse . . .’ But it was too good an opportunity to miss, and Balasha and her family felt it was a risk worth taking.

By early June he was in Bucharest, now stripped of its pre-war gaiety, and made contact with Pomme’s daughter Ina who was then working as a draughtswoman in an architect’s office. She met him after work on a borrowed motorbike, and with Paddy riding pillion, they began the eighty-mile journey to the town of Pucioasa in the foothills of the Carpathians. It was a long ride over rutted roads, and by the time Ina let him into the house it was well after dark. They climbed upstairs as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the neighbours, but it was hard to stifle the cries of welcome that greeted his arrival at the top of the house.

Pomme, Constantin and Balasha had been sharing an attic studio since their eviction from Băleni on the night of 2–3 March 1949. On that evening, a small posse of Communist apparatchiks and police had arrived in a truck. Pomme and Constantin were forced to sign a document surrendering ownership of the house, and the family was told to pack a small suitcase each. They were advised to take warm clothes, and told they would be leaving in fifteen minutes. They were taken to Bucharest, where they lived until orders came through that they were to be transferred to Pucioasa.

‘In spite of the interval,’ wrote Paddy, ‘the good looks of my friends, the thoughtful clear glance and the humour were all intact; it was as though we had parted a few months ago, not twenty-six years.’ Hidden behind that carefully worded sentence was the shock of finding Balasha ‘a broken ruin’ of her former self. Though only in her early sixties, she was shrunken by hardship and anxiety; her black hair was grey, her face lined, and she was very deaf. She and Pomme managed to survive by teaching English and French. Constantin, already ill with the heart disease that would kill him two years later, was too frail to work.

‘Their horrible vicissitudes were narrated with detachment and speed,’ he continued. ‘Time was short and there were only brief pauses for sleep on a couple of chairs. The rest of our forty-eight hours – we dared risk no more – were filled with pre-war memories, the lives of all our friends, and a great deal of laughter.’ He had brought new watches for Pomme and Balasha, and later he set up an account for her at the Heywood Hill bookshop so she would never be short of books. He also knew that Balasha had a present for him. On her last night at Băleni, in the fifteen minutes she had been given to pack, she had seized a battered green notebook. It was Paddy’s last journal, the one he had begun in Bratislava in 1934; she now put it into his hands.

…

He was back home in December, elated and relieved, having been given the all-clear – and then he heard that Balasha was dying of breast cancer. Had she had it treated earlier, she might well have survived; but she had kept the symptoms to herself, refusing to see a doctor until it was too late to operate. It was a decade since Paddy had been to see her in Pucioasa and now he wanted to rush to her bedside, but Balasha forbade him to come: ‘nothing would upset me more,’ she told Pomme to write on her behalf. Her letters to Paddy, and Joan to whom she wrote separately, reveal that she had made a decision to live in books and her memories and expected nothing more from life. She died in March 1976. Seven months later her niece, Ina Catargi, who had taken him to Pucioasa on the back of a motorcycle, was also dead – of lung cancer. Of that generous family which had been such a part of his life only Pomme Donici remained, now bereft of husband, sister and daughter. She arranged for Balasha and Constantin’s remains to be buried in the Cantacuzene family crypt in the cemetery at Băleni, where she eventually joined them in 1983.

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by | 17 October 2022 · 3:02 pm

Paddy Offends Willie, 1957

From Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artemis Cooper (New York Review Books, 2013), Kindle loc. 5015ff.

Ann [Fleming] had been invited to stay at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat by Somerset Maugham, then in his eighties and living in retirement with his partner, Alan Searle. On her arrival she found a letter from Paddy, urging her to arrange an invitation. Paddy was duly invited to lunch, and arrived (according to Ann) with ‘five cabin trunks’ (according to Paddy, all he had was one zippered holdall), ‘parcels of books and the manuscript of his unfinished work on Greece strapped in a bursting attaché case’. Paddy made himself very agreeable at lunch. He and Maugham exchanged memories of the King’s School, Canterbury, and Maugham asked him to stay on for a few days. All went well until dinner that night.

Maugham had lived with a pronounced stammer since childhood. In his novel Of Human Bondage, which deals with the misery of his schooldays, the stammer is turned into a limp. Paddy knew the book and had been hearing the stammer all day, but neither sufficed to stop him from putting his foot in it. The first jokey reference to stuttering passed without comment, but the second was more serious. Maugham had just staggered through a sentence to the effect that all the gardeners had taken the day off because it was the Feast of the Assumption. At this point, Paddy recalled being in the Louvre in front of a painting of the event, with his friend Robin Fedden (who also had trouble getting his words out): ‘and Robin turned to me and said “Th-th-that’s what I c-c-call an un-w-w-warrantable assumption.” There was a moment’s silence – the time needed for biting one’s tongue out.’

The evening was wrecked. When the other guests left, Maugham turned to Paddy and said, ‘G-goodbye, you will have left by the time I am up in the morning.’ After their host had retired, Ann described Paddy breaking the silence with a cry of anguish, as he slammed his whisky glass on the table ‘where it broke to pieces and showered a valuable carpet with blood and splinters’. Ann helped Paddy pack the following morning, and as he picked up his bag and walked to the door, Paddy heard ‘a sound like an ogre’s sneeze’. The monogrammed linen sheet had caught in the zip, leaving a great tear a yard long.

Ann Fleming and Diana Cooper, who was staying nearby, persuaded Maugham to have Paddy back to lunch to make up. ‘It was really a gasbag’s penance and I, having learnt the hard way, vouchsafed no more than a few syllables.’ Maugham was perfectly polite, but he had had enough of Paddy. He was later heard to describe him as ‘that middle-class gigolo for upper-class women’.

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