Leapfrog

This Is More Of A Concept Than The Children's Game

We will still have to go into it, nevertheless, as what follows on requires you be aware of how it's played.  Conrad also needs to be literal about things, as the Facebook twod mods have not intervened of late and are probably itching to interfere and earn their salaries.  Art!

     Let me explain.  The first child adopts a crouching pose, and the following child jumps over them by placing their hands on the croucher's back and leaping forward, legs well to the side.  Having made the leap, they then crouch down themselves and the ex-croucher becomes the leaper.

     It's not clear to me where the frogs come in.  Batrachologists would be puzzled and alarmed were they to witness such behaviour in frogs.

     ANYWAY let us - sorry, what's that?  A whisky?  Go on, then - Art!

CAUTION! Imbibition may cause delusions of childhood

     Moving swiftly along, we return to the North African littoral of the Second Unpleasantness, where the British et al were attempting to advance in the wake of the retreating Axis, where supplies, especially of water, were going to be crucial.  Art!

     That shows the whole panorama, from El Alamein in the east to El Agheila in the west, about 1,000 miles by the coast road.  Water was pumped from Alexandria to Misheifa, 270 miles on, and additional water was carried in specialist ships, for dispensing to water-barges, which could come ashore and deliver to waiting transport.

     This is where the 'leapfrog' concept comes into play.  There were small ports along the coast that could be used to supply the 8th Army as it advanced, so the supplies were moved on to Mersa Matruh, then Sollum and then Bardia in turn, allowing about 300 tons of supplies to be unloaded daily at each port until the army moved on.  Art!

Supplies of drinking water being landed by barrel for onward transport

     Further along the coast was the important port of Tobruk, which had a natural harbour.  Despite having been bombed by both sides for years, it was still capable of landing 880 tons of supplies per day.  The first sea convoy arrived in Tobruk on 19th November, which is not bad going.  

     The leapfrogging continued.  As I've shown above, the sea-heads moved from the small ports to Tobruk, and then from 26th November the leapfrog moved to Benghazi, which had been undergoing repair and salvage since being captured in 21st November.  By this date the impetus was to have Benghazi as the primary supply sea-head, with Tobruk now becoming only secondary.

     

Now we come to the Field Maintenance Centres, a title that does not inspire dreams of blood and thunder.  Maybe not, yet still essential.  These FMCs supplied an army Corps of two plus divisions, and were in turn supplied by third-line Motor Transport from a sea-head, rail-head or road-head.  Art!

Supplies being off-loaded by 'roller-rail'

     Second-line MT would then carry supplies up to the 'B'-echelon vehicles of front-line units (or first-line MT), up to a distance of 50 miles from the FMC.  As an example, 7th Armoured Division, which required 400 tons of supplies daily, would be advancing on El Agheila, supplied by an FMC up to 50 miles to the rear, which would in turn be supplied from Benghazi.  Again the leapfrog effect; in the example above, as 7th Armoured moved further forward, another FMC would be established 50 miles ahead of the last one.

     Please remember that the battle of El Alamein had only concluded on 11th November 1942, so all this logistical leapfrogging was being done both at short notice and with great despatch.  Despite the best efforts of the Axis to slow them down with demolitions, booby-traps, rear-guard actions and passing the port to the right.  In fact the port of Benghazi proved to have over 100 wrecked vessels in the harbour, which needed to be removed.

     A WORD FROM THE EDITORIAL STAFF

     WE'RE EXPERIENCING A FEW TECHNICAL ISSUES AND CANNOT LOAD UP

     ANY PICTURES 

     I HAVE TRIED RE-BOOTING, SWEARING AND HITTING IT WITH A HAMMER

     BUT NO SUCCESS YET.

     BE BRAVE.

   O!  It worked.  Hang on, a bit of retrospective Art work is in order.  Allow me to cattle-prod our Neanderthal into action.

How To Say "I'm An Idiot" Without Saying "I'm An Idiot"

Or, no good turn goes unstoned.  In the South Canadian state of Missouri, a journalist called Josh Benaud was doing a deep dive into the IT security of various state databases.  He was accessing the websites via a normal browser, and discovered that, in the HTML code of one educational database, the Social Security numbers - the peculiar South Canadian name for National Insurance Numbers - were clearly visible.  Art!

This is not that story

     This is what one would call a 'glitch', or, in technical terms, a 'gaping security flaw'.  Why so?  Because in South Canada you can use a SSN to open things like bank accounts and credit cards and thus comprehensively defraud people.

     Josh, being an upright citizen, informed the state Education Department, whose database it was, so that they might correct the error.

     Next comes proof that electing the stupid to office always ends badly.  State Governor Mike Parsons, the most powerful politician in Missouri, got it into his kitten-sized brain that Josh had been ILLEGALLY HACKING THE DATABASE!  Art!

The 187-year old governor in question

     He probably has to read by using his finger and moving his lips.  Ol' sub-Parsons decided he was going to prosecute the wicked evil illegal hacker and referred the case to the Cole County Prosecutor's office.

     Who said they were doing nothing, case closed there will be no more comments.

     We'll be coming back to this in a Part Two!

"The War Illustrated Editioni 191"

Fingers crossed that the pictures still load or this will be a text-heavy blog.  Please remember that these pictures are dated October but are used to illustrate stories and events from September 1944.  Art!

     This is the first photography that TWI has put up about the airborne component of 'Operation Market Garden', which makes sense when you realise that the paratroopers at Arnhem were fifty miles behind enemy lines with no way to transmit photographs.

     In the top photo you can see 38 gliders that all seem to have landed successfully without crashing into either each other or bits of landscape.  Yes, many seem to have been cut in twain.  Art!

     This is the British 'Horsa' glider, which was designed to come apart after landing, so the troops could egress all the quicker.

     The bottom photograph shows scads - I am NOT going to count them - of paratroopers being dropped, and it's also an illustration of why gliders were used.  The brolly-men are vulnerable to wind and get scattered all over the place, whereas a glider will put twenty men down precisely on a single spot.

Ho Ho No

There's an unflattering clip on Twitter showing DJ Tango flubbing a speech he made in front of the press at Mar-A-Lago.  There are long pauses in between fatuous commentary that makes even less sense than usual.  Art!

     Rather than translate, let Conrad The Psychologist interpret that this is a very old man, stressed to the heavens, unable to take Adderall any longer thanks to health issues, and who cannot read a teleprompter or understand what's being said via an earpiece.  Jake Broe cuttingly and snarkily called Trump on the campaign trail 'elder abuse'.  Also - Art!

     I think the political term for this is 'Going off the rails'.

     Choo-choo!

Following On From That

One person who used to be almost joined at the hip to Donold Judas Trump was Alina Habba, who was always popping up in the media to give her opinion, whether it was requested or not.

     Suddenly she's not around any more.  One wonders, has she been fired?  Her legal acumen was definitely lacking but she looked good in a bikini, which counts more with Trump, unless you start to lose him money.

     No, you're not getting a shot of her in a swimsuit WASH YOUR MINDS OUT YOU DISGUSTING PERVERTS.  Art!

     In the words of Z Z Top, "Every girl loves a flabby, balding adult-diaper wearing pasty-faced man."
     Okay, I lied.  But I lied creatively!

Finally -

Supplies of sugar-free sweets getting dangerously low.  A trip into Lesser Sodom is on the cards this Saturday.