24 August 2003

It was cool on the balcony. James Wilkins, Staff Meteorologist of The Weather Channel tells me that the dry air will continue here for a few days. That should be good for the merchants at the shore, and the run-up to the last big holiday of the season. The coolness makes me dream of the sadness that hangs in the air with the smell of the grills back home, back Up North, where the coolness in the morning is the first hint of the wintry blast that is coming as inevitable as an avalanche. The end of summer is upon us, says the gentle cool breeze. It will be hot again here in Washington, that is the nature of this place in the bogs along the Potomac. Back home they will have a few weeks of Indian summer, the last farewell. In a week the tourists will be packing to go and in two weeks they all will be gone. The summer people will have shuttered up the cabins and will be hunkered down once more in their brick cities across the Midwest, leaving the beaches almost pristine and the merchants bored behind their silent cash registers.

The cool dry air and the hot steaming coffee begiosn to move the fog from my forebrain. It had been a gret evening for a housewarming last night, a joyous celebration the completion of a twenty-seven month reconstruction of an already nice home over in a leafy neighborhood south of the Seven Corners. The Admiral and his wife had done the job right. The windows were replaced and light flooded the rooms. The ceilings were raised and the floors were sanded and the good bones of the brick house were saved. A mighty soaring glass atrium had been added in the back amid the landscaping that made you think you were alone in the country and not huddled in a neighborhood off the Leesburg Pike. The beer was cold, and the company was superb. The stories of our shared history were raucous, victories won and careers well served. The last of the guests shoveled themselves out the door quite late, or at least late by Washington standards. We stayed because we genuinely enjoyed the celebration of the commissioning of a place in which to live life well.

Living life well may be the only thing that matters. After honor, of course. Today is the anniversary of the end of living well for the people of Pompeii and Herculanium, the two little towns on the flank of Mount Vesuvius. The houses were warmed to incandescence. The former was smothered in ash to the rooftop. The latter was buried in molten liquid mud to a depth of more than a hundred feet. They knew something about living well, those ancients, and I walked through the Scavi, the excavations, one time, in a soft Italian rain. Eternal optimists, the Italians rebuilt and a modern village sites on top of the hardened wall of mud, and at the edge of the dig I placed a hand on the natural wall, realizing suddenly that most of the ancient city is still under the mud, frozen in time. This is not a good day for the ancient Empire. The Eternal City was conquered on their version of this warm summer day by the Visigoths. After eleven centuries on top they were off their game that day. Aleric was king of these vandals, and the Roman Senate was frankly perplexed when their delegation met the German at the Gates. "What will you leave us?" asked the Senate.

"Your lives" said the German, and then he burned the houses of Rome.

I drink coffee and wait for all the mental fog to clear. The media is abuzz with word from the Massachusetts prison system that defrocked priest John Geoghan, convicted serial child molester is dead. He died Saturday after an incident with another inmate about noon and was pronounced shortly after being taken to Leominster Hospital. There is no word on whether he got the Last Rites of the Catholic Church. The Department Of Corrections says they are going to do an autopsy tomorrow to see if he is really dead. I don't know what they expect to find. He was reportedly strangled by another inmate who is serving a life sentence and had absolutely nothing to lose. Father John had been abusing kids for decades in Boston, and I really can't dredge up much feeling about it except a certain guilty pleasure in the fact that someone did him for a change.

"The other inmate involved was immediately identified and isolated," said the Corrections Department spokeswoman. That is useful, I suppose. Not that he was going anywhere, and the trial for this crime will only be a distraction from life as usual in high security. He has apparently been bored of late. The radio says he enjoys murdering older people and was responsible for an anthrax hoax from his cell last year.

Something else happened today, not a long time ago by Roman standards. The Fuhrer should have stayed out of the military business. He obviously had some sort of twisted genius for politics, at least as they are practiced by today's Visigoths. But his undeniable heroism as the divisional message-bearer in World War One hardly prepared him to be the general of the ages. Saddam had the same problem, so maybe it is an endemic trait that goes along political types who become absolute despots. Aleric rose from the military side of the house, and he was pretty good at it.

Anyhow, the Fuhrer and his merry men had swept to the Channel and knocked the French into servitude in 1940. The preparations for the cross-channel invasion of Britain, an operation called Sea Lion, had begun. But first the Royal Air Force had to be neutralized. The British were still licking their wounds after the miraculous evacuation of the Expeditionary Force from the beaches of Dunkirk. Several weeks passed while the Luftwaffe replaced pilots and materiel and established themselves at aerodromes in northwestern France. The lull as the German forces consolidated was vital in permitting the Royal Air force to prepare. By the beginning of July 1940, the RAF had 640 fighters. Opposing them Goering had assembled 2600 bombers and fighters. The stage was set for the Battle of Britain, the battle Napoleon never pulled off. If Hitler could knock the Brits out of the war, Germany's western flank would be secure and every resource of the Gothic war machine could be applied to the destruction of Russia.

On the 24th of August, 1940, the weather over the Channel was mainly fine, though overcast and cloudy in the North. It was a busy day. Just before 9:00am a large raid of over 40 Junker Ju-88's and Dornier Do-17's appeared, escorted by over Messerschmidt Me-109 fighters. The RAF scrambled Hurricanes and Spitfires to oppose them over the white cliffs of Dover. Contrails marked the sky in wild circular patterns. More raids came later in the morning, and after lunch. The RAF scrambled to intercept in each case, but some of the bombers got through, warming the targgets. The point of this phase ofhte battle, from the perspective of the Luftwaffe High Command, was to kill the Hurricanes and Spitfires, and most particularly, kill the young men that flew them. All the aircraft in the world meant nothing if there were no experienced pilots to bring them to life.

Toward tea-time, more Heinkels and Dorniers and Messerschmidts were engaged over North Weald by RAF fighters from Duxford. More fighters scrambled Biggin Hill, and tangled with the escort fighters Essex, the Thames Estuary and Kent. Later during the raid, Hurricanes were scrambled from Hawkinge to engage Me109's south of London. The Luftwaffe permitted the RAF crews no time for a cuppa. The British fighters landed, rearmed and launched again as fast as they could. The Luftwaffe reappeared over the Isle of Wight with Stuka dive-bombers, sirens wailing from their wings to spread terror on the ground, and they roared Portsmouth to attack the docks of the ancient naval base. Another dinner-time raid was turned back, but the German operations continued through the night. The Luftwaffe hit targets across southern England, South Wales, the Midlands, Liverpool, Middlesborough, Sheffield, Hull and East Anglia.

On this summer day, the Royal Air Force lost 32 aircraft damaged or destroyed, but more importantly, ten 10 pilots were killed and another 10 wounded. At that rate, the RAF would be out of the fighter pilot business in a few months, and the Luftwaffe would own the sky over England.

On this day, so far, the game had been played by the rules. It had been military, or at least military-associated, targets that were hit. That was in accordance with the treaty and the laws of war. But a late raid this particular summer day would change human affairs as we know them. Against Luftwaffe High Command orders, and we should remember that it was a mistake made by young men in the heat of combat over a foreign country. bombs were accidentally dropped on areas of London where there were only civilians. And British civilians died.

Air Marshall Harris of RAF Bomber Command was given permission to retaliate. He struck Berlin with incendiary bombs, tit for tat. The attack infuriated Hitler, and like I said, he was no real strategic thinker. He commanded his Lufftwaffe to begin the destruction of Britain's cities, one by one. He decided to break the British national will to resist. You remember what Churchill had to say about all this, and I don't need to repeat his immortal words here. You will remember, I hope, what we all owe to those young men of RAF's Fighter Command.

My Uncle Jim met one of The Few in Canada much later, mid-way through the war. He asked him what it had been like and the pilot, old beyond his years, looked at him blankly. He did not remember. He said one time he woke in his cockpit. He was in flight.. He had a lap-full of incendiary grenades and he was over water in darkness. His cockpit was open and the wind roared. He surmised that he had been ordered to throw the bomblets at Nazi surface raiders if he could find them. But he was not sure. He told my Uncle that it was not heroism in any way he could explain. It was survival. For six months it was like that, ragged, scared, and fatigued beyond living. The pilot later returned to action and was killed in the last year of the fighting over Germany.

Well, long story short, Hitler's change in tactics permitted the few pilots of the Royal Air Force to live, and to fight on. It meant that London would have the Blitz, Central London and Saint Paul's warmed in fire. It meant that Coventry would die in November to protect the secret of the broken German codes. And it meant ultimately that Aleric's descendants would get back, obliquely, the revenge of ancient Rome from another imperial outpost.

Bomber Command would not give the Goths the same laconic assurance Aleric gave the Roman Senate. The rules had changed for civilians.

Forever.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra.