Quotulatiousness

April 19, 2022

When the Germans had to surrender twice

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The end of the war in Europe is usually noted as being the 8th of May, 1945, when General Eisenhower received the surrender of German forces, but the Soviets (and now the Russians) mark the anniversary on the 9th:

ADN-ZB/Archiv
II.Weltkrieg 1939-1945
Die bedingungslose Kapitulation der faschistischen deutschen Wehrmacht wird am 8. Mai 1945 in Berlin-Karlhorst unterzeichnet.
Links: Der Vertreter des Oberkommandos der Roten Armee, Marschall der Sowjetunion G. K. Shukow, am Tischende Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel.
J 0422/600/2 N

It was at three in the morning on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, that Generaloberst Alfred Jodl of the German High Command, signed a surrender document at General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rheims, France. The European war was over. It was VE-Day. Stalin’s representative, General Ivan Susloparov, cabled his chief the great news.

However, the Russian leader flew into a rage. He wanted his own observance and insisted on a further ceremony at the Soviet military HQ in Karlshorst, a former Wehrmacht officers’ mess, six miles south-east of central Berlin. Chosen simply because it was one of the few buildings in the capital left with windows and a roof, the formalities were presided over by the captor of the city, Marshal Georgy Zhukov.

This time, it was Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, Jodl’s superior, who read over a near-identical document. Susloparov was again present, along with Carl Spaatz for the Americans and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, representing France. Newsmen were unaware of the diplomatic spat that delayed proceedings.

De Lattre refused to sign unless the French tricolore was in evidence among the standards and pennants decorating the surrender room. The first Soviet solution hilariously produced a Dutch flag. To pacify an even-more outraged de Lattre, a Red Army seamstress was summoned to run up the appropriate banner. More delays ensued while the Allies bickered over the order of signatures and witnesses, only agreed after the mollifying effects of vodka and some food.

This is why the final ceremony began shortly after midnight. Cameras captured Keitel in full dress uniform, arriving in pompous mood. Flashlights caught the glint of his many medals, and the arrogant flourish of his marshal’s baton, held with gloved hands. He gazed around the room, haughty contempt written across his face. The field marshal removed only his right glove, screwed his monocle into his left eye and applied a fountain pen to the two-page, typewritten document. It was 00:16 local time on Wednesday, 9 May, which became Soviet Victory Day and remains so in Eastern Europe.

Each subsequent year on Victory Day, Red Square has echoed to the “Hurrahs” of vast numbers of Russian soldiers, sailors, marines and paratroopers, national guardsmen and airmen. They are drawn up to listen to their commander-in-chief and inspected by generals. Banners are saluted; swords flash through the air. Serenaded by massed bands playing stirring tunes, they march past the top brass, assembled on the roof of Lenin’s Mausoleum.

History of Rome in 15 Buildings 05. The Colosseum

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

toldinstone
Published 27 Sep 2018

Six lions fighting eight tigers! A troupe of performing elephants! Executions, accompanied by a full orchestra! Twelve gladiatorial combats, guaranteed to the death! So might a day of games at the Colosseum, the subject of our fifth episode, be advertised. No monument better encapsulates Roman imperialism – or its costs.

If you enjoyed this video, you might be interested in my forthcoming book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans. You can find a preview of the book here:

https://toldinstone.com/naked-statues…

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To see the story and photo essay associated with this video, go to:
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Thanks for watching!

QotD: “Bog iron” in ancient and medieval society

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are quite a lot of ores of iron, but not all of them could be usefully processed with ancient or medieval technology. The most commonly used iron ore was hematite (Fe2O3), with goethite (HFeO2) and limonite (FeO(OH)·nH2O) close behind. Rarer, but still used was magnetite (Fe3O4) and siderite (FeCO3). All of these can occur in big rock deposits, but may also occur as “bog iron” where oxidation occurs in acidic environments (in swamps and bogs) leading to the formation of small clumps of iron-rich material. Many of these ores can be spotted visually by someone who knows what they are doing; hematite can be blackish to reddish-brown but leaves tell-tale red streaks (of rust); goethite’s black-brown color is also fairly recognizable, as is limonite with its burnt yellow-orange hue. We’ll come back to these ores a few times both this week and next, because while they can all yield iron, some of them yield that iron easier than others.

One distinction here is between bog iron and iron in ore deposits. Bog iron is formed when ground-water picks up iron from iron-ore deposits, where that iron is then oxidized under acidic conditions to form chunks of iron minerals (goethite, magnetite, hematite, etc.), typically in smallish chunks. Bog iron is much easier to smelt because it contains fewer impurities than iron ore in rock deposits, but the quantity of iron available from bog iron is relatively low (although actually renewable, unlike mines; a bog can be harvested for iron again after a few decades as the processes which produce the bog iron continue). Because of its low output, bog iron tends to be an important part of the iron supply only when production is relatively low, such as during the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Europe, or the early medieval period.

But what I want to stress here at the outset is that while the local variety of iron may vary based on conditions, iron ores are sufficiently common that prior to the industrial revolution, it wasn’t generally necessary to trade or transport them over long distances because most areas have deposits. There are some exceptions (Japan is notoriously mineral poor – my limited geological understanding is that this is common in volcanic land formations – and while it does have some iron deposits, they are few and relatively small), but for the most part, getting iron ore was not hard. As we’ll see, timber availability was actually often a more pressing limitation on iron exploitation than the ore itself […]

Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.

April 18, 2022

Once upon a time, the American military wanted to know precisely nothing about the sex lives of servicemen

Filed under: Health, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Yet another trip into a far distant past, this time in the US armed forces, long before the Current Year:

General Edward Ord (1818-1883), the designer of Fort Sam Houston, saw action in the Seminole War, the Indian Wars, and the American Civil War.
Undated photo from before 1883 via Wikimedia Commons.

For much of its history, the American military has had an aversion to hearing in any official way about the sexual conduct of servicemembers. In one of the US Army’s most notorious 19th-century legal conflicts, Captain Andrew Geddes reported from a remote post in Texas that Lieutenant Louis Orleman had been forcing his teenaged daughter to have sex; in a written statement to his commanding officer, Geddes wrote that Orleman “had been having sexual intercourse with her for the past five years, or since she was thirteen years of age, and that he had placed a loaded revolver to her head, threatening that he would blow out her brains if she did not consent to his horrible desires.” Thus informed, then-Brigadier General Edward Ord convened a court-martial — to conduct a trial of Captain Geddes, for putting such an appalling thing in writing.

As Louise Barnett concludes in her book about the trial, “acknowledging the possibility of incest by bringing charges against Orleman would have officially validated and magnified a scandal that would have haunted the Army, and the Department of Texas, for years to come. Fortunately for Orleman, this course of action was unthinkable because incest itself was unthinkable in America in 1879.”

Similarly, a rich and colorful history of the early American navy attempts to count recorded acts of sodomy at sea, and finds them buried in euphemism within official reports of sailor misconduct: “improper conduct too base to mention”, or “filthy conduct”, or “improper conduct on the berth deck”. As the historian James Valle has written, naval courts-martial finding themselves hearing testimony about shipboard sodomy tended to adjourn quickly, or to end testimony and immediately vote to acquit — after which the accused tended to vanish from a ship’s rolls, without explanation, the very next time the ship made port. “Consequently,” Valle concludes, in the early republic “not one navy man was ever convicted of homosexuality by a formal court-martial.” Herman Melville mentioned the unmentionable by writing, in White Jacket, of complaints regarding shipboard acts “from which the deck officer would turn away with loathing.” They didn’t want it to happen, but if it happened, they didn’t want to know about it.

The exceptions are, you know, interesting. In the early years of the Cold War, the sudden arrival of the threat posed by nuclear weapons and the emerging political power of the Eastern Bloc produced a moral panic in which security officials in the federal government hunted communists by looking for homosexuality; the “lavender scare” ran alongside the red scare. And so, as Elizabeth Lutes-Hillman has written, the Cold War military justice system became endlessly obsessed with sexual difference, throwing aside the usual disinclination to take notice of sexual behavior in the ranks: “Courts-martial instead became a performance of military values for the culture at large, setting the boundaries of deviant behavior for the armed forces, and so, to a certain extent, for the American body politic.” To drag that language about the performance of values down to the plane of action, Lutes-Hillman reports the example of the shore patrol in Norfolk, Virginia, which proudly reported in the late-1950s that it had caught 231 sailors in acts of sodomy by drilling holes in the wall of the local YMCA.

Putting all of that together, the American military has mostly preferred to avert its eyes from the sexual behavior of servicemembers, except in moments of transition and political crisis. If the armed forces are really interested in the question of which bed you spent the weekend in, Private Snuffy, something different is happening. For something more than 200 years, the default message from a company commander on Friday afternoon has generally been, “Handle your business, don’t interrupt my weekend with a phone call from a police department, and you’d best be in formation when the flag goes up on Monday morning.” Normal is the view that servicemembers are grown-ups whose intimate matters aren’t military business. Historically, if the armed forces officially have sex on the brain, something has been disrupted; anxiety and disorder outside the military have seeped into the ranks.

Now. To go back to an example from last year, this:

… suggests a number of obvious questions, starting with how did the United States Navy know this? Is this liberation, or is it intrusion? (BREAKING: The Department of the Navy proudly announces which helicopter pilots are into dudes, and stand by for detailed information on which surface warfare officers are bi-curious. We’re still asking around on that one, so.) It’s like the shore patrol is drilling holes in the wall at the YMCA again, but this time it’s so they can bus in a cheering section. The chain of command is right outside your door, you guys, and we hear what you’re doing in there, and OH MY GOD WE’RE SO PROUD OF YOU DO YOU NEED SOME CONDOMS? The Department of Defense isn’t a regular mom, it’s a cool mom.

Republic to Empire: The Augustan Settlement

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 23 Mar 2021

Here is the tenth lecture, which covers the Augustan Settlement and the ending of the Roman Republic. Discussion includes: the Constitutional Settlements, graphical representations of the old and new Roman Constitutions; opinions in Rome and the provinces of the new order; the legitimisation propaganda; the general success of the reign of Augustus.
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7.62mm Rifle L8: The Last Gasp of the Service Lee Enfield

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Dec 2021

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After the British adopted the FAL as the L1A1 rifle, there was still an interest in converting stocks of existing No4 Enfield rifles to the new 7.62x51mm cartridge for reserve and training use. A conversion system was developed using a new barrel, bolt, and magazine — although the Sterling company was doing much the same thing at the same time and intellectual property lawsuits would close the project for nearly 10 years. By the time the lawsuits cleared up, it had become clear that the rifles were neither particularly successful nor particularly necessary anymore. The problem the British has was one of accuracy — the 7.62mm version just wasn’t sufficiently accurate. A thousand were sold to Sierra Leone, and a few more used in New Zealand and by cadet organizations in the UK, but the project was basically a failure.

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QotD: Colonialism in the British Raj

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A few years back during my doctoral research, I was invited to a colloquium on imperialism at Oxford, which, because of our modern standards of free and open intellectual discourse, was effectively a secretive little conclave. This was during the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, around the time when, due to mob pressure, Portland professor Bruce Gilley’s “The Case for Colonialism” paper was redacted by an academic journal. The seminar’s organisers did not want hysterical teenagers egged on by activist dons to disturb what turned out to be the nuanced discussion you’d hope scholars would, and could, engage in.

There I met a man of very advanced age, whose name I cannot remember (to my shame) who had been a civil servant in India during the final days of the Raj. He told me something I have pondered ever since. “We were just a handful of people providing guidance and administration”, he said, “with overwhelming consent in a gigantic country. We even slept in the streets during summer on khatias and had no fear of being killed.”

Whatever politics was happening was between the British and Indian political elites, and plainly did not affect most normal Britishers or Indians.

Consider, that in 1901 Indians numbered nearly 300 million while the British-born population of India was around 150,000. Colonialism was indeed by the consent of the governed, and the independence fight was primarily an intra-elite affair, where the mostly western-educated native would-be boss class fought with the foreign overlords who taught them, for political control.

In the sub-continent, the civil service, lower (and some higher) judiciary, magistrates, police officers, intelligentsia, landed gentry and local businesses were primarily Indian, a lot of them pro-imperial to the end of their time. What happened to those voices? In current post-colonial discourse, one cannot read any pro-imperial literature, which is either lost or considered too reactionary to be taught at universities, an injustice to a clear understanding of history.

Sumantra Maitra, “Pro-imperial truths of the old world”, The Critic, 2021-11-09.

April 17, 2022

Operation Mincemeat, 1943

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Once an obscure bit of espionage and military disinformation, the events of Operation Mincemeat are being brought to the big screen (boy, does that term seem dated) in a feature film starring Colin Firth. Michael Curtis provides a look at the actual deception mission that inspired the film:

The corpse of Glyndwr Michael, dressed in a Royal Marine uniform with false documents and a fake ID, used in Operation Mincemeat, 1943.
Public domain image from The National Archives.

The story of the British deception, a fascinating story of Allied subterfuge, is now told in the film Operation Mincemeat. It is a remarkable and seemingly highly improbable story of a plan of Allied intelligence to deceive Hitler and misdirect German intelligence. Indeed, it is one of the best examples in history of military deception.

The concept of a plan starts with the Trout Memo, officially written in 1939 by Admiral John Godfrey, director of Naval Intelligence, but almost certainly written by his subordinate Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, not yet dreaming of 007, about the deception of an army in war time by fly fishing. Many ideas were suggested, including sending out tins of explosives disguised as food so that hungry sailors would pick them up. One idea, number 28 on the list, almost certainly the thought of Fleming who thought of elaborate deception options, was to use a dead body dressed as an airman dropped from a parachute that had failed and carrying false papers, and drop it where the Germans would find it and be deceived by it.

The deception was planned by a group, the Twenty Committee, XX, headed by Lieutenant Commander RNVR, Ewen Montagu, Cambridge, Harvard, a naval intelligence officer and prominent Jewish lawyer, who later became a judge, together with an RAF officer Squadron Leader Charles Cholmondeley. Montagu later wrote an account of the affair in a book, The Man who Never Was, 1953. The memory of the event is also simply commemorated in a mortuary in Hackney in East London where the body that was used in the plot is buried. In a rather unkind but truthful remark Montagu said of the man who was used, “The only worthwhile thing he ever did, he did after his death.”

The main deception in the plot was a personal letter purported to be from General Sir Archibald Nye to General Sir Harold Alexander, starting, “My dear Alex.” Nye’s letter contained details of sensitive topics, and of a new commander of the Guards brigade, and U.S. service medal awards. He also referred to Operation Husky, an imminent Allied invasion of Greece, that the Germans had been reinforcing and strengthening their defenses in Greece and Crete, and therefore the chief of the Imperial General Staff felt that the Allied troops planned for the assault were insufficient. Thus, it was agreed by the chiefs of staff that the 5th division should be reinforced by one brigade group for the assault on the beach south of Cape Araxos and that similar reinforcement should be made for the 56th division at Kalamata. The letter was a clever double bluff. Nye wrote that “we stand a very good chance of making the Germans think we will go for Sicily, it is an obvious objective and one about which they must be nervous.” To confuse Hitler, he therefore suggested the Allies would invade Sicily.

It is interesting but not surprising that a key figure in the deception appears to have been Ian Fleming, Mr. James Bond, who had written of methods to confuse the enemy, and was crucial to the Trout Memo.

The plot developed. After some difficulty a suitable body was found by a London coroner and kept on ice for few months. It was Glyndwr Michael, 34, homeless Welsh laborer, penniless, with mental health problems, who had died after ingesting rat poison in a London warehouse. He was transformed into Major William Martin, of the Royal Marines whose body contained love letters from a non-existent fiancé named Pam, a jewelry bill for an engagement ring, ticket stubs, religious medal, a copy of a letter marked “personal and most secret”, and above all the false Nye letter. The body had to look as if it had died in an air crash, but floated ashore and he had died at sea. Major Martin, his body wrapped in a life jacket, and with a black attaché case chained to his wrist, was found on April 30, 1943, by a Spanish fisherman off the coast of Huelva.

Even more unlikely than the plan itself was the impact the “secret” document had on Axis planning, summarized in the Wikipedia article:

On 14 May 1943 Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz met Hitler to discuss Dönitz’s recent visit to Italy, his meeting with the Italian leader Benito Mussolini and the progress of the war. The Admiral, referring to the Mincemeat documents as the “Anglo-Saxon order”, recorded

    The Führer does not agree with … [Mussolini] that the most likely invasion point is Sicily. Furthermore, he believes that the discovered Anglo-Saxon order confirms the assumption that the planned attacks will be directed mainly against Sardinia and the Peloponnesus.

Hitler informed Mussolini that Greece, Sardinia and Corsica must be defended “at all costs”, and that German troops would be best placed to do the job. He ordered that the experienced 1st Panzer Division be transferred from France to Salonika, Greece. The order was intercepted by GC&CS on 21 May. By the end of June, German troop strength on Sardinia had been doubled to 10,000, with fighter aircraft also based there as support. German torpedo boats were moved from Sicily to the Greek islands in preparation. Seven German divisions transferred to Greece, raising the number present to eight, and ten were posted to the Balkans, raising the number present to 18.

On 9 July the Allies invaded Sicily in Operation Husky. German signals intercepted by GC&CS showed that even four hours after the invasion of Sicily began, twenty-one aircraft left Sicily to reinforce Sardinia. For a considerable time after the initial invasion, Hitler was still convinced that an attack on the Balkans was imminent, and in late July he sent General Erwin Rommel to Salonika to prepare the defence of the region. By the time the German high command realised the mistake, it was too late to make a difference.

Kursk – The Next Great Battle? – WW2 – 190 – April 16, 1943

Filed under: Africa, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 16 Apr 2022

The Allies have one chance left to catch the Axis forces in Tunisia before they can reach the Tunis defences; in the USSR both the Axis and Soviets are making plans for a fight near Kursk; and in the skies, in the South Pacific a Japanese aerial offensive ends and Yamamoto himself flies off to congratulate his pilots.
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Queen Victoria’s Easter Cake

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 Mar 2021

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April 16, 2022

Remember all the angst about untold numbers of unmarked graves at former residential schools?

Filed under: Cancon, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Oh, c’mon man! You must remember the performative grief and anger as even the Prime Minister got into the act by declaring Canada a nation that had committed genocide against as-yet-uncounted First Nations children (oh, and upping the ante, he also implied that this genocide was still ongoing). Do you remember the number of times these graves — often described as “mass graves” rather than merely “unmarked graves” — were investigated in the wake of all this media attention and the fate of at least some of the victims confirmed? No? Well, there’s a good reason for that:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

Rosanne Casimir, the chief of the local Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, said that “knowledge keepers” within the community had guided investigators to the area to be searched — which had once been an apple orchard on the residential school’s premises. The chief also said that knowledge keepers had already told her that what lay below the surface were graves of children whose deaths had previously been undocumented.

Following that announcement, several other First Nations announced their own discoveries. And in December, the Canadian Press called the discovery of unmarked graves, the “news story of the year”.

If you aren’t from Canada, it’s hard to understand the scale of the national reaction to this story. It’s been known for decades that thousands of Indigenous children died during their time in the residential-school system, many of them from tuberculosis. But this new discovery set the country off emotionally. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, lowered the Canadian flag on public buildings, and didn’t raise it for another five months. And journalists became unrestrained in the language they used. In one Canadian newspaper, a headline ran, “Is this Canada’s Holocaust moment?”

Canadians were assured that these weren’t just graves, they were the graves of children; and furthermore, it was suggested, these children hadn’t just died from malnutrition or untreated disease — which is obviously bad enough. Some suggested these children were flat out murdered and dumped in shallow graves in the middle of the night. These claims were even aired by the national broadcaster, CBC, on an investigative show called Fifth Estate.

In the Kamloops press, meanwhile, Dr. Sarah Beaulieu, the ground-penetrating-radar expert who’d helped with the discovery, described — as a newspaper put it — “recollections of children as young as six years old being woken up in the middle of the night to dig holes for burials in the apple orchard.”

But there was one odd aspect to the story — and it got odder as the weeks and months marched on: No one seemed to be in any kind of hurry to see what was actually beneath the surface. All we had were ground-penetrating-radar images. And those images don’t show bodies, or caskets, or anything like that. What this technology shows are soil dislocations, which, depending on their depth and spacing, can sometimes indicate the possible presence of grave sites. Why weren’t police, or indigenous authorities, or forensic teams searching for the remains of these poor children?

It’s important to remember that Canadians were being told that this was a crime scene — indeed, not just any crime, but mass murder. If you told Canadians that, say, 215 murdered white children were buried in a field in Toronto, or Ottawa, or Vancouver, there’d be investigators and police all over the place — to see if they could find remains that could be tested and identified. Maybe evidence could be collected showing the manner of death.

And remember that many of the abuses identified at the Kamloops residential school and others like it date to the middle of the 20th century. This means that some of the perpetrators of these claimed child homicides — that is, the teachers, administrators, priests, and ministers who worked at these schools — some of them could still be alive. Shouldn’t we be getting evidence and building a case against them?

How to Make a Royal Marines Officer: Part 2 (1989)

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Royal Marines
Published 13 Sep 2012

First transmitted in 1989, this is the second part of a programme that follows the progress of 29 men who want to be Royal Marine officers. The remainder of those hoping to be Royal Marine officers face their toughest test.

From the comments:

Nick B
5 years ago (edited)
Richard Van der Horst (honour sword winner) rose to become a Lt Col and commanding officer of the SBS. He was widely expected to be fast tracked to General and command of all UK special forces. Tragically he died in a diving training accident in Norway in 2005.

Tank Chats #143 | Hetzer | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 31 Dec 2021

Our Patreons have already enjoyed Early Access and AD free viewing of our weekly YouTube video! Consider becoming a Patreon Supporter today: https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum

The Munich Agreement averted the outbreak of war but for Czechoslovakia, it meant giving way to German occupation. Join David Willey to discover how Germany was able to use the country’s existing military outputs to build the tank destroyer, Hetzer.

00:00 – Intro
00:28 – The history of the tank destroyers name
14:55 – Wartime production
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QotD: The Edict of Diocletian

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Such a system could not work without price control. In 301, Diocletian and his colleagues issued an Edictum de pretiis, dictating maximum legal prices or wages for all important articles or services in the Empire. Its preamble attacks monopolists who, in an “economy of scarcity”, had kept goods from the market to raise prices:

    Who is … so devoid of human feeling as not to see that immoderate prices are widespread in the markets of our cities, and that the passion for gain is lessened neither by plentiful supplies nor by fruitful years? — so that … evil men reckon it their loss if abundance comes. There are men whose aim it is to restrain general prosperity … to seek usurious and ruinous returns. … Avarice rages throughout the world. … Wherever our armies are compelled to go for the common safety, profiteers extort prices not merely four or eight times the normal, but beyond any words to describe. Sometimes the soldier must exhaust his salary and his bonus in one purchase, so that the contributions of the whole world to support the armies fall to the abominable profits of thieves.

The Edict was, until our time, the most famous example of an attempt to replace economic laws by governmental decrees. Its failure was rapid and complete. Tradesmen concealed their commodities, scarcities became more acute than before, Diocletian himself was accused of conniving at a rise in prices, riots occurred, and the Edict had to be relaxed to restore production and distribution. It was finally revoked by Constantine.

The weakness of this managed economy lay in its administrative cost. The required bureaucracy was so extensive that Lactantius, doubtless with political license, estimated it at half the population. The bureaucrats found their task too great for human integrity, their surveillance too sporadic for the evasive ingenuity of men. To support the bureaucracy, the court, the army, the building program, and the dole, taxation rose to unprecedented peaks of ubiquitous continuity.

As the state had not yet discovered the plan of public borrowing to conceal its wastefulness and postpone its reckoning, the cost of each year’s operations had to be met from each year’s revenue. To avoid returns in depreciating currencies, Diocletian directed that, where possible, taxes should be collected in kind: taxpayers were required to transport their tax quotas to governmental warehouses, and a laborious organization was built up to get the goods thence to their final destination. In each municipality, the decuriones, or municipal officials, were held financially responsible for any shortage in the payment of the taxes assessed upon their communities.

Since every taxpayer sought to evade taxes, the state organized a special force of revenue police to examine every man’s property and income; torture was used upon wives, children, and slaves to make them reveal the hidden wealth or earnings of the household; and severe penalties were enacted for evasion. Towards the end of the 3rd century, and still more in the 4th, flight from taxes became almost epidemic in the Empire. The well-to-do concealed their riches, local aristocrats had themselves reclassified as humiliores to escape election to municipal office, artisans deserted their trades, peasant proprietors left their overtaxed holdings to become hired men, many villages and some towns (e.g., Tiberias in Palestine) were abandoned because of high assessments; at last, in the 4th century, thousands of citizens fled over the border to seek refuge among the barbarians.

It was probably to check this costly mobility, to ensure a proper flow of food to armies and cities, and of taxes to the state, that Diocletian resorted to measures that, in effect, established serfdom in fields, factories, and guilds. Having made the landowner responsible through tax quotas in kind for the productivity of his tenants, the government ruled that a tenant must remain on his land till his arrears of debt or tithes should be paid.

We do not know the date of this historic decree; but in 332, a law of Constantine assumed and confirmed it, and made the tenant adscriptitius, “bound in writing”, to the soil he tilled; he could not leave it without the consent of the owner; and when it was sold, he and his household were sold with it. He made no protest that has come down to us; perhaps the law was presented to him as a guarantee of security, as in Germany today. In this and other ways, agriculture passed in the 3rd century from slavery through freedom to serfdom and entered the Middle Ages.

Similar means of compelling stability were used in industry. Labor was “frozen” to its job, forbidden to pass from one shop to another without governmental consent. Each collegium or guild was bound to its trade and its assigned task, and no man might leave the guild in which he had been enrolled. Membership in one guild or another was made compulsory on all persons engaged in commerce and industry, and the son was required to follow the trade of his father. When any man wished to leave his place or occupation for another, the state reminded him that Italy was in a state of siege by the barbarians and that every man must stay at his post.

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 3: Caesar and Christ, 1944.

April 15, 2022

Russian Army Saved by French Blunder – The Battle of Lubino 1812

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Real Time History
Published 14 Apr 2022

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French general Junot and Emperor Napoleon I had a bit of a history by the time of the 1812 campaign. Even though Junot has been in Napoleon’s service for years, he hadn’t been promoted to Marshal. At the Battle of Lubino (Battle of Valutino-Gora) Junot stands idly by as the Grande Armée is missing their best chance yet to win a decisive victory over the Russians. To the north, at Polotsk the French and Russians are also clashing.

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» SOURCES
Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. Napoléon et la campagne de Russie en 1812. 2021.
Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon. 2010.
Maag, Albert. De Schicksale der Schweizerregimente in Napoleons I. Feldzug nach Russland 1812. 1900.
Rey, Marie-Pierre. L’effroyable tragédie: une nouvelle histoire de la campagne de Russie. 2012.
Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. 2005.

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