Tag Archives: military

235. 1989 Revisited

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This follows Tuesday’s post. 

In the early nineties, my wife and I were traveling on a train in Germany, where we found ourselves sharing a compartment with a young German college student. We congratulated her on Germany’s recent reunification. She became flustered and could not understand why we, as Americans, could be concerned with the reunification of her little country.

Germany is not a little country. It fought the British Empire to a standstill in WWI, then conquered essentially all of mainland Europe in WWII, and today is a leading state in a more-or-less united Europe. But this young woman would have been the granddaughter of people who were there at Germany’s defeat in 1945, and her parents would have grown up in the western half of a nation, whose eastern half had been gobbled up by the Soviets. Her humility made sense, at that moment in history.

Germany was divided in 1945 and reunified in 1990, but the real year of change for Germany and the rest of eastern Europe was 1989. That is why I slid Raven’s Run into that year when I began to post it in the twenty-first century.

**       **       **

On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa (death sentence) against Salman Rushdie. Even before a year of great progress in international relations had fully begun, the sound of the coming world challenges were echoing in from the Middle East. The next day, the Soviet Union announced that the last of its troops had left Afghanistan, ending a fruitless nine year war that some called Russia’s Viet Nam. Unfortunately, America didn’t get the message about the fruitlessness of trying to change Afghanistan.

The Warsaw Pact alliance was getting shaky. For forty five years Russian had maintained its dominance over eastern Europe by military might. It had cost them, in rubles, in the lost productivity involved in maintaining a huge standing army, and in the growing recalcitrance of the peoples under their domination.

There had been other risings during that near half century – in East Germany in 1953,  and in Hungary and Poland in 1956. But by 1989, conditions within Russia itself had deteriorated badly. Russia’s new leader Mikhail Gorbachev was ready for change. When mass protests occurred in Hungary in March, he allowed reforms to begin. It was a far cry from the Russian tanks and guns of 1956.

The Hungarian revolution of 1956 had been put down ruthlessly. Officially, it was not seen as a Hungarian uprising, but as something orchestrated by the West. Now the story was changed, and it was officially accepted as a popular movement. Soon the Hungarians began tearing down the fence that closed off the Austrian border, which eventually had major consequences for East Germany.

Germany was partitioned in 1945 and Berlin, inside the Russian sector, was also partitioned. The two Germanies were fenced apart, and between the two Berlins the East Germans, at Russian insistence, built a massive concrete barrier. The Berlin Wall became the visible symbol for the separation of Europe.

By stealth and guile, innumerable refugees fled from East Germany to the west, but no defections got as much attention as those that broke through, over, and under the Berlin Wall.

With loosening of restraints in Hungary, East Germans defections intensified. For decades, they had vacationed in Hungary. Now they went to Hungary by the thousands and crossed from there to Austria. By September, 30,000 had escaped. When the East German government closed that route, East Germans flocked to Czechoslovakia where they descended on the Hungarian and West German embassies. In October, the East German government closed the border with Czechoslovakia. Those East Germans who had not been able to escape, turned to protests, which grew weekly in size. A shoot to kill order was given, then retracted under pressure from Gorbachev. By late October, the crowds of demonstrators numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

The East German government relented and opened the Berlin wall. East German people then tore it down.

Throughout eastern Europe, variations on the theme played out. Dozens of countries were freed from Soviet domination, but there was one massive casualty. Yugoslavia, a conglomeration of smaller states since WWI, disintegrated shortly after the breakup of the Warsaw Pact nations, leading to wars throughout the nineties.

Germany reunified in 1990 and the Soviet Union dissolved into its component states in 1991.

191. Nobody Won

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World War I began 102 years ago today with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and continued until November of 1918. Millions died, centuries old dynasties disappeared, countries ceased to exist, and new countries were formed. It was the Great War, the war to end all wars, but when it was over, the dance continued.

Nobody really won. But then again, no one deserved to. It was, in many ways, a continuation of wars from Napoleon onward through the Crimea, when dozens of European countries, regions or ethnic groups tried to gain dominance, or to retain dominance, or to avoid being dominated. Only the last might be considered valid. Before the final smoke of battle had cleared at the end of World War I, the seeds of World War II had sprouted and were growing strong.

Until past the middle of the nineteenth century, Germany did not exist as a modern nation. Numerous small states coalesced under pressure from Prussia into a single country – Germany – in 1871. France and Russia feared this shift in power, and formed an alliance to counteract it. Germany reacted by forming an alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire. Italy joined Germany and Austria shortly after. Britain reacted to the change in Europe by aligning itself with old enemies France and Russia.

The assassination caused Austria-Hungary to force war on the Kingdom of Serbia. Russia intervened on Serbia’s behalf, and the dominos fell.

In America, we tend to think of Germany as the aggressor and Britain as the victim. That won’t really hold water. All the groups on the battlefield were in contention for colonies, wealth, power, and trade. Germany was newly arrived on the world stage and aggressive. Bismarck made a good cartoon villain – he is sometimes painted as a sort of proto-Hitler – and the British have always been a gentle and civilized people in their own eyes and ours. Even though Americans would never have achieved independence from Britain without the French navy, we still think of Britain as our mother country.

It isn’t.

At least it is no more the mother country to America than France, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Scotland (who were not part of Britain when America was colonized, and who were still at war with England thirty years before 1776), Norway, Sweden, Italy, Spain, a dozen European states that no longer exist, China, Japan, and – oh yes – Germany. And let’s not forget Africa.

During the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century, European nations changed allies more often than hippies changed partners at a love-in. Britain had been at war with her World War I ally Russia just sixty years earlier in the Crimea, and had been at war with her World War I ally France for most of the preceding two hundred years. Who was on our side and who was on their side was mostly an accident of which decade the war broke out.

I admit to an illogical fondness for Buchan and Edwardian espionage novels, but I also know that war was largely about possessing the wealth of Africa, the Middle East, India, and the Far East. The Germans who died under English guns were as much the victims of a senseless war as the English who died under German guns.

The people of the colonies world were the victims, whether there was a war going on or not.

190. Riddle of the Sands

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Riddle of the Sands was the first British spy story, according to Eric Ambler. Over the years, it has been a favorite of lovers of old-fashioned British writing and of small boat sailors, both real and wannabe. Riddle of the Sands is fiction, but it usually get listed with such books as Falcon on the Baltic (referenced internally) or A Voyage Alone in the Yawl Rob Roy – century old books about real small boat journeys.

Don’t expect a thriller; it may say thriller on your copy’s cover, but you know how unreliable back blurbs are. If you are a fan of Bond and Bourne, you’ll fall asleep by the third page, but it is one of my all time favorite books because it is so English, in the best sense of the word.

You might get the idea from the BREXIT posts and from 188. Before the Storm that I am down on the English. Far from it. It’s just that they spent several centuries as winners on the world stage, and winners get a lot of chances to do terrible things to the losers. America has now inherited their position, along with all its moral perils.

Riddle of the Sands is the story of two Brits, Davies and Carruthers, on an extended exploration of the waters off the Netherlands and Germany a decade before World War I. It unfolds slowly, in typical old-British fashion with intimations from the first that there is more going on than appears on the surface. Carruthers finally worms the truth out of Davies, and discovers that he is convinced that Dollmann, a German yachtsman of his acquaintance, is in fact a renegade Englishman acting as a spy for the Germans. Davies fears that there is a plot afoot to do great harm to England, and he has recruited Carruthers to help him ferret it out.

The plot against England is real and the danger is imminent, and its unfolding is properly slow and logical. But the charm of the book lies elsewhere, in the day to day work of seamanship as the two try to discover Dollmann’s intentions. And they are such good chaps, in the most English sense of decency, courage, and selfless patriotism.

Dollmann’s plot is uncovered, the British authorities are warned and danger is averted. Yet, at the end of the book, the author complains that the events uncovered by Davies and Carruthers have again been forgotten, and danger is still on the horizon.

Indeed, it was.

189. World War Zero

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They called it the Great War, for its size and horror. The term World War I came later, to distinguish it from WW II, which came with even greater size and horror. Neither name is accurate. By 1914, Britain had already been waging world wars for at least 250 years.

Of course early Europeans had been fighting since the first Homo Sapiens Sapiens hit the last Neanderthal on the head with a rock. With increasing food sources, skirmishes became battles. With the rise of social organization, so that armies could stay in the field longer, battles became wars. With increasing population density, the wars could become both wide spread and long lasting, but a world war could not be fought until Europe exploded across the globe as the Age of Exploration morphed into the Age of Colonization.

Portugal began it all. Spain – including Columbus – came close behind, followed by the Dutch, French and English. Exploration led to colonization, and colonies were fought over. The Dutch were early world wide colonizers, especially in the Americas and the far East. The Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1600s were primarily fought in the North Sea, but the prize was world domination. The English won, New Amsterdam became New York, and the Dutch were left dominating the Spice Islands (basically modern Indonesia).

North America was fought over for centuries by Spain, England and France. Our French and Indian War was only one theatre in the globe spanning Seven Years War, fought by England and her allies against France and hers. That conflict involved Europe, the Americas, Africa, India, and the Philippines.

The Treaty of Paris ended the war, but not the fighting. A decade later, France was again fighting the English as allies of the newly forming United States. The three way battle between France, England and Spain continued off and on through the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, and at every step the nations’ colonies were involved as actors or as pawns. The Louisiana Purchase, which defined America, came about because France, which had control of the territory through its control of Spain, needed to consolidate its position before engaging England, by obtaining money while getting rid of a vulnerable possession.

You should realize that I have left out innumerable wars, battles, and skirmishes to keep the size of this post in check. All this conflict was on a world wide scale, in pursuit of world wide trade. Call it World War Zero.

Needless to say, this much active history can’t pass without an accompanying literature. My personal interests are not military, but they are maritime, so I found myself caught up in the stories of “wooden ships and iron men” despite myself. I discovered Forrester’s Hornblower when I was in my twenties and read them all, several times. Hornblower is such a complex character, so full of ambition and self-doubt, that I can’t recommend him to everyone, even though he is my favorite. I would start someone new to this kind of novel with Kent’s Bolitho. He is a more normally heroic captain; I liked him quite well, but by the time I was half way through his adventures I had overdosed on the genre. Bear in mind that I had probably read all the Hornblowers three times before I discovered Bolitho, so that isn’t a criticism. For the last decade or so, O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin books have been widely popular. By the time they came on the scene, I had moved on, so I can only report them as hearsay.

174. Painfully United

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The UK has a painfully long name – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. How it came to be united is also painful; it is a millennium long story full of warfare, with some significant sore losers.

Since BREXIT, every knowledgable news commentator is predicting at least a partial breakup of Great Britain. A full understanding of why would take a book. I am going to put it into shorthand, with all the inaccuracies that entails. None of what follows is wrong, but it’s a kindergarten primer.

Once upon a time the British Isles (that includes Ireland) were Celtic. During the first millennium AD, Germanic invaders began to raid and colonize. These invaders were speakers of Germanic languages, including the languages ancestral to English. That doesn’t mean they were Germans, as we use the word today. Germany came to nationhood only very recently.

Over centuries, these Germanic speaking invaders came to conquer a good deal of what is now England, and were essentially the native population by 1000 AD. One group, the Angles gave us the name England.

Meanwhile, a  bunch of Vikings (Northmen, Normans) conquered the part of western France which came to be called Normandy. They shed their Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family and took up French, along with wine, clothing that wasn’t fur, and other aspects of a better life style. in 1066, William the Bastard crossed the channel and conquered England, becoming William the Conqueror. He brought top-down feudalism, displaced the local lords, handed out fiefdoms to his followers, and introduced French as the language of the court. Middle English became the language of the commoners; it would take centuries for English to supplant French as the language of the intelligentsia.

The Robin Hood legends with poor Saxon serfs under the hated Norman lords comes from this period.

Wales fell under English domination through simple conquest in 1284. Full union with England took place in 1536, at which time Welsh law was suppressed.

In what would become Scotland, ancestral languages similar to Middle English had already overtaken the lowlands by the time the followers of William moved in. Beyond the highland line, as in Ireland and Wales, Celtic languages remained. Over the centuries, Scotland became a nation, with its own kings, traditions, and court culture. As it did so, the ancestral languages evolved into Scots. Scots is not English with a bad accent; it is a similar but separate language with its own literature, used in the Scottish court.

Scotland and England fought intermittently throughout the centuries. Since England was larger and more fertile, and could field larger armies for longer times, England won more often than it lost. Scotland became sometimes a vassal state and at other times, nearly so.

When Queen Elizabeth died childless, her cousin James the Sixth of Scotland was given the English throne. His proper title became James the Sixth and First, but the English ignored his Scottish heritage. So did he. He was ill used as a child in Scotland, and he couldn’t get to London fast enough. Although a Scottish King on an English throne, his home country was only a bad memory to him. 1603 was called the Union of the Crowns, but Scotland still had its own parliament.

For four generations spanning most of a century, the Scottish/English kings had their hands full fighting against English protestants who disliked their Catholic leanings. Back in Scotland, rabid Protestants had increased their power. Mid-century brought about the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, sometimes called the English Civil War, although it was also fought well beyond the English border. It was a complex situation, with the English vs. the Scots, Royalists vs. those who opposed the Divine Rights of Kings, and Catholics vs. Protestants. Individuals found themselves torn between conflicting loyalties, and the changing of sides was common. The planting of American colonies was heavily influenced by these events.

1707 saw the Act of Union. The Scottish Parliament was subsumed by the English one, after English manipulations had nearly bankrupted Scotland. The Scots language was suppressed. At one point, maps labeled Scotland as North Britain.

Events in Ireland were even more harsh, with multiple invasions from England, annexation, the plantation of Scottish protestants in Northern Ireland during the War of the Three Kingdoms, the genocidal Irish Famine, rebellion, partition, and the Troubles. Since 1921 Northern Ireland has been part of Great Britain while the bulk of the island became the separate Republic of Ireland. Ironically, this was done by vote, during which Northern Ireland stayed with Great Britain basically because the mass plantation of Scottish (now Scots-Irish) Protestants three hundred years earlier had shifted demographics.

If this sounds like England bashing, I apologize. It’s a complex situation, but winners tend to be hated by losers, and those feelings can last a long time. Just ask anyone who lives on the route of General Sherman’s march to the sea. England, AKA Great Britain, was the most powerful country on Earth for a third of a millennium. Such a country makes enemies. Unfortunately, some of them live in England’s back yard.

168. A Woman in Space

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53 years ago today, the first woman flew in space. Her name was Valentina Tereshkova. The Soviets hailed her as a hero of the People (see131. Chasing Cosmonauts), and as proof that Russia was ahead of the US in social advancement as well as in space travel.

The US treated her as a joke.

Both assessment were wrong, although both contained kernels of truth. Even today, half a century after the event, it is difficult to come to a balanced appraisal of the flight of Vostok 6. Russian propaganda and American dismissal still cloud the picture.  I am taking a shot at accuracy here, but a workman is only as good as his tools, so keep a measure of skepticism in mind.

Tereshkova’s father was MIA during WWII, leaving her mother to raise Tereshkova alone. She left school early to join her mother working in a state textile mill. There she joined a parachute club, which was a military auxiliary, and became an expert parachutist as well as secretary of the local Komsomol.

Early in the Soviet space program, there was a movement to add female cosmonauts, mostly for propaganda purposes. Candidates did not need flight experience since the Vostok craft were fully automated, but the did need extensive parachute experience, since at that early stage cosmonauts finalized their landings by personal parachute (see130.  First Into Space). Tereshkova was one of fifty-four candidates interviewed, and one of five who made it through training.

Tereshkova was personable, doctrinally sound in communism, from the peasant and workers class, hard working, willing, and an expert parachutist. She was not well educated nor an experienced pilot. Ponomaryova and Solovyova, female cosmonaut trainees who had those additional qualifications, were scheduled for a later, more sophisticated flight, and Tereshkova was scheduled for the Vostok 5/6 dual flight.

Vostok 5, crewed by  Valery Bykovsky, was launched on June 14, scheduled for an eight day flight, but a low orbit forced it to be shortened to five. Vostok 6, crewed by Tereshkova, was launched on June 16 and remained in orbit for three days. They passed within five kilometers while in space.

During the flight, Tereshkova discovered that the automatic orientation system had her flying sideways in orbit, an error that would have been fatal during reentry. Ground control confirmed and corrected. Whether she activated her final reentry personally or not is still unclear.

In those early days, landing accuracy had not been perfected. When she ejected from her craft, she found herself coming down into a large lake, and was only saved from downing by a strong wind that carried her to a rough landing on shore.

American astronauts, all of whom were test pilots, had little respect for the skills of Soviet cosmonauts. They used Tereshkova’s flight to justify their ridicule, saying that the Russians had simply pulled a woman off the line in a factory and sent her up into space as a glorified passenger. There was a bit of justification in their assessment. It was a propaganda stunt, but that didn’t mitigate the dangers. Tereshkova was uneducated, but by six years later she had taken advantage of her situation to earn a degree in engineering. She was not a pilot when chosen for training, but by the time of Vostok 6 she had learned to fly jets and had made 120 additional jumps to hone her skills as a parachutist.

Alan Shepard was a superb test pilot when he flew his Mercury mission, but he had almost no control over his capsule and nobody called him spam-in-a-can. Well, actually, Chuck Yeager did, but that’s what too much testosterone will do to your thinking.

Tereshkova’s contribution to space flight was real, but the Soviet commitment to equality was not. Ponomaryova and Solovyova’s flight was cancelled, and it would be nineteen years before another Soviet woman flew in space. It would be twenty years before the first American woman, Sally Ride, entered space, even though thirteen American female astronauts had been chosen and trained during the early sixties. Like Ponomaryova and Solovyova, they never flew.

167. On the Brink of Glory

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Not everyone who does the work endures the danger is there to reap the glory.

Take Eliot See and Charles Bassett for example. Both were chosen for the second group of astronauts, and were assigned as the crew of Gemini 9. They were flying together in a T-38 trainer en route to prepare for that mission when they went down on approach to Lambert field in bad weather. Both were killed, crashing into the building where their spacecraft had been built, not 500 feet from the Gemini 9 itself.

Gemini 9 would have been the first spaceflight for each man.

Everyone knows the names Grissom, White, and Chaffee, who died on the launchpad in the “Apollo One” fire. Grissom and White were veteran astronauts. Roger Chaffee was among the third group of astronauts chosen. He worked through the Gemini program without being given a mission, then was chosen to replace Donn Eisele, who had been injured during training, on the first scheduled Apollo mission. That flight ended in fire, on the ground during routine preparations; Chaffee never got to fly in space. Eisele recovered from his injuries and flew on the next (and first successful) Apollo mission.

Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. was the first African-American astronaut. (Ed Dwight had been an astronaut candidate earlier, but was forced out.) At Edwards Air Force Base, Lawrence investigated unpowered glide return characteristics using an F-104 Starfighter, contributing greatly to knowledge necessary to the Space Shuttle program. He was assigned to the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, but before he flew in space, he was killed in a crash landing while acting as a pilot instructor to a trainee. When the MOL project was abandoned, many of it’s astronauts transferred to NASA, where they became the backbone of the early Space Shuttle missions. Lawrence would almost certainly have been among them.

Milburn Apt became the first man to reach Mach 3, and died in the same flight. It was his his first flight in the X-2 rocket plane. He achieved the mission objectives, but found that his flight had carried him unexpectedly far from Edwards. Because of the X-2’s noted instability, he was not scheduled to begin return maneuvers until his speed had dropped, but that would have carried him too far for a safe return glide. He began to turn back at above optimum speed, and lost control as turbulence knocked him unconscious. When he regained awareness, he ejected his safety capsule – the forward section of the craft – but did not survive.

Apt received unwanted posthumous fame. The cockpit camera recorded the final seconds of his flight, and that film became required viewing for all subsequent pilots preparing for hypersonic flight.

Apt’s daughter was two years old when he died. She later became a writer, and her Letter to My Father Concerning the State of the World is a moving exploration of what it meant to her to be the daughter of a test pilot who did not survive.

165. Hopping Across the Atlantic

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In False Fame on June 7, I gave Lindbergh a bit of a hard time. That was fair, but there is more to the story.  Lindbergh left New York, flew to Newfoundland, then crossed the Atlantic and landed in Paris, all in one unbroken flight and solo. No one had done that before and he deserved credit for his achievement.

During the New York to Newfoundland part of the flight, and crossing France at the other end, Lindbergh could have tried to set his plane down in a cow pasture if it had faltered. He would probably have lived to tell the tale. It is the over water part of his flight that scared those who followed his exploits and made him a hero.

However, eight other men had already crossed the Atlantic by air and two of them were on a non-stop flight.

***

A great deal of progress in aviation had taken place between the Wright brothers first flight and the end of WW I. By 1919, the U. S. Navy was ready to attempt a flight across the Atlantic, using Curtiss flying boats.

There was a generation of world wide flight, now largely forgotten, between world wars one and two, that used flying boats. The reason was simple – there were few airfields. If you wanted to fly to Cuba, for example, your only choice was to land in the water at Havana harbor. All that changed in the 40s when warring nations, especially the US and Britain, built military airfields across the globe. When peace returned, the day of the flying boat was over.

300px-Curtiss_NC-4_four_engine_configuration-detailIn 1919, that generation of flight was just beginning. The U. S. Navy had commissioned Glenn Curtis to build four flying boats before the end of WW I, and now planned to use them in an attempt to cross the Atlantic by air.

On May 8, the NC (Navy Curtiss) 1, 3, and 4 left New York on a three jump flight to Newfoundland, where they were repaired and readied for the longest over water part of the journey. They left Newfoundland on May 16, heading toward the Azores. A string of naval ships were set out along the way for navigation or rescue. The NC-4 arrived at the Azores after a 15 plus hour flight. The NC-1 and -3 didn’t make it. The NC-1 landed in the open ocean; it crew was rescued but the craft later sank. The NC-3 also landed in open water, then taxied the last 200 miles to the Azores.

The NC-4, now alone, left for Portugal on May 20, but didn’t get far. After repairs, it again departed on May 27 and arrived at Lisbon harbor ten hours later. From North America to Europe, the trip took just under 27 hours – or just under 11 days, depending on how you spin your figures. Subsequently, the NC-4 flew on to Portsmouth, England, making it the first flight from the United States to Great Britain.

All in all, three aircraft with six-man crews and 53 Naval support ships were involved in the journey. The crew of the NC-4 were Albert Cushing Read, Walter Hinton, Elmer Fowler Stone, James Breese, Eugene Rhodes, and Herbert Rodd.

Two weeks later two British aviators made the Atlantic crossing non-stop. We’ll look at their flight tomorrow.

163. X-craft

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Jay Miller wrote a book called The X-planes: X-1 through X-31, and later revised it to include craft through X-45. (Presently, the number is up to X-56.) If you are any kind of a space aficionado, you need to look it up in your local library. The only thing wrong with the book is its title; not all X-craft were planes.

When I was growing up, I was in love with the F-104 Starfighter and the X-15 rocket plane, two aircraft with markedly similar outlines. The F-104 was designed, a few prototypes were built and tested, then it went on to become one of the most successful fighter jets in history. The X-15 was designed, three were built (and rebuilt after various incidents), and tested. There were never any more X-15s, nor had there ever been a plan to build more. The X-15 was never a prototype, because a prototype is a first iteration, built to be tested, perfected and turned into a series. That is true whether you are talking about fighter jets or can openers, but not true of X-craft.

X-craft were something different. They were flying laboratories – a much overused term, but still accurate, although technology demonstrator is preferred.

After World War II, advances in flight by Germans, British, and Americans, along with nascent cold war tensions, put us on the edge of an unknown frontier. The “sound barrier” loomed as the best known obstacle to further advances in aviation, but there were a hundred other unknowns that never made it into the popular press. Wind tunnels could only tell so much, computer modeling was decades in the future, and it made no sense to build a squadron of high-performance aircraft that might or might not fly.

First_Supersonic_Flight_1997_Issue-32c

A glance at the first X-plane, the Bell X-1, gives clues to what was known and what was not known. We already knew that turbulence off the wing would foul up the tail controls at high speed, so the horizontal stabilizer was attached high up on the vertical stabilizer, not on the body. It was not known what negative effect the cockpit bubble would have, so the windscreen was faired into the shape of the fuselage. It was shaped like a 50 caliber bullet – everybody says that without explaining. It is a reference to the machine guns carried on fighter planes. Fired from a ground rest, those bullets would have been sub-sonic. The planes they were mounted on flew at subsonic speeds, but bullets fired from a plane in flight had been going supersonic for a long time.

An aside here for the non-nerd. Planes flying slower than the speed of sound are subsonic. That includes all commercial aviation except the Concorde. Planes flying faster than the speed of sound are supersonic. The X-1 and its follow-ons proved that supersonic flight is not problem. The problem is the transition zone, the trans-sonic region. Slower than sound, the accumulated shock wave is out in front of you. Faster than sound, it is behind you. At the speed of sound, it is right in your lap, trying to tear your plane apart. No modern, supersonic plane lingers at that speed.

The X-1 broke the sound barrier (i.e., passed through the transonic region into the supersonic region) on October 14, 1947, with Chuck Yeager at the controls.

Since this is A Writing Life, I’ll add that I was born about two months after the sound barrier was broken. I was present on the planet for almost all of the early X-craft explorations, although far too young to notice. When I became aware of the X-craft, I fell gloriously in love with them and the infatuation never passed.

The X-2 was a more normal looking aircraft, with swept wings and a pilot’s bubble. It carried supersonic speeds to new heights, but killed its pilot in the process. I will tell that story next Wednesday.

The X-3 was an extreme aircraft, stretched out and incredibly streamlined right down to the tip of its needle nose. It looked faster than any plane before or since, but it wasn’t. All that streamlining couldn’t make up for the fact that the engine slated for the plane wouldn’t fit, and the one that did fit was underpowered. The fastest (looking) plane in the sky flew slowly.

The X-4 was tailless and not successful. The X-5 tested variable sweep wing technology. The X-6 was an aborted project testing out the possibility of a nuclear powered aircraft. The X-8 was a small, unmanned rocket designed for upper atmospheric research. The X-7, and X-9 through X-12 were test beds for missile research. X-13 and X-14 were early attempts at Vertical TakeOff and Landing (VTOL).

Then came the coolest aircraft/spacecraft in the history of mankind, the X-15, which will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.

150. Old Enemies

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There are times when a man has to stand up and defend his country. That is the flip side to yesterday’s post criticizing boot camps.

Today we face Islamic extremists who would destroy us. We can bemoan the our mistakes in Iraq, but we have to move forward from where we are. Wishful thinking is of no value in this issue. We call them fanatics. That’s an accurate description, but it is not useful. It’s just another word like evil, enemy, or barbarian – just another word that means THEM, as opposed to US.

If we are going to understand Islamic terrorists in order to defeat them, we have to find the inner fanatic in our own culture, so we can start to see the world through their eyes. Today we will revisit a time when Christians were killing each other over doctrine. Tomorrow, we’ll compare that to Islam.

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Trying to compress two thousand years of Christian history into a few hundred words borders on the burlesque, but let’s try. Christianity began with Jesus, who did not write the Bible. Fundamentalists like my people believe that it was written by his immediate followers under the infallible inspiration of God, but textual evidence suggests that it was actually written hundreds of years later.

In any case, by the third century there were hundreds of “books” to chose from. The Church chose some and discarded many in order to create the Bible. This gives some validity to the Catholic notion that the word of the Church is more important than the Bible, or at least others’ interpretations of the Bible.

Within the Roman empire, Christianity went from persecuted, to allowed, to the official religion of the state. Then along came Martin Luther. He was not the first to question the Church, but he was the first one to live through the encounter, because of changes in world politics which pitted proto-German rulers against Rome and provided him with a sanctuary.

The dam broke and here came a vast flood of new denominations, each anti-Catholic and each disputing with its fellow Protestants. For protection, many of these denominations sought the protection of secular leaders. Protection from outside enemies soon moved toward forced conversions within an area. The Dutch and Swiss became largely Calvinist, many Germanic states became Lutheran, Ireland remained Catholic at the core, although under increasing pressure from their English conquerors, France and Spain remained Catholic, England became the realm of the Church of England, and Scotland fell under a particularly Knox-ious form of Calvinism.

From 1618 through 1648 the Thirty Years War decimated Europe as country after country fought to see which form of Christianity would prevail, cementing the notion of one realm, one ruler, one religion. The notion of individual choice in religion was crushed under the boots of Kings and generals. This era provided every denomination with myths of how THEY were trying to destroy OUR beliefs. That WE were also trying to destroy THEIR beliefs tends to be forgotten.

The English Civil War, also called the War of the Three Kingdoms, came hard on the heels of the Thirty Years War. American notions of religious freedom were born out of the horrors of a conflict where various interpretations of God’s Truth were enforced at sword point, and partisan armies swept the land. The American answer to all this was the separation of church and state, found in the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .

There is a bit of cynicism in this. Instead of insisting that God’s will be done, Americans have learned that the man in power rarely understands God’s will.