From this week's lesson in one of my classes.
A few years ago, I had a day off in London. My estimable travel people had put me in a modest but comfortable hotel in the business district near the Tower Bridge, not very lively from a residential perspective, but a great location for someone who likes to hike in urban ecosystems. No more than 50 meters from my hotel was the public path along the Thames, which now runs along both shores for the entire length of the City of London and more. On Saturday morning I headed for the bridge to get across to the Tate Modern to see Kandinsky on one of its last days in town.
And got distracted for most of the day. There was an exceptionally low tide that morning, and most of the Thames bottom along the flood walls on both banks was exposed. Being a mudflat ecologist by training and beachcomber by preference, I was very soon up to my knees in sticky, mayonnaisy mud and finding, to my surprise, animal bones—horse and cow teeth, skull fragments, limb bones, ribs—as deep into the mud as I could easily dig. Inquiring of the nearest gentleman working the same flat with a metal detector suggested that a slaughterhouse and meat purveyor operated at that location for a long time—he thought many decades, medieval to post-medieval times. And that the facility was permitted to dump as much of anything they could into the river for precisely one hour per day. My bed of bones, which by my measure with a length of one-by-two was at least a couple meters deep and maybe much more, was the modern outcome of that bit of regulation (possibly it wasn’t even “regulation” in a formal sense, being simply polite custom), no doubt intended at the time to reduce the nuisance of smell and noxious material in the marketplace.
Lesson one for me: effects of regulations can last a long, long time, well beyond the span of their intended purpose.
In the 1980s, I worked with a team under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Government of Egypt to develop a manual for environmentally sound…now we would say “green”…development of tourist villages along the desert coasts of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. These were gorgeous tropical waterways, vacation magnets for northern Europeans enduring the raw gloom of German, Danish, or Dutch winter-to-early-spring weather. But the remote nature of the landscape and haphazard history of occupation yielded some uncomfortable—and some downright unhealthy—outcomes. Solid waste management was ineffective, and trash littered the resort areas. In some cases withdrawal ports for desalination for potable water supplies adjoined the discharge ports for untreated sanitary sewage. Our integrated group of engineers and ecologists compiled a user-friendly manual of specifications for sustainable and attractive, and most especially, healthy, development of financially profitable tourist villages in this fragile environment. It was a very nice piece of work, I am proud of my small part in it to this day.
However. Just as the manual was to have its published unveiling, accompanied by a suite of visits to developers and development facilities to discuss its importance, the violence of the 1990 Gulf Conflict began to grow from the shards of the long-running Iran-Iraq war. Subsequent events simply plowed our plans and specifications under the soils of the desert battlefields of Kuwait and the effects that spread across the region like ripples on a storm-struck pond.
Our well-funded, carefully-written, thoroughly reviewed specifications for sustainable development disappeared under a heap of higher priorities. Lesson two: environmental issues, however important and well-intended, are easily lost in the fog of war.
Later in the 1990s, I was engaged as an expert in natural resource damages and ecosystem service losses associated with impacts of the Gulf Conflict on several nations affected by the outcomes of that war. At issue were such effects as damage to pastureland by refugees and their herds, intense use of water, food, and medical supplies, physical impacts to coastlines and waterways, pre-emption of agricultural lands, habitat injuries and loss of endangered species, and others. For this effort, the United Nations established a Compensation Commission program by which a fractional contribution was taken from legal petroleum sales and channeled to funds for reparation of war damages in social, economic, and environmental arenas.
This process seems to have worked rather well for at least a while. Many of the claims were documented, verified, and paid. Some of the environmental claims lagged, and these may end up being victims of subsequent events again overriding the original priorities. Still, at least some, and possibly much, of the intent of the UNCC program was accomplished successfully.
Lesson three: environmental regulations, developed rationally and implemented conscientiously, can work, even under difficult circumstances.
Notes
I have been unable to date to verify the medieval slaughterhouse theory that my friend on the Thames mudflat gave me. It does not appear to be mentioned in Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Thames: The Biography. But I’ll keep looking.
Nor have I found an available source of our 1990s sustainable development manual. More up-to-date and useful sources of similar materials are, however, widely available. For example, see
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=manual+for+environmentally+sound+tourist+village&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=manual+for+environmentally+sound+tourist+village&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&prmd=ivns&ei=-XJ9TdrvCMnB0QHlwO3fAw&start=20&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=cb68b71298b37dc8
regarding fresh water, and
http://150.214.182.12:8080/turismo/turismonet1/economia%20del%20turismo/turismo%20sostenible/globalisation%20versus%20sustanaible%20tourism%20in%20coastal%20areas.pdf
more generally and theoretically.
Many documents and some of the regulatory history of the United Nations Compensation Commission program are included in this week’s lesson upload package. A general overview is available here:
http://www.uncc.ch/
PS--if you have the time, I got the material. Surf on over to
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
Thanks for stoppin' by!
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Lebensraum
A few years ago, jazz producer and entrepreneur Joel Dorn (I think) ended up with the tapes of a radio broadcast concert by Rahsaan Roland Kirk from Germany in the 1970s. To the disgust of his record company (and it was HIS record company,BTW) he insisted on naming the resulting (outstanding) album “Brotherman in the Fatherland”. Even though Dorn recounts the deal at length in the liner notes, it remains unclear why he stuck to his guns on this. I’m gonna guess that it was because: a) Kirk would have appreciated the irony; b) it pissed his record company off; and c) he could.
For vaguely similar reasons, I’m titling this one with the vaguely similar Lebensraum. Based on none-too-productive casual research, I’m beginning to think that the “German” side of my father’s family may have been Alsatian Jews. And that at least some of the Germans in my mother’s ancestry may have been Jewish as well. As many of you know, I pretty much live for irony. Not necessarily TASTEFUL irony, of course… .
Anyway, here’s the deal. For the foreseeable future (which, given present state of available cancer therapies is NOT going to be pretty), I’m going to shift http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, originally intended for commentary on music and mass media, to the diary of my illness. But, having recently discovered how smegging easy it is to record shit on Mac laptops, I still need a place to park music and music reviews. So I’ll just make http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ into a food-plus mode, where we’ll pick up entertainment along with dining. That will leave http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for ecosystems analysis and sustainability science, and http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for family, photography, and general fun. Hopefully this meets with your approval. With a little luck—like I’m still here to be writing this shit next year at this time—maybe we’ll rearrange priorities again. I’d sure as hell be up for that!
“Brotherman” is an outstanding album, BTW. Highly recommended—no household should be without!
A few years ago, jazz producer and entrepreneur Joel Dorn (I think) ended up with the tapes of a radio broadcast concert by Rahsaan Roland Kirk from Germany in the 1970s. To the disgust of his record company (and it was HIS record company,BTW) he insisted on naming the resulting (outstanding) album “Brotherman in the Fatherland”. Even though Dorn recounts the deal at length in the liner notes, it remains unclear why he stuck to his guns on this. I’m gonna guess that it was because: a) Kirk would have appreciated the irony; b) it pissed his record company off; and c) he could.
For vaguely similar reasons, I’m titling this one with the vaguely similar Lebensraum. Based on none-too-productive casual research, I’m beginning to think that the “German” side of my father’s family may have been Alsatian Jews. And that at least some of the Germans in my mother’s ancestry may have been Jewish as well. As many of you know, I pretty much live for irony. Not necessarily TASTEFUL irony, of course… .
Anyway, here’s the deal. For the foreseeable future (which, given present state of available cancer therapies is NOT going to be pretty), I’m going to shift http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, originally intended for commentary on music and mass media, to the diary of my illness. But, having recently discovered how smegging easy it is to record shit on Mac laptops, I still need a place to park music and music reviews. So I’ll just make http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ into a food-plus mode, where we’ll pick up entertainment along with dining. That will leave http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for ecosystems analysis and sustainability science, and http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for family, photography, and general fun. Hopefully this meets with your approval. With a little luck—like I’m still here to be writing this shit next year at this time—maybe we’ll rearrange priorities again. I’d sure as hell be up for that!
“Brotherman” is an outstanding album, BTW. Highly recommended—no household should be without!
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
“North to Thrace, Make Your First Right…Or Is It Left?”
This week's essay from one of my classes follows.
One of my children was addicted to alternate history fiction through his high school years. I’m sure more than one standardized test score suffered from his eagerness to get back to the newest Harry Turtledove novel.
My own exploration of alternate histories has been less rigorous, limited largely to fantasies and daydreams. For example, my perspective on the “what if the Axis won World War Two” question is a little out of the mainstream. I don’t see a German-Japanese world. I see a Russian one. Let’s say Hitler’s officers manage to keep him out of the Soviet Union in 1941. Instead, Germany consolidated conquests in the west and actually invaded and occupied Britain.
At that point, Hitler might well have let democracy squeeze out communism in his pantheon of obsessions. Put his heavy metal alchemists to work brewing up alembics of long range bombers, super submarines, and intercontinental missiles. With the breathing room, Stalin might have taken his time developing, compiling, and finally launching his long-suppressed attack on the Nazi empire. With essentially limitless human and natural resources, the Soviet Union would have swept the Nazis away and replaced them across Europe. With that foundation, it seems feasible for Japan and China to have fallen, eventually, to the Soviets. Voila. A Russian world.
Of course, we can conceive of alternate histories that would have left the world so different that the great wars of the twentieth century never happened. Around 500 BCE, the future rested on a knife edge. The blade was the Persian empire of Darius I, from India and Afghanistan in the east to Turkish Europe (Thrace) in the west, and from Egypt and Arabia in the south to Macedonia in the north. On one side was his north and east—the Scythian peoples and their empire that reached into central Asia, beyond the Caspian and Aral seas. On the other was Greece. Logical annex of Thrace, and gateway to Europe. Darius was inclined to Schythia. Rich in cultural and natural resources, source of military strength, investment for the future.
Disease derailed this logic train. Darius’ wife Atossa contracted a malevolent, overt, visible breast tumor. She was pretty bummed about it. Turned inward and resolutely silent, locked away in her chambers, waiting to die.
However. At some point, she allowed a Greek slave, one Democedes, to excise the tumor. She survived the primitive surgery. Was grateful. Democedes wanted to go home, and she wanted to get him there. She intervened in Darius’ strategic planning to get the Persian attention shifted from Scythia to Greece, in the hope that adding Greece to the Persian empire would let Democedes return to his land and people.
Darius went to Marathon, the Persians got their butts kicked. Not long after, Atossa’s son Xerxes went to Thermopylae and Artemisia and the Persians got their butts kicked. By the time Persia finally took Greece, it wasn’t a particularly useful or important part of the empire.
Consider an alternate history. Darius takes Scythia. Gains the enormous natural and cultural resources of an ancient land and important trade route. Builds his strength. Grows his military, industrial, and administrative might. THEN Persia invades Greece. At that point a few farmers at Marathon, Spartan citizens at Thermopylae, and Athenian triremes at Artemisia might not have been sufficient. Persia would have been in Europe, and strong enough to go further west. And then, quite possibly, further east building from the resources of Europe and the Mediterranean world.
The world might well be very, very different now, with the culture of the Persian empire setting the standards in both western and eastern societies.
Disease is a companion, outcome, and sometimes cause, of war. This is the one case I know of where a cure, however temporary, so altered the course of human history. The biosphere as we know it is in a number of ways a direct result of Atossa’s cancer and surgeon/slave Democedes’ treatment, and the resulting (possibly premature) recalibration of the mighty Persian war machine from east to west.
As Elvis Presley said “if you got a little time to kill”, please surf on over to the other components of this weblog empire:
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
And thanks!
Notes
The great-grandparent of alternate history fiction is, of course, The Man In the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. It remains one of the most cogent and imaginative of the Axis-win-the-War novels as well, despite being first published in 1962. Excellent entre to Dick’s work is available here: http://www.philipkdick.com/
The story of Atossa and Democedes is recounted nicely in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s outstanding The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner, 2010). The Wikipedia entry for Atossa at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atossa was revised February 2011 to incorporate Mukherjee’s account.
Will Durant, in The Story of Civilization volume II The Life of Greece, provides what remains a compelling and scholarly description of the ecotone between Darius’ Persia and Greece.
Mukherjee, Durant, and pretty much everything else written about the interface of ancient Greece and Persia originates with Herodotus. Excellent and incredibly valuable access to English translation of Herodotus and other key sources (what the hell did we do before the internet and projects like this supremely altruistic Tufts University program?) is here:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
I found the passages related to Atossa and Darius via this search string:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?target=en&all_words=Atossa%2C+Darius&all_words_expand=on&phrase=&any_words=&exclude_words=&documents
One of my children was addicted to alternate history fiction through his high school years. I’m sure more than one standardized test score suffered from his eagerness to get back to the newest Harry Turtledove novel.
My own exploration of alternate histories has been less rigorous, limited largely to fantasies and daydreams. For example, my perspective on the “what if the Axis won World War Two” question is a little out of the mainstream. I don’t see a German-Japanese world. I see a Russian one. Let’s say Hitler’s officers manage to keep him out of the Soviet Union in 1941. Instead, Germany consolidated conquests in the west and actually invaded and occupied Britain.
At that point, Hitler might well have let democracy squeeze out communism in his pantheon of obsessions. Put his heavy metal alchemists to work brewing up alembics of long range bombers, super submarines, and intercontinental missiles. With the breathing room, Stalin might have taken his time developing, compiling, and finally launching his long-suppressed attack on the Nazi empire. With essentially limitless human and natural resources, the Soviet Union would have swept the Nazis away and replaced them across Europe. With that foundation, it seems feasible for Japan and China to have fallen, eventually, to the Soviets. Voila. A Russian world.
Of course, we can conceive of alternate histories that would have left the world so different that the great wars of the twentieth century never happened. Around 500 BCE, the future rested on a knife edge. The blade was the Persian empire of Darius I, from India and Afghanistan in the east to Turkish Europe (Thrace) in the west, and from Egypt and Arabia in the south to Macedonia in the north. On one side was his north and east—the Scythian peoples and their empire that reached into central Asia, beyond the Caspian and Aral seas. On the other was Greece. Logical annex of Thrace, and gateway to Europe. Darius was inclined to Schythia. Rich in cultural and natural resources, source of military strength, investment for the future.
Disease derailed this logic train. Darius’ wife Atossa contracted a malevolent, overt, visible breast tumor. She was pretty bummed about it. Turned inward and resolutely silent, locked away in her chambers, waiting to die.
However. At some point, she allowed a Greek slave, one Democedes, to excise the tumor. She survived the primitive surgery. Was grateful. Democedes wanted to go home, and she wanted to get him there. She intervened in Darius’ strategic planning to get the Persian attention shifted from Scythia to Greece, in the hope that adding Greece to the Persian empire would let Democedes return to his land and people.
Darius went to Marathon, the Persians got their butts kicked. Not long after, Atossa’s son Xerxes went to Thermopylae and Artemisia and the Persians got their butts kicked. By the time Persia finally took Greece, it wasn’t a particularly useful or important part of the empire.
Consider an alternate history. Darius takes Scythia. Gains the enormous natural and cultural resources of an ancient land and important trade route. Builds his strength. Grows his military, industrial, and administrative might. THEN Persia invades Greece. At that point a few farmers at Marathon, Spartan citizens at Thermopylae, and Athenian triremes at Artemisia might not have been sufficient. Persia would have been in Europe, and strong enough to go further west. And then, quite possibly, further east building from the resources of Europe and the Mediterranean world.
The world might well be very, very different now, with the culture of the Persian empire setting the standards in both western and eastern societies.
Disease is a companion, outcome, and sometimes cause, of war. This is the one case I know of where a cure, however temporary, so altered the course of human history. The biosphere as we know it is in a number of ways a direct result of Atossa’s cancer and surgeon/slave Democedes’ treatment, and the resulting (possibly premature) recalibration of the mighty Persian war machine from east to west.
As Elvis Presley said “if you got a little time to kill”, please surf on over to the other components of this weblog empire:
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
And thanks!
Notes
The great-grandparent of alternate history fiction is, of course, The Man In the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. It remains one of the most cogent and imaginative of the Axis-win-the-War novels as well, despite being first published in 1962. Excellent entre to Dick’s work is available here: http://www.philipkdick.com/
The story of Atossa and Democedes is recounted nicely in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s outstanding The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner, 2010). The Wikipedia entry for Atossa at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atossa was revised February 2011 to incorporate Mukherjee’s account.
Will Durant, in The Story of Civilization volume II The Life of Greece, provides what remains a compelling and scholarly description of the ecotone between Darius’ Persia and Greece.
Mukherjee, Durant, and pretty much everything else written about the interface of ancient Greece and Persia originates with Herodotus. Excellent and incredibly valuable access to English translation of Herodotus and other key sources (what the hell did we do before the internet and projects like this supremely altruistic Tufts University program?) is here:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
I found the passages related to Atossa and Darius via this search string:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?target=en&all_words=Atossa%2C+Darius&all_words_expand=on&phrase=&any_words=&exclude_words=&documents
Friday, March 4, 2011
Bacteria and Protozoans and Nematodes, Oh My!
My essay from this week's lesson in one of my classes.
North Africa, autumn, 1942. Warm. Windy. Dusty. And, oddly, steamy. This close to the Mediterranean beaches, the baking sun and constant breeze pull water into the air by the liter [or Imperial gallon, depending on which side you represent. Of course, I must confess that I have never been to North Africa to explore coastal atmospheric conditions in person. This includes being totally remiss and not getting to Morocco to visit my daughter when she was at university there a couple years ago. However, I have been to the Red Sea coast of Jordan at Aqaba and the Arabian Gulf in Kuwait, and been shocked at how moist the air is near the water. Of course, it only takes a kilometer or so inland to drop all that moisture out and leave you back in the bone-dry desert. The best place to observe this effect, of course, is in California. There you can see the almost vertical face of the fog banks as they roll in from the Pacific and meet the dry terrestrial air]. I imagine, though, that for many soldiers, the environment of the northern Sahara was more comfortable than, say, the cold wastes of the Russian steppe or the claustrophobic green of New Guinea jungle. And it might have seemed healthier, as well. No months-long nightmare of muddy Ukrainian fields. No dripping, leech infested Solomon Islands forest paths.
But of course the tankers and foot-soldiers weren’t disease ecologists or public health specialists. Well, except for a few of them. And those few made an enormous difference in a campaign that helped set the course for the entire European conflict.
The war in North Africa was a tidal affair. Axis armies pushed the allies back into Egypt, then the allies swept the Axis back and away, then the Axis took the desert back. They traversed, often fought over, the same ground repeatedly. In general military terms, the Axis had every advantage. Better hardware, more experienced soldiers, shorter supply lines. Yet as the campaign wore on, the biggest sea change was the decline of Axis competence and the rise in that of the Allies.
This was partially due, of course, to brute-force military exigencies. Germany had a lot to deal with geographically. Italy proved an unreliable source of first-rate military assets. The U.S. bootstrapped its own butt into gear to provide more and better hardware. Allied soldiers gained skill and experience.
But there was another factor at work, one that contributed cryptically but powerfully and directly to the decline of the Axis forces in North Africa.
Dysentery. The depressing, discomfiting, exhausting, dehydrating diarrhea. Your gut rumbles. You can’t eat. You can’t function. If you’re moderately healthy and have access to medical care, it doesn’t usually kill you. But it can leave you wishing it did. And in war, it can sap your strength and concentration so that you’re more susceptible to dying from other causes.
The Wikipedia entry for dysentery at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysentery
provides a pretty well balanced and referenced entry-level discussion. The bottom line is that severe “intestinal disturbances” of whatever source—parasitic nematodes, protozoans, bacteria, viruses, inflammatory autoimmune illnesses—are categorized as “dysentery”.
At El Alamein in the autumn of 1942, dysentery proved to be a huge differentiator.
The British 8th Army, forced out of Libya earlier that year, came back with powerful friends in the Operation TORCH landings in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in November. The UK forces, with insights from centuries of tropical empire, obsessed over hygiene. Very particular specifications were provided for the location (away from other facilities) and structure of toilets, pit depth, hygiene protocols, and a simple and ingenious cloth cover on each privy to reduce the production of flies.
The Afrika Corps, on the other hand, not so much. Per the DOD course material provided with this week’s lesson, “Their campsites were filthy. Large amounts of feces lay on the surface of the ground.” About 2.5% of the British forces were admitted to med stations for dysentery. Of the Germans, the figure was 20%, and nearly half of those were front-line combat troops.
Bottom line is, it’s hard to fight effectively when your biology is out of wack. Rommel attributed the German defeat in large measure to the dysentery that affected his troops. Of course, it is worth remembering that he was himself being treated for dysentery in Germany when the battle began.
There are a number of sources for the material on the North Africa campaign. History Channel has a documentary on rotation with an excellent presentation of the issues, and that is where I learned about the cloth fly cover. I include with this week’s upload package some (badly formatted) material I slurped from the web that appears to be an undated and unattributed U.S. Defense Department course in military diseases. It is pretty cool, you can find the whole course at:
http://www.tpub.com/content/armymedical/MD0152/MD01520005.htm
I would like to be able to cite and credit this material, so if any of you can find information that would allow me to do so, please let me know.
Remember, if you have a bit of time, to slide on over to visit the other units of this weblog infrastructure:
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
And thanks for stopping by!
North Africa, autumn, 1942. Warm. Windy. Dusty. And, oddly, steamy. This close to the Mediterranean beaches, the baking sun and constant breeze pull water into the air by the liter [or Imperial gallon, depending on which side you represent. Of course, I must confess that I have never been to North Africa to explore coastal atmospheric conditions in person. This includes being totally remiss and not getting to Morocco to visit my daughter when she was at university there a couple years ago. However, I have been to the Red Sea coast of Jordan at Aqaba and the Arabian Gulf in Kuwait, and been shocked at how moist the air is near the water. Of course, it only takes a kilometer or so inland to drop all that moisture out and leave you back in the bone-dry desert. The best place to observe this effect, of course, is in California. There you can see the almost vertical face of the fog banks as they roll in from the Pacific and meet the dry terrestrial air]. I imagine, though, that for many soldiers, the environment of the northern Sahara was more comfortable than, say, the cold wastes of the Russian steppe or the claustrophobic green of New Guinea jungle. And it might have seemed healthier, as well. No months-long nightmare of muddy Ukrainian fields. No dripping, leech infested Solomon Islands forest paths.
But of course the tankers and foot-soldiers weren’t disease ecologists or public health specialists. Well, except for a few of them. And those few made an enormous difference in a campaign that helped set the course for the entire European conflict.
The war in North Africa was a tidal affair. Axis armies pushed the allies back into Egypt, then the allies swept the Axis back and away, then the Axis took the desert back. They traversed, often fought over, the same ground repeatedly. In general military terms, the Axis had every advantage. Better hardware, more experienced soldiers, shorter supply lines. Yet as the campaign wore on, the biggest sea change was the decline of Axis competence and the rise in that of the Allies.
This was partially due, of course, to brute-force military exigencies. Germany had a lot to deal with geographically. Italy proved an unreliable source of first-rate military assets. The U.S. bootstrapped its own butt into gear to provide more and better hardware. Allied soldiers gained skill and experience.
But there was another factor at work, one that contributed cryptically but powerfully and directly to the decline of the Axis forces in North Africa.
Dysentery. The depressing, discomfiting, exhausting, dehydrating diarrhea. Your gut rumbles. You can’t eat. You can’t function. If you’re moderately healthy and have access to medical care, it doesn’t usually kill you. But it can leave you wishing it did. And in war, it can sap your strength and concentration so that you’re more susceptible to dying from other causes.
The Wikipedia entry for dysentery at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysentery
provides a pretty well balanced and referenced entry-level discussion. The bottom line is that severe “intestinal disturbances” of whatever source—parasitic nematodes, protozoans, bacteria, viruses, inflammatory autoimmune illnesses—are categorized as “dysentery”.
At El Alamein in the autumn of 1942, dysentery proved to be a huge differentiator.
The British 8th Army, forced out of Libya earlier that year, came back with powerful friends in the Operation TORCH landings in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in November. The UK forces, with insights from centuries of tropical empire, obsessed over hygiene. Very particular specifications were provided for the location (away from other facilities) and structure of toilets, pit depth, hygiene protocols, and a simple and ingenious cloth cover on each privy to reduce the production of flies.
The Afrika Corps, on the other hand, not so much. Per the DOD course material provided with this week’s lesson, “Their campsites were filthy. Large amounts of feces lay on the surface of the ground.” About 2.5% of the British forces were admitted to med stations for dysentery. Of the Germans, the figure was 20%, and nearly half of those were front-line combat troops.
Bottom line is, it’s hard to fight effectively when your biology is out of wack. Rommel attributed the German defeat in large measure to the dysentery that affected his troops. Of course, it is worth remembering that he was himself being treated for dysentery in Germany when the battle began.
There are a number of sources for the material on the North Africa campaign. History Channel has a documentary on rotation with an excellent presentation of the issues, and that is where I learned about the cloth fly cover. I include with this week’s upload package some (badly formatted) material I slurped from the web that appears to be an undated and unattributed U.S. Defense Department course in military diseases. It is pretty cool, you can find the whole course at:
http://www.tpub.com/content/armymedical/MD0152/MD01520005.htm
I would like to be able to cite and credit this material, so if any of you can find information that would allow me to do so, please let me know.
Remember, if you have a bit of time, to slide on over to visit the other units of this weblog infrastructure:
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
And thanks for stopping by!
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