Capitaine Vengeur

Blame ZOG?

So grotesque that I first thought it was the pitch for a new episode of The Thin Blue Line sitcom, with the most improbable CID branch in the Kingdom!

In the late 20s - ealy 30s, Fonck and Udet often met each other in Germany (yes, often Berlin) and were often photographed together seemingly getting on with each other, the top Allied and top German living aces, for the aviation magazines to proudly display this symbol of reconciliation after "The war to end all wars". Fonck's main release was "Mes combats" (1920): I have seen several different covers, implying many re-editions, but this one seems to be the first and most often displayed. That's the book where he claimed to have downed 141 enemy planes, 127 of which he was absolutely sure. I have only read an extract about his feat of May 9 (six in a day, the first three crashing less than 400m to each other: the cover illustration, probably), but the whole book seems to be a monument of self-indulgence. Fonck wasn't appreciated among his peers. Besides their competition as aces, Nungesser detested him for his boasting, and also for his weird, atypical character (they were so incredibly different, like the soldier monk facing the bar brawler!). Fonck shocked many by stating after beloved Guynemer's death, as an unrespectful brief epitaph: "Well, with his way of fighting, it's surprising he survived that long...". His Escadrille fellowmen didn't like him either; his ascetic way of life most often let him away from them, and he clearly didn't care about. He alone accounted for more than two thirds of the kills of SPA 103, and none of his three usual wingmen all along 1918 ever became an ace: unlike the Red Baron, he wanted all of the spoils just for himself. Claude Haegelen, while considered as his closest "friend", even stated: "He is not a truthful man. He is a tiresome braggart, and even a bore, but in the air, a slashing rapier, a steel blade tempered with unblemished courage and priceless skill. ... But afterwards he can't forget how he rescued you, nor let you forget it. He can almost make you wish he hadn't helped you in the first place."

René Fonck was probably the most perfect example of point #4 about physical fitness. He ate frugally, never smoked, never drank, never dated "loose women", never partied with comrades, never took-off when feeling unfit, sometimes left the front for up to one month of physical rest (his slack months in 1918), practised several hours a day various forms of physical training, and was even one of the very, very few Europeans at that time to practise Yoga Pranayama. To be able to control his own breathing allowed him to cruise for long at very high altitudes, his favourite place for look-out with the SPAD diver plane; it also made him able to develop a more accurate concentration, and perhaps even to control his own heart beats in battle (he was a matchless sharpshooter). To submit his own body in accordance with his cold-blooded, merciless instinct made him a perfect killing machine. On the other hand, Charles Nungesser achieved great success with a much looser way of life, to say the least; but it's only through chance and strong constitution that he survived countless potentially lethal wounds.

I know none Allied top ace lost that way, but Erich Löwenhardt, Fritz Rumey, and Oswald Boelcke, German top aces #3, #6 and #10, died from air collisions (from "friendly" collisions for Löwenhardt and Boelcke, with the other guy surviving, and also from failing parachutes for Löwenhardt and Rumey). Enough said about the danger of collisions.

It smells cowshed and unwashed drakkar just to watch !! Shampoo was certainly a marvellous invention...

The old village settled down the slope has been rebuilt with the same name at some distance (3 kms or so), more integrated to the farming plains. The mashed ruins have been left untouched for the neighbouring woods to reconquer ground, as a mark of remembrance. La Bataille du Chemin des Dames is the French name for the Second Battle of the Aisne, April-May 1917. The road, named after two of Louis XV's daughters that passed there, lies along the top of a ridge where the Germans had settled formidable defensive positions: the French assault waves were slaughtered one after another by machine-guns nests set into the fortified quarries and caves deeply dug into the chalky slope, and that had been left untouched by artillery. The plateau under which Craonne was settled is named Le Plateau de Californie, after "La Californie", a "saloon américain" that was settled there (actually, a discreet rural brothel!). An interesting visit in the immediate vicinity of Craonne is the main of these fortified caves, known as La Caverne du Dragon in French and Die Drachenhöhle in German. Long, terrible hand-to-hand fightings with knives and grenades in almost complete darkness occured in these galleries of chalk.

My mother remembers that in her rural childhood (the Fifties), every November 11, the pupils of the village were gathered around the War memorial, one after another naming a dead, and a second one replying "Mort pour la France". Then salute, music, fuss, etc... I have never known such ceremonies in my own childhood. And I don't even think that nowadays French children, disorientated by Eurocratic politically correct teaching of History, know what November 11 means, safe for a public holiday. The main visual remembrance of that war are the ubiquitous memorials, especially in small villages where they usually stand in the middle of the main square. They are especially touching in these small places, where one can sometimes find more names on the plaque than people staying in the village after the urban migrations. Some 30,000 of these monuments can be found everywhere in France, mostly erected within 1919-21, each village setting its own pride in having a nicer monument, with more names than the neighbouring village. As quoted in Bertrand Tavernier's "Life and nothing but", it was an incredible, miraculous market giving juicy contracts for years even to the poorest artists. When a statue is added to the monument, it is almost always a Poilu in light blue with helmet, even through about one third of the French deads wore képis and red trousers. But the long years of immobile muddy attrition, the hagiographic picture of the heroes of Verdun, are the most commonly remembered.

Here are two places where I sometimes go wandering when coming back to my parents'. The crater lies on Côte 285, Argonne (December 1916, 52 tons of explosives, according to the sign at the edge of the hole, which is at shoulder's height). The scarred woods with remnants of stonewall are the place where Craonne stood, a living village under a green slope in 1914, erased from the face of Earth by industrial warfare, in a countryside fertilized by thousands of unrecoverd anonymous bodies during the Second Battle of the Aisne.

Yep, Hugault's art is wonderful. Both about slender planes and buxom girls. But Olham, the French comics publishers even hijack the best German-speaking authors, just the way Delcourt has hired excellent Swiss artist Franz Zumstein for "Les faucons du désert", about fascinating WW2 air warfare over North Africa and Malta. A fine work, and at least, the German version is easy to find.

Any good resolutions for this new year to come?

So tragic... Especially involving lifesaving equipment...

The French training was famed throughout the World before the War. One of our oldest military airfields next to my hometown of Reims (closed just last year) saw the first international air meeting in 1909. There had been formed in the early 1910s the first military pilots of many small nations like Serbia. Several allied Russians had received their military pilot's licenses there before the War, and so had Francesco Baracca, Italian top ace ever, in 1912.

A punching gentleman, indeed... We miss sportsmen like him.

Skills according with ranks, retrieved and translated from a grunt's military madness I found amusing. Guess which rank the author had... General : He can make a standing jump over high buildings. He is stronger than a big locomotive, faster than a missile. He can walk on raging waves. And every day, he has dinner with God. Colonel : He can jump over high buildings with three steps of run-up. He is stronger than a medium locomotive, and as fast as a large-calibre shell. He can walk on quiet waves. And every day, he chats with God. Lieutenant-Colonel : He can jump over small buildings, when authorized. He is almost as strong as a medium locomotive, almost as fast as a small-calibre projectile. He can almost walk on water. And possibly, if his request is accepted, he will be allowed to talk to God. Major : He can jump over a Bedouin tent. He will lose after a hard fight against a medium locomotive. He can use a large-calibre weapon. He is a fair swimmer. Sometimes, God could talk to him. Captain : He will cause much damage if trying to jump over buildings. He will be crushed by a locomotive. He can use a rifle, in favourable circumstances. He can swim with the help of dolphins. He talks to animals. Lieutenant : He runs into buildings. He can recognize a locomotive twice out of three tries. He will never be entrusted ammunitions. He can float, if trained in using a rubber ring. He talks to walls. Second Lieutenant : He smashes his face up in the stairs at the entrance of buildings. He can fight against a locomotive toy. He can get wounded using a water gun. He walks in puddles. He mutters to himself. SARGE : He pushes aside the buildings bothering Him. He derails locomotives in a single kick. He stops bullets with teeth and spits them out. He freezes the raging ocean in a single look. HE IS GOD !

I want that down here, on the other side of the Channel! I can just imagine our first petitions, among classics: -- Zidane president ! -- Remove Nicolas Sarkozy's high heels -- Remove Carla Bruni's clothes -- Remove Dominique Strauss-Kahn's balls -- Forbid sober driving

Using rusty F-84s salvaged and flown by the less dumb morons of the True Americans' Militia of Michigan, Operation McVeigh's Revenge? Well, another nightmare of America...

If flying actual Yaks, I suppose so, it could be worth watching: they're among my favourite birds. Many elements of this amazing story would deserve a remake in the modern way, like the evolution of relations between French pilots and Soviet mechanics, from mutual scorn and distrust at first, to mutual respect, to intimate friendship bonds and complete admiration towards each others' skills. All of them cried when a French pilot preferred to crash to death rather than to abandon his crippled Yak and the Soviet mechanic he carried behind his seat and was close friend with: echoed by propaganda, this was this story that first made the regiment famous in the USSR. Gepard, can this movie be found in DVD (Euro standards)?

I suppose that these "French institutions" in German-occupied areas kept on working, for the fullest entertainment of Landsers and Junkers. But the army who had the toughest problem was them was of course the American one, in an era of the most churchy puritanism: it was okay to send boys being smashed for the Noble Cause, it was not to allow them to experience forbidden pleasures (death is Good, sex is Evil). Here in Le Havre where most of the Doughboys landed, General Pershing put pressure on the authorities to have the streets cleared from any "loose woman". The other source of concern for the Americans was that in this loose country, many of their black soldiers were to experience sex with white women, an aberrancy not even imaginable in many States.

Memphis Belle is a fine advert for the resilience of the Boeing military planes, in the same way Airport was for the resilience of Boeing civilian aircraft. A box of Flying Fortresses under attack is still a stunning view.

The Blue Max and Battle of Britain. Great unmatched classic jewels of the Sixties. I love piston-engined planes, and enjoy the merciless ace system in the first one, and the epic struggle for survival in the second one.

There are many examples of chivalry in the sky... but countless examples of the contrary. Less known than the Guynemer/ Udet story, Charles Nungesser was also spared once by an unknown superior German pilot flying a superior plane (a Halberstadt scout was reported), who played the cat and mouse with him, let him go, flew next to him to his airfield near Paris, and then surprisingly, landed next to him, sent him a salute, and took-off away, letting Nungesser puzzled and humiliated. The story is known through Nungesser's accounts, the identity of the chivalrous Jagdflieger remained unknown. He couldn't have missed Nungesser's conspicuous emblem, and yet, he let alive this already famous scourge who was yet to kill many other German airmen. During WW2, the Soviet and American pilots (both ETO and PTO) were known to be the most prone to fire on enemy parachutes. A young promising American ace, whose name I don't remember, once crashed himself to death on the ground when trying to machine-gun the crew of a German Me-110 he had just forced to the ground. British, German and Italian pilots fought in a more civilized way, at least within their own caste (merciless ground attacks, including towards civilians, were another story). Over the Channel in 1940, Werner Mölders once almost overshot a Spitfire after realizing that he was out of ammo. Both planes stayed wing to wing for a brief moment, both pilots staring at each other. Then the British pilot tapped his own temple and broke, letting a surprised Mölders break on the other side and come back home.

Agincourt was an expensive lesson, bleeding for long the French and Burgundian nobilities. But it was a well-learnt lesson, as proved in the three decisive battles that closed the Hundred Years War, on a French strategic victory that confined the English language to one side of the Channel (safe for summer holidays). In 1453, safe for Calais, all of the possesions England had on the continent at the time of Edward III (Normandy, Aquitaine...) had been lost once and for all to the Valois kings, who 25 years before were confined to a small area along the Loire. At Patay (1429), the French mounted knights could surprise Fastolf's army before it could build field fortifications, and slaughtered the bowmen in the open ground (100 casualties to 2500). At Formigny (1450) and Castillon (1453), the French knights fought dismounted on a dry ground against Kyriell's and Talbot's armies, bypassing the wooden pickets and fighting the bowmen hand to hand. The newborn French artillery also played a role, marginal at Formigny but decisive at Castillon, the first decisive intervention of artillery in European History (100 casualties to 4000, a reversed Agincourt). If France suffered from backwardness in technology and tactics between Cressy and Agincourt, she had gained by large the upper hand at the time of Castillon. Year 1453 marks the end of the Middle Ages, not only for the Fall of Constantinople, but also for the end of the Hundred Years War and the entry into the Age of Powder. None of these battles are known as well in France as Cressy, Poitiers and Agincourt are in England, as no king participated there. But they proved to be more decisive in the long term in drawing the present map of Western Europe.

Lexx, there is actually a legal precedent in China, 2006, when some man was condemned to pay for the care of a dying person he had led to the hospital. The court considered that the man performed that charitable deed because feeling guilty, so was probably responsible in the accident. Besides such stupidity from the institutions, I don't think that this shameful general behaviour of ignoring dying people around has much to do with communism. On the contrary, I would consider a disturbing inadaptability of the Chinese ancient holistic mentality to our own Western individualistic, materialistic mentality. Zombis passing by fallen people feel dependant on their pods, mobiles and new gadgets rather than on an intimate code of living, dependant on their own private agendas and careers rather than on what happens around them. Bible wouldn't change that much in these people's behaviour: they would probably keep on driving fast and ignoring fallen people around, if they are late for the Mass. Still their damned own private agendas above everything else. Unfortunately, I think that such a thing could happen in my damned shabby district, with somebody on the ground and 18 zombis passing by - because all of them walking drunk. Creaghorn, I believe it's too late now to think about a boycott on Chinese products, which would let all of us Westerners naked assholes with bare hands, living in empty houses (damn, I couldn't say if even the cement for our houses also comes from China!). How could have we been led in such a dead-end !?