War Movies 5: “Dresden.”

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In retrospect, the Cold War loomed at the end of the Second World War.  This has led to speculation that the Americans and the British unleashed extraordinary air-borne violence against the enemy as much to impress the Russians as to end the war.  In the American case, it was the atomic bombings.  In the British case, it was the fire-bombing of Dresden.

Dresden was a beautiful city (“Florence on the Elbe River”) in eastern Germany.  From 13 through 15 February 1945, 1,200 British and American bombers dropped almost 4,000 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the city.  Although the Nazis claimed that the bombing and the fire-storm it set off killed 200,000 people, the current best estimate is 22,000 to 25,000 dead.  One of those who survived the attack was the American POW Kurt Vonnegut.

“Dresden” (2002) is a German television movie about being on the receiving end of “strategic bombing.”  The movie’s plot is melodramatic and conventional.  A German nurse falls in love with a downed British bomber pilot on the run; her father and her German fiance are diverting morphine meant for the patients onto the black market through a corrupt official so they can buy a hospital in nice safe Switzerland; the nurse’s best friend is a Gentile married to a Jew; the nurse’s little sister is a Valkyrie look-alike having it off with the corrupt official; Mom is popping pills (cue Mick Jagger); the British bomb Dresden, with the downed pilot’s best friend leading the attack; and fire and death rain down on the city as the nurse, her German fiancé, and her British lover try to escape through the inter-connected cellars of the old city.

What do we see in this movie?  There is the prolongation of the air war against cities until the last stages of the war as the Germans launched V-1 and V-2 rockets against London and the Allied air forces bombed, then re-bombed every possible target.  There is the hatred felt by the German civilians for the British air-crew, who sometimes were lynched as “terror-flyers” when they had to parachute onto German soil.  There is the savagery of the dying Nazi regime toward anyone who showed the slightest hint of defeatism.  A woman arrives at the hospital with a head-wound, then the military police arrive to finish the job for having sheltered her deserter-husband.

There are the air-raid precautions as Germans turn off the gas to the stove, gather their possessions, and head for the shelters in the basement of the apartment block when the air-raid sirens sound.  There is the experience of being in the shelters while fire rages above and just outside the sealed doors, and the ground rocks with the explosions.  People pray, comfort frightened children, and light candles as a warning of carbon monoxide, while the bloc-warden tries to maintain order and morale.  There are people sucked into the fire by the draft a 1,000 degree fire creates.  There is the horrific aftermath of an air-raid, with dazed survivors wandering through rubble-choked streets or chalking messages on the walls of their wrecked homes, and the bodies turned to cinder.  There are the rare moral doubts felt by the flyers and senior officers.

What we don’t see in the movie is the successive attacks.  For dramatic reasons, everything is shown as one great attack.  This hides the reality that successive attacks were partly meant to catch the firemen and the EMTs out in the street—and kill them.  Nor do we see the controversies that have swirled around the attack since almost as soon as it happened.

War Movies 4: “The Star.”

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The Germans invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.  By Christmas they were near Moscow, where they stalled for the winter.  In Summer 1942 they attacked again, this time in Southern Russia.  Eventually, the German Sixth Army fought its way into Stalingrad.  There it got trapped and had to surrender in early 1943.  After more fighting in Summer 1943, the Russians were ready to go over to the attack in Summer 1944.  Operation Bagration was the greatest battle of the Second World War.  By the end of the summer the Red Army had destroyed the German Army Group Centre and reconquered the Ukraine, Belorussia, and eastern Poland.

“The Star” (2002) is set during the preparations for “Bagration.”  Red Army commanders want to identify the location of important German troop units before the attack.  They want to target the German units with air and artillery attacks before launching their own offensive.  In this particular story, they want to find the Waffen SS armored division “Wiking” (part of Himmler’s private army).  A local commander details a captain (who looks like the Russkie Tom Cruise) to lead a small patrol behind German lines to find “Wiking.”

The movie is conventional in one sense.  The scout team is made up of “representative” figures from the multi-ethnic Soviet Union of the time.  The captain and his side-kick are Cossacks (they are shown riding horses easily and the sidekick has a fur hat, so they’re Cossacks); there is a Tatar sharpshooter who practices as a shaman on the side; there is the wimpy college-boy radio operator-translator who mans-up in the end; there are three other guys I can’t place because I don’t speak that much Russian, but I’m sure that they are representative “types.”  In this sense, it is just like any American war movie: struggle against a common enemy dissolves difference and creates unity.  Also, at the other end of the radio link is a young woman named Katya.  She has fallen for the Cossack captain and rebuffs the commander who ordered the patrol when he wants to make her his “field wife.”

It is less conventional in other ways.  For one thing, this is a post-Communist Russian movie.  There are pictures of Stalin and Lenin on office walls, but none of the men are Communists.  For another thing, there is nothing hi-tech about this mission.  They have camo smocks to wear over their uniforms and a little radio-telephone to lug around so that they can report to headquarters.  (Nobody knew Morse code because it took too long to learn.  All training was pretty bare-bones compared to what Americans got.)  Other than that, they have sub-machine guns and pistols and knives.  Mostly, they skulk in the woods and report what they see.

For yet another thing, the movie is casually explicit about the brutality of the war.  There’s a boot with a leg in it; there’s a river full of corpses of Red Army POWs murdered by the Germans; there’s a brief tracking shot that runs from bucolic idyll-to-burned farmhouse-to-hanged peasant family; there is a German with a bayonet shoved all the way through his neck.  Conversely, the Russian patrol habitually kills the Germans they capture along the way.  It isn’t out of revenge.  They just can’t take prisoners along on a secret mission.  Until they capture an SS general.  Of course, that brings the Germans after them in hot pursuit.  Will they succeed in their mission?  Will they escape?

War Movies 3: “Hamburger Hill.”

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“Hamburger Hill” (1987) follows the misfortunes of a squad (the smallest Army unit) of the 101st Airborne Division[1] in the Spring 1969 fighting in Vietnam, Republic of.

The squad is led by Sergeant (Sgt.) Frantz, an able veteran who is returned to the unit after the military police arrested him for over-staying leave.  His squad mixes blacks and whites; and “short-timers” (men counting down their year-and-a-day tour of duty), veterans, and “FNGs” (Fucking New Guys who don’t know how to do anything and who will be killed or cause other people to be killed through their ignorance).  The constant bickering inside the group reflects these tensions, but slowly gives way to group solidarity; the FNGs rapidly mature into good soldiers.  In both cases, it is the shared experience of combat that changes men.

The squad forms part of a platoon, nominally under the command of a new lieutenant named Eden, but actually run by the veteran top sergeant, Worcester.  That is as far as visible authority goes in the movie.  The higher order–company, battalion, regiment, and division—appear only briefly as disembodied voices on the radio.

One common image of the Vietnam War is of a guerrilla war: suspicion of a civilian population that seems uninvolved in the war and only interested in gouging money out of the G.I.s; big sweeps through the boonies by American forces searching for contact with the Viet Cong (VC, Victor Charlie); brief fire-fights before the enemy fades away into the jungle.

That is not what happens in this movie.  Instead, we witness an assault on a heavily entrenched position defended by North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars.  The “American way of war” portrayed here relies upon the use of technology.  On the one hand, soldiers ride to war in helicopters that move them rapidly over long distances.[2]  On the other hand, the Americans apply massive firepower.  The infantry spray fire from automatic rifles (M-16s), light machine guns (M-60s), and grenade launchers (M-1s); they call in “fire missions” from artillery (whenever they talk to “Coldsteel” on the radio); they are supported by airstrikes from helicopter gunners and jets dropping napalm (jellied gasoline).  Even so, it all comes down to the “grunts.”          References to American popular culture of the era show the men to be part of mainstream culture: they listen to Motown or country-and-Western music (which is meant to show the distortions of military recruiting); they admire muscle cars in Road and Track and the Zeppelin-breasted models in Playboy.  Yet the references to “hairheads” and college students back home, and the lack of support from both politicians and the media show a growing estrangement from that society.  Back home, people were discussing the “Generation Gap.”  In this movie we see a different gap, one that continues to trouble us to this day: the gap between those who do military service and those who do not.[3]  What can a country ask of it citizens, what does a citizen owe?

[1] The “Screaming Eagles,” are also at the center of the HBO series “Band of Brothers.”

[2] The origins and first use of this method is portrayed in “We Were Soldiers” (2002), based on the book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young (1992) by Lt. Gen. Harold Moore (ret.) and Joseph Galloway.

[3] Former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator John McCain, Democratic Senator John Kerry, and former Democratic Senator Bob Kerry all served in Vietnam.  Former Presidents Bill Clinton, Democrat, and George W, Bush, Republican, did not.  Nor did I…nor did anyone I know.

War Movies 2: “Currahee.”

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How do you transform people from civilian volunteers into excellent soldiers?  E/”Easy” Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (P.I.R.), 101st Airborne Division, United States Army, provides a case study.

The company consisted of three rifle platoons and a headquarters unit.  Each platoon consisted of three rifle squads and a mortar section.  Each rifle squad consisted of twelve infantrymen; each mortar team of six men.  Each rifle squad had one machine gun; each mortar team had one 60-mm mortar.  In sum, nine rifle squads and three mortar sections, 135 men with  semi-automatic rifles, carbines, and sub-machine guns, nine light machine guns, three mortars.  That was a lot of firepower.  They would need it.

The idea behind paratroopers was to drop them behind enemy lines before an attack so that they could seize key points of communication.  This would disrupt enemy communications and hold open the door for advancing ground forces.  In one of the most dramatic and bloody fights of the war, German paratroopers had stormed Crete from the air.   Now the British and Americans hoped to do the same on the grand scale.  The paratroopers would be out on the end of a limb until the ground forces arrived.  Skills and toughness would be essential to success—and to survival.

A crude camp near Toccoa, Georgia, in the Piedmont region and close to the South Carolina line, served as the initial training site.  The soldiers were all very young when they began training.  Most of the officers ranged in age between 22 and 25.  Most of the enlisted men ranged in age between 18 and 23.  They were young and impressionable.  They had grown up during the Depression, when nobody gave you anything for free.

Lieutenant, later Captain Herbert Sobel (1912-1987), commanded the company during its training.  Sobel drove his men ruthlessly to achieve the highest standing in physical fitness and military training.  Long marches, lectures on military subjects, calisthenics, weapons training, numerous inspections with minute infractions punished by cancellation of week-end passes, and frequent timed runs up the neighboring Mount Currahee—“three miles up, three miles down”—did the job.  The regiment’s commander judged Sobel’s company to be the finest in the regiment.  Then came parachute training and test jumps.  Five jumps in one day and “anyone who hesitates in the door will be immediately removed from the paratroopers.”  Then came “war games” in North Carolina as companies were forged into battalions, battalions into regiments, and regiments into divisions.  As more and more men failed to make the cut, the survivors could regard themselves as a special group of men who had shared many hardships.  Of this, comradeship began to be born.

In early 1944 the regiment shipped out for Britain.  Here the training became even more intense, but also more focused on combat operations.  Stresses and strains developed.  Whatever Captain Sobel’s achievements as a trainer, his unsympathetic character left him estranged from his men.  He initiated court-martial proceedings against his own Executive Officer, Lieutenant Richard Winters, in what might be taken to be a case of petty abuse.  Worse, he showed signs of being a poor tactical leader when all minds had turned to the coming jump into German-held territory.  Easy Company’s sergeants offered to resign their ratings and requested transfer to another unit rather than serve with Sobel in combat.  Sobel soon found himself transferred to other duties with the regimental headquarters.  Lieutenant Thomas Meehan took command of Easy Company.  Now began the anxious waiting for the invasion of Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” in Summer 1944.  On 5 June 1944 the order came.  The men began to pile into their planes.

War Movies 1: The Thin Red Line.

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When James Jones (1921-1977) enlisted in 1939 the Army shipped him to Schofield Barracks in the Hawaiian Islands.  He spent a couple of years getting to know the “Old Army” and witnessed Pearl Harbor.  A year later, in December 1942 and January 1943, he fought in the Battle of Mount Austen on Guadalcanal and was wounded there.  After the war, he wrote two of the great novels of military life based on his experiences: From Here to Eternity (1951) and The Thin Red Line (1962).  Both were made into movies, the second one twice.

The second, 1998, version of “The Thin Red Line” is the better-known of the two.  The idiosyncratic Terrence Malick[1] wrote the screen-play and directed.  Malick is famous for shooting miles of film with an enormous cast of stars, then cutting most of them out of the final print of the movie. Fair’s fair: I’m going to do the same thing to his version of “The Thin Red Line” by omitting all the philosophical goop.  (Is “philosophical goop” redundant?)

The men of Company C, 127th Infantry Regiment, 25th Division land on Guadalcanal in late 1942 to help finish off the Japanese forces on the island.[2]  Some of them are veteran soldiers, but none of them have been to war before.  The youthful General Quintard (John Travolta) patronizes the older, passed-over Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte), who is desperate to make his life mean something by commanding men in battle.  Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) finds himself commanding Company C in a struggle in which Reason and Argument play no role. As a lawyer in civilian life, he finds this disconcerting to say the least.  Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn), who really runs the company, discovers that War is his element.  Private Witt (Jim Cazaviel) doesn’t like the Army or the War, but proves himself a brave soldier.

After pushing inland from the landing beach without encountering any opposition, Company C is ordered to attack a high ridge covered in tall grass defended by Japanese troops in bunkers that cannot be seen from below.  An artillery bombardment is just for show.  “It’ll buck up the men,” says Tall.  Men are shot down by the hidden Japanese.  The frontal attack up the ridge quickly stalls and Staros refuses an order from Tall to keep pushing.  A small party of volunteers goes forward to destroy the bunker.  A chaotic fight among a few men suddenly turns from defeat into victory.  Japanese resistance collapses, so Tall orders a general attack.

In this movie there is nothing of the loving attention to military minutiae that one sees in recent depictions of Americans at war (e.g. “Band of Brothers”; “Saving Private Ryan”; “Zero Dark Thirty”).  Instead, the artillery support never does any good and the rear echelons can’t get water to the fighting men in a tropical climate.  Soldiers crumple under the weight of fear and leave the battlefield or engage in acts of heroism just to get their dying over with.   A veteran sergeant grabs a grenade by the safety pin, a classic “rookie mistake” that kills him.  Ragged, starving Japanese prisoners are abused and murdered.  The essential humanity of Staros makes him a poor commander, while Tall’s egotism brings “victory.”

Later, Captain Staros is relieved of his command by Colonel Tall.  His replacement (George Clooney) mouths platitudes about the company as a “family.”  Witt, who has listened to Sergeant Welsh deride the significance of any one man “in this fucked-up world,” sacrifices himself to save a patrol during an encounter with a larger Japanese force.  The war grinds on.

[1] B.A., Philosophy, Harvard (1965); Rhodes Scholar (1965-67); M.I.T. philosophy instructor (1967-68); free-lance journalist; MFA (1969); directed “Badlands” (1973); “Days of Heaven” (1977); “The Thin Red Line” (1998); “The New World” (2005); “The Tree of Life” (2011); and “To the Wonder” (2013).  Two Best Director nominations.

[2] From August to November 1942 the First Marine Division held a chunk of the island against Japanese attacks.  Having broken the Japanese forces, they were relieved.  Fresh Army and Marine troops arrived to finish the job.

Zombies in International Relations

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What if the whole world, rather than just some remote hamlets populated by attractive young people with no future in movies, was attacked by zombies?  Daniel Drezner has addressed this question in Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Princeton University Press, 2010).  Drezner analyzes how a zombie apocalypse would be explained by political scientists.

“Realism” holds that conflict is normal as each country pursues its own advantage regardless of what happens to the rest of the world.  Countries can co-operate when they have a shared goal, but only so long as it takes to accomplish that goal and they are striving for individual advantage even when they are co-operating.  What happens inside another country is irrelevant to international relations.  Three of George Romero’s “Dead” movies illustrate this.  In “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), a zombie attack forces quarrelsome people to put aside their disputes and to co-operate.  However, selfish individualism constantly strains the need to co-operate.  Further problem arise from an imperfect understanding of events as they are under way.

In “Dawn of the Dead” (1978), zombies spread faster than can the government response, which always lags behind because of bureaucratic inertia, partisan political infighting, and the resistance of civil libertarians.  In a rip-off of Boccacio’s The Decameron, a handful of doomed survivors take refuge and indulge their worldly desires.  Their reverie is interrupted by an irruption of equally selfish barbarians.  In “Day of the Dead” (1985), a deluded bleeding heart liberal scientist hopes to reform the zombies by first understanding them.  His rival is a vicious, authoritarian Army officer.  People don’t have much of a choice once the crisis hits.

“Liberalism” holds that conflict is abnormal since countries naturally co-operate on matters of shared concern.  The more that “globalization” integrates the whole world into one system, the more co-operation will develop.  This co-operation takes the form of building international institutions and formulating rules of conduct.  From this perspective, one could anticipate the creation of a World Zombie Organization equivalent to the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund.  The internal politics of a government do matter for international relations because governments that are oppressive at home tend to be aggressive abroad.  Unfortunately, humanitarian liberalism would probably produce countervailing groups that argued for comprehension and conciliation of the zombies.[2]  “28 Days Later” (2002),  “Shaun of the Dead” (2004) and “Zombieland” (2009) illustrate liberalism as people are awakened from their selfish individual pursuits by the appearance of danger and co-operate.  The end result is durable community.  In “Shaun,” even the outcome for the remaining zombies also is positive as they are allowed to survive by playing a constructive role in society.  (This is a metaphor for post-1945 Germany.)

“The George W. Bush Administration.”  Do you want to fight the zombies over there or over here?  Better to fight them there to stop them before the start to expand.  Use air power and special forces to the extent you can, but it may be best to invade the central home of the zombies.  Wipe out as many as you can until the others realize the error of their ways and change sides, becoming—I don’t know—Zuslims?  Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, “28 Weeks Later” (2007) is a good example of both the theory and of its unintended consequences: the failure to destroy the zombies in the original site followed by their flight into new areas as they seek sanctuary.

[2] People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies or Zombie Amnesty.  That sort of thing.  You could start a club.

Keynesianism and Monetarism

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Accepted truth from 1776 to 1929: the “invisible hand” of the unrestricted free market is the best regulator of the economy.  The economy expands, contracts, expands in natural cycles.  Government should stay out of the way, balance its budget (no deficits), and keep taxes low.  This is called “laissez faire” (pronounced lay-zay fare).  These ideas are most associated with the British economist Adam Smith who wrote a book called The Wealth of Nations (1776).

Then came the Great Depression from 1929 to various points in the Thirties.  Thousands of bank failures, tens of thousands of bankrupt businesses, millions of unemployed people, and year after year of hardship with no hope in sight.  The “invisible hand” seemed too invisible for most people’s liking.

Accepted truth from 1933 to 1973: Recession (bad) and Depression (worse) result from a shortfall in Demand (people wanting to buy stuff) compared with what the economy can actually produce.  Government should make up the difference by spending money to buy stuff.  Also, if a government ran a budget deficit in the process of reviving the economy, it was all right and not the end of the world.  So, the government could manage the economy, do lots of things for citizens, and let the politicians decide how much to spend on what.  These ideas are most associated with the British economist John Maynard Keynes (pronounced Kanes) who wrote a book called The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936).  So this is called “Keynesianism.”  By the mid-Sixties everybody was a “Keynesian.”

Then came the Seventies.  The “oil shocks” of 1973 and 1979 caused world-wide “stagflation”: a combination of high inflation and high unemployment.  In economic theory, this could not happen.  In economic reality, it could happen.  People observed that big government deficits dumped gasoline on the fire of inflation, while lots of government control of the economy blocked adapting to new conditions.

Accepted truth from 1973 to 2008: the money supply and interest rates really govern the economy.  Deficits are bad because they either dump excess money into the economy (fueling inflation) or “crowd out” businesses that want to borrow money (smothering economic progress like a wicked step-mother).  The government should balance budgets, cut spending, cut taxes, keep interest rates low, and let the natural economy function.  These ideas are most associated with the American economist Milton Friedman who wrote a book called The Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1971). So this is called “Monetarism” (rather than “Friedmanism”).

Then came the “Great Recession” of 2008-201_ (fill in blank when you get a job).  Unregulated bankers did a lot of, you know, silly things.  The world financial system almost collapsed.  We’ve got seven percent unemployment.  Monetary policy isn’t working: the interest rate is at about zero, but the banks still aren’t lending; my 401(k) is only now back to where it was in 2008.  So, what is to be done?  Ask Keynes.

Hitler’s War

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Adolf Hitler created the Second World War.  He didn’t just start the war, he repeatedly took the initiative to expand it and to point it in new directions.  For this reason it is best labeled “Hitler’s War.”

The war really began in late-August 1939 when Hitler made a deal with Russia to divide Eastern Europe.  This led to the rapid conquest of Poland (Sept. 1939).  In late 1939 Hitler decided on war in the West at the first opportunity.  In April and May 1940 German forces over-ran Denmark and Norway.  In May and June 1940 they over-ran Holland, Belgium and France, driving the British army off the Continent.  Hitler was master of Europe!  Except that the British had now concluded that Mr. Hitler was not a very nice person at all.  (See: Charles I, Louis XIV, Napoleon I, Kaiser Wilhelm II.)  The British fought on, defeating Germany’s planned invasion by winning control of the air over the English Channel in the Battle of Britain.  The Germans then turned to starving out the British through submarine warfare in the Battle of the Atlantic.  This, too, failed.

Hitler’s victory forced other countries to make choices they didn’t want to make.

Italy declared war just as France fell, then found itself at war with Britain in the Mediterranean.  The German conquests in Europe created a vacuum of power in the Far East.  Japan sought to exploit this to establish its own supremacy.  Germany’s defeat of France and the weak position of Britain terrified the Americans, who began to supply military assistance to the British (Lend-Lease) and to take a strong line against Japan.

Hitler widened the war in1941.  He responded to a local challenge by conquering Yugoslavia and Greece in Spring 1941.  In June 1941 he launched a huge surprise attack on his Russian ally, capturing millions of prisoners and conquering huge swaths of territory.  Alarmed that the war would end without their having any claim on territory, the Japanese attacked.  The air raid on Pearl Harbor was followed by the conquest of the Philippines, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies.  Soon after Pearl Harbor Hitler declared war on the United States.  Also in 1941 Hitler ordered the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”: this would involve the murder of millions through mass shootings in Russia and the construction of death camps in Poland.

The further course of the war is best summed up in the term “ocean barriers and land bridges.”  American forces had to cross vast oceans to reach their German and Japanese enemies.  An armada of ships had to be constructed and control of the seas won.  Worse still, the Americans and the British divided their resources between the European war, which mattered, and the Pacific war, which did not.  In contrast, Germany and Russia had no water barriers between them; they were in continuous contact from Summer 1941 to Spring 1945.  Neither side could break off, so the great majority of German casualties were suffered on the Eastern Front, while the British and the Americans made less of a contribution to the defeat of Hitler.  Until Summer 1944 the bombing of Germany destroyed cities without harming the German war effort.

The war rushed to an end from Summer 1944 to Summer 1945.  The Americans and the British invaded France (June 1944) just as the Russians unleashed a gigantic attack on the Eastern Front.  Hitler’s empire crumbled, while the Americans banjoed the Japanese in a remarkable war fought across trackless ocean and trackless island jungle.

War had ruined virtually the whole world, and had revealed that people were capable of anything (Auschwitz and Hiroshima).  There would be no easy peace.

Dengue Fever

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The Aedes aegypti type of mosquito likes humans.  It likes to lay its eggs in artificial water containers, like in flower pots or old truck tires lying on the ground in the rain, rather than in puddles or ponds.  It likes to feed on humans, not on other animals.  Scientists call it “domesticated,” like dogs and cats.  It’s nice to have friends.

The Aedes aegypti type of mosquito likes Spring Break.  They live between 35 North latitude and 35 South latitude, and below an elevation of 1000 meters.  So, warm to hot places close to the shoreline.  So, all your favorite resorts: Panama City, Florida; South Padre Island, Texas; Cancun, Mexico; Lagos, Nigeria, Jakarta, Indonesia; “Soi Cowboy” in Bangkok, Thailand (if that’s how you roll).

The Aedes aegypti type of mosquito likes Capitalism.  The mosquitoes broke out of Africa between the 15th and the 19th Centuries as a side effect of the massive expansion in the slave trade.  In the many days ago, ships carried their drinking water in wooden barrels.  Probably the A. aegypti were passengers in the holds of the ships.  Slave ships crossing the Atlantic to the Caribbean carried the skeeters to the Americas.  Probably ships trading between the Americas and the Far East carried them to Asia.  Then the range of A. aegypti greatly expanded between 1960 and 2010 because of global warming (not stuck between 35 N and 35 S any longer), the growth of towns and cities[1], and increased international migration/travel.

Other than the fact that they are kind of hard to keep as pets (try buying a mosquito leash), the big problem with A. aegypti is that they carry dengue fever.[2]  (“Dengue” is a Spanish word that may have begun as an African word brought to the Americas by slaves.  Nobody knows what it means.)  The symptoms are fever around 103 degrees, torrential sweating, headaches that make you feel like your eyes are going to pop out of your head, muscle and joint pain, and an ugly rash.  It used to be called “breakbone fever” if that gives you a clue.

The first recorded dengue epidemic washed over Asia, Africa, and North America in 1779-1780.  One of the places hit hard by dengue was Philadelphia, because an unusual weather pattern had pushed the range of the A. aegypti farther north that summer.  There weren’t a lot of world-wide epidemics after that, but dengue kept killing people on a smaller scale all the time.  Once Western people started building empires in Africa and Asia in the 19th Century, dengue and other tropical diseases came to their attention.  Europeans used to call Africa “the white man’s graveyard.”  Generally, disease posed a greater danger than did native resistance.  So, scientists and sawbones got busy trying to deal with diseases.  In 1906 doctors confirmed that A. aegypti transmitted dengue; in 1907 doctors confirmed that dengue came from a virus.

Dengue evolved (I’m not sure that this is the correct term for a virus) in some fashion around the time of the Second World War.  Dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome began to be identified in Asia and the Americas.  You got deader sooner.

Dengue now is endemic (never goes away, but never kills everyone, in a specific place) in more than 100 countries.  Between 50 million and 100 million people get it every year.  On average, 25,000 of them die each year.  Scientists haven’t come up with a way to prevent infection (a vaccine).  Until they do, the chief method is to reduce the skeeter habitats.  Failing that, they kill them with bug spray.  That’s fine with me, but don’t tell PETA.

[1] Towns and cities have in-door toilets instead of out-houses or lush shrubberies where you squat in the nightime.  A.aegypti just loves the stagnant water found in toilet tanks as a place to lay their eggs.

[2] To be fair, they also carry yellow fever.

The Perils of Adventure 2

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Charles George “Chinese” Gordon had some odd helpers in extending the British Empire.

Romolo Gessi (1831-1881) had an exotic background (his father was an Italo-Armenian employed on the Levant in the British consular service) and an adventurous disposition.  He served as an interpreter with the British Army during the Crimean War (1854-55).  Here he first encountered Gordon.  In 1859 he fought as a volunteer with the Sardinian Army against the Austrians.  After the completion of the “Risorgimento” he started a business in Rumania, where he again met Gordon.  In 1873, when the khedive of Egypt appointed Gordon governor of the province of Equatoria in the Sudan, he invited Gessi to join him.  On Gordon’s orders Gessi circumnavigated Lake Albert.  Bent out of shape by perceived slights from the Egyptian government, Gessi resigned.  In 1877-1878 he tried to reach western Ethiopia from the valley of the Blue Nile.  This expedition came to nothing, so he answered a new call from Gordon who had been appointed governor-general of the whole of the Sudan.  He made Gessi governor of the Bahr al Ghazal province and ordered him to suppress the slave trade.  The leading figure in that trade was Suleiman al-Zubayr.  Gessi chased Suleiman, then killed him in battle.  Meanwhile, Gordon had been replaced by an Egyptian governor who dismissed Gessi.  Gessi had fallen ill and died at Suez on his way home.

Eduard Schnitzler (1840-1892) had a mundane background and an adventurous disposition.  He studied medicine, receiving his degree in 1866.  Unlike most doctors–German or otherwise, now or then–Schnitzler had no interest in a comfortable life, social respectability, and an early tee-time.  No sooner had he graduated from the University of Berlin than he signed up with the Turkish government.  From 1866 to 1875 Schnitzler was in Ottoman employment in the Balkans.  Not only did he kick over the traces by rejecting conventional employment, but he also took a Muslim name, Mehmed Emin.

In 1875 Gordon hired him as medical officer for Equatoria in the Sudan.  Emin impressed Gordon with his administrative abilities.  In 1878 the Khedive of Egypt appointed Emin as governor of Equatoria province when Gordon resigned.  In 1881 the Mahdist revolt began farther north.  This cut off Emin from all contact with the outside world.  Emin continued to rule Equatoria for the next seven years.  In 1888 Henry M. Stanley arrived to “save” Emin in the same way that he had “saved” Livingston.  Unlike Livingston, Emin went down to the coast with Stanley.  Then the German government, belatedly becoming interested in Africa, asked Emin to lead an expedition to establish German territorial claims around Lake Victoria.  The expedition did not work out well.  Eventually, Emin sent most of his caravan down to the coast to safety, while he remained behind to take care of those members of the expedition who had fallen ill.  Arab slave traders murdered him in Kanema.

Rudolf Slatin (1857-1932) just had an adventurous disposition.  He grew up in Vienna and studied business.  His father died when he was sixteen, so the boy got a job in a bookstore.  In Cairo, Egypt.  Cairo seemed exotic, but not exotic enough.  He went up the Nile to Khartoum with a German businessman, then to Kordofan with a German ornithologist, then back to Khartoum because of a rebellion.  He met Emin Pasha, who promised to recommend him to Gordon, but Slatin had just turned 21 so he had to go back to Austria for his army service.  After fighting in Bosnia, Slatin accepted an invitation from Gordon to come to the Sudan.  Slatin served as governor of Darfur (1879-1883), then was a prisoner of the Mahdists (1883-1895), then made a daring escape, then wrote a good book, then helped defeat the Mahdists (1898), and then helped govern the Sudan (1899-1914).  The rest of his life was quiet.  Comparatively.