Steve Hely's Blog, page 108
June 14, 2017
Beyond Meat
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Grilled some Beyond Meat burgers yesterday (over a combo of mesquite briquettes and mesquite chips). As a noted burger enthusiast I declare this: pretty darn good.
File this under: Long June news you can use.
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June 8, 2017
A Strange Tale From East of the River
My favorite book title of the year.
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A lonely man meets a mysterious woman in a strange neighborhood of Tokyo. Nagai – a proto Murakami?
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From now on I will insist that it be noted in all foreign translations of my work that my English is somewhat eccentric.
Seidensticker, ever precise.
June 6, 2017
Helytimes Classic: D*-Day
Reprinting this beloved post from a year ago:
[image error]* the D is for Dave!
Happy birthday, tomorrow, June 6, to Dave King (the Great Debates co-host, not the Bad Plus drummer)
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Dave King the drummer photographed by Wiki user Steve Bowbrick
A promise made in Host Chat is a promise kept so here is a selection of D-Day readings for Davis.
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scene from the Bayeux Tapestry
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New Yorker’s July 15, 1944 parody of the Bayeux Tapestry
The single best thing to read about D-Day
is online and free. It is S. L. A. Marshall writing for The Atlantic in November, 1950.
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During World War II, Marshall became an official Army combat historian, and came to know many of the war’s best-known Allied commanders, including George S. Patton and Omar N. Bradley. He conducted hundreds of interviews of both enlisted men and officers regarding their combat experiences, and was an early proponent of oral history techniques. In particular, Marshall favored the group interview, where he would gather surviving members of a frontline unit together and debrief them on their combat experiences of a day or two before.
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The article is called “First Wave On Omaha Beach” here is an excerpt:
Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it. The less rugged or less clever seek the cover of enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are knocked off by machine-gun fire.
Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless. At Boat No. 2, Lieutenant Tidrick takes a bullet through the throat as he jumps from the ramp into the water. He staggers onto the sand and flops down ten feet from Private First Class Leo J. Nash. Nash sees the blood spurting and hears the strangled words gasped by Tidrick: “Advance with the wire cutters!” It’s futile; Nash has no cutters. To give the order, Tidrick has raised himself up on his hands and made himself a target for an instant. Nash, burrowing into the sand, sees machine gun bullets rip Tidrick from crown to pelvis. From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top.
Captain Taylor N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfoot never make it. They had loaded with a section of thirty men in Boat No. 6 (Landing Craft, Assault, No. 1015). But exactly what happened to this boat and its human cargo was never to be known. No one saw the craft go down. How each man aboard it met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along the beach. It is supposed that the others were claimed by the sea.
After the war, Marshall would write Men Against Fire:
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which claimed that only about 25% of American combat soldiers actually fired their guns at the enemy:
Marshall’s work on infantry combat effectiveness in World War II, titled Men Against Fire, is his best-known and most controversial work. In the book, Marshall claimed that of the World War II U.S. troops in actual combat, 75% never fired at the enemy for the purpose of killing, even though they were engaged in combat and under direct threat. Marshall argued that the Army should devote significant training resources to increasing the percentage of soldiers willing to engage the enemy with direct fire.
Marshall has been harshly criticized:
General Marshall said soldiers who did not fire were motivated by fear, a desire to minimize risk and a willingness, as in civilian life, to let a minority of other people carry the load.
In his 1989 memoir, About Face, Hackworth described his initial elation at an assignment with a man he idolized, and how that elation turned to disillusion after seeing Marshall’s character and methods first hand. Hackworth described Marshall as a “voyeur warrior,” for whom “the truth never got in the way of a good story” and went so far as to say, “Veterans of many of the actions he ‘documented’ in his books have complained bitterly over the years of his inaccuracy or blatant bias”.
Omaha Beach was the worst of it, but experiences on D-Day were vastly different.
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stolen from the Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2336753/Back-beaches-final-time-D-Day-heroes-return-Normandy-mark-69th-anniversary-landings.html
Twenty-one miles away on Juno Beach the Canadian Ninth Division landed with their bikes:
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Picture: STF/AFP/Getty Images
Leave it to Canadians to bring their bikes. (900 Canadians died in a botched semi-practice D-Day in 1942).
Best Single Book To Read About D-Day
Looking around I can’t find my copy of Normandy Revisited by AJ Liebling:
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Planet Earth 2
Important to remember some things such as nature documentaries are better than ever!
June 5, 2017
Seal of Acceptance
shopping for shoes today. I see this on one of them:
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Would love to attend this banquet.
Astronomers
Nantucket’s own Maria Mitchell
I follow a bunch of astronomers on Twitter. One of them got a new ergonomic chair today and she’s so happy about it!
June 4, 2017
Sappho
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I find Mary Barnard’s photo on the Oregonencyclopedia:
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Her literary career took her from a childhood in the Oregon backwoods, where she often traveled with her timber-wholesaler father, to Reed College in Portland, where she was introduced to the classics and to the modern poetic revolution by Lloyd Reynolds.
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MOA
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Very cool place: MOA – Museum of Anthropology, on the campus of University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Bag Balm
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My feet were kinda messed up (from walking?). Mentioned this to my friend Hana. She knows how to bring forth bounty from the Earth, I knew she would have some wondrous cure. She thought about it and came back with this medicine they use for messed up cow udders.
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Gotta say it seems like a miracle product. [image error]
If you are cool buy some of Hana’s blankets and yarn:
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from Hinterland Textiles website
