Category Archives: education

by | 26 February 2025 · 7:07 am

From Dari at DLI to AFSOC

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 49-52:

At the end of my year at DLI, I could debate the merits of divorce and its effects on children in Dari, discuss politics, and attempt to answer the question “What is love?” (This was the last question I was asked in my speaking exam. I would like to think my inability to answer was more due to my being twenty than my lack of language skill.) I could tell jokes, explain the meanings of proverbs, and generally shoot the shit with most any Dari-speaking Afghan. I thought in Dari, dreamt in Dari, and often found it easier to express myself in it. This is true for lots of recently graduated linguists; when we met a newly minted Arabic linguist at survival school and asked him what DLI and learning a language so fast was like, he said it’s cool, but it can mess with your thinking a little bit. A couple days later he was telling some story, when he stopped halfway through a sentence, with a dazed look on his face. “Wait, shit. What’s the word for that thing you eat cereal with?” “A spoon?” “Yeah, that’s it, a fucking spoon. Fucking Arabic.”

Like any skill, language can atrophy. After I left DLI, and went to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, for cryptology school, I wasn’t expected to speak Dari seven hours a day and I didn’t. While we were there, my friends and I still used our Dari, the whole secret language thing feeling like a superpower on occasion, but it wasn’t quite the same and so I forgot some words and a few complicated grammatical structures. But after Goodfellow, I wasn’t spending time with a group of other Dari linguists. Everyone else in our class had been assigned to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, to fly on the Rivet Joint, or RJ, a billion-dollar spy plane with a half dozen plus linguists listening to multiple languages flying on it during any given mission. Back then, if you enlisted as an airborne linguist, this was essentially what you signed up to do; new linguists could only get assigned to Offutt, or so we were told. But something had changed, so I, and just one other student, Taylor, had been assigned to Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) at Hurlburt Field, Florida (affectionately known as Hurby, Hurlburt being annoying to say). This meant that we had to travel separately from our friends, as we had to get different training than them.

Taylor and I did not like each other when we were at DLI. We were both arrogant, confident that we were better at learning languages than our classmates. This confidence was encouraged by our teachers, who weren’t paid to teach us how to be good humans, just good linguists. But Taylor’s surety had never really been challenged; I doubt anyone had ever told him that he was “the most insecure narcissist I’ve ever met” (this was said to me by my best friend’s mother when I was in high school). If anything, someone had probably told him he was the most secure narcissist they ever met, and he had said “Thank you!” with a gleam in his eye and some Cheshire cat in his grin….

He didn’t even need to enlist, as he’d secured all the letters he needed to attend the Air Force Academy. He had just decided that he didn’t want to deal with all the bullshit that goes on there.

When we got assigned to Special Operations, told that we were going to become DSOs, the most elite of airborne cryptologic linguists, Taylor fell for the mythology (a mythology that he knew virtually nothing about) hook, line, and sinker. He managed to keep it to himself when we were at Goodfellow with our RJ-bound classmates, but once he and I went our separate way, on to parachute training before heading back to survival school for Advanced Beatings class, he would tell anyone who would listen what badasses we were, or at least had been chosen to become.

When he would tell some other random airman, “Yeah, we know three languages—Farsi, Dari, and Tajik,” I’d supplement this—not complete untruth, but not total truth—with “Well, they’re really the same language, but with different accents.”

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Filed under Afghanistan, education, language, military, U.S.

by | 25 February 2025 · 3:54 pm

Becoming an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 34-36:

“So, you want to do what again?”

“Airborne cryptologic linguist.”

He sort of smiled at this, with that same now seemingly standard-issue surety that comes with not actually having any experience with the thing you’re so confident about. I can’t blame him for this dismissal. To him, I’m sure I was just another redneck kid who thought too highly of himself.

I agreed to take a practice Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, in his office. Every potential military recruit has to take this multiple-choice test, which “measures developed abilities and helps predict future academic and occupational success in the military.” There’s a minimum score for joining each branch of the military, but there are other, higher scores that serve as cutoffs for different career fields; I don’t think my recruiter expected me to score high enough to even qualify for the other test that all prospective linguists have to take. It turned out that the practice ASVAB was harder than the real thing, so when I scored in the 88th percentile, his tune changed drastically. Gone was his apathy, replaced with hustle and bustle, finding of paperwork, looking up of phone numbers, his excitement to get me to take the real ASVAB and then the follow-up I would have to pass in order to qualify for linguist training almost palpable.

The Defense Language Aptitude Battery, or DLAB, is a test used by the Department of Defense to assess a candidate’s ability to learn a language. This is in direct opposition to testing knowledge of any one specific language, as the military most often aims to teach you a new language, not use whatever random one you happen to already know. To this day, this test is spoken and written of in hushed, fearful tones. When I (and all the others before me) took it, before information about it was readily available on the internet, it was even more fabled. Allegedly, the DLAB is written in Esperanto, or at least derived from Esperanto, a synthetic language invented by a Polish ophthalmologist in the late 1800s. If this sounds confusing and slightly silly, you can imagine how I felt when the recruiter told me some of these details (he mentioned the Esperanto part, but either didn’t know or care to include the eye doctor detail). There are apparently guides and resources to prepare for the test now; Wikipedia goes so far as to say that without using these materials obtaining a passing score would be well-nigh impossible. Unless the test has changed dramatically, I can assure you this isn’t true, as I, and thousands of others that attended language school alongside and before me, didn’t have such materials. We just took the test.

As far as I could tell, a strong grasp of English grammar, or, I suppose, any language’s grammar, would take you pretty far on much of it. While it is specific to language, the test evaluates a much broader skill, that is, the ability to assimilate unfamiliar, seemingly conflicting information and apply it to novel situations. I, characteristically, believed that this test, like all other (non-math) standardized tests before it, would be a cakewalk. It was not. The DLAB, like other tests based on logic, doesn’t have wholly correct answers. Instead, it relies on the test-taker’s ability to determine the most likely, or best available answer. This could be, and indeed was, immensely frustrating for someone who had undergone traditional public education (in rural North Florida no less), where tests are multiple choice and simply have one right answer, and three wrong ones.

At the time, the Air Force required a minimum passing score of 100 (out of 164) to be eligible for language school. Through some combination of luck, exposure to the sound of multiple languages, and unalloyed bookwormishness that had provided me with a decent understanding of English grammar, I received a score of 103. Not great, but good enough.

When I was forced to negotiate with the Charlottesville, VA, Army recruiters (after finding the VA draft board not willing to negotiate) in 1969, I remember taking a vocational aptitude battery of tests. I scored poorly on Morse code, but did well enough on the language aptitude to get a contract to learn Romanian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey before enlisting. Romanian was 7th on my list of 8 languages that I preferred to study (partly because they would keep me in school at least 9 months). I don’t remember a follow-up language-aptitude test like the DLAB. My top choices were Korean and Chinese, where my childhood in Japan would have given me an unfair advantage. Being raised abroad may also have impeded my ability to get any top secret clearances that may have been required to actually use my language skills. After doing well in Romanian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, I was assigned to be a translator-interpreter in the do-nothing 95th Civil Affairs Group in Ft. Gordon, GA, where I ended up working as the HQ Company clerk, just using my English and typing skills.

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by | 20 February 2025 · 5:19 pm

Whence Eastern European Nationalism?

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 798-800:

Thus capitalism did not produce nationalism in Eastern Europe; instead, it was a device that helped reshape and spread national ideas and identities that already existed. What generated those ideas and identities, and the commitment to live for them, was the consuming fear of oblivion, profound resentment over condescension, and smoldering hatred of subjugation. Why these emotions emerged across the East European map in the late eighteenth century had to do with imperial powers being themselves (that is, trying to outdo one another for power and glory). Joseph II wanted to be France and Great Britain—simultaneously nation-state and vast empire—Catherine the preeminent European land power, and the sultans wanted to ensure that they were not driven from Europe altogether. Thus their dangerous acts of rooting out corruption in the Greek and Serb lands.

The first visible substance that the new nationalisms nurtured in this vast space on the edges of empires was language, and language is the most arresting blind spot in the analyses of the best-known theorists. In [Benedict] Anderson’s scheme, the vernacular was a given that had only to be transcribed; in fact, the vernacular emerged only after decades of contentious “imagining” brought it to life despite internal dissension among patriots, and against the wishes of recalcitrant censors. The Czech case again is paradigmatic: every inch of Czech newspaper space, every minute of Czech theater performance, each new Czech classroom were objects of human effort—effort for which neither Anderson, nor the other major theorists have time, because they are not universal.

Anderson imagined nationalism moving across borders in a chain reaction beginning in France. In basic outline this claim is incontrovertible. That a nation should control its destiny from within defined boundaries, was a lesson people in and beyond Europe drew from Paris. But where Eastern Europe is concerned, the reality of transfer was more paradoxical. The first to absorb the French model—Germans—simultaneously rejected it and molded their version of nationhood around things that had supposedly eluded the model nation, namely, the language and culture the French took for granted. East Europeans then formed their own ideas of nationness against Germany, while also focusing on culture and language. To an outsider visiting Prague in 1860, the Czech anti-world seemed indistinguishable from the local German variant: Czechs ate the same food, wore the same clothes, loved similar music and stories, had the same local saints, and the same professional ambitions and aspirations for the good life. That was the impression one had until one began listening to what Czechs were saying in their distinct, precious, and, for the Germans, vexingly difficult vernacular.

They spoke of the fate of being a small nation, controlled like a colony, desperately in need of secure borders in a way that citizens of long-established and powerful states like Britain and France could not understand. T. G. Masaryk—an outsider who became an insider—first had to master that language to build the Czechoslovak nation-state. It’s a message that still eludes Western observers, oddly enough, precisely for their insistence on seeing Eastern Europe simply as an extension of their own European space. (Rejoining Europe, after all, was the prime goal of the dissident movements.) In Cold War terms, what happened after 1989 appeared to be the first world embracing and absorbing the second in a concluding act of history.

Yet beginning in about 2010, we have seen that East Central Europe stubbornly carries its own past. This morning, January 4, 2019, the New York Times printed a letter on the injustice of Trianon! The fact is that East Central Europe is a place where the first, second, and third worlds persist and overlap, each making claims on the same and different pasts. After 1989, the Czech lands, for example, came under the sway of the determined neoliberal Václav Klaus, a local nationalist of sorts, but before that they were a center of the second world’s anticapitalism, and before that, colonial subjects, co-inventors of the idea of national liberation struggles, going back to the late eighteenth century.

The scholar-patriots of that distant time, together with the Czech students of 1968 and 1989, Polish workers of 1956 and 1988, and Yugoslav intellectuals of the 1960s or 1980s, all intertwined three strands of struggle for liberal, social, and national rights: for responsible political representation, lives in dignity without want, protection of their national cultures. The stories of 1938, 1948, and 1968 were not a radical break but a refreshed version of older stories of self-assertion against foreign domination. In many ways the big-bang of 1919, or Budapest’s 1956 and Prague’s 1968, were a replay of the ferment of 1848/1849. The miraculous 1989 was a national liberation struggle, as well as an assertion of deeper traditions of local democracy, and basic civic rights, traditions going back centuries. See, for example, the Polish constitution of 1791 or the very old Hungarian traditions of local self-rule.

If there is a lesson from these stories, it is that when the demands of any of these three worlds are met with contempt, forces emerge claiming to set things right, forces that are rarely liberal. The Habsburg monarchy, under siege from many claimants, liberal and otherwise, opened the Pandora’s box of representative government in the 1860s, and what came forth, especially after the liberals’ failure of 1879, has been various kinds of populism, left and right, all briefly united in 1882 at Linz. The intervening generations have witnessed the temporary victories of liberal nationalism; national socialism; socialist nationalism; and most recently after the “return to Europe,” yet again an intense nationalism, connected to the past—to events like Trianon—but also to a politics for which a name has yet to be found.

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by | 13 February 2025 · 9:26 pm

Nonviolent Protest in Plauen, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 726-729:

Citizens of Leipzig also knew that in East Berlin and Dresden, small groups had taken to the streets two days earlier on the national holiday of the state’s founding; they had been beaten brutally. The exception to violence on that October 7 was Plauen, a manufacturing town on the border to Bavaria, where some 15,000 had marched for reforms and dispersed peacefully, thanks to the intervention of that city’s Protestant Superintendent. Like many citizens of southern East Germany, Plaueners had suffered poor air quality and provisioning, and they were still electrified, recalling the fourteen trainloads of fellow East German refugees from Prague that had rushed through their town on September 30, southward to freedom. But the October 7 demonstration in Plauen, the largest to that date in East Germany, would not have happened but for the act of one young man, the toolmaker Jörg Schneider. The previous week, he had distributed dozens of leaflets around town calling townspeople to a demonstration for reforms and basic rights. As a result, thousands descended on central Plauen that rainy Saturday afternoon. Authorities did nothing to stop them, because they too had called on citizens to come into town that day: for a celebration of the state’s founding. The crowds had no leader, but they morphed into a demonstration when police pummeled a man who had unfurled a banner reading simply “we want reforms!” The huge crowd then marched around the city center and finally gathered at Plauen’s city hall, the seat of power, where local party officials were sequestered, not knowing what to expect. Guarding them were police armed with enough ammunition to frustrate any attempt to storm the building.

Fortunately, the superintendent, Thomas Küttler, a man of peace, went through the cordon, spoke with the party secretary, a man he knew well, and elicited a pledge to receive a citizens’ delegation in the coming days. He assured the crowd over a megaphone that their demands had been heard, and it dispersed peacefully. Within a few weeks, Plauen had its own round table, as did virtually every East German town.

But before that point was reached, the regime had to be openly tested in its will to use violence to maintain power, and that test occurred on Monday, October 9 in Leipzig. For reasons that are still debated, the regime backed down and let the largest demonstration to date—an estimated 70,000 people—take place without incident. Honecker’s heir apparent, the “youth functionary” Egon Krenz (a man famous for a big smile), later took credit, but actually decisive were three other factors: an impromptu intervention of six prominent local figures, including the SED first party secretary as well as Maestro Kurt Masur, who drafted and read a call for peace on the radio; the fact that no commander in the huge assemblage of well-armed troops and police (with ambulances at the ready) was ready to take responsibility for a bloody showdown; and the fact that the demonstration started as a peace prayer. The October 9 demonstration commenced with thousands of East Germans departing a church holding lit candles as a sign of their commitment to nonviolence.

Thanks to cameras that Roland Jahn had smuggled into the GDR, audiences in the East and West could watch on television the tens of thousands who joined them the next day. They had chanted the authorless words, “We are the people!,” a phrase more daring and challenging than it sounds. For decades, authorities had claimed—in posters and other propaganda draped all over the country—to represent the people. For example, their social policies were “all for the good of the people!” Here on the streets of Leipzig, the people were in fact speaking, revealing the regime’s claim as a lie. You are not the people—we are.

Without the example of a Soviet leader who sanctioned thoughts of radical change, and circumstances that desperately needed change, the demonstrations in Plauen or Leipzig would not have happened. But they also would not have happened without the courage of thousands of anonymous citizens who wanted change and believed that it would come that day or never. They marched and chanted, knowing that the police and militia might fire. After this point, the police and military seemed defanged, their ability to intimidate broken, the regime’s claim to incorporate the will of a “socialist community of human beings” an obvious fiction. Within a week, more than 300,000 came for the Monday demonstration in Leipzig, and they were joined by hundreds of thousands in towns across the GDR, men, women, and children, hands often raised as a sign of peace. A little more than a week later, the leadership of mostly eighty-year-olds submitted its resignation.

In their banners and chants, the demonstrators used an eloquent German word to tell what they had come to detest in the state socialist welfare state: having been treated like children. But they were “mündig,” adults (literally, “people with mouths,” that is, voices). One banner mocked Honecker’s successor Egon Krenz, the man of the irrepressible grin, placing him in a crib above the inscription: “What big teeth you have, Grandma.”

Four of my classmates in advanced Romanian language classes at the University of Bucharest in 1983-84 were German girls from Leipzig University. They were adding Romanian to their translator/interpreter skills repertoire; they already knew Russian. Two of them seemed strict party-liners but the other two seemed more open to exploring new ideas and I ran into one of them (a fellow redhead) at a West German embassy art exhibit in Bucharest. She panicked and begged me not to tell anyone. Of course, I kept silent about it. I ran into the redhead again just before leaving Romania when I went to their dorms to give away my shortwave radio/cassette recorder to one of the two Chinese classmates who became a friend. (They worked for Radio Beijing’s Romanian broadcast service.) The daring redhead insisted on giving her capitalist classmate a good-bye kiss. I’ve lost track of my German classmates’ names but wonder what happened to them in 1989 and where they ended up.

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Filed under democracy, education, Germany, migration, nationalism, philosophy, religion

by | 6 January 2025 · 5:40 am

U.S. Patriots at “Tokyo High”

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 79-81:

People in Honolulu have called McKinley “Tokyo High” since the 1920s. The majority of Nisei in Hawaii attend the public school here; it’s more responsible for the Americanization of Japanese Hawaiians than any other institution besides the city’s movie theaters.

Today’s rally is the work of the Oahu Citizens Committee for Home Defense, a new group formed to promote patriotism on the island. The committee is led by Dr. Shunzo Sakamaki, a University of Hawaii teacher. He’s been at the forefront of the Japanese loyalty movement in Oahu, forming aid groups to assist dual citizens to renounce their Japanese citizenship and promoting student military service.

Behind the scenes, Sakamaki is one of six Nisei leaders who meets Shivers to advise the FBI on domestic security. He endorses incarceration of Shinto and Buddhist priests in the event of war, citing elements of emperor worship in their rituals. He himself is Christian, rare even among the Nisei in Hawaii.

“This meeting is not an end in itself,” Sakamaki tells the crowd. “It’s a step toward the goal of complete national unity, preparedness and security.” If war comes, he adds, “we will do everything we possibly can, giving our lives if necessary, in defense of those democratic principles for which other Americans have lived and fought and died.”

The outreach that produced this display at McKinley would not have been possible if not for Masaji Marumoto, whose relationship with Shivers has developed into a close personal one. Their families vacation together, and Shivers makes sure to invite other government officials to meet the charming attorney. Marumoto makes connections with the military intelligence apparatus amid dinners in Hawaii and bouts of bridge. One of the people he meets through Shivers is Col. Morrill Marston, the new assistant chief of staff for military intelligence for the Hawaiian Department.

The FBI man also gains connections. Marumoto has introduced him to a wide swath of his community, and it’s borne fruit in the form of patriotic citizen groups like the Oahu Citizens Committee for Home Defense, formed earlier this year. The committee’s seventy-five directors, men and women, meet with Shivers or other FBI agents once a week. One goal of the group, Shivers says, is “to prepare the Japanese community psychologically for their responsibilities toward this country in the event of war, and for the difficult position in which the war would place them.” The group’s publicly stated purpose is to “promote racial cooperation, unity and unswerving loyalty to the United States.” That message is certainly on display at the McKinley rally, with each speech and song.

…

News of the rally is carried across the islands and the nation. It’s a high point of Nisei patriotism in Hawaii, and those in the crowd act on the emotion it inspires. As a direct offshoot of the rally at McKinley, multiple small community advisory groups form to promote unity. A “Speak English” campaign begins, aimed at replacing Japanese characters on public signs and businesses.

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Filed under education, Hawai'i, migration, military, nationalism, religion, U.S., war

by | 20 December 2024 · 5:30 am

U.S. Navy Ship “Crossing the Line”

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 109-111:

The Moo’s southbound course put her across the equator for the first time some seventy miles west of Baker Island on January 22, an occasion that the ship marked with a line-crossing ceremony. In this centuries-old tradition, sailors who have never crossed the equator before—known as pollywogs—are initiated into the “Ancient Order of the Deep” by their more experienced colleagues, known as shellbacks. Filled with farcical ritual, harmless pranks, and old-fashioned hazing, the festivities were a welcome distraction from daily routines and worries about the upcoming operation. In the days before the ceremony, the crew had received occasional warnings from the ship’s loudspeaker system: “Beware all you pollywogs!” On the nineteenth they received a legal summons from King Neptune himself, warning the Cowpens was approaching his royal domain:

…

In advance of King Neptune’s arrival, his shellbacks relieved Captain McConnell in a bloodless coup and took command of the ship. The air group’s senior officers were forced to serve lunch in the enlisted men’s mess, while many of the junior officers were assigned meaningless tasks, such as calling the bridge every five minutes to report on temperature. For his part, newly arrived pilot Ed Haley was stationed on the forecastle with a pair of beer bottles for binoculars and ordered to scan the horizon for the Royal Party.

Streaming seawater and festooned with seaweed, Neptune and his Royal Court—all of whom bore a suspicious resemblance to several of the Moo’s saltiest chief petty officers—planted themselves on the flight deck and bid the lowly pollywogs to do them homage. A group of Royal Bailiffs rounded up the pollywogs and herded them to the flight deck. Some did not go quietly; Art Daly and some cohorts ambushed several shellbacks in advance of being dragooned, engaging in a bare-fisted skirmish with officer and enlisted alike. There was nearly a large brawl on the fantail between the two groups before a passing officer warned them to knock it off. In another instance, some mutinous pollywogs roughed up a couple of Neptune’s royal cops, and shellback reinforcements restored order by spraying down the melee with fire hoses.

George Terrell described how the pollywogs were rounded up and then led single file up to the flight deck by a group of shellbacks that he called the “Judas Battalion.” Once there, “we were beaten to our knees with blivets by our merciless captors, formed into creeping columns,” and, with further whacks with wooden paddles, encouraged to move forward.” With Captain McConnell watching the proceedings from the bridge with a bemused look upon his face, the pollywogs were force-marched to the Royal Court’s red carpet. This was a target sleeve, a fabric tube thirty inches in diameter and thirty feet long, normally towed behind an airplane as target practice for the ship’s gunners. Unfortunately, the pollywogs were not to walk on it, but crawl through it, and the sleeve had been loaded with stinking garbage and slop from the ship’s galley for the occasion. With further encouragement from the paddles, the pollywogs dove headfirst into the sleeve and crawled through thirty feet of muck. “Do you know how fast you can move on your hands and knees?” wrote Terrell. “Would you believe thirty feet in 15 seconds? Records were set and broken in rapid succession.”

Finally, the pollywogs were introduced to King Neptune and his entourage, bedecked in robes, wigs, and gold-painted cardboard crowns. The most colorful member of the court was the Royal Baby, a fat, balding, half-naked chief petty officer in a diaper and covered in axle grease. Each pollywog was forced to his knees in front of the baby, who took a handful of lubricating grease from a drum at his side and rubbed it all over his sweaty abdomen. Then came the order: “Kiss the baby’s belly!” If the pollywog hesitated, a shellback bailiff delivered a whack to his backside. “I closed my mouth and eyes,” recalled Sam Sommers. “I wish I could have held my nose.” Accepting the kiss as tribute, the Royal Baby haughtily waved on the pollywog, with his paddle-wielding bailiffs making sure he cleared out quickly to make room for the next victim.

The final stop was the Royal Barbers and their merciless clippers. Each pollywog ended up with a highly unconventional buzz cut that left his hair in tatters. “They were real artists,” said Marine George Terrell. “A thousand haircuts to be given and no way were any two going to be alike.” Some sailors emerged with a Mohawk or bird’s nest (bald on top, with a fringe around the bottom), but the barbers also sometimes amused themselves by spelling C-O-W-P-E-N-S or V-I-C-T-O-R-Y on successive heads. Sailor Robert Lee attempted to evade the royal clippers with a preemptive head shaving, but soon found out “it doesn’t pay to be smarter than King Neptune. For punishment I had my head and body smeared with a combination of oil and eggs and had to stand on the bow of the ship for one hour in the sun. Did I have fun taking the oil and eggs off my head and body with cold salt water. I learned my lesson.”

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Filed under education, labor, military, Pacific, U.S.

by | 16 December 2024 · 6:14 am

Green U.S. Navy Crews, 1942

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 21-23:

The greenness of Cowpens’ personnel presented a major challenge for Captain McConnell. Teaching any crew to operate and maintain a complex and untried ship is a difficult task, and in Cowpens’ case these problems were compounded by the fact that most aboard were as new to the Navy as the ship itself. Men who had already served at sea were few and far between; most had only the basic skills taught in the Navy’s boot camps and training centers. Only weeks before, they had been civilians from all walks of life—countless Americans from small towns and big cities, factory workers and farmhands, or kids fresh out of high school. This was not unique to Cowpens; each one of the CVLs [light aircraft carriers] departed for the Pacific with more than 70 percent of their complement having no seagoing experience. The old Navy saying was that it took six years to make a sailor, but McConnell had only a matter of months to take this green mob of men and forge them into a combat-ready team.

Youth was one thing that the officers and men of Cowpens had in common. The bulk of the enlisted men were only seventeen or eighteen years old, while most of the ship’s junior officers were only slightly older, with two to four years of college under their belt. There were only a few men aboard who were in their thirties or forties, mostly Captain McConnell and his senior staff. One of the ship’s newly arrived Marines, George Terrell, was seventeen and described his shipmates as “just a bunch of green kids.” In his estimation, 90 percent of the crew was as young as he was. “A man got to be twenty-one [and] he was looked up to as a senior citizen,” Terrell explained. “Even the pilots that flew these hot fighter planes were kids. By the time they got to be twenty-five they were veterans… most of them were between twenty-one and twenty-two.”

…

Only a handful of the Moo’s complement of 107 officers had prewar experience or Naval Academy degrees. Instead, most were reservists—fresh out of college or civilian employment, and recent graduates of the Navy’s three-month crash course officer training program, earning them the moniker of “ninety-day wonders.” The number of reservists so significantly outnumbered the career officers that it sometimes seemed to them that they were strangers in their own Navy. More officers were in training in 1943—120,472—than there were total personnel in the Navy in 1938.

One of the few trade school boys assigned to the Moo was Lt. Frank Griffin “Grif” Scarborough. He graduated in the Academy’s class of 1942 and served one cruise aboard Enterprise as an ensign. He was a rarity aboard the Moo, as he was one of the few who had actually fired a weapon in combat. Although Scarborough started the cruise commanding a gun crew, the Cowpens’ senior assistant engineer was suddenly reassigned, leaving a position that needed to be filled. This wasn’t just a matter of a gap in the organizational table. The ship’s senior engineer was a thermodynamics professor from Penn State with no experience operating a ship’s power plant. McConnell and his executive officer, Cmdr. Hugh Nieman, wanted a seasoned officer to help him grow into the role. Given Scarborough had a degree in engineering, and the bulk of his fellow officers were either aviators or ninety-day wonders, Grif recalled, “Suddenly I was the man of the hour—I became senior assistant engineer of the Cowpens by default!”

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Filed under education, Japan, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 15 December 2024 · 4:48 pm

A Mustang in the Asiatic Fleet

From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 12-13:

Robert P. McConnell was one of many US and Allied officers who narrowly escaped the initial Japanese offensive that followed Pearl Harbor. The handsome, silver-haired McConnell was forty-six years old and a rarity in the prewar Navy—a “mustang,” an officer who started his career as an enlisted man. McConnell studied mining engineering at the University of California at Berkeley before dropping out to join the Navy in 1917. Although the 1918 armistice ended World War I before McConnell saw action in Europe, the practical and conscientious young man secured a commission, starting a Navy career in 1920 as a lieutenant.

McConnell’s unconventional background and lack of a Naval Academy degree nearly hamstrung his career before it began. Amid the draconian personnel cuts that followed the war, the Navy became more parochial, with an officer’s professional pedigree just as important in determining advancement as his performance. Through sheer determination and persistence, McConnell managed to survive and advance in rank in this unforgiving environment. But it wasn’t easy. His daughter Doreen McConnell Johnson recalled how her father had to work harder than the Naval Academy graduates who surrounded him, and he was constantly nettled by reminders that he would always be an outsider in the service’s old boys’ network. Even among the families, Doreen recalled the first question asked in any social engagement was “Oh, what Academy class was your father in?”

McConnell was assigned to the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines, where he briefly served as the executive officer (second in command) of seaplane tender Langley before assuming command of that ship in early 1942. While every naval officer dreamed of commanding a ship, the Langley was no prize and neither was the Asiatic Fleet. In fact, the assignment was likely the Navy’s way of telling Commander McConnell that his career advancement had come to an end. Despite its grandiose name, the Asiatic Fleet was a ragtag collection of obsolete ships primarily intended to “show the flag” in East Asia rather than do much fighting. It was a place of exile, where the Navy shipped its over-the-hill or incapable officers to wait out their retirement. Similarly, the Langley was exactly the sort of misfit that ended up in the Asiatic Fleet. She’d started life as a humble collier (coal ship), but in 1920 was rebuilt into the Navy’s first aircraft carrier. Langley was more of a test bed for naval aviation than a warship, never really intended to go into harm’s way. She was desperately vulnerable—slow, unmaneuverable, and with little in the way of antiaircraft defenses. Deemed no longer useful as an aircraft carrier, in 1936 she suffered through a conversion to a seaplane tender that cost her almost half her flight deck. Langley lost the ability to launch and land planes in return for the space to winch aboard one of her flock of long-range PBY Catalina seaplanes for maintenance.

Although the Asiatic Fleet had been bracing for the outbreak of hostilities, news of the attack on Pearl Harbor arrived like a bolt out of the blue in the predawn hours of December 8. It caught Commander McConnell and his crew entirely by surprise. Langley received her orders to raise steam and head south as fast as she could, only barely keeping ahead of Japanese air strikes on her home port of Cavite, Manila. They escaped to Australia, where Langley and McConnell had a two-month reprieve patrolling its northern coast before being called back to the war.

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Filed under education, Japan, military, Pacific, Philippines, U.S., war

by | 8 December 2024 · 1:58 pm

Communist Takeover in Prague, 1948

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 535-538:

At the Cominform’s founding, [the Soviet leaders] urged the radical Yugoslav faction to publically humiliate French and Italian Communists for sharing government with imperialist forces, and Czechoslovak Communists understood they were implicated as well. At that time, they were sharing a coalition with Catholics, Czech National Socialists, and Social Democrats, and were gearing for parliamentary elections in 1948. On returning to Prague, Party General Secretary Rudolf Slánský informed his Politburo that the time had come for a decisive act to place the country on a direct path to socialism. That implied a rupture with existing policy: the previous year, party leader Gottwald had still been speaking of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism,” without a dictatorship of the proletariat or violence on the Soviet model.

In February 1948, Czech and Slovak Communists used their huge cadre base and control of the military and police to stage a rapid seizure of power. Though backed by overwhelming force, the coup was bloodless. They took advantage of an embarrassing mistake by the National Socialist and Catholic politicians, who were tiring of the sundry illegalities of their Communist coalition partners. In November 1947, Communist authorities in Prague had staged a purge of the police force. Believing the population would support them, the Catholic and National Socialist ministers resigned in protest on February 21, thinking that the president would now dissolve the government and immediately call for elections. But they miscalculated: the Communists and their Social Democratic allies still had a majority of seats in the government, and simply replaced the ministers who had resigned with politicians of their own choosing. Then they summoned party cells across the country to form “action committees” that would purge every institution in public life.

The leaders got more than they bargained for. Within a few days, mostly young and impatient Communists had ousted directors and managers from newspapers, state administration, sporting clubs, political parties, schools, and cultural institutions such as theaters. Then they began firing people the next level down. The purge was so thorough that party chief Gottwald had to restrain students, who believed that they had advanced into a new stage of history. Charles University was expecting guests from across Europe to celebrate its six-hundredth anniversary, and the young radicals had just unseated the rector, causing several Western universities to withdraw their participation and spoiling the event’s propaganda value. Gottwald got on the phone to the student leader in charge and asked whether he and his comrades were thinking with their heads or “their behinds.” He did not object to the purges that students were carrying out in their own ranks. Opposition leaders were simply arrested, but the rest of the student body was required to appear before “verification commissions,” which expelled more than one-fifth of them. These “class enemies” were usually sent to do heavy labor, often in mines, and thus were erased from Czechoslovak cultural, economic, and political life.

A final stage now occurred in salami tactics. Having sliced off independent peasant, nationalist, and Catholic politicians, the Communists devoured their Social democratic partners whole. This was a regional trend. In the summer and fall of 1948, these more moderate Marxist parties were compelled to form “unity” parties with the Communists. The result in Hungary was the Hungarian Workers Party and in Poland the Polish United Workers Party. In East Germany, the Soviets had forced the merger of Communists and Social Democrats in April 1946, producing the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In all these cases, the joint cadre base of the new party was much larger than when the Communists stood alone; the challenge was now to subject Social Democrats to Leninist discipline. Czechoslovakia’s Communists dispensed with the pretense of a new name, however, and after absorbing the smaller Social Democratic party, they remained the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

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Filed under Czechia, democracy, economics, education, Hungary, labor, migration, nationalism, philosophy, Poland, Slovakia, USSR, Yugoslavia

by | 7 December 2024 · 3:01 pm

Contempt for Old Elites, 1945

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 510-512:

Contempt for old elites derived not only from blunders of international politics, however. Beyond failing to protect their countries from the onslaught of well-armed and rapacious neighbors, the prewar leaders had neglected grievous social problems, instead monopolizing and reproducing privilege for themselves. They had made limited investments in modern industries and introduced few educational reforms, and therefore the overwhelming majorities of the populations were cut off from hopes of social advancement. Now leading intellectuals sought to expiate their guilt for the rampant injustices of the interwar regimes by siding with people’s democracy, understanding that those governing them were of lower class background and had to learn to behave “culturally” through educational advancement that only the intelligentsia could provide.

Few leaders of the interwar years remained to face the consequences. In 1945, Admiral Miklós Horthy was a prisoner in Nuremberg, and after release went into exile in Switzerland and Portugal. Polish foreign minister Józef Beck escaped to Romania, only to die there. Peasant Party leader Stanislaw Mikołajczyk returned to Poland, but the rest of the London government did not. Yugoslav King Peter had fled at war’s outbreak, never to return. Boris III of Bulgaria died in 1943 and his nine-year-old son, Simeon, went into exile in 1946. In February 1945, as the result of a decision of a Communist-controlled “people’s court,” virtually the entire surviving government of Bulgaria was executed, including three regents, twenty-two ministers, and sixty-seven parliamentarians. The popular King Michael of Romania was forced to abdicate at gunpoint in December 1947 and left for exile in Switzerland the following month.

The devastations of war had also weakened the governing classes, especially in Poland. There Nazi and Soviet occupiers had acted as co-conspirators in genocide by deporting and killing Poland’s national elite, most egregiously at the forests near Katyn in early 1940, when the NKVD shot more than 22,000 reserve officers, who in civilian life were leading figures in politics, culture, and the economy. When Soviet authorities sent four transports of more than one million Polish citizens from eastern Poland to central Asia and Siberia in 1940/1941, they targeted persons with higher education and means; and from the moment German armed units crossed Poland’s borders, SS units followed with lists of Polish intellectuals to kill. The physical and human destruction overlapped most dramatically in Warsaw, which had served as the political but also as the cultural and economic locus of power. Of the city’s 1.2 million inhabitants, historians estimate that 800,000 lost their lives during the war. The municipality was still more than 80 percent ruins as late as 1948. Those elites who survived staggered from the blows received and were unable to mount serious resistance to people’s democracy.

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, education, Germany, migration, military, nationalism, USSR, war