The Merchant
(A German First World War medal awarded to submariner Paul Konig Photo: the Telegraph and CHRISTOPHER PLEDGER).
If you like your weather predicted by large furry rodents, you are in luck this morning.
I hope you have put some money on the Super Bowl’s outcome as predicted by the Manatees of Florida, who are going with a five-year winning streak. I think I heard of some other top-notch prognosticator from the Animal Kingdom has chimed in as well. But to the point this morning, with another Polar Vortex storm scouring its way across Fly Over Country, I am prepared to believe Punxsutawney Phil.
He emerged from his Pennsylvania burrow at Gobbler’s Knob a couple hours ago and saw his shadow. Or at least we think he saw his shadow- this is all subject to interpretation by Phil’s entourage- and thus predicted six more weeks of winter.
Duh.
I have the car packed to go back up north, but got stuck on other matters once I knew it was going to stay cold. In general order, I had a sobering exchange with the professional group about leadership failure in the British Army writ large and in specific regarding the horror of the assault at Passchendaele in 1917. The battle was also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, or “Wipers,” as the Tommies of the day would have said before being drowned in the mud or blown to smithereens.
(The Flanders village of Passchendaele, before and after, 1917).
We batted around the unimaginable numbers of The Glorious Dead, a phrase that must have been said with a straight face a generation ago. Think of it, in just one of these bloodbaths over a half million wounded or killed outright in a campaign that lasted only from late October to December when even the dolts in command tired of feeding the meat-grinder.
That strand of discourse wandered off into the musing about Lance Corporal Hitler’s service during the battle, and how the whims of war let him live, and the fact that his Iron Cross First Class citation (our equivalent of the Silver Star) was submitted by a Jewish Staff Officer of the his regiment.
So, this morning was thoroughly shot with cautionary tales, and remember, we have four more years of the centennial to get through and we have not even approached The Guns of August.
I have no idea if we are going to see something like that happen between an increasingly cantankerous Japan and a rising China- with Uncle Sam getting dragged along for the ride in something similar to the slow-motion juggernaut that produced the maelstrom that destroyed the Old World and made inevitable the one in which we live.
So, aside from learning some new (and cautionary) fun facts about unimaginable horror, I ran across something else. This one comes from our cousins at The Daily Telegraph, and is another thing of which I was blissfully unaware when I rose late at the farm. If you prefer, the entire article by Jasper Copping is at:
It is a story that has everything. Action, danger, romance and high explosives.
(Paul and Kathleen Konig).
English-born Kathleen König and her husband Paul were living in Germany when the criminal stupidity broke out in August of 1914. Being proper Victorians, they vowed their love for one another and Kathleen made preparations to return to England for the duration of the conflict.
Paul was a merchant sailor (which probably accounts for the couple’s ability to handle separation- many Navy couples say the marriages were saved by deployments) but he found himself called to the most amazing story I had never heard about.
Here is what it was: The Kaiser’s ministers realized the blockade of Germany by the Royal Navy was crippling the war effort. A way had to be found to get around it and import raw materials from the non-combatant nations, namely the United States.
Accordingly, they constructed civilian merchant submarines to run the blockade. This is hardly new news- “merchant” subs for contraband are a stock in trade for the drug cartels these days, but the German version was truly a machine built to work in the world ocean. The subs were beamy and unarmed- they were designed to be “innocent” non-combatants. Paul’s sub was “213 feet long with a top speed of 15 knots on the surface and 7 knots while submerged.”
Paul was awarded his cross of iron for an amazing journey through the steel thicket of the Royal Navy. He called at the Port of Baltimore, a city with a large German population and was welcomed as a hero. He and the crew of the Deutschland were invited to tour the White House.
(The merchant submarine Deutschland of the Deutsche Ozean-Reederei, a subsidiary company of the North German Lloyd Shipping Company, 1916. Photo Hapag-Lloyd).
The dangers of conducting merchant operations in a theater of war were stark. The sister boat to Deutschland was sunk on its maiden voyage, with a loss of all hands.
The enterprising Germans were building six more of the merchant subs when the United States entered the war. The boats were converted to offensive platforms, the horror of the trenches continued, now with American kids flowing toward the West Front.
Like I said, this is gong to go on for a few more years, so get ready to learn more stuff we have forgotten, and re-learn some of the same brutal lessons about how things really work, and how the follies of the human heart can lead is so disastrously astray.
Paul survived the war, and was re-united with Kathleen, by the way, though they lived in their respective nations, visiting one another regularly for amicable conjugal relations. Paul died in 1933, and avoided seeing the next really big German mistake with the Lance Corporal.
Kathleen died ten years later, when the outcome of the war was very much in doubt, which is sort of the way I feel this morning.
(The Commander and men of the German trans-Atlantic blockade runner submarine “Deutschland” (POPPERFOTO)
Enough. I have to get back north. Like Punxsutawney Phil, I need to get prepared for the game and six more weeks of this crappy weather.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
