Sounds Like An Oxymoron, Doesn't It?
Today we are dealing with WILD COINCIDENCE, secrecy, the Iranian Embassy Siege, Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler, just not necessarily in that order.
Yes, we are talking about the Special Air Service, which was created in North Africa during the Second Unpleasantness, disbanded at the end of that conflict and then brought back full time in 1952. Art!
It's an important plot point in "The Long Goodbye". Marlowe, who has an eye for detail, notices Eileen Wade wearing a pendant, which he is curious about and checks up on.
Eileen's story is that it was given to her by a lover when she was living in England in 1940, a lover who was later killed at Andalsnes, during the Norwegian campaign of 1940.
Okay, this kind of detail may be easy enough to find in the days of teh interwebz, but not when Ol' Ray was writing TLG in 1953. Art!
Now, Ol' Ray gets a few facts wrong about the winged dagger. Eileen claimed it was a present in 1940 from a soldier with the Artists Rifles; Marlowe said it didn't exist before 1947. Both are wrong; it was created in 1941. Marlowe has also done his background checking, because the Artists Rifles were never present in Norway.
The Commandoes, however - O I've not used that word for simply twenty-four hours! - were allegedly carrying out a raid there in 1942, which is when this supposed lover went missing. Phil, a very thorough chap, informs Eileen and her husband's publisher Spencer, that the Artists Rifles were converted, in his words, to a "Special Air Service Organisation'. Art!
Notice Artists Rifles shoulder badge and winged dagger cap badge
Ol' Ray's interest in England and Britain as a whole came as rather a surprise to me earlier this week; he grew up in This Sceptred Isle for several years and was partly educated here. He liked visiting and thought that Britons were a bit of a cut above South Canadians, thanks to not being as shallow and greedy.
He has a point.
Now, we take an abrupt detour and travel back in time to October of 1944, which is when Edition 191 of "The War Illustrated" was published. Art!
One of the later articles is this feature on - this is where the wild coincidence part of the title comes into play - the Special Air Service. This organisation had been created in North Africa in late 1941 as the brainchild of Lt. David Stirling (upper port) and Lt. Jock Lewis. Unit members had to be parachutists, experts with small arms, able to muster unarmed combat, and be able to march up to 100 miles. You can see members of a patrol to upper starboard, where the blurb claims they are walking over a hundred miles to rejoin their lines. How fortunate that a photographer was there to capture the moment!
At bottom port you can see what made them so dangerous for such a small unit: a desert-modified jeep (note condenser can mounted on the radiator) carrying a ton (possibly literally) of supplies, and mounting four machine guns. The one being pointed looks like an air-cooled Browning M2, found on an aircraft, which they probably stole. This beast would throw 800 rounds per minute and stop anything not mounting a lot of armour. The other three weapons are Vickers 'K' Guns, again normally used on aircraft but being given out to other services when made obsolete. Each of them fired at a rate of 1,000 r.p.m. so this mobile arsenal could do an awful lot of damage in a very short time. Art!
August 1944
The SAS only came off the censored list after the liberation of Paris, and had been kept out of the limelight for two and a half years. One suspects the Axis in North Africa knew there were wild desert pirates out there committed to mischief.
The Regular 22nd SAS were reconstituted in 1952 and operated for nearly 30 years with a level of anonymity simply unachievable nowadays. Art!
Because this
Yes, the Iranian Embassy Siege. The SAS went in and solved the problem of hostage rescue by rescuing the hostages - you are probably ahead of me there - and killing the bad guys. Thing is, they did it in front of the world's television cameras. So they are now both famous and secret.
O and that naughty French SAS trooper in the middle of the page is passing around cigarettes to Tunisian troops. Tut tut.
Conrad Courts Controversy
I did float this on Facebook last night with the words "A 1,031 page biography? O go on then", but coyly refrained from identifying said work. Well, here it is. Art!
No! It's "Heinrich Himmler" by Peter Longenrich, not the other way round. It was a speculative spot purchase in Waterstones years ago, as there was damage to the cover so it was only £8, instead of £24. It has been sitting on my shelves unread ever since then, so I chose it to go out and peruse in the sun after finishing work yesteryon. Art!
That's the end of the actual work itself, then the Endnotes, then the Bibliography, then the Index. Art!
This is no hastily-written exploitative screed, it took Longenrich 10 years amongst working on other books.
I did cheat a bit and look into the text about 500 pages in, where the Second Unpleasantness had broken out, and discovered that, up to that point in time, Himmler's glory years had been 1935 and 1936, and he'd blotted his copybook with Herr Schickelgruber over his obsession with mysticism. Interesting!
Point And Laugh, Maliciously
It's always amusing to indulge in schadenfreude at the expense of Modern-day Mordor. No, this isn't about anything military - wellllll apart from F-16s have now started to arrive in Ukraine, which must make the VDV quite nervous - rather a bit of an economic gloat. Art!
This is the interest rate in Perfidious Albion. Hmmmm a cut to 5%. Remind me again, what's the interest rate in Soviet Union 2.0?
Ah, schadenfreude, the delicious zero-calorie form of fun you can enjoy between meals.
"Lobster Quadrille"
Ah, what a source of content Steve and Oscar are! (Memory and Subconscious respectively). Only this morning, as I was pottering about getting bits ready for work, the phrase 'Lobster Quadrille' popped up in my head.
As most of you ought to know by now, Conrad thinks with his stomach, and his first thought was that this was a culinary dish.
Not so! Art?
It's a song from "Alices Adventures in Wonderland", as performed by the Mock Turtle, and is alternatively known as "The Mock Turtle's Song", which almost sounds like the name of a band .....
I'm going to boost the word count here by putting up the first verse.
Yes, 50 brownie points if you noticed that it parodies "The Spider and the Fly", which doesn't sound like a band name at all. Unless they hail from Mars.
Thank you Steve and Oscar!
Here's One I Preserved Earlier
As you should surely know by now, when I take over August 17th will be Global The Comsat Angels day, when all radio stations worldwide will have to have a playlist of their songs and nothing else.
Yes I am a bit of a fan. Art!
A lot of afficionados feel this is their best overall album - 'All killer no filler' as the phrase goes, and it warms my fusion-powered pumping unit to see it back and available. Do your descendants a favour and purchase a copy. Or ten.
Finally -
August being a Dry month, I'm going to be drinking a lot of tea, and only have 2 packets of loose-leaf Darjeeling left, so a trip to Sainsbos tomorrow looks on the cards.
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