BOOJUM!: A Look Back With Quite A Lot Of Anger

Tonight, Gentle Reader, We Look Back 78 Years

The dates don't align exactly but you can't have everything. Your Humble Scribe is currently hammering the keys on 11th September 2021, which falls almost midway between September 4th and September 18th.

What significance does this have? Because that wartime publication "The War Illustrated" was published on a fortnightly schedule, and the issue I'm going to impact your eyeballs with came out on September 4th. Art!

In the nine months since Pearl Harbour, South Canada had indeed become the arsenal of democracy, as you can see here from the transport aircraft and the Jeeps waiting to board. The editorial staff must have been mightily pleased that, after years of defeat and retreat, things were beginning to look up for the Allies - or the "United Nations" as TWI has is. Art!

It's not clear why they include both of these pictures. The upper one shows the port of Tobruk, captured in Rommel's finest hour, which yielded an immense amount of booty and prisoners, who can be seen in the lower photo. The port was captured, however, three months previously; perhaps the lower picture, an Axis propaganda one, had only just become available.

The port, in reality, was a waning asset. It had been bombed silly by each side when the opposition was in occupation, and the harbour was choked with sunken ships. The Royal Navy, before leaving in a hurry, had blown up their desalination plant, an act that reduced Rommel to a paroxysm of fury. And by September all the food, fuel and water taken in June had been consumed. An interesting logistical problem! Art!

The Ockers arrive!

Rommel must have gone a bit pale when he realised the Australians were back in Egypt, because they were short on bullshine and long on bloodshed, as the Italians would have reminded him*. That first photo shows some of the Ockers examining an Italian M13/40 tank which seems to have been abandoned; there's no visible sign of exterior damage so it may well have broken down. That the Ockers can idly inspect it means it lies on a battlefield now owned by Perfidious Albion, otherwise it would have been recovered.

The second and third photos are clearly posed to demonstrate how wonderfully the Brits and Ockers got on, which was not always the case, especially as senior British officers were often horrified at how casual discipline was in their Antipodean comrade's ranks. Alan Moorehouse, himself an Australian, had more to say on this and if you aren't careful I'll look his insights up and post them. Art!

If you're not au fait with aircraft of the Second Unpleasantness, then you'd not raise an eyebrow here, since this seems to be a British fighter going for a constitutional. HOWEVER! it's actually a Teuton Focke-Wolf 190 fighter. The pilot may well have gotten lost, confused and then landed at what he thought was an airfield in Holland or Belgium, only to be greeted by the levelled guns of grinning members of the RAF Regiment (RAF soldiers tasked with airfield defence). This happened surprisingly often. Hence an aircraft in perfect condition, which has been painted in RAF livery and which will have the rivets flown out of it by test pilots in order to see how it flies. Eventually these results would wend their way down the chain of command to RAF squadrons, informing them of the 190's performance and how best to beat it in the air. It will have gone to swell the ranks of what was amusingly called the "RAFwaffe", a circus of captured enemy aircraft. Art!

The dreaded Teuton Heinkel He111, in RAF livery

There is, of course - obviously! - an awful lot more in TWI's issue 136, which I won't go into here or this post would be 5,000 words long**.

Motley! We're going to wargame El Alamein again, so nip down to the builder's yard and purchase a metric tonne of sand, will you?

A Modicum Of Order

We need an item of surpassing banality and normalcy after all that world-shaking stuff. Okayyyyyyyyy <thinks> aha! We all know Conrad is given to reading books, making notes and watching DVDs, frequently all at the same time. We also know he is an utter slob with no sense of tidiness not imposed by an outside force. Art!

Behold the midden that existed beside my comfy chair. I think biologists would call this an 'accretion' and suck their teeth about it. Art!

Much more streamlined! There is a stack of DVDs, my Collins Concise off to one side all alone, and the books I am currently reading in a select pile. The rest are sitting in the big mobile bookcase. You see, I can do it if I try, and don't ask about the beer cans -

The Beer Cans

- because that's my job. As you should surely know by now, Conrad is always perusing the beers, wines and spirit aisles in shops and supermarkets, looking for that can or bottle that can spark a pun. Or, just look unusual. There are some breweries that obviously over-reach - "Disco Forklift Truck" anyone? - so one has to exercise discretion. Thus - Art!

If anyone mentions that musical then the Remote Nuclear Detonator is going into overdrive. I just thought the design looked interesting, with a nod to classical Japanese woodcut art***.

Finally -

"Terry Talks Movies" is a Youtube channel created by an Australian called - you may be ahead of me here - Terry. He appears to be of a similar vintage to Your Humble Scribe, meaning he is an old git. What he does have is a fine sensibility for good films and television series, genre stuff and local as well as from a broader origin. Yesterday he was talking about some forgotten gems of the Sixties and Seventies, even going so far as to claim that viewers like Conrad would be unaware of their very existence.

Not quite. Art!