“Even if stealing is an easy matter, hiding is what’s difficult.” – Anton Chekhov, “Small Fry” (trans. Constance Garnett)
Category: Lit & Crit
“By the end of November 1943, the new Allied Control Commission working with the [new] Italian Government was at the end of its rope. The 1943 harvest had fallen 25 to 30 percent below normal; amassing grain under the old unpopular Fascist system completely broke down and the major portion of the short harvest found its way into the black market. Even the low 150-gram bread ration [a little more than a quarter-pound per person daily] could not be maintained, and the only way to prevent mass starvation in urban centers such as Naples seemed to be a crash program of imports.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The minor wars in Ethiopia, Spain, and Albania had placed a severe strain on the Italian economy; three years of World War II as a German ally pushed it to the brink of collapse. Italy entered the war in 1940 unprepared and was never able to mobilize her economy in efficient fashion. Though nominally an ally, Italy was forced into an economic as well as political and military dependence on Germany that left her at the mercy of the Nazi overlords of Europe. The country did not prosper under the German hegemony.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The invasion of Sicily was the first Allied operation for which there was a definite civilian supply plan prepared in advance. The plan, to cover a 90-day military period, was based on the assumption that once the dust of battle settled, Sicily would be self-sufficient except for coal and oil. For such immediate relief needs as arose, AFHQ [Allied Force Headquarters] hoped to rely mainly on stockpiles in North Africa. Only 12,100 tons of food were requested from the United States, and some thought even that quantity excessive. The Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory (AMGOT) instituted in Sicily soon found this optimism entirely unwarranted. Whether there was enough grain to provide bread for all the people was a debatable proposition, but, for the moment quantity was irrelevant, since the lack of transport, the colossal black market, farm hoarding, and the ravages of battle kept grain out of the cities. Two months after the invasion, cities such as Palermo were still living ‘hand to mouth’ with ‘not even 24 hours reserves of breadstuffs in the town.’” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The War Department, while insisting adamantly on military control over civilian supply during the initial phases of operations in overseas theaters, also sought vigorously to limit that responsibility to the narrow field of relief. This attitude in the end produced serious delays in the provision of rehabilitation supplies necessary for the resuscitation of transportation and communication facilities, and industrial and agricultural production in liberated areas. Slow progress in rehabilitation almost inevitably resulted in larger and larger demands for relief. The experience in every liberated territory pointed to the need for a balanced economic program with internal transport as perhaps the real heart of the problem. The military formula of food, fuel, and sanitary and medical supplies was therefore hardly a satisfactory one.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“If money go before, all ways do lie open.” – William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.2
“At the outset of the North African campaign, on 13 November 1942, President Roosevelt declared: ‘No one will go hungry, or without the means of livelihood in any territory occupied by the United Nations, if it is humanly possible within our power to make supplies available to them.’ This announcement heralded the beginning of a civilian supply problem that was to complicate the work of military logisticians immensely. It was not just a matter of humanitarian concern as the President’s announcement might suggest, but one of military necessity. Disease and disorder in rear areas or lack of co-operation from local governments could easily disrupt lines of communications and endanger the success of military operations.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“America’s a hustle.” – Noelle Valdivia, “Bliss,” The Penguin
“During the first two years after the German attack in 1941 the urgency of Soviet needs had been so great, the threat of Soviet collapse so imminent and foreboding for the Allied cause, that almost any effort or sacrifice seemed justified in order to deliver supplies. This sense of urgency died hard even under the changed conditions of the last half of the war when victory over Germany and Japan seemed assured. The postwar implications of thus helping to strengthen the Soviet position in Europe and Asia were either not foreseen or ignored.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Aid to the USSR in the Later War Years,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“In the postwar period the United States was to be forced to resort to new devices to maintain a going British economy and to bolster British military strength, starting with a loan in 1946 and progressing through the Marshall Plan and the Mutual Security Program. A forthright approach to the problem in 1945 might have saved much lost time and have been more economical in the end. Certainly the restrictive attitude of the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] played some part in preventing such a forthright approach to a situation in which Presidential direction was uncertain and a practical policy vacuum existed. It seems evident that both Roosevelt and Truman, the latter perhaps belatedly after Potsdam, saw the need for helping the British in their postwar economic adjustment, but Roosevelt’s hand was faltering in the last six months of his life and he did not take the necessary steps either to lay down a clear policy for the executive branch to follow or to secure the legislative authority that would have made the course of his successor easier. Without legislative authority, Truman felt his hands were tied, and lend-lease was allowed to lapse without any real consideration of how it might be used as an effective instrument of U.S. policy in promoting postwar adjustments—just as it had been used during hostilities as an extremely effective means for fighting a coalition war.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The End of the Common Pool,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The British did not have quite the same respect for the ‘scientific’ calculation of requirements that the Americans at least professed to have, and regarded the end result as merely an educated guess. It is at least possible that American insistence that the British determine their requirements far in advance was also conditioned less by their confidence in anybody’s ability to do so than by their desire to keep production plans stable and not allow them to be continually disrupted by British demands for bits and pieces.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Lend-Lease and the Common Pool,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“Dog wants only a dry hole. Wants only tasty bone. Wants the cockles off him. All else is luxury.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“There’s much to be said for looting the past.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“Dog’s curse comes announced by wind and wind says, ‘The maggots shall eat you all. One way or another maggot shall rule the world.’ Dog is loose in the memory or he’d rise up and demand a higher shelf for his life and invent sweet myths to explain it all. Once upon a time, two ticks in the Garden, one saying to the other, What this place needs is a dog. . . .” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“You owe no one nothing, least of all yourself. What’s life anyway, but a hill of beans? Don’t feel bad.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“The framework of plans for the final massive assault against Japan had been started in 1943 and 1944; the military machine for executing them was in existence and needed only to be moved into position. Schooled in the necessity of preparing for every contingency, fearful that public pressures might lead to the premature dismantling of the military machine, and, for the most part, unaware of the new technological revolution brewing in the laboratories and on the testing grounds, American military staffs continued to work at completing the structure around the framework of plans until the very moment that the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima presented startling evidence of the arrival of a new age in warfare.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The argument can certainly be made that the Japanese would hardly have surrendered except in the certain knowledge that the United States had the means, the plans, and the intent to invade, whatever the effects of bombing (atomic and conventional), blockade, and Soviet entry into the war. Legitimate criticism can still be directed at the massive scale on which the final effort against Japan was planned when forces of the Army and Navy and of America’s allies are taken into consideration, at the seeming absorption of the military staffs in preparing for the execution of plans that had generated a momentum of their own, and at their failure to take into consideration in their plans the possibility of Japan’s collapse, or to even begin a downward adjustment of force requirements until that collapse was a certainty.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“On 6 August 1945 an American B-29 dropped one atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On 8 August the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and its Far Eastern armies began their march into Manchuria. On 9 August another atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. On 15 August a Japanese Government that had long before concluded that the war was lost made known its intention to surrender. On 2 September the surrender was consummated in ceremonies aboard the U.S.S. Missouri. The war against Japan thus came to its end in a manner radically different from that which the military planning staffs had envisaged. The elaborate plans and preparations for invasion of Japan had no ultimate utility.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“On many Pacific islands supplies were to deteriorate in open storage until 1950 when the United States was to find a new and unexpected use for them in the Korean War. A naval historian, commenting on the roll-up of naval supplies in the South Pacific, has summed up the effort of the Army just as fittingly: ‘The logic of rolling forward rear bases was impeccable. In the case of personnel its urgency could not be denied. But to set up a cross current against the normal flow of supply and support proved to be extremely difficult, if not impracticable. Much of the usable material was in fact moved forward. The rest remained in the South Pacific to be locally disposed of or to stand as a monument to the unsparing waste of war and the greater importance of time over cost.’ The ‘greater importance of time over cost’ might indeed be designated as the most important factor in logistics in World War II.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“After howl comes nothing, comes bleached bones, then dust’s mortification, then petrification, final bitter democracy.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“I won, I won, and all for what? Void, void, I thought, that’s all there is. Howl and only more howl comes back, it doomed to die like thunder on a summer plain, with no span of time so meaningfully shallow, so empty, so wretched pure in its silence as that one clapping down after thunder ceases—you won, oh you won, you’ve scattered the devils, but where’s the logic, where’s victory’s afterglow? Void, void, the true kingdom, void only and no other.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“We are dealing with distances half way around the world. We are dealing in personnel by the million. We are dealing with supply in millions of tons. A mass of detail and delicate timing is involved.” – General Brehon B. Somervell, USA, Commanding General, Army Service Forces, May 15, 1945 (as quoted by Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945)
“That final victory over Japan was assured, there was no longer any doubt in U.S. councils. Timing was the vital question. American staffs, reflecting the temper of American public opinion, were impatient. Their impatience, nevertheless, did not permit them to underestimate Japanese ability to resist. To the Army staff, at least, mass invasion seemed the quickest way, indeed the only way, in which Japanese capitulation could be assured. It was also undoubtedly the costliest way both in human lives and resources.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Pacific in Transition,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“Hold on to affection’s smallish stuff . . . for otherwise it is all hell in a bucket.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“Spiders will amaze me, for they are more shiftless than you may think. You will never see one spider running with another, or having fellowship of any sort, either with its own kind or another, and this is true for all varieties of them, of which there are more than there are grains of sand in our Guild Pit. Nor do the webbers have any vestige of humor. They are colder in their dispositions than a white-eyed turnip. They are of two sets, shortsighted and longsighted, I’ve noted, and it’s the former I’d sooner avoid. But I hate all spiders. I hate them for their webs primarily and for where they put them, but more that they will always go for my nose, then give a squeak before I can throttle them. But they make good comfrey for dog’s bad breath.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“Soul is an airy-fairy thing, with a cock-a-doodle-do for what you may think of it.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“In the natural hierarchy of medicine, first came physician, then surgeon, then tooth-drawer, tinker, horse-leech, sow-gelder, and conjuror.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog
“How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 5.5
“It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another: therefore, let men take heed of their company.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 5.1
“A rotten case abides no handling.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 4.1