Heavy Guns Research Articles

Orange Soda

Orange Soda Leo Coffey (bio) Dan is fifteen and almost a foot taller than me. Even though I'm only six years younger, he thinks it's funny to call me a kid. Our daddies cut grass together, so in the summer we spend a lot of time with each other. We like to shoot BB guns at the neighbor's cats and swim in the creek behind my house. Sometimes we sneak into my daddy's closet [End Page 69] and hold the real heavy guns while we look in the mirror, but I always get nervous doing that. I think because my grandpa once told me about how he watched a man get his head blown clean off in Vietnam. I never could get the image of that man's neck spewing blood like a fountain out of my head. Sometimes when it storms, I dream about that man walking up behind me. I never fail to wake up just before I turn around, but I always know that it is him. It is one of those hot summer days in Ellenboro, North Carolina, like strip your clothes off as soon as you walk out the door hot. There seems to be no end in sight to our friendship as Dan and I make our way down US-74 on foot. We don't talk much; we just walk with our T-shirts pulled up over our heads to let some air onto our skin. My belly button pokes out like a budded flower. When we make it to the KwikStop, the parking lot is empty minus an old white Honda Accord parked by the air pump. I can hear The Lake playing a tribute to Whitney Houston from the speakers, the soft tune of her asking, "Where do broken hearts go? Can they find their way home?" She died earlier this week, and everybody's momma was torn up about it. I sit outside on the bench to the left of the door while Dan goes inside. Dan wants to get a soda before we walk to his house a half-mile further. He doesn't tell me that he doesn't have any money. There are piles of ash sitting along the bench and I lean down and blow them off one at a time, watching the wind redeposit every particle onto the asphalt. After a few minutes, the door creaks open and Dan walks out. He sits down next to me and lifts his shirt to reveal a bulged can shoved deep into his pants pocket. He cracks open the aluminum and takes a long sip like he hasn't ever had anything to drink in his life. His nose scrunches up as the [End Page 70] liquid tunnels down his throat. He swallows hard and takes a deep breath to make room in his mouth for words. "Damn! That's good shit," he says. He places the can on the pavement by his feet and removes a Snickers from his pocket. Sweat falls like shadows on the floor from the black hair that curtains his forehead. He devours the candy bar in a few bites and tosses the wrapper over his shoulder. It falls to the ground like a leaf. "You ever stolen anything, Clint?" Dan asks. I say no. "Why not? Think you're too good for it?" I say no. He takes a blade out of his pocket with his free hand and unfolds my fingers to place its metal weight into mine. My eyes grow wide with surprise. "I want you to go in there and steal something. Anything you want. And if that lady behind the counter says anything, you flash her this knife," he says. I say I can't do that. I tell him it's wrong. "What's more wrong-going hungry and dying of thirst? Or stealing?" I say nothing. "Fine. Well, you ain't having none of my orange soda, and you can turn around and go on home, too." It is hot as piss outside. I can feel myself growing more fatigued the longer we sit in the heat. I don't want to...

The Anglophone Pogrom by Some National Warlords

The write-up catches by capturing and recording the brazen barbaric injustices and the travails of the Anglophone civilians in the hands of Gestapo security agents in the English regions of Cameroon, who are being tortured, tormented, harassed, and hated without the observation of some domestic and international security protocols, by the state security agents. It should be said that any society which tolerates thuggish disposition of its security forces is one which is lost beyond redemption. The fever pitch crisis in the Anglophone regions have witness the harsh treatment of the English people. This crisis which can be termed as a storm in a tea cup in Cameroon has unfortunately created a lot of scandalous injustices to the Anglophones just to say but the least. Our paper therefor looks at the Anglophone crisis with the numerous cruel and gruesome acts of security brutality committed against the Anglophones without substantial justice against the perpetrators. The heavily armed Cameroonian security forces usually kitted with heavy guns, bullets vests and daggers have often raided community’s setting ablaze homes in communities without legitimate justifications. The write-up also examines how the military has been used as a weapon of tears and destruction aimed at a particular geographical group of people in the country. In a deteriorating democracy like Cameroon whereby, the military attitude and its acts against the Anglophones are so horrifying with thousands of complainants having no recourse to justice in the Cameroonian justice system. This paper therefor begs for national and international justice for the Anglophones due to the fact that, the international Bills of Rights and other international rights cannons for civilized nations are in total in existence in English Cameroon. The victimization of the Anglophones particularly the poor and the weak is evidence in several dimensions. Some Anglophones have been jailed innocently, others shot to dead by security forces, some assaulted and all this done without an independent commission of inquiry opened against the tormentors of these Anglophones. Cases of the Cameroon government criminalizing some principal Anglophone leaders through a pattern of fighting the conundrum have been examined with many of these activists send to draconian dungeons. The paper further looks at the symbol of political and military power in Cameroon with a subjective but objective eye. Besides, the author set aside his partiality as a Cameroonian and assumes a neutrality position by calling for the respect of the rule of law in Cameroon with the strict respect of the Cameroonian constitution and other statutory obligations in Cameroon by the government. We question the merits of the Cameroonian justice system and opt for the intervention of international justice as the Anglophone regions in Cameroon are in need for international justice because the cannons and protocols of international justice are being abused in Anglophone Cameroon. In our paper, we also highlight the bad and nasty reputation of some political leaders in Cameroon for using state institutions for their naive and parochial benefits. Worrying about the Cameroonian leadership challenges and where Cameroonians can resort to for sound, reputable, creditworthy, amiable and forthright leadership, we nevertheless set the change agenda with some recommendations which if adopted will save the country from an eventual self-mutual assured destruction. This is done because the boomerang effects of the Anglophone crisis may be very suicidal in the future because of the entrenched illegalities and injustices suffered by these Anglophones. The only way the government of Cameroon and the international community can attempt to prove it does not sanction the bestial conduct of the security men is to fish out those responsible for the barbaric conduct and ensure the rule of law is followed in all the violations. It will only be a crude assault and a desecration of the rule of law in Cameroon and in the international community if the security gang-steric and brutal conduct is not chased away with legal remedies.

The Great War and the Middle East

The centenary of the First World War has brought forward a veritable creeping barrage of books on its battles and campaigns. The concussive effect of all this makes an operational pause welcome, and allows one to contemplate the significance of the various studies, original and synthetical, which have issued forth from the cannon's mouth, so to speak. Rob Johnson's new book stands out from the mêlée—as one would expect from the director of the Changing Character of War research programme at Oxford University—as a carefully considered reappraisal of the Great War in the Middle East from a strategic perspective. Tipping his hat at Clausewitz, Johnson sets out ‘to identify, assess and explain the most significant themes of that theatre, not as a “military history” of manoeuvres and experiences but as a “study of war” which illustrates the interactions of decision-making with the prevailing concepts, context and changing conditions’ (p. viii). Moreover, he follows a Clausewitzian line of operations when he states that ‘war is not merely “an extension of politics”: war is a dynamic interaction of its actors, and the product of the friction of violent events. Contemporaries struggled with those dynamics, and tried to adapt their responses accordingly’ (p. viii). Read like this, the Great War in the Middle East becomes more than the usual portrayal of a pointless slugging match in Mesopotamia or Gallipoli. This was a war fought on multiple fronts, from the Somalilands to the Caucasus, and from the Western Desert of Egypt to the Afghan borders of British India. Johnson is adept at making the strategic connections between these campaigns and the greater war effort, especially when it came to command decisions over the allocation of men, munitions and material to the various fronts. He is acute in his emphasis of the technological context of the war, and especially the power that this gave early on, in 1915–16, to the defensive position in depth, of trench lines protected by barbed wire and machine guns, of strongpoints and killing zones for directed fire. He cites Lanchester's law, stating that an attack rarely succeeds unless the attacker enjoys a 3:1 superiority in infantry and firepower. This helps explain British failures at Ctesiphon and in the attempted relief of Kut, Gallipoli and the first and second Gaza battles. The British did not have enough troops or artillery to make the required breakthroughs in 1915–16. He points out that sound strategy depends on ‘the sinews of war’, adequate logistics and resources in men and material. By the third Gaza battle in 1917, General Allenby's Egyptian Expeditionary Force could deploy ten infantry divisions, four mounted divisions and 116 heavy guns, as well as squadrons of the new Bristol fighter plane. The British had aligned ‘ends, ways and means’ to shatter the Ottoman front in Palestine. Johnson makes clear that the Ottomans, despite their operational victories at Gallipoli and Kut, could simply not compete because of their lack of war industrial capacity and infrastructural weaknesses.

Tennesseans at War, 1812-1815: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans by Tom Kanon (review)

Reviewed by: Tennesseans at War, 1812-1815: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans by Tom Kanon Jonathan M. Atkins (bio) Keywords Andrew Jackson, War of 1812, Battle of New Orleans, Tennessee, Creek War Tennesseans at War, 1812-1815: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans. By Tom Kanon. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. Pp. 263. Cloth, $49.95; ebook, $49.95.) The title Tennesseans at War might lead readers to expect a study of the sixteenth state’s homefront during the War of 1812. Tom Kanon, archivist at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, plans instead to address the state’s social and cultural history in a separate volume. Here he presents a ‘‘military and political history of the Old Southwest’’ (2) that focuses on Tennessee soldiers in Andrew Jackson’s armies during the Creek War and at the Battle of New Orleans. These campaigns deeply influenced Tennessee, Kanon argues, because although no fighting occurred in the state, Tennesseans ‘‘participated in more Southern battles than any other state in the region’’ (6–7). Beginning with the observation that the nickname ‘‘Volunteer State’’ dates from the War of 1812—not, as popularly believed, the Mexican War—Kanon’s study opens with an assessment of the conditions that encouraged Tennesseans to fight. Both East and ‘‘West’’ Tennessee (the contemporary term for modern Middle Tennessee) stood as frontier societies at the opening of the nineteenth century. Frequent conflicts with Native Americans arose mainly from the settlers’ conviction that Indians were ‘‘wasting’’ (12) valuable lands, but Tennesseans also blamed Great Britain and Spain for inciting Indian attacks to stop American expansion. European hostility likewise threatened access to New Orleans, the crucial port for shipping their produce; and Spanish possession of the Florida [End Page 488] territories, where several southwestern rivers emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, blocked other potential outlets for trade. Kanon finds that westerners sincerely condemned Britain’s violation of American neutral rights in the Atlantic. Mainly, though, they charged Britain with supposedly instigating the Shawnee chief Tecumseh’s efforts to form a hostile alliance of Native nations. With the onset of war, the Indian threat, British insults to American honor, and the need to assert their worth as descendants of their Revolutionary fathers—as well as peer pressure, opportunities for adventure, and an ‘‘inner drive for ‘fame’ ’’ (43)—convinced Tennesseans of the need to fight. Volunteers expected to participate in an effort to seize Canada, but circumstances instead took them to the southwest. Several themes guide Kanon’s account of the region’s conflict. The sudden abortion of Jackson’s Natchez expedition in late 1812 and early 1813 once again displayed the federal government’s ‘‘utter lack of urgency to western needs’’ and ‘‘encouraged Tennessee to stand on its own when it came to military matters’’ (47). East and West Tennesseans put aside their differences to join forces in the Creek War, though sectional tensions persisted; Jackson eventually ordered the arrest of East Tennessee’s commander, Major General John Cocke, for ‘‘mutinous conduct’’ (95). Shortages of men and supplies constantly plagued Jackson’s efforts, and his army almost dissolved because of confusion over when the volunteers’ terms of service actually expired. The ultimate victory at New Orleans nevertheless confirmed the legend that frontier militiamen and sharpshooters devastated the British army that had defeated Napoleon, though Kanon attributes the result mainly to superior American artillery. ‘‘Regular army soldiers, naval personnel, French Creoles, and Baratarian pirates operated the heavy guns,’’ Kanon concludes, ‘‘and if the Lion’s share of the American victory goes to artillery fire, then these men deserve their just rewards’’ (187). Other studies have well-covered the southwestern campaigns, most notably Frank L. Owsley, Jr., Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands: The Creek War and the Battle of New Orleans, 1812-1815 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1981) and Robert V. Remini, The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory (New York, 1999). Still, Kanon’s well-written and thoughtful account offers a fresh perspective. Especially insightful is the author’s use of letters, diaries, and memoirs left by common soldiers, whose observations displayed the human [End Page 489...

Ordnance, B.L., 18-inch Howitzer, Mark I: The Last of the Super-Heavies

By 1914, the Victorian Railway Proof Carriage, the only one of its type surviving, had seen 28 years of service preparing numerous heavy gun barrels for naval armament in the defence of Empire. The 18-in. howitzer, completed after the First World War, was used to great effect with the carriage in the development of an effective concrete penetrating bomb for the RAF, a vital capability during the latter stages of the Second World War.

Professional Seamen: A Strategic Resource during the Scanian War, 1675–1679

On 1 July 1677, the Danish navy won a decisive victory over a superior Swedish fleet in the bight of Koge. This success was partly due to trained seamen, who had been recruited in Amsterdam and manned the Danish men-of-war. Another professional seaman was the admiral Cornelis Tromp, who had been employed by the Danish king, not only for his skill and talent as a naval commander, but also because his very presence in Baltic waters had a deterrent effect on the Swedes. This article assesses these experienced seamen and argues that they were skilled craftsmen, who were just as important a resource for the success of a navy as big ships and heavy guns. So important, in fact, that the naval authorities were willing to pay relatively high wages to secure the expertise of professional seamen.

Virtually Witness Augmentation Now: Video Games and the Future of Human Enhancement

Virtually Witness Augmentation Now: Video Games and the Future of Human Enhancement

Albert Victor Craig

Born in Halifax, Yorkshire, Albert Victor Craig was named after his father, a general practitioner, who had died of pneumonia while his mother was pregnant with him ( BMJ 1924;1:90.1)....

Beurteilung einer Lärmbelastung bei Schafen

The behaviour of sheep was recorded as a reaction to the sound pressure levels caused by shooting with heavy machine guns. The reactions varied in intensity depending on the distance of the source of the noise from the fold. In the case of salvoes that were fired in the immediate vicinity of the fold and were associated with sound pressure levels higher than 120 dB (LCpeak), the sheep reacted with marked fright reactions, and no adaptation to the shooting noise was observed. It is concluded that the tolerable maximum noise level for sheep with this kind of noise source is likely to be less than 120 dB (LCpeak).

British Reaction to American Civil War Ironclads

By the 1840’s the era of the wooden ship of the line was coming to a close. As early as the 1820’s and 1830’s, ships of war were outfitted with increasingly heavy guns. Naval guns such as the increasingly popular 68 pounder could quickly damage the best wooden hulled ships of the line. Yet, by the 1840’s, explosive shells were in use by the British, French, and Imperial Russian navies. It was the explosive shell that could with great ease, cripple a standard wooden hulled warship, this truth was exposed at the Battle of Sinope in 1853. For this reason, warships had to be armored. By 1856, Great Britain drafted a design for an armored corvette. In 1857, France began construction on the first ocean going ironclad, La Gloire, which was launched in 1859. This development quickly caused Great Britain to begin construction on HMS Warrior and HMS Black Prince. By the time HMS Warrior was commissioned in 1861, the Royal Navy had decided that its entire battle fleet needed to be armored. While the British and the French naval arms race was intensifying, the United States was entering into its greatest crisis, the United States Civil War. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the majority of the United States Navy remained loyal to the Union. The Confederacy, therefore, gained inspiration from the ironclads across the Atlantic, quickly obtaining its own ironclads. CSS Manassas was the first to enter service, but was eventually brought down by a hail of Union broadside fire. The CSS Virginia, however, made an impact. Meanwhile, the Union began stockpiling City Class ironclads and in 1862, the USS Monitor was completed. After the veritable stalemate between the CSS Virginia and USS Monitor, the Union utilized its superior production capabilities to mass produce ironclads and enter them into service in the Union Navy. As the Union began armoring its increasingly large navy, the world’s foremost naval power certainly took notice. Therefore, this paper will utilize British newspapers, government documents, Royal Naval Reviews, and various personal documents from the 1860’s in order to examine the British public and naval reaction to the Union buildup of ironclad warships.

Study on Pumping Perforation Technique for Horizontal Wells

Aiming at the deficiencies of tubing-conveyed oriented perforating technology for horizontal well, a pumping perforation technology in horizontal well has been developed. Pumping perforation technology process is a perforation process transferring the perforating gun string into perforation section of the horizontal well with pumping fluid, and then completing the perforation while perforating bullets exploding after powering on, and finally towing back the perforating gun to the ground with cable. It is of the advantages such as simple perforation column, simple and convenient process and the shorter operating time. Perforating gun string is acted on by the impact, gravity and buoyancy of pumping liquid during moving in the horizontal section. Based on the theory of metal friction and the hydraulics principles, the calculation model of the critical injection rate (namely pumping displacement ) in the horizontal section is established by considering the effect of the composition of the gun string, buoyancy, friction coefficient, heavy guns, gun ramps, pumping fluid density, and calculated the impact of impact, effects of assembly components of gun string, pumping-fluid buoyancy, frictional coefficient, weight of gun, angle of gun-string, pumping-fluid density and computing method of impacting force. Field applications show that the calculation model established can meet the construction needs.

Lieutenant A and the rottweilers: a pheno-cognitive analysis of firemen's resilience in action

This article is based on a study of French urban firemen on an operational level. Their missions are punctuated by more and more critical incidents that have the potential to paralyse their cognitive functioning though they usually manage to resume their missions afterwards. I wonder if a microanalysis of their cognitive experience could unveil what helps a fireman get over a critical incident. Firemen's decision making in naturalistic settings has been studied mainly at a tactical level and from a third-person standpoint. Their ability to overcome critical incidents in action has been very little studied with research focusing mainly on Post-Traumatic Syndrome Disorder (PTSD). This study exposes the case of Lieutenant A who, supervising a victim rescue mission, finds himself attacked by two rottweiler dogs and is caught in the midst of a heavy gun shooting aimed at killing them. Based upon pheno-cognitive analysis, a qualitative method derived from phenomenological psychology, I explicit 38 elementary decision cycles pacing Lieutenant A's subjective experience of his intervention. The study shows that his cognitive experience of trauma unfolds in several stages and that he resumed his course of action because of a fortunate reinvolvement in the story in progress. It yields a cognitive ontology and cognitive patterns that describe decision-making dynamics.

Building a state for the Congolese people

A pickup truck marked “Delta Protection” zooms around a corner on a main avenue in the heart of the Congolese capital, with two uniformed men in the cab and another standing on the back, swinging a mounted heavy machine gun back and forth. They wear sunglasses, though it is night. On another street, a minivan labeled “African Defence System” bounces along with more than a half-dozen armed personnel.

Errors and Omissions in Franco–British Co-operation over Munitions Production, 1914–1918

The opening weeks of the First World War depleted stocks of guns and munitions for all belligerents. For Britain and France the potential existed for co-operation to overcome the slow rate of the necessary industrial mobilization. French expertise combined with British resources might have given the two countries a vital advantage over the Central Powers, but national sentiment vitiated this potential. Although the two countries co-operated in less vital matters such as finance and coal imports, and the first munitions ministers of both countries worked well together, no big project (such as an Allied artillery reserve of heavy guns mounted on railway wagons to be used between Italy and the North Sea as required) ever materialized. When the USA joined the war, problems were compounded. The struggle for influence in arming the new American armies presented an unedifying spectacle. The bureaucratic successes in transport matters contrast sharply with the missed opportunities chronicled here.

Comment on Mosier's War Myths

March/April 2005 · Historically Speaking9 is a good antidote to Mosier's various theses, reminding us that it is hard to give credit for victory to a particular army in a multifaceted struggle replete with differing types of sacrifice , and that certain theories of advance are not only predicated on particularly favorable conditions, but also only work in concert with their radically opposite counterparts. The same pattern of overgeneralization is again true ofMosier's critique of strategic air power. It likewise was not a static concept. Sending lumbering bombers over targets at high altitudes, without fighter support, when wedded to the illusion of pinpoint accuracy with a small load of high explosives was naive and surely not worth the sacrifice of devastating losses in crews and planes. By 1942-43 the Army Air Corps nearly wrecked itself over Europe, proving that the grand claims of air advocates of the 1930s were lunatic. Or were they? In the rapidly changing contexts of World War II what was true in 1942 (Mosier's "right from the start of the war") was not necessarily so in 1944-45, either in Europe or over Japan. Fast fighter escorts with drop tanks, improved versions ofthe B17s , the entrance of the latest model Lancasters, and the appearance ofthe B-29 in the Pacific, coupled with the frequent use of incendiaries in loads of well over 10 tons per plane, soon spelled the loss of entire cities and a resulting disruption in enemy industrial production, communications, and transportation that in a cost/benefit analysis (ifwe dare use such terminology when speaking ofmass death) could more than justify the (vastly reduced) losses in strategic aircraft. Moreover, much of the successes over Europe in 1944-45 were borne on the experience bought so dearly in 1 942. That Germany did not have successful four-engine bombers with long-range fighter escorts eventually proved deleterious for its cause for a variety ofreasons. Neither Russia nor England (much less the United States) redeployed critical artillery for antiaircraft use around its major cities to the same degree as the Germans. Therefore, they were free to use far more oftheir available heavy guns on the ground in their offensives against panzers. And this question of degree is important. Both Americans and Germans diverted fighters from ground support to dogfights over the German cities. But the Americans had far more planes to spare and were inflicting bombing damage in the process; the Germans sought to defend the homeland and diverted their precious fighters from attacking rapid Allied armor advances. The belated use of V-Is and V-2s was a disastrous strategic blunder, precisely because it allotted scarce capital and labor to weaponry that in comparison to a Lancaster or B-17 was a terribly inefficient means of dropping a ton of explosive per Mark spent. And as Williamson Murray has variously shown, it is not accurate to imply that historians are correct in concluding that "the strategic bombing campaign in Europe was hardly a howling success"—even ifwe look only at the larger picture of the vast diversion of resources to prevent air attacks, the inefficient restructuring ofthe German economy to adapt to daily bombing, and the real effect that the destruction of urban cores had on transportation and communications. The Americans, unlike either the Germans or Russians, waged a multifaceted war involving surface ships, merchant marine convoys, and a variety of land, sea, and air forces over two vast theaters, an effort in which Blitzkrieg and strategic bombing played key, but not necessarily always the key, roles. Examine the failed German blitz of 1940, and Douhet looks like a crackpot prophet. But look again at March to August 1945 when Curtis LeMay's Superfortresses, loaded with napalm and mines, virtually shut down the Japanese economy in six months without destroying his bomber fleet, and we are not so sure quite how to assess his mad predications. By March 11 over Japan, "the bombers always get through" was as true as it was over Germany by early 1945—and as false as it had been in 1942. In short, Mosier offers historians valuable reminders not to become wedded to myths that a particular...

Lake Atitlan, and: Election Day, Chiapas, and: Day of the Dead, and: Chalchuapa, and: Somewhere In Mexico, and: Brazil, and: Little Portugal

Lake Atitlán The guidebook said it was beautiful - two volcanoes loomed over the lake, the smaller one not quite ready to erupt, coughing like a teenager smoking her first joint. And there were fewer tourists, since the soldiers opened fire on the market, killing an American and hundreds of peasants, splattering blood and vegetables in the square. The lake was not for swimming, but you could sway on a hammock, sip coconut milk by the shore or spoon avocado from its rind - you could buy whatever you chose. You wore a long skirt and no shoes, dived so easily off the rocks he thought you were native, greeted you in a language neither of you knew. You laughed because you'd seen him in the market, haggling for a melon. He pulled out the fruit, promised not to fight for it, said he was tired of fighting, said he'd like to share with you, please take some. [End Page 159] That night he unlatched the door to your room. You were sleeping on a straw mat that scratched. He was not gentle either, grinding sand in your mouth and eyes. Which is how you learned: roosters pecking at corn husks, rain through the bamboo roof, mark of straw on your back, in a place where nothing hurt enough. Election Day, Chiapas Outside San Cristóbol before the election, we stopped at the last checkpoint. A man sauntered on board the bus, toting a heavy gun. He grabbed our papers, thumbed through mine to see where I'd been, said I was far from home for an American. That first night I roomed with a Canadian who was reporting on the election. You can be my interpreter, he said, flashing his press pass. A polite man, he asked, May I? before climbing into bed. Our cots creaked over the din of the TV. In town an anchorman for national TV thrust a microphone at an Indian woman. She knelt before him on a bed [End Page 160] of pine needles, predicting the election. I watched them until the anchorman questioned me. I'm not with anyone, I said. It is dangerous to walk alone, he said. He pulled me toward him, his breath heavy, and I tripped on his feet. Then the anchorman lifted me off the ground and danced Mexican: my body his. I asked about the election. I like your lips, he replied, moving to the bed. The next day I awoke in his bed. I would like to see you again, he said. But it was the morning of the election. He rushed into the street with his TV crew. They filmed a group of Chiapan farmers who traveled all day, a woman grabbing at ballots, a camouflaged man poised in the crowd. I did not go to bed that night: I recalled the Canadian man alone in his room, and what he'd said about interpreting; I thought of the TV man who would leave after the election. As I gathered my bags after the election, the Canadian man sat in front of the TV, watching me instead. I've been robbed, he said. [End Page 161] Day of the Dead 1. Even my friends thought you ugly: small and pockmarked, hands deep in your pockets. Yours didn't know about me. Rubbing against me on the floor of a classroom, splinters in my back, you closed your zipper when wind knocked the door. You whispered about plans, and we made private vows; I would forget and talk too loud because I was American. 2. The coast wasn't what I'd hoped: the air thick with swarming insects, the water warm as tears, your hands groping. In your pocket plastic crinkled, but it was too hot to touch. Sometimes you didn't say much after the first few drinks. We must have held each other sleeping on the bus. [End Page...

From the medical museum

Henry VIII's flagship The Mary Rose sank in the Solent, at the outset of a battle to repel an impending French invasion in 1545. She went down less than 2 km from the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour, in full view of those waiting to fight on land and sea. Perhaps too heavily laden, with 91 heavy guns, while making a turn under sail she took on water along one side through her open gunports, and swiftly capsized. Her hull settled metres deep under the soft sediments it had initially disturbed. There she lay, on the underlying clay of the sea bed, until the remarkable process of raising her remains was completed in 1982.

Time Capsule from the 17th Century: Stockholm’s Vasa Museum

Exhibit Review TIME CAPSULE FROM THE 17TH CENTURY: STOCKHOLM’S VASA MUSEUM JOHN G. ARRISON In the 17th century Sweden was one of Europe’s great powers, whose expanding boundaries made the Baltic almost a Swedish sea. Sweden’s territories included not only Finland but also the lands around the Gulf of Finland and parts of Germany and Poland as well. Sweden’s copper and iron mines became the primary source of raw materials to fill Europe’s demand for large guns. Sweden’s navy played a key role in the country’s growth, and the royal warship Vasa was to be the pride of that navy. But the ship met with disaster in 1628, foundering in Stockholm harbor on its maiden voyage. Three-andone -half centuries later, however, the Vasa stands marvelously resur­ rected, the centerpiece for the most popular museum in Scandinavia. Built on the shore of Stockholm’s Djurgarden, the Vasa Museum serves as a monument to Sweden’s past eminence. The story of the Vasa is not one of romantic grandeur, and the ship itself does not have the traditional characteristics of a national relic. It is more an archetype for the failures of modern government contract­ ing—poor communication, frequent change orders, cost overruns, missed deadlines, and high-level inquiries. As the Vasa was being built and outfitted between 1625 and 1628, King Gustavus II Adolfus, “Lion of the North,” was on the Continent fighting his Catholic cousin, King Sigismund of Poland, over rights to the Swedish throne. A strong navy was essential to the logistics of a war across the Baltic, but in the three years of the Vasa’s construction the Swedish navy lost twelve large vessels, primarily due to storms. In an effort to buttress his naval power, the king ordered a number of changes to the Vasa—greater length and breadth, more guns, and heavier guns. A ship possibly designed with one gun deck ended up with Mr. Arrison is a naval architect and Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware. His dissertation on labor and technology in 20th-century shipbuilding stems from past work at Bath Iron Works and as curator of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Hart Nautical Collections.© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X794/3501 -0007$01.00 158 Time Capsule from the 17th Century: Stockholm’s Vasa Museum 159 two, carrying sixty-four guns, including forty-eight 24-pounders. The resulting ship was top-heavy; ballasted so heavily that the lower gunports were dangerously close to the waterline, it was still too shallow to hold sufficient ballast to remain stable in a strong breeze. Yet the Vasa still reflected the glory of the royal family. It had an overall length of 69 meters, an 11.7-meter beam, and a displacement of 1,210 tons.1 The Vasa made its ceremonial maiden voyage on Sunday, Au­ gust 10, 1628. On board were 100 crewmen plus wives and children. All of Stockholm was watching. The ship had gone little more than 1 kilometer when a gust of wind filled the four set sails. It heeled over, the lower gunports on the lee side began taking water, and the Vasa sank in 35 meters of water. About fifty lives were lost. For spectators and victims alike, the loss of the Vasa was not unlike the disaster of the space shuttle Challenger. Early attempts at salvage proved fruitless, with the sole exception of an effort mounted by Albreckt von Treileben, a Swede, and a German named Andreas Peckell. In 1664 and 1665, using a simple diving bell, they succeeded in recovering more than fifty of the Vasa’s heavy guns. For almost 300 years after that, the Vasa remained forgotten. Then, in the 1950s, Anders Franzen began researching the ship and succeeded in locating it on August 25, 1956. The subsequent “Save the Vasa" campaign marshaled all the forces of national pride, bringing to­ gether the government, private enterprise, foundations, and indi­ viduals throughout Sweden. After an expensive and risky salvage effort, the Vasa broke the surface on April 24, 1961. Though badly damaged, the hull was whole and floatable because...

Makers of Modem Strategy: From. Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age ed. by Peter Paret

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 139 any other war, yet Hue did not fall to bombardment or smart bombs. Hue was taken and retaken the way the Spanish took Port’Ercole (1555) in the War of Siena, by infantry assaults. Since Hue, the United States has shifted resources away from com­ bat infantry and toward esoteric weapons that are seldom employed and often have no combat function. This shift away from infantry has nothing to do with technological efficiency. Wars around the globe are still being won and lost by infantry, though at a terrible human cost. For social and political reasons the United States is not willing to pay that cost. The battle for Hue produced a classic photo­ graph of an APC loaded with Marine casualties, an image difficult to sell on TV. Clean animated pictures of high-tech weapons that may not even exist have proved easier to market. Rodrigo Garcia y Robertson Dr. Garcia y Robertson is currently writing on the effect of arms control on 20thcentury weapons technology. His article “Failure of the Heavy Gun at Sea, 1898— 1922” appeared in the July 1987 issue of Technology and Culture. Makers of Modem Strategy: From. Machiaveili to the Nuclear Age. Edited by Peter Paret. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. vii+941; notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). This is a book with an illustrious ancestry. In 1941, Edward Mead Earle organized a seminar on American foreign policy and se­ curity issues for the faculty of Princeton University and the Insti­ tute for Advanced Study. A result of this seminar was a collection of twenty-one essays published in 1943 by Princeton University Press under the title Makers ofModem Strategy. This book, long consid­ ered a classic, has been widely assigned in courses on military af­ fairs and international relations. Its successor aims to achieve the same status. Despite its ancestry, the book is almost entirely new. Of twentyeight essays, only three were reprinted unchanged from the 1943 edi­ tion, and another four were revised or rewritten. The reasons are twofold. Eleven essays are on war and strategy since 1941. Even the seventeen that deal with warfare before 1941 reflect new informa­ tion and newer interpretations. This befits a discipline in constant tur­ moil. The cause of the turmoil is not hard to find: it lies in a changing technology that leaves strategists and generals far behind. For a cen­ tury, military thinkers interpreted war through the ideas of Clausewitz , Jomini, and Mahan. By the time their lessons had been fully absorbed, machine guns, tanks, and aircraft had made them obso­ lete. The result was that warfare was paralyzed in World War I, 140 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and strategy was taken out of military hands by political leaders in World War II. Readers of Technology and Culture will be disappointed to find lit­ tle discussion of weapons and arms manufacturing in this volume; in­ stead, the essays assume considerable prior knowledge of these aspects on the reader’s part. (Here readers might wish to consult Wil­ liam H. McNeill’s The Pursuit ofPower: Technology, Armed Force, and So­ ciety since A.D. 1000.) Even then, the sensitivity of the authors to technological change varies considerably. The earlier essays, dealing with the great strategists of the preindustrial age, such as Machiavelli , Vauban, Jomini, and Clausewitz, assume a relatively static weap­ onry. Not so the later essays. David Maclsaac’s “Voices from the Central Blue: The Air Power Theorists” reveals the inability of airpower strategists to keep up with (let alone direct) the incredible advances in aviation between 1914 and 1945. Similarly, in his essay “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” Philip A. Crowl places Mahan in both the context of his own time and the minds of later writers; in both cases, Mahan’s ideas, though brilliant analyses of the past, were out of date as soon as they were written. It is interesting to juxtapose Crowl’s essay with D. Clayton James’s “American and Japanese Strategies in the Pacific War.” James shows the limitations of the Mahanist doctrine of decisive encoun­ ters between fleets of capital ships and...

Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-Century Siena by Simon Pepper, Nicholas Adams

138 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-Century Siena. By Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams. Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Pp. xxiv+245; illustra­ tions, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95. Technological success and social success can be very different. This is the lesson that emerges from Firearms and Fortifications: Mili­ tary Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-Century Siena, by Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams. The advent of siege artillery trig­ gered a technical contest between cannon and improved fortifica­ tions. Gunners increased the mobility and striking power of their pieces while architects redesigned medieval defenses to meet gun­ powder. The architects clearly won this contest. Sixteenth-century Siena had neither the time nor resources to completely transform its medieval defenses, so the ruling republic reinforced vulnerable points often with earthworks and incomplete bastions. During the War of Siena (1552—55), these improvised defenses passed the test of Spanish artillery. The incomplete defenses of Montalcino turned back a Spanish army, and the walls of Siena were never breached by gunfire. Forts and walls fell only to infantry assault, largely with­ out artillery support. Walls were cost effective in total and at the mar­ gin. Though exact figures are not available, Pepper and Adams show that the expense of maintaining a besieging force far ex­ ceeded the cost of the walls. The depth of the authors’ detail is im­ pressive and their logic is excellent. However, they give us too much on bricks and mortar, when we need to know more about the people who built these bastions. Despite the economy and success of its walls, the Sienese Repub­ lic was defeated in an almost matter-of-fact manner. In social terms, the republic lost its independence as soon as it started to re­ sist. The Sienese faction that fought the Spanish began by inviting in the French, and the citizens’ committee formed to destroy the hated Spanish citadel actually incorporated it into the new FrancoSienese defenses. Sir Charles Oman correctly concluded that Siena fell because France could not maintain a field army in central Italy. Spain had the resources to cut the city off from its rural base, and Siena starved behind its almost perfect defenses. The Spanish won Siena by investing superior resources in infe­ rior technology. In Flanders, the Spanish pushed this same policy to the point of bankruptcy. Geoffrey Parker’s The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567—1659 shows how the failure to storm fixed defenses actually led to greater investment in guns and in­ fantry. Today firepower has increased and fixed fortifications have de­ clined, even though walls continue to resist guns. The last major bat­ tle over a brick and bastion citadel was the battle of Hue (1968). The United States expended more firepower in Vietnam than in TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 139 any other war, yet Hue did not fall to bombardment or smart bombs. Hue was taken and retaken the way the Spanish took Port’Ercole (1555) in the War of Siena, by infantry assaults. Since Hue, the United States has shifted resources away from com­ bat infantry and toward esoteric weapons that are seldom employed and often have no combat function. This shift away from infantry has nothing to do with technological efficiency. Wars around the globe are still being won and lost by infantry, though at a terrible human cost. For social and political reasons the United States is not willing to pay that cost. The battle for Hue produced a classic photo­ graph of an APC loaded with Marine casualties, an image difficult to sell on TV. Clean animated pictures of high-tech weapons that may not even exist have proved easier to market. Rodrigo Garcia y Robertson Dr. Garcia y Robertson is currently writing on the effect of arms control on 20thcentury weapons technology. His article “Failure of the Heavy Gun at Sea, 1898— 1922” appeared in the July 1987 issue of Technology and Culture. Makers of Modem Strategy: From. Machiaveili to the Nuclear Age. Edited by Peter Paret. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. vii+941; notes, bibliography, index. $55.00...