29 December 2007

Radiation


My Ukrainian friend Taag, 2007

I doubt if Elena Filatova ever met my Ukrainian friend Taag, although they certainly were in proximity in the newly independent state at the same time. Elena was born in 1974, in the Soviet Union, and she gets around.

Taag was born in 1997, in what had become Ukraine. He is not as young as you would think, being a horse, but he is also a dark brunette though he has a bright blaze on his forehead.

Elena has a global network that radiates out in the web, and is a highly articulate brunette from Kiev. She is either quite mad, or a clever artist and entrepreneur.

She is also a figure of some controversy, though I would prefer to take her at face value. Like her, I am in search for something from Ukraine. She is looking for the story of the million who died or disappeared from her homeland. Taag is part of that story, though his winds north and west, through the Kaliningrad Oblast.

My part of it, going east, passes through England before it radiates across the Continent before following the Amber Road south.

If you care to lose yourself in it all, I recommend Elena's remarkable dreamlike work “Serpent's Wall,” which is a labor of web photojournalism. http://www.serpentswall.com. She rides motorbikes with abandon, and has another story about rides through the post-apocalypse world that stretches for miles and miles around the former reactor complex at Chernobyl.

She considers the radiation only dangerous if you stop, and her English account of it all has a poetic flair that is almost hypnotic. There are those who say it is bogus, too, but you can Google that up for yourself.

My search for the Ukraine started with some papers that are in Russian- Taag's documentation. That is how we wind up in the Kaliningrad Oblast, though I'm afraid I am going to have to drag you to London to get this all straight, or as straight as I am likely to get it.

The search is about Taag's bloodline and where he came from. In the horse world, it is of great importance in understanding capability and worth. We humans are not judged the same way, or at least we are not supposed to be. Elena has some words about that, and where today's Ukrainians come from.

Taag's great-grandparents are documented in sixteen narrow boxes the radiate down the grid of his lineage. They were all foaled in the late 1930s. The question at hand is where the barn was located, and what language in which the entries were made in the stud book.

I'm afraid that drags us back to London, and what happened on this very day a very long time ago. It was the second Great Fire in the City's history. This conflagration one was not an accident. The Germans came in aeroplanes that snarled in the night, dropping incendiary devices all over the sprawling metropolis.

Germany began dropping the fire-bombs on London through the orders of a plump former hero of the air from the First War named Hermann. He was an ardent nationalist and sensualist who was an early adopter of the Nazi Party. He parlayed his blue Pour leMerite into a position as Chief of the Luftwaffe with the rise of Hitler.

He had promised to bring England to its knees, and nearly did in the air campaign of 1940. This day in December was something special, though. This attack marked a shift from military and industrial target to one against civilians. It changed the tenor of something understandable, if brutal, to one that was frankly unforgivable.

Hermann dispatched 136 planes to drop 120 tons of high explosives and 24,000 incendiary devices on London. The aimpoint for the destruction was the cultural center of the British Empire, Saint Paul's Cathedral.

I was walking from the Tube station across Paternoster Road a half century after that night, and puzzled at the difference in the architecture in the buildings around the churchyard in comparison with the magnificence of Christopher Wren's soaring masterpiece.

I had one of those epiphanies when I realized that all around the church had been torched from the sky, and the great cathedral had nearly been turn to ashes and rubble, too.

Mr. Churchill had ordered the fire brigades to "Save St. Paul's!" at all costs, and Priests had scaled the lofty rafters to extinguish phosphorous canisters. That attack left 163 people dead and a full square mile- almost the whole of the City of London- in ruin and ash.

You cannot help but understand why Bomber Command took the whole thing personally, and later their American cousins, when they entered the conflict. The Germans had taken the armed struggle to a new level in the concept of total war.

Frustrated by their failure to cow the British, the cross-channel invasion code-named Operation SEALION was postponed and ultimately cancelled altogether. The Leader of all the Germans decided to leave open the war in the West, and send his legions to the East.

The decision to trick his erstwhile ally Uncle Joe is what ultimately did him in, though even with treachery so profound and supply-lines so long, the matter was a near-run thing. Many of the residents of Ukraine, who had suffered under the brutal yoke of the Communists from Moscow, were inclined to see the Germans as liberators, at least at first.

Having taken the concept of war to a new level in London, the Germans continued to perfect the art of annihilation with cold cruelty. A trickle of American aid began after Pearl Harbor, but became a flood across the chill waters, disgorging trucks and aircraft at Murmansk in quantities that staggered the imagination.

Uncle Joe convinced the peoples of his empire that this was a matter of blood- it was not hard after what happened at the cities named for himself and Lenin- and that the struggle would end with the total elimination of the enemy.

Elena's story of the Serpent Wall tells the tale of the titanic storm that raged across the plains of the Western Soviet Empire in a personal way, much more intimately than I can. Of course, the Ukrainians are still in Kiev, and Elena can tell their story, and that of the armies that passed over them with such fury.

There are no Germans left to tell the tale of what happened to the north, where the horses were. There are plenty of Russians in the Kaliningrad Oblast, and many Ukrainians. But no Germans.

Uncle Joe made sure they were fresh out.

I'll have to tell you about the equivalent of the Neutron Bomb that hit East Prussia tomorrow. You remember the big controversy, don't you? It was part of the big Reagan defense build up, and the concept of the “enhanced radiation weapon” became a major political issue.

Sam Cohen of Lawrence Livermore is generally credited with inventing the concept in the late 1950s, but it did not become a political football until Reagan re-started the production lines for the insidious things in 1981. The point of the W70 warhead was its use on the battlefield, since the effect was the low yield, but devastating effect on enemy personal through the burst of neutrons, which were quickly absorbed by the air.

This destructive property left much of the infrastructure intact and suitable for re-use, while eliminating the opponent. Previous methods were equally effective, but much more expensive and messier.

I'll tell you about that tomorrow, along with what happened to Hermann's hunting lodge, the horses and the priceless Amber Room.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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