August 7, 2007
Bismarck and Tirpitz Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that “We will, of course, never know if the Germans could have won the Battle of the Atlantic by having concentrated on submarines before the outbreak of war instead of trying to build a surface fleet to take on the Royal Navy. But surely had the shipbuilding capacity and the design talent that went into building such ships as Bismarck and Tirpitz (quite possibly the finest battleships ever built) gone into submarines instead, the Battle of the Atlantic would have been an even nearer-run thing than it was.” It is almost certainly true that the Bismarck and Tirpitz were a waste of German resources, most crucially of steel, but it was not necessarily mad for the Germans to have built the ships. First of all, the Bismarck and Tirpitz, laid down in peacetime, were intended for a world war that was supposed to break out at a time of Hitler’s choosing, probably in 1942 or 1943. Battleships take years to build, so these ships had to be laid down well in advance of their expected use. What most obviously failed was less the projected force structure of the German Navy than Hitler’s diplomacy. The ships were intended to be part of a large German battle fleet, one that would include the even larger battleships of the Z Plan, and were expected to defeat first Britain and then the United States (the plans for ships that could fight on our side of the Atlantic is now considered an important clue about Hitler’s long-run intentions). But even in the war they actually fought, the Bismarck and Tirpitz made a significant contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic. What may have been the greatest German victory in the battle, the destruction of convoy PQ 17, occurred only because the Tirpitz put to sea, at which point the convoy scattered and was destroyed piecemeal by submarines and aircraft. The Tirpitz, which turned back before engaging, had done dreadful execution by putting to sea at all. She did the harm she did because any modern battleship could have swiftly and effortlessly destroyed any Allied convoy with normal escorts, i.e. corvettes and Destroyer Escorts and perhaps a few slightly heavier combatants, none of which had any chance against a capital ship. So the Bismarck and Tirpitz were a fleet in being, and tied down the scarce and precious British capital ships reserved to deal with them if they ever broke out. When they did break out, however briefly, they caused vast alarm. So I think Mr. Gordon goes too far when he writes that “The Bismarck and Tirpitz proved useless.” When Mr. Gordon states that had the steel that went into them been used for submarines, those subs “could have devastated British shipping before Britain could have acquired the escort vessels and long-range aircraft (properly armed to attack submarines) that finally proved the key to winning the battle,” I also disagree, because without any German capital ships, much more of the RN of 1939 would have been available for escort duties, and the RAF had fairly long-range bombers available from the beginning of the war (the Blenheims, the Whitleys, the Hampdens, etc.) but was generally very unwilling to use them to help keep the sea lanes open, instead insisting that they be used for strategic bombardment. So some of the vulnerability of Allied shipping was the result of bad doctrine, which aggravated shortages of escorts and aircraft. The planes available in 1939 did not have the range of the B-24s that would completely close the mid-Atlantic gap left by shorter-ranged land-based aircraft, but they would have helped immensely, and with no German surface fleet, some RN carriers would also have been freed up for duty in the mid-Atlantic. When Mr. Gordon writes that the Bismarck and Tirpitz were “quite possibly the finest battleships ever built,” my guess is that (to his credit) he has no idea what a minefield he is entering. Mr. Gordon seems, on the strength of his posts, a sane man with many interests, so he probably has no idea of the rhetorical savageries and monomanias that afflict the very passionate and extremely learned people who specialize in hypothetical match-ups of WWII battleships. I am not such a person, but I have met some and read others. These people tend to point out that the Bismarck and Tirpitz had smaller and fewer guns than did many of their rivals (by comparison, USN Iowa-class ships had 9 x 16” guns vs. 8 x 15”). The Iowa-class ships also had better armor, speed, range, and infinitely better AA and sensors. Having 16” vs. 15” main armament meant 10,000 lbs. of extra weight in the broadside, 24,000 lbs. vs. 14,000 lbs. Interestingly enough, the French Richelieu or Jean Bart also had deadlier fire than either German battleship, as well as better turret and deck armor, and came close to or matched the Bismarck on AA, speed, and armor belt. Had they been completed, Stalin’s Sovyetskiy Soyuz-class BBs might have handled the Bismarck and Tirpitz pretty roughly—they were better armed and armored. The RN’s HMS Vanguard, laid down in 1941 and finished in 1946, was also a deadlier ship than the Bismarck, and the great Japanese battleships (for example, the Yamato and Musashi) were vastly superior. I have read people who argue, I think persuasively, that while the Bismarck and Tirpitz had some brilliant qualities—for example, excellent optics—they had one very great strength, which is that they were hard to kill at short range by direct gun fire, but this was offset by the fact that they were not too hard to disable.
Mr. Gordon also writes that “I wish someone would write a new book on Mahan and how his theories affected twentieth century warfare. I have the perfect title for it: The Influence of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History Upon History.” There is indeed an essay on that theme, and if I remember correctly—I am up on the Cape, and cannot easily check—it has a comparable title: “The Influence of History Upon Sea Power”. [Perhaps “The Influence of History Upon Sea Power: The Navalist Reinterpretation of the War of 1812,” by Mark Russell Shulman, Journal of Military History, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 1992). – Editor]
August 5, 2007
The Birth of Modern Political Reporting Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:40 PM EST If you’ve been overwhelmed by the heavy traffic in presidential campaign coverage, as have I—with over a dozen candidates, at least six plausible contenders, and hundreds of print, electronic, and new-media outlets, it’s maddening—you might enjoy a tidbit I learned while reading Timothy Crouse’s classic volume The Boys on the Bus. Crouse was a writer for Rolling Stone who spent the 1971–1972 presidential cycle covering the people who covered the candidates—wire reporters, national political correspondents, magazine writers, network television correspondents, and the like. Among his most interesting observations was the shift in campaign coverage between 1968 and 1972. Prior to ’72, most journalists focused exclusively on the inside game—what the candidates were saying, which political bosses and interest groups were endorsing which contenders, and how internal party dynamics were shaping the field. But after a solid year of covering Eugene McCarthy’s unlikely triumph over Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, the surge in antiwar activity among grassroots Democrats, and the seeming inevitability of a realignment in national politics, many professional journalists were stunned when Richard Nixon, undoubtedly the most bland and evasive candidate in the 1968 field, managed to capture the Presidency. Crouse interviewed the veteran journalist Joseph Kraft, who (in Crouse’s words) “went on to argue that Presidential candidates like McCarthy, [Bobby] Kennedy and even Nelson Rockefeller, who campaigned among college kids and blacks, got all the coverage, while Richard Nixon, who made his pitch to ordinary Americans, ‘was almost entirely out of the news in the weeks before he walked off with the Republican nomination. . . . In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. [Kraft’s words].’” Enter Haynes Johnson, a veteran journalist with the Washington Post who, virtually alone among the reporters covering the ’72 race, spent little time on the candidates’ campaign buses and planes and instead devoted the better part of 18 months to tracking the opinion of the “middle Americans” who were thought to determine the outcome of national elections. With help from the electoral analyst Richard Scammon, the Washington Post identified 443 registered voters spaced out across 50 key precincts, and together with his colleague David Broder, Johnson tracked their opinions on a range of social and economic issues by way of formal surveys and informal interviews. “We wanted to chart the mood of the country over a period of years,” he explained, “so that when we got into the campaign we would really have something to base conclusions on. We would really have a sense of the major issues and what was moving people.” This brand of reporting, which Crouse termed “mood of America coverage,” and which critics tend to dismiss as pop sociology, later became standard fare in media treatment of presidential and congressional elections. Today, even regional newspapers and local newscasts hire pollsters to conduct focus groups, visit diners and office parks to gage the “sense of the people,” and interest themselves in what the voters are saying almost as much as in what the candidates are saying. Arguably, this sort of coverage enriched the larger universe of news reporting, as it recognized elections as political ecosystems rather than inside parlor games. It’s fascinating that the major outlets only discovered this methodology about 25 years ago.
August 4, 2007
The Guerre de Course II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 PM EST Just a few thoughts regarding Fredric Smoler’s thoughtful post on this subject. We will, of course, never know if the Germans could have won the Battle of the Atlantic by having concentrated on submarines before the outbreak of war instead of trying to build a surface fleet to take on the Royal Navy. But surely had the shipbuilding capacity and the design talent that went into building such ships as Bismarck and Tirpitz (quite possibly the finest battleships ever built) gone into submarines instead, the Battle of the Atlantic would have been an even nearer-run thing than it was. The Bismarck and Tirpitz proved useless. The former was sunk in a week (after a thrilling chase to be sure), and the latter was bottled up in a Norwegian fjord until sunk by bombs late in the war. Germany had only 57 U-boats at the outbreak of the war and most of them were small, short-range vessels intended to operate in British coastal waters. Even the long-range U-boats were essentially of World War I design. If Germany had had a large fleet of submarines of state-of-the-art design, it could have devastated British shipping before Britain could have acquired the escort vessels and long-range aircraft (properly armed to attack submarines) that finally proved the key to winning the battle. Speaking of poets, a very good if often very didactic one, Rudyard Kipling, understood the threat of the guerre de course. I don’t think the Confederate guerre de course was designed to win the war for the South. As always it was a faute de mieux strategy, and the question is whether the resources devoted to the guerre de course against the North could have been deployed elsewhere with more effect. It seems to me that the resources were small and the effect large, giving the strategy more bang for the buck than any other. The effect, especially if unexpected, can be huge. John Paul Jones managed to put the British maritime industry (a large part of the British economy) into fits and deeply embarrass the British Admiralty when he captured British warships in home waters. Jones didn’t come close to winning the American Revolution, but he sure helped, psychologically and thus politically. Mr. Smoler writes, “Come to think of it, when did the guerre de course ever produce a victory in war, rather than merely add to a war’s cost? Commerce raiding was the naval strategy of the Confederacy, the Wilhelmine empire of Germany, and also of the French monarchy, the French Republic, and the Napoleonic Empire. It failed every time.” Indeed it did, which just goes to show that Alfred Thayer Mahan was right in his remarkably influential book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: the superior naval power wins the big wars. I wish someone would write a new book on Mahan and how his theories affected twentieth century warfare. I have the perfect title for it: The Influence of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History Upon History. Catchy, don’t you think?
August 4, 2007
Florence Foster Jenkins Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:10 PM EST While we are memorializing spectacularly untalented poets, we should not forget the most untalented singer ever to sell out Carnegie Hall, Florence Foster Jenkins. Madame Jenkins, born in 1868, was the daughter of a very successful Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, banker. Though she was given music lessons as a child, when she said that she wanted to travel to Europe to train as a singer, her father refused to foot the bill. She eloped with a young doctor, Frank Jenkins, but he, too, gave her no encouragement. With her divorce in 1902 and her father’s death in 1909 leaving her plenty of money, Florence Foster Jenkins was able to undertake the singing career of which she had always dreamed. Unfortunately she lacked any sense of pitch, rhythm, or tone, defects of which she appears to have been blissfully unaware. She gave her first concert in 1912 and, after her move to New York from Philadelphia, she gave an annual concert in the ball room of the Ritz Carlton Hotel. She determined who could get tickets, giving them out to her friends—-who all seemed to be as tone deaf as she was—but they were soon in great demand among New York’s musical cognoscenti, because she was so bad she was howlingly funny. As one writer put it, “Audiences laughed at her—laughed until the tears rolled down their cheeks, laughed until they stuffed handkerchiefs in their mouths to stifle the mirth—but she was never dismayed. Even when a song was punctured by rowdy applause (her listeners sometimes responded to a piercing clinker with whoops of “Bravo! Bravo!”), the diva simply smiled and bowed. After all, she modestly murmured, didn’t Frank Sinatra arouse the same sort of buoyant enthusiasm among his adoring bobby soxers?” It wasn’t just the singing. She filled the stage with potted palms and flowers and appeared in costumes suitable for the song. For one of her favorites, “Angel of Inspiration,” she would dress in acres of tulle, complete with angel wings adorning her dumpy, unlikely-to-get-airborne figure. She was always accompanied by a pianist with the unlikely name of Cosmé McMoon, who did his best to adjust to her sense of rhythm, or lack thereof. Finally, in October 1944, at the age of 76, she rented Carnegie Hall and allowed the tickets to go on public sale. The concert sold out weeks in advance. The people lucky enough to get tickets cheered her to the rafters, but the critics were, predictably, less enthused. One described her as “undaunted by the composer’s intent.” Another wrote, “Only Mrs. Jenkins has perfected the art of giving added zest by improvising quarter tones, either above or below the original notes.” Robert Bager of the New York World-Telegram was more gentle: “She was exceedingly happy in her work” he wrote. “It is a pity so few artists are. And her happiness was communicated as if by magic to her listeners . . . who were stimulated to the point of audible cheering, even joyous laughter and ecstasy by the inimitable singing.” Her life work now complete, Florence Foster Jenkins died a month later. Fortunately for us, she recorded several songs and these are still available on Amazon on such albums as Florence Foster Jenkins and Friends: Murder on the High C’s. Or you can catch her splendiferous awfulness on YouTube (earlier bad link now fixed).
August 4, 2007
Terrorist Attack on New York by Revolutionary War Submarine? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:25 AM EST Yesterday morning three police boats, a helicopter, and the Coast Guard converged on a suspicious craft in New York Harbor approaching the Queen Mary 2. Fearing the worst as they moved in for an arrest, they surrounded a mostly submerged plywood egg containing Duke Riley, a Brooklyn resident who according to the story in today’s New York Times “emerged from his rusty hatch without the tall-boy can of beer he had taken into his vessel when it launched.” One of the police officers present remarked, “What are we going to do with this thing? It looks like the Turtle!” The officer knew what he was talking about. The craft was, in fact, a replica of the submarine Turtle built during the American revolution by a man named David Bushnell. In 1776 Bushnell took his one-man, pedal-powered wooden sub into New York Harbor and attempted to screw a time bomb into the hull of the flagship of the British fleet. Bushnell’s Turtle was an audacious attempt at the probably impossible long before the birth of the true submarine. It didn’t blow up any ships, but Bushnell survived, and one of his descendants was assisting Riley yesterday; another living relative is Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City. Riley, a sort of performance artist who last year built a makeshift illegal tavern on Rockaway Inlet in Queens to recreate the lawless atmosphere of the area a century ago—the police quickly put a stop to that, too—actually constructed a sub that was if anything even cruder than Bushnell’s. It was of cheap plywood coated with fiberglass, rather than Bushnell’s thick sections of hardwood, lacked enough ballast to get all the way underwater, which was probably lucky, and lacked any means of propulsion. “I’m not really a very technical kind of guy. I just guessed a lot on this,” he explained yesterday. He got out into the water off Red Hook with the help of friends in a rubber raft, floated on the current toward the Queen Mary 2, and apparently had no real plan for moving along from there. His arrest may have been his goal; the Times reports that his sub will make its next appearance in a Chelsea art gallery. American Heritage of Invention & Technology ran a full account of the original Turtle and of a recent more thoroughgoing, if less headline-grabbing, attempt to recreate it a few years back. You can read it here.
August 4, 2007
A Turtle Slideshow Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 10:25 AM EST Mr. Riley has posted an entertaining slideshow about his Turtle and yesterday’s events on Flickr. You can see it here.
August 2, 2007
America’s Worst Poet Ever? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 06:20 PM EST At least Julia A. Moore enjoys the tribute of immortal infamy. For my money, John F. Bair was as bad a poet as ever lived, yet no one remembers him today. I know of him because an autographed copy of The Complete Poetical Works of Rev. John Franklin Bair, 684 pages long, published in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1907, was left to me by my grandmother, who had treasured it for most of the twentieth century. Bair’s range is positively Shakespearean, from two quatrains about a humble farmyard scene . . . There was a lot, there was a hen,
There was a garden, shoo!
The man into his garden went,
Then hen she went in too. Down he stooped and seized a stone,
The hen cried, Gookle goo!
The stone descended from his hand,
The hen descended too. . . . to the 74-page epic “Drucilla,” with this stirring scene of Captain Long leaving to fight in the Spanish-American War:
The beautiful city of Frisco now many miles in the distance,
Now it has faded completely, nought can they see now but water,
Tears very freely are flowing as the boys think of their loved ones;
Many are seized with sea sickness, see them lean over the railing,
Pouring libations to Neptune time after time from their stomachs.
Weary, they lie down and slumber, morning dawns, they are no better,
Nothing will stay in their stomachs, never saw anything like it.
Day after day thus they suffer as they glide over the ocean. Bair does not fear to address in rhyme the burning issues of the day, and sometimes his words may even be taken as prophetic: “The plague, the plague, halloo, hey, hey!/ Just see ’tis coming right this way/ Across the Atlantic Ocean route/ And we’ve no fence to keep it out!/ That plague is foreign immigration/ From ev’ry European nation,/ They’re coming, thickly, more and more,/ Each year to fair Columbia’s shore . . ./ Let the ballots of one and all/ Be used to build a monstrous wall . . ./ Let that wall be so high and strong/ That it may turn that endless throng/ Of lawless criminals away/ From our fair shores now and alway.” And he knows how to find the moral lessons in history. In his poem “Ohio’s Presidents,” he writes of Rutherford B. Hayes, “I adore him because, like a Christian so true,/ One brave noble act he determined to do,/ ’Twas to always discard the use of the wine/ Whenever with guests he would sit down and dine.” He later adds, “James Garfield, like Hayes, discarded the wine/ Whenever, with guests, he sat down to dine,/ He went to his work and with all his might/ He firmly stood up for that which was right,” before greeting the election of William McKinley with, “But we hope that he too like James A. Garfield,/ To wine and dishonesty never will yield,/ But that every time he sits down to dine/ He too will discourage the use of the wine./ We hope that McKinley successful will be,/ And that from distress we will ever be free,/ May the blessings of heaven upon him descend/ And guide and direct him till his term shall end.” He does not touch on President Grant’s drinking or not in his earlier passage on that Ohioan. Bair was such a complete poet that even lack of inspiration was inspiration: One entire poem reads, “I’m tired and I’m sleepy,/ My mind will not work right,/ So I’ve about concluded/ I’ll write no more tonight.” Should such a bard be forgotten?
August 2, 2007
When She Was Bad She Was Horrid Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:20 PM EST An Associated Press story tells of efforts in Edinburgh, Scotland, to honor William McGonagall, a native of the city who is widely acclaimed as “the world’s worst poet.” As an example, the article cites this excerpt from what may be McGonagall’s most famous work, “The Tay Bridge Disaster”: Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember’d for a very long time. Okay, I’ll admit, that is pretty bad. And plenty more along similar lines can be found here. But for capturing the narrative sweep of an epic tragedy, does it really compare with this: Have you heard of the dreadful fate
Of Mr. P. P. Bliss and wife?
Of their death I will relate,
And also others lost their life;
Ashtabula Bridge disaster,
Where so many people died
Without a thought that destruction
Would plunge them ‘neath the wheel of tide. Those lines were not written by any whiskey-sipping habitué of cosmopolitan Edinburgh; they sprang from the fertile soil of America’s heartland, courtesy of a Michigan farmer named Julia A. Moore. McGonagall the world’s worst? Ha! It’s the old, old story: A woman has to be twice as bad as a man to get half the recognition. This all stems from the “separate spheres” mentality, in which women were allowed to be bad at cooking, driving, and other humble pursuits, while leaving incompetence at lofty subjects like poetry, politics, and warfare to the “stronger” sex. These days Julia Moore is forgotten; no plaques, monuments, or memorials perpetuate her memory. Yet in the years following the 1876 publication of her debut collection, The Sentimental Song Book, Moore was celebrated nationwide as the Sweet Singer of Michigan. Today, when the Internet makes a cornucopia of awful writing available with a few clicks, it can be hard to appreciate the impact made by Moore’s not-slim-enough volume. Reviews ranged from mock raves (“a coal of fire on the altar of poesy,” “a collection the like of which has never tested the strength of type before”) to blunt ridicule (“Shakespeare, if he could read it, would be glad he was dead”). The acclaim was surely deserved for an author capable of writing lines like the following: “His father and mother being dead,/ It left him an orphan boy./ When he was with his brother/ His health failed him, poor boy./ Kind friends they thought ‘twould do him good/ To travel for his health;/ To California he did go/ With his Uncle Zera French.” In common with Lord Byron (of whom she wrote, “‘Lord Byron’ was an Englishman/ A poet I believe,/ His first works in old England/ Was poorly received”), she did not hesitate to strike back at her critics in verse: “Perhaps they talk for meanness/ And perhaps it is in jest,/ If they leave out their freeness/ It would suit me now the best.” Yet that was as much hostility as Moore, who clearly merited the “Sweet” half of her sobriquet, was capable of. In the end, she threw herself on the mercy of her readers: “And now, kind friends, what I have wrote/ I hope you will pass o’er/ And not criticise as some have done/ Hitherto herebefore.” Satirists from Bill Nye to Mark Twain imitated the Sweet Singer, often with quite amusing results, but none could match Moore’s guileless blend of banality and self-assurance. Like Walt Whitman, Moore was at her best when celebrating the richness and exuberance of American life: “On a moonlight evening, in the month of May/ A number of young people were playing at croquet.” Elsewhere, not unlike a later poet with the same last name—Marianne Moore, who penned odes to the Brooklyn Dodgers—the Sweet Singer immortalized the Grand Rapids Cricket Club: “In Grand Rapids is a handsome club/ Of men that cricket play/ As fine a set of skillful men/ That can their skill display.” Julia Moore ended her career at her husband’s insistence after being jeered at a public reading in December 1878, but discerning readers and critics have never forgotten the Sweet Singer of Michigan. Readers who wish to experience Moore’s work for themselves can purchase Mortal Refrains, a reprint of her complete works, edited and with an introduction by Thomas J. Riedlinger, or visit this website. Julia A. Moore exemplified a newly confident America, one that no longer deferred to the Old World even in pursuits requiring previously unimagined levels of ineptitude. Moreover, in an era of rampant sexism, she struck a resounding blow for equality, demonstrating that badness knows no gender. Most of all, in the nation’s centennial year, her debut volume served as a second Declaration of Independence, heralding a world where an unschooled woman in a land recently reclaimed from wilderness, strengthened by years of farm toil and nourished by the prairie sun, could be more than a match for the worst Europe had to offer.
August 2, 2007
Elizabeth I Returns III Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:05 AM EST I am glad Mr. Gordon shares my enthusiasm for Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I also enjoyed Mrs. Brown, though I agree that it’s not exactly “the stuff of which apotheoses are made.” That said, neither is Warm Springs, the HBO film about FDR, featuring Kenneth Branagh. But that has more to do with the biographical moment the filmmakers chose to portray than the qualities and achievements of their subject. A tiny quibble with Mr. Gordon’s post—“As far as I know,” he writes, “G&S never referred directly to Queen Victoria. No fools they.” In one of my favorite moments in The Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert and Sullivan actually do mention Queen Victoria, and to great comic effect. It’s toward the end of the play, when those dastardly pirates are, at last, apprehended. The sergeant tells the Pirate King, “We charge you to surrender, in the name of Queen Victoria!” Much to the audience’s surprise, the King replies, “We yield at once, most humbly; for, with all our faults, we love our Queen.” “Yes, yes,” the police echo. “With all their faults, they love their Queen.” I imagine the authors of this pithy scene did, too.
August 2, 2007
Elizabeth I Returns II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:50 AM EST I thank Alexander Burns for telling me of the forthcoming Elizabeth: The Golden Age. It looks so terrific that I will probably bestir myself sufficiently to see it in a movie theater rather than wait a few months and get the DVD. He writes, “Mr. Gordon wrote yesterday about Elizabeth I, who is ‘forever enshrined as the apotheosis of English monarchs, clear-eyed assessments be damned.’ I’m not sure what Gilbert and Sullivan would think of this, not to mention Queen Victoria herself . . .” Well, here’s what Gilbert and Sullivan thought of Elizabeth I (while making fun of the House of Lords in Iolanthe): When Britain really ruled the waves—
(In good Queen Bess’s time)
The House of Peers made no pretence
To intellectual eminence,
Or scholarship sublime;
Yet Britain won her proudest bays
In good Queen Bess’s glorious days! As far as I know, G&S never referred directly to Queen Victoria. No fools they. They were both great queens, and they both have had the ultimate in historical compliments bestowed upon them: to have their names become adjectives to denote the times in which they lived. But as for which queen better deserves to have the title of “apotheosis of English monarchs” bestowed upon her by popular (as opposed to professional historical) acclaim, I would offer this bit of evidence: Compare Elizabeth I: The Golden Age with the most recent movie about Queen Victoria, Mrs. Brown. The former is the story of a monarch as the heroic leader of her people in a time of national crisis. The latter is a quite touching story of a woman—who happened to be the Queen of England—helped out of her inconsolable grief over the death of her husband by a bumptious, pushy, often drunken servant who was hated by everyone else, from the other servants to the Prince of Wales. While a superb movie, I don’t think Mrs. Brown is the stuff of which apotheoses are made.
August 1, 2007
Elizabeth I Returns Posted by Alexander Burns at 07:45 PM EST In my post last weekend about the movie Hairspray, I neglected to mention something that might be of interest to readers of AmericanHeritage.com. John Steele Gordon, by utter coincidence, has given me a perfect opportunity to correct this omission. Mr. Gordon wrote yesterday about Elizabeth I, who is “forever enshrined as the apotheosis of English monarchs, clear-eyed assessments be damned.” I’m not sure what Gilbert and Sullivan would think of this, not to mention Queen Victoria herself, but that’s entirely beside the point. Mr. Gordon quotes Elizabeth’s 1588 speech to her troops at Tilbury, in which she announced: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.” My fellow blog contributor asks whether Shakespeare could have written better words. I haven’t the faintest idea, but I doubt that any playwright or filmmaker could turn this speech into a more dramatic scene than the one already preserved in popular memory. At least I would doubt that, had I not seen, last Saturday, a preview for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, the Working Titles Films sequel to Cate Blanchett’s magnificent 1998 film, Elizabeth. In The Golden Age, Blanchett returns as the queen, Geoffrey Rush is back as Sir Francis Walsingham, and Clive Owen appears for the first time as Walter Raleigh. I expect this film, like Elizabeth, will take its fair share of creative liberties with history. But I also expect it will be a damned good film. One doesn’t see very many brand-new high-quality movies about history—or, at least, about history before 1900—and this looks like it might be a welcome contribution to the genre. I might end up disappointed – but watch the preview for yourself, and see if you don’t end up with similarly high expectations.
August 1, 2007
The Guerre de Course Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:55 PM EST In this website’s lead piece earlier this week “The Confederates’ Devastating Naval Weapon,” John Steele Gordon wrote that the Confederacy’s campaign against U.S. merchant shipping “was perhaps the South’s greatest victory of the war”, noting that “an inferior naval power, unable to slug it out gun for gun with a stronger power, has little alternative but to adopt the strategy of the ‘guerre de course,’ or war on the run. It means attacking the enemy’s commercial shipping with fast vessels that can strike quickly and then flee over the horizon and hide in the vastness of the ocean. This has a greater effect than merely capturing a few ships and cargoes, for it sends insurance rates soaring and forces the enemy to divert naval resources needed elsewhere.” He continues, “The strategy can be devastatingly effective. Had Germany concentrated more on building submarines before World War II instead of diverting much of its shipbuilding capacity to a surface fleet that could not match the Royal Navy’s, it might well have won the Battle of the Atlantic and thus the war.” As for the Second Word War and the Battle of the Atlantic, maybe, and Churchill later claimed that he’d worried about this more than he did about any other part of the war. On the other hand, had the Germans deployed more submarines sooner, the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy might then have earlier adopted convoying, and more quickly allocated long-range aircraft to the Battle of the Atlantic, which could have shut down the threat, because when the Allies eventually did that, they won the Battle of the Atlantic. Submarines were so devastating because the Allied navies initially fought them so ineffectively, resenting the diversion of resources to antisubmarine warfare, and made the early mistake of committing too large a force to an attempt to hunt down enemy subs, when there was not enough force left over for escort duties. But what the Allies had to do was have their merchantmen avoid the subs, or drive off subs that found merchantmen; finding and sinking enemy submarines was by comparison irrelevant to the outcome of the war. Aircraft forced the subs below the surface, where most of them were slower than most merchantmen, which did a lot to win the crucial defensive portion of the battle, and convoying did the rest. But however great a mistake the Germans made in not committing more resources to the guerre de course, I think that for the Confederacy the guerre de course was a strategic blind alley. The reason the guerre de course had to fail was that in the 1860s the industrialized United States already spanned a continent, and in the long term it needed to import very little—maybe nothing—to prosecute the war. The Confederacy had a feeble industrial base and needed to import a good deal while exporting cotton to pay for what couldn’t be had on credit. The C.S.A. did superbly at the guerre de course, and lost anyway. The U.S. Navy applied our sea power via the Anaconda Plan, which Mr. Gordon notes worked brilliantly, and made a significant contribution to the American victory; compared with the casualties inflicted on the battlefield by the Confederate armies, the Confederate navy’s effort never produced effective political pressure on the American government. All the Confederate navy did was add to the United States’ costs, and whatever the C.S.A. spent on naval war was money wasted. Come to think of it, when did the guerre de course ever produce a victory in war, rather than merely add to a war’s cost? Commerce raiding was the naval strategy of the Confederacy, the Wilhelmine empire of Germany, and also of the French monarchy, the French Republic, and the Napoleonic Empire. It failed every time. This is not to say that total blockade by a superior naval force, one that strangles an enemy’s economy, will not make a great contribution to victory—blockade was part of the mix of forces that worked against the Confederacy, also against Wilhelmine Germany. Blockade did terrible damage to imperial Japan, and it would almost certainly have inflicted many millions of casualties had it gone on into 1946. Blockade might do terrible damage to the Islamic Republic of Iran if we tried it, and its probable effects on the Chinese economy may be keeping Taiwan free. But the guerre de course waged by an inferior naval power has a pretty feeble record.
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