Showing posts with label conscription. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conscription. Show all posts

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Allied Big tent needed, to defeat Axis quickly

In mid 1940, the Axis's Big Tent still included fellow traveller Joseph Stalin*, along with a whole host of quasi fascist governments in the nominally Neutral nations. (Franco and Petain's governments were among the most prominent).

The British Empire alone, still had a huge demographic advantage over the Axis nations it was formally at war with, if Whitehall choose to include the colored populations of the Far East, Africa and the West indies, along with the French-speaking Canadians.

By and large it did not.

If the army forces placed in Britain as a potential invasion force against Germany's home territory had to be too small to do the job as a price for remaining basically all-white and all Protestant, so be it.


Because if Britain's infantry was boosted by six million Indian "colored" volunteers that then led the successful invasion into Germany (at the cost of the de facto recognition of the postwar independence of India) then Churchill and ninety percent of the English elite wanted no part in it.

The lessons of The Great War for the world's elites : modern all-out war unleashed social changes almost worse than abject military defeat...


Over and over, all the Allied nations (along with the Axis, by the by) chose to be at a military disadvantage, in a total war situation, rather than risk the unleashing of the social consequences of a Big Tent coalition, because it would result in a too wide a sharing of the moral success of victory.

One almost feels that if the elites had believed that the war could have been successfully conducted a small elite force of middle class volunteers in metal machines of submarines, airplanes and tanks, waging war from far above the fray, they would have done so.

Foregoing the conscripting of mass infantry armies of working class men, all demanding postwar pensions and political and moral rights that come from having personally defeated the enemy in old fashioned face to face combat.

It was the united effort to avoid sharing the wartime responsibilities, if it also meant sharing postwar power, that Dr Henry Dawson set out to combat with his personal Manhattan Project ....

 * Who can forget Stalin's northern naval base that he provided for Nazi u-boats - who besides the apologist historians for the Allied cause ?

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Was Alexander Fleming a coward ?

FLEMING avoided this ....
Hard to say --  but he definitely didn't have a chivalrous bone in his body.  And twice - while still a young man - when given a chance to be brave,  he fearlessly declined.


Fleming joined an infantry unit when he was 19 and the Boer War was a year old and despite being a crack shot , he never volunteered to go and fight.

He remained with that infantry regiment, the Scottish London Rifles, enjoying laying at war until 1914 when a real war broke out.

He quit the regiment in 1914 (April, apparently) and thus avoided going into battle with them on October 1914 at Messines Ridge.

His regiment is forever remembered for being the first  ever Territorial Army unit to go into general war action : but Fleming wasn't among them.

Aged 33 when war broke out, Fleming was young enough to be conscripted but unexpectedly got married - shocking his friends.

(Marriage among lifelong bachelors is always very popular in wartime.)

As a married man ,he needn't fear conscription -- at least until after December 1916, when the marriage exemption was ended. Later the upper limit for conscription was raised from 41 to 51 , but in any case he was well under those limits and healthy as an ox.)

In any case, Fleming was already in military uniform, working at a desk job in a medical lab, well behind the front line.

Fleming and Florey : what a pair !


Howard Florey was equally (not) brave : a first rate, highly competitive athelete, he claimed health reasons for why he didn't join his fellow students in the Australian Army in WWI.

Like Fleming, in WWII now that he was safely too old for combat, Florey was a real chicken hawk on conducting an aggressive war policy when it came to rationing penicillin away from dying civilians and towards unfaithful soldier husbands with a dose of the clap...