History

The Years of Great Silence

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Review: The Years of the Great Silence: The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941-1955, J. Otto Pohl, 2022.

In order to avoid the undesirable occurrence and to prevent serious bloodshed the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet deemed it necessary to resettle all the German population, living in the region of the Volga, to other regions . . .

Thus 177 years as an ethnic group invited into the Russian Empire as a valuable minority with privileges like free land, interest free loans, limited tax exemptions, local autonomy, and exemption from the draft came to a spectacular end on August 24 28, 1941 in the wake of Nazi Germany invading the USSR.

The Volga Germans were only the largest settlement of Germans in the Russian Empire. Other areas of settlement included the Black Sea (including a group of Mennonites), North Caucuses, Bessarabia, the Transcaucasus, and Volhynia. It wasn’t always smooth sailing for the settlers. Privileges, like local autonomy, would be granted, repealed, and sometimes granted again. Emigration out of Russia or internal migration to Central Asia occurred after famines. The requirement for military service was reinstated. There were Kazakh attacks on some settlements.

Still, by 1914, the Germans in Russia had grown in number almost 7% of the Empire’s population and were an economically industrious group with a culture supported by schools, libraries, and museums of their own.

The woes of the German Russians started with the forced resettlement of the Volynian Germans into the Volga region. 

But it was the Bolshevik Revolution that was to turn them into a particularly persecuted minority. While the Volga region was declared, in 1919, an ethno-national state, the Germans, with their successful agricultural operations, resisted Bolshevik collectivism. Confiscation of German Russian grain supplies created a severe famine in the Volga in 1919 through 1922 though it was partially mitigated by international aid. When requestioning of food by the government ended, the Volga Germans were able to recover somewhat. By 1928, there was a record grain harvest. Various institutions – the Komosomol, labor unions – were used by the Communist Party to solidify the German Russians as a “titular nationality” with its own language and culture. Even in Kyrgystan, Germans got a larger autonomy. 

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Planning Armageddon

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Given our times, I decided to pull this one off the shelf and put its review at the top of the queue. It’s an account of another time a great power attempted, by “economic derangement”, to win a war.

It didn’t go well either.

Review: Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare in the First World War, Nicholas A. Lambert, 2012.

In one of the great failed predictions of all time, Norman Angell said, in his 1910 bestselling book The Great Illusion, that war between great powers was unthinkable. It would result in, to quote Lambert, “economic Armageddon – a kind of economic mutually assured destruction”.

Ivan Bloch made a more successful prediction in his 1899 work Is War Now Impossible?:

The future of war is not fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men, but the bankruptcy of nations and the break-up of the whole social organization.

The British government, particularly the Royal Navy, didn’t dispute these ideas. It embraced them. Given its dominance in international shipping, central position in a world network of submarine cables, and that London was the world’s financial capitol, maybe England could cut out an enemy nation from international trade and win a war before it, too, economically bled out.

After the 1898 Fashoda Crisis drove up maritime insurance rates for British ships, the Royal Navy reluctantly realized that attacking and defending trade would have to become part of its strategy. A study was commissioned. A six-week month project stretched into years, but, by 1902, the Royal Navy had a dim view, obscured by the lack of good statistics, of the outlines of the problem.

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Porter Rockwell

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Essay: Porter Rockwell, Richard Lloyd Dewey, 1986, 2002.

Orrin Porter Rockwell wasn’t just any Mormon gunfighter. He was the first Mormon baptized after the parents of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith. He was a man Rockwell revered like an older brother.

While you may have never heard of Rockwell, he is a saint-like figure among the Saints, an anti-Peter in the Mormon story of their founder’s martyrdom. It’s no coincidence that I first came across him in the weird westerns of Mormons Joel Jenkins and David J. West and not in accounts of Old West gunfighters. He supposedly appeared in his own dime novels of the 19th century (a claim I have not confirmed) and as a character in several films, it took a Mormon – Dewey himself – to write and direct movies centering on him. Statutes, songs, and places are named after him. There are Rockwell bobblehead dolls. And, of course, you can get his likeness on t-shirts.

Several Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ affiliated sites favorably mention him.

It’s no mistake that, according to one of his descendants (he had many but was never a polygamist), historians who might be interested in Rockwell stray away from writing about him. Too many undocumentable stories, good and bad, about him.

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Histories of a Plague Year

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Regular readers of this blog know I’m not given to picking my reading based on bestsellers, hype, popularity or any contemporary trend.

However, I did engage in a bit of “COVID reading” back in April. Actually, I just wanted toread another Black Plague book, one of the few unread in my library.

So let’s look at the Sanitary Dictatorship circa 1630-31. Readers may recognize it from our current versions: shut businesses, informers, and house arrest.

Review: Histories of a Plague Year: The Social and Imaginary in Baroque Florence, Giulia Calvi, trans. Dario Biocca and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., 1989.

While the bubonic plague that came to Florence in 1630-31 wasn’t quite as deadly as the second European pandemic of the plague in 1347, it still killed between 20 and 60 percent of those infected.

Florence was prepared for the return of the plague. It never really left Europe since 1347.

They formed the Florentine Public Health. When plague hit the city, Public Health initiated a series of laws regarding entry to the city, identification of infected people, isolating them, treating them, and, all too often, burying them.

What could be the problem? It seems so sensible – apart from the fact that doctors, barber-surgeons, and herbalists had no clue what caused the disease.

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The Suicide Battalion

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This one I read solely because Gilbert Stuart MacDonald served in the 46th Canadian Infantry Battalion (South Saskatchewan). He’s my closest personal link to World War One combat. And not a very close one at that. If I understand genealogical terminology, he’s my fifth cousin three times removed.

Review: The Suicide Battalion, James L. McWilliams & R. James Steel, 1978.

As the authors point out at the very beginning, the 46th Canadian Infantry Battalion (South Saskatchewan) was not the only battalion to be designated the “Suicide Battalion” in the Great War. Its losses in the war were heavy. Of the 5,374 men who served in the unit during the war, 1,433 died and 3,484 were wounded. Only 457 were unscathed. But there are units on both sides of the war that could claim similar statistics.

This is a very personal book for the authors. McWilliams is from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, home of the unit. Steel’s grandfather served in the unit.

The book is from Hurtig Publishers, founded by Mel Hurtig because he thought Canadians should have some Canadian history books in their bookstores instead of just American history books.

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Turn Off Your Mind

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I’ve longed liked Gary Lachman’s articles in the Fortean Times. I’m also an admirer of his work, under the name Gary Valentine, with the rock band Blondie, particularly his song “X Offender”.

So, it was only a matter of time before I decided to read one of his books.

Review: Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, Gary Lachman, 2001. 

Lachman’s basic thesis is that several elements of the mystic 1960s led not just to the Summer of Love but the murders of Charles Manson and that the strains of thought that produced both go back to the late 1890s.

It’s an interesting story, but most parts of it were familiar to me already, and I’m not going to talk much about them. I am also not sympathetic to mysticism, the Summer of Love, or the spirit of the 1960s.

What I am going to talk about is the surprising amount of material in the book about writers and works of fantastic fiction and how they were connected to the mystic Sixties.

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s not only wrote the very popular The Morning of the Magicians, but Bergier also wrote a letter praising H. P. Lovecraft that appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. The Morning of the Magicians, published in 1960, had Fortean material and centered on mysticism, transcendence, mutation and the evolution of consciousness. It was a heady mix that drew from the zeitgeist.

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The Great Siege, Malta 1565

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One of my historical interests is the Crusades, but I haven’t done a lot of reading about them lately, and I’ve only posted about an account of Richard III’s Third Crusade. This history, of course, is not about the Crusades, but it does center on one of the peculiar institutions that sprang from them: the warrior-monk of Christendom.

Review: The Great Siege, Malta 1565, Ernle Bradford, 1961.

In the summer of 1565 on the parched ground of Malta, the future of Western Civilization was decided. Would the Moslems continue their expansion into the Mediterranean, preying on European ships and taking Christian slaves as far away as England? Or could they be held back?

It was an epic struggle, an astounding tale of resolve and leadership, of disunity in command and disunity among allies.

Soleyman the First was on the move. Even his European foes grudgingly said he earned the title “The Magnificent”. He had conquered large parts of the Middle East. His movement into Europe was only stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1529. But, at age 70, he was not resting on his laurels. Malta was a strategic thorn in the side of the Ottoman Empire, a base Christians could use to attack his supply and communication lines.

It would not be the first time Soleyman had tangled with the Knights of St. John, the Hospitallers, who used Malta as their base. In 1493, he had driven them off Rhodes. But they had turned Malta with its fine harbors into a base for raiding Moslem shipping.

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The Great Scuttle

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Knowing I was heading to Scapa Flow and hearing of this book’s release, I pre-ordered a copy from Amazon prior to my trip.

It didn’t come. On first arriving in Kirkwall, I went to the local Orcadian Bookshop. Of course, they had a copy.

Review: The Great Scuttle: The End of the German High Seas Fleet, David Meare, 2019.

Lots of us have went on school field trips. I doubt any of those were as historic as the one the children of Stromness in the Orkney Islands took on June 21, 1919. From the deck of the Flying Kestrel, they saw more ships go to the bottom of the sea at one time than any day before or since.

There are, of course, other histories of that day. I reviewed one recently, Dan van der Vat’s The Grand Scuttle. Meara covers much the same ground as that book. We hear about the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet, its time in Scapa Flow, its scuttling, and the salvage efforts that raised much of it.

What Meara brings, besides the concision of 96 pages and lots of beautiful photographs and paintings, some in color, is the local angle all but ignored before now – what the Orcadians said about that day.

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The Grand Scuttle

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Last fall I took a trip to the Orkney Islands in Scotland. In preparation, I took this book off the shelf.

I inherited it from a late friend of mine who had a keen interest in naval history and World War One history.

He tried three times to make it to the Scapa Flow Museum. Once he got no closer than London due to a missed flight. Another time he made it to the ferry port on the mainland, but the ferry wasn’t running. Another time, he made it to the museum – only to find it closed for remodeling.

I didn’t do much better. It was closed when I was there too.

This book, published by the respected Naval Institute Press, is still well thought of by historians. You can still find it in places in the Orkneys. It was in The Orcadian Bookshop in Kirkwall, and I believe I saw copies at the Stromness Museum when I nipped in for an all too short look at some of the artifacts from the Grand Scuttle.

Review: The Grand Scuttle: The Sinking of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919, Dan van der Vat, 1986.Grand Scuttle

The scuttling of the German Fleet on June 21, 1919 sank more marine tonnage in a single day than any time before or since.

Van der Vat’s book looks at the German High Seas Fleet from its beginning as a notion in the head of Captain Alfred von Tirpitz to its voyage to outer space.

Some parts of that story are relatively well known.

Histories of the war’s beginning often talk about the Anglo-German naval arms race as a cause of World War One, and van der Vat places too much emphasis on it. Germany lost that arms race by late 1912, and both sides knew it. But he does show it was a definite cause in the souring German-British relations before the war.

Certainly, German naval actions in skirmishes in the North Sea and, of course, the Battle of Jutland have gotten wide coverage.

Likewise, the actual scuttling of the fleet on the summer solstice has certainly been covered elsewhere. The nine German sailors who died that day – half shot in lifeboats as they left their sinking ships – are the symbolic last German casualties of the war.

Where the book shines is in its coverage of the fleet between the Nov. 11, 1918 Armistice and the scuttling and the fate of the fleet after the scuttling. Continue reading →

A History of the First World War in 100 Objects

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Review: A History of the First World War in 100 Objects, John Hughes-Wilson, 2014.History of the First World War in 100 Objects

A remarkably complete history of the war covering every major combat theatre – Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East – from mining operations below ground to air combat and bombing, from under the sea to the Battle of Jutland. It covers weapons and war financing, logistics and espionage, home front politics and war production, mutinies, the soldiers’ life in combat and behind the trenches and on leave, and artists and the war.

The format is simple. Each chapter has a full-page picture of an object, an inset talking about it, and anywhere from one to six pages of text, often with additional, smaller photos, covering the subject the object represents.

The objects are not always what you expect. For instance, a “body density map” is shown for a chapter on Western Front casualties, a fullerphone (a scrambler for voice and Morse signals passed on a wire), Lieutenant Augustus Agar’s boat (used in a raid on the Bolshevik fleet for which he won “the mystery VC”), and a harpoon gun used by interred German sailors at Scapa Flow to supplement their meagre rations with birds. Continue reading →