I-Spy Paris: war memorial to the Tsar's troops

In 1916, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia sent 20,000 Russian troops to help France fight the Germans on the Western Front. Above is the memorial in Paris to the 5,000 who were killed.

Tsarist Russia was part of the Triple Entente with France and Britain, lining up against the Central Powers of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. 

Tsar Nicholas would be killed by the Bolsheviks as the Russian Empire collapsed. The First World War also brought an end to the German Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were dismantled.

Reflections from 66

 I was there. At Wembley the day England beat West Germany in the World Cup Final. What I think I am seeing now is the best England team since that day. It may lack individuals as outstanding as some from the years in between - Bryan Robson, Gerrard, Rooney, Gascoigne, but as a team it has cohesion, and the squad has depth that allows an impressive manager to rest players and to adjust selection to the differing challenges posed by different opponents.

Some parallels with 1966 strike me. (The structure of the tournament was the same then, except there was one game fewer - no round of the last 16. If you qualified from the group you went straight into the last 8.)

1. England did not concede a goal until the semi-final.

2. England started slowly, but improved as the tournament went on.

3. The toughest game until the semi-final was the first in the knock out stage. Against Germany this year. A narrow 1-0 win against Argentina in 1966 after the Argentines had had a man controversially sent off. 

4. England won both semi-finals 2-1, beating a very good Portugal side in 1966.

5. In 1966, England played all their games at Wembley. This year they have played all but one there.

6. In the finals, they met probably the best team in the tournament excluding England. In 1966, it was West Germany, with England coming out winners 4-2 after extra time, amid controversy over 3 of the England goals. The first came from a free kick taken while the referee seemed to be still ticking off a German defender. The third was the famous 'did-it-cross-the-line?' shot from Geoff Hurst, and play should have been halted before the fourth, as there were spectators on the pitch.

And so to tomorrow. Good luck, England!

Brexitwatch: the Germans have two words for it

Even the most enthusiastic Brexit supporter surely cannot maintain the negotiations are going well. The EU side seems prepared, united and knows what it wants. The UK side appears in crisis: still unprepared, deeply divided, and with no idea of what it wants, let alone how to get it.

Two long German words might help us to do better – Gesinnungsethik and Verantwortungsethik. The first means ‘ethic of conviction’; the second ‘ethic of responsibility’. They reflect a conflict between idealism and pragmatism that came to the fore in the crisis that wracked Germany after the First World War.

Politicians who follow the ‘ethic of conviction’ believe in preserving their moral purity, following the course they ‘know’ to be right whatever the consequences. And if it all goes horribly wrong, that is not their fault.

Increasingly this ‘ethic of conviction’ is the ONLY argument we hear for Brexit: ‘it is the will of the people’. There is no real pretence that leaving the EU will make life better for the British people in any meaningful way. (I have already explained in my post of 15 December 2016 why the ‘will of the people’ argument is bogus.) This is odd in a nation that used to pride itself on its pragmatism.

Those following the ‘ethic of responsibility’ on the other hand, are guided by the likely consequences of their actions and decisions. What will they do to the people affected by them? If Theresa May and her government could switch to this approach, it might help bring them some much needed clarity and avert what is beginning to look more and more like an impending disaster. 

100 years ago today - the last day of the Somme

A service of remembrance is being held today at Thiepval in northern France to commemorate the last day of the Battle of the Somme. (Though the historian Martin Gilbert in his Somme: The Heroism and Horror of War, puts the final action on November 19.) Thiepval’s Memorial to the Missing lists the names of more than 72,000 soldiers whose bodies were never found.

I wrote about the Somme in my book Britain’s 20 Worst Military Disasters, noting that every other battle I featured was clearly a defeat, while the Somme is sometimes seen as a victory.

The ground gained was negligible. Nowhere did the Allied line advance more than six miles, and many objectives due to be taken on the first day were never captured, nor did the Allies liberate a single town or gain a single strategically significant point. But it is said that the bloody attrition fatally drained German resources and paved the way for the Allied victory two years later.

The offensive involving British, British Empire and French soldiers had begun on 1 July, 1916. By the end of that day, nearly 20,000 British soldiers were dead, and 36,000 wounded – the worst toll for a single day in the history of the British Army.

When rotten weather and cloying mud finally brought an end to the battle, Britain and the British Empire had suffered an almost unimaginable 400,000 casualties, the French had lost about 200,000, and the Germans perhaps 450,000.

Brexitwatch: What Boris Johnson really thinks about the EU - 3

A few months ago Boris Johnson did an interview with Der Spiegel. He was asked what would happen if we voted to leave the EU and he replied: 'The Foreign Office, the German Foreign Ministry and everybody else would get together and invent a series of bilateral deals and virtually reconstruct the relationship.'

'There would be several disadvantages. First, we wouldn't be able to stick up for what we believe in. Secondly, we would face some penalties. And then there is the Scottish factor. If we get out, what happens in Scotland?'

So let me get this right, Boris? If we leave Europe, we spend huge amounts of time, money, and effort getting back to something not as good as what we have at the moment, during which time, we lose Scotland and our economy goes down the pan.

Why don't we just Vote Remain?

Europe: stay or leave. Focus on fact - 7

Vote Leave, get Stay - on worse terms. Why Brexit is doomed to failure even if the anti-Europeans win the referendum.

Today's fact: Any trading agreement that the UK makes with Europe post-Brexit requires the agreement of the 27 EU countries.

Boris, Gove and co claim that because German car makers and French cheese and wine makers will want to go on selling goods to us, they will give us whatever we want. Even if that is true, and there is no evidence, there is no evidence that they can compel their own governments, let alone those of another 25 countries to agree.

Boris Johnson's own newspaper, the pro-Brexit Daily Telegraph, has to admit that the best we will be offered is membership of the EEA - the same deal as Norway - having to allow free movement of people from the EU, paying into the EU budget (rather more per person than we do now), and having to obey EU rules. The only difference being that we will no longer have any say on what those rules are:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/19/the-eu-will-play-hardball-with-post-brexit-britain/

*Because of the urgent task of getting some facts into the UK's Europe referendum debate, for the next couple of weeks I am going to be concentrating on that issue on this blog. Normal disaster history service will be resumed after June 23.

Train crashes and safety improvements

We still do not know what caused this week’s German train crash in Bavaria, in which 10 people died. The trains collided head-on on a stretch of single line track, but safety precautions introduced after another fatal accident in 2011 should have made this impossible.

As a German train approaches a red signal, an alarm is supposed to go off in the driver’s cab, and if he fails to stop, the brakes are supposed to go on automatically. Since the crash, there has been speculation that a signal controller may have turned off the automatic system, or even that someone else may have sabotaged it.

Rail crashes have often provided the spur for safety innovations. So in 1989, five people were killed at Purley in South London when one train ran into the back of another after going through a red light, even though the driver’s cab was fitted with an alarm that sounded when the train was approaching the danger signal.

After that, a system called ATP (Automatic Train Protection) was introduced to apply the brakes automatically if the driver ignored a red light. But that did not prevent a crash between a passenger and a goods train at Southall in West London in 1997 (see picture) in which seven people died. Neither the alarm system nor the ATP were working. For more, see London's Disasters.

How religious fanaticism exacted a dreadful toll in 17th century Europe

There’s a fascinating series running on BBC2 called Sex and the Church. In the second programme, Prof Diarmaid MacCulloch tells how perhaps 65,000 women were executed as ‘witches’ in Europe between 1500 and 1660. About 15,000 men were also killed. Any who tried to deny their ‘offence’, which often included some lurid tale of sexual intercourse with the devil, were tortured or threatened with torture, and that usually did the trick.

The worst place was what is now Germany, where 26,000 lost their lives. It was probably no accident that this was the place where the Reformation began, and where the battle lines between Protestants and Catholics were most clearly drawn, notably in the mindbogglingly devastating 30 Years War.

At first, the Protestants were less repressive than the Church of Rome, allowing priests to marry, for example, while the Catholic hierarchy decried all sex as sinful, even within marriage. (Controlling people’s access to sex, of course, is a very good way of controlling them.) But soon the Protestants were burning witches with as much enthusiasm as their enemies.

As part of the Counter-Reformation, its fightback against Protestantism, the Catholic Church also started running schools for poor boys. And what do you know? In no time, there was a scandal about sexual abuse. And how did the Church, right up to the Pope, react? They tried to hush it up. The first two episodes of Sex and the Church are still available on I-player.

*My account of the greatest volcanic eruption of modern times at Tambora (see my blog of April 11) in my book, Historia mundial de los desastres (A Disastrous History of the World) is quoted in this article on a Spanish website - http://untipodeletras.net/2015/04/07/el-monstruo-de-frankenstein-y-el-efecto-mariposa/

The shelling of Hartlepool + 100

100 years ago today…..German warships shelled a number of towns on England’s Yorkshire coast. The First World War had come home to Britain in an unforeseen way. Many had expected the first threat to civilians to come from air raids.

The first shells hit the important shipbuilding centre of Hartlepool at about a quarter past eight in the morning. Nine soldiers manning a battery and 7 sailors were killed, but most of the 100+ casualties were civilians – men, women and children.

The ships then moved on to Scarborough (pictured) where a church was hit during a Holy Communion service, while a shop that was damaged quickly put up one of those defiant signs saying ‘Business as usual’, which would become so familiar in both world wars. Whitby was hit too. The Times commented that there was ‘an entire absence of panic’, though many people fled to the countryside.

The attacks had one or two consequences the Germans may not have foreseen, with 22,000 Hartlepool men volunteering for the armed services and the town regularly winning prizes for the amount of money it raised for the war effort. For more on this story, see A Disastrous History of Britain.

Remembering World War One

Went to the Tower of London yesterday to see the 888,246 ceramic poppies planted in the moat - each one representing a British military death in World War One. Although I arrived early, there were already hundreds of people there.

In spite of the precision on British losses implied by the number of poppies at the Tower, there is much less certainty about overall casualties in the Great War, partly because of the immense social dislocation the conflict brought, with four of the combatants facing revolutions around its end.

Estimates put the total number of military deaths at more than 8 and a half million, with Germany and Russia each suffering about one and three quarter million, and Austria-Hungary and France each losing well over a million.

Coming up with an authoritative figure for the civilians who perished through massacre, accident, disease, hunger, exposure and hardship is even more difficult, but some estimates put the number even higher than that for military casualties, at around 13 million.

Did a North Sea tsunami wipe out Doggerland?

Did a tsunami more than 8,000 years ago put paid to the last inhabitants of Doggerland, a submerged land mass which once connected north Germany to East Anglia?

Around 10,000 years ago, it was still one of the richest hunting grounds in Europe, but 2,000 years later, it had become a low-lying, marshy island about the size of Wales. That was around the time of the Storegga tsunami – generated by a massive landslide beneath the sea off the coast of Norway.

Fishing boats operating around Doggerland have turned up ancient human artefacts, but none date from later than the tsunami. The tsunami theory of Doggerland’s end is based on computer simulations of the effect of the Storegga slide, but some scientists argue the area had already been abandoned before the disaster.

Some, though not all, scientists also maintain that the deadliest flood ever suffered by mainland Britain, the Severn Flood of January 30, 1607, was also caused by a tsunami. It is estimated that 2,000 people, and thousands of livestock animals were killed.

My A Disastrous History of the World has now been translated into Romanian - http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/cele-mai-mari-dezastre-din-istoria-omenirii-5358/

Chemical weapons

So the UN inspectors now have the taks of destroying 1,000 tonnes of Syrian chemical weapons. Such weapons were first banned by the Hague convention of 1899.

This relatively new rule book, though, was not enough to stop them being used during World War One, first by Germany, and then the Allies. They killed at least 90,000 soldiers.

During the 1930’s they were deployed by the Italians in Ethiopia and the Japanese in China. In the later stages of World War Two, President Roosevelt was advised by some to use them on the Japanese stubbornly defending Iwo Jima from caves and tunnels, where they would have been particularly vulnerable. He rejected the idea.

In the post-war era, Saddam Hussein employed chemical weapons against Iran and against the Kurds and other minorities in Iraq, while in 1995, a terrorist used a home-made nerve gas to attack commuters on the Tokyo subway system.

Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 18 - the Somme

On Saturday, 1 July, 1916, British, British Empire and French soldiers launched a huge offensive on the Somme.    By the end of that day, nearly 20,000 British soldiers were dead, and 36,000 wounded – the worst toll for a single day in the history of the British Army.

When rotten weather and cloying mud finally brought an end to the Battle of the Somme in November, Britain and the British Empire had suffered an almost unimaginable 400,000 casualties, the French had lost about 200,000, and the Germans perhaps 450,000.

Of all the disasters featured in this series, this is the only one sometimes claimed as a victory.   It is said that this bloody attrition fatally drained German resources and paved the way for the Allies to finally win the war two years later.

The ground gained was negligible.   Nowhere did the Allied line advance more than six miles, and many objectives due to be taken on the first day were never captured, nor did the Allies liberate a single town or gain a single strategically significant point.

For the full story, see Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters from the Roman Conquest to the Fall of Singapore.

Unlucky church

I was in Hamburg recently, and managed to pop into the wonderfully light and airy St Michael’s Church.  The inside reminded me a bit of St Martin-in-the-fields in London.    Originally constructed in 1647, it was destroyed by fire 103 years later after being struck by lightning.

It was rebuilt, but in 1906 it was burned down again, this time while building work was going on.  Then it was severely damaged by Allied bombing during World War Two.  

In July 1943, Hamburg was hit by what was then the most devastating raid of the war.   The RAF started a firestorm which reduced eight square miles of the city to blackened ruins.   About 42,000 people were killed, and Hitler’s minister for war production, Albert Speer, told the Fuehrer that if another three or four cities were bombed like that, it would mean ‘the end of the war’.

* Here’s a new review of my book Disaster!  ‘as much fun as any horror film’ – I take that as a compliment.

http://www.readprint.com/work-105455/Disaster-A-History-of-Earthquakes-Floods-Plagues-and-Other-Catastrophes-John-Withington

And this is me on the tv in the 1970’s:-

http://www.macearchive.org/archive.html?Title=23745

The massacred village

On this day…….67 years ago, the SS murdered 642 men, women and children at the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.    The victims ranged in age from one week to 90 years.    Most were inhabitants, but a few just happened to be seized as they were cycling through the village.

Soldiers from the 4^th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment were on their way to confront the allies who had landed in Normandy four days earlier, when they were approached by members of the Milice, the French secret police who worked with the Gestapo, to say the Resistance were holding an SS officer hostage in the village of Oradour-sur-Vayres, about 15 miles from Oradour-sur-Glane.   

It seems the SS got the wrong village.    At Oradour-sur-Glane, they herded the men into barns, shot them, then burned down the barns.    Then they locked the women and children in the church, set it on fire, and shot down any who managed to get out.    Just one woman survived.    Finally the village was destroyed.

Today its ruins are still preserved as a monument.

*Something more cheerful.   My friend Johnny Bull’s wonderful picture of the Queen Mary, The Return of the Native, has been selling like hot cakes at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition in London.     Get along to see it while stocks last!

http://johnnybulletins.blogspot.com/2011/01/work-in-progress-return-of-native.html

World War Two - last war crimes trial?

In what may turn out to be the last World War Two war crimes trial, 91 year old John Demjanjuk has been found guilty of helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews at the Nazi death camp of Sobibor in what is now Poland.     He was sentenced to five years in prison, but will be released pending appeal.   

Demjanjuk told the court in Munich that he had not served as a guard at the camp, and that he was a prisoner of war.   The case turned on an SS identity card, which the defence claimed was a fake.   In all, an estimated 250,000 people were killed at Sobibor.

In the 1980’s, an Israeli court indentified Demjanjuk as ‘Ivan the Terrible’, a notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp, and sentenced him to death, but the country’s supreme court overturned the verdict after new evidence emerged.

Some of the relatives of those who died at Sobibor said the verdict on Demjanjuk was not the most important thing.    They were satisfied that a court in the city where the Nazi party was born had had to listen to the details of the industrialised murder machine that Hitler’s regime created.    (See also my blog of Nov 30, 2009.)

Dresden

New research in Germany has concluded that about 25,000 people were killed in the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. Quite enough, but a good deal lower than the previous estimate of around 40,000, while some far-right groups claimed the true total was half a million.

The Dresden Historians' Commission spent five years examining city archives, cemetery and court records, and official registries. But feelings in the city still run high, and within an hour of the report’s publication, 150 protestors had marched on the town hall.

Before February 13, 1945, Dresden had barely been targeted, but on that night more than 750 British bombers attacked its railway marshalling yards, to try to disrupt plans to strengthen German forces on the Eastern Front. World War Two bombing raids, though, were never particularly accurate, and this one also started a ferocious firestorm in the city centre.

The following day, 450 USAF aircraft renewed the attack. Some fires burned for a week afterwards, but rail services were put out of action for only three days. (see also my blog of Feb 13, 2009)

The holocaust in context

Just back from Berlin, where I visited the Jewish Museum for the first time. Not to be missed. The holocaust, of course, provides the prism through which you view every exhibit, and the red thread that guides you through the collection moves relentlessly towards it, but there is more, much more.

We know Jews settled in Germany as early as Roman times. Routinely, they faced discrimination. They were banned from craftsmen’s guilds, and there were professions they could not enter. Handily, though, they could lend money at interest which, for a long time, Christians were not allowed to do. Now there was always plenty of demand for borrowed money, especially among ambitious or improvident princes, so, not surprisingly, many Jews did become moneylenders , and, in the grand old tradition of “blame the victim”, were stigmatised for it.

Three German cities – Mainz, Speyer and Worms – became Europe’s centres for Jewish erudition in the Middle Ages. Persecution and murder, though, really began to take off around the time of the Crusades. Then the Jews got the blame for the Black Death in the fourteenth century (see my blog of March 31), and suffered more massacres.

When the German Empire was founded in 1871, Jews notionally became full and equal citizens, but anti-Semitism remained a powerful force. Twelve thousand Jews died fighting for Germany in World War One. (It was, incidentally, a Jewish officer who recommended Adolf Hitler for the Iron Cross.) That, though, counted for nothing when roaring inflation and mass unemployment swept the Nazis to power.

About half of Germany’s Jewish population managed to escape, but the Nazis murdered 200,000. After World War Two, around 20,000 Jews settled in Germany, and today there are more than 100,000 – many of them recent arrivals from the Soviet Union.

Black Death exhibition

An interesting little exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London. It goes by the name of Treasures of the Black Death, and features Mediaeval jewellery and coins found at Erfurt in Germany in the 1990’s and at Colmar in France in the 19th Century. They were almost certainly buried by Jewish families at the time of the Black Death.

This pestilence was perhaps the worst disaster ever to afflict humankind – killing off maybe a third of the population of Europe. In the panic, the Jews often got the blame, and there were massacres at Frankfurt, Narbonne, Carcassone, Basel, Mainz and many other places. (In a variation on this theme, the islanders of Cyprus murdered their Arab slaves instead.)

As for the places featured in the exhibition – the city council at Colmar announced on December 29, 1348 that the cantor of the Strasbourg synagogue had admitted to sending someone to poison the wells at Colmar (this was a fairly standard accusation). The townspeople then burned the Jews outside the city gates.

More than 100 Jews were massacred at Erfurt in March 1349, and the rest were driven from the town. Later the town council invited them to return, though they added that they could not guarantee their safety. However, some clearly were brave enough to come back. In 1357, they built a new synagogue and by the following century, Erfurt had one of the most important Jewish communities in Germany.

The exhibition runs until May 10.

Two related anniversaries

On this day......76 years ago, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. In the dying months of the First World War, Hitler had been awarded the Iron Cross (the officer who recommended him for the decoration was Captain Hugo Guttman, a Jew). After the war, his dream of becoming an artist never came true, and he went off to run the propaganda operation of the National Socialist (Nazi) party.

After an abortive Nazi coup, he spent nine months in prison, and used the time to write the first volume of Mein Kampf in which he denounced Communism and the Jews. During the 1920’s the Nazis never managed to poll more than 6.5% in Reichstag elections, but then came Hitler’s big break – the Great Depression. Terrified by the spectre of Communism, big business began bankrolling him, and the rest is disaster history. The Nazis were setting up concentration camps within weeks, and through murder, forced labour, starvation, medical experiments etc, they killed perhaps 20 million people.

On the 12th anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power, on January 30, 1945, a ship named the Wilhelm Gustloff was carrying German refugees along with soldiers and sailors across the Baltic away from the advancing Russian forces. There were up to 10,500 people on board when she was hit by a torpedo from a Soviet submarine. It is believed that not more than 1,000 survived, making this the worst shipwreck in history.