Nuremberg

Take a look at the drawing to the right.  (If you click on it, it will enlarge.)  This is an image of the medieval city of Nuremberg, taken from the Nuremberg Chronicles—sort of a medieval version of a combination encyclopedia and atlas, published in 1493.  This work described the peoples of the world shortly before the known world was about to double in size.  

Written by Hartmann Schedule and illustrated by a large team of artists, it described the cities and people of the world.  Schedule was both a physician and a collector of books.  (He’d feel right at home in my house, since my wife, The Doc, and I are serious book collectors/hoarders.)

The book contained both maps and drawings of the principle cities, the largest of which was Nuremberg, where the book was printed. 

The beautiful example at right was hand-colored, and clearly shows the old, walled city, protected by a moat, with well-guarded defensive gates.

This was a remarkable city that grew rapidly because the local artisans and merchants were free from the restrictions normally imposed by local guilds and unions.  An imperial free city that had been granted local autonomy by the Holy Roman Emperor, the city quickly became both an economic hub and an artistic center, especially for printmaking and publishing.

Visitors can attest that the town still looks remarkably like this drawing, right down to the protective walls and the moat.  Nuremberg has always looked like this…Except for a few years following 1945, when the historic district of Nuremberg was called the ‘steppes’, because the town was mostly loose brick and rubble.

Though this was the home of Albrecht Dürer, Michael Wolgemut, Adam Kraft, and countless other artists, if you mention Nuremberg today, the images that pop into mind are of the Nazi rallies staged there by Hitler or the War Crimes Trials held there later—a dark legacy that is unfair to a city that has contributed so much incredible art to the world. 

Unfortunately, the Nazis turned the beautiful old city into something of a munitions factory, making it a prime target for strategic bombing.  After building a sub-camp of Flossenbürg concentration camp close to the city, the unfortunate inmates provided slave labor for manufacturing aircraft, tank engines, and the diesel engines for submarines.  The Allies were especially interested in destroying the latter, and Nuremberg was a frequent bombing target.

Between August of 1940 and August of 1943, the Royal Air Force bombed the city nine times, but it was usually the outskirts of town that were damaged.  Early in the war, too, the raids were smaller, their accuracy was lower, and the munitions used were less effective.  By 1944, this changed dramatically.

Throughout 1944, both the United States Army Air Force and the Royal Air Force repeatedly hit the industrial areas around Nuremberg.  The American bombing raid on October 3rd was typical:  454 B-17 bombers destroyed 518 buildings, and damaged 5900 others.  Luckily, the old city center was spared most of the damage.

The Nazi government knew that the Allies were reluctant to bomb areas with significant cultural significance and deliberately used several historic structures for just this reason.  One centuries-old church was co-opted to house fortified anti-aircraft gun batteries.

The historic old city’s luck ran out on January 2, 1945 when 514 Royal Air Force Lancaster bombers and seven Mosquito wooden, multirole planes dropped 1800 tons of high explosives and 479 tons of incendiary bombs directly on the historic old city.  By one account, over a million small incendiary devices were dropped.  Since the old buildings had brick foundations and timber construction on the upper floors, the British thought a combination of the two munitions would start a fire storm.

The raid was more effective than the British had expected.  In one hour, 4553 Buildings were completely destroyed and  another 12,000 were damaged—about half of that number so thoroughly damaged that they could not be occupied.  The resulting fires—over 3000 in number—finished off most of the remaining historic area. 

Over 90% of the historic structures were simply gone.  One of the few remaining structures was the former house of Albrecht Dürer, now the Dürer Museum.  While the city fathers had hidden most of the city’s priceless art works and city records deep underground at the start of the war, most of the walled city was simply gone.  What had formerly been beer cellars—some as deep as 24 meters—were used to store the city’s heritage through all of the bombs, fires, and combat.

The war was not yet over.  The metropolitan area was targeted for strategic bombing another ten times after the initial firebombing of January 2.  By the spring of 1945, the Russians were pushing towards Berlin from the East and a combination of the British, American, and Canadian forces had invaded Germany from the West.  Despite the fact that the war was clearly lost, Hitler ordered his forces to fight to the last man (or last boy in many instances) in each of the German cities.  In Nuremberg, Gruppenführer Eric Holz took the insane order literally, despite his forces being severely outnumbered.

The Battle for Nuremberg was a devastating example of the destructiveness of urban warfare because the American Infantry was forced to fight for each building and every block.  Holz and the few remaining defenders eventually made their final stand in the city’s police station and by the time the building was destroyed, it was impossible to tell whether Holz had committed suicide or had died in the fighting.  Ironically, it was Hitler’s birthday.

After the war, the city was the site of the infamous war crime trials which lasted until October 1946.  Finally, in 1947, the city started to rebuild.  The town fathers established a Board of Trustees for the Reconstruction of Nuremberg, and plans for a “new” version of the old city were approved.  By 1955, most of the reconstruction was either in progress or finished, and by 1960, the replacement Nuremberg Town Hall was completed.

One of the longest-running projects was the rebuilding of the four-kilometer city wall, with its protective moat.  Though reconstruction had to stop repeatedly while bomb crews removed unexploded ordnance, today, incredibly, half of the historic center of the old city once again resembles that five hundred year-old engraving.

The Last Student Athletes

We can now bid a fond farewell to the tradition of the collegiate “student athlete”.  The notion has been on life support for decades, but now it is in the last stages of cancer of the assets.  

The Never Cares About Academics (NCAA) has recently ruled that collegiate athletes can be paid for using “their name, image, and likeness.”  (Yes, the last two terms are a little redundant, but what did you expect from the a group that grosses a billion bucks a year from selling television rights to college games while pretending to educate the players?)

The National Collections of Athletic Administrators (NCAA) has caved to the state legislature of California, who took a break from outlawing common sense or repealing the Law of Gravity to pass a law allowing college athletes to be paid.  Despite the fact that most collegiate programs lose money faster than a kosher deli in Baghdad, this is guaranteed to raise the cost of athletics just about everywhere so that even more programs will be in the red.

Athletes from all over America will quite naturally be drawn to the program that promises to provide them with the most income, meaning that California will have a distinct advantage in recruitment over the other states who are still misguided enough to believe that the purpose of a university is to teach students.  Consequently, similar legislation has already been introduced in Illinois, New York, and Florida.  The only thing preventing every state from following suit is the likelihood that Congress (having already solved those pesky little problems like balancing the budget, war in the Mideast, and poverty) will likely pass similar legislation for the entire nation.

Instead of college campuses attempting to attract athletes based on such minor details as the quality of the education they might receive, enticing new athletes will be based strictly on the bucks…  Small schools need not apply unless they close down their Math Departments and divert the funds to people who play with balls. Since recent Socio-scientific studies have convinced Seattle educators that Mathematics is a racist construct and not appropriate school material, abolishing those departments would be a “win-win.”

We live in a strange world when importing minority children from inner city ghettos for our entertainment--until they are too crippled to perform--is considered less racist than math.

Why would the Nutty Cash for Athletes Association (NCAA) make such a stupid ruling?  Well, the current board chair of the association is Michael Drake, who is also President of Ohio State University, which coincidentally has one of the most profitable football programs in the country.  (That’s probably just a coincidence, of course!)

Selling images (or even likenesses) of athletes probably has a limited market.  I’m sure that fairly soon, the market will be flooded with products endorsed by various athletes, most of which will be legitimate.  But, the system would be very easy to cheat in as sponsors could buy multiple copies of useless products or pay athletes to needlessly endorse products.

Naturally, there is a historical example.  

Back in the 1980’s, voters started demanding that restrictions be placed on congressional influence buying.  Among other abuses, a group seeking favors from our elected leaders might pay a congressman a huge sum to make a useless speech at a bogus meeting.  So laws were passed severely limiting damn near everyone but ex-presidents, the husband of the Secretary of State, and private foundations from doing that.  (Damn!  Now, I’m redundant.)

Speaker of the House Jim Wright found a way around the restriction.  He wrote a book filled with his political wisdom, deep insights, and personal philosophy.  Actually, it was more of a pamphlet than a book, since it was only 117 pages—most of which had less than a full page of print.  Actually, quite a few only had a single word centered on the page for artistic effect.  I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn that the publisher reported that the majority of the books sold were large volume sales to unions, corporations, and lobbying groups.  It probably also won’t surprise you to learn that Wright managed to negotiate a royalty of 55% for each book sold—about five times higher than the industry standard and about twice what a writer like Stephen King gets for a best seller.  If J. K. Rowling produced another Harry Potter book, she wouldn’t get that big a royalty.

Sadly, I couldn’t find a single copy of the wonder book in any library in the state.  While this is not quite as tragic of the burning of the library at Alexandria, it’s close.  

Naturally, the scandal forced Wright to resign.

While we may have lost Wright’s timeless prose, I’m sure that shortly we will be able to buy an endless stream of products endorsed by quarterbacks, point guards, and baseball pitchers.  

Once the athletes start getting paid, it won’t take long before competing institutions will be forced to find new ways to funnel money into the hands of athletes.  This is going to cost universities big money, and it comes at a time when most institutions are already hard up for funds.  Insurance rates for athletics are soaring, labor costs are up, and almost every state university has a crisis funding retirement funds.  Something will have to give, and I think the loss will be in the athletes’ education.

College will still have athletics, but I’m not sure we will be able to continue to call them students.  And this is just the beginning: As Mark Drake recently said, "We must embrace change to provide the best possible experience for college athletes,”

He forgot to say, “student athletes”.

The Last Day

There is a general consensus that the closing days of World War II went something like this:  On August 6, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  Three days later, on August 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.  After a couple of days of communications, Japan agreed to surrender terms on August 14, and the actual surrender document was signed on September 2, 1945, ending the war.

That chronology is correct, but it leaves out a significant number of important events that affected the surrender.  Both the Soviet Union and Mongolia declared war on Japan following the attack on Nagasaki, the Chinese Civil War resumed, Korea was invaded by Russia, the Allies had a resounding victory over the Japanese forces in the Philippines, and the United States dropped leaflets warning of future nuclear attacks on all the major Japanese cities—all of these events happened in the week following the bombing of Hiroshima.

One event that is missing from this list, which is rarely mentioned in history books (or in war documentaries, or in Hollywood movies), is the last bombing mission of the war, when over 1,000 American planes attacked cities across Japan.  The event is rarely mentioned for two reasons:  First, the bombing raid is relatively unimportant compared with the enormous consequences of the end of the war or the first use of nuclear weapons.  Second, many accounts of the last days of the war focus on the morality of using those nuclear weapons.  (An argument that I have no interest in reviving in a blog post of only 1,241 words.)

By November of 1944, the United States was able to begin devastating strategic bombing raids on Imperial Japan.  The production of thousands of long-range B-29 bombers (each capable of dropping up to ten tons of explosives), coupled with suitable runways built on the recaptured Marianas Island, meant that twice the monthly tonnage of bombs that had been dropped on Germany could now be dropped on Japan.

In addition, the bombing raids on Japan were more destructive because the United States had made improvements in the incendiary explosives that proved to be particularly effective on the type of construction used in Japanese cities.   The use of incendiary bombs on Tokyo in the spring of 1945 were so effective that the city was ruled out as a possible target for nuclear weapons—in part because the city had suffered so much devastation that it was feared that Japanese officials would not be able to appreciate the destructiveness of the atomic bomb. 

Nicknamed “firebombing”, incendiary raids on Japanese industry were far more effective than using conventional explosives owing to the Japanese custom of putting factories in densely populated areas of cities.  Realizing the effectiveness of this new tactic, American napalm production increased by 700% in 1944.  In the test of the new tactics, American bombers destroyed a square mile of the industrial area of Tokyo.

Click on the photo at left to enlarge it.  While at first glance, this looks like Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the nuclear attack, this is Shizuoka after it was firebombed in June, 1944.

A string of islands in the Marianas had been turned into bomber bases, each capable of launching 80 to 120 large bombers.  From the Marianas, the bombers flew 1,500 miles to Japan—the equivalent of taking off in Canada to bomb Mexico.  Along the way, as the bombers passed Iwo Jima, they were joined by fighter plane escorts of P-51 Mustangs outfitted with belly tanks to extend their range.  After dropping the bombs on their targets, the planes reversed course, landing back in the Marianas more than fifteen hours after they had taken off.  These were the longest bombing missions ever undertaken.

Most people are still surprised to learn that the single most deadly aerial bombing mission during World War II did not use nuclear weapons.  On March 9, 1945, 334 B-29 bombers based in the Marianas dropped 1,667 tons of napalm and petroleum jelly cluster bombs on Tokyo.  More than 100,000 people died, injuring several times that number and destroying 267,000 buildings.  This remains the highest death toll on any air raid in history, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The raid was roughly four times as destructive as the firebombing of Dresden, which had occurred a month earlier.

On August 10, the day after the atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese began preliminary surrender talks with the United States, generally agreeing to the terms previously laid out in the Potsdam Conference, but insisting on allowing Hirohito to keep his historical titles and powers—a rather large exception to the unconditional surrender demanded by the Allies. 

During this time, two smaller bombing raids were conducted by the Army Air Corps.  A night time raid was conducted against an oil target, and a precision daytime raid, on a factory in Tokyo.  The next day, all strategic bombing was canceled by President Truman, to encourage the Japanese to continue negotiations for surrender.  Truman also knew that if bombing continued, it might appear that the talks had stalled, resulting in a loss of morale in Americans who were already jubilant at the prospect of an end to the war.

On August 13, American bombers once more took to the air, but the payloads were leaflets that outlined the Japanese government’s conditional offer to surrender.  All major Japanese cities were targeted to receive the propaganda.  This was actually the third time in less than thirty days that leaflets had been dropped.  The first, on August 3, had been dropped by the millions on 33 cities (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) warning that America had the military power to utterly destroy Japanese cities.  Nicknamed the “Lemay Leaflets”, it pictured five B-29 bombers firebombing Yokohama.  On their second mission, following the bombing of Hiroshima, warning leaflets that included a photo of the mushroom cloud over that city were dropped, warning citizens of specific cities that they should evacuate these targets immediately. 

When the surrender negotiations had made no progress, the President allowed bombing to resume on August 14.  General Hap Arnold planned for the largest bombing mission in history—over a thousand planes to attack multiple Japanese cities at the same time.  There were 828 B-29’s escorted by 186 P-51 fighter planes, for a total of 1,014 aircraft, that attacked targets at Iwakuni, Osaka, Tokoyama, Kumagaya, and Isesaki (the last two targets were firebombed).  The farthest target, the Nippon Oil Refinery at Tsuchizakiminato, was destroyed. 

That last target is all but unpronounceable for Americans, so it is usually listed in history books as Tsuchizaki—or even more likely, Akita after a town five miles from the refinery.  Today, a memorial to the more than 250 civilians killed in the raid stands at Akita.

During the return flight of their fifteen-hour mission, the planes received a radio message informing them that after their successful attack, Japan had radioed an acceptance of Allied surrender terms.  At noon, the next day, August 15, Emperor Hirohito made a radio broadcast announcing his country’s intention to surrender.

The longest air raid (and the largest air raid of the war) is all but forgotten today, rarely mentioned in history books or listed in timelines of the war.  When the planes took off, the world was at war and by the time they all landed (and all returned safely), the world was—at least temporarily—at peace.