• About

doubtfulsea

~ adventure romance fantasy

doubtfulsea

Tag Archives: machine gun

The Nazgul Brothers?

27 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

aircraft, anti-aircraft gun, Aviation, Bellerophon, bombers, British Army, dogfights, Dragons, early airships, flight, flying machines, Great War, harpies, Hermes, machine gun, manoeuvres, military intelligence, Nazgul, Paris, Pegasus, Schlieffen Plan of 1914, Sir Douglas Haig, Sir James Grierson, The Blitz, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, trench fever, trenches, Wraiths, Wright Brothers, WWI Trenches

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Imagine a world where there were no airports, no contrails, no roar of engines, no small silver objects crossing the skies, the sound of their flight trailed behind them.  The only flying things would be birds and those in different seasons, some permanent, some migratory (or used to be—where we live in North America the Canada Geese, whose great chevrons across our skies used to be powerful signs of winter to come or spring soon to appear, now squat here year round).

image1geese.jpg

This would have been England in 1892, the year JRRT was born.  There were early airships—basically big balloons of various sorts, but they were primarily stationary and used for (limited) military intelligence.

image2intrepid.jpeg

Then came the Wright brothers

image3wrights.jpg

who, in December, 1903, produced the first engine-propelled, manned flight in their enlarged kite.

image4kittyhawk.jpg

Thereafter, flight would, literally, take off, but the Wrights, who were idealistically inclined, believed that such an invention would actually end war by making it too terrible.

The British army thought differently, however, and there were soon aerial observation units attached to military formations.  In fact, Sir James Grierson

image5grierson.jpg

tactically outfoxed his rival, Sir Douglas Haig,

image6haig.jpg

not only by his skillful use of aircraft for observation, but also by his keen understanding of how to conceal his own movements from Haig’s aircraft

image7airship.jpg

in the army manoeuvres of 1912.

image8manoeuvres.jpg

 

The Great War, when it came, two years later, would then be the proving ground for all sorts of aerial experimentation.

First, it was just observation.

image9be2.jpg

A British aviator, flying north of the army, first spotted the massive German columns which were designed to outflank the British and French armies and capture Paris in the Schlieffen Plan of 1914.

image10schlieffenplan.gif

Because observation was their task, the earliest aircraft were unarmed, but this changed and soon there was aerial combat, the so-called “dog fights”, the popular images being “knights of the sky” who jousted with manoeuvres and machine guns, rather than with lances, maces, and swords.

image11joust.jpeg

image12dogfight.jpg

Next came the use of aircraft to disrupt enemy formations and their movements, bombing and strafing, sometimes as part of major attacks, the whole idea being to dominate the sky over the enemy’s trenches, while protecting your own.

image13dogfightingovertrenches.jpg

And this is where we imagine 2nd Lieutenant JRR Tolkien

image14jrrt.jpg

in the summer of 1916, standing in such a trench,

image15atrench.jpg

looking up, and thinking…

We can also imagine him imagining—not seeing flying machines, but something much earlier.  After all, with his education, background, and interests, it would have been difficult not to think of classical harpies

image15harpies.jpg

or Hermes

image16hermes.jpg

or Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus.

image17bellerophon.jpg

And, with his Norse passion, there would also, of course, be dragons…

image18smaug.jpg

And, perhaps a combination:  a Bellerophon mounted on a miniature dragon?

image19nazgul.jpg

In the world of the trenches, there were two defences against aircraft:  friendly aircraft in the air

image20dogfight.jpg

and anti-aircraft guns on the ground.

image21aagun.jpg

But the war ended fairly quickly for the scholarly lieutenant, laid low by a more primitive enemy than Industrial Age Germans with bombs:  lice.

image22lice.jpg

JRRT became sick with what was then called “trench fever”, an illness conveyed, like typhus, by the bite of the tiny insects who colonized the clothing and bodies of soldiers in every dugout in Europe.  Wracked with recurring fevers, headaches, and complete exhaustion, among other complaints, men ill with trench fever were brought to base hospitals and, if sick enough, were sent home, as there was no cure, to recover as best they could.  Tolkien spent the rest of the war in the hospital or in garrison in England and thus escaped the last and perhaps worst years of the war in the trenches.

At home, he became Professor Tolkien, taught his classes, fathered four children, and then a second war came, one in which the primitive air war of the first war was intensified by more sophisticated aircraft, more powerful explosives, and plans to bomb Britain into ruin and submission in what was called “The Blitz”.

image23blitz.jpg

 

JRRT went back into service, this time as an air raid warden, even as two of his sons were more directly involved in the war.

image24airraidwarden.jpg

Night after night, the bombers came,

image25bomber.jpg

to be met with the same weapons as the previous war:  aircraft,

image26spit.jpg

anti-aircraft guns

image27aagun.jpg

and, because the enemy began to attack at night,

searchlights.

image28searchlight.jpg

And this brings us back to our imaginings.  Working on The Lord of the Rings, staring into the night sky, listening for enemy bombers, would Tolkien have thought of danger to Middle-earth in the form of flying things, not machines but terrible figures mounted on even more loathsome creatures—and what could be done about them?  Magic, perhaps?

image29gandalf.jpg

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

Advertisements

Armistice and Simbelmyne

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by lebedusya1 in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Allies, armistice, Armistice Day, barbed wire, Belgium, Christmas Truce of 1914, Eisenhower, Evermind, flamethrowers, France, German Government, Guy Fawkes Day, John McCrae, machine gun, maxim gun, military, military rifle, Paris, poisoned gas, poppies, Remembrance Day, Simbelmyne, tank, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, truce, Veterans' Day, Western Front, Woodrow Wilson, Word War I, WWI Trenches

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

“At the foot of the walled hill the way ran under the shadow of many mounds, high and green. Upon their western sides the grass was white as with drifted snow: small white flowers sprang there like countless stars amid the turf.

‘Look!’ said Gandalf. ‘How fair are the bright eyes in the grass! Evermind they are called, simbelmyne in this land of Men, for they blossom in all seasons of the year, and grow where dead men rest. Behold! we are come to the great barrows where the sires of Theoden sleep.’ “ (The Two Towers, Book 3, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

simbelmynemounds

Like our bonus posting last week, for Guy Fawkes Day, this one is tied to a specific day, now called “Veterans’ Day” in the US, and “Remembrance Day” by our linguistic cousins around the world.

November 11th here was originally called “Armistice Day” when it was first declared by Woodrow Wilson in 1919. The change to “Veterans’ Day” came in 1954, but, to us, it would be good if it had remained as it was, both its name and what it commemorated, and President Eisenhower had chosen to add another holiday to the calendar, instead.

The armistice was, of course, the truce which marked the beginning of the end of World War I, the date and time—the 11th hour of the 11th day of 1918—agreed upon by commissions of the Allies and the Imperial German government who met in a railway car outside Paris in early November, after over a month of on-again-off-again negotiations. This was only a truce—the actual peace treaty was not agreed upon and didn’t come into effect until 10 January, 1920—but it did stop the fighting in the west almost immediately.

Armisticetrain_(slight_crop) Waffenstillstand_gr

The war to which it gave a permanent pause had been appalling in its losses: over 17 million people had been killed and 20 million wounded and the weapons used to kill 11 million soldiers had gone from the ordinary military rifle to the machine gun to barbed wire to poisoned gas to flamethrowers to the tank—and that was just on land.

Short_Magazine_Lee-Enfield_Mk_1_(1903)_-_UK_-_cal_303_British_-_Armémuseum

gassed

barbedwire

1280px-Sargent,_John_Singer_(RA)_-_Gassed_-_Google_Art_Project

flamethrower-10215292

tank-wire

In the process, it had driven men to dig 500 miles of trenches on the Western Front, where they lived a life of perpetual misery.

_77694555_sommetrench

Thus, the news, even of a truce, was the best of news to soldiers and civilians on both sides.

armistice

The price for that truce and for the eventual peace was almost too much to bear: all over northern France and southern Belgium seemingly endless, but necessary, cemeteries had gradually sprung up and, with the coming of peace, had been rationalized and formalized so that they looked like militarized civilian graveyards. To visit that area today is to understand, in some small way, what a horror that war was for those caught in it. And this is just the Western Front: there are many more burial places to be.

zonnebeke.passendale.tynecot.air_.dkv_

In 1921, people in the US began to wear little artificial poppies as a symbol of remembrance on 11 November and the custom was adopted abroad and still continues in Canada and Britain, at least. It is said that the custom was inspired by this poem, written by a Canadian soldier on the Western Front, John McCrae, in 1915. He had noted that poppies seemed to grow more quickly on ground which had been freshly turned—in the fighting and in the burials afterwards. And the image of the flowers, bright red as fresh blood, scattered across the fields was too powerful for a poet not to use, particularly a soldier-poet.

In_flanders_field_poppy_thumb

We here at Doubtful Sea want to commemorate all of the soldiers on both sides in this posting and wish that the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 had seen the end of the war, instead of four years and millions of deaths later.

Christmas-Day-Truce

And we offer, as Tolkien fans, not only the poppy, but the Evermind, the Simbelmyne, in remembrance.

Processed by: Helicon Filter; simbelmyneflower

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

  • lebedusya1

Categories

  • Artists and Illustrators
  • Economics in Middle-earth
  • Fairy Tales and Myths
  • Films and Music
  • Heroes
  • Imaginary History
  • J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Language
  • Literary History
  • Maps
  • Medieval Russia
  • Military History
  • Military History of Middle-earth
  • Narnia
  • Narrative Methods
  • Poetry
  • Research
  • Terra Australis
  • The Rohirrim
  • Theatre and Performance
  • Tolkien
  • Uncategorized
  • Villains
  • Writing as Collaborators
Follow doubtfulsea on WordPress.com

Across the Doubtful Sea

Recent Postings

  • Boom April 18, 2018
  • Psalters and Psalms April 11, 2018
  • Middle-under-earth April 4, 2018
  • Legionnaire, But No Disease March 28, 2018
  • “Dragons, Other” March 21, 2018
  • Many Woven Cloths March 14, 2018
  • Lent to a Museum (Mathom.2) March 7, 2018
  • I Love a Parade February 28, 2018
  • Wormy February 21, 2018

Blog Statistics

  • 23,675 Views

Posting Archive

  • April 2018 (3)
  • March 2018 (4)
  • February 2018 (4)
  • January 2018 (5)
  • December 2017 (4)
  • November 2017 (4)
  • October 2017 (4)
  • September 2017 (4)
  • August 2017 (5)
  • July 2017 (4)
  • June 2017 (4)
  • May 2017 (5)
  • April 2017 (4)
  • March 2017 (5)
  • February 2017 (4)
  • January 2017 (4)
  • December 2016 (4)
  • November 2016 (5)
  • October 2016 (6)
  • September 2016 (5)
  • August 2016 (5)
  • July 2016 (5)
  • June 2016 (5)
  • May 2016 (4)
  • April 2016 (4)
  • March 2016 (5)
  • February 2016 (4)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (5)
  • November 2015 (5)
  • October 2015 (4)
  • September 2015 (5)
  • August 2015 (4)
  • July 2015 (5)
  • June 2015 (5)
  • May 2015 (4)
  • April 2015 (3)
  • March 2015 (4)
  • February 2015 (4)
  • January 2015 (4)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (4)
  • October 2014 (6)
  • September 2014 (1)
Advertisements

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel