#U.S. Air Force Europe

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

TOTAL WAR 1942 -- AIR ATTACK (MASSACRE OF INNOCENCE),OVER FRANCE.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on Flying Fortresses of the U.S. 8th Air Force escorted by Spitfires, making a daylight air attack on Fives-Lille Steel and locomotive works at Lille, Nazi-occupied France on 8-11-1942. These works can produce 100-150 main line engines per annum.

EXTRA INFO: Bombs from a Flying Fortress falling towards their target on 8th November 1942. The photo was later repurposed by Kelvin "Cal" Morris of DISCHARGE for the band's "WHY" 12 inch EP/mini-LP, released by Clay Records in May 1981.

Dis nightmare still @$!*#&% continues!!

Source: www.mediastorehouse.com/memory-lane-prints/mirror/1400to1499-01445/flying-fortresses-u-s-8th-air-force-escorted-21891004.html.

[my-vanishing-777]

A hierarchy based on skin tone plays an important role in the UAE’s sex industry, according to interviews with trafficked women and visits to spots where prostitutes congregate. Lighter-skinned women from Europe are generally trafficked into higher-end venues serving wealthier customers. Darker-skinned women are often steered to alleys and street corners, providing sex to low-income migrant workers from South Asia and Africa.

One Nigerian woman described being taken by a trafficker to an open-air brothel in the desert between Dubai and another emirate, Abu Dhabi. She and other women would take off their clothes and spread them on the ground, and men would come to have sex with them from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.

A Nigerian mother in her 20s said a trafficker led her and two other women to a parking lot in Ajman, one of the emirates that make up the UAE, and forced them to have sex with male clients amid vehicles that were being painted and repaired. At the end of the night, she said, the traffickers took all the money, leaving them with nothing to buy food.

After she broke free of the trafficker, the woman said, she slept in the streets and begged for food. She nearly lost her mind, she said, before a nurse from Nigeria rescued her and helped her get home.

The UAE’s sex industry is shaped by the country’s distinctive demographics and economy.

Nearly 90% of its population comes from somewhere else — mostly foreign workers employed in construction, hospitality and other industries. Most of them are men and they arrive alone. As a result, 69% of the UAE’s population is male. The government deals with these demographic realities by deploying extensive surveillance within the country — and by allowing a bustling sex trade as a way of pacifying male workers, according to two former diplomats who were based in the UAE and monitored sex trafficking.

[mercurygray]

Friends, I have failed you all. I've seen a lot of posts over the last week with a lot of great biographical detail about many of the flyers and aircrew who've been name-dropped so far in Masters of the Air - and I haven't seen a single thing about the one name that is directly in the center of this blog's lane.

In Part 2, returning from their mission to Trondheim, Cleven and Egan walk into the Interrogation hut and Egan accepts a cup of coffee from a woman he thanks as Tatty. Later on, at the dance, James Douglass remarks that he will be 'coming in hot' on one of the American Red Cross women on the other side of the room, and one of his friends asks "General Spaatz's daughter? Or the other one?"

Katherine "Tatty" Spaatz was a member of the American Red Cross Clubmobile service and the daughter of General Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, who commanded the Eighth Air Force on its move to England. (General Spaatz later moved to overall command of the entire Army Air Forces in the Europe Theatre of Operations, or ETO. He is, as the kids say, rather important.)

But we're not talking about him here. We're talking about her.

Katherine was 22 years old when she arrived in Europe with the Red Cross. (One of her traveling companions that trip was Kathleen Kennedy, daughter of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph P Kennedy Sr., also coming to serve overseas with the ARC.)

The American Red Cross's mission in Europe had many facets during the Second World War - in addition to activities we might think of today, like collecting blood, providing disaster relief at home and running first aid seminars, they were responsible for collecting and distributing packages for Prisoners of War.

They also operated large canteens like the Rainbow Corner club, a recreational facility in London where soldiers on leave could get a room for the weekend, a bite to eat, and a number of other amenities. Smaller clubs called Donut Dugouts provided a space where a serviceman could always be assured of a cup of hot coffee, a donut, and a pretty girl to talk to, specially recruited for being friendly, fair, approachable, and specially trained to be the girl next door overseas. In addition to these more permanent installations, they also operated the Clubmobile service, a mobile version of their popular Dugouts that moved operations into retooled Green Line Bus Company buses to take donuts and a taste of home to the front line.

Tatty, as she was called, worked on the Clubmobile "North Dakota" along with Julia "Dooley" Townsend, Virginia "Ginny" Sherwood, and Dorothy "Mike" Myrick. Life Magazine did a full article on their clubmobile in February of 1943, which you can read online at the link. There is another lovely blog post with pictures here. She also worked for a time in a more permanent post at the USAAF base at Snetterton Heath, and was later sent to France. You can read a little bit more about her and see more pictures at her bio page at the American Air Museum in Britain website.

If you'd like more information about Tatty, Helen, and women like them, as well as the Clubmobile service, consider reading the following:

Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys by James H. Madison Battlestars & Doughnuts: World War II Clubmobile Experiences of Mary Metcalfe Rexford War through the Hole of a Donut, by Angela Petesch Goodnight, Irene (fiction) - Although this is a novel, it is based on Luis Alberto Urrea's mother's time as a Clubmobile worker and her personal papers.

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

1970 Boss 429 Mustang

In 1970, lawyer and drag racer Al Eckstrand put together a Lawman Racing Team, consisting of two 780hp Boss 429 Mustang drag cars and six 428 Cobra Jet Mach 1s, to tour U.S. military facilities around the world. It was during the Vietnam War, and servicemen were happy to see some of the musclecars from back home.

Two Lawman Boss 429s were built, one for Eckstrand demonstrations in Southeast Asia and the other for use as a show car in Europe.

The first car was destroyed at sea when an 8-ton ship container fell on it (possibly the USS Coral Sea, ID 43).

So, Eckstrand hastily finished the second car, which was flown by Air Force transport to the south Pacific.

Over the next three years, the Lawman United States Performance Team performed demonstrations to an audience of over 240,000 servicemen.

In 1999, Eckstrand reacquired the Lawman Boss 429 from Sam Eidy, who had purchased the car and maintained it as a tribute to Eckstrand.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The HMS Queen Elizabeth docked in New York Harbor on August 31, 1945, carrying home thousands of troops who had fought in Europe. But happy families were no match for the fans and paparazzi who turned out to welcome home one of them, Colonel James Stewart of the U.S. Army Air Corps (now the Air Force).

Photo: Associated Press

[mariacallous]

This is dated 12-29-2023, for the record.

It was a nightmare scenario that Ukrainian and Western officials had feared for months. Western officials have watched as Russia stacked up precision-guided munitions to launch targeted attacks on Ukrainian critical infrastructure in the winter while keeping up the pace of strikes on cities using unguided “dumb” bombs. 

And on Friday morning, it became a reality. Russia conducted a hailstorm of strikes across Ukraine, hitting Kyiv, Dnipro, Lviv, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, and Kharkiv. There were at least 158 drone and missile strikes in all, which damaged hospitals, a shopping mall, and schools, killing at least 31 people and injuring more than 160. 

The numbers are still going up as search and rescue teams pick through the rubble. Russia fired its missiles with so much abandon that the Polish government confirmed one of the Kremlin’s projectiles entered its airspace. In the chaos that engulfed the Kyiv streets, one man tried to stop the fires from spreading by driving his burning car away from his neighbors. 

The renewed barrages have Ukrainian officials and U.S. experts questioning how long they’ll be able to keep the lights on during winter—or hold territory—especially with the long tail of U.S. military aid running out, unless Congress acts soon. 

Ukrainian officials believe that Russia’s capacity to strike is even greater than what it just showed off: The Kremlin can fire off about 300 Iranian-made suicide drones in one attack on Ukraine and about 150 ballistic missiles in one shot on Kyiv, said Sasha Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker.  

And with the Ukrainian counteroffensive stalled and fresh weapons not flowing until January at the earliest, how resilient will the Ukrainians be? 

“The Ukrainians are heading for a tough winter, for obvious reasons,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson said in an interview earlier this month. “But I think that the Ukrainian morale is much, much higher than the Russian morale. What is crucial right now, of course, is that we all will step up support.”

But that morale is now getting tested, as Ukrainians were shaken out of bed by dozens of air raid alerts that lit up their phones. And the aid isn’t coming—at least until the U.S. Congress gets back from recess in the second week of January, and maybe for even longer. 

“Ukraine needs funding now to continue to fight for freedom from such horror in 2024,” Bridget Brink, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, wrote in a tweet screenshotting the numerous air raid alerts sent to Kyiv residents.

U.S. officials have seen movement across the nearly stagnant front lines slow considerably in recent weeks, a trend that is expected to continue. The weather in Ukraine has hit subzero temperatures and piles of snow have mostly halted forward movement along the 600-mile front, underscoring the prospect of several months of attrition warfare. Ukraine is already making moves to lower the draft age to get more men onto the battlefield.  

Ukraine doesn’t need any silver bullets, experts say. It just needs the regular kind. 

“We’re clearly past the ground counteroffensive now,” said Peter Rough, a senior fellow and director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia at Hudson Institute. “Since it won’t get large numbers of longer-range precision fires, Ukraine probably needs to entrench and defend right now—and absent Congress passing the supplemental, even those defensive lines may not remain stable.” 

Still, Jonson said the Ukrainian military has been getting some access to more long-range strike weapons, which has forced Russian ships and aircraft to move farther away from the front lines. But Ukraine has had to build its military while fending off the invasion: Jonson said that Kyiv is operating about 600 types of Western weapons systems, while ferrying fuel and spare parts across the front line. All that on roads that will be coated with sleet, snow, and ice. 

Even with its limited arsenal of Western-provided long-range weapons like British-made Storm Shadows and the cluster variant of the U.S. Army Tactical Missile System, Ukraine has still made a dent, knocking out a Russian tank landing ship in Crimea on Tuesday. And experts believe that Russia’s fragile logistics system—which was never designed for continuous military operations across Europe’s second-largest country—is a good target.  

“If they had longer-range weapons, they could completely wreck the logistics system,” said Ben Hodges, the former head of U.S. Army Europe. “I think they know this is a real vulnerability for the Russians, particularly in winter.” 

But Ukrainians fear they are already running out of munitions—and time. Though Western-provided air defenses blanket much of Kyiv, they are not enough to defend against far-flung Russian attacks that could dot the country during winter. As much as Ukraine needs more air defenses to blunt attacks like Friday’s firestorm, Ukrainian officials have indicated that the falling temperatures have already shifted their priorities: Attrition warfare means a premium on artillery fire, and Europe is far behind on its target to produce a million artillery shells by March 2024.

“The biggest problem we’re going to run into is when they start shelling us heavily,” Ustinova said. “Because we will not have enough munitions.” 

But Ukraine has been forced to cut military operations as aid has dried up. Ukrainian Brig. Gen. Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, who heads up a group of forces in the southern push, told the BBC this week that Ukraine is facing particularly acute shortages of Soviet-era 122 mm and 152 mm shells, which still make up a large portion of Kyiv’s military arsenal. And if the Ukrainians want to apply forward pressure in spite of the snow, they have to clear entire minefields in front of them, only for the Russians to reseed the deadly explosives from the air. 

The Russian war chest is still heavily stocked. Hanno Pevkur, the Estonian defense minister, said in November that Russia still has about 7,000 to 8,000 tanks in reserve. Meanwhile, Russia has turned its sanctions-battered economy into a war economy. The Kremlin plans to spend 6 percent of GDP on defense next year. And Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deals for drones with Iran and ammunition with North Korea have indicated to Western officials that Russia’s game is quantity, not quality. 

“It doesn’t matter. As long as it fires, as long as it unfortunately kills Ukrainians, it is good for Russians,” Pevkur said. “They are increasing their production, especially ammunition. They don’t care about the quality. They care about the quantity.” 

Western officials believe that there are 300,000 to 400,000 Russian troops on Ukrainian soil, across a swath of occupied territory that is about the size of the contiguous Baltic states. Russian casualties have totaled about that many troops in the 22 months since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion began. But experts caution that the cannon fodder won’t last forever. It might not have to last that much longer, though.

In November, Russian forces claimed to gain ground around the eastern city of Avdiivka, where Western officials believe the Kremlin is trying to make a pincer move to encircle the town, the site of a major coke fuel and chemical plant. They’ve also set their sights on the important railway junction of Kupyansk. 

“They just keep pushing these guys into a meat grinder to convey the sense that they have endless resources,” Hodges said. “They don’t have endless resources.” 

For now, though, absent Western aid, Russia’s focus on eastern Ukraine could lead Kyiv to cede more ground. 

“That’s very painful for us, because we pay thousands of lives to get every single kilometer,” Ustinova said.  

“They are already taking more territory,” she added. “Look at the map.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

deAdder

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 28, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 29, 2024

Former president Trump appears to have slid further since last night’s news about a new grand jury’s superseding indictment of him on charges of trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Over the course of about four hours this morning, Trump posted 50 times on his social media platform, mostly reposting material that was associated with QAnon, violent, authoritarian, or conspiratorial. 

He suggested he is “100% INNOCENT,” and that the indictment is a “Witch Hunt.” He called for trials and jail for special counsel Jack Smith, former president Barack Obama, and the members of Congress who investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. And he reposted a sexual insult about the political careers of both Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign has today escalated the fight about Trump’s photo op Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, where campaign staff took photos and videos in Section 60, the burial ground of recent veterans, apparently over the strong objections of cemetery officials. Then the campaign released photos and a video from the visit attacking Harris. 

Arlington National Cemetery was established on the former property of General Robert E. Lee in 1864, after the Lee family did not pay their property taxes. At the time, Lee was leading Confederate forces against the United States government, and those buried in the cemetery in its early years were those killed in the Civil War. The cemetery is one of two in the United States that is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army, and it is widely considered hallowed ground.  

A statement from the Arlington National Cemetery reiterated: “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate's campaign. Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants. We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio first said there was a “little disagreement” at the cemetery, but in Erie, Pennsylvania, today he tried to turn the incident into an attack on Harris. “She wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?” Vance said. “She can go to hell.” Harris has not, in fact, commented on the controversy. 

VoteVets, a progressive organization that works to elect veterans to office, called the Arlington episode “sickening.”

In an interview with television personality Dr. Phil that aired last night, Trump suggested that Democrats in California each got seven ballots and that he would win in the state if Jesus Christ counted the votes. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post pointed out today, Trump has always said he could not lose elections unless there was fraud; last night he suggested repeatedly that God wants him to win the 2024 election.  

When asked his opinion of Vice President Harris, Trump once again called her “a Marxist,” a reference that would normally be used to refer to someone who agrees with the basic principles outlined by nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx in his theory of how society works. In Marx’s era, people in the U.S. and Europe were grappling with what industrialization would mean for the relationship between individual workers, employers, resources, and society. Marx believed that there was a growing conflict between workers and capitalists that would eventually lead to a revolution in which workers would take over the means of production—factories, farms, and so on—and end economic inequality.

Harris has shown no signs of embracing this philosophy, and on August 15, when Trump talked at reporters for more than an hour at his Bedminster property in front of a table with coffee and breakfast cereal at what was supposed to be a press conference on the economy, he said of his campaign strategy: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.” 

Trump uses “Marxist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, and when he and his allies accuse Democrats of being one of those things, they are not talking about an economic system in which the people, represented by the government, take control of the means of production. They are using a peculiarly American adaptation of the term “socialist.”

True socialism has never been popular in America. The best it has ever done in a national election was in 1912, when labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, running for president as a Socialist, won 6% of the vote, coming in behind Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. 

What Republicans mean by "socialism" in America is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when African American men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the economic system from which they had previously been excluded, these men voted for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as prosthetics for veterans, a vital need in the post-war U.S.), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to rise to prosperity. 

Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting almost as much as they hated the idea of equal rights. They insisted that the public programs poorer voters wanted were simply a redistribution of wealth from prosperous white men to undeserving Black Americans who wanted a handout, although white people would also benefit from such programs. Improvements could be paid for only with tax levies, and white men were the only ones with property in the Reconstruction South. Thus, public investments in roads and schools and hospitals would redistribute wealth from propertied men to poor people, from white men to Black people. It was, opponents said, “socialism.” Poor black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, "Socialism in South Carolina" and should be kept from the polls.

This idea that it was dangerous for working people to participate in government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the developing factories. Like their counterparts in the South, they voted for roads and schools, and wealthy men insisted these programs meant a redistribution of wealth through tax dollars. They got more concerned still when a majority of Americans began to call for regulation to keep businessmen from gouging consumers, polluting the environment, and poisoning the food supply (the reason you needed to worry about strangers and candy in that era was that candy was often painted with lead paint).

Any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man's liberty, wealthy men argued, and it would cost tax dollars to hire inspectors. Thus, they said, it was a redistribution of wealth. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers' government to life, Americans argued that their economy was under siege by socialists. Their conviction did indeed lead to a redistribution of wealth, but as regular Americans were kept from voting, the wealth went dramatically upward, not down.

The powerful formula linking racism to the idea of an active government and arguing that a government that promotes infrastructure, provides a basic social safety net, and regulates business is socialism has shaped American history since Reconstruction. In the modern era the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 enabled wealthy men to convince voters that their tax dollars were being taken from them to promote the interests of Black Americans. President Ronald Reagan made that formula central to the Republican Party, and it has lived there ever since, as Republicans call any policy designed to help ordinary Americans “socialism.”

Vice President Harris recently said she would continue the work of the Biden administration and crack down on the price-fixing, price gouging, and corporate mergers that drove high grocery prices in the wake of the pandemic. Such plans have been on the table for a while: Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) noted last year that from July 2020 through July 2022, inflation rose by 14% and corporate profits rose by 75%. He backed a measure introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—who came up with the idea of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that would set standards to prevent large corporations from price gouging during an “exceptional market shock” like a power grid failure, a public health emergency, a natural disaster, and so on. Harris’s proposal was met with pushback from opponents saying that such a law would do more harm than good and that post-pandemic high inflation was driven by the market.

Yesterday, during testimony for an antitrust case, an email from the senior director for pricing at the grocery giant Kroger, Andy Groff, to other Kroger executives seemed to prove that those calling out price gouging were at least in part right. In it, Groff wrote: “On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[cuzikan]

1970 Boss 429 Lawman Mustang being loaded aboard the USS Coral Sea. 🇺🇲

In 1970, lawyer and drag racer Al Eckstrand put together a Lawman Racing Team, consisting of two 780hp Boss 429 Mustang drag cars

and six 428 Cobra Jet Mach 1s, to tour U.S. military facilities around the world. It was during the Vietnam War, and servicemen were happy to see some of the musclecars from back home.

Two Lawman Boss 429s were built, one for Eckstrand demonstrations in Southeast Asia and the other for use as a show car in Europe.

The first car was destroyed at sea when an 8-ton ship container fell on it

(possibly the USS Coral Sea, ID 43).

So, Eckstrand hastily finished the second car, which was flown by Air Force transport to the south Pacific.

Over the next three years, the Lawman United States Performance Team performed demonstrations to an audience of over 240,000 servicemen.

In 1999, Eckstrand reacquired the Lawman Boss 429 from Sam Eidy, who had purchased the car and maintained it as a tribute to Eckstrand.

[nocternalrandomness]

"Mighty Eighth" by Greg Carroll

During World War II, Eighth Air Force earned a reputation as a great warfighting organization. Originally, the U.S. Army Air Forces activated the Eighth at Savannah, Georgia, on 28 January 1942 with three major subordinate units: the VIII Bomber Command (BC), the VIII Fighter Command (FC), and the VIII Ground Air Services Command (GASC).

During World War II, under the leadership of such generals as Ira Eaker and Jimmy Doolittle, the VIII BC (then Eighth Air Force) formed the greatest air armada in history. By mid-1944, the unit had a total strength of more than 200,000 people, and it could send more than 2,000 four-engine bombers and 1,000 fighters on a single mission against enemy targets in Europe. For this reason, Eighth Air Force is commonly known as the "Mighty Eighth."

[good-old-gossip]

U.S. Government PROUDLY ARMS & SPONSORS TERRORISTS

On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken approved a new batch of arms sales to Israel, totalling over $20bn in military equipment, according to the Pentagon.

In a statement, the Pentagon said, "The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to US national interests to assist Israel in developing and maintaining a strong and ready self-defense capability. This proposed sale is consistent with those objectives."

The Pentagon confirmed that Blinken approved the potential sale of F-15 jets and related equipment worth nearly $19 billion.

Additionally, he approved the possible sale of tank cartridges valued at approximately $774m and army vehicles worth $583m.

The tank rounds would be almost immediately available for delivery.

This multibillion-dollar package is the latest in a series of arms deals that Israel is set to receive from the US, adding to the $14bn in additional military aid approved earlier this year.

The sale comes amid mounting criticism of the Biden administration for continuing to authorise arms transfers to Israel despite the death toll in Gaza approaching more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Since Israel's war on Gaza began last October, Israeli forces have destroyed much of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, mosques, and UN shelters.

Over the past ten months, the Biden administration has transferred hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms and munitions to Israel.

Weapons sales as ICC warrants loom The weapons sales to Israel come despite the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on the grounds of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Gallant and Netanyahu face war crimes and crimes against humanity charges over the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; wilfully causing great suffering; wilful killing; intentional attacks on a civilian population and extermination, alongside several other charges.

Even as the US continues to pump billions worth of weapons to Israel, the country increasingly boasts record sales from its weapons industry internationally. Israel's defence ministry said in June that its arms exports for 2023 hit a record in sales.

The report by the defence ministry said that the total exports of Israeli arms reached $13.1bn in 2022, an increase of $500m from the previous year and double the amount of exports from five years ago.

More than a third of the sales comprised missiles, rockets and air-defence systems, with one of the biggest contracts of 2023 being with Germany, which signed a deal to purchase the Arrow 3 long-range air defence system for around $4bn.

"While our industries are primarily focused on providing the defence establishment with the capabilities to support our troops and defend our citizens, they are also continuing to pursue areas of cooperation and exports to international partners," Israeli Defence Minister Gallant said in a statement.

Roughly half, 48 percent, of all sales, went to the Asia and Pacific region, while Europe accounted for 35 percent of sales, and North America accounted for nine percent.

[whencyclopedia]

Interview: Refugees & Reformation in 16th-Century Frankfurt

In the 16th century, German cities and territories welcomed thousands of refugees fleeing the religious persecution sparked by the Protestant Reformation. In Strange Brethren: Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608, Professor Maximilian Miguel Scholz explores one major destination for refugees—Frankfurt am Main—and underscores how they inspired new religious bonds, religious animosities, and religious institutions. In this interview, James Blake Wiener speaks to him about his title and the unique social climate that pervaded the Hessian city.

Cover: Strange Brethren: Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608

Association of University Presses (Copyright, fair use)

JBW: Professor Scholz, thank you so much for speaking with me on behalf of World History Encyclopedia (WHE). When many think of Protestant refugees in the Early Modern Era, their minds usually turn to the plight of Huguenots or Anabaptists. Many of them found refuge in cities like London, Amsterdam, Geneva, and Hamburg. What was it that first attracted you to the history of 16th-century Frankfurt am Main? Moreover, what differentiated Frankfurt am Main from other Protestant cities within the Holy Roman Empire?

MS: Frankfurt hosted thousands of refugees in the 16th century. It still does today! But the city is often overlooked because the documents pertaining to its 16th-century experience of refugee accommodation were destroyed by the U.S. and British militaries in 1944. I wanted to shine new light on Frankfurt’s centrality in the story of Protestant refugees. Frankfurt lay at the center of Germany, which it still does today. It was also the symbolic capital of Germany, where the Holy Roman Emperors were elected and crowned. (After the Second World War, there was a push to make Frankfurt the capital of Germany once more.) Frankfurt was the transportation hub of Germany then as it still is now. If we want to understand how refugees impacted German society, Frankfurt is the ideal place to start. Beyond its prominence in Germany, Frankfurt was different from other German cities because its Reformation had followed the lead of Martin Bucer rather than Martin Luther (though of course Frankfurters loved Luther too). Bucer had advocated for reforms that fell somewhere between the later Calvinist and Lutheran camps.

Religions in Europe in the 16th Century

Simeon Netchev (CC BY-NC-ND)

JBW: Repeated bombing by British and American air forces destroyed many of Frankfurt’s churches and archives in 1944. If I’m not mistaken, Frankfurt was formerly the largest half-timbered city center in Germany too, so a great deal was lost in a very short period of time. Could you comment on the tremendous hurdles you and fellow scholars face in researching Frankfurt am Main’s Early Modern history as a result?

MS: Yes, Frankfurt’s archive suffered grievously. The archive’s director believed the Nazi fantasy that Germany was impervious to assault, so he did not protect the archive’s treasures by moving them underground. Thus, the bombings of 1944 destroyed about 70% of the archive’s holdings, including the Acta Ecclesiastica, which documented the birth of Protestantism in Frankfurt. Historians interested in the religious changes of the 16th century need to use either non-civic sources (like the records of the Dutch and French Reformed communities in Frankfurt, which were not housed at the archive) or reproductions of the original sources, which can be found in the appendices of many pre-WWII histories of Frankfurt. My book relied on documents from an imperial court case in 1720. The Dutch and French Reformed (i.e. Calvinists) sued the city of Frankfurt at the imperial supreme court, and both the sides collected and printed documents from the Reformation that they believed helped their case.

Reformation Wall

Henri Bouchard and Paul Landowski  (CC BY-SA)

JBW: Frankfurt am Main received French-, Dutch-, and English-speaking Protestant refugees throughout the 1550s, 1560s, and 1570s. Many of the earliest refugees were the so-called “Marian exiles.” Who were these early exiles, what brought them to Frankfurt am Main, and how long did they stay in Hesse?

MS: These exiles were the earliest Protestants (though they did not call themselves that), and they were fleeing Catholic rulers. The point of contention was the Catholic mass. The refugees in my book refused to attend the Catholic mass, because they rejected the idea that a priest could perform a ritual on an altar that would summon forth the actual body of Jesus. These people considered this idolatrous and believed the mass should be replaced by a simplified eucharist, which would focus on the Bible and memorialize the Last Supper. The Catholic authorities began to violently persecute those who did not attend the mass, and these early Protestants faced a choice: be martyred at home or flee abroad. Thousands fled to Frankfurt, which as an independent city (it was not then part of Hesse) could rule its own religious affairs, to an extent. In the case of English Protestants fleeing the Catholic Queen Mary I of England (the Marian exiles), they returned when she died and was replaced by the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England. Thus, they were in Frankfurt for just five years. Other refugees from the Low Countries settled in Frankfurt and have descendants who still live in the city.

JBW: Professor Scholz, how did Lutheran elites and ordinary citizens in Frankfurt am Main first react to the presence of Calvinist refugees? What subsequently changed over the next few decades?

MS: At first, they welcomed them. They considered these newcomers brethren, who had suffered under the cruel rule of tyrannical Catholics like Charles V and Mary Tudor. But it proved difficult to live alongside these newcomers, many of whom were richer than the citizens of Frankfurt. When Frankfurters witnessed the church services of the refugees, they realized that these people practiced Christianity differently. Frankfurters were scandalized that the refugees took the bread of the eucharist into their own hands. And they were further disgusted that the refugees brought their screaming children with them into the churches. Frankfurt’s pastors were the first to turn on the newcomers, demanding that they conform to Frankfurt’s ritualistic practices or leave the city. The pastors whipped up a popular hatred of the refugees.

Martin Bucer

Unknown Artist (Public Domain)

JBW: I think some readers who are relatively unfamiliar with the history of the Protestant Reformation may be surprised to learn about the high degree of confessional strife and rivalry between Calvinists and Lutherans. Could you thus explain to us how officials in Frankfurt am Main ultimately circumscribed Calvinist worship and freedom?

MS: The refugees and native Frankfurters split into two religious camps that we now call Calvinist (they called themselves Reformed) and Lutheran (they called themselves Evangelical), and this division became violent at times. For Americans, living in a country that has separated religion from government, it can be hard to imagine how little differences in worship or belief could have resulted in legal trouble, expulsion, or worse. Once Frankfurt’s leaders concluded that the refugees were “Calvinists” they banned them from applying for citizenship and closed their churches. Periodic riots against the refugee community resulted in deaths and the burning down of a small chapel the Reformed had built outside the city wall.

JBW: How would you characterize the Calvinist refugees’ religious and civic impact upon Frankfurt am Main? Can we still detect their legacy in the city today?

MS: They enriched Frankfurt enormously by bringing in goods and industry from the Low Countries. The Low Countries were the most industrially advanced part of Europe, and the Protestants who fled places like Antwerp took their industrial know-how with them into German cities like Frankfurt. And when Frankfurt began to harass these newcomers, they settled in little towns outside of Frankfurt, towns which became (and still are) hubs of industry, like Hanau and Offenbach.

Frankfurt on the Main, c. 1617

Matthäus Merian (Public Domain)

JBW: What lessons can we draw from the experiences of the Calvinist refugees in Frankfurt am Main that could perhaps be applied to our own era?

MS: Welcoming, resettling, and integrating refugees into a city can be very difficult and may provoke problems that persist for generations. But it is not impossible. The internal cultural organizations of a refugee community (like the Calvinist consistory in 16th-century Frankfurt) can help facilitate financial support for refugees, management of their affairs, and integration into the host city. We need to confront the reality that it may take generations for refugees and their descendants to embrace (and be embraced by) host societies.

JBW: Professor Scholz, thanks so much for your time and consideration! I wish you many happy adventures in writing and research.

MS: Thank you so much for your questions.

Professor Maximilian Miguel Scholz

Association of University Presses (Copyright, fair use)

Biographical précis:

Professor Maximilian Miguel Scholz specializes in the social and religious history of early modern Europe and teaches at Florida State University. His first book, Strange Brethren: Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608 (University of Virginia Press, 2022) explores the fate and impact of Reformation refugees by looking at one center of European refugee life, the city of Frankfurt am Main. His second book, tentatively titled The Great Refugee Realignment: How Forced Migrants Transformed Government in Northern Europe, 1550-1750 uses refugee treaties collected from archives across Europe to illuminate the ways refugees transformed governments, stimulating the growth of centralized bureaucracies and contributing new ideas about political membership and new systems for managing religious, ethnic, and migration-status diversity.

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[usafphantom2]

On August 13, 1981, Jay Reid and I made the first SR-71 landing in Continental Europe. It was virtually unannounced—and not particularly welcomed.

There is no doubt that our presence was heralded to Soviet personnel on the ground by the sweet (and rather loud) sound of freedom: the distinctive double-sonic boom of the 2,200 mile-per-hour SR-71.

The Soviet Union claimed their sovereign territory extended 100 nautical miles from their land mass. The international norm is 12 miles. Heading inbound, we turned so that we flew within 12.5 miles of the Soviet coast in a 30-degree right-banked turn while obtaining radar imagery (or photographs) and recording Soviet electronic countermeasures.

This somewhat provocative technique was trolling: we stimulated the Soviet defenses, causing their radios and radar to bristle with electronic information, thus impelling them to reveal telltale electromagnetic signatures indicating the type of equipment, modes of operation, and limits. There were sometimes other American assets offshore, but within radio range, which also collected electronic transmissions.

Our indication was the illumination of the left-engine oil supply low-quantity red warning light. From our training and experience with the aircraft emergency checklists, we knew immediately that this required that we “land as soon as possible. While Jay was transmitting our mandatory abort reports via high-frequency, long-range radio, I contacted Norwegian Approach Control. Our orders were not to broadcast that we were flying an SR-71, but rather give the general type as “U.S. Air Force Tactical,” which really meant nothing to a controller concerned about arranging for emergency equipment, and notifying proper authorities of our emergency condition.

My call sign was “Belmont 86” and my transmissions to approach control were something like this:

“Bodø Approach, Belmont 86, six-zero miles west, declaring an in-flight emergency, request straight-in approach to land on runway zero seven.”

“Belmont 86, say aircraft type, nature of emergency, souls-on-board, and fuel remaining.”

“Bodø Approach, Belmont 86, US Air Force Tactical, engine problem, 2 souls, zero plus four-five fuel-on-board.

The reception was well taken, but when it came time to feed us, there is nothing on the table, but four different smelling bowls of fish! I asked for cornflakes, and thankfully, they rustled up some.

We are thankful that Norway treated the United States SR 71 crewmember so well on the four times that they were forced to land there while flying missions nearby in the 1980s.

@Habubrats71 via X

[girlactionfigure]

⚠️ DEVELOPING: U.S. military bases in Germany, Italy, Romania and Bulgaria raise threat level to 'Charlie' due to possible threat. 

Highest threat level in at least 10 years, according to CNN. 

US military bases in Europe raise security threat levels U.S. military bases in Europe were put on a heightened state of alert over the weekend as installations urged vigilance among their members.

At U.S. European Command headquarters in Stuttgart, the Army garrison on Sunday issued a communitywide alert that the force protection threat level was elevated to condition “Charlie” until further notice. Similar directives were sent to other bases in Germany, including the Army’s Rheinland-Pfalz and Ramstein Air Base, which together form the largest U.S. military community overseas. The Rheinland-Pfalz garrison alert includes Baumholder and outlying installations in Romania and Bulgaria. Aviano Air Base in Italy also rose its condition level to Charlie, and other installations in Italy introduced enhanced security measures. The Charlie threat level “applies when an incident occurs or intelligence is received indicating some form of terrorist action or targeting against personnel or facilities is likely,” according to the Army’s website.

Read more at: Stars&Stripes

[zvaigzdelasas]

If we want a prosperous Ukraine with a viable path toward liberal governance and European Union membership, we will have to concede that it cannot be a NATO or U.S. ally, and that this neutral Ukraine must have verifiable limits on the types and quantities of weapons it may hold. If we refuse to agree to those terms, Russia will quite probably turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional wreck incapable of rebuilding itself, allying with the West, or constituting a military threat to Russia.

Russian progress is not yet evident on the map, where the battle lines have not moved appreciably over the past year. Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed to break through Russian defenses, and Russia has not pushed Ukrainian forces significantly westward. An observer comparing territorial holdings in January 2023 with January 2024 might reasonably conclude that the war has become a stalemate.

But this picture is misleading. The Kremlin is almost certainly not seeking such a breakthrough, at least not yet. Rather, it is methodically grinding down Ukraine’s capacity not only to wage war, but also to reconstitute a post-war military, by killing and wounding enormous numbers of Ukrainian soldiers and exhausting Ukrainian and Western arsenals of arms and ammunition. Ukraine is running short of artillery shells, and the U.S. and Europe cannot manufacture new ones quickly enough to meet Ukraine’s needs. Russian barrages of long-range air and missile strikes are increasingly overwhelming the capacity of Ukrainian air defenses, and the West simply lacks the ability to continue providing Patriot missiles or other advanced air defense systems.

It is quite true, as the Biden administration has warned, that ending U.S. aid to Kyiv would quickly result in Ukraine’s collapse. Sufficient aid to help Ukraine to stand successfully on the defensive should therefore continue. But what U.S. policymakers need to understand and honestly acknowledge is that absent a compromise peace settlement, massive levels of aid will have to continue not just for the coming year, but indefinitely. There is very little realistic chance of the West being able to outlast Russia and force it to accept peace on Ukrainian terms. The controversies in Congress over aid to Ukraine reflect these realities and are unlikely to diminish.

Under such circumstances, for the Biden administration to pledge American support to Ukraine for “as long as it takes” to defeat Russia is unwise, and even dishonest. It is widely believed in Washington that the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive means that the West has no choice but to back Ukraine’s fight against Russia for many years to come. Seeking compromise with Moscow is regarded as not only undesirable but also futile. Lacking alternatives, we must stay the present course, hoping that time will improve Ukraine’s position.

But time is not on Ukraine’s side, either militarily or economically, and so Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations may well be very much worse than at present. Russia’s population is at least four times that of Ukraine and its GDP 14 times. The Russian army is far better led and more tactically adept than it was at the start of the war, and Western sanctions show no signs of being able to cripple the Russian economy, which is more and more geared for war.

And whatever Brussels may say, as long as the war continues it is exceptionally unlikely that Ukraine will be able to develop economically and begin the extremely difficult process of joining the European Union.

Most importantly, the United States has not tested the assumption that Russian President Vladimir Putin has no interest in talking. It is indeed very likely that Putin believes Russia now has the upper hand in the war and can afford to wait. Nonetheless, Putin has repeatedly insisted that Russia is ready to talk, and also that Washington – not Kyiv – makes the key decisions in the war and therefore it is for Washington to engage in talks.

This may be posturing; but it is also possible that Putin recognizes that absent a settlement, Russia is headed toward the dangers of a permanently volatile confrontation with the West, an economy distorted by the demands of military production, and a constricting degree of dependence on China. Russians’ concerns about these problems are likely to grow as their fears they may lose the war in Ukraine diminish.

It is further alleged that Putin believes that a future Donald Trump presidency would be the Kremlin’s best hope for a settlement on Russian terms. However, Trump’s first term produced some friendly rhetoric but much hostile action toward Moscow, including withdrawal from nuclear arms agreements and increased flows of U.S. weapons and training for the Ukrainian army.[...]

Given that Russia now has the advantage on the battlefield and senses that time is on its side, to get Putin to end the war and end his ambition to subjugate Ukraine or seize more territory, Washington will have to offer some serious incentives. These will need to include showing that the U.S. is prepared to meet Russian concerns about the U.S. and NATO security threat to Russia (concerns that are genuinely held throughout the Russian establishment).

This will mean agreement to a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality, with security guarantees for Ukraine, that will allow that country to follow neutral Finland and Austria during the Cold War and develop as a free market democracy. Western sanctions against Russia would need at least to be eased if not suspended, but with a binding commitment that they would automatically resume if Russia launched new aggression.

An agreement along these lines would be extremely painful for both Ukraine and the Biden administration. However, we should see preserving the independence of 80 percent of Ukraine as a real victory, even if not a complete one. It is certainly far better than what appears to be the alternative: a war of attrition with dreadful losses for Ukraine, leading sooner or later to a far greater Ukrainian defeat.

11 Jan 24