Ian Fleming’s Moonraker was published in hardback in 1955, but it was published in paperback the next year in the US — as Too Hot to Handle, with Americanized English and explanatory footnotes.
Too Hot to Handle
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012Wedemeyer’s Report to the President on Korea
Monday, October 1st, 2012Albert Wedemeyer’s 1947 Report to the President on Korea makes a point that a young Korean-American woman made to me years ago — South Korea was always the less-developed half of the country:
South Korea, basically an agricultural area, does not have the overall economic resources to sustain its economy without external assistance. The soil is depleted, and imports of food as well as fertilizer are required. The latter has normally come from North Korea, as have most of the electric power, timber, anthracite, and other basic products.
The economic dependence of South Korea upon North Korea, and of Korea as a whole, in prewar years, upon trade with Japan and Manchuria, cannot be too strongly emphasized. Division of the country at the 38° North parallel and prevention of all except smuggling trade between North and South Korea have reduced the Korean economy to its lowest level in many years. Prospects for developing sizable exports are slight. Food exports cannot be anticipated on any scale for several years, and then only with increased use of artificial fertilizer. South Korea’s few manufacturing industries, which have been operating at possibly 20 percent of prewar production, are now reducing their output or closing down. In part this is a natural result of ten years of deferred maintenance and war-time abuse, but lack of raw materials and essential repair parts, and a gross deficiency of competent management and technical personnel are the principal factors.
In 1947, Wedemeyer is more concerned with Communist-inspired riots than full-scale invasion:
The military situation in Korea, stemming from political and economic disputes which in turn are accentuated by the artificial barrier along the 38° North parallel, is potentially dangerous to United States strategic interests. Large-scale Communist inspired or abetted riots and revolutionary activities in the South are a constant threat. However, American forces supplemented by quasi-military Korean units are adequate to cope with such trouble or disorder except in the currently improbable event of an outright Soviet-controlled invasion.
Whereas American and Soviet forces engaged in occupation duties in South Korea and North Korea respectively are approximately equal, each comprising less than 50,000 troops, the Soviet-equipped and trained North Korean People’s (Communist) Army of approximately 125,000 is vastly superior to the United States-organized Constabulary of 16,000 Koreans equipped with Japanese small arms. The North Korean People’s Army constitutes a potential military threat to South Korea, since there is strong possibility that the Soviets will withdraw their occupation forces, and thus induce our own withdrawal. This probably will take place just as soon as they can be sure that the North Korean puppet government and its armed forces which they have created, are strong enough and sufficiently well indoctrinated to be relied upon to carry out Soviet objectives without the actual presence of Soviet troops.
It appears advisable that the United States organize, equip, and train a South Korean Scout Force, similar to the former Philippine Scouts. This force should be under the control of the United States military commander and, initially should be officered throughout by Americans, with a program for replacement by Korean officers. It should be of sufficient strength to cope with the threat from the North. It would counteract in large measure the North Korean People’s Army when American and Soviet forces are withdrawn from Korea, possibly preclude the forcible establishment of a Communist government, and thus contribute toward a free and independent Korea.
(Hat tip to Foseti, who has much, much more to say.)
The Origin of the James Bond Theme
Monday, October 1st, 2012The idea for a Bond theme began in late 1961, when Dr. No co-producer Albert Broccoli asked songwriter Monty Norman to compose music for the film:
In early 1962, Mr. Norman traveled to the movie set in Jamaica, where he wrote the film’s Caribbean-flavored songs before returning to London that spring.
But time was running out for the theme. According to Mr. Norman’s website, he reached into his bottom drawer for a song he had already written for an aborted musical called “A House For Mr. Biswas,” based on the novel by V.S. Naipaul. It worked: The “Dr. No” producers liked the catchy melody on his “Bad Sign, Good Sign.”
Next, Mr. Broccoli and co-producer Harry Saltzman turned to John Barry, a film composer who had seen some success with his John Barry Seven rock band. Mr. Barry added orchestration to Mr. Norman’s melody line—but he felt his score still needed a dominant “voice” to symbolize Bond’s masculinity.
“John called me over to his apartment in June 1962,” recalled Mr. Flick, who was the John Barry Seven’s lead guitarist. “He showed me Monty Norman’s music and asked how we could give it more power.” Mr. Flick pecked out Mr. Norman’s melody on his guitar, Morse-code style, and suggested dropping the key to E-minor from A-minor for a stronger statement. And the theme as we know it was born.
In the end, Mr. Norman retained the theme’s sole composer credit. When Mr. Barry hinted that he deserved partial credit in a British magazine in 1997 and London’s Sunday Times followed up with a nasty jab at Mr. Norman, the theme’s composer sued the paper, and the jury decided in his favor.
Best. Theme song. Evar.
Atomic Missiles and Car Bombs
Monday, October 1st, 2012
One of the central characters is badly scarred from the war, where he was the victim of a car-bomb attack by German saboteurs — working for the infamous Otto Skorzeny.
This struck me as odd, but not impossible, because I had read that the IRA had popularized car bombs long after the war. I found this history of the car bomb instructive:
On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: “Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!” They were signed: “American Anarchist Fighters.” The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon — packed with dynamite and iron slugs — exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.
“The horse and wagon were blown to bits,” writes Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true story. “Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan’s offices, Thomas Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets.”
Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan himself was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded — the great robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting lodge. Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism.
His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of anarchist fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite; but it was also an invention, like Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, far ahead of the imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic bombing had become commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued insurgents into the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly radical potential of Buda’s “infernal machine” be fully realized.
Buda’s wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.
Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically — producing notable massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963) — but the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) accidentally, so the legend goes, improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes against entire city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete skyscrapers and residential blocks.
In Moonraker, the effectiveness of a car-delivered payload seems lost on that former-victim later in life.
By the way, Moonraker also describes the villains as speculating against British currency, with their inside knowledge of impending doom. Is George Soros a Bond villain?