JF Ptak Science Books

What Was the Strategic Cost of the V-1 and V-2 to the Nazis?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1551

One of the defensive weapons in the Allies' arsenal during WWII may have been the V-1 and V-2.  This sounds horrible to say, and I don't mean this application intentionally, of course--but the production of the V-1 and V-2 was something that could have caused the Nazis the equivalent production of something like thousands (dozens of thousands?) of fighter aircraft--a part of the Luftwaffe that he Allies didn't need to shoot down because they were never built.  As horrible as it sounds, the V-1 and V-2 may have been the far greater thing to choose from in the production of multiple evils.

The Vengeance Weapon was a great-ish achievement of the Nazi regime, intended to strike enough fear and destruction in London and other cities and to render them a shambles, an effort that was thought would bring the Brits to their knees.  What happened, though, was this:  that in all of the raids and bombings at the hands of the V-weapons, much of the attack was lost to going off-course, unable to find their gigantic target.  Over time, the V-1 and V-2  terror weapons did kill 9,000 people  or so in the U.K. in their  raids from 1944 and 1945, wounding 25,000  and destroying 20,000+ houses. Over 11,000 of the V-weapons were fired by the Nazis:  more than 9,100 V-1s were fired at Britain (with 2,500+ hitting London), while 1,115 V-2s were launched.   They were terrible weapons, and they killed many people--overwhelmingly a civilian population--but they performed nowhere near their strategic intentions. 

These totals for the entire campaigns of the V-1 and V-2 rockets  are less than those of a single large raid by Bomber Command, sometimes less than one mission, on one night.  The massive expense involved in producing the V-1 and V-2 weapons could well have been used to fabricate 5 or 10 or perhaps 25 thousand fighter planes.  Fighter planes that could have been used in the war on offensive and defensive procedures. That's 25,000 fighter aircraft that never flew for the Luftwaffe, never terrorized anyone, never flew in defense of German cities, never had to be shot down. (Assuming of course that the Germans would have had the fuel to power them.)

They were terrible weapons--the V-1, in particular, made a very dirty, nasty sound, that was a terrifying experience to hear.  When the sound of the engine stopped, the bomb fell.  Long, throaty, deathly gurgle,then silence, then explosion.  The V-2s came in mostly silently, a masked death, but in so doing also somewhat mollified a significant psychological terror weapon.

Perhaps I am way off base with this, but the V-weapons seem to me to have cost the Nazis far more than they gained.  Of course if they had been able to produce an order of magnitude--or more--of the weapon and delivered it more effectively, then perhaps it becomes a different story.  It would have been a different story too if the Germans had had any reliable intelligence on the effectiveness of the weapos so that they could have adjusted their flight, and if Ultra had not existed, and so on down that ridiculous rabbit hole of speculation.  But my own idea remains that the V-weapons were not as horrific as other things could have been had those resources been allocated differently. 

A Note on the Decision to Use the Bomb: 17 July--6 August, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1550

July 17, 1945 (Trinity +1 or Hiroshima -20), the day after the Trinity test of the first atomic weapon in the Alamogordo Desert of New Mexico, was the first day in which very concerted, very real discussions ensued about what to do with the bomb and where to us it.  Actually the discussions were mostly on the “where” than on the “whether”.  (As it turns out part of a minor segment of the “whether” part was Leo Szilard’s petition to President Truman not to use the bomb and which was signed by 155 Manhattan Project scientists, and which had reached its final version on this day.)

The truth of the matter was that it was a very complex issue, an easily misunderstood tapestry of circumstance and consequence. The major issue of course was that the Japanese would not surrender, and that there would be “fanatical resistance” once the invasion of the Japanese islands had begun.    The battle of Okinawa had just been fought—it was a horrible confrontation taking 12,5000 American lives and more than 100,000 Japanese , demonstrating that even in impossible circumstances that the Japanese simply would not surrender (unconditionally).   This is just one instance—there are many others, not the least of which was t he recent firebombing of Tokyo, taking 150,000 lives.  Air strikes in general seemed to not make a difference in the will of Japan to fight—as was demonstrated again and again in the British and American bombing of Germany—as was further demonstrated in General Curtis LeMay’s and General Hap Arnold’s  60-city attack in the May-August span.  The thought was that if there was an invasion that it could well cost the U.S. 100,000+¹ casualties and would be completely devastating to Japan.

One issue concerned the Soviet Union breaking their neutrality by invading Manchuria (scheduled for 16 August according to American intelligence reports)  and entering the war against the Japanese, creating a northern front and an impossible position for the Japanese.  Another issue regarded the Soviets brokering a truce—revealed on 12 July to the American administration through intercepted communications between Moscow and Tokyo—between the U.S. and Japan.  In both circumstances the issue of the unconditional truce that was demanded by the Americans could well have been made impossible and bartered out.

Over the next few days the Potsdam Conference would come to an end, and the Japanese would reject the orders of surrender two days after that.  On 21 July the approval to use the bomb was made by Truman and sent along to Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the 24th.  One day later the only written order to use the bomb would be sent by acting chief of staff of the Joint Chiefs Thomas Handy to General Carl Spaatz, Commander of the US Army Strategic Air Force.  Targets were selected (with General Groves clinging to his desire to bomb Kyoto, a spectacularly bad choice, which I believe was also the choice of John von Neumann).  Nagasaki was not yet on the list but would be in a few days.  By the end of July Hiroshima is chosen as the first target—one reason being that there were no American POW camps located in the city (as was the case with the other two pre-Nagasaki selections).

Returning to the “whether” part—it is perhaps surprising to see the list of people who had great reservations about using the bomb (at all).  Dwight Eisenhower was one of them, and he wrote about his distaste for using the bomb against Japan in his book Mandate for Change:

"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."   - Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

Eisenhower also had no stomach for the United States to be the first country to use “that thing”.

Another was Admiral William Leahy  (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), who weighed in strongly with the following: 

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” --William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.

The list is quite long, and includes people like General MacArthur, John J. McCloy (assistant Secretary of War), Joe Grew (Under Secretary of State), Paul Nitze, Lewis Strauss, Albert Einstein, and more.  General Spaatz, who received the one written order to use the bomb, wrote later "If we were to go ahead with the plans for a conventional invasion with ground and naval forces, I believe the Japanese thought that they could inflict very heavy casualties on us and possibly as a result get better surrender terms. On the other hand if they knew or were told that no invasion would take place [and] that bombing would continue until the surrender, why I think the surrender would have taken place just about the same time."

Its very difficult really to get the full flavor of this issue in a thousand words or so, and impossible to try and recreate the atmosphere of those few weeks; it is also impossible to imagine the cast relief of the many millions of people who woke up on 7 August to the news of the destruction of Hiroshima. 

And of course the Japanese still didn’t surrender until after the use of the second bomb on 9 August against Nagasaki.  And so on. They were 20 very full days.

Notes

1. Estimating American casualties for the invasion of Japan was a very trickly business--I've seen the numbers range from 50,000 to almost a million.  For the Japanese the story would have been far worse, and could have led to the utter devastation of the country. 

The War Department was very busy trying to figure out the American casualties for the final invasion of Japan.  In one famous paper, Memorandum for the Chief of Staff: Amplifying Details on Planners' Paper for Presentation to the President. (17/18  June 1945). prepared by General Hull, estimates for American casualties invading Kyushu (on the way to the mainland) were based somewhat on the very recent experiences at Okinawa. Kyushu was the site of an enormous Japanese military build-up in a final preparation for the defense of the homeland—there were more than six times the number of soldiers here than at Okinawa, totaling some 550,000.  By August 8, today, the American casualties at Okinawa were about 49,000.  There would still be a very long and bloody war to wage had not the Empire of Japan finally surrendered four days after the use of the second atomic weapon at Nagasaki.  Estimates are as follows (this taken from Douglas MacEachin, The Final Months of the War with Japan: US  Signal Detection, Invasion Planning and the Atomic Bomb Decision, CIA, 1999):

**for further quotes on those having reservations about using the bomb see Doug Long's very useful site Quotes gathered from Doug Long’s site.

A Child's Reader on Being a Migrant Farmer, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1549

I hardly expected the story that I found in this little square pamphlet, particularly since I had selected it because of its cover art.

Jack of the Bean Fields--written by Nina Millen and published by the Friendship Press of New York--turns out to be a photo-essay on one seasonal adventure of a boy named Jack Marco and his migrant vegetable-picking family.  The story starts with the family in a bad way, heading out on the road in a broken car filled with Jack's mother, father, grandmother and three siblings, out to find a camp where they could find jobs picking early beans. 

As the family fixes the car, Jack heads out to play in the fields, where he finds a book.  We find that--at age 8 or thereabouts--Jack hasn't been taught to read and hasn't been to school in years, and the family doesn't own a single book. The family gets underway, finds a camp, and moves into an empty unit in a series of shanties. They clean the place up, and Jack lays his book on a shelf.  "Now we are settled again" announces Ma.  Wincing.

 

In a story that could have been a very maudlin or saccharin affair, it was surprisingly matter-of-fact, eventually telling how community and church groups appeared through the intercession of a camp nurse to help the migrant families, clothe the children, and send them to school. 

The war was underway, the Depression was on its way out, the economy was beginning to bounce--but then, as today, there were migrant farmers--they just weren't being displaced by Dust Bowl factors anymore.  But, basically, it was a good story for kids, focused mainly on appreciating what we have and our small gifts, such as family--and the ability to read. 

Child Straigtener & Other Edwardian Cyborg Bits: Patent Reports

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1549

(The following images are taken from the U.K. Intellectual Property Office Espacenet patent search page, here. The quotations following the illustrations for the patents are from that page.)

Close Straightening Encounters for Children of the Reading Kind

Here's an interesting implement that no doubt brought secondary thoughts about reading to any child made to wear this thing--the unhappy child is at left, and the skull-cap, at right.

 

Abstract of  GB 190421618  (A)

"Lorenz, H.. For indicating when wearer deviates from an upright position; caps.-A cap I is made in the form of an inverted bottomless saucer with holes 3 in the side for lightness and ventilation. It is intended to be worn by school children to prevent stooping, inasmuch as it only remains on the head so long as the wearer remains in an erect posture..."

 

Hand Guard for Cutting Things

 

Francis John Crell: GB190402703 (a) "A Hand Guard for use in Cutting Bread and for Other Like Purposes".  I'm not sure how this works as a glove-protective unit  given the spaces in-between the springy fingers--mostly it seemed to increase the cutter's grip rather than protect them for accidental cutting.

 

 Walking and Running Anti-Deformation Appliance

Abstract of  GB 190414477  (A)

"Skorzewski, Comte V. Walking and running, appliances for aiding.-A n appliance for aiding walking and running is adapted to store up, and to give up at the required moment, the energy resulting from the alteration in height of the centre of gravity of the body. The user sits on a saddle 2 adjustably attached to a tube 1 provided with handle - bars. The tube 1 branches into two tubes 5, which are connected by joints 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17 to other tubes of narrower crosssection, conforming in shape to the legs of the wearer, who is strapped to the appliance. The joints 16, 17 are connected by means of stirrups 18, 19 to soles 20, 21, or to straps by means of which soles may be attached to the appliance. The tubes are filled with compressed air through a suitable cock or valve. The joints are preferably formed of armoured rubber tubes, coated or not with para rubber."

 

Women with Guns--a "First" in Women/Pistols/Advertising?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1548  [Abdullah Cigarettes Revisited]

 

 
Here's a not-usual question:  when was the first image printed of a woman pointing a gun in the commission of a felony who was NOT an American Western leather-slapping, bronc-ridin', Buffalo gal?  I have a funny feeling that it wasn't until relatively recently, 20th century, or thereabouts.  I thought about this when I saw this ad in the Illustrated London News for 21 August 1926, calling for women to rush out and buy the ciggy that was worth stealing--Abdulla ("Superb") cigarettes.

The doggerel of the poet-izer F.R. Holmes that decorates this page (and who recognizes that the clerk named Archibald who was handing over the cigarettes was chattering through "store-teeth", which is kind of nice) did absently grind out a factual bit when he referred to the packaging of the Abdulla cigarettes as "Caskets". Of course he had something else in mind in line with his time, but he did mistakenly have a peep into the future when he labeled the box of coffin nails so, though not so "fragrant" as he was thinking.  (I also like the masked male accomplice peeping into the scene from the safety of the getaway car.)

Offhand, though, I cannot bring up an earlier image of a non-cowgirl-performing woman pointing a gun at someone to achieve a criminal end--especially not in an advertisement. 

It is interesting considering this ad as a statement of sorts of women in the marketplace purchasing stuff that had previously been considered male terrain.  Woman had been he target of cigarette manufacturers in some small ways in the late 1880's and early 1890's, but it seems not until after the War and then after the Vote was there a full-on effort to sort women into some consuming fields that they had been excluded from previously.  Unfortunately, in this case, the advertisers recognized that they were missing perhaps half of their possible market, and that new market was pursued and resulted in tens of millions of cancer-related deaths. 

Well!  Now that I've finished this short post, it just came to mind that a good alternative and much earlier source might be images of she-pirates, though it might still be a stretch to find one of those women with their sword at someone's neck...

Fear of Numbers, Part 7 and Seven Sevenths: Octophobia.

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   [Part of the Unintentional Absurdist series.]

This illustration comes from the beautiful Bibliodyessy site (follow link for the full description of the artwork), where the curator unearthed this series of 32 hand-colored engravings of the gardens of the great emblematicist, Jacob Cats.  I wonder why this fellow had such a strong reaction to whatever it was he was seeing.  I guess he was just looking at the shrub, but the vicinity of the eight, and its potential peril (!) for what it might represent (from eight-of-something-bad to the sign for an inverted infinity) , made this a little too good to resist.  [This is the first in a series of "found" images displaying unusual reactions to unintentioned floating numbers.]

And the full image from which this detail was removed, a garden Mount Parnasus. 

 

History of Lines: Complicated Simplicity and Marconi's Lines of Communications

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1547   [Part of the History of Lines series.]

This is an illustration of the approximate times and places that ships at sea could expect to be able to communication with each other by the relatively new invention of wireless telegraphy. (We're talking about Marconi here and just very briefly; this is not the place for the discussion of what he did or didn't "borrow" from his predecessors and contemporaries such as Heinrich Hertz, Oliver Lodge and Nikolai Tesla.  He at the very least however owed all of them at least an enormous helping of gratitude, and probably more.  Then there's Marconi's very conservative technical continuation in the field which is confusing and interesting.  And finally but not the least of all of the stuff about Marconi is his comfort and support of the Fascist regime in Italy, where Marconi became a member in 1923, escalating in his fame through the party ranks to have none other than Benito Mussolini serve as the best man in his second wedding.  But as I said that's all for another day.) It appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1907,surrounded by an article on Obelia in the "Science Jottings" section of the magazine.  This chart isn't

quite as complicated as it seems, really: all you need to do is follow one line from the top to the bottom.  Simply put, each diagonal line represents a specific ship (all of which are named) and their positions as they make their ways across the North Atlantic ocean; each intersection represents the time and place that two ships can communicate via wireless with one another.  So, for example, the Empress of Britain will on its six-day voyage be able to communicate at least 26 times with other ships for news and information.

What this seems to me to be is the supplemental efforts of the ocean-going ships

to the newly established trans-Atlantic radio-telegraphic company and installation opened by Marconi in October 1907.  Even though the first transatlantic communication is celebrated as having taken place in 1901, the performance, even in 1907, was still spotty.

Again, I'm just after this for the image 

Crowd Series--Find the Hat, NYC, WWII

JF Ptak  Quick Post

Funny how in so many of these big crowd picture that I've performed surgery on that hats seem to be an issue.  For example, there's this iconic photograph by Weegee (Arthur Felig, born Usher Felig in the Ukraine, 1898-1909, a man who lived for "the shot" and got it over and over again, evidently at the cost of just about everything else in his life) of the crowds at Coney Island. ("Weegee" was the phonetic spelling of Ouija, a moniker given to the man because he seemed be able to intuit the location of a crime or action of some sort.  It helped that he was the only journalist/photographer given a license to have a police-band radio receiver at home and in his car. 

So far as I can tell there is only one man in a hat--the guy in the bottom right corner of the image, and he's wearing a fedora at that.  The person at 10:00 from him--white-hatted with a plastic visor--may be a man, too, in which case I'll have to amend this a little to restrict hats to fedoras.  And wearing it, too, at the time of the photo--there's another man in there somewhere who is doffing his boater to the photographer.  And that's about it.  Not much sand in this picture.

It is a little unusual, this hat business--but Weegee at least has captured hats in unusual places.  Finding his bread buttered by crime photography and the gritty aspect of late-night city life, Weegee documented all manner of criminal activities in NYC during the 1930's-1950's, including more than his fair share of Mafia slayings.  I recall several of this photographs featuring the "hit" face-down on the pavement or on the table-clothed tabletop, hat still firmly in place. MOMA bought several of Weegee's works in the 1940's for an exhibit called "Action Photography"--which I guess would describe Weegee's work, though if the action was starkly captured by a flash at night in tough surroundings, the description might be better. 

This photograph by Weegee captures a few sailors in their caps, which I'm not sure count.  Primary in this photo though is the man in the middle, wearing a mask (for reasons unknown). 

The History of Lines: Lines Come and Gone.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1546    [Part of the History of Lines series.]

This picture tells as much about the making lines--railroads pushing their way  towards one another, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, pushing on towards one another to complete a rail line that connected the American coasts--as it does in covering them up.  The photograph is of a Union Pacific supervisor named Samuel Reed, who was inspecting the rail bed--in 1868/9 it was not uncommon for one team to clear the land and lay down the ties miles ahead of the track layers.  Miles of bits of wood, waiting for their iron.

But most roads, or at least most early roads, were in their places for a reason, and generally that reason was because it was a good way for getting from Point A to Point B.  This photograph, along the way of the Old Platte Valley route,  seems to be a mid-way point between the old and the new, or between the old and the old, lines of communication and lines of travel.  These timbers are laid down on top of the old immigration route from the east to California and Oregon, which in turn were laid on top of the trails of fur traders, which were on top of those of Indians, which were on top of those of the buffalo herds, and so on, all the way down. 

Aerial Bombing Accuracy Calculator, WWII

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1545

I found this object in my paper-calculators box (moveable disk calculators made of paper, two going back to A. Kircher in the 1660’s)—I’m not sure why it was there as it is not paper, though it is an interesting calculator.

[Images are greatly expanded in click mode.]

I learned a big lesson from it.   The “Small Target Bombing Probabilities” calculator was issued by the little-known (in the popular sense) Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Council (NDRC)¹ in the early 1940’s during WWII. 

Marked “Restricted”, it calculated the number of bombs that would successfully be delivered given (1) the number of bombs, (2) the “aiming error”, and (3) target size. It would then generate results for “(a) the expected number of hits for the indicated number of bombs”, (b-e) the probability of at least one hit to four hits.

What is a little surprising to me was the number of bombs that didn’t find their target. For example, a 65,000 square foot target bombed with 1000 bombs and an aiming error factor of 2000 feet could expect to land 3-4 bombs on the target, with an 88% chance of landing at least two hits, 75% chance of landing three hits, and about 50% of landing at least four hits.  And so the necessity of large numbers of planes dropping a large number of bombs.  

Notes

1. The establishment of the NDRC was announced so: “It is announced by Science Service that the following committee has been appointed in the United States to correlate "scientific research on the mechanisms and devices of warfare": -- Nature 146, 191-191 (10 August 1940).

“Members included: Dr. Vannevar Bush (chairman), president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, formerly dean of the faculty of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Prof. Richard C. Tolman (vice-chairman), dean of the graduate school and professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology; . Dr. Irvin Stewart (secretary), formerly Federal Commissioner for Communications and chairman of the Committee on Scientific Aids to Learning; Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen, director of the Naval Research Laboratory, Anacostia, D.C.; Conwiy P. Coe, U.S. Commissioner of Patents; Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, formerly professor of physics at Princeton University; Dr. James B. Conant, president, formerly professor of organic chemistry, Harvard University; Dr. Frank B. Jewett, president of the Bell Telephone Laboratories; Brigadier General G. V. Strong, assistant chief of staff, U.S.”

The "Other" Hiroshima: Hamburg, Operation Gomorrah, Summer 1943

JF Ptak Science Books   Post  1543

It was during the spring and summer of 1943 that the Allies came to the conclusion that the idea of strategic bombing needed to be expanded--the expansion part grown to include the total destruction of the target city. 

The "most secret" letter¹ (dated 27 May 1943)  that outlined the coming approach to aerial bombing was sent by Air Chief Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris  to his six group commanders and detailed the more-new strategic approach to bombing cities--the city itself would be a strategic target, with the goal in this case of destroying the entire city.

Operation Gomorrah occupied four nights from 24-30 July, involving 791 aircraft on the 24/25th, 90-110 B-17s on the 25th, 131 B-17s on the 26th, 787 aircraft on the 27/28th,  777 on the evening of the 29/30th., and finally with 740 aircraft on the night of the last raid on 2/3 August.3,000+ aircraft were employed in the action dropping 9,000 tons of bombs.   At the end of the Gomorrah campaign, 42,600 people had been killed as well as almost 40,000 wounded, destroying about half the homes int the city and causing another million people to flee the city.  The greatest amount of damage and death occurred on the night of the 27th, when 787 British aircraft caused an enormous firestorm to be formed, at one point fueled by a 1500'-foot tall tornado of fire, which caused 150 mph fire winds, temperatures reaching so high (1800 degrees and more) that it  set the asphalt streets on fire.  Most of the dead were killed by asphyxiation, the oxygen pulled out of bomb shelters and hiding places to be used in the fires.  The infrastructure of the city had been largely destroyed before this day's bombing, so getting firefighting crews to any of the new scenes would be impossible.  As a matter of fact, there was so much smoke generated from the previous day's bombings that the USAAF B-17 attacks were suspended because targets could not be identified. 

 

And from this point to the end of the war there were another 60+ campaigns flown at Hamburg, attacking and re-attacking oil storage facilities, shipbuilding industries, U-Boat factories, and the like.  53 missions involving several thousand aircraft, flying against the re-supplking and ruined city right to the end of the war, including 5 major actions in the last week of the war. 

I don't think that this was its own "Hiroshima" as British command thought, because, well, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have their own categories for destruction.  As does Tokyo. And Dresden.  It does though share a newness of bombing with Hiroshima in establishing the mission against Hamburg as a mission against an entire city rather than specific targets--certainly there were specific targets in mind for the hour or more worth of aircraft, but the overall effect was to support a carpet bombing plan and to initiate a fire so massive and destructive that the entire city would succumb.

Newsreel of the bombing of Hamburg.

Notes

1.   The Harris ltter:

MOST SECRET

---

BOMBER COMMAND
OPERATION ORDER NO. 173
Copy No: 23 Date: 27th May, 1943

---

INFORMATION

The importance of H A M B U R G. the second largest city in Germany with a population of one and a half millions, is well known and needs no further emphasis. The total destruction of this city would achieve immeasurable results in reducing the industrial capacity of the enemy's war machine. This, together with the effect on German morale, which would be felt throughout the country, would play a very important part in shortening and in winning the war.

2. The 'Battle of Hamburg' cannot be won in a single night. It is estimated that at least 10,000 tons of bombs will have to be dropped to complete the process of elimination. To achieve the maximum effect of air bombardment, this city should be subjected to sustained attack.

Forces to be Employed

3. Bomber Command forces will consist of all available heavies in operational squadrons until sufficient hours of darkness enable the medium bombers to take part. It is hoped that the night attacks will be preceded and/or followed by heavy daylight attacks by the United States VIIlth Bomber Command.

INTENTION

4. To destroy HAMBURG.

[Source]

Are there More People than Knots? Finding the Structure of Matter in Smoke Rings

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1541 (Part of the Series Blank, Empty & Missing Things.)

Embedding a circle in 3-D Euclidean space is another way of looking at a simple and substantial elements of human activities.  Knots have played a large role in human history over a long period of time--not just for connecting things, or determining speed, but also in design, the appearance of, say, objects that would later be known as  Borronean rings that appear in Tibetan Buddhism (endless knots as keys to infinity) to the Celtic knots (decorating, say, the Book of Kells).

Gauss did very early work (1)-as is so often the case-- on knot theory, as did William Thomson, Lord Kelvin,who visualized atoms as knots in the aether and who was perhaps inspired by P.G. Tait's experiments on smoke rings (2)  and who in turn had been influenced by  a paper of Hermann von  Helmholtz on vortex-rings in incompressible fluids, and organized the  stability of chemistry around this pricnipal.  In turn  P.G. Tait based his very solid work on knot theory in 1867 on this work of Kelvin and von Helmholtz. .(Kelvin's theory (3) was rather well received for several decades until it was not, but it did enjoy the support for a time by J.C. Maxwell.  Kelvin was a brilliant man who I think is too often remembered for some of the few hundreds of the millions of words that he wrote and lectured, not the least of which were his pronouncements at the every end of the 19th century on the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight.)   Tait--who also co-authored a very well respected textbook on Natural Philosophy with Kelvin--moved on to firmly establish knot theory and on the elements that makes knots different, formulating tables on how knots form, and in essence believing that he was fabricating a table of the elements. All of this work suffered a fatal blow when the great Michelson-Morely experiment (1887) (4) failed to detect the luminiferous aether. 

 

• [The first page of how knots come to be as they appeared in P.G. Tait's earliest work, though he by necessity kept the investigations to  relatively minimal degree: "We find that it becomes a mere question of skilled labour to draw all the possible knots having any assigned number of crossings. The requisite labour increases with extreme rapidity as the number of crossings is increased. ... I have not been able to find time to carry out this process further than the knots with seven crossings. ... It is greatly desired that someone, with the requisite leisure, should try to extend this list..."]

This was the beginning of the tabulation of knots, found in Tait's beautiful work.  To date some 7 billion tabulations have been identified, a number nearly equal to the of the world's population. Knot theory has taken shape as an area of study within the field of topology, which was developed in the 1850's through the 1870'sby Riemann/Listing/Mobius/Klein and then which received its algebraic foundation by Henri Poincare (5) just af ew years after Michelson-Morely and in the same year as Roentgen's x-ray, 1895.

Notes

1.  The Gauss linking integral,1833, carried forward by Johann Benedict Listing.

2. An interesting modern recreation of the Tait smoke ring experiment can be seen here. See malso: Silliman, Robert H., William Thomson: Smoke Rings and Nineteenth-Century Atomism, Isis, Vol. 54, No. 4. (Dec., 1963), pp. 461–47

3.  Lord Kelvin, Sir William Thomson, "On Vortex Atoms", Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. VI, 1867, pp. 94-105. Reprinted in Phil. Mag. Vol. XXXIV, 1867, pp. 15-24.

--It was also Kelvin (along with A.A. Michelson) who spoke on the finiteness of physics, with Kelvin in particular stating at a British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1900 that there would be nothing new in physics, and that all that was left was measurement.  I seem to remember a story about one of Einstein's uncle's (?) warning him against going into physics because there was nothing left new to do...I can't remember if this was before or after Roentgen.  In any event, Kelvin's statement was five years after Roentgen, but it didn't stop him from making his claim. 

4. On the Michelson-Morely experiment.

5.  H.Poincaré, "Analysis Situs", J. Ec. Polytech ser 2, vol 1 (1895) 1-123.

--The Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications was founded in 1992, establishing a journal devoted purely to knot theory.

A Note on the Pledge of Allegiance: Exluding "Equality" and including "God".

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy (1855-1931) in 1892 for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Western Hemisphere.  The Christian Socialist Baptist Minister Bellamy started the pledge out as a simple confirmation, and at one time considered the inclusion of the word "equality" in the message, but backed away after he saw potential difficulties with the word, what with the social and legal exclusions of women and Black people getting in the way of the concept. 

The History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things--the Voice of Beethoven

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1540   (Part of a long series on The History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.)

So, in the history of very creative people saying things, I wonder if Ludwig van Beethoven said the most of the least interesting things? I'm referring to his correspondence and other written works, and not his music of course—and given the music nothing else really matters. But given the amount of surviving letters and conversation books, and of course his staggering genius (which makes him one of the most important men of the century) it is kind of remarkable that there isn't more attractive, inventive, interesting content in his communications—which at the very least makes reading the stuff somewhat disappointing, and, at the very most, pretty much the same.

When Beethoven (who died at age 57 on 26 March 1827, a year younger in death than Dickens and five years old than Shakespeare—a remarkable thing to consider how much these people accomplished in a very short period of time) began his experience in being deaf he resorted to using largish, quarto-sized blank chap books for his visitors to write their questions and answers to him. These books, Konversationshefte, the Conversation Books, were precisely that—they recorded the conversations with Beethoven over a number of years. Unfortunately, they reveal some very basic, daily, non-sequitur sorts of stuff, and contain almost nothing of what Beethoven actually said.

Sometimes—according to scholars—it is possible to intuit what Beethoven sort of said by looking at series of questions and answers from his guests. But by and large the notebooks offer few clues to what the voice of Beethoven was actually saying. This is particularly grueling given the extent of the notebooks—136 of these books remain, covering the periods from about 1819 to 1827. (Actually, at Beethoven's death there were more than 400 of the things, but his biographer, Anton Schindler, the man who inherited much from Beethoven including the notebooks, managed to purposely destroy at least 160 of the books. Evidently he found them impolitic, among other things, and tried to protect Beethoven's reputation by making the evidences of the supposed impertinences disappear.)

The conversations cover all manner of small, daily bits of life, including numerous one-sided conversations with/to the Maestro on how to take his enemas. (It is extraordinary that such evidence remains in the face of how much other –and probably more interesting—material didn't.

The letters of Beethoven, too, as voluminous as they are, are a terror to read, mainly because—at least to a general reader—there's so little of interest in them. I have no doubt that for scholars they are vast repositories for things like Lost Punctuation and the sort, but the letters as intellectual documents, as things that give and insight into the mind of Beethoven, or what he thought about his work, or the works of contemporaries, and so on, well, the content just doesn't seem to be there. (There are some occasional bright spots, like his continued reference to how extraordinary Handel was and that he, the great Beethoven, still learns from the man, even on his deathbed, but there's really very little like this, relative to the great weight of the sheer number of words in the letters.)

A number of writers have quoted W.H. Auden saying that there was only one memorable sentence in the whole of the Beethoven correspondence.  I can't yet find what this was to Auden--my first guess is that it is in the "Immortal Beloved" writing, where we do get a big, deep cut into Beethoven's mind.

The letters do reveal all sorts of other things, most of which makes me sad, particularly when the sick room of Beethoven is described in not-pretty terms as an outreach and indicator of his possible poverty, and how much the ill Beethoven had to worry about securing a little money to pull him through his illness and into the next half-year or so of life if he survived  himself. 

Even making my way though the Thayer biography of Beethoven and looking for his voice is a chore. I tried to content myself constructing found poetry in the questions of the visitors to Beethoven in the notebooks, but that was fairly well a failure.

It is in these cases that the authentic voice of Beethoven  seems to be almost entirely missing--a blank, empty and missing sound from the man who made some of the most beautiful music ever created.

The other end of this part of blank, empty and missing things history, and sound, and Beethoven, would obviously be his deafness, or perhaps his depression (in the 1815-1820 period, when he was plagued by, well, something).  For years Beethoven heard very little; and then for years after that, he heard almost nothing at all.  But he was sensitive to vibration, so he was able to experience music, though in a different sense form what we think of as auditory.  Missing music--though I wouldn't call it "Empty" or "blank."

 

High Color in Cowboy Vocabulary, Selections from an Unpublished Typescript (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I reckon that at some point or another one or some or all of these words might come in handy, a garnish to a small thought or medium sentence, or even as a companion to Patrick Starfish and his "sentence enhancers".    They're a little far from the "history of science" material that I guess I'm supposed to be writing about here, but, well, like all of the other non-science stuff that makes an appearance in these pages, its interest was too irresistible for me to say "no" to. 

And so to some colorful Cowboy vocabulary, choice morsels that I plucked from a document found some time ago at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.  They're located in what still seems to be an unpublished typescript from the Texas Folklore Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Writers' Project (FWP).  The language was collected by marginally-employed historians and such put on temporary dole by the U.S. government, sent out to the far regions, interviewing old Cowboys for what they knew and remembered. The document is dated February, 1938. 

 

Bog rider	Cowboy sent to patrol bogs and extricate cattle
Button	Boy
Chuck eater	Easterner come west to learn ranch work
Circle	Area a roundup rider must inspect in a day
Climb your hump	Fight
Deep in the wood	Firmly in saddle
Drag your loop	I didn’t steal that cow, itjust poked its head in the loop I was dragging”
Fork a horse	Ride a horse
Forty Rod	Liquor
Give up the head	Complain
Gizzard gravel	Courage
Grass train	Ox-team freighters
He left the score	Left in a panic
Jiggle	Ride
Jingler	One who herds horses for an outfit
Lacing up a tree	Putting the saddle on
Moonshine	Night rider
Old cedar	Six shooter
Rattling his hooks	Ride fast
Riding through strong	Riding horses average cowboy doesn’t want to ride
Slop and tatter	Pacing horse
Swing a long rope	Horse or cattle thief
Turn a cat	Take a fall
Wheelbarrow man	One who walks across the plains