From: (Nick)
Date: 22/09/03 00:20 GMT Daylight Time
Message-id:

-remove- (Mhoulsby) wrote in message
...
From: (Nick)
Message-id:
...
"'Yes, I am fond of history.'

'I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing
that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings,
with
wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and
hardly any women at all--it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd
that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The
speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and
designs--
the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me
in other books.'

'Historians, you think', said Miss Tilney, 'are not happy in their flights

of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of
history, and am very well contented to take the false with the true....'

--Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I believe--these are the simple premises of my efforts--that present and
past are indissoluble, that life and work are hard to separate even if the

connections may remain obscure and partly unconscious. These are
commonplaces
that have replaced the older notions of a J.B. Bury, who believed in
history
as science, or a Fustel de Coulanges, who said--in genuine modesty, I
believe--"It is not I speaking, but history speaking through me." The
reckless subjectivity that has invaded our field in some areas might make
one
regret the passing of the older austerity, exemplified in Leopold von
Ranke's
wish to 'expunge the self', but I believe that only totalitarian societies
can extinguish the self. In all other situations, historians are unlikely

to escape their own times or their own complicated selves."
--Fritz Stern (Einstein's German World, pp. 200-1)

"In short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction.
But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly
antipositivist
ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely
fundamental."
--Eric Hobsbawm ('The New Threat to History' in the
"New York Review of Books" 16 December 1993, p. 63)

"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
--Bertrand Russell

Yes, quite.

'The ignorant peasant without fault is greater than the philosopher with
many;
for what is genius or courage without a heart?'
--Oliver Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield)

Dear Mr Houlsby,

I am afraid that most people tend to confuse what they may believe is
thinking
for themselves with simply reiterating what they have been taught that they
should believe, without any further thought.


Yes, quite.

Interestingly (or uninterestingly, if you're an adherent of the views
expressed through the medium of Ms. Austen's typically adept
characterisation)

Would an anachronism be avoided by referring to Our Jane as 'Miss Austen'?
:-)


Is it anachronistic to refer to a proto-feminist in that manner? Would she
disapprove? Does she care (what's left of her)? Does anyone?

Mr. Spivack has been unable to substantiate his assertion that his namesake

Mr. Schama supports the contemporarily popular policy of appeasement
pursued
Chamberlain's administration of His Majesty's government.

Evidently, Simon Spivack did not make that assertion, but you had
misunderstood
him to have done so within the context of your discussion.


Evidently. Whatcha tryna do, antagonise the guy even more?


I prefer not to comment here on your dispute with Mr. Spivack beyond stating
that I have appreciated both some of your and his contributions to this
forum.

For my part, I have appreciated his and yours in like manner.

I hope that you and he may be able to resolve your differences soon with
mutual
satisfaction.


Given that it is he who has placed certain preconditions upon the proximity of
my posts to his, perhaps it is to Simon that you need to repeat this assertion
(I know that you did so in the Zaitsev thread). For my part, I wish no such
restrictions. Evidently, Simon doesn't appreciate being misinterpreted. Equally
he has envisaged our (his and my) posting in the same thread in parallel. Will
we observe this phenomenon shortly, I wonder? :-)


No doubt Mr. Spivack might equally assert that because his namesake,
Mr. Schama, stated that after the resounding victory of Parliament's army
in
the decisive battle of the English Civil War, at Naseby on June 14, 1645
"...God was clearly on the side of Parliament", then Mr. Schama (who is
Jewish) truly believes that God is a Puritan... Hmmm...

Perhaps you should not hypothesise more on what Mr. Spivack might assert.


"Perhaps, perhaps" (Geri Halliwell)

"Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps" (Farres/Davis)

God might be an Englishman (according to R.F. Delderfield), yet how many
Puritans can be found amongst the English today? :-)

'What has emerged in place of the stiff upper lip of Trevor Howard and the
trembling lower lip of Celia Johnson is the most effervescent youth culture
in the world.'
--Jeremy Paxman (The English: a Portrait of a People, p. 231)

Now, "appeasement", as Government Policy, of course, (while maintaining an
intrinsic similarity) meant something rather different at the time of, say,
Baldwin's government, from what it meant in Chamberlain's time.

In the latter case, here in Britain we were in the position of needing to
rearm, as quickly as possible. We had limited resources available to us.
What
was not altogether clear was whether we should be concentrating upon
preparing
for a desert war (in north Africa, against Italy) an air war (in
northwestern
Europe, against Germany) or a naval war (in the Pacific, against Japan).
This
dilemma perhaps goes some way towards explaining the reason why pursuing a
policy of appeasement (which bought time while the above question was
beginning to clarify) was considered, in late 1930s Great Britain, by
the-powers-that-be, not only to be expedient, but actually rather prudent.

I lack the time now to discuss the 1938 Munich Crisis in detail.


Phew! :-)

Prime Minister Chamberlain was then advised that the Royal Air Force (nearly
all of its fighter squadrons were still equipped with biplanes) was
thoroughly
unprepared to fight the Luftwaffe (which was armed with the Messerschmitt
Bf-109 fighter, which had ruled the skies in the Spanish Civil War).


Yes, quite.

"It is worth recording that, at the time of the Munich crisis in September
1938,
six Gladiator squadrons were still operational with Fighter Command, compared
with two of Hurricanes (a monoplane) and no Spitfire squadrons; the balance
of
its strength comprised Hawker Furies and Demons, and Gloster Gauntlets. By
the
outbreak of war one year later the transformation to monoplane fighters was
almost complete."
--Francis Mason (The British Fighter Since 1912, p. 245)


Yes, quite.

Its popularity, by contrast, derived, in large measure, from the memory of
the terrible toll exacted by the 1914-18 conflict with Germany and its
allies.

"When Daladier landed at Le Bourget after returning from Munich there was a
large crowd to acclaim him. Chamberlain was equally popular. There was a
brief vogue for buying Chamberlain umbrellas--which people called 'mon
chamberlain'--and one paper set up a fund to buy him a country house in
France.
An opinion poll in October 1938, the first ever undertaken in France, showed
that Munich was approved of by 57 per cent of the population."
--Julian Jackson (The Fall of France, p. 149)

Freeman Dyson was a thirteen-year-old English schoolboy in 1937.

"The older generation had fought The War and built the the War Cloister.
They
were determined that we should constantly be reminded of their tragedy. And
indeed our whole lives were overshadowed by it. Every year on November 11
there was the official day of mourning. But much heavier on our souls
weighed
the daily reminders that the best and the brightest of a whole generation had
fallen. English life had sunk into sloth and mediocrity, we were told,
because
none were left of those who should have been our leaders. The missing
generation
was conspicuous by its absence in the government and in the professions.
Everywhere tired men of sixty-five were doing the work that vigourous men of
forty-five should have done. The arithmetic was simple. Our school put out
each year a graduating class of eighty boys. Our six hundred dead (from The
War of 1914-1918) were more than seven complete years. The classes of 1914,
1915, 1916 were wiped out. Few survived from the eight years 1910-1917.

We of the class of 1941 were no fools. We saw clearly enough in 1937 that
another bloodbath was approaching. We knew how to figure the odds. We saw
no reason to expect that the next round would be less bloody than the one
before. We expected the fighting to start in 1939 or 1940, and we observed
that our chances of coming through it alive were about the same as if we had
belonged to the class of 1915 or 1916. We calculated the odds to be about
ten to one that we should be dead in five years.

Feeling ourselves doomed, we were comforted by the thought that the whole
society in which we lived was doomed equally. The coming war would certainly
bring massive bombing of civilian populations. We expected bombing, not with
old-fashioned high explosives, but with poison gas such as the Italians had
recently been using in Ethiopia, or with the anthrax bombs that Aldous Huxley
described in 'Brave New World'. We expected biological weapons to be used
more and more recklessly, until some new Black Death would get out of control
and destroy half the population of Europe. Gas had been used recklessly by
both sides in World War I, and there was no reason to hope that germ warfare
would lend itself to any greater restraint. We then expected World War II to
end with man-made plagues destroying our civilisation, just as inevitably as
forty-five years later we are expecting thermonuclear weapons to do the job
in World War III.
...
We were not so naive as to blame our predicament upon Hitler. We saw Hitler
only as a symptom of the decay of our civilisation, not as the cause of it.
To us the Germans were not enemies but fellow victims of the general
insanity.
The first book I read in German was Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western
Front',
describing the German class of 1914 torn to pieces by The War in the same way
as their English contemporaries. Remarque's book is as powerful a memorial
to
them as our War Cloister is to our six hundred. My tears stained the pages
of
my German dictionary as I came to the end of the story. We did not bother to
read 'Mein Kampf'.

We looked around us and saw nothing but idiocy. The great British Empire
visibly crumbling, and the sooner it fell apart the better so far as we were
concerned. Millions of men unemployed, and millions of children growing up
undernourished in dilapidated slums. A king mouthing patriotic platitudes
which none of us believed. A government which had no answer to any of its
problems except to rearm as rapidly as possible. A military establishment
which believed in bombing the German civilian economy as the only feasible
strategy. A clique of old men in positions of power, blindly repeating the
mistakes of 1914, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing in the
intervening twenty-four years. A population of middle-aged nonentities,
caring
only for money and status, too stupid even to flee from the wrath to come."

--Freeman Dyson (Weapons and Hope, pp. 109-12)

Of course, if it had not been for Mitchell,

Reginald Joseph Mitchell (1895-1937) was the chief designer of the
Supermarine
Spitfire fighter. After being diagnosed with cancer, Mitchell defied his
doctors' orders to rest and follow a prescribed course of treatment.
Instead, Mitchell urgently continued working on his design because he
believed
that it was more important for his country that his work should approach its
completion than that his life could be prolonged.

R. J. Mitchell's life was dramatised in the 1942 film, 'The First of the
Few'.

(Reginald Joseph Mitchell (1895-1937) should not be confused with
Reginald Price Michell (1873-1938), a British chess master.)


Or Keith Michell, the actor and one-time pop star.

Or Joni Mitchell, (born Roberta Joan Anderson, on November 7th 1943, who wrote,
among other things, "California" [which I recently quoted in these groups]
"Woodstock", "Big Yellow Taxi", "Both Sides, Now" and many, many more of the
finest songs ever written).

The Hawker Hurricane, not the more glamourous and less numerous Spitfire, was
Fighter Command's workhorse in the Battle of Britain. The Hurricane was
slower
than the Spitfire, yet it was preferred in the vital role of intercepting the
Luftwaffe's bombers. The Hurricane had these advantages over the Spitfi

1) The Hurricane could withstand more battle damage.

Right, its fuselage was mostly linen, which made it easier to "patch up" and
return quickly to battle....

2) The Hurricane was a more stable gun platform.
3) The Hurricane probably was easier for the inexperienced pilots to fly.


You omitted an important capability:

4) Its turning circle was smaller than perhaps any of the enemy's aircraft.
This enabled the Hurricane's pilots to outmanoeuvre their foes and attack them
from behind.

Royce

The North American P-51 Mustang became a successful long-range escort fighter
in the United States's strategic bombing of Germany only after it was
installed
with a British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.


Yes, indeed.

and, perhaps most especially, Turing, we would have lost WWII.

Some historians have contended that the United Kingdom did lose that war in
the sense that, at least partly as a consequence, it lost most of the British

Empire not long afterward.


Yes, quite.

O, ye of little faith! Should you not have simply trusted the Americans to
"save the world" then, as they like to keep saying that they always have and
will again? :-)


Surely you don't mean to imply that Americans DON'T do this?! :-)

"Le voilà donc connu, ce secret plein d'horreur." --Voltaire

'Perhaps, on the whole, more power is lost than gained by habits of secrecy.'
--Anthony Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds)


"That I, or any man should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible.
Who could endure to own the doing of a mean thing? Who is there that has done
none?"

--Trollope (an Autobiography)

"We often happen to blurt out something which might in some way be dangerous to
us; but we are not deserted by our reticence and discretion in the case of
those things that might make us ridiculous, because here the effect follows
close on the cause."

--Schopenhauer ('Psychological Remarks', Parerga and Palipomena)

"There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves."

--Bernard Shaw (Back to Methuselah)

--Mark