Conscience of the American Revolution

"The rights of the individual should be the primary object of all governments"

~ Mercy Otis Warren

Mercy Otis Warren

Mercy Otis was born on September 14, 1728 in Barnstable, Massachusetts. Her father, James Otis, Sr., was colonel in the militia and a distinguished lawyer in Massachusetts. Early in her life, she began to write poetry and essays and argue politics with her brothers, James Otis, Jr. and Samuel Allyne Otis. Her father wanted her to excel, so she was tutored with her Harvard bound brothers.  

In 1754, Mercy married James Warren, who was a distant cousin and college friend of her brother, James. James Warren was impressed with her writing skills and encouraged her. By the time of the revolution, Mercy was a close friend of Abigail Adams and wrote to many founding fathers including Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams. The latter wrote to her husband saying, “Tell your wife that God Almighty has entrusted her with the Powers for the good of the World, which, in the cause of his Providence, he bestows on few of the human race. That instead of being a fault to use them, it would be criminal to neglect them.”

James Warren

James Warren was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1766-1774 and 1775 and later became it's speaker. In 1775, He was president of the Provincial Congress and also paymaster-general. Mercy followed his progress with keen interest and between 1773 and 1775, she wrote two political plays, The Adulator and The Group. With the publication of these plays, she became the first American playwright.

In 1805, Mercy published the first history of the American Revolution, the controversial three-volume work,
History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. President Thomas Jefferson ordered subscriptions for himself and his cabinet, but John Adams thought the history was a radical simplification of real events and was displeased with Mercy’s open criticism of him in the book. It led to a heated correspondence and a breach in their friendship that lasted until 1812.

Mercy was an Anti-Federalist and opposed the ratification of the Constitution. She advocated freedom of speech, freedom of press and trial by jury; all of which became part of the Bill of Rights. She was called the Conscience of the American Revolution and holds her place as a founding mother with other influential woman of the time such as Abigail Adams, Sarah Franklin Bache and Martha Washington. 

Mercy Otis Warren died in 1814 at the age of 86. A statue of her stands in Barnstable Massachusetts with the Bill of Rights in her upraised hand.  

~Psyche

Wild Ideas of WWII: Some that worked...and some that didn't.

It's that time of year when I find myself subconsciously humming the theme from The Longest Day, or singing Requiem for a Soldier from Band of Brothers. 

We have seventy years of hindsight under our belts since the allies stormed the Normandy beaches, June 6th, 1944. World War Two still remains the largest conflict in human history, touching every part of the globe from Antarctica to the Sahara desert. Huge advancements were made in technology and in six years, biplanes went out and jet fighters came in. It was a desperate affair for both sides and sometimes some pretty desperate plans were thought up to win it. There were weird plots popping up all the time in the fertile brains of MI5 and over on the other side of the channel, Hitler was still trying to come up with a super weapon when the Russians were closing in on Berlin. 

Operation Mincemeat takes the cake as one of the most bizarre plans ever to be thought up by man; it even

Identity Card for Major Martin, the man who never was

supersedes the plot to dust itching powder on Nazi clothes in an attempt to win the war. Operation Mincemeat was dreamed up by MI5 in conjunction with the Royal Navy. The plan was to somehow dupe the Germans into thinking the Allies were planning to invade Sardinia and Greece, when the real objective was Sicily. So, they invented a man who never was. The Navy procured a dead body at a morgue, outfitted him with high ranking identification papers, forged top secret plans to plant on him, then, in the dead of night, set him adrift in the Mediterranean to float ashore at a German base. The amount of planning was spectacular, but in the end it was worth it...the Germans fell for it, moving their forces to Greece and Sardinia while the Allies landed on Sicily.

Artists conception of Project Habakkuk next to an
ordinary Second World War aircraft carrier

Judging from Operation Mincemeat (and the itchy powder thing) the British were pretty desperate during the war. They'd just been pulverized by the Blitz and had left mountains of equipment behind on the French Beaches in 1940. Some of their plans were pretty brilliant, like the Bouncing Bomb, or the Mulberry Harbor. With all this in mind, it seems odd that they chose to sink their money into an idea as wild as Project Habakkuk. The plan was to build a landing strip on an iceberg, but when it was decided that icebergs are too fragile, they switched to frozen wood pulp. Project Habakkuk was going to be a massive aircraft carrier, adrift in the North Atlantic, with an elaborate cooling system to keep the wood pulp frozen. Fortunately, it was decided that it wasn't worth the severe paper shortage and the project was scrapped.

The Ratte compared to the Maus and the Tiger;
the Maus (mouse) was the largest tank ever built

If the British were mad, the Nazis were insane. Hitler loved wild ideas and always gave them his full support. From Vengeance Weapons (which included the V2, the first man-made object to enter space) to a plan to create giant whirlwinds to combat the RAF, Hitler was always game. His elephant under the rug, though, was probably the largest tank ever to be conceived. It was called the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte, and if built, would have been the size of a house, outfitted with the same guns used on the Scharnhorst-class battleships. Unfortunately, his engineers were never able to come up with an engine powerful enough to run the 1,000 ton tank, and the project was cancelled.

Tubby

Another of Hitler's attempts at a 'super weapon' was the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet. These nifty little fighters were the first (and hopefully the last) rocket powered fighters. Though they were capable of going 700 mph (a speed not equaled again until 1947), they were not effective, because they could only stay up in the air for eight minutes. Oh, and they blew up regularly, too.  

The Japanese came up with a fair number of ideas

themselves; they built the largest battleships ever to float (and consequently, ever to sink), but finally degraded to kamikaze attacks. The Japanese were desperate and hurting for money and supplies, but still managed to work on highly advanced projects. The Kyushu J7W is probably one of the weirdest looking airplanes ever built; it would have been exceptionally fast, but even if it had been produced in large numbers, it probably would not have changed the course of the war.  

The Americans were in on the weirdness, too. While a group of scientists was in the Arizona desert working on the Manhattan Project (which literally blew all the other super weapons out of the picture), a psychologist named B. F. Skinner came up with the idea of a pigeon-guided missile (which was almost as crazy as the bat-bomb idea...don't get me started on that one). The theory was that pigeons inside the missile would peck at a screen to keep the thing on course; surprisingly, the United States Army actually gave the project funding, though fortunately, a pigeon-guided missile was never used. No one ever mentioned what happened to the pigeons.

We have the Italians to thank for Human Torpedoes. They were invented during the First World War and

Siluro San Bartolomeo: an Italian manned torpedo

perfected in the Second for use against ships in harbors. According to the plan, divers would point them in the right direction, then jump off while the torpedo continued on to blow up a ship. By the later half of the war, the British, Americans and Germans were using them too, so did the Japanese, only their divers didn't bother jumping off.

Secret weapons and plots abounded throughout the Second World War. One could argue that a few of them cut the war short (the Manhattan project certainly did), but despite it all, actual flesh and blood men, willing to give the ultimate sacrifice, have remained the main element in every war in history.

~Psyche

Knights in Shining Armor?

Walking tank?
Tudor or Elizabethan jousting armor
Image by Tirithel

Once upon a time, there was a knight. This knight carried a great, heavy two-handed sword and wore upon his person a suit of shiny armor. He traveled up and down the country on his gigantic charger righting wrongs and saving damsels that had gotten stuck in towers. Everyone knew who he was because he wore on his helmet a fluffy plume and carried in his right hand a stripy lance...

We'll stop it there.

There are probably several things about this description that we know immediately are wrong. Knights didn't go riding around righting wrongs (unless they happened to be named Don Quixote) and damsels hardly ever got stuck in towers. Stripy lances of course, were only used in jousts, which didn't really get going until the High to Late Middle Ages. But the rest of it is wrong, too, at least in the context of a serious battle (admittedly, I know very little about these things and I will endeavor not to sound like a complete idiot as I continue).

There are several misconceptions about knights...all largely to be blamed on Sir Walter Scot. As I was growing up, I was under the impression that European knights of the Middle Ages wore plate armor to battle and that this plate armor was so heavy that the only horses that were strong enough to bear the weight were draft horses. Not only that, but when these slow-poke Medieval knights ran into warriors from other cultures, they met instant death, because the weapons, armor and horses of these other cultures were either sharper, lighter or faster.

This actually isn't true.

Joan of Arc, one of the most famous armor
wearers in history, was active in the 15th century,
which was after the start of the Renaissance

To start out, knights of the Middle Ages didn't wear full plate armor, and didn't wear suits of armor at all, until the end of the era. Plate armor originated as a sort of 'bullet-proof' vest made of small plates to supplement mail. True plate armor and suits of armor did not come to their own until the period called the Renaissance when it was already rendered obsolete by the advent of firearms. For the most part, full suits of armor were not worn in battle, only for tournaments, or parades. The stuff isn't as heavy as we probably were led to believe (a full suit doesn't weigh more than sixty pounds and is generally half that weight) but it's still hot and unpleasant and restricted vision. Some of the most famous suits of armor still in existence are parade pieces that belonged to Henry VIII. Fully suited up, it's said Henry had to be hoisted aboard his horse with a crane, but this was more due to the weight of the King than to the weight of the armor. I feel bad for the horse.

So what did they wear?

A piece of hand-welded Medieval mail
ancientresource.com

They wore exactly what everyone else wore; after all, mail shirts have been around for centuries. The Vikings wore them, the Mongols wore them, the soldiers of the Islamic Golden Age wore them. Mail shirts themselves were excellent protection against both slashing and stabbing cuts and would even limit the penetration of a longbow, or crossbow bolt. They didn't do well against battle axes, or war hammers or a horseman's lance; even so, wearers were more likely to die from concussion than the horrific gaping wounds we see in movies. Because each ring had to be welded or riveted into a particular pattern by hand, mail shirts were also expensive, so most people just wore hard leather, like boiled leather or rawhide, which offered fairly good protection.

Which brings us to Helmets.

This nasal helmet was used extensively by he Normans
and shows hints of their Viking ancestry
this is a replica of the style used between 10th-12th century
Image by Silar

Helmets didn't get visors or plumes on them until
tournaments in the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance . During the Early to High Middle ages, or the era we associate with the Crusades, a helmet would simply be a metal cap with a nose guard. They were made of steel, and with the knight's own hair bound up under them, they weren't half bad for protection. By the end of the 12th century, flat-topped cylindrical helmets, that looked a bit like tin cans with eye holes, were vogue. A direct blow to either helmet from the era with a broadsword would only dent it, not cleave it in two.

The first line of defense...

Was not the sword at all. The sword was a personal weapon, only to be used in close quarters. The Romans

The Norman charge of the Saxon shield wall at the Battle of Hastings

used long cavalry swords on the Barbarians and by the 18th century, sabers could be used effectively from horseback because of the reduced armor, but during the Middle Ages, the Knight's first weapon was the spear, or the lance. Cavalry charges with outstretched spears were frightening things, especially with the weight and momentum of the horses behind them. They could break through shield walls and had no trouble with mail shirts. Jousting on either side of the tilt, or barrier, was a Renaissance invention, inspired by the days when knights charged each other across open fields with sharpened spears in the Middle Ages, then battled it out on foot. Jousts were not a major part of Medieval tournaments, which originated as free-for-alls with armies of Knights wielding swords and spears: the goal was to capture as many of the opposing Knights as possible and hold them for ransom. Ivanhoe really didn't have it right.

And speaking of broadswords...

A classic Medieval sword, a type VII, this replica
weighs 2lb 10oz. Sword is by Albion Swords, while the
 scabbard and the picture are by DBK Custom Swords

They weren't that heavy, either. And despite their differing profiles and construction, they compared to the weapons of other cultures. For example, they are similar in both the cut and the thrust to a curved blade, despite the radically different shape. They were also quite sharp, but because of the weight and shape of the sword, a 'razor edge' wasn't necessary to be effective. By the Early Middle Ages, the advent of the weighted pommel made the wielding of European swords quick and fluid. In later years, massive two-handed swords nearly six feet long were vogue, but during the Early to High Middle Ages, a one-handed sword weighed between two and three pounds. To put it in perspective, a 'light' sword of another era, the rapier, often weighed about two and a half pounds. Battles sometimes lasted all day and we can't have our knight getting worn out, now can we?

Now we'll get to the Horse.

At its heaviest, a mail shirt only weighed thirty pounds and most mail shirts weighed between ten and fifteen

The modern Frisian is a medium sized horse, with a usual height
of sixteen hands, that is descended from Medieval war horses

pounds, and since most mid-sized horses can easily carry three hundred pounds, weight was not a great factor when choosing a horse. Inspection of horseshoes and horse armor from the Middle Ages suggests that Medieval warhorses were between fourteen and sixteen hands, or between 4'6" and 5'3" at the shoulder, only slightly smaller than modern day hunters. Compare that to modern draft horses that can be upwards of six feet at the shoulder...and uncomfortably wide to ride.

Many references were made to Spanish horses during the Middle Ages.
The Andalusian is a very ancient breed and like
 the Freisian, they are agile and highly intelligent
Wenni on Flickr

The biggest factor in a knight's horse was not size, but training. Most knights, or soldiers from the Middle Ages, rode coursers, or light, fast horses that could get them there and back and do it in a hurry. A handful of knights owned destriers, which could be worth seven times as much as a courser. Destriers were generally more agile and more strongly built than coursers, but most importantly, they had specialized training.

Today, we call it horse dancing, or dressage. In Vienna, the Spanish Riding School has developed a breed devoted to it, called the Lipizzaner. Medieval desteriers were trained to fight on command. Moves that are natural in the wild, such as bucking, rearing or kicking, were refined into specialized moves that we watch today at the Olympics. A knight's life might depend on the responsiveness or agility of his horse, but also on his steed's ability to land a well-aimed kick. A sword is important, but a horse can be a secret weapon.

In conclusion...

Probably the best depiction we have of Medieval knights is in
the Bayeux Tapestry (which isn't actually a tapestry)

Medieval European knights were much more frightening than the suit-of-armor stereotype rattling about like a pile of crockery on a falling-asleep draft horse. Instead, they wore flexible mail shirts or tough leather that was nearly impervious to Medieval weapons, wielded spears that could punch through armor while riding about on horses that were capable of spinning in place, kicking you, or leaping into the air on cue.

Of course, the armor, the weapons and the horse might set you back the same amount that a four bedroom house would today, so there weren't very many of these fearsome knights around.

~Psyche