HardThrasher
Published 11 Oct 2026Like many Nazi ideas, what looked good on paper was, in reality, somewhat different. The Rocket craze of the late 1920s led directly to the development of one of Nazi Germany’s most expensive weapon systems, which was technologically astounding, but militarily rubbish.
Today we’re going to look at how that all began, the race to develop the A-4 rocket, the building of a massive test site to create the weapons and talk about what the A-4/V-2 was, how it was supposed to work, how the technical challenges were over come, and ask the question no one did at the time — why bother?
00:00 Big Rockets, Bad Ideas: The V2 Story
00:55 The “So What” Question
03:04 Rocket Fever — the late 1920s
06:51 The Lads in Grey Step in
08:50 von Braun’s Faustian Pact
11:21 Peenemünde: Onwards and Sometimes Upwards
13:42 Size Matters: The A4 Concept
19:26 Getting the Gang Together: The V-2 Engineers Come Together
22:36 A Quick Tea Break and some Blatant Self Promotion
23:51 The A4 and Other Rockets: A Timeline
27:28 Anatomy of the A4
29:26 Guidance and Gyroscopes: Making It Go the Right Way
35:09 The Rocket Engine: Controlled Fire and Clever Plumbing
38:36 The V-2 Turbopump: The Wolverine
46:54 Survivor’s ClubNotes
[1] Guy Walters, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, Head of Zeus, 2026 p.27 (Kindle ed)
[2] Tooze, Wages of Destruction p. 750 gives German GDP in 1937 as RM73.757bn, approximate cost of the V2 programme whilst Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p.273 gives the total cost of the A4/V2 project, excluding vehicles, warhead and guidance systems as RM900m
[3] Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: Free Press, 1995), Kindle Edition pp. 122–124
[4] Stephen Ransom & Hans-Hermann Cammann, Me163 Rocket Interceptor, Crecy Publishing, 2021, pp.30–32
[5] Micheal Nuefled, Von Braun, 2007, Smithsonian (Kindel Ed), p.50
[6] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, pp. 19–21.
[7] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 23.
[8] Neufeld, Von Braun, p.55
[9] Neufeld, Von Braun, p.61
[10] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 32.
[11] Neufeld, Von Braun, pp.64–65
[12] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 50
[13] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 51
[14] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 52.
[15] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 179
[16] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 59.
[17] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 98 & 121 – A-9 development stopped in 1942, A-10 was never more than a paper study
[18] As above, worth picking out the A-10 proposals as theoretical
[19] A4/V2 Rocket in detail: Turbopump “V2 Turbo Pump Part 1”
[20] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p.65 and on
[21] For those who’re so minded there’s a complete explanation of the V2 engine systems here: John A. Halchak, James L. Cannon and Corey Brown, “Materials for Liquid Propulsion Systems,” in Aerospace Materials and Applications (AIAA, 2018), p.15 and onward
[22] “Analysis and Evaluation of German Attainments and Research in The Liquid Rocket Engine Field. Volume 4. Propellant Injectors”, which you can get in pdf form online has a really good description of how this works.
[23] Walters, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, p.27
[24] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 80.
[25] A4 / V2 Rocket in detail: Turbopump – I make no apologies for referencing the same YT video here, it is art, go and watch it
[26] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 88
[27] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 85
October 12, 2026
The V2 Story: 1934-1940, A Pact with the Devil
The Great Game for Asia 1894-1905
Real Time History
Published 15 May 2026The 19th century is a time of violent global imperial competition. The Scramble for Africa and the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires over influence in Central Asia are among the best-known examples. But the 2nd half of the century also involved another Great Game – the Great Game for Asia.
00:00 Intro
05:35 1st Sino-Japanese War 1894-95
30:02 Boxer War 1900-01
55:40 Russo-Japanese War 1904-05
01:22:14 Conclusion
(more…)
QotD: Blame the “Silent generation” for The Sixties™, not the Boomers
I’ve written many times that the real culprits here aren’t the Boomers, but the Silents. Pick any obnoxious “Boomer” who did whatever in The Sixties™, and it’s Build Back Brandon to one that the “Boomer” in question was born in the 1930s. Which makes sense for a lot of historical reasons, but simple chronology will do: If we take as read that The Sixties™ started with the Port Huron Statement, then The Sixties™ started in 1962. The Baby Boom started in 1945, meaning that the very oldest Boomers were still in high school in 1962. They might’ve enthusiastically embraced every word — then again, they might not — but they surely didn’t write one letter of it.
Further, what could they really do? The voting age was 21 until 1971, and as hard as this is to hear, voting was just as pointless back then as it is now. St. Kennedy only won through massive voter fraud, and that was 1960. As John Derbyshire used to say, if the American People had been consulted on anything of importance since then, the USA would still be a White Christian nation … and yet, here we are.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee put on a better show back in the days, but the Uniparty was still the Uniparty. America’s ruling caste caught religion back in the 1920s, and on the long view, you could make a pretty robust argument that Mustache Guy and the Anime Club actually did us a huge fucking favor — left to his own devices, President-for-Life Roosevelt would’ve ushered in the USSA by the late 1930s, with the enthusiastic support of all the Beautiful People on both sides of the Uniparty.
… hats off to you [Isoroku Yamamoto] — you and your dipshit friends bought us a few decades. Decades we squandered, of course, but that’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, unless you think the boys on the Higgins boats should’ve shot their officers, turned the ships around, and conducted a massive air, land, and sea invasion of every faculty lounge and radio station in America … and even if you do think that, what are you going to do about it?
As for Gen X, we were no better. I can’t blame the Boomers for running with it, any more than I can blame myself for running with our thing. I spent most of college, for instance, getting drunk and chasing tail. Chasing tail is bad, full stop — I should’ve been saving it for marriage, with all that implies — and while getting drunk isn’t bad every now and again, I didn’t do it every now and again. I lived a life as dissolute as any Boomer’s, and while I was equally powerless to change anything in the broader culture, I could’ve been a much better person … but I wasn’t.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-23.
October 11, 2026
Britain – “… one starts to wonder if a nation can run out of ruin”
In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank reflects on the sage words of Adam Smith during that eighteenth century unpleasantness with some of the North American colonies:
In 1777, Britain lost the battle of Saratoga — a decisive defeat that would spell the end of its rule over the 13 Colonies. A young John Sinclair declared that the nation would soon be ruined. An older and wiser Adam Smith replied that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”.
Smith would be vindicated. Despite losing 60 per cent of its North American territories, Great Britain would go on to become the leading economic and military power of the 19th century. But history does not necessarily repeat itself. Today, as the mistakes and catastrophes pile up one on another, one starts to wonder if a nation can run out of ruin.
Consider the news of the past week. The most dramatic scene played out late Sunday night in Gosport, as illegal immigrants were ferried onto shore by the coast guard. Overlooked by the remaining might of the Royal Navy, in sight of HMNB Portsmouth which two thirds of the surface fleet call home, illegal migrants were delivered to tax-payer funded accommodation by the British state. The full coercive power of that state was on display, but it was not directed towards the young men seeking to invade English waters, but against the people of Gosport. The entire town was locked down, and the right of assembly suspended, using a law usually deployed against vagrants and vandals. Legions of high-vis jacked police were deployed across the town, clashing with protestors in the streets of a once-sleepy seaside community.
This is bad enough, but consider what else is going on across the country. Prisoners were being released early, not because of their exemplary behaviour or reformed characters, but simply because we had run out of room to safely house them. The parole services openly admit they cannot cope, and parolees could wait weeks before they are fitted with electronic tags.
The economic situation is no happier. There is a global surge in bond yields, meaning higher costs of borrowing and straitened circumstances for our government as it prepares for the autumn budget later this month. War in the Gulf and the Arabian peninsula looks set to cause a surge in fuel prices over the coming winter, hitting consumers and business alike. Far from being prepared to weather this storm, Britain has some of the lowest diesel reserves in the developed world. Our domestic supplies of oil and gas, already squeezed by reckless environmental policies, could now face strike action that could see a third of production shut down.
If you have faith in British civil society and public life to respond with stoicism and solidarity, one can think again. The country recently had a hysterical and ugly debate over whether Rishi Sunak was a real Englishman, in which a number of right wing ethnic minority figures claimed not to be, and a number of progressives suggested that there is no ethnic English identity at all. In the latest horrific chapter of our coming apart as a culture, the Green Party passed a motion at its conference declaring that Zionism is “racist” and that Israel should be entirely annexed by a Palestinian state. During the same vote, they rejected a proposal promising not to engage in disciplinary proceedings against Jewish party members for affiliation with synagogues or Jewish organisations that support Israel. Given that the majority of British synagogues could be described as Zionist by some definition, this was effectively a declaration that observant Jews were no longer welcome in the party. Nothing like this has been seen in British society for a century.
As a country, we are running up against hard limits to how far we can manage decline and stifle unrest. The patience of the public, the confidence of markets and the state’s own capacity to enforce order are all reaching breaking point. Britain is indeed on the brink of ruin.
But what does ruin look like? Writing three years ago, and looking ahead to a likely Labour government, I warned that temporary disasters can become long term realities: “Argentina, a country economically competitive with the USA in 1900, proceeded to politically wreck itself for over a hundred years, with cyclical economic crises destroying hard-won prosperity. In Argentina, the situation of the ‘precariat’ is all that most of today’s middle-class families have ever known.”
The end of colonial Africa
Celina reviews a 1960s film I’d never heard of, and having read her review I can understand why it has been forgotten because it tells a brutal tale as the colonial European powers withdrew from their former colonies in Africa far too often leaving the newly independent peoples to settle old scores in bloody civil conflicts:
The 1966 Italian documentary Africa Addio (Goodbye Africa), directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi of Mondo Cane fame, is a must-see for absolutely anyone who wants to understand the realities of African governance. Filmed in Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Rwanda, Angola, the Belgian Congo, and South Africa between 1963 and 1965, Africa Addio captures the bloody upheavals accompanying the end of White colonial rule across much of the continent. It chronicles the withdrawal of the British and Belgian colonial powers, alongside Portugal’s efforts to retain its African colonies and White South Africans’ determination to preserve their rule.
The film itself is bewildering at moments, for much of the film a camera is mounted in a light aircraft, capturing the serenity of the azure waters and brilliant white sands of the Zanzibar archipelago. The visual splendour of the landscape is overwhelming in its beauty, it evokes the pristine imagery of a mid-century travelogue designed for European consumption.
Nevertheless, as the aircraft gradually descends, the white sands are revealed to be peppered by dark, irregular shapes. As the telephoto lens finds its focus, the visual abstraction resolves into a horrifying, incontrovertible reality. The idyllic beaches are entirely strewn with the corpses of hundreds of Arab and Indian civilians, the victims of the January 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.
Screenshot from the film Africa Addio. 19 January 1964. Arab civilians attempting to flee revolutionaries.
Screenshot from the film Africa Addio. 20 January 1964. Bodies of Arab civilians at low tide, caught while trying to flee Zanzibar.
Accompanying this almost god-like, detached aerial survey of mass slaughter is the melancholic, and achingly beautiful orchestral score of the celebrated Italian composer Riz Ortolani.
This startling juxtaposition, which is only one of many in the film, feels immensely unsettling with the sheer, unfathomable scale of human atrocity paired with the romantic elegance of European orchestration. It encapsulates the disturbing essence of Africa Addio.
The opening sections focus primarily on Kenya. We see a series of trials of Mau Mau terrorists and their accomplices, who massacred White families and mutilated their cattle, and for some inexplicable reason also tortured and hung wild baboons. Most were sentenced to life in prison for these egregious crimes. A few years later, Jomo Kenyatta, the anti-colonial activist who served as Kenya’s Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964, pardoned the Mau Mau criminals.
[…]
If you decide to watch Africa Addio today, you will subject yourself to a gruelling, psychologically taxing endurance test of historical horror. The film explicitly positions itself as a visual archive of decolonisation in motion, capturing the violent and often utterly merciless transition from European empire to African independence.
After watching this film, you realise that it is a genuine civilisational artefact, yet somehow it still feels wrong to watch. It forces the viewer to confront the terrifying speed with which order can evaporate when a European hegemon suddenly withdraws. Through its seemingly endless catalogue of massacres, mercenary warfare, political assassinations, and ecological devastation, Africa Addio becomes an uncompromising mirror of the anxieties surrounding the collapse of the European imperial order.
[…]
The film highlights the horrific brutality of the new African order emerging across the continent. In conflicts such as the Congo rebellion, insurgents receiving Soviet-bloc or Communist Chinese support terrorised White civilians. Nevertheless, the violence depicted in Africa Addio does not end with Whites fleeing for safety from the militant communist backed African hordes: it extends to the massacre of other ethnic and political enemies.
In Zanzibar, the targets were Arabs who were associated collectively with the island’s history of slavery and Arab domination. In January 1964, the newly independent government was overthrown in a revolution involving pro-communist forces, followed by the massacre of thousands of Arab civilians. Some estimates place the death toll as high as 20,000, although the precise number remains disputed. Historian Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim explicitly argues that these killings constituted genocide, and that their recognition has been obstructed by the political narratives surrounding African liberation.
One Artillery Piece for the Road! – StuG III – Nazi Rearmament 09
World War Two
Published 10 Oct 2026The StuG III was built to support infantry. It became one of Germany’s most important tank killers. How did the Sturmgeschütz III go from mobile artillery to a mainstay of German armored warfare?
Built on the Panzer III chassis, the StuG traded a revolving turret for a low silhouette, strong frontal protection, and a fixed gun. Originally designed to destroy machine-gun nests and fortifications, it gained a long-barreled 75 mm gun as Germany confronted the T-34 and other Soviet tanks.
In “One Artillery Piece for the Road”, Spartacus Olsson follows the StuG III from Manstein’s assault-artillery concept through its development, production, and combat service. We examine its strengths, mechanical limitations, and the struggle between the artillery and Panzer branches over its expanding role.
Germany’s most numerous fully tracked armored fighting vehicle also exposes a larger contradiction: Nazi Germany could build practical, economical weapons, yet repeatedly burdened its war effort with costly complexity. What made the StuG different, and why could its battlefield successes never solve Germany’s strategic problems?
“Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking”
L. Wayne Mathison on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
I watched this video about Indigenous education and reconciliation in BC schools. It raises some questions we should be asking across Canada.
Schools should teach history, including residential schools, treaties, colonization and the treatment of Indigenous people. But history should be taught honestly, with evidence, context and room for disagreement.
When students hear slogans like “Indigenous brilliance” and “land back”, are they being encouraged to examine what those terms mean, or simply expected to agree?
Orwell warned us about political language that substitutes slogans for clear thinking. Sowell taught us to judge policies by their results rather than their intentions. Hayek warned against assuming anyone possesses all the necessary knowledge. Bastiat reminded us to consider the costs nobody bothers to mention.
Those principles belong in every classroom.
Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking. Historical injustices deserve examination, but so do competing historical accounts, modern treaty obligations, property rights, individual responsibility and the consequences of government policy.
Students should be free to question every claim, including those made by teachers, politicians and Indigenous leaders.
If a historical claim is true, it should withstand scrutiny. If a political proposal is sound, it should withstand debate.
Education should produce independent thinkers, not obedient political activists.
We owe young Canadians an honest education, not a preferred political narrative dressed up as unquestionable truth.
QotD: The history of New Harmony, Indiana
Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.
Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.
In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the “Boatload of Knowledge”. Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here.
It collapsed almost immediately.
The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn’t they?
Production dropped and food ran short. Buildings decayed because no one owned them and no one was responsible for maintaining them. Endless meetings replaced actual work. Owen wrote seven different constitutions in two years trying to fix it. None of them worked.
American inventor Josiah Warren, one of the country’s earliest libertarian thinkers, was there. He watched the community fail from the inside and later wrote about why. His conclusion: “The difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity”. The more the community demanded unity, the more it fractured. Warren identified the deeper problem almost a century before Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek made it famous in academic economics.
When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. When labor earns the same reward regardless of effort, effort disappears. When prices vanish, no one knows what anything is worth.
Owen finally admitted defeat in 1827. In his farewell address, he blamed the settlers themselves, saying they were “unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality”.
Translation: the system would have worked if only people had been different.
Every socialist regime since has offered some version of that excuse.
His own son, Robert Dale Owen, put it plainly years later: “All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle must work their own downfall”. He had lived through the collapse. He knew what killed it.
Every socialist experiment since New Harmony has ended the same way, and for the same reasons.
Prices communicate what things are worth. Ownership creates responsibility for maintaining them. When both are abolished, production collapses because no one can calculate what to make or repair.
Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-09.
October 10, 2026
Denouncing great art of the past as “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”
Not content with reading history backwards to find fault with historic figures based on the most progressive views of the modern world, the same approach is now taken with fine art:
For a discipline devoted to art, contemporary art history can seem remarkably contemptuous about the object of its study. In the 1970s “new art history” began to revolutionise a discipline that was hitherto focused on the connoisseurship of the Western canon.
It became instead a subject that used artworks as artefacts for social and political critique. John Berger, the pioneer of the new approach, questioned the very permissibility of having a “love of art”, dismissing it as “a useful concept to the European ruling classes”.
New art historians have since continued this crusade, with different “lenses”, each now well known, encompassing such topics as the “feminist turn”, the “de-colonialist turn”, the “LGBTQ+ turn”, and so on.
As critics such as Lola Salem and Pierre d’Alancaisez have argued in this magazine, this tendency now extends beyond academic fashion: the assumptions through which art is studied have migrated into museums, funding bodies and cultural institutions, where they shape what is exhibited, how it should be interpreted, and what socioeconomic purposes art is expected to serve.
The old question, “Is this good art, and what does it tell us about the civilisation that made it?” has acquired a formidable set of competitors: “What makes this work and its creator suspect, what depravity does is its supposed beauty trying to hide?”
In Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art, Daisy Dixon’s sense of contempt is made plain in the very first line: “When I was a teenager, I hated the painter Paul Gauguin.” As assistant professor of Philosophy at Cardiff, Dr Dixon has built a social media platform as an outspoken critic of historical and contemporary visual media. Not even Miriam Margolyes is spared her rancour.
In a world now dominated by AI, Dixon tackled the very real issue of deepfake pornography, where this new technology was abused by perverts to create pornographic images of victims (mostly women) without their consent. Whilst Dixon’s criticism of this sinister practice was laudable and justified, the extension of her criticism to art is misguided and regrettable.
The indignant chapter titles of her book — Obscenity, Criminality, Oppression, Malevolence, Cruelty, Iconoclasm, Reparation — read more like the call-to-arms of the culture wars than a work of fair and rigorous academic analysis. At the heart of her book lies the accusation that art with an erotic element by the likes of Titian, Velázquez or Giulio Romano should be considered “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”.
To support her argument, Dixon begins outside the confines of art with a work of literature: Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. Using the indisputable “depravity” of De Sade, she aims to justify her accusation that those paintings were motivated by the same male and depraved roots in Western culture.
Her greatest ire however is reserved for Titian’s Rape of Europa, which she considers “just a portrayal of an immoral act”. The failure to consider any alternative meaning to the picture is indicative of the reductive and misleading nature of her approach.
Titian’s The Rape of Europa, c. 1560-62.
Wikimedia Commons.
Without delving further into the many other readings of the Rape of Europa, suffice it to say that the reductive conclusions drawn by Dixon impede us from a deeper understanding that might call her assumptions into question.
Although I read Art History at one of the most renowned institutes in Britain, I can confirm that students are taught this superficial understanding and contempt. I remember a senior lecturer singling out the experience of finding a group of Oxford postgrads discussing Titian’s Diana and Actaeon as a scene worthy of ridicule. “I was shocked,” the lecturer opined, “how they were so busily discussing which translation of Ovid that Titian consulted, when they completely ignored that there was a black slave girl in the picture.”
The girl depicted was one of the handmaidens of Diana, something the lecturer would have known had she even the most elementary knowledge of the story. More distressing was the sight of a senior academic masquerading assumptions as fact.
QotD: JFK’s soft coup to destroy Diefenbaker and install Pearson
His name was Lou Harris. He was John F. Kennedy’s personal pollster, one of the handful of men who had just put a president in the White House, and he was moving under a false identity because the job he had come north to do could never be seen to be done. He had come to take down the Government of Canada.
It worked. Within months, John Diefenbaker’s nationalist Conservative government was gone, and the Liberal campaign that replaced it had been quietly run on American polling, American media tactics, and American psychological warfare, with Harris directing from the shadows. No shots were fired. No tanks crossed the border. Most Canadians lived out their lives never knowing it happened at all.
That is not a theory. This is documented history, laid out in painstaking detail in John Boyko’s Cold Fire: Kennedy’s Northern Front, and once you know it, you cannot look at this country the same way again. Because here is the question nobody has had the nerve to ask in the sixty years since: if Washington toppled a Canadian government in 1963 and paid no price of any kind, why on earth would it have stopped?
It didn’t stop. That is the argument of this essay, and I intend to prove it with receipts. What began as a Kennedy operation against one stubborn prime minister became the permanent condition of Canadian politics. Blue America captured our governing party, its money, its methods, its personnel, and eventually its policy. Red America, more quietly, built our opposition, supplying the ideas, the operatives, and the reflexes of what now calls itself Canadian conservatism. Two parties, two foreign patrons, one country in between, and not one law against any of it. By the end, you will understand why every election feels like choosing between American factions. Because it is. And you will have, in plain terms, the only program that can end it.
Start where the occupation started: with the prime minister who said no.
Diefenbaker’s crime, in Washington’s eyes, was sovereignty. JFK despised him for defending Canadian autonomy, and teamed up with Lester B. Pearson’s Liberals to permanently rewire this country’s trajectory. Harris and his fake passport were only the covert half. The overt half played out in public, and it is somehow more shocking. The breaking point was Diefenbaker’s refusal to accept American nuclear warheads for the Bomarc missiles Washington had parked on our soil, and refusing to put our forces on alert on Washington’s schedule during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He insisted a Canadian government would decide these things in Ottawa. For this, on January 30, 1963, the United States State Department did something no ally had ever done to another: it issued a press release publicly calling the Prime Minister of Canada a liar about the state of defence negotiations. A foreign power’s foreign ministry, openly contradicting our head of government, in writing, to force his hand. Within a week, Diefenbaker’s government fell on a non-confidence vote. Within months, Kennedy’s friend Ben Bradlee put Diefenbaker on the cover of Newsweek in a hit piece so vicious it read like an obituary. The pollster in the shadows, the press release in the open, the friendly magazine on the newsstand. Every layer of American power, aimed at one Canadian who said no.
What happened to Canada was not an isolated incident. It was one front in a global campaign of regime change Washington ran throughout the 1960s. The same decade they were meddling in Ottawa, they were toppling governments worldwide to secure their sphere of influence. In 1960, the Eisenhower administration laid the groundwork for the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, finalized in Mobutu Sese Seko’s military coup. In 1961, the Kennedy administration financed race riots and engineered an electoral coup in British Guiana to depose the democratically elected Cheddi Jagan. By 1963, Washington was backing the violent coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. A year later, the Johnson administration ran Operation Brother Sam, providing military backing to the coup in Brazil that replaced President João Goulart with a military dictatorship.
By installing Pearson, Washington broke Canada’s nationalist resistance using the exact playbook it deployed on developing nations, locking us permanently into a continentalist framework.
And look at what the new management delivered, and how fast. Within two years of taking office, Pearson gave Washington the warheads Diefenbaker had refused. In 1965 he signed the Auto Pact, integrating the commanding heights of Canadian manufacturing into the American industrial system, the economic annexation the National Policy had been built to prevent, accomplished with a signature. And in the same year came the new flag. Understand what that meant to the men who fought it. The Red Ensign, the banner Canadians had carried up Vimy Ridge and across the beaches of Normandy, was struck, and with it the visible sign that this country belonged to a British inheritance rather than an American continent. Diefenbaker fought the flag change with everything he had left, and he was mocked for it as a relic, because the men mocking him understood exactly what he understood: a country’s symbols are its memory, and a country stripped of its memory will accept a new identity from whoever supplies one. The supplier was already chosen.
That 1963 intervention laid the structural tracks for Pierre Trudeau to dismantle our traditional British and Loyalist inheritance entirely, replacing it with official multiculturalism, a weaponized Charter, and a hyper-progressive legal order. The horrors you see today are not random accidents. They are the long-term realization of the colony Kennedy and Pearson engineered decades ago.
But here is what even the people who know the Diefenbaker story get wrong. They think 1963 was a coup against Canada’s right. It was bigger than that. It was a proof of concept. Washington learned that Canadian politics could be run from outside, cheaply, legally, and without consequence. And in the sixty years since, both American political tribes have taken the lesson. Blue America perfected the Pearson playbook and used it to capture our government. Red America ran a quieter operation and captured the opposition. Not two conspiracies. One condition. A satellite country whose entire political spectrum, left flank and right flank, answers to a foreign capital’s internal quarrels.
Upper Canadian Cavalier, “The Occupied Dominion”, Upper Canadian Cavalier, 2026-07-06.
October 9, 2026
Conrad Black on Tucker Carlson
On his (new-ish) Substack, Conrad Black discusses Tucker Carlson’s media career before he unceremoniously left Fox News and what he has been doing since then:
Tucker Carlson talking to Mike Pence, July 2023.
This became a dangerous cycle because the more Tucker forayed into the fringe, the harder he struck a vein of malformed but popular sentiment. Meanwhile, censorship of his relatively tame views only handed him a bigger megaphone and more incentive to go further. His sensible opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters, and his wariness of another quagmire emerging in Ukraine, curdled into progressively more unhinged forms of isolationism. His legitimate concerns about demographic trends and failed immigration policy curdled into belief in a coordinated conspiracy to erase white people from Europe and North America. Reasonable criticism of Israel and the American role in the Middle East curdled into the quasi-antisemitic trope of AIPAC as the hidden hand controlling U.S. foreign policy. His well-earned distrust of government curdled into various conspiracies involving some mix of extra-terrestrials, the CIA, and the Jews.
The pattern has become so predictable that if there was an effort to block him from praising Brussels sprouts as his favourite vegetable, at least three of his next five interview guests would spend two hours apiece insisting the maligned little cabbage is the victim of a coordinated smear campaign bankrolled by Big Salad. The attempted prohibition becomes the proof.
As a free-speech and free-market advocate, I think Tucker is entitled to say what he wants, and I congratulate him on his commercial success, even while finding many of his views idiotic. What troubles me is not so much the outlandish claims, but the skill atrophy — the phenomenon whereby any skill sharpened by adversarial pressure dulls without resistance. In boxing, the term “ring rust” is sometimes used to describe the way a boxer who stops facing strong opponents loses their timing, power, and urgency, until nothing’s left but a shell of their former selves. Looking back over his podcast guest list, with the exception of this Rees-Mogg segment, Ted Cruz last year, and perhaps a handful of others, it has been a long procession of hundreds of people brought on to confirm his own worldview back to him, in their own words. And the ring rust has set in.
I first noticed it at an event in Edmonton in January 2024, where I sat on a panel with Tucker and Jordan Peterson. I found myself in the awkward position of feeling the need to defend then-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in front of a packed arena of anti-Liberal partisans (with whom I would have considered myself somewhat of a kindred spirit). I was booed by parts of the audience for pointing out the fact that while Freeland, whom I know slightly and like personally, was politically hopeless, she was not, as Tucker had claimed, a fascist. The typically leftist habit of reducing every political opponent to a Hitler or Mussolini analog is lazy and obnoxious — not adjectives I would have used to describe the old Tucker. His justification was that he had recently seen a video of reporter David Menzies being detained by the RCMP after a collision with an officer while trying to get his microphone close enough to pick up Freeland’s response (or lack thereof). It was an outrageous overreaction by the officer, but there was no suggestion that Freeland had ordered the arrest. Ironically, Menzies’ question that Freeland was trying to dodge had been about why the Liberal government had gone soft on Iran’s terrorist regime — a question one might well put to Tucker.
The signs of atrophy continued to show up and in ways that, as a former admirer of Tucker’s, became progressively more alarming. At the memorial following the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, Tucker gave an odd speech in which he claimed that the assassination was reminiscent of his “favourite story”, in which Jesus Christ was killed for telling the truth by a group of shadowy figures “in a lamp-lit room” in Jerusalem, “sitting around eating hummus”. When asked about it a few days later, Tucker employed a variation of the Jon Stewart technique of backing away from his own words to avoid serious scrutiny. With his characteristic forced laugh, he denied any implication that he had echoed the nascent conspiracy theory that Israel had murdered Charlie Kirk. His defense: hummus is a traditional Arab (rather than Jewish) food.
The evident decline grew even more pronounced in his May 2026 New York Times sit-down, when Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked why he had suggested that Donald Trump might be the Antichrist. Tucker insisted he had never said that, wasn’t even sure what the Antichrist was and insisted “those words never left my lips” — then, after he was shown a clip from his own show of the words leaving his lips, he apologized that his remarks from the clip implied “a precision I haven’t arrived at”. In other words, the jury is still out about whether Trump is the Antichrist, and he regretted jumping the gun on the verdict.
Which brings us to the latest instalment. After roughly 200 interviews, each amounting to hours-long sessions of Tucker and his guests regurgitating the same pablum into each other’s mouths, the transformation into a shell of his former self appears to be complete. In this conversation, moments after declaring that killing the innocent is “never justified under any circumstances”, he pivoted almost in the same breath into a full-throated defence of Hitler — history’s single greatest killer of innocents. He argued the invasion of Poland was understandable given that 15% of the country had been German before the Treaty of Versailles. While absurd, at least it is consistent with his position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But even if, for argument’s sake, that justified Poland, Hitler didn’t stop there. What justified the invasions of Belgium and France? After all, France was faithfully adhering to the Tuckerite foreign policy of reluctant rearmament, appeasement, and assuming an entirely defensive posture (behind the Maginot Line). Stretching the flimsy logic further one could argue (feebly) that France had it coming too, since 6% of France (Alsace-Lorraine) was also German before Versailles. But there’s still no justification for the invasions of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece, or the Soviet Union — with whom Hitler had a signed non-aggression pact. None of those countries were ever German, let alone Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt.
What’s clear is that Hitler used his early invasions to test whether anyone would stop him — and the feedback he got was a green light for more. History keeps teaching the same lesson: appeasement is just expansionism outsourced to your enemies.
Small wonder Tucker hasn’t learned this lesson from history, given that he called Darryl Cooper — a man with zero historical credentials — “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper spent two hours on Tucker’s show in September 2024, arguing Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the war, and that the deaths of millions in Nazi camps owed more to German logistical incompetence than deliberate extermination.
QotD: Polis magistrates – Archons
Numbers however is the first key difference here. Most modern governments have a single magistrate – a president or prime minister – from whom flows all executive power, delegated down to subordinates who are often unelected and whose power thus derives from the one chief magistrate at the top. In some cases, that power is less vested in the person of a prime minister as it is in the collective cabinet (where the cabinet wields power and notionally takes responsibility collectively), but there is still one line of power, reaching from the people, through a single executive person or body, then down to many functionaries whose role is to implement the will of the single executive.
This is not how ancient Greek magistrates (or indeed, ancient magistrates generally) worked.
Instead, Greek magistrates were a product of efforts to weaken royal power by dividing it, which of course only works if executive power was truly divided, that is vested in different autonomous figures. Thus it is important to not to see these magistrates as organized into a “chain of command” or even engaged in collective decision-making. Instead, the best way to understand most magistrates is to imagine them as individual actors whose powers are restricted to a single sphere of action (that is, they have a specific job) and that a city might have many of them. Thus there isn’t one executive power in a polis, but many. Even in cases where magistrates function as a board, it is often the case that each member of that board carries the full power of the magistracy – it is a board of ten magistrates, not a board of ten acting as a magistrate, which means the individuals can act independent of the board.
So instead of one executive, what you have in a polis are many independent, little executives, each with a fragment of the overall executive power. And if you are thinking, “that sounds like an awkward system, since magistrates might be working at cross-purposes with each other”, well, yes. There’s a reason we don’t generally structure governments this way. But the Greeks did and they liked it that way, because this sort of structure keeps the powers of the magistrates in check.
So what might the high magistrates of a polis do exactly? Though there are many different configurations for high magistrates, they tend to do the same basic set of jobs (again, split up usually). You need magistrates to 1) lead the armies and fleets (not usually a distinct job; strategoi are generals and admirals), 2) manage and organize the law courts (which may or may not include making summary judgements in minor cases), and 3) conduct key religious rituals on behalf of the community. Those who have been here a while will note how this maps on neatly to the three roles of kingship (chief general, chief judge, chief priest), though the shift from royal law maker-enforcer-judge to “court scheduling specialist” is a meaningful one.
So at Athens, we have the initial three archons which slot neatly into these roles: the polemarch (πολέμαρχος, polemarchos, lit, “war-leader”) was in charge of the army, the archon basileus (ἄρχων βασιλεύς, lit, “king archon“) who filled in for the king in religious rituals which required his presence but had no broader non-religious powers, and finally the eponymous archon, who lent his name to the year (“in the year of the archonship of so-and-so” being a standard dating form) and ran the courts. It seems fairly clear that early on the eponymous archon often stood as judge and initially also presided over the meetings of the Athenian boule and ekklesia as its chief magistrate (and so supervising the law making process as well).
Over time these offices in Athens were weakened or supplanted, breaking power up further in order to buttress the democracy against both oligarchic power (remember: strong magistrates are a tool of “the few”) and tyranny (strong magistrates have a good position to overthrow the democracy and institute a tyranny). The eponymous archon slowly lost most of his power; the boule came to be a select council which ran the ekklesia and in turn there was an even smaller select council, the prytaneis who acted as a select of the boule and presided over it. Meanwhile, the polemarch became mostly an organizational, “managing the home front” figure, while the war leading role was replaced with a board of ten generals, the strategoi. The strategoi ended up being a pretty key office. As everyone understood you needed generals with expertise, it was an office where one could be elected multiple times in succession and was never determined by lot the way the archonships were; that meant a capable politician could secure a permanent role in the state by getting elected over and over again as strategos; this is for instance the position Pericles held.
As for the courts, these got bigger even as the eponymous archon got smaller and so the Athenians created six lesser archons, the thesmothetai (θεσμοθέται, sing. θεσμοθέτης; “law-giver”) who operated the courts (but did not dispense justice; these are jury courts). Still the eponymous archon kept some vestigial legal powers, like a supervisory role over the epikleroi, sometimes translated as “heiresses” (although that’s not quite right – they weren’t and indeed under Athenian law couldn’t inherit, but rather property was passing through them to legally valid inheritors – they were required to marry into their paternal line in order to generate a husband who could be such a valid inheritor – which in most poleis had to be male.).
At Sparta, the ephors and the two hereditary Spartan kings filled the role of high magistrates; the existence of the two hereditary kings is, we know, quite unusual but the board of ephors is not. We know that several other poleis had ephors and evidently on Crete they had kosmoi (described by Aristotle but epigraphically attested at Eleutherna, Eltynia, Gortyn, Knosos, Lyktos, etc.; Inventory 1159, 1160, 1164, 1169, 1175) whose powers were apparently much like the ephors. Ephors and kosmoi appear invariably as boards of officials with a wide range of executive powers: the Spartan ephors (of whom we are best informed) handled most foreign policy, served as a high court and could propose legislation to the assembly. At Sparta the ephors had the job of making sure the kings did their job, including their religious role, but also had some of their own ritual functions, like the ritual declaring of war on the helots (Plut. Lyc. 28.4). As you might imagine, a board of magistrates with such wide-ranging powers tended to be tools of “the few” and indeed Aristotle notes that the Spartan ephors were easy to bribe (Arist. Pol. 2.1271a) while the Cretan kosmoi monopolized power to produce an effectively hereditary oligarchy (Arist. Pol. 2.1272b). Also notably it seems like one of the ephors or kosmoi was always eponymous, giving their name to the year just like the Athenian eponymous archon.
Athens and Sparta weren’t the only poleis with these kinds of high officials, of course, but as noted the magistrates of other poleis are often very poorly attested. Thebes had an eponymous archon (of unclear powers) and at least two polemarchs by 382 (Inventory, 455); the Boeotian confederation, of which Thebes was the leading power, also had seven Boiotarchs (Βοιωτάρχης, a fusion of βοιωτία (the name of the region) and that ἀρχ- root meaning “leader”), elected for a term of one year who led the combined armies of the Boeotian poleis. Argos’ assembly had a presiding magistrate attested in inscriptions, who was assisted by a secretary with a six month term of office; they also had board of five strategoi who commanded the army reported by Thucydides as well as a board of treasurers (ἀρτῦναι, artunai; Inventory, 604).
Demiourgoi (“public workers”) appear in a number of poleis, often as a board or group of magistrates (Larissa had these, Arist. Pol. 1275b; Inventory 696), though the role of demiourgoi seems to vary from polis to polis as you might expect with so general a name (at Larissa they were apparently able to make new citizens, but the title was also used for the officials of the Hellenistic-era Achaean League (a federal alliance of poleis) and the representatives of the Peloponnesian League (Dem. 18.157) among quite a few others.) That said, demiourgos is a word with a wide range of meanings, to include magistrates but also skilled workers in public employ as well as being used in a philosophical sense to mean a kind of “creator god”, so it’s a tricky word.
All told then what should you expect in terms of the high magistrates of a polis? Well, first that the key jobs here are leading the army, organizing the courts (and/or acting as a court as a board) and filling religious roles; you should expect these jobs to split over multiple magistrates. In democracies, offices that don’t require a lot of technical know-how may be selected by lot, but the rest tend to be elected (in oligarchies often from a subset of the polis, defined by wealth). In either case, magistrates serve relatively short terms, usually just one year (but sometimes a little longer or shorter). It is generally only the “specialist” offices (read: generals) that can be held multiple times consecutively. The more powerful the magistracy, the more likely it is to be organized as a board of magistrates.
Now those are the most important and central magistrates, but a large polis with thousands of politai (and even more non-citizens) is going to need a slew of other state officers to handle a lot of the day to day matters. That brings us neatly to minor magistrates …
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part IIb: Archons“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-24.
October 8, 2026
Singapore’s journey from British colony to independent economic star
At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West reviews the autobiography of Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of an independent Singapore and the man most responsible for its amazing economic success:
There are few political memoirs as readable as Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World to First, but then there were few politicians like him. Arguably the greatest statesman of the post-war era, Lee led Singapore out of a failed federation with Malaysia, turning a poor and precarious little nation into a dazzling success story, now twice as rich as Britain, its former colonial ruler.
While many things have been written about Lee, the most interesting are by the man himself, with his early years covered in The Singapore Story, published in 1998. The sequel mixes memoir, analysis on international affairs, his own personal philosophy and a how-to guide to statecraft. As he puts it: “There are books to teach you how to build a house, how to repair engineers, how to write a book. But I have not seen a book on how to build a nation out of a disparate collection of immigrants from China, British India, and the Dutch East Indies …” It’s safe to say that he’s cornered that particular market.
It is a strangely cinematic story, almost fit for Hollywood: a man battling to save his small nation against the odds, who must feel that all is lost but struggles on and ultimately wins. Singapore’s identity, unlike that of most young countries, was not forged on the battlefield with swords and guns, but by markets, driven by a determined belief in economic growth, social order and hard work. Only these goals would allow it to overcome its severe demographic challenges, and avoid the violent fate of many post-colonial societies. Defying what experts thought was the direction of history, it became the most successful, and significant, city-state since the Renaissance.
The situation to start with was desperate, and Lee can be seen crying in black and white video footage from August 1965, when he announces that his city has been kicked out of Malaysia, a rare case of a state achieving independence against its will. As he puts it: “Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it.”
Singapore was poor and cursed by its combustible demography. Twice the size of the Isle of Wight — and roughly the same shape — it nestles at the bottom of the Malay peninsula and to its south, just an hour’s ferry ride, is the giant of Indonesia. Neither neighbour was friendly, and Indonesia’s declared regional policy of Konfrontasi – Confrontation – was not reassuring.
Under Stamford Raffles in 1819, the British had founded Singapore as a trading post out of a collection of villages inhabited by Malays and a long-established community of overseas Chinese. Its position at a choke point was crucial for control of the sea lanes between the Far East and Indian Ocean, and under British rule it flourished as an entrepôt. Free trade was its foundational belief, and its hands-off rulers allowed the Chinese in particular to express their entrepreneurial skills; as its economy grew, Chinese migration increased, and by the time of independence they constituted about three-quarters of the population, with Malays accounting for 15 per cent and Indians the remainder.
Born in 1923 as the eldest of five, Lee was something of a father figure to his three brothers and sister, their actual father being a somewhat irresponsible and distant figure, and he certainly exemplified Adler’s birth-order theory, becoming the conscientious elder sibling to an entire nation.
The great-grandson of Hakka-speaking immigrants, Lee came from the somewhat Anglicised Straits Chinese elite. Often British in their mindset, Lee describes himself as “the last Victorian” and this worldview would shape Singapore’s history. He attended the English-speaking Raffles College, where he met his future wife, Kwa Geok Choo, another lawyer and a formidable individual in her own right; the two often finished first and second in exams.
Lee would have gone on to great things in any case, but he happened to come of age in a notably turbulent period. If worldviews are indeed shaped by the events of an individual’s twentieth year, for the budding young law student it was the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the British Empire’s greatest defeat and humiliation. Lee noted at the time that, whatever happened next, this was the end of European rule.
Dining on the Supersonic Concorde
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Apr 2026Roasted lobster tails with creamy beurre blanc served with smoked salmon roses with caviar
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1970sThe luxury dining experience that came with the exorbitant price tag of a ticket aboard the supersonic airliner Concorde (about $9,000 in 2026 money for a one-way ticket from New York to London) included an exclusive lounge experience at the airport and continued with a multi-course meal in the air.
Here I’m recreating a dish from a photo aboard Concorde of smoked salmon shaped into roses, garnished with crème fraîche and caviar. The caviar served aboard Concorde would have been beluga, of course, but feel free to opt for a more reasonably priced alternative. I used white sturgeon caviar, which was still a bit of a splurge.
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October 7, 2026
Lessons from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander
As a child, I was a very early fan of C.S. Forester’s series of novels on the career of Horatio Hornblower, so I was a bit wary about reading Patrick O’Brian’s new-to-me stories set in the same period. A friend from Halifax practically forced Master and Commander on me during my first visit to Nova Scotia and I quickly picked up Post Captain, HMS Surprise and a few more in the series. At Athena’s Bridge, Mike Hennelly makes the case that there are valuable leadership lessons that can be learned from O’Brian’s work:
Cover from a later printing than the one I read in 1982.
In the study of leadership, there are many who say that there is nothing to be gained from novels or movies. Their argument is that only the study of reality (real CEOs, real generals, real political leaders) will yield insights of value for the study and practice of leadership. The purpose of this essay is to argue the opposite case. One of the most remarkable literary achievements of the 20th century was Patrick O’Brian’s multi-volume depiction of British naval life during the Napoleonic Wars. Eventually stretching to twenty books, O’Brian gives us the lives of Captain Jack Aubrey and his great friend, Doctor Stephen Maturin. A reviewer from the New York Times stated (rather categorically) that O’Brian’s books are “the best historical novels ever written”. O’Brian’s characters finally appeared in a movie entitled Master & Commander and the film faithfully captures much of the atmosphere and spirit of this maritime world.
O’Brian’s world, both in the books and the movie, is surprisingly faithful to the world of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. He brings to life the nature of the great naval leaders of the time, the victories they achieved and the hardships they endured. As O’Brian himself notes, “I have gone straight to the source for the fighting in this book. I have log-books, official letters, contemporary accounts or the participants’ own memoirs“. What follows is not a review of the movie nor a synopsis of the plot. This is an essay that uses one particular movie to frame a discussion of leadership in realistic, uncertain and risky circumstances. Our focus is the character of Jack Aubrey – created by Patrick O’Brian, visualized by director Peter Weir and brought to life by actor Russell Crowe. An examination of Aubrey’s behavior and attitudes throughout the movie provides a wealth of insight into the mystery that is called leadership.
To begin at the beginning, a consideration of the term “master and commander” brings two curious facts to light. First of all, in the early days of the Royal Navy, this term applied to two people – not one. When English warships fought the Spanish Armada, for example, they had a “master” who was a life-long mariner with the nautical experience to sail the ship and a “commander” (frequently a noble) who was entrusted with the combat performance of the ship. Over time, this phrase was combined and came to describe the responsibilities of a warship’s captain. The second curious fact is that this term (as a job description) is incomplete. When Patrick O’Brian brought the character of Captain Jack Aubrey to life, he did so in a way that clearly shows that the term “master and commander” was an incomplete description of a captain’s responsibilities. HMS Surprise might be a ship (that needed a master to sail her) and she might be a weapon of war (that needed a commander to fight her) but she was also a collection of almost two hundred sailors of all sorts (who needed a leader to direct and influence their actions). To carry out all the responsibilities of a ship’s captain, Jack Aubrey needed to be a “master, commander and leader”. Without the ability to take a random set of landsmen and mold them into a cohesive, disciplined and skilled crew, he would not have been able to sail the ship safely nor would he have been able to exert any combat power.
“She’s a vastly heavier ship. She’s out of our class” (or, how leaders get others to face existential risk)
As the movie begins, it is the spring of 1805 and we are aboard HMS Surprise, a small Royal Navy frigate of 28 guns with a crew of 197 souls. The Surprise is under orders to find the French frigate Acheron and “sink, burn or take her as a prize”. The Surprise is off the coast of Brazil and approaching a fogbank when she is ambushed by the Acheron. Captain Aubrey is energized by the prospect of combat (“straight at ’em, Mr. Mowatt!“) but events soon take a turn for the worse as Surprise‘s rudder is shot away and the British barely escape safely into the fog.
We learn more about Aubrey as he faces a serious leadership challenge after this disastrous encounter with the French. The ship’s officers, somewhat in shock, are discussing the engagement and they observe that Acheron was “more like a ship of the line than a frigate” and “our shots couldn’t penetrate“. Their misgivings are understandable. HMS Surprise, with twenty-eight guns, is about as small as a ship can be and still be called a frigate. The forty-four guns of the Acheron make it far larger and more heavily armed than the Surprise and what this means in combat is that every broadside fired by the Acheron is almost four times the weight of a broadside from the Surprise. Aubrey’s command team assumes that the clear superiority of the French ship means the Surprise will have to abandon her mission and head home. But their misgivings are not in line with the attitudes of a) the British Admiralty, b) the British public and c) their captain. At this point in the war, most Britons and the Admiralty operate under the assumption that their navy should always project an aura of invincibility. This has been a British naval characteristic since the great British sea-victories at Camperdown (1797) and the Nile (1798). Furthermore, we find out that Jack Aubrey’s mental model of an ideal officer is Lord Nelson who was famous for his relentlessly aggressive behavior at sea. One of Nelson’s most famous sayings was “no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy” and that is exactly what Aubrey intends to do to the Acheron. Aubrey quickly disabuses his officers of the idea of abandoning their mission. Positively radiating with decisiveness, he tells them there is not a moment to lose if they are to carry out repairs and catch up with the French.
Aubrey faces two challenges as he attempts to lead his ship into a situation of existential risk. First, he must gain the support of his officers and secondly, he must ensure the willingness of his crew. He addresses these concerns in turn. To gain the support of his officers and bolster their morale, he addresses their concerns with a discussion of battle tactics in a way that provides reassurance. Although the French ship has far more guns, Aubrey explains that the Surprise possesses intangible advantages that level the killing field. He is convinced that the Surprise is more maneuverable than the Acheron and he intends that his gun crews be better-trained and more effective than their French counterparts. Without any further dissent from his officers, the Surprise carries on with its pursuit of the bigger and more powerful enemy ship – which is a testament to the effectiveness of Aubrey’s leadership.
Aubrey’s approach to the crew about the threat of the Acheron is intensely practical in nature. The crew spend much of their time engaged in gunnery drill. Captain Aubrey has very high standards for the ship’s gunnery because he expects his gun crews to be both fast and accurate. Accuracy in naval gunfire is always a challenge because ships are inherently unstable firing platforms, but, in addition, the faster the rate of fire, the sooner a gun crew is exhausted with a corresponding reduction in accuracy. Aubrey’s standards, while achievable, are higher than the standard in naval fleets of the time. His standards require intensive, dangerous training which is the only way to produce highly disciplined and effective gun crews. To keep his crew motivated while they are training so hard, Aubrey gives them a rousing talk (Do you want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? NO!, they roar back. Do you want your children to have to sing “La Marseillaise”? NO!). He also states his expectations in terms that every sailor can grasp – the gun crews of the Surprise must be able to fire two broadsides for every broadside fired by the Acheron. Over time, the crew of the Surprise is welded into a cohesive and effective fighting force; they take pride in their achievements and their confidence grows as they face the prospect of future combat.
