The Snows of Kandahar: India and Afghanistan

He used to be a familiar figure in the India of yore: the itinerant Afghan merchant or skilled labourer or moneylender, the Kabuliwallah as he was called (and so immortalised in a story by Rabindranath Tagore), bearded, turbaned, full of the mystery of the untamed hills of his native lands.

Once, before the Mughals came down from Central Asia, his forebears had ruled in Delhi. But the British had followed the Mughals, and even though he had defeated them, they had carved his homeland in two, with their imperial boundary, the Durand Line, keeping a large number of his people as part of the subjects of British India, as part of the "Great Game" between Imperial Russia and Britain. And then independence had come, and the nations split again, and those of them who had migrated further in search of employment or education or for other reasons found themselves, many times, as the citizens of yet another new nation – India. There are Pashtuns here in this town, on the other side of the subcontinent from Afghanistan. 

I wrote that introduction, basically, to explain that India and Afghanistan have had links going back many centuries, and to this day, Indian music and Bollywood are extremely popular in those parts of Afghanistan where such things as movies and music are allowed. But the links are, of course, all cultural. India is a South Asian nation, not part of Central Asia. It is not directly concerned in any way with Afghanistan. It has no strategic considerations there.

But India’s great rival, Pakistan, has such strategic considerations; or thinks it does. Pakistan is a narrow nation, much narrower than India, and most of its cities and industry are at modest distances from the Indian frontier. Many times over the years, Pakistani strategists had dreamed of “strategic depth” against India, a space in which Pakistan could operate with impunity, and this more than anything else is the reason why the then Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq practically fell over himself in accommodating the United States’ proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan. And, most especially, this is why the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) helped set up the Taliban in 1995-6, with American connivance; it was supposed to be a pliant Pakistani tool which could replace the brutal warlords battling for power and wealth in Kabul and let Pakistan do more or less as it wished.

Alas for the best laid plans of mice and men, it didn’t quite go that way. The Taliban couldn’t quite take over all Afghanistan, and their incompetent and brutal regime made itself hated all over the world. Even the Americans, who had been negotiating with the Taliban for pipelines bringing oil and natural gas from the new Central Asian banana republics down to the Arabian Sea (vide Ahmed Rashid,Taliban: The Story Of The Afghan Warlords), finally gave up and turned against them when they began sheltering an old US protégé-turned-foe, Osama bin Laden.

And then the incident of 11/9/2001 happened. For the purposes of this article it isn’t significant who was actually responsible for the episode or where the planning and preparations were conducted, or whether one or more intelligence agencies were directly or indirectly complicit in allowing it to happen. What matters is that it was seized upon by the US as a reason to launch an invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, arguably an invasion and occupation which had nothing whatsoever to do with the ostensible cause. The alliance of warlords called the Northern Alliance, which had been supported by Russia, India and Iran all these years, came storming into Kabul, with Indian magazines proudly proclaiming victory. Hamid Karzai, a former employee of the American oil firm UNOCAL (which had earlier lost out to Argentina’s BRIDAS in the battle for the pipeline deal) was parachuted into Kabul as the new President, and Indian businessmen and engineers descended on the capital too, contracts in hand. Bollywood music again played from shop windows, and it seemed India was back, and Pakistan had lost all it had.

But that was back then. A few years later, things have changed a fair bit. The Taliban are back in force, the Americans have their backs to the wall, and the Karzai regime is in bad trouble. Pakistan seems to have decided that its lost strategic depth is again within its grasp. And India, which poured in money and effort to build schools and hospitals and roads (while its own languished) for Afghanistan, finds itself suddenly isolated, ignored, and increasingly targeted.

As can be seen on the list provided here, India’s efforts on the ground have been extensive and expensive, but have produced little or nothing of lasting value. Of course we Indians can congratulate ourselves on how much the Afghans love us, but the fact remains that it is to Pakistan that Afghanistan is now turning, not India, to find a way out of its problems. And the fact also remains that India’s efforts in Afghanistan are shrinking, not expanding; India’s presence has fallen by half in recent months.

A fundamental question, then: why is India involved in Afghanistan? Should India be in Afghanistan at all?

Unlike Pakistan, as I said, India has no direct strategic interests in Afghanistan. At the most, it served under the Taliban as a training ground for some anti-Indian terrorist groups, but such training camps were usually run by Pakistanis and could have been hosted just about anywhere, including the Pakistani-run part of Kashmir. And since there was not a thing in hell India could have done about those terror camps except grin and bear it, all that it could do was block the terrorists from entering, or if they had already entered, to kill them. This applied wherever the terrorists had been trained, in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and this is something that the Indians managed to do, on the whole, rather well.

Therefore, India gained nothing, whatsoever, from all the effort it poured into Afghanistan in some kind of new Great Game. While it may have got some popularity because it has not sent military forces and because its reconstruction efforts have been more successful than the incredible corruption overseen by NATO and the US, this remains on the street and has nothing to do with any actual diplomatic or political advantage. Arguably, in the villages of Pashtun Afghanistan, where American drones and high-flying aeroplanes have made a habit of bombing civilians, all India has done is show itself as aligned with – if not the occupation forces – at least with the government propped up by those same occupation forces.

Let me say something here. The Americans are going to lose in Afghanistan. You can’t win a guerrilla war by pouring in troops and by bombing weddings from drones. Even if you kill the guerrillas opposing you at the rate of ten thousand to one, even if you kill every guerrilla you can find, as long as the reasons for the existence of those guerrillas persists, they will be replaced. The guerrillas don’t even have to win a single battle outright to win the war. All they have to do is outlast you, and wait for you to bankrupt yourself fighting them. It’s clearly happening already.

Therefore, India finds itself backing the losing horse, and badly at that. It supports, one the one hand, Hamid Karzai, who has no real political base and is derisively known as the Mayor of Kabul, a man whose brother is a drug warlord and who presides over one of the most corrupt governments in the world. At the same time, it aligns itself with the erstwhile Northern Alliance, warlords who are quite as brutal – and a great deal more corrupt – than the Taliban they claim to be fighting. And also it is, by association if not by deed, identified as well with the occupation forces, who are, of course, hated.

At the risk of repeating an oft-told theme, let me make the point once more: the Afghans hate foreigners in their territory. Just because the foreigners build roads and power stations doesn’t make them loved and welcome with opened arms; check what happened to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The only reason they tolerate India is that India is far away and no direct threat. Put Indian soldiers on the streets of Kabul and Kandahar, and Indian tanks rolling down the potholed Afghan highways, and you’ll see just how fast that love of India turns to bitter hatred.

The arguments for an increased Indian role in Kabul, such as they are, fall under a few headings:

First: India can’t “abandon” the Afghans.

India hasn’t a stake in Afghanistan, at least not now. The Afghans aren’t looking up to India as a big brother, and to arrogate to oneself the role is presumptuous and insulting.

Second: India’s interests demand that Afghanistan remains friendly to us and hostile to terrorists.

Aligning yourself with a hated foreign occupier, a puppet president and venal warlords isn’t the way to ensure that the nation is friendly. And when the nation is basically a giant real-action training ground for guerrilla fighters, basic blowback will ensure you’ll get it in the neck in future. Besides, as India has already demonstrated before 2001, terrorists can be fought without hitting their training camps (which in any case are mere yards and cabins) – and has equally demonstrated after 2001 that an Afghanistan under occupation doesn’t insulate oneself to terror strikes.

Third: A Taliban government would be aggressively expansionist and hard-line Islamic, and try to turn the world into an Islamic Caliphate.

The Taliban are a semi-literate bunch of Pashtun thugs whose interests are strictly village-to-province-level. They have no pan-Islamic ambitions; they can’t even control the non-Pashtun contiguous areas of Pakistan. The pan-Islamic bunch isn’t Taliban; they’re, among others, Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda is a decentralised organisation of scattered cells, almost none of whom are in Afghanistan any longer. And as for the Islamic Caliphate, don’t make me laugh.

Fourth: We have already poured too much money and effort into Afghanistan to back out now.

Throw good money after bad: a classic formula for success.

Fifth: India’s new-found friend the US has to be supported.

Even if one believes the idea that the US is a friend, one does not need to cut one’s own throat to oblige a friend who has begun a knife-fight on his own account.

Sixth: The strategic depth Pakistan lost after the US invasion will be restored if the Taliban return to power.

A Talibanised Afghanistan, one that isn’t looking for survival support to Pakistan, is liable to view the Pakistanis with dislike and suspicion at the least and – if Pakistani involvement gets overt – with visceral hatred. Certainly an Afghanistan with the Taliban in complete command of the southern half of the nation will want the re-integration of the Pashtun-inhabited areas of Pakistan with it, and this is going to be a major headache for Pakistan, not for India. Surprise: a Taliban Afghanistan could actually be an ally of Indian interests, even if by accident...

Seventh: The Taliban have an awful human rights record.

Yes. So? Most of the Taliban’s human rights violations are crude and overt in the extreme (remember those women being shot between the goalposts during football matches?) and if we know anything about history, it is that crude and overt violations are the ones that get set right most easily. The west no longer burns witches at the stake, for instance. Also, if the Taliban are so odious, they aren’t markedly worse than, say, Saudi Arabia and are in some respects less bad. Only they don’t have oil. Therefore they are pariahs (I bet you they wouldn’t have been, though, had they given UNOCAL that pipeline contracts). Besides, who’s India to talk about human rights violations? One can write volumes about India's own skeletons in the cupboard.

This also bypasses the point that the Taliban of today are a bit different from the men of Mullah Omar, and in fact the term no longer has much meaning (“Taliban” means “students,” specifically religious students). It’s extremely doubtful if a new Taliban government would have much in common with the old one.

Advice to India, therefore: get out while the going’s good. Maybe at some future date, just maybe, we can return. But until then, leave Afghanistan to Pakistan, the US and the Taliban to fight over; we already know who’s going to be the victor.   

Most Remarkable Like You

(From April 2011)

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, 
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you
                                             Rudyard Kipling, Tommy Atkins

You keep coming across those news articles; you know, headlines like “Ten insurgents die in clash with army,” or “Landmine explosion kills soldier.” And you either skim over them cursorily, or read them with satisfaction or not, depending on which side did the killing and which side the dying in that episode.

Like, recently, I was reading about how some rebel in Libya was being interviewed “next to the charred corpse of a Gaddafi soldier” – a throwaway line probably intended to make him sound like a heroic fighter. I don’t know whether the rebel or the Gaddafi soldier’s corpse actually existed outside the reporter’s imagination, but that doesn’t particularly matter.

For imagine the reality. Every one of those dead people was a human being like yourself. Every single one of them, so casually mentioned in a media article, was someone who had felt the touch of wind on his face, the rain on his arms, seen the red of a flower bleed into the air from among the green of leaves. He, too, might have held a lover in his arms and felt her heart beating against his chest, her face buried in the hollow of his neck. He, too, would have had dreams, if only the dream of being a glorious martyr.

In two of my four completed novels, I’ve followed the fortunes of “terrorists”: I’ve tried to humanise them as far as I could, and when I did, I found a strange reluctance to kill them off as I’d intended. In the second instance, that reluctance actually led me to changing the very course of the novel, turning the said “terrorist” from an ancillary character (who's killed off halfway in the first draft) to the book’s primary focus. He was simply too human to die, by my hand anyway.

Do you know this iconic photograph from Guadalcanal?


Even this nameless Japanese soldier must have had dreams and hopes, parents waiting for him in Yokohama or Kyoto. Even he, who might have perhaps bayoneted a Chinese prisoner in the Rape of Nanjing, or used the services of “comfort women”, might have had dreams and hopes and aspirations. I'm not saying he did any of those things; just that he might have. That doesn't make him less human.

That’s not something the media wants you to think of. Because when you think beyond the statistics, you begin to wonder how any of this makes sense, especially when this planet will be cremated by the sun anyway in a few billion years, even assuming that humanity lasts anywhere near that long.

Answer: It doesn’t make sense.

Not to me.

The Bunker

(From Dec 2006; Bush was at high tide)

One of the wonders of the Second World War is the fact that the German people continued, even when the war was obviously lost beyond all recovery, to worship at the altar of Adolf Hitler. Apart from Valkyrie (the abortive July 1944 coup against him), marked by a breathtaking incompetence, there was never serious opposition even to the last days of April 1945. By 1944 the leading Nazis were all aware that defeat was inevitable, and many began to make arrangements to disappear, but Hitler himself, and a few acolytes like Goebbels, continued to dream of der Sieg (victory). The last ridiculous action along this line was the "Steiner Offensive" in defence of Berlin, to be launched by an SS general, Felix Steiner, who could not be located and using troops who no longer existed. Not surprisingly, it was underwhelming as a success.
One might say that Hitler was insane - and towards the end he undoubtedly was. But what of his generals? They had advised him against invading the USSR (in a preventive war "against absolute Communist evil") without first defeating Britain, and were ignored. They had watched while he fatally delayed Fall Barbarossa in order to vent his spite on harmless Yugoslavia, and they did nothing about it. They had advised him to pull back from Stalingrad while there was still time, and had heard him scream "Ich bleibe an der Wolga! Where the German soldier sets foot, he remains!" They had advised him (and he had initially agreed) not to attack Kursk in 1943; yet he had listened to a minority of them, and against his own instincts, had thrown his tanks into the operation (Fall Zitadelle)  which was to destroy the Panzer forces beyond recovery. And his generals stayed loyal! The German people saw their neighbourhoods disappear under a rain of Lancaster and B24 bombs, their soldiers vanish into Russia never to return, and they stayed loyal! Some of Hitler's advisers told him to make peace with Stalin or with the Western Allies so as to concentrate on one enemy, and he refused. And they stayed loyal!  He repeatedly assured the country of "miracle weapons" that would bring victory, and these weapons were always too little, too late, and misused at that, and they still stayed loyal. Berlin was a sea of ruins, the Red Army was at the gates, and Hitler and his spaced out group of bizarros (like this guy) were rejoicing at the death of Roosevelt, taking this as a "turning point", an omen of inevitable final victory, or at least of an honourable negotiated peace. Even in the last days he put up favoured incompetents like Himmler as chief of Army Group Vistula, and the generals did not rebel! And the German people, even as the Reich's authority crumbled around their ears, stayed loyal!
How did Hitler do it?
One way was by equating himself with "god". The German soldier's oath went...

Diensteid der Soldaten der Wehrmacht	Service oath for soldiers of the armed forces
Ich schwöre bei Gott diesen heiligen Eid, daß ich dem Führer des Deutschen Reiches und Volkes Adolf Hitler, dem Oberbefehlshaber der Wehrmacht, unbedingten Gehorsam leisten und als tapferer Soldat bereit sein will, jederzeit für diesen Eid mein Leben einzusetzen.	I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be ready, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.

So, as we see here, the oath was to Hitler, not to the state, and since Hitler was the Fuehrer of the state, any opposition to Hitler was tantamount to opposition to the state. Also, since it was an oath sworn by "god", obedience to Hitler was ipso facto a religious duty. The civil service had a not dissimilar oath:

Diensteid der öffentlichen Beamten	Service oath for public servants
Ich schwöre: Ich werde dem Führer des Deutschen Reiches und Volkes Adolf Hitler treu und gehorsam sein, die Gesetze beachten, und meine Amtspflichten gewissenhaft erfüllen, so wahr mir Gott helfe.	I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and people, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfil my official duties, so help me God.

All this was allied to a highly intrusive surveillance programme which was justified by the idea that only "enemies of the Fuehrer/ state" had anything to fear from it (these enemies would promptly vanish into torture and the hell of concentration camps, and towards the end of the war included such men as the former Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder). And right from school attempts were made to drill obedience into young minds along with militarism and state orchestrated violence.
Meanwhile the industrialists were kept happy because endless war meant an endless flood of orders to their factories, not to mention an endless flood of Jewish and PoW slave labour. And the media were carefully controlled by means of locking up intransigent reporters and promoting such organs as the Nazi party mouthpiece Volkischer Beobachter ("People's Observer") which trumpeted the idea of a righteous war in defence of Western, specifically Aryan, civilisation against absolute evil.
So the German people were controlled by a mix of indoctrination,  intimidation, the deliberate confusion created between religion and the state, and the state and the government, which was the leader. And the German military, now full of "foreign allies", was controlled by hanging recalcitrant officers and rewarding the rest with worthless strips of metal, Iron Crosses and Knights' Crosses, and the like.
This is why, even when the enforcers of the Nazi order had vanished and Nazism itself collapsed in ruin, the German people remained loyal to Hitler until his hold was finally broken by his own suicide. To the last he went on declaring, to his secretary Traudl Junge, that he had "never wanted this war" while insisting, as always, that the first war had never been lost; the Germans had been "stabbed in the back" and if they lost this war, were "unworthy of his genius".
And - oh - did I mention that Hitler came first to power by an entirely democratic election, where he won votes by playing on peoples' fears (scaremongering, in a word) of the "internal enemy" who was "out to destroy German Kultur"; that he consolidated that power by engineering and playing up a staged incident (the Reichstag Fire) which was used as an excuse to impose rule by decree, suspend civil liberties, and fulfil a preplanned agenda; and that he maintained that support in his early days by dazzling people's eyes with a vision of Empire?
Why am I reprising all this ancient history?
"Imminent danger"..."preventive war against absolute evil"..."western cultural values against Eastern barbarism"..."America attacked"..."extraordinary rendition"..."US Patriot Act"..."traitors"..."operation to recapture Baghdad"..."body counts"..."freedom medals"..."God in the White House"..."strong war leader"..."we're an empire now"..."embedded reporters"..."military industrial complex"..."stabbed in the back in Vietnam"... "no cutting and running"..."stay the course"..."final victory"..."rewarding service with citizenship"..."Zarqawi's/Uday and Qusay Hussein's death is a turning point"...and so on and so on.
Sounds familiar?
Throw in the inability to recognise reality and the rewarding of incompetence, and all you have missing is a Charlie Chaplin moustache. Karl Marx was right again...history does repeat itself, the first time as  tragedy, the second as farce.
So might we hope to have the last days in the Fuehrerbunker repeated as well?

The Shadow Of The Shark: The Sinking of PNS Ghazi

 

The water lay black and still. In the distance the low hills behind Vishakhapatnam harbour were dark and showed not a glimmer of lights.

With a sudden swirl, a long thin shape broke the surface. It swung left, then right, like an elephant's trunk seeking air to breathe. It trailed a thin wake behind it as it went.

Ten metres below, something long and predatory slid through the water, black and smooth and lethal. It resembled nothing so much as a gigantic shark, complete with hydroplanes like pectoral fins and a huge conning tower like a flattened dorsal fin.

Inside the steel cylinder, a naval officer put his eyes to the rubber eyepieces of his periscope and tried to decipher some landmark with which to orient his vessel. Somewhere out there was the enemy he had to bottle up, or, if possible, destroy. It was midnight on the third of December, 1971.
The stage was set for one of the great tragedies of recent military history.

It's incredible how little use has been made of the submarine in the post Second World War era. As of this writing, just two ships have been sunk since that time by submarines, the Indian frigate INS Khukri by the Pakistani submarine PNS Hangor  in 1971 and the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano by the British submarine HMS Conqueror during the war for the Islas Malvinas. But give the Pakistanis credit. They did try...

The PNS Ghazi was originally a Tench Class submarine, USS Diablo, first launched in 1944, during World War Two and then upgraded to the level of a fleet snorkel submarine. It was leased to the Pakistanis by the Americans in 1964 and became the first submarine operated by a South Asian navy. (At this time the Indian navy – as usual in those days – went crawling to the British for a sub from their scrap-heap: the latter refused on the grounds that Indian personnel were incompetent to operate submarines. The first Foxtrot Class sub only joined the Indian navy in 1967, when India finally realised that the Russians better bets as a source of weapons than the British and their American masters.)

In 1965 the Ghazi operated off Bombay harbour without success – the Indian Navy stayed almost entirely in harbour to prevent any potentially prestige-damaging sinkings. Ghazi did claim to have sunk the frigate INS Brahmaputra but this ship was displayed intact for the media at the conclusion of the war. It's said that an Indian anti-submarine Alize aircraft flew right over the Ghazi without noticing it.
In 1968 the Ghazi went for a refit in Turkey, acquiring there the ability to lay mines through its torpedo tubes. It returned to Pakistan in 1970.
In 1971, when war threatened, the by now 26-year-old but still long-range (17000km) sub was sent over to the Bay of Bengal, leaving Karachi harbour on Nov 14. It had a crew of 93 under Captain Zafar Muhammad Khan and its mission was to sink the Indian Navy’s carrier, Vikrant, stationed ostensibly in Visakhapatnam. Ghazi was the only one of Pakistan’s four submarines capable of getting this far – the others were just short-range French Daphne Class coastal submarines.

War broke out on Nov 22 1971 when India finally invaded East Pakistan (please, no more of the ridiculous lie that war started with the Pakistani air strikes of Dec 3). At this time, Vikrant shifted to a secure anchorage in the Andamans. Vice Admiral Krishnan, Commander of the Eastern Naval Command, was aware that Ghazi was in these waters and decided to distract attention by laying a false trail of spurious provision orders and radio messages that seemed to indicate that Vikrant was still in Visakhapatnam.

The Pakistani authorities, on Nov 26, accordingly ordered the sub to move to the approaches of Visakhapatnam harbour. At around the same time, the old Indian destroyer, INS Rajput was ordered to the Bay of Bengal to generate misleading radio traffic. The Rajput was ready for decommissioning and did not have even depth charges fitted. Ghazi arrived off Visakhapatnam on 27 Nov, carrying mines as well as torpedoes.

On the night of 3 Dec, the evening before Pakistan launched air strikes in response to the Indian invasion, Ghazi moved to the harbour approaches to lay mines. Visakhapatnam being a narrow mouthed harbour (I've posted a video I took of that harbour, here) a few mines, strategically laid, would likely have blocked it for days or weeks. 
So the old sub, in darkness, unable to orient itself owing to the lack of lights due to blackout, moved in for the kill, as it thought. And then...
Around midnight something exploded in the front section of the sub, so loudly that windows were rattled in Visakhapatnam and people thought an earthquake had come. It blew the bows right off the submarine and drowned everyone aboard. The next morning fishermen reported oil slicks and floating wreckage. This was the first indication, despite later claims, that the Indian Navy had of the sinking. Divers, finally, on the 5th December, found the wreck and identified it.
Initially the Navy was ready to acknowledge that it was an accident but political pressure from Delhi forced it to claim that depth charges from the Rajput had sunk the sub, which actually had no charges fitted at all.

What sank the Ghazi? It might have been the explosion of one of its own torpedoes or mines, a spontaneous explosion of built-up gases, or perhaps it (as the Pakistanis claim) struck one of the mines it had itself laid. The explosion was certainly internal - the hull is  blown outwards, but the burns characteristic of a gas explosion were absent on the bodies that were recovered. The only certain thing is, that it was not the Indian Navy that was responsible for this sinking. Both the Americans and the Russians have offered to raise the sub at their own expense and find out how it sank, but the Indian government refused to allow it. I guess it's afraid the "Indian Navy sank it" claim might finally meet a watery grave of its own.

Today the Ghazi lies on the seabed off Visakhapatnam, wrapped in fishing nets. One hopes its crew died quickly when the end came. One hopes they did not have time to close watertight doors and lie in their bunks waiting for the end, while the water slowly rose.
Slow drowning is not the best of fates for brave men sacrificed by a stupid and ignorant leadership.

(Feb 2007)

The Sinking of the Lusitania

(From 2008)

Turn your clock back. Let the years roll away like waves retreating from the shore. Let the withered leaves spring off the earth and clothe the branches, grow green and shrink back into the wood. Let the water gather itself off the wet ground and rise into the sky, let the moon consume itself in reverse, and let the sun come out of the west and go to bed in the east.  

It’s May, 1915.

The Great War is on. Britain, France and Russia are facing Germany and Austria-Hungary. Britain – whose lifelines from its colonial empire stretch over the sea lanes – is desperately looking to bring in more allies, particularly the US, then neutral. Those sea lanes are threatened both by German surface raiders and more importantly by German submarines (U-boats).

In the Admiralty in London is the First Lord of the Admiralty (equivalent to Minister of the Navy), one Winston Churchill, someone whose name would become better known years later in different circumstances. Churchill, who is half-American, has no compunctions about using questionable tactics to try and get the ships through the U-boat lines. One of his secret orders to the captains of the merchant ships is to fly the flags of neutral nations, especially American flags. Another is his order to merchant ship captains to ram any surfaced U-boat that cares to approach. And yet another order is the Q-ship programme: armed ships with hidden weaponry and sailors dressed in civilian clothing that are meant to attack any U-boat that surfaces and approaches, a war crime if there ever was one.

But why should any U-boat surface and approach a merchant ship, you ask? Well, this is 1915, and there are certain rules that submarines are supposed to observe. Submarines in this day and age, you see, are supposed to be submersible cruisers, and they’re supposed to fight by Cruiser Rules.

And what are these Cruiser Rules?

Briefly, this is what a U-boat that sees a merchant ship is supposed to do: it should surface and fire a shot across the bows of the ship from its deck gun (all the subs of the time carry a deck gun) as a signal for the ship to stop. It should then approach the ship, put a boarding party on it, search it, and if it’s a neutral, let it go. if it’s an enemy ship, it’s the responsibility of the submarine to ensure the safety of the crew and passengers (if any) after which it can take the ship as a prize of war. Cute rules, right?

How can anyone in his right mind expect any submarine to obey these rules? How can any sub skipper ensure the safety of possibly hundreds of crew and passengers, in the middle of the ocean of all places? If he takes the ship as a prize, what the hell is he supposed to do with it? Abandon his sub and sail on the ship to the nearest friendly harbour?

Still, it’s the law, and that’s what the U-boat mostly does: it allows the crew to take to their lifeboats and then sinks the ship. But in order to do all that, it has to surface and approach the ship, doesn’t it? Trusting the ship to obey the rules as well?

Now these are the rules applying to unarmed ships. Ships which are armed or escorted by armed ships have no right to such considerate treatment from cruisers or from submarines.

Well, it should be obvious to anyone with sense that if the sub is afraid that any ship that it approaches might try to ram it, or open fire with hidden guns, it will not surface and make itself a target. And if it has reason to think that enemy ships are flying neutral flags, it might as well disregard the neutral flag and assume any ships it encounters are hostile. Logical, right?

What Mr Churchill has achieved, by his actions is therefore to put at risk every ship and every sailor on those ships, even if they belong to neutral nations and are completely innocent of all involvement in the war. It is inconceivable that he does not know what he is doing.

As I’ve said, the primary purpose behind all this is the desire of Mr Churchill to involve the US as a belligerent in the war on the side of Britain, and he is not particularly scrupulous about how he goes about it. He is helped by the officials in the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, who are about as pro-British as it is possible to get without openly declaring war on Germany. They know, because the Germans have showed them captured documents, all about the British orders to fly the American flag and to ram U-boats – but they do nothing about it.


Wilson, meanwhile, is quietly going about the job of “manufacturing consent” – working at changing the mindset of the neutralist American population towards involvement in a European war that is absolutely none of America’s business. He knows that it’s still far too early to go to war, because the spadework has to be done first, but he is busy doing it.

One way in which the Americans are helping Britain is by shipping quantities of munitions – contraband according to the laws of war – to Britain in the holds of merchant ships. Since these munitions are contraband, they are shipped under various cover names, like “fur”, for instance, or “lard”, or “cheese”, and are dispatched from fictitious firms and meant for fictitious firms.

One such shipment of munitions is going across the Atlantic in the holds of the passenger ship Lusitania.

The Lusitania is much more than a passenger ship. Once the fastest ship to make the Atlantic crossing, she was designed from the outset to be an armed merchant cruiser in time of war and has gun mounts (though no actual guns) hidden under coils of ropes on her deck. Almost her entire cargo is contraband, but as usual, disguised as “fur” etc. She also carries over a thousand passengers (this is 1915 and travelling to a country at war for a holiday or on business isn’t unusual) including 139 Americans.

Meanwhile, Americans of German ethnic origin are well aware of the Wilson government’s attempts to propagandise the people into a war mood. They realise that if a British ship carrying Americans is sunk, and Americans in large numbers are killed, it’s going to play into the hands of the pro-war party. The next such ship to sail is the Lusitania, and they issue, post-haste, an advertisement in it in the name of the German embassy cautioning passengers from travelling in British ships in a war zone. The ad ultimately appears only in one paper – ironically right next to another advert, this one of the Lusitania sailing.

Although the ad does cause some disquiet, not many actually cancel their passage on the ship.

Lusitania sails on 1 May, 1915. As a wartime economy measure one of her boiler rooms is shut down, thus limiting her top speed. It still is much faster than any sub can manage, though.

Meanwhile, the U-boats are active off the west coast of Ireland. One such boat is the U 20, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, a slightly ruthless character who has a habit of attacking ships (including a hospital ship on one occasion) without warning. In Schwieger’s defence, though, it might be said that on his previous patrol his sub had been damaged in a ramming attempt, and therefore he is naturally not inclined to risk his command in glorious Cruiser Rules engagements.

Over the course of his patrol, Schwieger attacks and sinks several ships, all off the west coast of Ireland, in an area which is directly in the path of the Lusitania. Among his victims are two merchant ships which he torpedoes without warning. However, apart from a general message warning of submarine activity, Captain Turner of the Lusitania is given no information whatever about the activities of the U 20. And, although the Royal Navy cruiser Juno is ordered to act as escort, she is suddenly ordered to port, leaving the Lusitania to steam into danger, at below her top speed, unwarned and unescorted.

Short of fuel and running out of torpedoes, Schwieger decides to make for home, and turns northwards. On the afternoon of 7 May, his course brings him into sight of the Lusitania, and he submerges and prepares to attack. He gets into position and fires a single torpedo into her starboard (right) side.

German torpedoes of this period – we are in 1915, remember – are noted for their unreliability. Sometimes they run wild, sometimes they fail to explode. Schwieger himself has little faith in them, and he is astonished at what happens when his shot strikes the British ship behind the bridge. Here is what he dictates to his log as he watches the effect of his torpedo through the periscope:

2.10 pm. Clean bowshot at 700 metres range, angle of intersection 90 degrees, estimated speed 22 knots.  Torpedo hits starboard side right behind the bridge. An unusually heavy detonation takes place with a very strong explosion cloud (far beyond front funnel). The explosion of the torpedo must have been followed by a second one (boiler or coal or powder?).  The superstructure above the point of impact and the bridge are torn asunder, fire breaks out and smoke envelops the high bridge. The ship stops immediately and heels over to starboard quickly, immersing simultaneously at the bow. It appears as if the ship is going to capsize very shortly. Great confusion on board; the boats are made ready and some of them lowered into the water. Apparently considerable panic; some boats, full to capacity, are rushed from above, touch the water with either stem or stern first, and founder immediately.

2.25 pm.  Since it seems as if the steamer can only remain afloat a short while longer, dive to 24 metres and head out to sea.  I could not have launched a second torpedo into that struggling throng of humanity trying to save their lives.

Schwieger’s torpedo holes the side of the Lusitania’s hull and lets in water, flooding the longitudinal bunkers, but it does not sink the ship. What sinks the ship is something else – a massive explosion in one of the forward cargo compartments, that blows out such a large part of the hull that the 45,000 tonne liner goes down in just 18 minutes. Due to a design weakness, hardly any of the lifeboats can be launched. The casualty list is horrifying – 1,198 people drown, including 128 of the 139 Americans on board, and not one of whom is not a civilian. What the cause of the explosion that sinks the Lusitania is a matter of conjecture: is it the coal powder in her holds, or is it her alleged cargo of “fur” and “cheese”? 
 
The British cruiser Juno is steaming towards the site of the sinking when she is explicitly recalled to port by the British authorities – even though she is within sight of the survivors in the water. Meanwhile, the U 20 and Kapitänleutnant Schwieger have long since headed out to sea.

Precisely as feared by the German-Americans, the sinking of the Lusitania is projected as a vicious piratical attack in the US media, all mention of the illegal cargo is suppressed or denied, and it serves as the beginning of a campaign that leads to the US entering the war two years later.

The exploiters of the events of 11/9/2001 may have had inspiration after all!      
 

Emil Klusmeier: the Final Torpedo

(From 2008)

 

On the night of May 7, 1945, a small convoy (code name EN91) of five Allied merchant vessels was approaching the Firth of Forth, in Scotland. The war in Europe was all but over. Germany had signed the surrender and the war was officially to end at midnight. It was approaching 11 pm.

Adolf Hitler was dead. Berlin had fallen to the Russians, Hamburg to the British, the rump German government of Grand Admiral (Großadmiral) Karl Dönitz was holed up in Flensburg on the Danish frontier, and the Wehrmacht had surrendered on the Western Front on 4 May – three days before.

The men aboard the ships of the convoy were probably justified in imagining that with the end of the war just an hour away, they were safe and they were celebrating. A mite too soon.

Out in the inky darkness, under the windy North Sea, a small German submarine was approaching.

It was the U 2336, one of the new breed of “electro-U boats”. U 2336 was a Type XXIII coastal submarine, meant for shallow water work at relatively short ranges. It was also one of the most revolutionary submarine designs ever, a sub so advanced that it rendered every older design obsolete virtually overnight; a sub so advanced that two scuttled examples were raised from the sea-bed ten years later and re-inducted into the resurrected German Navy. Can you imagine what I am talking about?

Like its larger but much less successful counterpart, the Type XXI electro-U boat, the Type XXXIII could travel underwater almost without ever needing to surface. It was so silent as to be almost undetectable, and if detected could evade any attack with contemptuous ease. Like the Type XXI, it was a genuine submarine, meant to remain underwater, unlike all previous subs which were basically torpedo boats which could submerge if they had to. And like the Type XXI, the Type XXIII subs were far too late to influence the course of the war.

In the control room of the U 2336, Kapitänleutnant Emil Klusmeier watched the ships of the convoy through his periscope. Klusmeier, the second man (the first was Oberleutnant Jürgen Vockel) to command the U 2336, was an unusual submarine commander for two reasons. This was his first operational patrol as captain, and he would not have been on it except that he volunteered for the job. He volunteered for it because he had been among the officers who had been involved in setting up the whole Type XXIII programme and he wanted to see how his ideas worked in actual combat.

No, the ships of EN 91 were not safe at all…

Klusmeier had left Kiel harbour on 23 April 1945 for a trial cruise, returning after five days. By that time the British were nearing and he left for Larvik in occupied Norway with his sub. There he refuelled, stocked up and loaded torpedoes, and left on a war patrol on 1 May 1945…one day after Adolf Hitler committed suicide and the same day that the Red Army took Berlin. Remember that. Hitler was dead, Berlin fallen, and Klusmeier must have known the war was about to end.

The first shots of the Second World War at sea were fired on 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, when Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp of the U 30 sank the British liner Athenia. Klusmeier was about to fire the last. 

The Type XXIII had just one major drawback. Due to the small size of the vessel, it could carry just two torpedoes pre-loaded in harbour in two torpedo tubes. Klusmeier had only two torpedoes to expend, and he must have wondered which two of the five shapes in his scope to expend them on…

The first recipient of his favour was the old Norwegian freighter Sneland 1. Klusmeier sent her to the bottom with his first torpedo, along with seven of her 29 man crew. He quickly switched his scope to the British/Canadian freighter Avondale Park, built less than a year previously. The torpedo sped from its tube, and Avondale Park went down with two of her 32 man crew. She was the last ship lost to German submarine action in the Second World War.

Klusmeier, with no more torpedoes to expend and with his combat tests done, then turned round and left for home. He arrived at Kiel on 14 May and surrendered the submarine there.

There were some questions awaiting him, the chief being just why he had attacked the ships, since Großadmiral Dönitz had ordered all German subs, by radio, to cease fire on 4 May. He said, and maintained throughout his later years as a prisoner of war and then as an appliance dealer in his hometown of Bochum, that he had never received the signal. Well, perhaps.

Even supposing Klusmeier was telling the truth, he must have known, having left port only a few days ago, that the war was about to end. Was he justified in torpedoing ships and killing men when the end of the war was certain and his actions would have no effect on it at all?

In this regard, while researching Klusmeier, I found this page here which says about Klusmeier that:

Emil Klusmeier ... later volunteered for a command in order to verify his ideas in practice and with U-2336 scored hits.

Since the U2336 only went on one war patrol and this was Klusmeier's first time as captain, maybe he was loath to let a chance go by to try out his theories in practice. Or maybe he still thought the war worth fighting so long as it wasn’t ended.

One might say the war was still officially on and that war is war, and it’s a warrior’s job to fight; and it was too bad that some men died needlessly, but all war deaths are needless in one way or other.

Or else one might say that Klusmeier was looking for revenge, and was a war criminal.

Me – I think that people who A-bombed a defeated Japan just to prove a point have no grounds to squeal.

And as for Klusmeier himself - I wonder if it had been an Allied sub commander who had sunk an Axis ship in the last moments of the war, whether he would have been condemned or feted. The latter, I strongly suspect.

As usual, the only real war crime is to lose.