Evil Smurfs

This started as me reading too quickly.  And without my glasses on.  Someone had written a piece about the lackluster summer movie season and among the listed films I saw The Smurfs 28 Years Later.  Of course there was a comma in there that I missed, but the idea of a Smurf Zombie movie intrigued me.  I mean, they already start out a sort of putrid blue color, and frankly zombies capable of biting you on the knee cap is a disquieting thought.

Because we live in times that defy satire I can report that the nasty little critter shown here is not a figment of my imagination.  No, there is a subgenre of Smurf lore in which some of them are not the cheerful little hypoxic Communards they usually try to pass for.

There actually was a Smurf episode called The Purple Smurf in which one of the standard blue Smurfs - Lazy Smurf as it happens - gets bitten by a weird insect and turns into effectively a zombie.

He becomes angry and hostile, hops around saying "Gnap, Gnap, Grnap!" and bites several other Smurfs who also transform.

Papa Smurf of course saves the day.  How?  Don't matter, most Zombie stories are short on logic and actual science.

The Purple Smurf episode aired in 1981, so just a few years after Dawn of the Dead.  The episode is considered by aficionados of Smurfdom to be a bit of a spoof.

But I ask you, is it fair that Smurfs be portrayed as villains?  Darn right, because that's basically what they are and always have been.

The Smurfs were created by a Belgian cartoon artist named Pierre Culliford, aka Peyo.  They first appeared in 1958.  They were a spin off from an earlier (1947) series he did called Johan and Peewit, which was set in Medieval times.  In it the titular characters encountered a little guy with blue skin.

If this sounds a bit, well, derivative its because  it is.  Or if you are being charitable there are only so many sources of inspiration, and Sleeping Beauty dwarves, the Roman era adventures of Asterix, even the Hobbits of the Shire all have common themes.  Asterix btw is roughly contemporary with the Smurfs, while JRR and Uncle Walt's creations were earlier.

The pointy hats, well, those are what are called Phrygian caps.  These are very well known from Roman times, and are sometimes called Liberty Caps.  Here's a coin commemorating the assassination of Julius Caesar....

Some Roman deities also went Smurfy style.  Notably Mithras and his attendants.  Oddly, the goddess Libertas usually did not.

As to the Smurfs being villains, well, sure.  But it was not as pejorative term as you might expect. The late Roman era and the early Medieval times had no sharp demarcation.  Rulers changed. Latin, which was probably not much spoken by the rustics anyway, moved over to the churches.  People mostly still lived in the same places as before, mostly did the same work.  Even Roman villas, the upgraded farmsteads where a gentleman could supervise his peasants then enjoy a hot bath and a bit of culture were not totally abandoned.  They just had new owners with a bit less class.

But the peasants who worked there?  Well for them it was pretty much Same Old.  By the Middle Ages, the period in which Peyo set his early work, the term Villain appeared.  Around 1300 if you want to be specific.  At that point villanus, meaning farm hand, had the connotation of "base, or low born rustic".  From there it was pretty much downhill, as in a few centuries it meant a man capable of any manner of gross wickedness".  Villainy if you prefer.

Well that's a long march from my mistaken - or actually was it? - concept of Smurfs as zombies.  One of the other people commenting on the initial discussion did run the basic idea through Chat GPT, asking for a synopsis for a movie script.  AI of course spat out predictable and unremarkable drivel.  I suspect that's all it will be capable of for many years to come.

Frenchy the Bottle Fiend

Below is a photo from Deadwood Dakota Territory, date unclear.  It shows a hillside covered in empty bottles.  I first ran across it back in the early 1980's when I lived in South Dakota and knew various people interested in Territorial history, old bottles and old photographs.

The theories on this varied.  Often said to be "empties" cascading out the back of a raucous saloon, there was a counter theory that somebody had intentionally collected the bottles.  On a whim I did a bit of sleuthing, and the second theory is the correct one.

Lets talk about Frenchy the Bottle Fiend.

Start with the photo.  It was taken by a pioneer photographer of the West named Stanley J. Morrow.  He is known to have visited and photographed Deadwood on a number of occasions starting in 1876 when the mining boom town was established.  This photo is somewhere in the 1876-1878 time frame.  I found one frustratingly vague reference to its appearing in a "period publication" with the caption "Bottle Fiend's Ranch in Deadwood".  I suspect this was from later in the 19th century when somebody was putting together a retrospective of the town's colorful early days.  In any event, somebody remembered......

The first mention of The Fiend in contemporary newspapers comes from The Black Hills Weekly Times, March 23rd 1878.

His real name is variously given as Justin Cachlin or as Justa Cacheline.  He clearly came to Deadwood early on, but of his previous life there is little information.  Or rather, a bunch of dubious info.  The Deadwood paper speaks quite disparagingly of an account of The Bottle Fiend that appeared in a rival paper down the gulch in Lead.  It implausibly claimed that Cacheline had been a Lieutenant in the US Army that he was independently wealthy, and that he had amassed a half million bottles.  

Rather he seems to have been something of a harmless eccentric.  He wandered the streets of Deadwood in bizarre attire sometimes borrowed from household clotheslines.  He carried a sack which he filled with empty bottles, taking them back to his shanty.  Various accounts claim he intended to sell them back to the breweries and distilleries that sent them off to this thirsty boom town, but the logistics made this difficult.  There were at this time no trains into the gold mining region of the Black Hills.  Everything came in and went out on "bull trains" long lines of carts pulled by oxen.  A cargo of whiskey or even beer could pay off.  Hauling empty, smelly, clanking bottles back to civilization was less of a viable business.

Frenchy was a valued member of the community but seems to have been the butt of many jokes, practical, journalistic and otherwise.  Little boys would sometimes throw rocks at his collection of bottles.  He was hauled before the magistrate a few times on the plausible charge of public nuisance.  This April 1878 article suggests he was quite talkative but mostly in a nonsensical fashion.

The Bottle Fiend did not live an easy life.  In December of 1880 it was reported that he was very ill, "....all alone in his cabin, with only the ground for a bed and a lot of old rags for bedding."  Soon thereafter his obituary was published.  It appeared in papers across Dakota Territory.

His "strange and mysterious life" came to an end.  There was some attempt to carry on the task of clearing bottles from the saloons and gutters - one of the street commissioners took this on as a part time job and was proclaimed the new "bottle fiend".  But oddly, the legend of the Bottle Fiend carried on.

"Deadwood" was a fairly popular show for a while.  It was based on a book of the same name by South Dakota author Pete Dexter.  In the book, but not the show, The Bottle Fiend is a  supporting character.  Mr. Dexter seems to have done his research well, so his account of the Fiend working at the public baths and having attempted suicide repeatedly could have some basis in fact, even in a work of fiction.

The indispensable Find a Grave website lists yet another variation on his name "Justine Cochelin" date of birth unknown, place of birth "France".  He rests not on Boot Hill but at Mount Moriah Cemetery.

The USS Namekagon

My place up north is near the Namekagon River.  A nice stream I've canoed it on numerous occasions and have helped with fish surveys there twice.  It is quite scenic, and is named after a Native American chief who lived in the area and supposedly had a stash of silver nuggets that was never found after his death.  

But it is not exceptional - I actually waded across it last deer hunting season - so I was surprised recently to learn that a ship was named after it during World War Two.

The USS Namekagon was (see below, maybe still is!) a smallish tanker of the Patapsco class.  Only 1850 tons empty and a bit over 4000 fully loaded they were built for the US Navy to shuttle gasoline between various island outposts.  They were mostly named after small rivers and were commissioned late enough in the war that they did not see any real action.  The Namekagon for instance had just finished her shakedown cruise and arrived at Pearl Harbor when the war ended.

This class of ships is unusual in that many were built about as far from salt water as you can get in North America....on a backwater of the Minnesota River.  Specifically at Savage Minnesota, at the barge terminal known as Port Cargill.  In an age where we seem to have difficulty getting things done competently we look back and marvel at the fact that a bunch of barge mechanics built a class of 23 ocean going ships.  Here is the Namekagon as it made its way down the Mississippi River after its launching.

When the war ended a lot of surplus ships headed straight to the Mothball Navy or the breakers yards.  But these little tankers were pretty versatile.  The career of the Namekagon is a good example. 

After the end of the war she spent 18 months shuttling fuel to the far flung islands of the Pacific.  Then in 1947 she underwent a refit before heading to her new base in Kodiak Alaska hauling passengers and freight to stations in the Arctic and down the West Coast.  After a few more years operating out of Pearl Harbor again she went into reserve in 1957.

In 1962 she was transferred to the Royal New Zealand Navy and given the name HMNS Endeavour.  Now she headed to the Antarctic delivering fuel to bases there until 1971.

That same year she was leased to the Republic of China's navy and renamed again, as the ROCS Lung Chuan.  The Taiwanese eventually purchased her outright and kept her going until she was decommissioned again in 2005.  Her final disposition is said to be "unknown", so there is a slim chance that the Namekagon is still out there as an aged tramp steamer!  The first ship in the class, the USS Patapsco was converted to a fishing trawler is said to still be afloat and in use.

Time Capsule - Civil Defense

The basement workshop has needed attention of late.  Lots of legacy robotics stuff, Barbie Jeep parts and suchlike - must go in order to make space for new robotics components.  I imagine in a few years those will be obsolete too.  It's the way of technology.  Sic Semper Recyclo.

Plenty of oddities have turned up including this gem.  I actually can't call it a mystery,  as I know why it was down there.  As to it's earlier story, difficult to say. 

It looks like, and in fact is, a Geiger counter.

These used to be somewhat commonplace items, but now you mostly see them in old movies.  The staccato clicking when it is held up and waved around was the universal sound of Nuclear Dread back in a day when the prospects of a US/USSR holocaust were on the minds of all.

Here's a few small details that help us pin down the history of the item at hand.

Universal Atomics does not appear to exist in 2021.  I guess if I were their PR department I'd have suggested a name change a long time ago.  The parent company Universal Transistor Products Company is enigmatic.  It is still listed in Delaware as an "INACTIVE AGENT ACCOUNT".  I find other mentions of it as an active concern and as a "FOREIGN BUSINESS CORPORATION".  This degree of opacity has a rather CIA/SpookCorp vibe to it.  Perhaps their HQ is under a volcano on some remote island.

A small plate on the unit suggests that it contains a RADIO-ACTIVE SOURCE.    You wonder what sort of less subtle warnings would have to go on it today.  Interestingly my understanding of Geiger counters and what info I can locate suggests that there is no radioactive material built into them, just inert gases that generate a charge when high energy particles cross them.

Geiger counters of course refer to the man who invented the technology that went into them, a certain Hans Geiger.  His story is fairly typical of German scientists of that era.  It's complicated.  Before WW I he traveled and corresponded freely.  He did graduate work in Manchester England and helped his boss, Ernest Rutherford, win the Nobel prize.  

A keen mind able to figure out the trajectory of very tiny objects would be expected to excel at helping plot the course of larger ones.  So Geiger served as an artillery officer in the German Army from 1914 to 1918.  Who knows, he may have directed some of the shells we dug up at Hill 80.  His health suffered from the effects of trench warfare but post war he went back into active research.  He on the one hand signed a letter objecting to Hitler's policies regarding academia.  But he also dabbled for a while with efforts to develop a German atomic bomb program.  He survived the battle for Berlin at the end of the war but died before the tumultuous year 1945 was over.

And what came after?  The Cold War.  Russia picking the bones of the German rocketry and atomic programs to build a counterweight to the Manhattan Project.  Creepy, dystopic black and white SciFi movies.  Red Scares and McCarthyism.  Hot wars in Korea and other points of conflict between the two great powers.  The production of millions of Geiger counters for Civil Defense....

For those with an interest in more detail, I can say that this particular model came into being, as I did, in 1957.  It was made for about two years and is unusual in that it had a yellow plastic case; most models made by other companies being metal.  

Eventually the threat of nuclear Armageddon receded, and the electronic components in these counters deteriorated.  In the 1980's lots of them were marketed to assorted hobbyists, including those hoping to prospect for uranium.  After sitting in some Civil Defense shelter for decades I suspect this specific unit ended up at a rock and mineral show, something one of my sons used to frequent.  He's much more able technically than I, and as he has not gotten it working I will just keep it around as a colorful artifact of an anxious past.

Addendum.  After this post was finished I was idling about and watched an old episode of "Half in the Bag", the boozy movie review show put out by the mad geniuses at Red Letter Media.  (It's not for everyone, mad genius can often be offensive).  And what do you suppose I spied in the background of one of their intentionally cheesy sets?

Heinrich Hertz and the tragedy of German Science

I learned things in my electronics class.  Not always things in the curriculum...because I kept wandering down interesting side paths.  For instance, we studied alternating current wave forms.  Ooh, compelling stuff.  Nah, only useful stuff.  But the unit of frequency for wave forms is hertz.  As in kilohertz, megahertz, etc.  I got to wondering who this was named after....and a remarkable but sad story emerged.  In a sense it is a condensed version of the larger somber tale of how German science and industry was bent to evil purposes in the first half of the 20th century.....

Meet Heinrich Rudolph Hertz.  A brilliant polymath he was accomplished not only in physics and engineering but learned Arabic and Sanskrit.  Although he had the previous theoretical work of Maxwell to build on he was the first scientist to prove the wave nature of electrical and magnetic fields.  Having basically just proven the principles on which radio, AC current and most modern electronics function he was asked what practical use he saw in this.  His answer?

"Nothing, I guess."

Heinrich Hertz died in 1894 at the young age of 34.  Cause of death was a disease I learned as "Wegner's Granulomatosis".  In recent years it has been renamed, as it turns out that Herr Docktor Wegener did some dodgy medical experiments involving concentration camp inmates.

Meet Gustav Ludwig Hertz, nephew of Heinrich.

Also a very bright fellow, he was one half of the team that presented the Franck-Hertz experiments to the scientific community in April of 1914.  These studied the electrical properties of gases in a vacuum and demonstrated the quantum nature of atoms. 

Oh, and about 1914 and gases....

Hertz served in the German army during WW I, in a special unit commanded by Fritz Haber that for the first time developed and deployed poison gas in warfare.  Pioneer Regiment 35/36 had no fewer than four future Nobel Prize winners in its ranks.  Franck and Hertz won the Physics prize in 1925.  Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission and won the 1944 Nobel for chemistry despite carrying on his research in Berlin!  (To be fair it was only announced post war).  Fritz Haber topped them all.  He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918.....at a time when the acrid stench of poison gas still lingered in the depths of shattered battlefields.

An interesting reflection on a different mind set.  Haber won his prize for discovering a way that atmospheric nitrogen could be "fixed" and utilized in chemical reactions.  It allowed the mass manufacture of high explosives that tore apart millions of soldiers.  Also the commercial production of fertilizers that fed billions of civilians.  How different from our "woke" modern attitude that requires past figures be subjected to modern judgments, their statues removed, their presence in texts erased or marked with asterisks!

It has become fashionable to condemn any questioning of science as an "attack" and those who do so as "deniers".  But let's be fair, brilliant men are far from omniscient. H. Hertz discounting electromagnetic waves as a clever parlor trick.  Haber, Hahn and G. Hertz not seeing past their equations to gasping and incinerated bodies.  But in the epilogue to this tale there are rays both of dark and light.

James Franck and Gustav Hertz arranged to defect to the Russians at the end of World War II.  They worked on the Soviet nuclear program which thankfully to date has never been used in war.

Gustav's Hertz's defection meant that his son, Carl, also a physicist would not be allowed to work in the US.  A POW captured in North Africa he went post war to Sweden where he pioneered inkjet technology and performed the first cardiac ultrasound.  

Otto Hahn was also captured by the Western Allies.  When given the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he was appalled at the direction his work had taken.  His immediate response was to get very drunk.  In the longer term he became a prominent advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons entirely.

Ah, but Fritz Haber had the strangest journey.  He continued work in secret on poison gas in the post WW I era.  But being of Jewish ancestry he fell into disfavor with the rise of the Nazi regime.  Remarkably he was invited to emigrate to England, where he worked for a few years. 

Fritz Haber

Finally Chaim Weizmann reached out to Haber, inviting him to come to Jerusalem and head up the Sieff Research Institute.  In failing health, Haber died en route.

The Sieff was later renamed the Weizmann Institute, premier academic organization of the post WWII state of Israel.  It was of course named for Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel and a man who attained his early scientific fame by devising a method of making high explosive cordite by fermenting starch, thereby making his own contribution to the ability to destroy human life on a grand and grotesque scale.

Inappropriate Songs of my Youth - Part Two

Imagine, a President of the United States who actively encourages Body Shaming for overweight children!  Why, such a scoundrel would probably also cheat on his wife regularly and engage in nepotism, hiring family members for important government jobs.

Indeed.  Oh, no I'm not talking about the annoying guy with the orange hair.  No, this was John F. Kennedy.

Perhaps the beginnings of childhood obesity were noted even then.  Now, JFK didn't invent the National Council on Physical Fitness but he did change the name to The President's Council on Physical Fitness, and as part of the new emphasis adopted as its theme song a remarkable bit of songwriting that will instantly resonate with everyone over the age of, oh mid 50's.

"Chicken Fat".  Also known as "The Youth Fitness Song".  I picked this YouTube version because of the image.  That is exactly the style of clunky, drab record player that was wheeled into the little gym at Lowell Elementary school.  We were all lined up and expected to jump, twist, bend, etc.  How else will you attain the cheerful end result, which was:  "Go you chickenfat, go away, go you chickenfat go!"

If you are really sharp you might recognize the name Robert Preston, or the jaunty up beat style of the music.  Preston of course was the titular character in the 1962 movie The Music Man.  The song in fact was recorded at the same time, and in the same studio as the sound track to the movie!  Meredith Wilson, the composer who wrote the songs for the initial Broadway version and adapted it for the screen, also wrote "Chicken Fat".  Preston was totally in character, and his performance in "Chickenfat" is similar to his expansive, over the top style in such songs as "Trouble in River City" and "Seventy Six Trombones".

Obviously the above is a still from the movie.  Now I don't know if he was in costume as well as in character when he recorded Chicken Fat but I'd like to thinks so.  Oddly the school gymnasium (?) in this picture looks an awful lot like Lowell Elementary school's.  I figure he's just getting warmed up.  Another stanza or two and at least those sluggish looking kids will be hopping about.  Maybe grandma will be shakin' that hoop skirt too!

Millions of copies of the 33rpm, 7 inch record were distributed to schools across the nation.  The original stereophonic master copy seems to be a Lost Masterpiece and all existing versions today are in the same glorious, tinny, magnificently enthusiastic mono that got us jumping and bending in place circa 1964!

Just for fun I left the "Chicken Fat" song play for a while while I moved on to doing homework.  Yikes!  I had forgotten just how compelling, nay commanding, this bit of fitness propaganda really was!  I found myself bobbing back and forth and my keyboard tapping acquired a certain jaunty cadence!

"Once more on the rise, next to the flabby guys, go you chicken fat go away! Go you chicken fat go..."

A Tree Shaped Tombstone....for a Tree?

The cemetery in Wausau Wisconsin makes you work a bit. It is sprawling, has the newer and older monuments all jumbled together, and has some unusual local "styles", I suspect from the availability of local red granite.  You find some odd gravestones there.  This struck me as the oddest.

Short, squat and made of granite.  Not your usual "tree shaped tombstone".

It was associated with this marker, remembering a husband and wife named Neu.

But it is the top of the stump that was really peculiar.  The inscription reads:

First Tree cut down in this Cemetery by FRED. NEU

Mr. Neu was born in Germany in 1827.  He came to Wisconsin in 1858.  After working a while at a saw mill and as a carpenter he started a furniture business in 1871.

There are several possible connections between Mr. Neu and the cemetery.  He was an alderman so if this was a publicly owned cemetery he may have had a supervisory role.  He also served as coroner, a job which does tend to bring you into contact with the less lively segment of the population.  But the biggest clue is the furniture business.  In times past those who made and sold tables and chairs often did the same for coffins, and served as defacto funeral directors.

Evidently he was involved in the founding of the cemetery, although why he should remember cutting down a specific tree with such fondness that he decided to spend money immortalizing the deed is an interesting question.

The One that Got Away - Gunther Plushchow

Getting out of a POW camp is not easy.  They tend to be designed to prevent that sort of thing. But it did happen with some regularity.  The real challenge is getting all the way back home.  During World War Two for instance, all German camps had to be 1000 miles from the English channel.  And the British simply shipped a lot of the prisoners they held to Canada or later to the US.

So the "Big Time" of POW escapes, the so called "home run" was a very rare event.  If you set the standards to the maximum you would have to say that the ultimate escape would be for an Allied POW to make it back to England before D-Day or for an Axis prisoner to manage a trans-channel escape from England.  The first case happened about a half dozen times.  But a German POW getting out of England?  One singular example out of hundreds of thousands of captives in two World Wars.

Gunther Pluschow.

In a previous post I took Guther's story halfway around the world, from aerial combat over China to his detection and arrest in Gibralter.

Usually armies do not prepare extensively for prisoners of war - the delusion of a quick, victorious conclusion being pervasive - so the handling of captives tends to be rather slipshod and improvised. Pluschow was at various times held in a friendly local jail, a dismal prison ship and a former stable. But eventually he made it to Donington Hall, the primary lock up for German Officers.

On being marched from the train station to the Hall Pluschow was busy memorizing landmarks, already contemplating escape.

Life in captivity is not enjoyable even under civilized conditions.  And in 1915 it was still possible to yearn for the glories of combat, and the officers, so confident in eventual German victory, felt cheated of their opportunity to pitch in.

Donington had a deer park and one day a fawn that had become separated from its mother came up near the wire.  With much coaxing and calling the prisoners persuaded it to wriggle its way through the wire.  The British were furious and marched the fawn back out of camp with an armed guard of twenty men bearing fixed bayonets!

Pluschow's escape did not directly stem from this incident, but clearly the barriers had been shown to be vulnerable.

On July 4th, 1915, Plushchow and his fellow escapee, a naval officer named Trefftz, made their move.  As an escape plan it was basic but clever.  They had observed that the evening roll call was done at slightly different times for the general population versus those on sick call.  So the two naval officers simply reported that they were sick and hid outside the building.  Immediately upon completion of the evening roll call two men were sent to play the parts of Pluschow and Trefftz, who were duly counted in their beds.

Under cover of a rain storm the barbed wire fences were scaled and the two escapees walked into nearby Derby and caught a train to London.

Both men were selected because of their knowledge of England from prior visits, and from their excellent command of the language.  But Trefftz was caught lingering around the docks in London, looking to catch a ride on a neutral ship.

The newspapers were soon publishing a very accurate description of Pluschow, down to the distinctive coat he was wearing.  He decided to get rid of it, but instead of tossing it into a back alley bin somewhere he took it to the coat check at Blackfriar's Station.  When he handed it to the coat room attendant he was asked; "Whose coat is this?".  In an exchange worthy of a Black Adder episode he distractedly answered in German "Meinen", meaning "mine".  The clerk handed him a receipt with the name "Mr. Mine".

Plushchow managed to stay free in London for three weeks.  He had  minor adventures that included disguising himself with boot black and coal dust, joining a local Social Democrats club under his new name George Mine, even resisting the very aggressive recruiting efforts of a British sergeant at a rally in support of the Kitchener Army.  He frequented low saloons and music halls and the British Museum before finally managing to steal a row boat and stow away on a Dutch steamer that was about to sail.

On arrival in Holland he simply continued to play the part of a sailor.  He  helped secure the ship to its wharf, then just walked away from it.

He got an initially puzzled welcome back home in Germany, but was eventually feted as a hero who had seriously tweaked the nose of the British lion. In just over a year he had entirely circumnavigated the globe by train, airplane, and boat, assuming at least a half dozen identities in the process.

Like many patriotic Germans post WWI he had a difficult time.  Eventually he raised money by writing about his adventures, then continued his wandering ways by being the first man to explore the far reaches of South America by air.

Gunther Plushchow died in 1931 when he crashed while on a photographic survey of Patagonia.

Pluschow....Gunther Pluschow.

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was a spy of sorts in the Second World War.  But he was pretty much a desk jockey.  His greatest creation is said to be a composite of various commandos and field operatives that he encountered during the war years.

It is unlikely that any of them had quite the skill set of Bond, who was constantly making amazing shots with his pistol, flying and crashing all manner of air and sea craft, escaping his captors with impunity, traveling the globe to exotic places.  And of course seducing women.  Lots of 'em.

To find somebody who actually did all these things, albeit with less actual spying, Fleming would have done better to go back a little further in history.  To World War One.  And to the towering historical figure of Gunther Pluschow.  Uh........who?

This guy.

In the fateful summer of 1914 Pluschow was a young naval aviator heading across Russia on a train to assume his duty post at the German colony of Tsingtao on the coast of China.  Shortly after his arrival two Rumpler-Taube scout planes came in by cargo ship.  Both crashed and only one could be repaired leaving Pluschow the sole aviator able to observe the approaching Japanese forces when war broke out in August.

It was a difficult assignment.  Keeping his plane flying was near impossible, in fact the home made replacement propeller he had to use needed to be removed and re-glued nightly.  But he persevered, not only helping with artillery targeting but even attempting some improvised bombing runs. Lacking any real ordnance he used four pound tins of "Sietas, Plambeck and Co. Best Java Coffee" repacked with dynamite and scrap iron.

He even claims to have shot down a Japanese plane....using his revolver.  He says it took 30 rounds to accomplish this, perhaps the first aerial victory in human history.

On this point I have doubts.  He mentions this event only briefly in a post war recounting of his adventures.  And what weight conscious pilot would carry five reloads for his side arm?  It would be tempting to write it off entirely, but everything else he did in the year that followed was equally implausible, yet apparently quite true.

Tsingtao never had a chance, it was an isolated outpost halfway around the earth from Germany.  On November 6th as the Japanese troops were making their final assault Pluschow took off under fire with a box of secret papers.  He made it away safely, crash landing in a rice paddy.

What followed was a bewildering odyssey of Mandarins and Missionaries, of captivity and escape, of superstitious peasants who thought he was the devil, and of a remarkable 36 course meal that included shark fins and swallow nest soup.

Eventually he made it to the international enclave of  Shanghai, but he was still under close watch.  In an incident where he is clearly hiding some details he recalls being driven out of town for a quick switch in carriages.  As he puts it, genteelly, "..with deep respect and gratitude I kissed a woman's slim white hands which were extended to me from the interior of the carriage.."

He still had to spend a few days acting like a mad man to discourage curious Chinese from approaching too closely.  Then he boarded a ship with false papers identifying him as being an Englishman named MacGarvin, representative of the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

There was still the small matter of police inspection when the ship docked at several Japanese ports, but the connivance of the ship's doctor allowed him to pass himself off as having ptomaine poisoning and being too ill to get out of his bed.

The rest of the trip to San Francisco was uneventful.  America was still neutral at this point in the war. He enjoyed a bit of Society life and a trip to the Grand Canyon before heading east.

In New York he was frustrated by his difficulty booking passage to a neutral European country. Eventually he met a shady fellow:  "I was never really quite able to ascertain his real occupation. However he was very successful at one particular job - which consisted in polishing up old passports".

Gunther might have had grounds to complain about the amenities on this trip, the best that could be arranged was passage in steerage posing as a Swiss locksmith.  But it was a busy time for those arranging clandestine transit to Germany.  Pluschow at one point shared a secret smile with a brother officer of his who was posing as a Dutch First Class passenger.

Illness, vermin and sea sickness plagued the voyage but Pluschow had high hopes.  Until an unscheduled stop at Gibralter.

British officials lined up anyone claiming to be a neutral citizen.  Of the half dozen or so "Swiss" Pluschow was the only one actually carrying a passport!  It all seemed to be going well for him until a civilian employee of the shipping line, who doubled as a counter espionage agent, protested that there were certainly Germans among the purported Swiss, and insisted on a close examination.

Clothing labels were scrutinized.  Baggage was turned inside out.  Pluschow was still doing well. Finally as a last resort a genuine Swiss citizen from First Class was summoned and an intense interrogation in Swiss dialect was carried out.  This was too high a bar for Gunther to attain.

Along with several others with dodgy stories - some of whom indeed were Germans trying to pass - Gunther Pluschow was marched into captivity in the fortress of Gibralter.  Further protests and demands to see "his" Swiss Counsel began to sound a little weak once he was searched and noted to have some items a poor locksmith would not have....several gold coins and a loaded revolver.

Soon he was on a ship to England, bound for a POW camp.  For him the jig was up,  because in the entirety of two World Wars nobody ever escaped from a camp in England and made it back to "der Vaterland".

Nobody that is, other than Gunther Pluschow....

(To be continued)

Naming the Liberty Ships - Part Ten

Time to say farewell to the Liberty Ships.  A list of their names has been a fun little sea voyage into odd corners of history.  In fact I had a hard time leaving some out.  Here are a few "odds" and ends.

Why, we have the S.S. Katherine Bates name in honor of the woman who wrote "America the Beautiful".  Also the S.S. Sarah Joseph Hale remembering the woman who penned "Mary had a Little Lamb".  Ms. Bates btw has become after the fact a figure revered by modern Gay activists.  Although from this long remove it is hard to tell just how much of her flowery 19th century professions of love for another woman were just overdone prose.  Whalebone corsets and Gay Pride....seems like two different planets.

Lets also remember the S.S. Thomas Bulfinch, a 19th century editor of folklore and mythology. Somehow he managed to distill out all the Grimm and naughty parts and make it respectable reading.

The Old West was commemorated in the S.S. Annie Oakley and the S.S. James B. Hickock.  A ship's insignia for the latter could possibly include the notorious "Dead Man's Hand" that Wild Bill was holding when he was shot, but that might be a bit much for suspicious mariners.

Aces over Eights.  The remaining card is a source of dispute.

There were an entire series of Liberties built for the British.  One would think the Brits would have enough historical figures to name endless numbers of ships.  But for some reason all these were dubbed names that began with "Sam".  Samcrest and Samglory, Samfaithful and Samfreedom. Even the unfortunate - to modern sensibilities - Sambo.

Another entire series were specially built for hauling coal.  They got inspiring names from, of all things, coal deposits.  Imagine a graybeard telling the younger generation about his time on the gallant S.S. Freeport Seam.

The names of the Liberty Ships are delightfully quirky, but were supposed to follow one firm rule: They were not to be named for a living person.  And even that rule was broken exactly once.

Francis J. O'Gara was a sports writer for the Philadelphia Enquirer before joining the Merchant Marine.  He was aboard the ill fated Liberty Ship S.S. Jean Nicolet when it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in July of 1944.  The horrific tale of how the survivors were treated is recounted here.

The handful of sailors rescued by Allied ships made it quite clear that the Japanese were slaughtering all survivors.  And besides, the sub had made a crash dive to evade an approaching search plane.  It seemed entirely appropriate to name a new Liberty Ship for men who died on the Nicolet, although why her Captain was not so honored is not clear to me.

The keel of the Francis J. O'Gara was laid down in April of 1945, with completion in June.  So she was a rather new ship when her namesake was shipped home from a POW camp in Yokohama at the end of the war.  The vessel returning him to the States was berthed right next to.....the ship posthumously named for him!

The extended story of Francis O'Gara can be found here.  I am borrowing from that site a marvelous photo, here is the only namesake of a Liberty Ship who could pose for a photo with her!

Naming the Liberty Ships - Part Nine

Note: This is part of a series of posts on odd bits of history as memorialized in the names of World War II Liberty Ships.  I am organizing them, after a fashion, around proposed artwork for imaginary "ships' insignia"  For a more complete explanation and background:  Part One

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You had to have done something interesting in life to get a Liberty Ship named after you, but in some instances what happened after people pass away is even more interesting....

It made sense that there would be an S.S. Park Benjamin.  Mr. Benjamin was a Naval Academy grad and retained an interest in naval affairs throughout a long and profitable career as an editor and a patent attorney.  His domestic life had a few quirks....

His daughter Dorothy must have been a wild child.  At age 25 she eloped with a 45 year old Italian opera singer.  OK, it was Enrico Caruso, but Papa Benjamin did not approve.

One year later Benjamin legally adopted Dorothy's long time governess, an Italian woman named Anna Bolchi.

On Benjamin's death in 1922 each of his biological children got one dollar and some scathing words from beyond the grave as published in the local papers.  The word "parasites" was used.  The former governess inherited the family fortune.

There was quite the legal tussle, some quiet settlement, then Bolchi went ahead and married the family lawyer who had written up both the adoption paperwork and the poisonous will!

Yes, yes it has been too long a winter and I have been over indulging in PBS mystery fare.  So I propose this logo for the S.S. Park Benjamin.

The will also specified that Benjamin's ashes be scattered in mid Atlantic.  Bolchi did so, presumably with a good chuckle and a champagne glass in her non scattering hand.

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The namesake of the S.S. George M. Pullman has left his name to us as something of a synonym for luxury.  He is remembered for designing the railroad sleeping cars called Pullman cars.  The first was built in 1864.  Abraham Lincoln made his final journey home to be buried in Springfield in one.

I can't tell if Pullman personally had a strong sense of class consciousness or if he was just in a business where this was a reality of life.  He started the tradition of hiring African Americans as porters for his trains, and was in fact once the largest employer of same in the country.  He also built an entire town for his factory workers.

Pullman Illinois was like most company towns.  It had a captive population dependent on Pullman as their employer and land lord.  Outside charities were banned as were independent newspapers.  It was a beautiful place with parks and schools up to the standards of the day.  But it was an oppressively paternalistic community that bred discontent. A Pullman employee is supposed to have said:

"We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell."

The Pullman strike of 1894 was triggered by wage cuts in a down economy, but fed by unhappiness with George Pullman as a modern day feudal lord.  The backlash was harsh, and in 1898 the company was required to divest itself of all assets in the town.

George Pullman had died the year before.  Feeling that the sentiments against him were so negative that anything might happen, he was worried that aggrieved former strikers would disturb his grave.

So he was interred over a two day long process that involved a lead lined mahogany coffin encased in multiple layers of reinforced cement and bolted together steel bars.  Ambrose Bierce, who we met recently, was said to have quipped:

"It is clear that the family in their bereavement was making sure the sonofabitch wasn't going to get up and come back"

It looks as if he is still securely planted.

Naming the Liberty Ships - Part Eight

Note: This is part of a series of posts on odd bits of history as memorialized in the names of World War II Liberty Ships.  I am organizing them, after a fashion, around proposed artwork for imaginary "ships' insignia"  For a more complete explanation and background: Part One.

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For the S.S. Stephen Hopkins II there is only one possible inspiration for a ship's insignia:

The Hopkins II was of course named for its predecessor the S.S. Stephen Hopkins.  And it, as one of the earliest Liberties, got one of the primo names, that of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  The first batches of Liberty Ships took longer to make, so the lag time from laying of keel on 2 January, 1942 to commissioning on 14 April was not surprising.

As it turned out the Hopkins never returned from her maiden voyage.

On September 27th she was homeward bound from Capetown to Surinam when out of the fog came a suspicious ship.  The weather conditions were such that they were only two miles apart, leaving little time for deliberation.

The Hopkins had in fact encountered the Stier.  This was the last of the ten "Hilfkruezer" ships that Germany had sent out as commerce raiders concealed as tramp steamers.  It was a very effective effort especially in the early war years when merchant ships were armed ineffectually or not at all.

The captain of the Hopkins alertly called his crew to battle stations, and when a demand to surrender was sent and ignored the fight was on.

It should have been a short, one sided affair.  The Stier had six 5.9 inch guns, each able to fire a 100 pound shell.  Three of these plus secondary weapons could be brought to bear as a broadside.  The Hopkins had a single 4 inch gun on its stern, firing a relatively puny 33 pound shell.  But Captain Paul Buck had turned the Hopkins away from the Stier giving his gun crew the best possible shot.  And as at this time the range was only 1000 yards, neither ship's gun crews had any excuse for missing.

It was over quickly.  The Hopkins drifted away on fire, 42 of her crew dead, three dying.  The 15 survivors brought their life boat ashore in Brazil 31 days later.  But captain Buck and his ship had their revenge.  The Stier was after all just a converted merchantman herself, lacking in armor and advanced damage control systems.  The Hopkins' gun crew kept firing and mostly died at their stations.  They scored 35 hits on the Stier, the last five at the hands of an Engine Room Cadet named O'Hara who came up from the heavily damaged lower decks and finding the gun unmanned was able to operate it entirely on the basis of what he had seen watching the Armed Guard contingent at their drills.

It was enough.  The Stier had lost steering and power and her captain scuttled her, transferring his men to a supply ship that he had in the area.

So ended what was essentially the only surface engagement between German and American ships in either World War*.

It was a gallant fight and one that was at the time quite celebrated.

In commemoration there were Liberty Ships named S.S. Stephen Hopkins II, S.S. Edwin Joseph O'Hara**, S.S. Paul Buck, and in honor of the chief mate, the S.S. Richard Moczkowski.  The commander of the Armed Guard contingent aboard the Hopkins was a newly minted Lt (jg).  His actions were honored in the christening of a destroyer escort, U.S.S. Kenneth M. Willet.
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*There were a few brief skirmishes between US ships and German E-boats in the English channel, most notoriously the bungled Operation Tiger.

** The S.S. Edwin Joseph O'Hara is listed in some sources as having been torpedoed and sunk in 1943. This appears to be in error, the ship involved being the Liberty ship Sambridges .  A series of Liberties built for the British all started with SAM in their names.  If there was a re-flagging of this ship I find no mention of it.

Naming the Liberty Ships - Part Seven

Note: This is part of a series of posts on odd bits of history as memorialized in the names of World War II Liberty Ships.  I am organizing them, after a fashion, around proposed artwork for imaginary "ships' insignia"  For a more complete explanation and background: Part One

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A sad bit of art to serve as the emblem of the S.S. Virginia Dare.  

In 1587 Virginia Dare became the first child born to English parents in the New World.  Her grandfather was Governor of the Roanoake Colony in present day North Carolina.  Her name seems so apt, her parents being among that hardy bunch of souls who abandoned the civilized world of London for the New Wilderness.  Of course it is just coincidence that their surname was Dare.

This was the so called "Lost Colony".  When a re-supply mission arrived it found the colonists gone, the buildings carefully dismantled and the enigmatic word CROATOAN carved into a tree trunk.

Virginia's fate will never be known.  The colonists may simply have been dispersed peacefully among the Native American tribes, or they have met a violent end.  It was natural to hope for the former, and in the generations that followed any fair skinned or light eyed Indian was felt to be a possible descendant of Virginia Dare.  

The very words "lost child" give us all a brief squirm of fear, so lets hope she had a life that was simple, but still long and decent.

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The namesake of the S.S. Peregrine White sure did.

Peregrine was the first child born to the Pilgrims in New England.  Offshore in fact, as they anchored off Cape Cod in November 1620.  The fact that William White was able to persuade his very pregnant wife Susanna to take ship for America tells me that both husbands and wives were made of much sterner stuff back then.

And they needed to be.  Peregrine - delightfully named for that far wandering bird - lived to the ripe old age of 83 but his father died in that first hard winter.

I rather enjoyed reading Peregrine's obituary:

Capt. Peregrine White of this town, Aged Eighty three years, and Eight Months; died the 20th Instant. He was vigorous and of a comly Aspect to the last; Was the Son of Mr. William White and Susanna his Wife;’ born on board the Mayflower, Capt. Jones Commander, in Cape Cod Harbour. Altho’ he was in the former part of his Life extravagant; yet was much Reform’d in his last years; and died hopefully.”

Regardless of prior extravagances, may we all be Reform'd in our last years - but not too soon - and die hopefully.

Naming the Liberty Ships - Part Six

Note: This is part of a series of posts on odd bits of history as memorialized in the names of World War II Liberty Ships.  I am organizing them, after a fashion, around proposed artwork for imaginary "ships' insignia"  For a more complete explanation and background:  Part One

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Now here is a fine starting point for a ship's insignia:

Not for any of the guys shown above.  No, this would be for the S.S. Gutzon Borglum which honored the sculptor who created Mount Rushmore.

Anyway, both Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt had Liberty ships named after them already.  Jefferson and Washington did not, but only because the Navy already had transports named for them before the Liberty ship program began.  (Oddly the S.S. George Washington got its name from the Germans.  It was built in 1908 for the North Atlantic routes.  When the U.S. got the ship after World War I they of course kept the name!)

Borglum was an interesting figure.  In some ways he was the quintessential American. A child of the frontier, a son of immigrants. He absorbed the arts and culture of Europe and brought them back to enhance American life.  He was confident and extroverted. But with the benefit of hindsight there are some aspects to him that concern later viewers, while not diminishing the greatness of his work.

He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that was formed during his time working on a Memorial to the Confederacy at Stone Mountain, Georgia.  And the whole concept of semi-deifying our leaders has a whiff of totalitarianism to it.  Stare for a moment at Teddy Roosevelt as shown above.... see a faint trace of Lenin there?

Speaking of Roosevelt, there was a second Liberty ship of that name: the S.S. Kermit Roosevelt. And that story is a sad one.

Theodore Roosevelt must have been the ultimate fatherly role model.  He swaggered, he charged up hills into enemy fire, he shot fierce beasts and defeated savage political foes.  He may have been our most Manly president, a man for whom obstacles existed only to be laughed at and then gleefully overcome.

It would be hard for any son to live up to that.  But they tried.  Three of the four died trying.

Quentin went first.  Only 20 years old he was a Harvard student and promising writer.  But when the U.S. entered World War I he did not hesitate.  He became that most romantic of Great War combatants, a fighter pilot.  He was shot down and killed on July 14, Bastille Day, 1918.

The oldest son, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. probably came the closest to living up to his father's greatness. His story should wait for another day, but suffice it to say that he was the only General to come ashore by sea on D-Day.  He died of a heart attack not long after.

But it is Kermit who cuts the most tragic figure.  He had done some amazing things in life.  He explored the Amazon jungles with his father, on an expedition that came close to killing the both of them.  He also fought in World War I, on the often forgotten Mesopotamian campaigns.  While there he learned Arabic.  He went on a hunting expedition with his brother Ted, seeking trophy sheep in mysterious Kashmir valleys.

But Kermit struggled with depression and with alcohol.  In the early days of World War II he used his friendship with Winston Churchill to wangle himself a British commission.  After nearly taking off on an ill advised mission to fight with the Finns against the soon-to-be-Ally Russia he apparently went on at least one commando raid into Nazi occupied Norway.

But his health was failing.  He resumed drinking and was discharged from the British Army in 1941 with a rank of captain. Returning to the States he vanished for a while, supposedly his cousin Franklin Delano had to send the FBI to find him and bring him home.

Probably to keep him out of trouble, or at least out of public trouble, he was commissioned a Major in the US Army and sent to Fort Richardson, Alaska.  His job sounds unimportant, he was an intelligence officer who helped organize local Eskimo militia units.

Alaska is a hard land.  In the winter night has no end.  Even in the summer the days stretch on and on without division one from the next.  It is not a good place to send a drinking man and a terrible one to send a depressed one.  On June 4th, 1943 Kermit Roosevelt died of a self inflicted gun shot wound. Authorities lied to his mother and called it a heart attack.

History has peculiar side channels, places where influences run from one point to another in unexpected ways.  From Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill in 1898 we get Kermit fighting in the Middle East a generation later.  And his son, Kermit Jr. took his father's interest in the area and his grandfathers expansive world view....and organized the coup that put the Shah of Iran into power in 1953.  Sometimes you start out with "a splendid little war" and end up being The Great Satan.

Naming the Liberty Ships - Part Five

Note: This is part of a series of posts on odd bits of history as memorialized in the names of World War II Liberty Ships.  I am organizing them, after a fashion, around proposed artwork for imaginary "ships' insignia"  For a more complete explanation and background:  Part One

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Most Liberty ships were named after Americans.  But even in our Melting Pot society it would be difficult to run across a name as exotic as Bernardo O'Higgens!

O'Higgens was a Chilean of Spanish/Irish descent.  He played a prominent role in the struggle for independence that was precipitated by the Napoleonic conquest of Spain.  He seems to have been inclined towards wearing extravagant uniforms and to mounting military attacks more notable for their enthusiasm than for their prudence.

But in the swirling mess that was South American politics back then, some things broke the right way for Bernardo and he ended up being Supreme Director of Chile from 1817 to 1823.  Perhaps by the time the S.S. Bernardo O'Higgins was launched in September of 1943 it was just glossed over that it was commemorating a military dictator of just the sort the Allies were trying to overthrow!  As a dictator he seems to have been fairly benign by Latin standards.  His long time friend, rival and fellow revolutionary Jose Miguel Carrera was executed during his regime but O'Higgins is mostly criticized for not intervening to pardon him.  (Sending a thank you note to the Governor who had Carrera drawn and quartered was a little harsh).
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You do have to be very careful treading in politics south of the border.  So discovered Ambrose Bierce, noted American journalist, writer and satirist.  Now remembered chiefly for his highly sarcastic "Devil's Dictonary" he was during World War Two more noted for his Civil War service and writings on same. In honor of which the S.S. Ambrose Bierce took to the seas in 1943.

In 1913 Bierce seems to have gone to Mexico to get a look at what Pancho Villa was up to in his attempted Revolution.

Bierce was never heard from again; one of history's great unsolved vanishing acts.  But there were those persisting rumors....

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But not everyone had a horrid time in Mexico.  The namesake of the S.S. Joel Roberts Poinsett for instance had a very distinguished career as an American diplomat in the first half of the 19th Century. But he is remembered almost exclusively for a swell flower he saw growing south of Mexico City. Being as well an amateur botanist he sent a few home....