When TWOD Got The Nod

First, You Need To Know Some Northern Slang
Because both my protracted and strained analogy and humour require it.  The word "Twod" is vulgarism that stands in for an outright swear, which we won't even infer because we value our SFW rating so much.  You can, after all, call someone "a bit of a twod" and not get a smack in the chops, and in the Royal And Ancient County Of Lancashire "twod" means "rubbish".  Art?

A.k.a. "Blackpool"

     There.  I think we've established the inherent negative quality of everything to do with TWOD.  So, why am I being positive about it by adopting a genuflective* pose?  ("Nodding" to those without access to a Collins Concise).
     Well, because I cheated.  "Surely not!" I hear you squeak in horror.
     Pausing only to wonder if you're taking the mickey, I shall explicate.  "TWOD" should have full stops present because it's an acronym of sorts.  Thus: T.W.O.D. as it stands for "The Wages Of Destruction" and is a major work of economic history by Adam Tooze.  Art!

Not, it has to be admitted, a quick blast you can whistle through on the bus ride home

     Adam - I can call him that because I bought the book - takes a long and very detailed look at the Nazi economy, going into the background of the Weimar Republic initially and dispassionately analysing, balancing and breaking down the facts of Herr Schickelgruber's dictatorship.  What emerges so far - and we're not even at the point of Poland getting invaded yet - is a picture utterly at odds with the braying brashness of gobby Goebbels.  Rather than being an economic colossus at the heart of Europe, the land of the Teutons was bordering on impoverished; a backward, agrarian-bound, under-resourced, second-rate nation that contorted itself into loops to try and boost economic progress.  Art?

The iconic Autobahn

     That's one of the Nazi myths, that Herr Schickelgruber was responsible for slaying the demon of unemployment with work creation building the autobahn.  As Adam reveals, the supposed "work creation" was an utter myth, a facade created for propaganda reasons.  And whilst there were autobahns, there were simply no cars to drive upon them; the Teuton population simply couldn't afford a luxury like a family car.  I remember Jim Holland and Al Murray on their podcast "We Have Ways ..." mentioning what an eye-opener some of the statistics about cars in the Third Reich as compared to Britain or America were; the South Canadians had fifty times the motor vehicles of Deutschland.  

The "Volkswagen" or "People's Car" -

 - which the people never got to see, let alone own - by the time the industrial plant came on-stream, everything it made went immediately to the army.  So there!
     I simplify, obviously, as there are a lot of statistics and forensic analysis that would make for poor repetition in T.W.O.D. but it is fascinating stuff for an anorak like yours truly.
     
Station "Y"  "Y"?  Because I'm Lazy
As you should surely know by now, your Resident Alien dearly likes to muck about with language and words and grammar, because in this way he can blend into the background inconspicuously and nobody will ever know him for what he truly is.  Except perhaps MI5 when I go on about nuclear weapons about frothing foofoodillies too often.
     So, Conrad does wonder what kind of impact he would have made at Bletchley Park, had he been drafted in to help break codes there.  Art?

There was quite a lot of it.

     The answer, I fear, would be "not much".  Yes, Your Modest Artisan is thermonuclear-hot at crosswords and cipherwords (official name for "Codewords") but I don't speak German, do I?  Besides which, numbers baffle me.  Art?

     This might be an exception to the numbers thing.  Of course I cracked it, because <looks in mirror>.  I shan't give you the solution, because i) I'm horrid like that and ii) a little intellectual exercise is good for you.

     Conrad may have solved that one, however, there were several other puzzles that simply looked too dull or too complicated, so I skipped them.  There is an entire chapter in the Reader's Digest Puzzle Compendium, whence these examples came, about number which I skipped altogether.  None of this pick-and-choose behaviour would have gone down well at the Y.  You can imagine it, at Hut 6 in Bletchley -

GROUP-CAPTAIN WINTERBOTTOM (Head of Station Y, bursting into the office): The German Fifty-Seventh Panzer Corps pulled out of the Gothic Line last week!

TILLY GOOSNARGH-HUMPLEBY: You made me blot a line!  And is that important?

GROUP-CAPTAIN <very very angrily>: I should say so!  They arrived on the Eastern Front in front of Kharkov and destroyed three Soviet armies - Stalin is hopping made and Winnie is out for blood!

TILLY:  Nil culpa.  I only deal with Occupied Scandinavia.  Norman!

NORMAN THE RIGHT HONOURABLE PINE-COFFIN <polishing monocle>: Not I - the Med, that's me.  Isn't Italy that new chap's purview?

GROUP-CAPTAIN: Oh.  The weirdo**.

<All eyes focus on the far corner, where a grumpy-looking white haired rascal sits, muttering to himself, fountain pen in hand>

CONRAD <For it is he!>: I say, what do you think the answer to 'Distinguishing mark, 8 letters' could be?

GROUP-CAPTAIN <quivering with barely-suppressed rage>: Did - did you neglect the ciphers for Italy last week?  Did you!

CONRAD: Hey, there were a couple of really difficult cryptics last week.  It was hellish, I tell you ...

     We shall draw a veil over what ensues.  Art?

     It was a proper crossword clue, you know.  And, me thinking "An eight-letter word that means 'Distinguishing mark" and which ends in "A" - it has to be "STIGMATA", got it wrong, because it was "INSIGNIA", as I belatedly realised.

     Phew!  The incredibly fraught lifestyle of a crossword solver!

More Of The Wargame

Because a day without scaled carnage wouldn't be proper, would it?  Art!

     This is halfway through Turn Five, when some units of cavalry were preparing to Charge, and I wondered if the unit being charged had to stay still or whether it could dodge out of the way?  Well it can't, as a proper reading of the rules would reveal; if the player who won the Tempo bidding is moving, then his opponent cannot move, and vice versa, and Charges are declared in the Move part.

     There's also no proscription I can see to moving a unit more than once, so I have done.

     I also realised, when my head hit the pillow, that all those units stacked one behind the other are, by default, in March Column formation.  This means they could have moved across the battlefield at twice normal rate - but it's a very bad formation to be fighting in.  And to change formation you need to spend Tempo points.  It'll be interesting to see what happens in Turn Six.

     I have also decided to call this battle "The Battle of Lower Splene", after the nearby market towns of Upper Splene and Lower Splene, separated by the River Aving, in the hundreds of Whataylzee, East Sussex.

The "Chyme of Bells" in Lower Splene

     And because I am an unreliable witness and cannot be trusted to write an honest sentence, here's the answer to that phone puzzle:

*  If this wasn't a proper word before, it is now.  
**  To be differentiated as "The Weirdo" at Bletchley is a badge of honour, I tell you.