(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)
On November 4, 1943, Convoy UGS 23 left Hampton Roads, Virginia, en route to the port city of Oran in Algeria. There were 96 ships in the convoy. One of them was the Liberty Ship USS James Hoban, named for the Irish architect who designed, among other things, the White House. Aboard the Hoban, as gunnery officer and part of the Navy's Armed Guard, was a young lieutenant named John P. Pierce, the son of a police detective sergeant in Worcester, Massachusetts, and his wife, a woman who'd begun life as a shepherd in the hills around Listowel, in north Kerry. His log of the trip contains laconic references to submarine alerts and air-raid alerts and the kind of storms you get as winter begins to come in the north Atlantic. What's between the lines in those slim notebooks is the stuff that is the raw nerve endings of history.
The Liberty Ships were one of those industrial miracles that wartime demands. They were built in a hurry; one of them went from blueprint to launching skids in four days. The first batch was named after the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. They carried ammunition and aviation fuel and troops, on occasion. They had 10 guns. They did not corner like speedboats. They could not outrun very much of anything.
Lt. Pierce made several crossings on the Hoban. The story he always told was of retreat in the evening in the port of Oran, with the desert sun falling into the ocean he'd crossed, and having to stand for every national anthem of every nation allied to crush European fascism. He didn't talk much about those moments that were between the lines in his logbooks. He ended up, in 1945, as port director in Niigata, in occupied Japan. He was a long way from the three-deckers of Main South in Worcester.
I say this every Memorial Day, as a prayer and a wish and a consolation to the children of a generation now passing swiftly. My children and/or grandchildren likely will see the death of the last veteran of World War II.
Thanks, Dad, for helping to save the whole damn thing.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Nobody But You" (Charles Bradley): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: It's Memorial Day, 1947, on the beaches of Normandy. There are still tanks rusting away there while they furl the flags. History is so cool.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
"Pawpawsaurus in particular, and the group in belonged to—Nodosauridae—had no flocculus, a structure in the brain involved with motor skills, no club tail, and reduced nasal cavity and portion of the inner ear when compared to the other family of ankylosaurs," said Ariana Paulina Carabajal, an Argentinian scientist involved in the research. "But its sense of smell was very important, as it probably relied on that to look for food, find mates and avoid or flee predators." The Pawpawsaurus skull was first discovered 24 years ago by 19-year-old Cameron Campbell in the PawPaw Formation of Tarrant County. Scientists analyzed the skull at that time, but have only recently explored it by using a CT scan, which allows them to see inside the fossil using X-rays.
If they don't name the skull Little Nellie, and don't call the dig The Paw-Paw Patch, I am going to go to my grave weeping.
That's it until Tuesday. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and take some time off. We all need a break.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
