Felix Sockwell

Talking About Fear, Real and Imagined        NYT

31.10.2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/opinion/l31fear.html

Picture > Phan Thi Kim Phuc, center,
with her clothes torn off, flees with other South Vietnamese children
after a misdirected aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places on June 8, 1972.
A South Vietnamese plane mistakenly dropped its flaming napalm on South Vietnamese troops and civilians.
 Kim Phuc became a symbol of the civilian suffering of the Vietnam War. AP Photo/Nick Ut. Version recadrée.
http://www.nandotimes.com/nt/images/century/photos/century0256.html

1st Cartoon > Garland
The Daily Telegraph        31.5.2006

From L to R: US President George W. Bush, Statue of Liberty,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Caricature sans article (sur le site du DT).

2nd Cartoon > Dave Brown
The Independent        23.10.2006.
M: US President George W. Bush + Tony Blair's face on the leaf.

1 - South Vietnamese National Police Chief Brig Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan
executes a Viet Cong officer
with a single pistol shot in the head
in Saigon, Vietnam on Feb. 1, 1968.
Carrying a pistol and wearing civilian clothes,
the Vietcong guerrilla was captured near Quang Pagoda,
identified as an officer, and taken to the police chief.

AP Photo / Eddie Adams
http://www.nandotimes.com/nt/images/century/photos/century0258.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1309850,00.html
http://suntimes.com/output/obituaries/cst-nws-xadams20.html

Cartoon

Dave Brown

The Independent

1.6.2006

2 - US President George W. Bush

Topic: Haditha massacre
Related
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-05-27-iraqallegations_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-05-29-haditha_x.htm
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9803/16/my.lai/
http://www.cnn.com/US/9803/06/my.lai.ceremony/

Borders to be shut during iraqi poll

The Guardian        p.16

19.1.2005

Photo non légendée, non attirbuée
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1393271,00.html

Peter Brookes

The Times

August 9, 2005

L to R: Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Prescott, Jack Straw, ?.

Background
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicsobituaries/story/0,,1544701,00.html

Vic Harville

Little Rock, Arkansas -- Stephens Media Group        Cagle

20.7.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/harville.asp
 

war
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/worldspecial/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1103566,00.html

tug-of-war
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/weekinreview/04landler.html

wartime
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/books/17garner.html

during wartime        2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/
robert-fiskrsquos-world-a-fair-point-everyone-is-equal-in-their-suffering-during-wartime-1609206.html

warrior
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/08/first-world-war-franz-ferdinand-sarajevo

conflict
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/first-world-war-battle-of-arras

defuse

catastrophe
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/08/first-world-war-mobilisation

clash of civilizations

military build-up

peacenik

conscientious objection

conscientious objector
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/08/family-military-first-world-war

hawk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1557526,00.html

hawkish

war-mongering rhetoric

war poetry        2008
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/poetry/article5090356.ece

militancy

Islamic militant groups

War photographer > Iraq > The Diary of a Shooter > The Documentary Photography of Zoriah
http://www.diariesofashooter.com/stories.html
http://zoriah.com/archivemainpage.html

War photographer > Iraq > Stefan Zaklin
http://homepage.mac.com/szaklin/Menu2.html

War photographer > Peter Turnley > The Unseen Gulf War        1990-1991
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_intro.html
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt01.html

anti-war war photographer > Philip Jones Griffiths        1936-2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/mar/24/photography.usa

Gerald Scarfe

The Sunday Times

13 December 2009

Tony Blair, former Prime Minister.

Iraq war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/iraq

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01military.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01obama-text.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01wed1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/iraq-drawdown.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/washington/28troops.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/politics/27obama-text.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51P0AY20090227
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-02-26-marine_N.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/27/obama-iraq-war-end-august-2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/dec/18/uk-troop-withdrawal-iraq-brown
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/dec/17/iraq-agreement-brown-maliki
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/a-moment-for-truth-as-britain-exits-iraq-1202312.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/
without-fanfare-or-much-thanks-britain-departs-from-iraq-1202313.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/
patrick-cockburn-our-troops-had-few-friends-in-basra-1202314.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/
matthew-norman/matthew-norman-nobody-threw-shoes-at-brown-ndash-but-his-guilt-is-still-undeniable-1202268.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/0,2759,423009,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23trans.html

Cartoons > Cagle > Leaving Iraq        2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/IraqExit10/main.asp

President Obama’s Address on Iraq        31 August 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01military.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01obama-text.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Recent scenes from Iraq        July 19, 2010
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/07/recent_scenes_from_iraq.html

Timeline: Iraq 2003-2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/30/iraq-timeline-2003-2009

Politics and Iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/iraq

US military presence in Iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/feb/27/iraq-us-troops

US casualties in Iraq
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2008-03-13-iraq-casualties_N.htm

Inside the surge: the provinces, Iraq        2009
award-winning Guardian photographer Sean Smith
spent almost two months embedded with US forces in Iraq.
This film shows that despite President Bush's claims of increased Iraqi cooperation in Anbar,
there is still great fear and hostility against US troops
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/video/2007/sep/10/iraq.sean.smith

'shock and awe'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/feb/27/iraq-us-troops

Reuters > Special report > Iraq war
http://www.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/iraq

Iraq war > five years in Iraq > Cagle cartoons        2008
http://www.cagle.com/news/Iraq5Years/main.asp

Iraq war > five years on        2008
http://iraq.reuters.com/
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1929611920080319
http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=78455&newsChannel=topNews
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120592985052048279.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120593326652748375.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120588186774146747.html
http://blogs.wsj.com/iraq/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-19-war-protests_N.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/18/world/middleeast/20080319_IRAQWAR_TIMELINE.html#tab1
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/weekinreview/16jburns.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/opinion/l18iraq.html

Iraq war > David Kelly
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/0,,1002607,00.html

Iraq war > The Hutton Report
http://www.guardian.co.uk/hutton/0,,1021216,00.html

Saddam Hussein is executed        Saturday 30 December 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/dec/30/iraq.topstories3?DCMP=EMC-thewrap08

beheading of Nick Berg        2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/12/iraq.alqaida?DCMP=EMC-thewrap08

Saddam Hussein is captured        Sunday 14 December 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/dec/14/iraq.iraq1?DCMP=EMC-thewrap08

New York Times > Select Editorials on Iraq
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/opinion/series/editorials_on_iraq/index.html
 

Afghanistan war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/afghanistan
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/afghanistan/index.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/21/uk-special-envoy-afghanistan-quits
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/21/royal-marine-300th-british-death-afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2010/jun/21/military-afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/21/bloodiest-year-british-troops-afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/21/sangin-afghanistan-dead-british-soldiers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/sep/17/afghanistan-casualties-dead-wounded-british-data
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/21/british-forces-need-support-afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/21/afghanistan-300th-british-solider-dies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2010/jan/19/afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/21/afghan-refugees-who-responsible-deaths
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/11/afghanistan_november_2009.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/afghanistan_september_2009.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/07/in_afghanistan_part_one.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/07/in_afghanistan_part_two.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/24/british-soldiers-taliban-afghanistan
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2009/06/11/CSIS_AfPakWar_Status2009.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/0,,548335,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23trans.html

Obama's Address on the New Strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Interactive video and transcript
of President Obama’s speechat the United States Military Academy       December 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/02/world/middleeast/20091202-obama-policy.html#

The Taliban, a Sunni Islamist group
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/taliban/index.html

Six months in Afghanistan
Photojournalist John D McHugh reports for the Guardian        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/sixmonthsinafghanistan

Timeline > Afghanistan: 2001-2008 - A chronology
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/08/afghanistantimeline.afghanistan

Afghanistan > America's forgotten war
Photojournalist John D McHugh on the US's other war        2007-2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2008/apr/22/fightingseason
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/30/sixmonthsinafghanistan.afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/apr/28/afghanistan.photography?picture=333745896
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/28/afghanistan.sixmonthsinafghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/28/afghanistan.sixmonthsinafghanistan1

U.S. troops in Afghanistan > Subduing the Korengal Valley        2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/magazine/24afghanistan-t.html

U.S. troops in Afghanistan > the U.S. 10th Mountain Division
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,,1986485,00.html

British troops in Afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2211294,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2294063,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,,1698844,00.html

Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/03/question-time-afghanistan-wootton-basset
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/nov/20/wootton-bassett-100th-repatriation-soldiers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jul/10/soldiers-deaths-afghanistan-wootton

US Medevac helicopter
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/sep/08/sixmonthsinafghanistan.afghanistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2008/sep/04/sixmonthsinafghanistan.afghanistan

New York Times > Select Editorials on Afghanistan
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/series/select-editorials-on-afghanistan/index.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, June, 2010
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/afghanistan_june_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, May, 2010
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/afghanistan_may_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, February, 2010
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/02/afghanistan_february_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, January, 2010
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/01/afghanistan_january_2010.html

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, October, 2009
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/10/afghanistan_october_2009.html
 

Vietnam war

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/v/vietnam_war/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1726840,00.html

World War II        1939-1945

http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/0,,1085469,00.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/
http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/

Description: Australian infantry wearing Small Box Respirators (SBR).
The soldiers are from the 45th Battalion, Australian 4th Division
at Garter Point, Ypres sector,
27 September 1917.
Source: Australian War Memorial catalogue number E00825.
Date: 27 September 1917
Author: Photo by Captain Frank Hurley.

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Australian_infantry_small_box_respirators_Ypres_1917.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I

World War I / The Great War        1914-1918

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/armistice-day-the-great-war-and-the-words-we-mustnt-forget-1818092.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/armistice-90-years-on-all-those-pals-of-mine-should-be-here-1012492.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/09/armistice-day-first-world-war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/08/family-military-first-world-war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/08/first-world-war-mobilisation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/08/first-world-war-anti-war-sentiments
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/05/poetry-andrewmotion
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/
band-of-brothers-a-tale-of-war-loss-and-remembrance-on-the-killing-fields-of-france-994636.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-killing-fields-of-the-first-world-war-979730.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/24/firstworldwar.military
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/08/first-world-war-anti-war-sentiments
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/08/first-world-war-franz-ferdinand-sarajevo
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-27-cover-ww1-vet_N.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/08/first-world-war-anti-war-sentiments
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/world_war_i/197437.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/worldwarone/
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWW.htm
http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/

World War I / The Great War > trenches
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/first-world-war-western-front
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/05/poetry-andrewmotion

World War I / The Great War > Armistice Day
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/09/armistice-day-first-world-war

World War I / The Great War > poppy

world war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1465040,00.html  

hybrid warfare
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/americas/23military.html

urban warfare
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/09/international/middleeast/09scene.html

urban guerilla warfare

germ warfare

sectarian warfare

tribal warfare

wartime
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/us/14topus.html

warlord
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/world/asia/06warlords.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/world/asia/23taliban.html

warmaker
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1551801,00.html

war crime
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1876151,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2365393,00.html

war criminal

war zone

buffer zone

war-torn country

in war-torn south Sudan

on (a) war footing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,550526,00.html

cold war
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,4029,1108424,00.html

war grave
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,1888850,00.html

war chest
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2006353,00.html

WW1 > War poetry > Wilfred Owen    1893-1918
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/holiday_type/history_and_travel/article5108619.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/wilfred-owen-dulce-decorum
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1945883,00.html

WW1 > War poetry > Ivor Gurney    1890-1937
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/ivor-gurney-on-somme

WW1 > War poetry > John McCrae        1872-1918
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/john-mccrae-flanders-fields

WW1 > Wartime Artist > Len Smith
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/oct/07/firstworldwar?picture=338366191

wage war
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29cyber.html

all-out war
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2279462,00.html

urban guerrilla war

Gulf war illnesses
http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,1238167,00.html

trade war

holy war
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/middleeast/15mideast.html?hp

civil war / full-blown civil war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/14/monarchy-television
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1989397,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-03-pentagon-congress_x.htm

on the verge of civil war

on the brink of war

war games
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/world/middleeast/22iran.html

war-game

go to war

go it alone

war planner

victory
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-11-19-kissinger-britain_x.htm

conflict

violence

upsurge of violence
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2186240,00.html

skyrocketing violence
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-10-21-iraq_x.htm

strategy
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2007-12-18-iraqstrategy_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-12-23-gates-bush_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-20-bush-iraq_x.htm

war planning strategy
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/americas/23military.html

tactics
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2415612,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-21-bush-iraq_x.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1769836,00.html

front
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/09/western-front-battles-timeline
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1951325,00.html

frontline

state of emergency

descend into mob rule

strife

strife-torn countries

wreak / provoke havoc
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1246976,00.html

take hostages

human shield

militia
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-10-20-shia-militias_x.htm

disband

Private Eye        c. 2004

copié c. 2004
http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/
russia/chechnya/children/2.html

The Guardian        p. 1

18.10.2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1329814,00.html

Philip Guston

Bombardment        1937-8        Private collection
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/?lid=1020

spy
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6723799.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1869844,00.html

spymasters

 Cambridge spy ring
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6723799.ece
http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/viewArticle.arc?
articleId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1979-11-21-01-001&pageId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1979-11-21-01
http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/viewArticle.arc?
articleId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1979-11-16-13-002&pageId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1979-11-16-13

private spy ring
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/world/16contractors.html

spy on

spy satellite
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2389183,00.html

 sleeper agent
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/europe/10russia.html

men of the underground
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1716505,00.html

traitor
http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/viewArticle.arc?
articleId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1979-11-16-13-002&pageId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1979-11-16-13

Top Secret

classified data
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/world/09breach.html

eavesdropping

snooping

wiretaps

surveillance

National Security Agency    NSA        USA
http://www.nsa.gov/

Big Brother
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/weekinreview/25bamford.html

third man
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1345570,00.html

pass on information

chatter

intelligence
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-26-bush-afghanistan_x.htm

Intelligence services
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1938212,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,23729-1739731,00.html

MI5
http://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page7.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1697562,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1711093,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1699405,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1698544,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1176423,00.html

MI6
http://www.mi6.gov.uk/output/Page79.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1664612,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1922824,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1533385,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,992693,00.html

GCHQ, the government eavesdropping centre
http://www.gchq.gov.uk/

Joint Intelligence Committee        JIC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Joint_Intelligence_Committee
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1454998,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/butler/story/0,14750,1261259,00.html
http://www.danplesch.net/articles/2004-07-16-The-Guardian-1-0,,1262585,00.html

military intelligence

military intelligence agent

mole
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,2240016,00.html

undercover agent

betray

WW1 / WW2

VE Day / Victory in Europe Day        8 May 1945
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/veday_germany_01.shtml
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWveday.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/veday/0,15989,1473337,00.html

Squadron Leader Eric Foster        1903-2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1771946,00.html

nazi

genocide

gas chamber

be gassed

scream

crematorium

WW2 > D-Day / June 6 1944
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1226533,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/0,14058,1085469,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/archive/0,14058,1085470,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1226579,00.html
http://www.iwm.org.uk/dday/
http://search.eb.com/normandy/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dday/
http://www.ddaymuseum.org/
http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0206/feature1/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1227981,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1223690,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1218915,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1218910,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,8542,1229026,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/dday/0,14564,1216111,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,1183628,00.html

WW2 > D-Day / June 6 1944 > the Guardian > Special report > D-Day
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/dday/0,,1216111,00.html

Colossus Mk 2

Lorenz code

Navajo code talker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1367771,00.html

indecipherable

The art of war
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/theartofwar/

propaganda

Psy Ops
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-us-afghan-nato.html

enemy propaganda

Imperial War Museum, London

http://www.iwm.org.uk/
http://london.iwm.org.uk/
http://www.iwmcollections.org.uk/

Tyne Cot Cemetery

"Tyne Cot cemetery is situated to northwest of the Belgian town of Ypres.
Tyne Cot is the biggest of the British war graves cemeteries.
It contains nearly 12,000 graves and has a memorial to over 35,000 men
who are recorded as missing and have no known grave."   

http://www.firstworldwar.com/today/tynecot.htm
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/westfront/ypsalient/cemeteries/tynecot.htm

U.S. President George W. Bush in Baghdad

Thanksgiving - 2003 - AP

Steve Bell

The Guardian

4.11.2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/archive/stevebell/0,7371,337764,00.html

President George W. Bush

Steve Bell

The Guardian

3.9.2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,7371,1034687,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1034488,00.html

President George W. Bush

Pentagon to Outline Shift in War Planning Strategy

June 23, 2009
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will adopt a new strategy that for the first time orders the military to anticipate that future conflicts will include a complex mix of conventional, set-piece battles and campaigns against shadowy insurgents and terrorists, according to senior officials.

The shift is intended to assure that the military is prepared to deal with a spectrum of possible threats, including computer network attacks, attempts to blind satellite positioning systems, strikes by precision missiles and roadside bombs, and propaganda campaigns waged on television and the Internet. The new strategy has broad implications for training, troop deployment, weapons procurement and other aspects of military planning.

In officially embracing hybrid warfare, the Pentagon would be replacing a second pillar of long-term planning. Senior officials disclosed in March that the review was likely to reject a historic premise of American strategy — that the nation need only to prepare to fight two major wars at a time.

Driving both sets of developments are lessons learned from the past six years, when the United States has been fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet is stretched to be ready for potentially significant operations elsewhere, Pentagon officials say, such as against Iran, North Korea or even China and Russia. Conflicts with any of those countries would also be expected to present a hybrid range of challenges.

But powerful constituencies in the military and in Congress continue to argue that the next war will not look like Iraq or Afghanistan, and they say the military is focusing too much on counter-insurgency and losing its ability to defeat a traditional nation-state.

Even so, senior officials say hybrid warfare will be adopted as a central premise of military planning in the top-to-bottom review required every four years by Congress. When completed later this year, the assessment, officially called the Quadrennial Defense Review, will determine how billions of dollars are spent on weapons and influence how the military reshapes its training.

During a Pentagon news conference last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said of the new strategy, “It derives from my view that the old way of looking at irregular warfare as being one kind of conflict and conventional warfare as a discreet kind of warfare is an outdated concept. Conflict in the future will slide up and down a scale, both in scope or scale and in lethality.”

Even before the review is complete, the new thinking has claimed high-dollar victims.

Mr. Gates proposed ending production of the Air Force’s top-of-the-line F-22 fighter jets, arguing that money should be spent on warplanes that carry out a broader array of missions, from countering enemy air forces to evading surface-to-air missiles to bombing insurgent militias in hiding.

But supporters of the F-22 in Congress are pushing for financing to keep the production line open, potentially setting up a veto battle.

The defense secretary also put on hold a multibillion-dollar program for the Army’s next-generation armored vehicle, saying its proposed flat-bottom design ignored lessons that angular troop transports are safer from roadside bombs, which have been the biggest killer of troops in Iraq.

In preparing to adopt concepts of hybrid warfare, the Defense Department has closely studied Israel’s last war in Lebanon in 2006, when a terrorist group, Hezbollah, fielded high-tech weapons equal to any nation’s, including long-range missiles. Likewise, when a traditional military power like Russia went to war with the former Soviet republic of Georgia last August, its tanks, paratroopers and warships were preceded by crippling computer network attacks.

The previous Pentagon strategy review focused on a four-square chart that described security challenges to the nation as perceived then. It included traditional, conventional conflicts; irregular warfare, such as terrorism and insurgencies; catastrophic challenges from unconventional weapons used by terrorists or rogue states; and disruptive threats, in which new technologies could counter American advantages.

“The ‘quad chart’ was useful in its time,” said Michele A. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, who is leading the strategy review for Mr. Gates.

“But we aren’t using it as a point of reference or departure,” she said in an interview. “I think hybrid will be the defining character. The traditional, neat categories — those are types that really don’t match reality any more.”

The nation’s top military officers are reviewing their procurement programs and personnel policies to adapt to the new environment, focusing in particular on weapons systems that can perform multiple missions.

“When I send a carrier strike group forward, or when I send an amphibious ready group forward with a Marine Expeditionary Unit on board, I don’t know what they are going to end up doing,” said Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations. “Therefore, the way that we view our training, the way that we view our capabilities, has to be packaged for this range of actions.”

He cited the experience of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which was steaming toward Iraq to carry out combat missions when it was diverted to become the American headquarters for tsunami relief in Indonesia. Both Admiral Roughead and Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, said in interviews that they had adopted goals of making certain each weapon system could “stretch” across a spectrum of operations, proving value in traditional and irregular warfare.

General Schwartz cited Air Force decisions to place surveillance systems on its long-range bombers and tactical warplanes to make each a provider of valuable battlefield intelligence, as well as maintaining strike capabilities.

“This is the kind of thing we are talking about, where we avoid point-mission platforms and look for versatility,” General Schwartz said. “Multipurpose platforms are inherently more affordable.”

For the ground forces, the goal is an ability to sustain 10 combat brigades abroad at all times, with 10 more in reserve and nearly ready to go as they complete training. This eventually would allow active duty troops to spend three years at home for every year deployed.

 

Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, when asked to define the Army’s goals in the review, said: “The most significant thing I’d like to get is an acceptance of that rotational model.”

    Pentagon to Outline Shift in War Planning Strategy, NYT, 23.6.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/americas/23military.html?hpw

Cyberwar

Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan

June 13, 2009
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — A plan to create a new Pentagon cybercommand is raising significant privacy and diplomatic concerns, as the Obama administration moves ahead on efforts to protect the nation from cyberattack and to prepare for possible offensive operations against adversaries’ computer networks.

President Obama has said that the new cyberdefense strategy he unveiled last month will provide protections for personal privacy and civil liberties. But senior Pentagon and military officials say that Mr. Obama’s assurances may be challenging to guarantee in practice, particularly in trying to monitor the thousands of daily attacks on security systems in the United States that have set off a race to develop better cyberweapons.

Much of the new military command’s work is expected to be carried out by the National Security Agency, whose role in intercepting the domestic end of international calls and e-mail messages after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, under secret orders issued by the Bush administration, has already generated intense controversy.

There is simply no way, the officials say, to effectively conduct computer operations without entering networks inside the United States, where the military is prohibited from operating, or traveling electronic paths through countries that are not themselves American targets.

The cybersecurity effort, Mr. Obama said at the White House last month, “will not — I repeat, will not — include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic.”

But foreign adversaries often mount their attacks through computer network hubs inside the United States, and military officials and outside experts say that threat confronts the Pentagon and the administration with difficult questions.

Military officials say there may be a need to intercept and examine some e-mail messages sent from other countries to guard against computer viruses or potential terrorist action. Advocates say the process could ultimately be accepted as the digital equivalent of customs inspections, in which passengers arriving from overseas consent to have their luggage opened for security, tax and health reasons.

“The government is in a quandary,” said Maren Leed, a defense expert at the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies who was a Pentagon special assistant on cyberoperations from 2005 to 2008.

Ms. Leed said a broad debate was needed “about what constitutes an intrusion that violates privacy and, at the other extreme, what is an intrusion that may be acceptable in the face of an act of war.”

In a recent speech, Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a chief architect of the new cyberstrategy, acknowledged that a major unresolved issue was how the military — which would include the National Security Agency, where much of the cyberwar expertise resides — could legally set up an early warning system.

Unlike a missile attack, which would show up on the Pentagon’s screens long before reaching American territory, a cyberattack may be visible only after it has been launched in the United States.

“How do you understand sovereignty in the cyberdomain?” General Cartwright asked. “It doesn’t tend to pay a lot of attention to geographic boundaries.”

For example, the daily attacks on the Pentagon’s own computer systems, or probes sent from Russia, China and Eastern Europe seeking chinks in the computer systems of corporations and financial institutions, are rarely seen before their effect is felt inside the United States.

Some administration officials have begun to discuss whether laws or regulations must be changed to allow law enforcement, the military or intelligence agencies greater access to networks or Internet providers when significant evidence of a national security threat was found.

Ms. Leed said that while the Defense Department and related intelligence agencies were the only organizations that had the ability to protect against such cyberattacks, “they are not the best suited, from a civil liberties perspective, to take on that responsibility.”

Under plans being completed at the Pentagon, the new cybercommand will be run by a four-star general, much the way Gen. David H. Petraeus runs the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from Central Command in Tampa, Fla. But the expectation is that whoever is in charge of the new command will also direct the National Security Agency, an effort to solve the turf war between the spy agency and the military over who is in charge of conducting offensive operations.

While the N.S.A.’s job is chiefly one of detection and monitoring, the agency also possesses what Michael D. McConnell, the former director of national intelligence, called “the critical skill set” to respond quickly to cyberattacks. Yet the Defense Department views cyberspace as its domain as well, a new battleground after land, sea, air and space.

The complications are not limited to privacy concerns. The Pentagon is increasingly worried about the diplomatic ramifications of being forced to use the computer networks of many other nations while carrying out digital missions — the computer equivalent of the Vietnam War’s spilling over the Cambodian border in the 1960s. To battle Russian hackers, for example, it might be necessary to act through the virtual cyberterritory of Britain or Germany or any country where the attack was routed.

General Cartwright said military planners were trying to write rules of engagement for scenarios in which a cyberattack was launched from a neutral country that might have no idea what was going on. But, with time of the essence, it may not be possible, the scenarios show, to ask other nations to act against an attack that is flowing through their computers in milliseconds.

“If I pass through your country, do I have to talk to the ambassador?” General Cartwright said. “It is very difficult. Those are the questions that are now really starting to emerge vis-à-vis cyber.”

Frida Berrigan, a longtime peace activist who is a senior program associate at the New America Foundation’s arms and security initiative, expressed concerns about whether the Obama administration would be able to balance its promise to respect privacy in cyberspace even as it appeared to be militarizing cybersecurity.

“Obama was very deliberate in saying that the U.S. military and the U.S. government would not be looking at our e-mail and not tracking what we do online,” Ms. Berrigan said. “This is not to say there is not a cyberthreat out there or that cyberterrorism is not a significant concern. We should be vigilant and creative. But once again we see the Pentagon being put at the heart of it and at front lines of offering a solution.”

Ms. Berrigan said that just as the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had proved that “there is no front line anymore, and no demilitarized zone anymore, then if the Pentagon and the military services see cyberspace as a battlefield domain, then the lines protecting privacy and our civil liberties get blurred very, very quickly.”

    Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan, NYT, 13.6.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us/politics/13cyber.html?hp

Pentagon Cyber Command to Create Force for Future

May 5, 2009
Filed at 4:08 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. military must reorganize its offensive and defensive cyber operations and will use a new command at a Maryland Army facility to create a digital warfare force for the future, the director of the National Security Agency says.

Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, also the Pentagon's leading cyber warfare commander, said the U.S. is determined to lead the global effort to use computer technology to deter or defeat enemies, while still protecting the public's constitutional rights.

In testimony prepared for delivery Tuesday to a House Armed Services subcommittee, Alexander and other military leaders in cyber matters outlined the challenges to keeping up with rapidly changing technologies and the need for more resources and training. In blunt comments, Alexander acknowledged that cyber training for the Pentagon's work force is inadequate and must be improved.

In separate prepared testimony, Lt. Gen. William Shelton, the Air Force's chief of warfighting integration, said the Pentagon relies heavily on industry efforts to respond to cyber threats. That approach, he said, does not keep pace with the threat.

The testimony comes as the Obama administration prepares to release its review of the nation's cybersecurity, and on the heels of a critical report by the National Research Council. The independent group's report concluded that the government's policies on how and when to wage cyber warfare are ill-formed, lack adequate oversight and require a broad public debate.

Alexander said the military's new cyber command at Fort Meade, Md., will be a sub-unit of U.S. Strategic Command, and would be designed to ''defend vital networks and project power in cyberspace.''

Defense Department networks are probed repeatedly every day and the number of intrusion attempts have more than doubled recently, officials have said.

Military leaders said earlier this month that the Pentagon spent more than $100 million in the past six months responding to and repairing damage from cyber attacks and other computer network problems.

------

On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

    Pentagon Cyber Command to Create Force for Future, NYT, 5.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/05/us/politics/AP-US-Cyber-Warfare.html

Images, the Law and War

May 17, 2009
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — It was a hypothetical question in a Supreme Court argument, and it was posed almost 40 years ago. But it managed to anticipate and in some ways to answer President Obama’s argument for withholding photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What if, Justice Potter Stewart asked a lawyer for The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime “would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?” The Times’s lawyer, Alexander M. Bickel, tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him:

“You would say that the Constitution requires that it be published and that these men die?”

Mr. Bickel yielded, to the consternation of allies in the case. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that my inclinations of humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment.”

And there it was: an issue as old as democracy in wartime, and as fresh as the latest dispute over pictures showing abuse of prisoners in the 21st century. How much potential harm justifies suppressing facts, whether from My Lai or Iraq, that might help the public judge the way a war is waged in its name?

The exchange also contained more than a hint of the court’s eventual calculus: The asserted harm can’t be vague or speculative; it must be immediate and concrete. It must be the sort of cost that gives a First Amendment lawyer pause.

As it happened, Mr. Bickel’s response outraged the American Civil Liberties Union and other allies of the newspaper in the Pentagon Papers case, which concerned the Nixon administration’s attempt to prevent publication of a secret history of the Vietnam War. They disavowed Mr. Bickel’s answer and said the correct response was, “painfully but simply,” that free people are entitled to evaluate evidence concerning the government’s conduct for themselves.

Which is a good summary of the interest on the other side: Scrutiny of abuses by the government enhances democracy because it promotes accountability and prompts reform.

Justice William O. Douglas, in a 1972 dissent in a case about Congressional immunity, described his view of the basic dynamic. “As has been revealed by such exposés as the Pentagon Papers, the My Lai massacres, the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident,’ and the Bay of Pigs invasion,” he wrote, “the government usually suppresses damaging news but highlights favorable news.”

Indeed, the Nixon administration successfully opposed the use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the release of documents and photographs concerning the killings of hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians in 1968 at My Lai. (The decision led Congress to broaden that law.)

Disclosure of abuses can also provoke a backlash. The indelible images that emerged from the Vietnam War helped turn the nation against the war, and may have steeled America’s enemies. And earlier photographs of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were used for propaganda and recruitment by insurgents there.

How, then, to apply the lessons of history and law to the possible disclosure of additional images of prisoner mistreatment by Americans in the current wars?

On Wednesday, when Mr. Obama announced that the government was withdrawing from an agreement to comply with court orders requiring release of the images, he said there was little to learn from them and much to fear. But he offered speculation on both sides of the balance.

“The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,” he said. “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

The first assertion, which the Bush administration also made, is not universally accepted. In a 2005 decision ordering the release of the images, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Federal District Court in Manhattan said they may provide insights into whether the abuses shown were indeed isolated and unauthorized.

And the claim that harm would follow disclosure — that terrorists, for example, would exact revenge — is hard to measure or prove. “The terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan do not need pretexts for their barbarism,” Judge Hellerstein wrote. In the Pentagon Papers case, too, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of publication, saying, in essence, that speculation about potential harm was not sufficient.

There are, of course, profound differences between the two cases. One concerned the constitutionality of a prior restraint against publishing information already in the hands of the press; the other is about whether civil rights groups are entitled to obtain materials under the Freedom of Information Act. But both involve contentions that serious harm would follow from publication.

Justice Stewart’s answer, in his concurrence in the 6-to-3 decision, was that assertions are not enough. “I cannot say,” he wrote, that disclosure “will surely result in direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our nation or its people.” In other contexts, too, the Supreme Court has endorsed limits on speech only when it would cause immediate and almost certain harm to identifiable people. More general and diffuse consequences have not done the trick.

In 1949, for instance, the court overturned the disorderly conduct conviction of a Chicago priest whose anti-Semitic speech at a rally had provoked a hostile crowd to riot. Free speech, Justice Douglas wrote, “may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are or even stirs people to anger.”

Fear of violence, however, was enough to persuade many people that publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad should be discouraged or forbidden.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who has handled terrorism cases, said the only prudent course in the current case is to withhold the images. “If you’re in a war that’s been authorized by Congress, it should be an imperative to win the war,” he said. “If you have photos that could harm the war effort, you should delay release of the photos.”

But Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer with the civil liberties union, said history favored disclosure, citing the 2004 photographs from Abu Ghraib and the 1991 video of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles.

But the touchstone remains the Pentagon papers case. It not only framed the issues, but also created a real-world experiment in consequences.

The government had argued, in general terms, that publication of the papers would cost American soldiers their lives. The papers were published. What happened?

David Rudenstine, the dean of the Cardozo Law School and author of “The Day the Presses Stopped,” a history of the case, said he investigated the aftermath with an open mind.

“I couldn’t find any evidence whatsoever from any responsible government official,” he said, “that there was any harm.”

    Images, the Law and War, NYT, 17.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/weekinreview/17liptak.html?ref=opinion

Op-Ed Columnist

Wars, Endless Wars

March 3, 2009
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

The singer Edwin Starr, who died in 2003, had a big hit in 1970 called “War” in which he asked again and again: “War, what is it good for?”

The U.S. economy is in free fall, the banking system is in a state of complete collapse and Americans all across the country are downsizing their standards of living. The nation as we’ve known it is fading before our very eyes, but we’re still pouring billions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with missions we are still unable to define.

Even as the U.S. begins plans to reduce troop commitments in Iraq, it is sending thousands of additional troops into Afghanistan. The strategic purpose of this escalation, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged, is not at all clear.

In response to a question on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Mr. Gates said:

“We’re talking to the Europeans, to our allies; we’re bringing in an awful lot of people to get different points of view as we go through this review of what our strategy ought to be. And I often get asked, ‘Well, how long will those 17,000 [additional troops] be there? Will more go in?’ All that depends on the outcome of this strategy review that I hope will be done in a few weeks.”

We invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago. We have not broken the back of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. We have not captured or killed Osama bin Laden. We don’t even have an escalation strategy, much less an exit strategy. An honest assessment of the situation, taking into account the woefully corrupt and ineffective Afghan government led by the hapless Hamid Karzai, would lead inexorably to such terms as fiasco and quagmire.

Instead of cutting our losses, we appear to be doubling down.

As for Iraq, President Obama announced last week that substantial troop withdrawals will take place over the next year and a half and that U.S. combat operations would cease by the end of August 2010. But, he said, a large contingent of American troops, perhaps as many as 50,000, would still remain in Iraq for a “period of transition.”

That’s a large number of troops, and the cost of keeping them there will be huge. Moreover, I was struck by the following comment from the president: “There will surely be difficult periods and tactical adjustments, but our enemies should be left with no doubt. This plan gives our military the forces and flexibility they need to support our Iraqi partners and to succeed.”

In short, we’re committed to these two conflicts for a good while yet, and there is nothing like an etched-in-stone plan for concluding them. I can easily imagine a scenario in which Afghanistan and Iraq both heat up and the U.S., caught in an extended economic disaster at home, undermines its fragile recovery efforts in the same way that societies have undermined themselves since the dawn of time — with endless warfare.

We’ve already paid a fearful price for these wars. In addition to the many thousands of service members who have been killed or suffered obvious disabling injuries, a study by the RAND Corporation found that some 300,000 are currently suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, and that 320,000 have most likely experienced a traumatic brain injury.

Time magazine has reported that “for the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Suicides among soldiers rose in 2008 for the fourth consecutive year, largely because of the stress of combat deployments. It’s believed that 128 soldiers took their own lives last year.

Much of the country can work itself up to a high pitch of outrage because a banker or an automobile executive flies on a private jet. But we’ll send young men and women by the thousands off to repeated excursions through the hell of combat — three tours, four tours or more — without raising so much as a peep of protest.

Lyndon Johnson, despite a booming economy, lost his Great Society to the Vietnam War. He knew what he was risking. He would later tell Doris Kearns Goodwin, “If I left the woman I really loved — the Great Society — in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs... All my dreams...”

The United States is on its knees economically. As President Obama fights for his myriad domestic programs and his dream of an economic recovery, he might benefit from a look over his shoulder at the link between Vietnam and the still-smoldering ruins of Johnson’s presidency.

    Wars, Endless Wars, NYT, 3.3.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/opinion/03herbert.html?ref=opinion

Preparing for cyber war: Bernd Debusmann

Wed Mar 19, 2008
11:07am EDT
Reuters
By Bernd Debusmann
 

(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - At the height of the Cold War, a Soviet oil pipeline blew up in an explosion so huge that the American military suspected a nuclear blast. A quarter of a century later, the incident serves as an object lesson in successful cyber warfare.

The pipeline blew up, with disastrous consequences for the Soviet economy, because its pumps, valves and turbines were run by software deliberately designed to malfunction. Made in the U.S. and doctored by the CIA, it passed into Soviet hands in an elaborate game of deception that left them unaware they had acquired "bugged" software.

"The pipeline software...was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welts. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space," Thomas C. Reed, a former air force secretary, wrote in his 2004 memoir.

The pipeline explosion was probably the first major salvo in what has since become known as cyber warfare. The incident has been cropping up in increasingly urgent discussions in the U.S. on how to cope with attacks on military and civilian computer networks and control systems - and how and when to strike back.

Air traffic control, power plants, Wall Street trading systems, banks, traffic lights and emergency responder communications could all be targets of attacks that could bring the U.S. to its knees. As Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, put it in recent testimony to a Senate committee:

"Our information infrastructure - including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems and embedded processors and controllers in critical industries - increasingly is being targeted...by a growing array of state and non-state adversaries." Cyber attacks, he said, had grown more sophisticated and more serious.

The Pentagon says it detects three million attempts to infiltrate its computer networks every day. There are no estimates of how many probes are successful but last year the Pentagon had to take 1,500 computers off line because of a concerted attack from unknown hackers.

POOR SECURITY, DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES

How tight are the U.S. government's defenses? Not very, according to the Government Accountability Office, the audit and investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. In a report last week, it said an audit of 24 government agencies - including Defense and Homeland Security - had shown that "poor information security is a widespread problem with potentially devastating consequences."

Striking back at cyber attackers poses a raft of tricky questions, chiefly because cyber war cannot be waged without involving civilians. Private companies own more than 80 percent of the infrastructure McConnell talked about and without close public-private coordination, effective counter-strikes are next to impossible.

"Unlike traditional defense categories (i.e. land, sea and air), the military capabilities required to respond to an attack on U.S. infrastructure will necessarily involve infrastructure owned and operated by the private sector," according to Jody R. Westby, CEO of the Washington consulting firm Global Cyber Risk and a champion of better public-private coordination to cope with cyber attacks.(http://www.globalcyberrisk.com/Pubs_psc.htm)

Coordination between the military and civilians has yet to be tested. The military stayed away from an exercise this month that brought together experts from the U.S., Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, 18 U.S. federal agencies and around 40 companies, including Microsoft and Cisco Systems. The game featured mock attacks against computer networks, pipelines and railroads.

(The exercise was described as the biggest of its kind. But "big" is relative. To get the scale into perspective: There are 233 countries connected to the Internet today, with an estimated 1.2 billion users. More than 120 countries are estimated to be developing cyber warfare capabilities).

As things stand, could the U.S. or its allies become victim of an attack similar to the Soviet pipeline blast? Probably yes. The threat comes from China, which has been placing heavy emphasis on what it calls "informationized war," and a motley array of hackers and terrorists.

Among the most potent weapons in their arsenal: "bots," malicious software robots that are the digital equivalent of terrorist sleeper cells that lie dormant for months or years before springing into destructive action. In testimony to Congress, Homeland Security's top scientist on cyber security, W. Douglas Maugham, has said that there is currently no effective antidote to bots.

BLEAK SCENARIO

How much damage could they do? Here is a scenario drawn from an interview with Westby, who is a member of the World Federation of Scientists' Permanent Monitoring Panel on Information Security. Her outline is based on the assumption that China has already implanted bots in millions of public and private computer systems.

"Bot herders" around the world unleash their malicious software bots to attack U.S. government, financial, oil and gas systems. One early victim: the U.S. Department of Commerce, which loses all communications because its internet and telephone communications use Voice over Internet Protocol networks. That means if the Internet goes down, all communications go down.

As Commerce is cut off, the U.S. collection point for inter-bank financial transactions discovers that bogus data are being inserted from both the sending and confirming side of the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system. Chaos ensues in financial markets.

The New York Stock Exchange shuts down after massive "denial of service" attacks similar to those that last year forced Estonia to close down websites run by government ministries, banks and telecommunications companies.

At the same time, systems controlling the valves of oil and gas pipelines come under attack as bogus instructions override system controls and false data is sent to control room screens. The pipelines are shut. Some explode. There are casualties.

The government decides it must block the malicious traffic and come to the assistance of the financial, gas and oil companies under cyber attack. This involves deploying classified solutions and counter attacks through the networks of various U.S. communication providers.

The problem: There is no agreement between the Pentagon and the private sector on transferring private networks to military control. Owners are reluctant to turn over their systems to the military for fear their networks and their reputation might be damaged as a result of cyber war actions not under their control. The problem could be solved by the government declaring martial law, a step it is hesitant to take.

And what about the foreign-owned networks that would have to be used to launch an effective counter attack? Does the U.S. have to ask permission before sending cyber war actions across foreign networks? Would NATO have to be involved? (The 50-year-old treaty does not cover cyber warfare). Should the U.N. charter be amended to apply to cyber war rather than only "armed attacks?"

These are all questions that require urgent answers if the U.S., more dependent on computers and the Internet than most countries, wants to protect what a writer in the latest issue of the Armed Forces Journal aptly describes as "America's digital Achilles' heel."

(Editing by Sean Maguire)

    Preparing for cyber war:Bernd Debusmann, R, 19.3.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersComService4/idUSL1981632120080319

Letters

    Talking About Fear, Real and Imagined, NYT, 31.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/opinion/l31fear.html

Making a killing: how private armies became a $120bn global industry

    Making a killing: how private armies became a $120bn global industry, I, 21.9.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2984818.ece

Spike Lee to Focus on Black Soldiers

    Spike Lee to Focus on Black Soldiers, NYT, 3.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-People-Spike-Lee.html

Searching for MIAs _ How You Can Help

    Searching for MIAs _ How You Can Help, NYT, 3.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iwo-Jima-Marine-Box.html

U.S. Looks for Fallen Troops at Iwo Jima

    U.S. Looks for Fallen Troops at Iwo Jima, NYT, 3.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iwo-Jima-Still-Missing.html

Robert Fisk on Shakespeare and war

    Manhattan’s Littlest Soldiers, NYT, 11.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/nyregion/11grays.html

Soldier's diary recalls horror of the Somme

Thursday March 8, 2007
Guardian
Paul Lewis

For almost a century, poets and historians have struggled to describe the carnage of July 1 1916, the bloodiest day in the history of the British army. Personal tales are easily lost amid the colossal death toll of the first day of the battle of the Somme. Of the 120,000 British soldiers who scrambled out of the trenches to march into a wall of fire, almost 20,000 died.

But a blunt account of the initial offensive by a grocer from South Yorkshire, which sold at auction yesterday for £7,360, goes some way to explaining what it was like to be there that day.

Not a lot is known about Walter Hutchinson, a stretcher-bearer in the 10th Battalion, York & Lancaster Regiment, who wrote the diary during the first three weeks of the battle. He is said to have been a mild-mannered and bespectacled man who stood 5ft 5in tall. He had a wife, Evelyn, and a daughter, Connie. He retired in the Lincolnshire seaside resort of Cleethorpes before he died in the 1980s.

But thanks to his diary, a few facts are indisputable. It reveals that Walter's "first taste of gas" came on the morning the deadliest battle of the first world war commenced, after he and his comrades crossed a marsh and clambered into a communication trench.

His description of the bloodshed that unfolded, repeated again and again in the diary, is as moving a phrase as any other. It was "an awful sight".

"We hadn't gone far up the trench before we came across three of our own lads lying dead," he wrote on that first day. "Their heads been badly damaged by a shell. Their names were Voice and Webster Brothers. We had to go scrambling over the poor fellows - in and out, in and out. It was one of the awful sights I had ever witnessed and at this point our own lads was coming out wounded as we was following them in."

The "lads" were ordered to "dump everything and fix bayonets" and fight. "We obeyed the order like men."

Walter was hit on the hip by a piece of shell, but "kept running after the boys".

"We then landed at the trench we was making for and found out it was our own original front line trench. And we saw some awful sights in it for a lot of wounded men had not been got out there."

The following day Walter peeled back the a sheet from the corpse he believed was covering his pal Charley: "But I went and lifted the oilsheet from over his face and found that it was Harold Beecher. And I asked questions about him and found out he was badly wounded Saturday night and died early on Sunday morning. He was a clerk in civil life. I was very sorry for we had been good chums from the day we arrived in France."

He and his colleagues were rescued, but spent three days without food.

On the third day, amid a lull in the fighting, Walter and his fellow men "got to work and dug some graves for our poor comrades. We buried the poor fellows as respectful as we could under the circumstances". There were more burials the next day. And the next. "It was an awful sight. We then got the poor fellows buried which was a very difficult task for shells was dropping all around us."

The diary, which fetched 10 times its estimate, was sold at Dix Noonan Webb auctioneers in London by Walter's niece, Jeanette Ive, 75, from Wimborne, Dorset. It went to a private bidder alongside a Military Medal and a pocket watch presented to him in 1917.

    Soldier's diary recalls horror of the Somme, G, 8.3.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,,2028735,00.html

Human rights concerns fail to staunch flow of UK arms

China tops list with £70m of exports in one year as military sales soar to blacklisted regimes

Sunday October 15, 2006
The Observer
Antony Barnett

The British government is exporting record levels of military equipment to 19 of the 20 states its own ministers and officials have just identified as 'major countries of concern' for human rights abuses.

The 20 countries were listed in the Foreign Office's annual Human Rights Report, which was launched by the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, last week. They include China, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe.

But the government's arms export records reveal that concerns over human rights appear not to have prevented ministers from approving tens of millions of pounds of military sales to those same regimes.

For instance, on China the report stated: 'The Chinese authorities continue to violate a range of basic human rights. The use of the death penalty remains extensive and non-transparent; torture is widespread.' Yet, despite the existence of a European Union arms embargo, ministers approved strategic export licences - which are needed to sell military items abroad - for China worth almost £70m between July 2005 and June 2006.

According to the UK government's own record of export licences, between January and March this year ministers approved the sale to China of military aero-engines, military communciations equipment and 'technology to build combat aircraft'. It also sold Beijing gun mountings and components for military vehicles, and 'components for nuclear reactors'.

The EU embargo prohibits countries from selling 'whole' weapons such as missile and aircraft, although it does allow the sale of parts.

Other countries whose human rights records concern the Foreign Office, but which still receive arms exports from the UK, include Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Russia, where more than £40m of military equipment was exported last year. On Russia, the Foreign Office report stated: 'Human rights defenders continue to be gravely concerned by actions taken by authorities... The North Caucasus... remains one of Europe's most serious human rights issues.' Yet last year ministers authorised export licences to Russia worth £10m. These included military cargo and utility vehicles, sniper rifles, gun silencers, shotguns, and components for military aircraft navigation equipment.

The analysis of military exports was carried out by Saferworld, the human rights campaign group. Claire Hickson, Saferworld's head of communications, said: 'This once again highlights the incoherence of UK policy which could result in British military equipment being used to commit human rights abuses abroad.'

At the launch of the Human Rights Report, Beckett said: 'This report would set down what we were doing to promote human rights and fundamental freedoms around the world. And it would be something by which the public, the NGO community and the media could hold us as a government to account.'

But Saferworld responded: 'The UK government does little to check what happens to arms exports once they leave the country. There is little way of knowing whether the arms find their way to other users, such as criminal gangs, pariah states, terrorists, paramilitaries or warlords or other rebel forces. A number of these states have reputations as conduits of arms to other irresponsible parties.'

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said that all military exports were rigorously scrutinised on a 'case by case basis' and the British government needs to be reassured that such sales would not be used for internal repression or external aggression.

The Human Rights Report was first published in 1998 by former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who wanted to promote human rights overseas in line with the new Labour government's 'ethical foreign policy'.

    Human rights concerns fail to staunch flow of UK arms, O, 15.10.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1922775,00.html

Revisiting Sgt. York and a Time When Heroes Stood Tall

    Revisiting Sgt. York and a Time When Heroes Stood Tall, NYT, 18.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/world/europe/18hero.html

Diary of North Vietnam Doctor Killed in U.S. Attack Makes War Real

    Diary of North Vietnam Doctor Killed in U.S. Attack Makes War Real, NYT, 6.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/world/asia/06vietnam.html

Cold War relics found under Brooklyn Bridge

    White House Letter; A Proclamation of Victory That No Author Will Claim, NYT, 3.11.2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/03/us/white-house-letter-a-proclamation-of-victory-that-no-author-will-claim.html

From The Times Archive > On This Day - August 24, 1990

From The Guardian archive > July 3 1982 > The traumas left by a small war

    From The Guardian archive > July 3 1982 > The traumas left by a small war, G, republished 3.7.2007, p. 32, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/07/03/pages/ber32.shtml

From The Times Archive > On This Day - June 18, 1980

With the Soviet Union developing more chemical weapons,
Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, voiced her concerns about Britain's lack of a chemical response

By Our Political Editor

MRS Margaret Thatcher, while carefully stating that the Government had “no present plans” to acquire chemical warfare weapons, emphasized to the Commons yesterday how “very worrying” she found the Soviet possession of a “substantial” offensive capability while Britain possessed only the means of providing soldiers with protective clothing against chemical attack.

The Prime Minister, and more extensively Mr Francis Pym, Secretary of State for Defence, confirmed in the first Commons exchanges on the subject, that the Government is actively considering with the United States ways to deter the Russians in chemical warfare.

Mrs Thatcher said that the Russians’ capability ought to be more widely known.

Mr Harold Brown, the United States Defence Secretary, suggested to Mrs Thatcher at 10 Downing Street on June 2 that Britain and the United States ought to consider acquiring chemical weapons. That was not a proposal as such, so the Prime Minister yesterday was able to tell Mr Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for West Lothian, that “no such proposal was made”.

However, short of deterring the Russians through a chemical weapons treaty ban — for which Mr Pym said Russian objections gave no hope for early progress — acquisition would seen to be the only remaining option.

Asked by Mr Robert Atkins, Conservative MP for Preston North, when he expected to make a decision on offensive capability, Mr Pym repeated that he had no plans, beyond making inquiries and studying the implications.

In telling Mr Patrick Duffy, Labour MP for Sheffield, Attercliffe, that the Soviet Union was causing anxiety as they improved and developed their chemical warfare techniques Mr Pym foreshadowed an eventual announcement.

    From the Times Archives > On This Day - June 18, 1980, T, 18.6.2005, http://www.newsint-archive.co.uk/pages/main.asp

From The Guardian archive > March 30 1971 > Calley found guilty of 22 murders

From The Times Archive > On This Day: March 30, 1971

From the Guardian archive >  August 1, 1963 > The toboggan ride to Hiroshima

Thursday August 1, 1963
Guardian
Alistair Cooke

The decision to drop the Hiroshima bomb was made by President Truman against the advice of General George Marshall, the chief American military leader of the Second World War, and in ignorance of a petition directed to the President by seven atomic scientists working in the secret laboratories of the bomb project in Chicago.

This is the nub of a moral and strategical controversy that raged behind closed doors [in] 1944-45, and which has until now been locked in the files.

"Look" magazine publishes the findings of two of its correspondents. Final clearance of the piece published today was granted by the State Department. Certain conclusions appear to be inevitable. The overriding aim of President Truman and his closest advisers including General Marshall, was to attain the conquest of Japan with the fewest possible losses of American manpower.

The estimate of American losses in the first month of an invasion of Japan was put between 31,000 and 42,000. Mr Truman and Mr Stimson strengthened in each other the conviction that the bomb should be used, without warning, on a large metropolitan area as a direct military weapon.

The moral question had been canvassed among all the participants. The President, it seems, was never seriously faced with the choice of using the bomb on Japan or deliberately withholding it. All the advice he received led him to accept the decisions of an interim committee of Government and scientific advisers he set up.

It reported on June 6, 1945 that the bomb was "to be used as soon as possible on a dual target, that is, a military installation or War plant surrounded by or adjacent to homes", and "without prior warning".

Bush and Conant [two committee members] argued, evidently without success, that immediately after the first successful trial, the facts should be published and Japan be put on notice.

On this question of "prior warning" General Marshall disagreed. "Every effort," he said, "should be made to keep our record of warning clear. We must offset by such warning methods the opprobrium."

It now appears that [the scientists' petition] was never shown to Mr Truman. As for the moral torment that some historians have seen Mr Truman enduring and conquering, General Groves has a laconic comment. The President, he says, acted all along on the assumptions he was fed that the bomb would be used when ready.

"He was," said the General, "like a little boy on a toboggan."

    From the Guardian archive > August 1, 1963 > The toboggan ride to Hiroshima, G, Republished 1.8.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1834548,00.html

From The Times Archive > On This Day - April 19, 1960

From the Guardian archive > June 29, 1945 > Hitler's deadly secret weapons come to light

Friday June 29, 1945
Guardian

The more that is learnt of German preparations and progress with new weapons, the more apparent it is that the Allies ended the war with Germany only just in time.

The dangers faced, above all by Britain, were many and terrible.

Radio and optical equipment. A fabulous ray was to deal with tanks. This proved to be only infra-red searchlights to blind tanks and was used in conjunction with the 88mm gun. It was more humdrum than the fable. But it was deadly against tanks moving at night, as ours did.

Guns. There were unpleasant novelties, such as the rocket-assisted shells. At a certain point in the shell's progress, the rocket took over and provided further propulsion. There was at least a scheme in the pre-development stage to provide the V2 rocket with wings, which had great possibilities.

Chemical warfare. The Germans had a new gas in great quantity with certain qualities more deadly than any yet used. It could have been mastered, but would have given trouble and caused much loss, especially as anti-gas discipline in England was naturally not as good as at the outset of the war. It is known that Hitler was the man who prevented its use, not through altruism but because he did not believe it would pay.

The Germans were experimenting with a piloted VI flying-bomb with a retarded take-off and an obvious increase of accuracy. They had also made considerable progress with controlled projectiles directed either from an aircraft to a ground target or to aircraft.

Naval construction. There was a torpedo with a range of 80 miles and an acoustic head which "listened" to its target. There were controlled torpedoes that would follow a zigzag course with deadly possibilities.

There was a jet-propelled submarine going into production with an underwater speed of 25 knots. These were made possible by a new fuel.

The inventions mentioned were in all stages, from pre-development to full production. When it is realised that full preparation was made by the Germans to carry out all essential production in underground factories impervious to bombing, the full extent of the peril becomes apparent.

It is not too much to say that the Germans were in the act of switching from one kind of war to another and that many developments of the kind I have enumerated would have been as deadly as those already disclosed in, for example, the VI and V2.

Allied bombing had delayed the switchover and would have hampered development, especially by attacks on communications, but could not have stopped it.

    From the Guardian archive > June 29, 1945 > Hitler's deadly secret weapons come to light, G, Republished 29.6.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1808269,00.html

From the Times Archive > On This Day - May 9, 1945

From the Guardian Archive > April 18, 1945 > A Nazi camp and its history

Wednesday April 18, 1945
Guardian

Records kept by the SS Oberführer in charge show the deaths at the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar numbered 6,477 in January, 5,614 in February, 5,479 in March, and 915 in April. The April toll was only up to the 10th of the month. The next day the American Third Army overran the area and brought release to the 21,000 inmates at this resort of starvation, torture, hangings and shootings.

Mostly the inmates were pitiful wrecks. At one time up to 80,000 people from a score of nations were here made to work long hours on the production of bombs.

When the sound of gunfire from the approaching Americans was heard, thousands of the inmates were marched off by 600 SS Guards to an unknown destination. Then the camp underground acted, overpowered the remaining guards, locked them up in small cells, and ran the camp themselves till the Americans arrived.

There were mass exterminations of 12,500 Jews in May and June, 1938. After the Nazi occupation of Austria a great influx of political prisoners and Jews took place.

With the outbreak of war several thousand Vienna and Polish Jews were slaughtered. One hundred and four Polish snipers taken prisoner were left foodless until they died. After the Munich beer-cellar bomb incident in 1939, 21 Jews were shot at random and the remainder forbidden food for five days.

In July, 1941, two truckloads of prisoners taken to Pirna died under poison-gas experiments. In March, 1942, four truckloads of 90 Jews each were taken to Bernburg experimental laboratory and died there.

In October, 1941, about 7,000 Russian prisoners of war were shot in the stables at Buchenwald, the usual scene of the shootings. According to prisoners, the outstanding place of extermination was Auschwitz, near Cracow, where they said 4,000,000 Jewish, Polish and Russian men, women, and children were liquidated. Buchenwald evidence repeatedly writes off hundreds as transported to Auschwitz.

Some 60,000 to 75,000 opponents of Hitlerism have perished at Buchenwald. Here, over these acres of suffering and misery enclosed by electrically charged fencing, is the stark gruesome reality of Fascism, with cells, a crematorium - in the ovens of which still lay charred skeletons and piles of ashes - a gallows, an experimental laboratory and a cellar store in which normally 500 bodies awaited transfer to the busy crematorium.

Hangings were carried out in a cellar from which an electric lift carried the bodies to the incinerators above.

    From the Guardian Archive > A Nazi camp and its history, G, Wednesday April 18, 1945, Republished 18.4.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1755561,00.html

From the archive > September 8, 1944 > Bombs damage 149 schools, 98 hospitals

Friday September 8, 1944
Guardian
Air Correspondent

The reports below were the first permitted after V1 flying bomb launch sites in France fell to allied troops. Relief was premature, and the date unluckily chosen. The same day, the first of the deadlier V2 rockets hit a house in Staveley Road, Chiswick

In addition to the great numbers of homes destroyed and damaged during the raids up to the end of August, damage had been reported to 149 schools, 112 public-houses, 111 churches and 98 hospitals.

Following is a list of casualties in some of the major "incidents" which for security reasons have not previously been disclosed: London County Council evacuation hostel at Westerham, Kent: 8 adults, 22 children killed. Tottenham Court Road: 20 killed. Surface shelter, St Pancras, 24 killed. Surface shelter, Hayes, Middlesex: 23 killed. Shop centre, Camberwell: 23 killed, 39 injured. Clapham Junction: direct hit on bus, damage to shops: 24 killed, 25 seriously hurt. Willesden: shops, houses, school and rest centre damaged: 20 killed,25 seriously hurt. Trench shelter at Barking: 15 killed, 13 seriously hurt. Melbourne House, Aldwych: 25 killed. Houses and a trolley bus at Leyton: 34 killed, 24 injured. Works at Barnet: 21 killed, 190 seriously hurt.

More than a hundred bombs

On one southern English borough have fallen more than a hundred flying bombs. Thousands of its houses have been damaged and a morning salutation among neighbours is often a raising of the eyebrows and nodding of the head as if to say "Rough again."

Numbers of women and children have gone away, but there are women enough to form fish queues in the battered High Street, which the wardens call "battlefield" because it has had a bomb at every corner, and enough children to occupy the day nurseries.

The brilliant success of the fighter squadrons of the air defence of Great Britain in combating the V1 is a striking example of how British pilots are capable of developing novel tactics to meet new problems and special conditions in air combat. At the outset the small size of the flying bomb and its high speed at low altitudes made the weapon a target by no means easy to locate visually and destroy. But within an extremely short time pilots grasped the peculiar situation arising from the new offensive, devised various methods of attack and then tested them.

The fact that 1,900 VIs were accounted for by fighters operating in all weathers, and at night as well as day, showed clearly that they had got the menace well under control.

    From the archive > September 8, 1944 > Bombs damage 149 schools, 98 hospitals, G, Republished 8.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1867484,00.html

From The Guardian archive > June 9 1944 > Attack began on D-Day minus one


From David Woodward, 'Manchester Guardian' War Correspondent



(Mr. Woodhead was one of the three British war correspondents who were landed in France from the air. He went by glider with a parachute unit. He was wounded, but not seriously, and is now in England.)

Somewhere in England. A British parachute unit formed part of the Allied airborne force which was the spearhead of the Second Front. It was landed behind German lines, seized vital positions, and then linked up with Allied forces which had landed on the beaches. I watched the unit go to war at dusk on D-1 (the day before D-Day), parading with everybody, from its brigadier downwards, in blackened faces. 'We are history,' said the colonel.

By the time the glider on board which I was had landed it was very nearly daylight, and the dawn sky was shot with brilliant yellows, reds, and greens from explosions caused by the huge forces of Allied bombers.

The inhabitants of little French villages awoke to find themselves free again. German prisoners proved a very mixed bag. The generally poor quality of these troops was not unexpected, and it was realised that behind them lay some of the best units of the German Army.

Our men were continually harried by snipers. Later German tanks and Panzer Grenadiers began their attack. Paratroops are considered light-weights for this kind of work, but these men stood up to the Germans. When the fighting was at its most critical a large force of gliders carrying reinforcements flew right in and landed their cargoes.

These gliders turned the tide, and next morning it was an easy matter for us to drive in a captured car to the beachhead formed by troops from the sea. The countryside looked empty, but it still looked like posters advertising summer holidays in Normandy. Scattered over the ground were the black shapes of our gliders, most of which had been damaged in their landings.

The pilots of the gliders which had done so well the day before were embarking in an infantry landing-craft for England to get more gliders to bring over. Having become a casualty, I travelled with them across the Channel, which in places seemed literally crowded with ships [in] the swept channels through the minefields.

The glider pilots landed this morning at one of the ports used to receive men during the evacuation from Dunkirk. One of the glider lieutenants told me he had been brought there at that time. 'The people cheered us then,' he said, 'and now they just watch us go by. Do you suppose the English ever cheer their victories?'

    From The Guardian archive > June 9 1944 > Attack began on D-Day minus one, G, republished 9.6.2007, p. 36, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/06/09/pages/ber36.shtml

From the Guardian Archive > April 21, 1944 > Skyscapes of bombers and wild geese

Friday April 21, 1944
Guardian
NM Roberts

The bombers come over as I am going home at dusk, flying high and lonely, the lights at their wing-tips glowing richly like the red and green jujubes we used to suck as children.

Standing back against the wall to watch them, the day still heavy upon me, I am teased by the memory of another time when I have stood like this. It comes back as one cruciform shape follows another against the cool, dimly blue evening. The wild geese driving in a great wedge across the sky, their exulting clangour and rhythmic, proud wings, the cold of the wind-scoured marsh aching in one's finger-tips, and a boy's half-broken voice beside one saying: "They look like aircraft flying in formation, don't they?"

For us on the coast the wild geese, every year, brought in the winter. The iron weather, in our minds, began with the October morning or twilight when the first trumpeting battalions passed over the town, just as spring was confirmed by the chiffchaff. Now it is the Lancasters that remind one of the wildfowl and one's spring song is the throb of their engines.

How can spring be both this and that other, one asks, and logic has no answer. Once "the drunkenness of things being various" [from Louis MacNeice's poem Snow] brought exhilaration; now there is only weariness and bewilderment.

One cannot find the synthesis that will make an orderly whole of the Juggernaut tanks roaring along the bypass and the horses reeking and straining ahead of the jangling plough chains, of the women who protest in print at the sending of vitamins and powdered milk to Occupied Countries while their own children are growing up without knowing the taste of milk chocolate.

The irreconcilables are crowded on one another - the striking apprentices: the pilots and their pin-up girls in their smart bars, impossibly young and heroic; the distorting mirrors of propaganda, the justice and felicity of a Mozart quartet on the radio; the narcissi and almond blossom massed before the Easter altar, and the VD advertisements in the press. The April sunshine is ironic and impartial on them all: there is no synthesis, no formula for integration, only panic edging closer.

Still the Lancasters, the iron geese who bring winter in our spring, are passing overhead, ascending into hell through a huge, serene sky, pricked with the first stars, faint and sparse. One will not hear them coming back: the droning will be no more than a menacing pedal in the troubled fantasia of dream whose cadences are never resolved, a ground bass to the melody of this, our sweet season.

    From the Guardian Archive > April 21, 1944 > Skyscapes of bombers and wild geese, G, Republished 21.4.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1758316,00.html

From the Guardian archive > June 1, 1940 > The miracle of rescue from Dunkirk

Saturday June 1, 1940
Guardian
EA Montague


In the grey chill of dawn today in a south-eastern port, war correspondents watched with incredulous joy the happening of a miracle.
By every canon of military science the BEF has been doomed for the last four or five days. Completely out-numbered, out-gunned, out-planed, all but surrounded, it had seemed certain to be cut off from its last channel of escape. Yet for several hours this morning we saw ship after ship come into harbour and discharge thousands of British soldiers safe and sound on British soil. As the sun was turning the grey clouds to burnished copper, the first destroyer of the day slid swiftly into the harbour, its silhouette bristling with the heads of the men packed shoulder to shoulder on its decks.

One watched them with a pride that became almost pain. They had passed through nights and days of hunger, weariness and fear, but nearly every man still had his rifle and a clip of ammunition: nearly all had brought their full kit with them - and what an agony its weight must have been. They were still soldiers and still in good heart. They were of all units and ranks. Some were in the position of the gunners whose battery had been shelled out of existence near Oudenarde, because our overworked fighter planes had had no time to deal with the German reconnaissance planes.

Their battery commander had told them to do the best they could for themselves, and they had walked 30 miles to Dunkirk. It is a stretch of level sand backed by dunes. The sea in front of it is shallow for some way out, so that ships cannot come close in. Many of the men have spent up to four days on this beach, hiding in hollows scratched in the sand, from the German planes which have scourged them with bomb and machine-gun.

Every now and then, among the men who climb the gangplank into England, one sees stretcher-bearers carrying a still form, its face bloodless and remote. Yet [others] survive in their thousands and are able to joke and sing.

In no time the ship is ready to return to Dunkirk. But before it is ready, another has drawn up alongside. British ships and French and Dutch, warships, drifters, trawlers, yachts, barges, they bring their loads across the hostile Channel and then go back undaunted into the inferno.

All the selfless courage of two nations is being thrown into the resistance at Dunkirk, and it looks as if it will not be spent in vain.

· Evelyn Montague, eldest son of the Guardian leader writer CE Montague, died in 1948 of tuberculosis contracted during his years as war correspondent

    From the Guardian archive > June 1, 1940 > The miracle of rescue from Dunkirk, G, Republished 1.6.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1787239,00.html

From the Guardian archive > May 29, 1940 > Our army in France has been cut off

Wednesday May 29, 1940
Guardian
EA Montague


The latest news of the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] in France is grave.

It had always been obvious, even before the defection of the Belgian king, that the British force was running risks of encirclement in its heroic efforts to keep the Somme-Arras gap as narrow as possible.

It now seems likely that we shall pay heavily in British lives for King Leopold's action. We have to face the fact that the possibility of withdrawing the BEF from its present position is small. It is now virtually surrounded, and the abandonment by the Belgians of their position on its eastern flank has left Dunkirk, its port of evacuation, in grave danger of falling to the Germans.

The situation is now so clear that nothing that we say today can be of the slightest value to the enemy. One is free to tell in outline the story of 18 heroic days.

Some of us have been nauseated by rumours in England that our soldiers had in some way failed. They did not fail in any way. No troops in the world ever fought better. Fierce fighting took place, and little ground was lost. But German pressure on the French forces farther to the south increased, and so did that fatal gap which had now been created between the French armies on our right and their main body. In consequence we had to carry out another withdrawal.

In the meantime, German armoured and motorised divisions had streamed through the gap and were already threatening Arras. In an endeavour to close it a British force moved down to the Arras area and counter-attacked successfully. The Germans were so vastly more numerous, however, that our success was only a local one.

The BEF was now faced with the problem of manning a extending front in order to protect its lifeline to the sea. The fact that it quickly formed the necessary defensive line is yet another proof of the heroic efficiency which both commander and troops have shown throughout this epic fortnight.

Small British motorised and light armoured detachments kept pace with the encirclement and resisted every attempt at penetration of our lines.

Up to this morning the BEF was facing the enemy on the French frontier from near Ypres to the River Scarpe. Thence it supported the part of two French armies roughly as far as Douai, and from there a thin but resolute line continued the ellipse into which the British force had been driven to west of Dunkirk.

The early collapse of the Belgian advanced positions enabled the Germans to push on fast and to attack the lines held by the British.

    From the Guardian archive > May 29, 1940 > Our army in France has been cut off, G, Republished 29.5.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1785166,00.html

From The Guardian archive > May 14 1940 > Blood, tears, and doing without a maid

May 14 1940
The Guardian

[The Manchester Guardian which reported Churchill's "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech carried an article which dealt with another pressing matter.]

People of modest means can effect a substantial economy during the war by doing without a maid. Her services will then be available for more essential work, and the employer can be sure of saving anything from one to two pounds a week.

Apart from food and wages the cost of many household items can be lessened. The careful and intelligent housewife will be able to halve her bills for soaps, powders, and cleaning materials. Light and fuel bills will be less and there will be fewer leakages. Careful planning will, however, be necessary if the housewife does not wish to be too tired and harassed to keep up outside interests.

In most houses the two most constant tasks are preparation of meals and keeping down the dust. The best way to keep the house spick and span is never to let dust accumulate anywhere, and for this a thorough turn-out of every room and passage is necessary once a week and a quick daily dusting. Employ a daily woman to come in, say, on two mornings a week for the turning-out. Then an hour a day should be enough to keep any small house immaculate.

Meals are a more difficult problem. Food must be provided, or health suffers. Soup, for instance, can be taken off the menu during the summer. Make plenty of use of all casserole dishes. If glass ovenware is used it should be soaked for an hour in very hot soda-water.

Potatoes should be baked or boiled in their skins. Eaten with salt and margarine or dripping they are not only more nutritious but more appetising, besides saving much time. Avoid puddings which necessitate the making of breadcrumbs, chopping ingredients, creaming, beating, and tying up of basins. Reduce the number of cooked meals as far as possible. One hot meal a day is ample for anybody except in very cold weather. This saves time in preparation, washing up and fuel, and is healthier as it enables more fresh food in the form of salads to be taken.

Grown-up members of the family should make their own beds, keep their rooms tidy, and clean their own shoes. Older children can also help in these tasks, but, apart from putting away their toys and being reasonably tidy, children should not be expected to spend much time on housework. Their free play-time is psychologically important, especially in these days, and should not be unduly curtailed.

    From The Guardian archive > May 14 1940 > Blood, tears, and doing without a maid, G, republished 14.5.2007, p. 30, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/05/14/pages/ber30.shtml

From The Guardian archive > May 8 1940 > Lessons of Norway

May 8 1940
The Guardian

[In popular histories of the war, this debate was dominated by one phrase, "in the name of God go", which destroyed Neville Chamberlain. That was not how the Manchester Guardian or the Times reported the occasion.]

As far as the debate has gone it has changed nothing in the Parliamentary situation. That is, superficially.

And yet there was a difference. Today's Prime Minister was not the Chamberlain of a few weeks ago whom one heard telling the Tory Central Council that Hitler had missed the bus. But one can still hear those cheers from the embattled "Yes Men" .

Mr Chamberlain's apologia for the Norwegian failure can be studied elsewhere. Here one turns to his "general observations" which shed a good deal of light on himself and his Government. The lessons are those which the Opposition parties have been trying to teach him for months, so the Labour and Liberal benches rocked with cheers at his discoveries.

One lesson was that we had not realised the imminence of the threat. There the Opposition cheered for a full minute. The Leader of the Opposition [Mr Attlee] saw Norway as only one more failure in the uninterrupted story of Ministerial failures. Yet he was full of confidence about our winning the war, though he said bluntly it would only be done by putting different men at the helm.

Drama touched the debate once, when Admiral Sir Roger Keyes alleged in effect that Trondheim had been lost through faint hearts in Whitehall. He rose in his uniform of an admiral of the fleet, as he explained, because he had come to Westminster to speak for men in the fighting Navy who were very unhappy.

Sir Roger admonished [Mr Churchill] to steel himself for vigorous action, because he possesses the confidence of the War Cabinet, the country and the Navy. He ended by reminding Mr Churchill of Nelson's saying that bold est measures are always the safest. So far this had been quite the most disturbing speech in the debate.

Sir Roger's speech will probably tell for more against the Government than Mr Amery's, which followed, but Mr Amery's speech was a sustained and harsh denunciation of the Government for its timidity and ineffectiveness, full of power, and concluding with the savage application to the Government of Cromwell's words to the Long Parliament: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say. Let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."

Mr Amery's philippic was delivered as usual to half-empty benches on his own side, but there was a goodly muster of the Opposition to hear him.

    From The Guardian archive > May 8 1940 > Lessons of Norway, G, republished 8.5.2007, p. 28, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/05/08/pages/ber28.shtml

From the Guardian archive > May 8, 1940 >  Preparations for slaughter on the Maginot Line

Wednesday May 8, 1940
Guardian
Evelyn Montague

Yesterday I tried to describe the queer, confused night fighting which goes on nowadays round our outposts in front of the Maginot Line. It seems all the queerer in its setting of country almost unspoilt by war.

The woods are in the full glory of the new leaf, except where it has been stripped away in places by bursts of shrapnel. The fields, across which the attackers move stealthily at night, are seen by day to be brilliant with cowslips and dandelions, and in "no-man's-land" there are apple trees in blossom in the orchards of deserted villages.

Behind the front line, the countryside shows even fewer signs of war. The local villagers were evacuated long ago, and British soldiers in rest and off duty wander, through streets unharmed but deserted.

One of my colleagues was walking through such a village the other day when he heard the sound of organ music coming from the church. He went in and found two British privates taking turns at the organ, one blowing while the other played for 10 minutes, strictly timed.

They were transport drivers from Northumberland, off duty for an hour or two and busy satisfying the good North Country craving for music. In another deserted church, British and French soldiers have attended together services conducted by a priest in the uniform of a French private.

There are plenty of French troops about, since our force in the Maginot Line is an integral part of a larger French formation. Such posts, held by mixed troops of both countries under a single command, are used on each of our flanks to weld up smoothly and firmly to the French forces on either side and to avoid leaving a weak spot.

I do not know whether we have yet used in these combined posts the British unit which appears to be more suitable than any other - the Hampshire Regiment, which draws heavily on the Channel Islands and has plenty of French names.

In the peaceful country farther back there are discreet preparations for the slaughter which has not yet happened. The first British military cemetery of this war - our earliest casualties, in December, were buried in a neighbouring French civilian cemetery - has six brown wooden crosses. A hundred yards or so away is the first German cemetery in the Allied area, with seven crosses in it. Only one of the crosses on the German graves has a name on it, the other six dead men could not be identified.

The Germans do not give away many points in the game of war.

    From the Guardian archive > May 8, 1940 > Preparations for slaughter on the Maginot Line, G, Republished 8.5.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1770013,00.html

From the Guardian archive > March 15 1938 > Britain replies to the Austrian anschluss

While Herr Hitler was making a conqueror's progress through the streets of the Austrian capital yesterday afternoon, Mr. Chamberlain in the House of Commons was announcing that Germany's actions would force Britain to take still further defence measures.

The Premier's words were: "I am confident that we shall be supported in asking that no one, whatever his preconceived notions may be, shall regard himself as being excluded from any extension of the national effort which may be called for.

"In regard to our defence programmes, we have always made it clear that they were flexible and they would have to be reviewed from time to time in the light of any new development in the international situation. It would be idle to pretend that the recent events do not constitute a change of the kind we had in mind."

Mr. Chamberlain brushed aside the official German pretences that "forcible pressure" was not exerted by the Reich. Mr. Chamberlain declared that the methods adopted by Germany throughout these events "call for the severest condemnation," and must prejudice the Government's hope of promoting international co-operation.

The Premier's reference to the "national effort" was not a hint of the possibility of military or industrial conscription. Mr. R. A. Butler, in making this clear in his speech closing the debate, also indicated that it was in the Air Force programme that expansion or acceleration may be contemplated.

The Premier, it was further explained, was referring to "certain inconveniences and perhaps sacrifices," which employers and work people would no doubt be asked to accept in the national interest if the Government decided upon these measures.

The Prime Minister's announcement about defence follows only a week after he had informed the country that the figure of £1,500,000,000 contemplated for the defence estimates would have to be substantially increased.

Mr. Chamberlain recounted in his speech the German assurances to Czecho-Slovakia, but said nothing of the British position.

Yesterday, France gave Czecho-Slovakia a solemn pledge that she is determined to honour her agreement in the event of attack. The pledge was given by M Blum, the Premier, and M Paul-Boncour, the Foreign Minister, to the Czecho-Slovak Minister in Paris, and the French Ambassador in London was instructed to inform the British Government of this determination.

    From the Guardian archive > March 15 1938 > Britain replies to the Austrian anschluss, G, Republished 15.3.2007, p. 40, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/03/15/pages/ber40.shtml

From the Guardian archive > May 19, 1935 > The death of Lawrence of Arabia
 

Strategist of the Desert Dies in Military Hospital

Lord Allenby's tribute - "Valued comrade"

Sunday May 19, 1935
Guardian

We regret to announce the death of Mr. T. E. Shaw ("Lawrence of Arabia"), which occurred shortly after eight o'clock yesterday morning in Wool Military Hospital, Bovington Camp, Dorset. Mr. Shaw, who until recently was an aircraftman in the Royal Air Force, was injured in a motor-cycling accident on Monday night and did not recover consciousness.

Tragic as it is that such a remarkable career should have been ended by a simple road accident, an official statement issued yesterday shows that if his fight for life had succeeded it would still have been a tragedy, for Mr. Shaw's brain was irreparably damaged.

Mr. Shaw was 46 years of age.

After a post-mortem examination by Mr. H.W.B. Cairns, the London specialist, the following statement was issued: -

"The post-mortem examination conducted by Mr. Cairns showed such severe lacerations and damage to the brain that in the event of his recovery he would have only regained partial use of his speech and eyesight. In view of the immense activity and energy of Mr. Shaw it is felt that this may be some consolation to those who had entertained anxious hopes of his recovery."

Another statement issued was: "The funeral of Mr. T. E. Shaw, formerly Colonel Lawrence, will take place at Moreton Church, Dorset, at 2.30pm on Tuesday. The service will be a simple one and no mourning and no flowers are requested. Apart from those specially invited the service will be confined to his particular friends and those who were associated with him in Arabia.

It is understood that there will be no military escort.

When it was realised that the crisis had been reached, Sir E. Farquhar Buzzard, physician-in-ordinary to the King, Mr H.W.B. Cairns, the brain specialist of the London Hospital, and Dr. Hope Gosse, the London lung specialist, were called to the hospital.

Last night's broadcasts

Tributes to "Lawrence of Arabia" were broadcast from London last night by Field Marshal Lord Allenby and Sir Herbert Baker. Lord Allenby said that in Aircraftman Shaw he had lost a good friend and a valued comrade.

After recalling that they were closely associated in the campaign which opened in 1917-18 in Palestine and Syria, Lord Allenby said: "His co-operation was marked by the utmost loyalty and I never had anything but praise for his work, which, indeed, was invaluable throughout the campaign. He was the mainspring of the Arab movement and knew their language, their manners and their mentality. He shared with the Arabs their hardships and dangers. Among these desert raiders there was none who would not have willingly died for his chief. In fact not a few lost their lives in devotion to him and in defence of his person.

"He was a shy and retiring scholar, archaeologist, and philosopher swept by the tide of war in to a position undreamt of. He had a genius for leadership. Above all men he had no regard for ambition, but did his duty as he saw it."

Lord Allenby added: "He has left to us who knew and admired him a beloved memory and to all his countrymen an example of a life well spent in service."

Sir Herbert Baker was unable to be at the microphone and his tribute was read for him. He first met Colonel Lawrence in Oxford shortly after the war and was fascinated by him. "He seemed to radiate a magnetic influence," said Sir Herbert. "When he last stayed with me about a month ago he pleased us by eating two human meals a day and expressing an ardour to do some great national work."

Other tributes - Mr Winston Churchill:

In Colonel Lawrence we have lost one of the greatest beings of our time. I had the honour of his friendship. I knew him well. I hoped to see him quit his retirement and take a commanding part in facing the dangers which now threaten this country. No such blow has befallen the Empire for many years as his untimely death. The personal sorrow which all he knew him will feel is deepened by the national impoverishment.

    From the Guardian archive > May 19, 1935 - the death of Lawrence of Arabia, G, Republished 19.5.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,959165,00.html

From the Guardian archive > October 21, 1918 > Our prisoners are being overworked

Monday October 21, 1918
Guardian

The following are extracts from letters written by British prisoners of war in Germany.

These letters are censored in Germany, but sometimes through carelessness, the complaints are not deleted, and sometimes passages marked by examiners as undesirable are left in or only partly deleted. In this way we learn what these men are suffering. One writes: "I am working in chemico-manure works near Stettin. It is heavy work, loading up sacks of manure in railway trucks and unloading barges of ironstone. We work ten hours a day, barring Sundays. We get half a pound of bread and three bowls of soup a day. There is no stay in the food for a man to work on ... I never felt so weak before."

Another letter runs: "We have been working here three months. It is what they call a surface mine or an open mine; the hours are too long ... The Germans told us it was a reprisal, as our people were keeping German prisoners in our trenches."

Most of the letters complain of the long hours. One man states that he is working in a coal pit for twelve hours a day, and for this he is receiving the sum of five shillings a week.

Another writes: "I came to work at six this morning, and won't finish till six tomorrow morning. I tell you it's no joke." And another writes: "I still manage to put a letter together, such as it is. Yes, work, and it's all work, only 14 hours per day, not long when you say it quick."

The worst cases are in the mines. Here is a sample: "The bosses in the mines are all-powerful, and frequently order men who are prisoners of war to work two shifts, which means 16 hours underground, or 19 hours' absence from their living quarters, and that on four small slices of brown bread, unless they take some with them out of their pockets; also they are abused without the slightest provocation.

"There are 24 young English lads who arrived here last week, and who, ignorant of the language and mining alike, have been beaten with sticks. Slapping the face with the hand is a common occurrence, and you have to consider the name 'swine' a term of endearment. In my own case, I have been very savagely attacked on two occasions by under-bosses, because I resented this face-slapping and being ordered to work two shifts without reason, and I have ample evidence in the shape of big scars on my head made by a pit lamp."

These are the things that have escaped the German censor. What of those that he has blotted out?

    From the Guardian archive > October 21, 1918 > Our prisoners are being overworked, G? Republished 21.10.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1927991,00.html

From The Guardian archive > June 12, 1917 > Shaw objects to hard labour for pacifists

Tuesday June 12, 1917
Guardian

Sir, - The announcement that a sentence of two years' hard labour has been passed upon Mr. Clifford Al1en raises the question whether the press and public, in accepting the news without protest or comment, are acting advisedly. Imprisonment with hard labour is the most severe form of incarceration practised in England. A sentence of two years is regarded as reaching the limit of endurance. When terms of imprisonment exceeding two years are called for the prisoner is sent to penal servitude. The difference is that a prisoner at the end of two years' hard labour is in a state of exhaustion which could not be prolonged without endangering his life, whereas penal servitude has to be so ordered that men can endure ten or even twenty years of it without physical collapse. It must therefore be clearly understood that a prisoner can be killed by sentencing him to hard labour for a continuing offence.Thus Mr. Clifford Allen, having already served a severe term of hard labour, is virtually under sentence of death. Is It the intention of the Government? If so, there is nothing more to be said. It may be so, for it is a matter of daily experience that many people think that such a death is too good for a conscientious objector, and do not hesitate to say as much. But are these vicarious zealots in the majority? Why are the scruples and personal rights of the objectors treated with pedantic respect when they operate to the dis­advantage of the objector, and overridden by force when they have the contrary effect? Mr. Stephen Hobhouse refuses to submit to medical examination. Why was he not examined by force? Objectors refusing to put on uniform have been forcibly clad. Women refusing their dinners have been forcibly fed. Your columns have just reported the case of an invalid recruit who was stripped naked and prevented from sitting near the fire. He is now dead. Yet when Mr. Hobhouse objects, his wishes and his person are regarded as sacred, and the authorities, deploring his obstinacy, consign him to hard labour for life. Anyhow, here are two gentlemen in a fair way to be killed because the public has no knowledge and the authorities no sense. If we wish to kill them, cannot we shoot them out of hand and have done with it, Dublin fashion? Yours, &c., G. BERNARD SHAW

[Allen, later the pacifist socialist peer Lord Allen of Hurtwood, developed spinal tuberculosisis and was released after 16 months. Hobhouse, nephew of the Guardian leader writer LT Hobhouse, was chairman of the Quaker committee for helping enemy aliens. He too was freed early because of ill health .]

    From The Guardian archive > June 12, 1917 > Shaw objects to hard labour for pacifists, G, Republished 12.6.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1795748,00.html

From the Guardian archive > September 6, 1916 > How the Zeppelin was destroyed

Wednesday September 6, 1916
Guardian

The military authorities announced yesterday that the destruction of the Zeppelin that came down early on Sunday morning at Cuffley, a few miles north of London, was mainly due to an army airman, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, Worcestershire Regiment and Royal Flying Corps.

The king has awarded Lieutenant Robinson the Victoria Cross. To the official announcement of this in last night's "Gazette" is added the following note:- "For most conspicuous bravery. He attacked an enemy airship under circumstances of great difficulty and danger, and sent it crashing to the ground as a flaming wreck. He had been in the air for more than two hours, and had previously attacked another airship during his flight."

Viscount French, Commander in Chief, Home Forces, in a statement says, "The airship ... passed through heavy and accurate gunfire, but it is established beyond doubt that the main factor in its destruction was an aeroplane of the R.F.C., which attacked with the utmost gallantry and judgment and brought it down."

Several other army aviators were on the track of or engaging the Zeppelin, and one of these who witnessed the end from a height of 10,000ft. describes how Lieutenant Robinson, anticipating the raider's movements, was able to dash in on the airship as the latter rose to about 12,000ft.

A flying officer, at the inquest on the German crew on Monday, expressed the opinion that the airship was not crippled by gunfire before the aviator's attack, but in other quarters this claim was made for the anti-aircraft guns.

An officer of the Royal Flying Corps who took part in the pursuit of the destroyed Zeppelin told a press representative that two other aeroplanes were endeavouring to engage the air ship, which was making frantic efforts to get away, firing with its machine guns, first diving and then ascending.

An east coast correspondent says Lieutenant Robinson was one of several British aviators who pursued a Zeppelin several months ago, but had the misfortune to meet with engine trouble. After cursing his luck he registered a vow that he would bring down a Zeppelin or die in the attempt.

Lord French stated yesterday:- "An important part of one of the enemy's airships which raided England on September 2-3 has been picked up in the eastern counties. There is no doubt that the ship suffered severe damage from gunfire."

It was reported on Monday that part of a Zeppelin gondola, with a great length of wire and a telephone installation, had been picked up in a village on the East Anglian coast.

    From the Guardian archive > September 6, 1916 > How the Zeppelin was destroyed, G, Republished 6.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1865541,00.html

From the Times Archive > On This Day - July 15, 1916

The Battle of the Somme has become synonymous with the horrors of trench warfare. In the midst of suffering, however, there were humorous interludes.

A SECOND lieutenant in a Yorkshire battalion tells a story of a German dug-out and its occupants. The dug-out was in the first line of trenches taken by the officer’s platoon. The men then went forward to the next trench, and the officer, being hit, had to stay behind. The rest of the story may be told in his own words: - “After a bit I wriggled back to that Boche front line into a shallow sap. I was resting there when I saw a Boche officer come climbing out of that big dug-out we’d put the six bombs in. He was peering first one way and then the other, like a burglar. “Oh, you beauty!” I thought. A second later he was dead. I charged my breech again, and no sooner done than my next target pops up – a lieutenant. I aimed for his shoulder blades, but the old gun kicked a bit, and I got him through the head.

Then a private came up, with never a weapon of any sort in his hands, and the fear of God in his face. ‘You’re a Boche,’ I thought; ‘and you ought to be shot: but you’ve got nothing in your hands.’ “Here!” I shouted at him.

We went along a passage, turned to the left into a regular boudoir. Dug-out! Why there was Turkey carpet on the floor, and beautiful tapestry curtains to the bunks. There were three cases of beer. There were about a hundred eggs; two cut hams; boxes of cigars; one case of champagne; cakes; and chocolates. I got the batman to help me back to daylight. There wasn’t a living soul in the trench, so I got the batman to take me pick-a-back while I stuck to my rifle.”

    From the Times Archives > On This Day - July 15, 1916, The Times, 15.7.2005, http://www.newsint-archive.co.uk/pages/main.asp

From the Times Archive > On This Day - March 31, 1913

The threat posed by the Zeppelin proved to be exaggerated.
Although there were bombing raids in the early years of the First World War,
the damage was limited, casualties light and the Zeppelin’s vulnerability to attack was soon exposed

WE NOW know the best and the worst of the Government policy concerning aerial warfare, and are in a position to realise the full effects of the neglect of the King’s Ministers in this branch of defence.

We are aided in this unpleasant task by the news which we publish from Berlin today showing that the Germans propose to allocate nearly four millions more to their aerial fleet, bringing up the total sum available to for this purpose to between six and seven millions sterling.

It is the Government as a whole on whom the responsibility rests for their inability to understand the importance of this new branch of warfare, and for their failure to take the measures necessary for our security.

It was obvious to every looker-on that when M. Blériot crossed the Channel a new chapter was opened in the military history of the British Isles, and it was obvious many years ago that the Germans had built dirigibles which were bound to exercise a most important influence upon warfare by sea and land.

At present Germany possesses a fleet of useful dirigibles, to be formed into two squadrons, each of five airships, while we possess not a single airship. The Zeppelins now travel 56 miles an hour, have a good armament, and a range of 1,200 to 1,500 miles. Germany has also built, or is building, eight dirigible stations. The stations on the Rhine are some 250 miles from Chatham, which can be reached in five hours, given favourable weather.

Does Mr Churchill or Colonel Seely seriously think that the Germans are so obtuse that they cannot realize the advantages gained by their audacity and perseverance?

    From the Times Archives > In This Day - March 31, 1913, Times, 31.3.2005, http://www.newsint-archive.co.uk/pages/main.asp

April 27, 1903

From the Guardian archive

Monday April 27, 1903
Guardian

Like so many other official documents on South African affairs, Lord Milner's new despatches are belated admissions of unpleasant truths that independent observers have long insisted on in the face of official indifference.

The public were sceptical as to the extent of the devastation of the conquered countries. It was thought that some six hundred farms had been burnt and then the mischief had stopped. Great was the outcry when the Boer Generals in appealing for funds declared that the whole land was laid waste.

But now what is Lord Milner's account? "We began working," he writes, "with the country absolutely denuded of everything."

Lord Milner has a turn for rhetoric and he states the case a little more strongly than a sober and literal-minded Boer would do. A Boer would have mentioned prosaically that there were only a few thousand cattle left, or that many towns were wholly and many partially destroyed.

However, Lord Milner is merely admitting at length what the Boer leaders contended eight months ago. The country when the war ceased was laid waste from end to end. He passes on at once to a further admission. One of the complaints from the Boer side about the administration of relief turned on the condition of the animals supplied to them instead of a money grant out of the three millions.

It was said that the animals taken over from the military were in a miserable plight, and that many died before work could be got out of them. That was thought by many to be a slander, but what, again, does Lord Milner say? "The large number of animals which we took over from the military were for the most part in wretched condition.

"Hundreds of them died before they had done any work at all; many thousands were useless for several months, and were only gradually resuscitated by the greatest care and at considerable expense."

A further complaint came from those who had surrendered during the war under promise of British protection and who nevertheless had their property destroyed later on - sometimes by the British themselves.

We note such admissions in no spirit of controversy, but because we in England have frequently had the argument from common sense checked by the argument from authority. When common sense and knowledge of affairs seemed to show that events were turning out one way, we were told that they were turning in precisely the opposite way. Milner was British high commissioner in South Africa before the Boer war

    From the Guardian archive > Lord Milner: the Boers got their facts right - April 27, 1903, G, Republished 27.4.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1762319,00.html

September 26, 1901

The war diary of a Boer family

From the Guardian archive

Thursday September 26, 1901
Guardian

The following extracts from a diary, of the authenticity of which we have obtained sufficient assurance, illustrate one aspect of the process of "clearing" tracts of the country occupied by the enemy.

Amsterdam, New Scotland, February 14 1901. This morning, about eight o'clock, the cavalry of the enemy entered the town, the infantry following.

Every garden and tree was stripped of everything. All the livestock was taken. General Campbell arrived; he was very abrupt. He said they, the English, had come to give us food and protection.

Mother replied that we were quite satisfied with the food and protection our own people afforded us. Then he said we were to be ready to leave the following day at 10 a.m.

Feb. 15. Worse than ever. The Provost Marshal, Capt. Daniels entered the house and began searching. They took what they wanted - soap, candles, mealies & c. even to white sewing cotton. When mother came in, Capt. Daniels turned to her and said, 'Those devils of Boers have been sniping at us again, and your two sons among them, I suppose. If I catch them, they will hang.'

Feb. 17. At dawn Capt. Ballantyne said we would be allowed a quarter of an hour to load, and only to take the most necessary things. Beds, clothing, mattresses, chairs, chests & c., odds and ends of all kinds were burnt. Foodstuffs were also taken. At 9 p.m. we out-spanned in a hard rain. It was pitiful to hear the children crying all night in the wet waggons for water and food.

March 5. Annie very sick. Must be the food, as we have only meat, and mealies when we can pick them.

March 6. Annie very ill all day. A driving misty rain. Oxen with lung sickness are made to pull until they fall down in the yoke to die.

April 19 [in captivity at Volksrust]. Message that Major Watt, Assistant District Commissioner, wanted to see [Mother] at once. Mother, Annie and Polly Coltzer went with the policeman. Major Watt was in a dreadful rage.

'You are Mrs. Cameron?' 'Yes.' 'You are a most dangerous woman, you have been speaking against the British Government. You are an English woman.' 'All my sympathies are with the Boers.' 'Make a note of that. All the concessions we intended making you will be withdrawn. You will not be allowed to receive any parcels.'

April 25. We received the following: 'I beg to inform you that you are to proceed to Maritzburg tomorrow by the 11p.m. train. A waggon shall convey your luggage to the station.'

B. R. Cameron,Prisoner of War, May 31 1901. Green Point, Pietermaritzburg, Natal.

    From the Guardian archive > September 26, 1901 > The war diary of a Boer family, G, Republished 26.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1881168,00.html

November 17, 1899

Boers wreck a train. Churchill is missing

From the Guardian archive

Friday November 17, 1899
Guardian

On Wednesday an armoured train was derailed near Chieveley and attacked. The escort was composed of half a company of Dublin Fusiliers, and another half company of Durban Light Infantry, 120 of whom are missing. Mr. Winston Churchill is among the missing. The armoured train consisted of, in the front, a flat truck with a seven-pounder gun, manned by a petty officer and five bluejackets from Her Majesty's ship Tartar. It contained 100 men in all. The train was despatched for the purpose of reconnoitring the Boer positions near Colenso and to ascertain the truth of reports that railway track had been destroyed.

The troops were entrained and left Estcourt at six o'clock in the morning. The train ran forward to Chieveley, where a body of the enemy was seen. The enemy opened a cannonade at a range of about 2,000 yards. The Boers also had tilted a rail.

Instantly two of the trucks were overturned and the third was derailed. Many of our men were injured. Mr. Winston Churchill bravely summoned the train hands and volunteers, detached the locomotive, ran back to the front trucks, and then, pushing and pulling, drove through the wreckage.

The infantry opened a rifle fire on the Boers, who were advancing on the west side of the line, and held them in check. [Mr. Churchill] set to work heroically with the engine hands and cleared the debris, and put many of our wounded men upon the locomotive and tender, which, though shelled, got back at ten in the morning. Mr. Churchill remained at Frere to assist the other soldiers.

Meanwhile our bluejackets fired their seven-pounder, the petty officer bravely laying and serving the weapon against the cannonade. He sent three shells bursting among the enemy, who numbered some 500.

The Boers poured shot and shellfire into the crippled train... A shell struck and hurled [the seven-pounder] away, overturning the truck. The only newspaper correspondent present was Mr. Winston Churchill, who distinguished himself by his courageous conduct, as did also Wagner, the driver, and Stuart, the stoker of the engine.

The troops, who had maintained a hopeless fight with great courage, were overpowered. A few managed to escape, but the majority were either killed or wounded or taken prisoners. Mr. Churchill was last seen advancing with a rifle among the Dublin Fusiliers. He is believed to have surrendered himself to cover the retreat.

· Within a year of his highly publicised capture and escape, Churchill became a Conservative MP at the age of 26

    From the Guardian archive > November 17, 1899 > Boers wreck a train. Churchill is missing, G, Republished 17.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1950384,00.html








 

"If they ask for it,

we know how to make some really big parking lots in this world"

- Tom Clancy
in We were told that life would change for ever, I, p. 4, 11.9.2003.

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