The ninja tradition is an invented tradition

Wednesday, September 30th, 2020

The ninja tradition centered on the neighboring areas of Iga and Koka is, Stephen Turnbull concludes, an invented tradition:

The ninja has become a familiar figure in popular Japanese culture as the world’s greatest exponent of secret warfare. He infiltrates castles, gathers vital intelligence, and wields a deadly knife in the dark. His easily recognizable image is that of a secret agent or assassin who dresses all in black, possesses almost magical martial powers, and is capable of extraordinary feats of daring. He sells his skills on a mercenary basis and when in action, his unique abilities include confusing his enemies by making mystical hand gestures or by sending sharp iron stars spinning towards them.

There is much popular support for the historical truth that is supposed to lie behind this familiar image. It is reminiscent of the passions displayed by the members of a religious cult, because like any cult the ninja’s loyal followers staunchly defend both his worth and his authenticity. Yet even the most devoted fans of what might be called “the ninja cult” will acknowledge that a certain amount of exaggeration has probably taken place. Similarly, only the most dogged ninja skeptic would dare to argue in an equally passionate manner that the idea is a total fabrication. The usual approach, even among scholars, is simply to accept the original ninja myth as a genuine historical phenomenon that has for centuries been greatly romanticized and, more recently, highly commercialized.

This modern exploitation of the ninja has proved highly profitable, eclipsing anything derived from Japan’s other great warrior tradition of the noble samurai, to whose example of loyalty the ninja provides a dark antithesis of secrecy and deception. The samurai have also been subject to exaggeration and commercialization in recent years, but whereas examples of the samurai tradition are to be found all over Japan, the modern ninja cult has one unusual feature in that its exploitation is concentrated in a very small area. This is the former province of Iga (now part of Mie Prefecture) and the place with which it shares a border, an area of modern Shiga Prefecture called Koka. The two places once had much in common and are often linked in the historical narratives. Nowadays Iga-Ueno City has by far the most developed ninja-related infrastructure, making it is the best place in Japan to visit a ninja house and a ninja museum, to enjoy martial arts displays, and purchase a wide range of ninja souvenirs.

[...]

All these points could apply to the development of the ninja, but if the ninja are indeed an invented martial tradition they are by no means alone, because military societies are particularly vulnerable to the creative approach. For example, the popular image of the pirate derives almost entirely from the American author and illustrator Howard Pyle (1853-1911). Pyle regarded the look of ordinary eighteenth century sailors as too dull for these romantic figures, so he added elements drawn from the Spanish folk costume of his day, especially headscarves knotted behind the head, large hooped earrings and wide trailing sashes, to a somewhat mistaken notion of authentic seafaring dress (Konstam, 2011, pp. 26-27). Nor is Japan exempt from such a process. The story of the vendetta carried out by the Forty-Seven Ronin of Ako derives almost entirely from an unashamedly fictionalized play that was staged shortly after the incident on which it was based (Turnbull, 2011, p. 5). Even the modern understanding of bushido, the virtually sacred “way of the warrior,” owes much to Bushido: The Soul of Japan, a book first published in 1900 by a Japanese Christian living in America (Nitobe, 1905). As bushido is such an important concept for defining the way of the noble samurai it is ironic indeed to consider that the cult of the underhand ninja may predate it by almost three centuries.

I must however declare an interest. It is not uncommon to regret the excesses of one’s youth, and to have produced a book where enthusiasm sometimes overwhelmed common sense is part of my own history. In Ninja: The True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult (Turnbull, 1991) I translated the historical sources that were then available and interpreted them as I understood them at the time. However, I allowed myself to become a little overdependent on compilations of these sources, in particular the books by Sasama (1968) and Yamaguchi (1969), neither of whom makes clear the age and reliability of the material they include. In their books contemporary descriptions of secret warfare are juxtaposed with accounts that were written well after the establishment of the ninja myth and therefore liable to have been influenced by it. In this article I shall therefore re-examine the evidence with a degree of academic rigor that may have been lacking in 1991.

For the purposes of this article, I propose that if the ninja have any basis in fact the following three criteria must be satisfied:

1. A unique corpus of military techniques involving secrecy existed in Japan during the
Sengoku Period.
2. The exercise of these techniques was confined to certain skilled individuals rather
than being spread more widely within Japanese society.
3. These skilled practitioners were identified in particular with Iga and Koka, from where
they sold their services to others.

[...]

I therefore conclude that the authenticity of the Iga Koka ninja tradition fails against all three of the suggested criteria in terms of the existence of secret warfare, the elite practitioners of it, and its narrow geographical location. Undercover operations were performed throughout Japanese history but were carried out by skilled warriors who did not belong to a hereditary tradition. Iga and Koka did not have a monopoly, nor is there any evidence for a transmission from there to other provinces after 1581. In fact the opposite is true. If the presence of shinobi in an account indicates that secret warfare is taking place, then Iga and Koka are remarkable not for how many references there are to them but for how few. The ninja of Iga and Koka therefore present a classic example of an invented tradition in terms of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s definition. There is a deliberate “attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past” whereby ancient records have been re-interpreted and exaggerated to reinforce a highly localized understanding of a military phenomenon (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983, p. 1). Hobsbawn and Ranger (1983) also identified the “use of ancient materials to construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes” (p. 4). This seems to be what has happened at Shimabara.

I do not however believe that the Iga-Koka ninja myth or the modern cult that developed from it represent a total fabrication. All invented traditions have a basis in fact, no matter how tenuously the links may be made between the developed tradition and recorded history. In Iga and Koka there must have been some genuine belief in a unique local expertise that was bolstered by folk memories and old soldiers’ tales, and the best that can be said for their plagiarism of other people’s exploits is that it supports one great ninja stereotype: they were very good at stealing things! Yet even if the Iga-Koka ninja cult draws upon little more than the manipulation of folk memories and historical records, any tradition that takes shape in about 1620 and continues to the present day is worthy of more attention and respect as a cultural property than is commonly given to other aspects of the samurai tradition. As the Iga and Koka ninja tradition is older than the 47 Ronin and even predates bushido it should not be dismissed but celebrated as Japan’s oldest martial invention and, through its modern cult-like manifestation, as Japan’s greatest martial fantasy.

The enemy was confused by the slashing American movements

Tuesday, September 29th, 2020

This Kind of War by T.R. FehrenbachT. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War) how, after turning things around, the American forces, well supplied with vehicles, with many good roads in that part of Korea, were advancing faster than the enemy could flee:

General Walker’s orders for the pursuit and exploitation had instructed the divisions to forget about their flanks, to press ahead against a beaten enemy, and this tactic was paying off.

[...]

But the enemy was also confused by the slashing American movements. During the evening a North Korean truck tried to pull into the town. It was loaded with crates, and seemed to carry about twenty soldiers.

An outpost of the 38th along the road fired a single bazooka round at the truck as it approached. Then the men of the outpost cowered in the ditches as the truck disappeared with a horrendous explosion, raining fire and fragments over a wide area. The crates had been filled with ammunition.

Concerned by the terrific detonation, Peploe came out to see what had happened. Viewing the reeking crater in the road, he could find no remnants of either the truck or the men who had been upon it.

Paying protection money was part of the cost of doing business in Afghanistan

Monday, September 28th, 2020

Westerners tend to be rather naive, as a recent recent Freakonomics podcast, When Your Safety Becomes My Danger (Ep. 432) illustrates:

Gretchen PETERS: I’ve heard the argument that paying protection money was part of the cost of doing business in Afghanistan. And I think it is a terrible, terrible argument. It’s just self-defeating for an organization to pay protection money and not deal with the problem from the start.

[...]

PETERS: He got a phone call one day from one of his team members saying the Taliban just fired a couple of R.P.G.’s at our project. Nobody’s been hurt. And so, he called up the Taliban commander and said, “What’s the problem? You told us you weren’t going to attack us anymore.” And he said, “No, no, nobody got hurt. We intentionally missed. But your payment’s due. You need to get over to the hawala market and send me my money.” And he said, “Oh, yes, I’m so sorry.” And went over and paid the money right away.

[...]

PETERS: So, the Taliban would fire warning shots when the bills were due. And they would often launch non-lethal attacks just before a contract was due. And that seemed to be an effort to try and get their security contracts renewed. And that would perpetuate this completely corrupt system.

[...]

Anja SHORTLAND: So, the question is, “Do you want to be economically active in territory that is controlled by the Taliban or not?”

[...]

SHORTLAND: If you do want to be active in that territory, you’ve got to make it somewhat in the interest of the Taliban. If they don’t get any economic benefit from your company being there, then they will attack you by any means possible.

[...]

SHORTLAND: You minimize the kidnapping by making sure that the people who control the territory get a certain flow of funds.

[...]

SHORTLAND: That is actually 99 percent of the business. So, it is disequilibrium behavior — as long as everyone pays, there is no need to kidnap anybody.

[...]

SHORTLAND: I started off with Somali pirates, and what really struck me about piracy was how many happy ends there were. How generally nonviolent it was from the moment that the pirates got on board, and how well the trades functioned.

[...]

SHORTLAND: I do find that if they work, then it is because somebody is making them work, somebody is creating institutions that turn what can be very tricky, one-off trades into repeated interactions. It’s about creating self-enforcing contracts.

[...]

SHORTLAND: When there is a famine in southern Somalia, and you want to get relief supplies in there, basically, you have to contract the trucking out and you have to accept that 50 percent of the supplies will disappear. So, the question is, “Do you want to provide relief supplies, knowing that a large proportion of it will end up in the hands of the Shabaab?” If you say no, then there is no way of delivering the aid.

[...]

SHORTLAND: That’s right. Or you’re trying to establish a protection protocol. But in general, it’s better for them to take their protection money and not bother anybody. And so, even if you’re working in a country that has an endemic kidnapping problem, it is possible for companies to keep their employees safe from kidnap by making some concession to whoever poses the risks to them.

Stephen DUBNER: When you say, “some concession,” usually in the form of some protection payment, yes?

SHORTLAND: Well, you would frame it in terms of, perhaps, a corporate social responsibility program, or you do a joint venture, or you do some community engagement. There are lots of words for this. The protection contract is implicit. It’s never spelled out. It is through subcontracting. And the more layers you can put between yourself and the warlord, the better this is going to work in terms of being caught by the media. It’s all about plausible deniability.

DUBNER: So, would “tax” be a better word generally?

SHORTLAND: Well, that’s effectively what it is. But if people are not really sure whether the cartel or the rebel group or the insurgents have the capacity to actually kidnap, they might skip a protection payment, which is effectively tax evasion and then they decide that they have to prove that they can do it, and then they will. And in a way, kidnap for ransom is a really good way of backing up that kind of threat because nobody needs to get hurt.

DUBNER: Now, of all the criminal enterprises and cartels and pirates that you’ve researched, how does the Taliban compare in terms of their efficacy and organization and ability to execute these plans?

SHORTLAND: Well, they control a lot of territory. And they use that territory to grow very high-value crops, like drugs. And therefore, they’re very well-resourced. And they also have a certain amount of legitimacy with the people whose territory they control. And therefore, they are very effective at delivering violence and that is and something that the U.S. government has recognized.

PETERS: In percentage, I can tell you that the Taliban were making about 25 percent of their budget in protection payments.

They can be martyrs on any given day, and traitors the next

Sunday, September 27th, 2020

This Kind of War by T.R. FehrenbachT. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War) the Korean character, as he saw it:

The Koreans, North and South, are by any standard a brave people, but they are mercurial, rising one moment to extremes of exaltation, dropping quickly back into despair. They can be martyrs on any given day, and traitors the next. They have been called, not without reason, the Irish of the Orient. And in some cases, not even rigid Communist training, with its denial of basic human nature, can eradicate the nature of the Korean peasant.

When it became daylight, Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku walked softly up into a small village held by the 8th Cavalry Regiment. Ironically, he had to awaken two sleeping American soldiers carefully in order to surrender. When they took him to the rear, the young, hard, square-faced North Korean was very cooperative with his interrogators.

He supplied them with whatever information they desired about his division. It did not matter, whatever he told them, because the division had been destroyed as a fighting force. Other prisoners, though of lesser rank, had told the same story.

His surrender so impressed General Walker that, when he heard the news, he phoned Tokyo from Taegu. Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku was the highest-ranking Communist prisoner to be taken by the U.N. during the Korean War.

And in captivity, he would do more damage to the U.N. cause than he had ever accomplished while serving in the Inmun Gun.

How American are these One Billion going to be?

Saturday, September 26th, 2020

Center-left Vox pundit Matthew Yglesias’ new book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, is actually, Steve Sailer argues, two contradictory polemics:

The book is both a sensible call for making family formation more affordable for younger Americans, and a demented demand for tripling the population of the United States (currently one-third of a billion) via immigration, thus ruining the chances of tens of millions of actual Americans to afford marriage and children.

There’s really no way to reconcile Yglesias’ two requests:

  • We should figure out smart ways to make life a little less stressful for Americans so they can have children as well as careers; and
  • We should also encourage the rest of the world to crowd into the U.S. and horn in on the birthrights of American citizens.

[...]

Of course, mid-20th-century USA was far more unified, due to the immigration shutdown in the 1920s that wisely ruled that no interest groups would be allowed to use immigration to change the country’s ethnic balance. Hence, the political system was more cooperative and functional than today when Democratic pundits like Yglesias’ partner at Vox Ezra Klein alternate between boasting that immigration will bury whiteness and complaining that whites are paranoid about being replaced.

Now Democrats envision using immigration to alter the racial balance to achieve perpetual one-party rule.

One obvious problem with this plan, however, is that all the immigrant ethnicities would then turn on each other in a struggle to control the capital of the world. Why compete with the United State militarily if you can use your co-ethnic immigrants to simply subvert the USA from within (such as this week’s example of an immigrant NYPD officer arrested for spying for China on Tibetan exiles), especially if Washington were so foolish as to invite in two-thirds of a billion immigrants?

Germany would have liked to do that using German immigrants in 1917, but the self-righteous WASP ruling class proactively crushed any German-American resistance with heavy-handed assimilation methods, such as banning Beethoven concerts.

But these days the Chinese are slowly learning how to play the White Guilt card against America. In an era when extirpating the vanishing phenomenon of White Privilege obsesses the American establishment, it’s inconceivable that we would take effective steps to Americanize the tens of millions of new Chinese immigrants. Always remember, diversity is our strength! Foreigners are who we are.

So, how American are these One Billion going to be?

Indeed, one reason for this summer’s mania over whites supposedly oppressing blacks is because blacks vaguely realize that the white man’s days are numbered due to immigration. Once the immigrants take over, nobody will take seriously anymore African-Americans’ sad stories about George Floyd, redlining, and Emmett Till. So blacks had better guilt-trip whites fast into making expensive concessions because the next rulers of America sure aren’t going to fall for black tears.

The man who asked first got the air support

Friday, September 25th, 2020

This Kind of War by T.R. FehrenbachWhen the 38th arrived in Korea, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), Peploe abandoned a mountain of baseball bats, footballs, and other peacetime athletic equipment, and marched for the Perimeter, where the front was 30,000 yards, many times what a regiment could hold:

At this time the Air Force was not flying planes out of Korean bases — they had withdrawn their fighter squadrons to Japan. This meant that the supporting aircraft could remain over the front for only limited times — and Peploe figured that the man who asked first got the air support.

The Air liaison officer with the 38th became resigned to being kicked out of the sack an hour before dawn. But when the planes arrived over the Naktong, he was ready with his requests, and the strafing, rocketing, and napalming ahead of the 38th cleared the way for its advance.

[...]

With the fighters spreading havoc ahead of them, Peploe and the 38th suddenly found themselves at the Naktong. All along the roads they had passed abandoned AT guns and enemy dead.

Looking at the wide, twelve-foot-deep Naktong before him, on 18 September Peploe called Lieutenant Colonel Swartz, Division G-3. “Where are the boats?” Swartz said, “There aren’t any boats.”

Peploe ordered Skeldon’s 2/38 to send patrols across the river and to secure a bridgehead on the west bank. A dozen of 2nd Battalion’s hard, eager young men stepped forward, volunteering to swim across and secure the far shore. These men stripped, and under the guns of their comrades went into the muddy brown water. Halfway across, one of the volunteers floundered and had to be rescued by another soldier. Hauled gasping back to the bank, he admitted he didn’t know how to swim.

Moving cautiously along the west bank, the patrol found no enemy. And hidden in a large culvert beside the river, they found a cache of NKPA weapons, several collapsible boats, and one large boat capable of carrying thirty men.

Two squads went across in the two-man rubber reconnaissance boats, while Peploe talked to Division HQ again: “Let me go across in force.”

At noon, Colonel Epley, Division Chief of Staff, gave him permission to cross one battalion.

Within three hours E and F and 2/38 had crossed and had taken the high ground a mile west of the river. Behind them, combat engineers built rafts to float over the heavy weapons, then a bridge for the regiment’s vehicles.

Striking the disorganized enemy by surprise, the advance companies took more than a hundred prisoners, including a major and seven other officers. They also captured more than a hundred tons of ammunition, and many arms.

After an ordeal of six weeks, American forces had at last broken out of the Pusan Perimeter

There’s only so much erosion a tax base can take before it starts to crumble from the inside

Thursday, September 24th, 2020

A former Bloomberg mayoral campaign manager says that New York City is in deep trouble:

In local political circles, it’s now fashionable to scoff at doomsday predictions and say that just as New York City came back in the 70s, came back in the 90s, and came back after 9/11, it will now too. It’s fashionable to say that even if some traditional office-based industries cut back significantly, the cheaper rents will lead to an artistic and technological renaissance that will spark new industries, trends and energy that will make the city better than ever.

Unfortunately, that’s probably more wishful thinking than anything else.

What we’re facing now is different: the beginning of a far more transformational shift in how we work, in many ways echoing the flight of manufacturing from the United States in the mid-late 20th century. Until now, there was a basic assumption that most white-collar employees would work in an office. Only something like a six-month quarantine could have challenged a norm so ingrained in our society.

[...]

There’s only so much erosion a tax base can take before it starts to crumble from the inside. Great American cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland were all decimated by the flight of manufacturing. Despite some well-intentioned marketing campaigns to the contrary, none of them really ever recovered.

New York has always been resilient because we’ve always been the physical home of industries like finance and media, law and advertising and health care. And not just one industry like some insurance towns, but many industries.

But that’s only because the idea that you don’t have to be anywhere else never occurred to anyone before.

[...]

Short term, the answer is to do everything possible to keep the city as appealing as possible. That means investing in quality of life measures like trash pickup and graffiti removal. It means figuring out how to curb abuses by law enforcement against blacks and Latinos while still bringing down the rate of shootings.

It means making the city an attractive place to do business. If you want to save jobs and help working people, raising taxes and adding regulations will only have the opposite effect.

Longer-term, it means trying to use newly vacant office space to spur new industries. It means reducing the cost of operating municipal and state government so that spending meets what the new tax base can actually afford.

It means having a mayor willing to personally call every major employer to ask what she or he can do to make them happy here, rather than having a mayor who is constantly trying to drive jobs away. And it means knowing that none of this may be enough and having five more approaches ready to go.

The Division CG was frequently annoyed because he could not find Peploe in his office or near a phone

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020

This Kind of War by T.R. FehrenbachT. R. Fehrenbach describes (in This Kind of War), George B. Peploe, commander of the 38th Infantry:

Peploe felt soldiers should train in peacetime exactly as they trained in wartime. For an army has only two functions, to fight, or to prepare to fight. But Peploe faced the basic problem all officers who thought his way faced in the postwar years — hard, realistic training was unpopular, and it sometimes resulted in injuries.

While everyone admitted realistic training resulted in fewer dead upon the field of battle, a man injured or killed by accident on the training field soon had Congress down about an officer’s ears. And the people up above showed no willingness to back their juniors up. Many a general who would have walked up a hill blazing with enemy fire without thinking twice quailed in his polished boots on the receipt of a congressional letter.

Under the Constitution of the United States, Congress holds the power of life and death over the military, and no one would have it otherwise. History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people, and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military. The people must dictate its size, composition, and its use — above all, its use. But control does not imply petty interference.

The problem seems to fall eternally upon the ground forces. While few men, legislators or otherwise, have felt down the years that they could command ships of the line or marshal air armies without specialized training, almost any fool has felt in his heart he could command a regiment.

And throughout history, the men in the ranks have been the ultimate victims of such philosophy. In the eighteenth century, when the British Navy, hard-bitten, professional, and competent, ruled the waves, His Majesty’s regiments — “The thin red line of heroes, led by fools” — left their bones scattered across the world.

In the summer of 1950, while 80 percent of the officers of Peploe’s 38th Infantry had seen combat in World War II, many of his new fillers had never so much as thrown a live grenade. Some of them were not even infantry by branch. Immediately and energetically, Peploe went to work. He put his men in the field, and he was always in the field with them.

The Division CG, General Keiser, was frequently annoyed because he could not find Peploe in his office or near a phone.

The flash from the M72 FFE’s muzzle and back blast is less than that of an M9 pistol

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2020

U.S. Marine Corps’ new anti-tank rocket is its old anti-tank rocket, the M72 Light Assault Weapon (LAW), upgraded to destroy buildings and bunkers:

Equally significant, the M72 Fire From Enclosure (FFE) is designed to be fired from inside buildings, without the flash revealing Marine positions. [...] “When firing at night, the flash from the M72 FFE’s muzzle and back blast is less than that of an M9 pistol. The ability to fire from an enclosed position combined with reduced noise and flash allows Marines to maintain a covered and concealed position, reducing the enemies’ ability to identify the point of origin.”

The M72 FFE will come in two versions. The M72A8 anti-armor round will feature improved armor penetration. The M72A10 multi-purpose round is designed to destroy buildings and bunkers.

“The M72A10 incorporates an advanced warhead design with a multipurpose explosive and a self-discriminating fuse that operates in either fast- or delay-mode based on target construction,” said Richard Dooley, a Marine Corps project officer. “These advancements enable Marines to engage various targets, such as structures, bunkers and enemy personnel.”

The logistic tail continued to wag the fighting dog

Monday, September 21st, 2020

This Kind of War by T.R. FehrenbachThroughout the war in Korea, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), the logistic tail continued to wag the fighting dog:

While certain commanders complained and warned, none ever took any effective steps to amend the front-to-rear ratio, which of course could not be done without drastically altering the logistical practices and standard of living of the United States Army. In fact, as the war progressed, the amount of supplies required to support the American troops increased. PX goods were assigned to every company, creating both a transport problem and a headache for some company officer who had better things to worry about.

Throughout the war, because of the continuing lack of motivation of U.S. personnel, every effort was made to raise morale by the supply of goods and luxuries to the troops. Unit PX’s carried tons of soft drinks and candy bars from battle to battle; they sold watches, cameras, and radios at tax-free prices, though the demand for these always exceeded the supply.

Actually, it was impossible to support overseas combat troops at anything like a decent American standard of living. The very nature and necessities of war forbade it. But every effort was made. Discussing the dozens of ships carrying fresh meats, poultry, and other goods from the States to Korea, one FECOM commander later wrote, “We can never again afford to support troops in battle with such logistic luxury.” But this commander took no steps to halt the trend.

Its wrongness would so annoy him that he’d tear it all up

Sunday, September 20th, 2020

I haven’t read William Gibson’s Burning Chrome collection in decades, but I remember enjoying “Dogfight” — which I did not remember was co-written by Michael Swanwick:

One writer had control of the story for a month, during which he could write as much or as little as he wished. He do anything he wanted with it. Change the plot, change the characters, put things in and take things out. There were a couple of small details that Gibson took out that on the next pass I put back only to have him take them out, back and forth several times until at last Bill won. When you’re working with somebody good, this can be a very exciting process.

On one of those passes, I came to a section that could only be written by Gibson. Luckily, from my collaborations with Gardner Dozois, I knew what to do. With Gardner, I had only to write a bad imitation of his style and its wrongness would so annoy him that he’d tear it all up and, with enormous labor, write it the proper way. So I wrote a bad William Gibson pastiche and sent it back to him, confident he would redo it from top to bottom.

One month later, I got the story back, expanded, with not one word changed in the pastiche section. In the accompanying letter, Bill was effusive with praise for that section.

Oh crap. I knew that if I let that section go through unchanged, the deficiencies that Bill was blind to would be as obvious to the critics as they were to me. Only, because it was written in Bill’s voice (almost), blame for this would fall not on me but on him. And people would conclude that, whatever Bill had once had, he’d lost it.

So I spent much of that month laboring mightily to bring that section up to his standards. I succeeded, I believe, but oh man that was not fun.

(Hat tip to Travis Corcoran.)

The North Korean High Command concealed word of the landing from their men

Saturday, September 19th, 2020

This Kind of War by T.R. FehrenbachFECOM hoped that the enemy would be demoralized by the news of the Inchon landing, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), but evidence indicates that the North Korean High Command concealed word of the landing from their men fighting on the Naktong:

The NKPA was in far worse condition than American Intelligence dared guess. Enemy losses in early September had been enormous; they will never be known with complete accuracy. Some idea of what was left to the People’s Army in middle September can be gleaned from a captured daily battle report that showed one battalion of the 7th Division at the following strength: 6 officers, 34 N.C.O.’s, 111 privates, armed with 3 pistols, 9 carbines, 57 rifles, and 13 automatic rifles. There were 92 grenades left to the battalion, and 6 light machine guns, with less than 300 rounds of ammunition for each.

All in all, the People’s Army could not have numbered more than 70,000 officers and men by 15 September, of which less than 30 percent were the original veterans of Manchuria and Seoul. Morale among the new inductees was low — only the fact that anyone who showed open reluctance to fight was shot held the army together at all. Almost all divisions were suffering badly from hunger. But the fact that the men of the Inmun Gun knew that their own fanatic officers and N.C.O.’s would shoot them kept the South Korean conscripts from surrendering.

Mighty Mice in Space

Friday, September 18th, 2020

A research team led by Dr. Se-Jin Lee of the Jackson Laboratory in Connecticut sent 40 young female black mice to the International Space Station in December, to study muscle loss:

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lee said the 24 regular untreated mice lost considerable muscle and bone mass in weightlessness as expected — up to 18%. But the eight genetically engineered “mighty mice” launched with double the muscle maintained their bulk. Their muscles appeared to be comparable to similar “mighty mice” that stayed behind at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

The PNAS abstract explains:

Among the physiological consequences of extended spaceflight are loss of skeletal muscle and bone mass. One signaling pathway that plays an important role in maintaining muscle and bone homeostasis is that regulated by the secreted signaling proteins, myostatin (MSTN) and activin A.

Here, we used both genetic and pharmacological approaches to investigate the effect of targeting MSTN/activin A signaling in mice that were sent to the International Space Station.

Wild type mice lost significant muscle and bone mass during the 33 d spent in microgravity. Muscle weights of Mstn -/- mice, which are about twice those of wild type mice, were largely maintained during spaceflight.

Systemic inhibition of MSTN/activin A signaling using a soluble form of the activin type IIB receptor (ACVR2B), which can bind each of these ligands, led to dramatic increases in both muscle and bone mass, with effects being comparable in ground and flight mice.

It’s not just mice who have muscle-building myostatin-related mutations, but Belgian Blue cattle, Flex Wheeler, a German toddler, a Michigan toddler, and “bully” whippets.

The Navy and Marine Corps had never fully accepted the plan

Thursday, September 17th, 2020

This Kind of War by T.R. FehrenbachIn the summer of 1950, General MacArthur began to think in terms of strategic goals and sweeping maneuver, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), rather than grinding infantry warfare across the face of Korea:

Admiral Doyle, who would command the naval forces, told MacArthur, “The operation is not impossible, but I do not recommend it.”

[...]

There were better landing sites in other areas, true, but none that could so quickly pinch the vital nerves of the enemy. MacArthur was willing to take risks, provided the campaign could be brought to a rapid close.

[...]

Whatever the early American participation in the Korean conflict had been, amphibious assault by X Corps was no small operation. It involved more ships and men than most of the island operations of the Pacific War, and it could be accomplished only because of the skills and knowledge acquired by the Navy and Marine Corps during that war.

The Navy and Marine Corps had never fully accepted the plan; yet they carried it out to perfection.

[...]

It had been decided to land a battalion of Marines on Wolmi-do early in the morning; they would secure the island and hold it while the falling tide forced the fleet to retire. Then, in late afternoon, the fleet would surge back into the harbor, throw its landing craft against the sixteen-foot seawalls surrounding the city of a quarter-million people. The amphibious assault could not begin until past 5:00 P.M., when the tide was high enough to float landing craft over the slimy mudbanks of the harbor, and this left the attacking Marines only two hours’ daylight to land and secure their beachhead.

[...]

It took Taplett’s men exactly one hour and twenty-five minutes to overrun and secure the rocky, caverned, 1,000-yard wide island.

The 5th Marine veterans killed or captured some 400 North Koreans of the 226th Independent Marine Regiment on Wolmi-do. They suffered total losses of 17 wounded.

[...]

At 1733 the first landing craft of the 5th Marines grated against the seawall just north of Wolmi-do, near the center of Inch’on. Marines piled over the wall on scaling ladders or poured through holes blown in the barrier by naval gunfire. Within minutes they were in Inch’on’s streets. After a brief, vicious fire fight along the wall, the enemy broke. Twenty minutes after touching shore, a Marine flare ascended into the sky, signaling the capture of Cemetery Hill, an initial objective.

[...]

There had been only 2,000 North Korean troops in the Inch’on area. By 0130 on 16 September, the Marines had completely ringed the city and taken each of their initial objectives. They had lost only 20 killed, 174 wounded, and 1 missing.

[...]

Unfortunately, many of these casualties had been inflicted by trigger-happy naval gunners aboard LST’s, who had fired into the 2/5 Marines.

[...]

While fighting still raged from barricade to barricade, and from street to street inside the Korean capital, MacArthur issued U.N. Command Communiqué Number 9 on 26 September. MacArthur stated that Seoul was recaptured.

[...]

However, for two more days inside the city, from Seoul Middle School to the Kwang Who Moon Circle, from the Circle to the Court of Lions in front of Government House, the Marines had their hands full mopping up. Official communiqués studiously ignored this action.

[...]

MacArthur spoke, briefly for him, but in his usual sonorous and dramatic style:

“Mr. President: By the grace of a merciful Providence our forces fighting under the standard of that greatest hope and inspiration of mankind, United Nations, have liberated this ancient capital city of Korea….”

[...]

Little, stooped, wrinkled Syngman Rhee rose to speak. The man who had spent the greater part of his life in exile, now aging badly but still active and courageous, for a few seconds could not speak for emotion. He held out his hands in front of him, clenching and unclenching his fingers, and blew on their tips. Only those who knew Syngman Rhee well understood why his hands worked when he was under emotional strain — over fifty years before, Japanese officers had tortured him by lighting oil paper pushed up under his fingernails, and had finished by smashing his fingertips one by one.

[...]

Before abandoning the ROK capital, however, the NKPA and Communist officialdom had wreaked a frightful revenge on the helpless bodies of the old men, women, and children of the families of South Korean policemen, government employees, and soldiers. Thousands had been shot or otherwise executed. And from this time forward, learning what had been done in their captured cities and towns, the ROK Army and Government showed no mercy to any Communist, whether NKPA, guerrilla, or sympathizer. To a certain extent, Communist frightfulness was repaid in kind.

ROK officials were adamant in their determination never again to allow a Communist-sympathizing underground to exist in South Korea.

Rarely are science fiction stories written by credentialed scientists

Wednesday, September 16th, 2020

John C. Wright highly recommends The Hidden Truth by Hans G. Schantz:

It is a gem of a book, a rare find, combining a charming coming of age story, diamond-hard science fiction speculation, a conspiracy thriller, a touch of trenchant political commentary, and, uniquely, a challenge written into a science fiction book of the reigning scientific orthodoxy of the day.

Rarely are science fiction stories written by credentialed scientists. Even more rare is one that proposes a revolutionary theory that questions the historical and theoretical roots of the standard model of modern physics, and no other book does so in the context of an action thriller.

[...]

If you liked Heinlein style juveniles, with their young men learning lessons about personal responsibility and integrity of character, and seasoned with brief avuncular lectures on topics ranging from electromagnetic theory to economic reality, then you are likely to enjoy this book.

[...]

Rumor has it that the author, Hans Schantz, is hard at work on the final volume, A HELL OF AN ENGINEER, but a hefty amount of public interest, and some book sales of the first three in the series, might stoke the fires under this boiler, and give him the spirit needed to complete the work in a reasonable time.