Defeatist Movies

Just an excellent, excellent list from James Jay Carafano at PJM:

Americans prefer not to dwell on defeats, but they are worth pondering. Sometimes the worst setbacks can be the best teachers. Here, courtesy of Hollywood, are six cinematic accounts of thumping failures that are worth revisiting

He lists Khartoum, Zulu Dawn, Gallipoli, Dien Bien Phu, Hamburger Hill and He died with his Boots on. Each movie has a military lesson.

When discussing the British Empire I like to show the bloody British defeat at the end of the movie to my class. One of the interesting facts of Zulu Dawn is that its a prequel of the equally great Zulu. In both movies the actually Zulu tribe is used toe recreate the victory and defeat of their ancestors. The directors really went out of their way here to humanize the Zulus, only adding to the greatness of both movies.

 

Midway

Every Memorial Day a few of the cable channels run every war movie they can. Midway has become a staple. It was one of the war movies of my youth and I get quite sentimental about it. More on that in another post.

I've been working on a magazine article about the actual defense of Midway. This is interesting. The navy had turned Midway into a fortress. Stationed there was a Marine Defense Battalion, the kind that garrisoned Wake and gave the Japanese a hard time. This was reinforced by three batteries of AAA guns of carious calibers. On top of that Nimitz dispatched two Marine raider battalions and a platoon of M-3 light tanks.

When the Japanese hit Midway they lost nine planes and more than 30 suffered at least some damage. It was a hornet's nest.

They had planned to hit Midway with a naval detachment of 1500. This wasn't enough. An attack by two or three times that number would have bee suicide.

That presumes that the Japanese could have made it ashore. They were planning to hit the southern end of the atoll. This was protected by a large coral reef through which the navy had to blast a channel. Hundreds of Japanese troops would have gotten hung up on the reef and gunned down. Any boats that made it beyond the reef would have been sitting ducks for the Marine MGs.

The Marines waiting for the Japanese, these weren't the battling bastards of Bataan but highly motivated troops almost itching for a fight. They rigged up makeshift bombs and even Molotov Cocktails Each building was ringed with barbed wire. Had Japanese troops landed they would have been hit by counterattacking Marines supported by tanks.

It never came to that, of course.

Mad Max

Lemme tell you why Mad Max: Fury Road is only doing OK.

First, a primer. 

The Road Warrior is a cult classic among people my age, part of the list of essential movies for boys in the 80's. This list also includes The Terminator, Conan, Aliens. Lets just say, if on summer afternoon in 1984, you and your friends were breaking mom's broomstick over each other's head because you wanted to be Conan, you saw the Road Warrior, a lot.

The Road Warrior takes place in a post-apocalyptic Australia. It is a western, for sure. One man, a road warrior, comes to the rescue of a town, except the Indians are barbarians and instead of horses they ride makeshift cars. Everyone is killing each other for the gas that's left. It is a world utterly lacking in humanity and compassion. When the barbarians capture a quartet of townspeople trying to break out, they stake one of the townspeople to a car by putting arrows through his shoulders, tie two more to the hood, and rape the woman with them before killing her for kicks. 

It is brutal, and shocking and can be hard to watch. I wonder why my friends and I were allowed to see this.

Mel Gibson, of course, is our hero, the cowboy riding into town who will drive a big rig full of gas against the barbarians. This is the 'Indian attack on a wagon train' component of the movie.

What happens next is epic. And its all live. If the reader hasn't seen this sequence watch it. Amazing stunts. Stupendous car crashes. Crossbows, sawed off shotguns, fire bombs. Gibson is up a tree, out on a branch with the branch about to be sawn off. He could be a cowboy, or a knight, heck, he could be Gilgamesh. Gibson here is full of manly vigor and virtue. Remember, this movie was made in 1981. Its all live, no CGI whatsoever.

Lord it was awesome.

People my age just don't trust Hollywood to do this right anymore. And that's why Mad Mad Max: Fury Road has only done OK at the box office.

Baseball is for Insomniacs

Via the Wall Street Journal we learn baseball has a massive youth issue:

The ball fields at Delano-Hitch Park were covered in snow when Jim Wilson launched a campaign to keep them in use. As president of the City of Newburgh Little League, he had seen participation numbers plummet to the point where the league was in danger of folding. Now, he and the league’s board of directors were calling parents one by one, asking if their children would play this spring.

I see no indication that anyone in this article really appreciates the problem.

The last time a world series game began before right was 1987, Twins v Cardinals. I remember it well. Since then all the games have been at night. During the epic 2001 Yankees-Diamondback series first pitch was at 8:37. You wanna know why Derek Jeter is Mr. November? Because he hit the homerun at 12:01 AM.

How many eight year olds were awake to see the homer, live, in real time?

Baseball in the age of Bud, as Phil Mushnik likes to say.

Baseball isn't the National Past Time and hasn't been in two generations.

Now, wanna know why the NFL is the most popular sport in America? Super Bowl kickoff is usually somewhere around 6:30. The game will be 3-3:00 tops and that's with an extended halftime. An eight year old can persuade mom to let him stay up till ten to see the game through.

Baseball sure had made a lot of money the last 20 years. But its small and more insular. It’s a bigger version of the NHL.

Bud Selig sold baseball's soul for prime time TV dollars. Now the game lacks younger viewers. Hope it was worth it.

In Which Life Imitates Israel Sttikes

Via the incomparable Legal Insurrection:

Much of the war against Israel is fought in the media and through deceptive “Non-Governmental Organizations” which issue endless distorted reports against Israel.

There hardly is any pretense of objectivity anymore — there is an attempt to tie Israel’s hands when dealing with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah which strategically use civilians as shields.

The Media War is a major part of my first Israeli novel, Israel Strikes:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I want to be clear. Your job is just as important as the one being performed by our brave pilots. You are our international vanguard. It is your duty to take to the airwaves, all airwaves, and deliver our message to the world. That message is simple. Israel is a pluralistic democracy acting in self-defense against a soon to be nuclear armed regime that has pledged our destruction. You must be candid, you must be forthright, you must take whatever verbal abuse is hurled at you with good cheer, and you must deliver the facts, no matter what.’

She paused and made eye contact with the assembled men and women. Her eyes fell first to their chief press officer, Colonel Avigdor Zev. He spoke English with a British accent and Arabic like a native of Baghdad; his parents fled Iraq in the 1950s. He would deal almost exclusively with news networks in Great Britain, as well as Canada, Australia, and other commonwealth nations. Next her eyes fell upon a pair of lieutenants, a young man and young woman. The young man played basketball in the Israeli league, while the young woman had done some modeling in Israel before becoming a helicopter pilot. Both had lived and travelled extensively in the United States. They would go on American networks like MTV and the Daily Show as a young duo to tell American kids what Israel was about. Next she came to a 40ish tank commander who had earned a scar across his face in Lebanon, and after that had served in Gaza. The rest of that face was smooth and chiseled, a shock of salt and pepper hair was atop his head. It was calculated, and the Prime Minister saw it herself, that he would appeal to Western women. Next came a tall, slender black woman who had been evacuated from Ethiopia in the late 90s; she would appear on television in Africa. Then she came to Major Romi Ben Joseph, an Arabic-speaking medical doctor. To him fell the difficult task, and Eitan thought, unenviable duty, of taking to the airwaves of al-Jazeera, among other Arab language networks.

 There follow several scenes where Israel PR men get the better of Islamic Imams and terrorist flaks.

 

I wonder if its worth it.

 

Outside of the English Speaking world (except for Britain), Israel is a pariah. Americans, Aussies, even Canadians are staunch supporters of the Jewish State.

 

Why do the Israelis put up with it all? They will go to herculean efforts to avoid civilian casualties while Hamas and Hezbollah exert similar efforts to make sure their own people get killed.  And still the Israelis get blamed.

 

I lost faith in the UN in the 1990s when they couldn't stop the Serbian destruction of Bosnia and Croatia. The Serbians shelled Sarajevo with impunity and all the UN and the west could do was wag a finger, tisk tisk.

 

Why shouldn't the Israelis do the same?

 

The Student Stumps

I like to teach Exodus as if it were history and I think a very strong circumstantial case can be made that the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt and the story of Exodus is true at least broadly. One of the  best arguments in favor of Exodus being real is this: why would anyone portray the Hebrews so badly.

Think about it, from the Ten Commandments, Edward G. Robinson telling everyone to build a golden calf and worship it. Remember, this is AFTER they've been delivered from Egypt. What a bunch of whiney ingrates.

Who would make that up about themselves?

A sharp student asked, 'Maybe the writers of the bible made up that story to make Moses look good?'

To which I responded, 'Well I don't....wait a minute.'

Addressing a criticism

I'm running into this one with World War 1990 and saw it with my Israel Strikes books. Some Amazon reviewers say the Israelis are invincible. Other's say the Soviets weren't as bad military as I make them out to be.

On the Israelis first. Israel has one of the top five militaries in the world. They have to. They aren't  invincible, but they are capable, tough and adaptable. Their adaptability makes the Israelis most deadly. When they encounter problems in their war-fighting, as they did in 2006 against Hezbollah, they fix those problems. Consider, also, Israel's enemies. I have studies and published widely on the Arab-Israeli wars and I say without hesitation that Arabs can't fight.

Now a moment on the Soviets. I can't find the clip, but once, about 1990 I saw Tom Clancy on Charlie Rose. Talking about the Soviets, and this is a direct quote he said, 'The more I learn about  the Soviets the less and less I fear them.' That's right. The Soviet army was a top-heavy, blunt force object built to bull its way to victory. Its equipment was second class to that of western armies as were its rank and file. Therein lied a tremendous weakness. The Soviets had no non-com officer corps like western armies, just conscripts who were promoted forward for any number of reasons. To put it another way, the Red Army had no grizzled, veteran sergeants barking orders to the fresh recruits. This is a tremendous defect. I talked about it a bit in World War: 1990.

Lets look at another example that fuses the above two. The Gulf War. Saddam fielded a well trained and veteran army armed with the latest equipment, most of it Soviet. The U.S. Army cut the Iraqi Army to pieces. The Battle of  73 Easting was a massacre. Here two Republican Guard Divisions went up against the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Soviet armed and trained, the Iraqis new one direction: forward. The Americans destroyed two divisions in 12 hours.

The West also enjoyed a tremendous technological advantage. Night vision, GPS, smart bombs, Sabot shells. The Soviets had no equivalent to these except numbers.

I had thought I explained my reasons for thinking the West militarily superior to the Soviets. Perhaps I was not clear enough. If the readership didn't see what I was getting at, that's my fault not theirs and I will address this in the intro to World War 1990: Operation Eastern Storm.

That said, a reviewer noted that when reading Israel Strikes War of the Red Sea, they felt the Israelis were invincible:

While reading it, I felt that Israel was incapable of failure, that there was never any doubt that they would win with comparative ease. Not much suspense, just moving from victory to victory.

I think that's about right, don't you?

Life Imitates Israel Strikes: War of the Red Sea

The German defense minister has visited Israel.

In Israel Strikes: War of the Red Sea, a subplot is Germany's relationship with Israel and the concept, not of guilt, but memory and reconciliation. A taste:

 The study was dark except for the dead light cast by the computer screen on Chancellor Hoppe's desk. Mr. Hoppe walked into the study. As he approached his wife he saw her computer screen. She was staring at the Drudge Report which carried a photograph of a Turkish naval ship and the headline "ON TO GAZA."
Mr. Hoppe came up behind his wife and put his hands on her shoulders. He lovingly rubbed them. The Chancellor leaned back in her chair and looked up at her husband's face illuminated by the computer light.
'It is past midnight,' he said.
'Yes.'
'And you have that speech tomorrow in Leipzig.'
'I know.'
He pointed to the computer screen. 'There is nothing you can do, you know.'
'Is that really true?'
Mr. Hoppe sat on the edge of the desk and folded his arms. 'Isn't it?'
'There is something I can do.'
'But you are not sure.'
The Chancellor took her husband's hand. 'No. I am sure.'
'Then why wait?'
'Because if I do this thing it will set a new course of history for Germany.'
Mr. Hoppe thought for a moment. 'Is it the right thing?'
'It is.'
'How often has Germany done the wrong thing?'
'Too often.'
Mr. Hoppe reached across the desk, picked up the telephone and handed it to his wife. 'Then make the call.'
The Chancellor nodded. She pressed a button patching into the residence's night secretary. 'Get me the Minister of Defence.'​

 

I once read about a German youth movement that featured young people making a pilgrimage to and working in Israel for a summer. This is of course similar to the Kibbutzim that many thousands of Americans passed through. 

An American, of course, can pick through his heritage and find ancestors who fought in any number of wars. Both my grandfathers were in WWII. My grandfather's stepfather was in the 77th Division in the Great War. Interestingly, my grandmother's father flew in the Luftwaffe during the Great War. What must a young German think knowing a grandfather or great grandfather fought on the side of unspeakable evil?

Of course, an 18 year old German bears absolutely no responsibility whatsoever for the crimes of his/her nation or even family. But is this German youth movement not an attempt to cleanse the family name, to make right a wrong rendered by a relative?

Here is an image of German Chancellor Willie Brandt laying a wreath at the Warsaw Ghetto:

This was an important event that has been memorialized with a plaque and a term Warschauer Knieffel-refers to a gesture of humility and penance by social democratic Chancellor of Germany Willy Brandt towards the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Even today the photo is powerful. Today a square in Warsaw is named for the late Chancellor.

Here is a video of a German women meeting an Israeli youth group at Auschwitz:

In a weird way the Holocaust binds the German and Israeli people. Israel would not exist without Auschwitz. Even for Americans my age, Germans are associated almost completely with the war. When I was a child in the 80's just by watching old war movies you could pick up enough German to man a road block. When does that end for the Germans?

 

           

Crush Your Enemies

A lot of interesting talk about this article, Six Reasons why Starship Troopers is the new Art of War, best quote, from the book itself:

"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst."

This is exactly right.

Giving peace a chance just makes the war worse.  Conan says 'crush your enemies' and he is right. First, think about all the conflicts that are allowed to fester, the Arab-Israeli Wars, the Korean War, various sundry wars in Africa. These are wars, especially the first, where the great powers intervene to bring about a cease fire, which will of course eventually break.

Now think of absolute victory. There are obvious examples, of course, WWII, the Civil War, the Carthaginian Wars. In each of this conflict the good guys utterly annihilated the enemy. They weren't nice about it. They weren't PC, they just won. It is difficult to imagine Sherman conducting his March to the Sea in today's climate. The same people who apologize for Islamic terrorists would apologize for slave owning southerners. Complete victory is not limited to the good guys. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese wiped South Vietnam off the map and brought about a peace on their terms.

Google 'Carthaginian Peace'. This kind of peace is long lasting and makes friends of enemies. Just ask Germany and Japan.

The crackup of the Elites (2)

Pursuant to what I wrote about yesterday, here is a perceptive Guardian Columnist making a similar point:

The universities, left press, and the arts characterise the English middle-class as Mail-reading misers, who are sexist, racist and homophobic to boot. Meanwhile, they characterise the white working class as lardy Sun-reading slobs, who are, since you asked, also sexist, racist and homophobic. The national history is reduced to one long imperial crime, and the notion that the English are not such a bad bunch with many strong radical traditions worth preserving is rejected as risibly complacent. So tainted and untrustworthy are they that they must be told what they can say and how they should behave.

Disdain is no way to win votes. Crying and complaining about losing an election is no way to win the next. Badmouthing nearly 40% of the country is not the solution to the elite's electoral loss, but it is a major symptom.

When the audience rejects your product, the audience isn't wrong, you are wrong. That's all there is to it.

The crackup of the Elites

Britain's election has continued a trend that we've seen for a few years now in the English speaking world as well as Israel. The global elites are losing.

Let us define 'global elites'. These are the trendy, hipster urban intelligencia. They like café lattes. They wear skinny jeans. They travel to exotic places. They have tons of education.

They hold all the correct beliefs. They really don't care about bread and butter issues. Matters of defense really aren't important to them. The global elites  don't get down into the nitty gritty of tax policy except to say everyone should 'pay their fare share'. They don't have policy opinions, they have attitudes, as George Will once said. Its the social issues that count. Think gay marriage.

The global elites are the people that pilloried Sarah Palin. For them the Sarah Palin 'issue' was really about class. Mrs. Palin attended several different middlebrow universities. To help pay her way she competed in beauty contests. She had five, count 'em five children. Her teenage daughter got pregnant and decided to keep the baby. Everything about Sarah Palin was tacky to the global intelligencia. Why she didn't even hyphenate her name.

Anyway, in Canada, Stephen Harper annihilated the Liberal Party. They're consigned to Toronto and a few other urban enclaves. In Israel, the last election left the Labour Party leader, Issaac Herzog, mayor of Tel Aviv and little else. After the recent British elections Labour is reduced to London and its traditional north country enclaves. Even in America the midterm elections blasted the Democrat party back to the coasts and Chicago.

Just a few years ago we were reading furrow browed commentary about how the GOP risked becoming a regional party and may even die if it doesn't adapt. Well, that's not really happening now, is it?  The Democrat party is not in danger, of course. But the hipster, trendy elites that run it are in considerable danger. And they don't even know it.

Cameron Rules Britannia

Personally, I had ben hoping for Labour win that would bring a Tory crackup with the rump of the party being folded into UKIP with Nigel Farage as the leader in a repeat of what happened with the Canadian conservatives. Oh well.

Cammy has a majority government and so we'll see if he's the wanker we think him to be.

Interestingly there have been three important elections in the last six months, Britain, Israel and the U.S. midterms, the conservatives won handily in all three. In all three, the conservatives were not predicted to win so handily. The government of Australia went conservative in 2013 as well.  We seem to be in a new era where conservatives are winning elections across the English speaking world. Canada has elections soon as well, so we'll see if he can make it a clean sweep for the conservatives in the Anglosphere.

What to write

Been in limbo the last few days wondering which novel to write next. Tried to sit down and outline the rest of To Liberate Mars, but nothing was happening. Not ready to do the finale to the Israel Strikes trilogy. And I'm sick of writing about the Politburo and exploding tanks. Arctic Storm is doing great and Eastern Storm is about to go to editing.

So I went to outline another idea I'd had about a middle eastern adventure.  I opened up the Word Doc I had created and found I had already outlined much of the novel. It was as if I received a message from god.

So here's the summer project. A Middle Eastern kingdom is besieged by Islamic terrorists and needs British assistance. Lots of desert nomads, lots of bloodthirsty terrorists, lots of SAS. Think Lawrence of Arabia and Wind and the Lion.

Reviews

A Line through the Desert is my first novel and also the most disappointing. This is the latest review:

A surprisingly poignant story about a young man who becomes a soldier, what he goes through and what it costs him. I think a lot of the negative reviews were expecting an action techno thriller rather than a more personal story, which this is.

The reviewer is right. A lot of people slam the novel for being a 'sappy teenage romance'. I don't get it.  I wanted to sell books, so I put a picture of an M-1 belching fire and smoke from its 120mm cannon on the cover. Star Wars has lots of battles and action, and also lots of scenes with a brooding Luke. There's a soldier on my cover of Starship Troopers, but a lot of Rico in HS.

All the stuff that happens in the beginning, it's backstory, its character, its the meat of the novel. I almost didn't write the middle, the parts with the  military, because I felt the important parts were the beginning and end.

Of course, every once in a while I get a review from a vet who  resents that I wasn't in the military, wasn't in their unit and wrote about both. You fought at the Battle of 73 Easting and I didn't. I couldn't care less. I write about what I want, you don't like it, tough, pal. A few have even attacked the book on those grounds on Amazon. I once got called a coward and a draft-dodger, I pointed out that in 1991 I was 17 and there was no draft.

Bad Reviews

God I dread these. A sample:

Why go to the trouble to write a novel if you can't bother to properly edit it? Such carelessness feels like disrespect for the reader. I have given you a few dollars, as well as a few hours of my time; the least you could do is respect my intelligence by writing proper English.

This review sent me scrambling. I read about 25% of the book and sure enough I found a few typos.

Don't start. That thing was gone over again and again, by me an by others. People who were paid, my official editor.

There is no such thing as a perfect book.  Websites are dedicated to typos in books. All-time great books have typos.

Reading a few of the reviews, I'm wondering if these aren't Yanks having issues with British spellings and military usage. Example, we (Americans) would make reference to the 7th Armored Brigade, while they (Brits) say 7 Armoured Brigade.

I like this quote, 'The only unforgivable typos are the ones you find in a book you've written yourself. '
So true.

Editing Hell

It's not writing, but editing I guess.

World War 1990: Operation Arctic Storm is doing great. Just check the Amazon rankings.

In the meantime I've been writing, re-writing, and editing the sequel, Operation Eastern Storm. God this is part that sucks, the part where I thrown my pencil down and proclaim, 'I'm getting a real job!' Another read-through, just to make sure there's character continuity, just to add a bit of character to some other characters simply because one of them will need to be named.

I'll explain.

One of the flaws in my writing style is my habit of referring to a periphery (one of my old poli-sci BS words) character by his title. The 'radioman', the 'XO' etc etc. This is actually something I picked up from the late Barbara Tuchman, the great historian who advised against putting too many names and place names in a sentence. 'Colonel Smith brought his B company North from Epionville while Colonel Bates brought C Company East from Apreville, with both B and C companies linking up at Granpre for a morning assault on Ancreville,' etc. Go on, tell me what I just described. You can't.

So its occurred to me that most of the 'XOs' and so forth in my books need a name, and therefore a bit of character. And not I got to go back through the whole MS and make sure Connor shows up in those scenes with Boyle.

I need a real job.