Three Tankmen, Три Танкистa--A Soviet Song About a Tank Crew

There are not a lot of songs about tank crews.  The 75th Anniversary of VE Day is very soon. Here is a song about those of us who are Tankmen: Танкистa!

“The Three Tankmen”

It is a very famous song. It was made in the time when a large danger of a war with Japan was real. 
Japan militaries acted very impudently so the two border conflicts - in the region of the Khasan Lake 
in 1938 and in the region of Khalkhin Gol (in the West it is known as “Nomongan conflict”) in 1939, - 
occurred. In both the conflicts Japanese invasions on Soviet territory (Mongolian one in the second 
case) were repelled by Red Army. It looks like the song was made on the basis of the events in the 
region of the Khasan Lake.

This song was sang in the famous pre-war movie “Tractor men”. A former military gets the post of 
the team-leader of the tractor men’s group, tightens up discipline and learns his subordinates to 
prepare to be drivers of tanks in the case of an enemy invasion.

This song stayed very popular and during WWII. I read memoirs of the WWII veteran who recalled 
how a Soviet tankman played on a bayan and singed this song in a captured German town in 1945.

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“The Three Tankmen”

(Translated by Andrey)

Some lowering black clouds move on the state border,
The inclement land is filled by silence.
The high banks of the Amur River are securing by
The sentries of the Motherland who are standing there.
The sentries of the Motherland who are standing there.

A firm covering force is placed there against an enemy.
A valiant and strong unit is standing
Nearly the border of the Far Eastern land - 
It is an armored shock battalion.
It is an armored shock battalion.

Three tankmen, three merry friends, 
They are the crew of a combat vehicle,
Live there like an inviolable firm family –
And the song guarantees that it is true.
Three tankmen, three merry friends, 
They are the crew of a combat vehicle.

Some thick dew fell on grass,
Wide fogs fell on a ground.
Samurais decided to cross the border 
Nearly the river in this night.
Samurais decided to cross the border 
Nearly the river in this night.

But the intelligence reported exactly
And the powerful unit was given by an order and became to move
On the native Far Eastern land -
It was the armored shock battalion.
It was the armored shock battalion.

Tanks were rushing, raising a wind,
The redoubtable armor was advancing.
And Samurais were falling to a ground
Under the pressure of steel and a fire.
And Samurais were falling to a ground
Under the pressure of steel and a fire.

And all the enemies were eliminated - and the song guarantees that it is true, -
In the fire attack
By three tankmen, three merry friends,
Who are the crew of a combat vehicle!
By three tankmen, three merry friends,
Who are the crew of a combat vehicle!

1938

Two Rides, Two Days, Same Time of Day, Completely Different Rides

Riding the same route, the exact same roads, every day on a bicycle can be an entirely different ride each time.  This is certainly true of a group ride where who is on the ride dictates the pace.

For the past month I have been riding alone and settled into riding the same 25-mile out-and-back ride four or five days a week.  I ride just a little east of due south out of Lancaster for nine rolling miles, then up a three-mile climb. I turn around in a parking lot at the top, descend a different hill and go back to my home in the city on the same road just west of due north. 

Yesterday, the wind was out of the North NorthWest at 17mph, a perfect tail wind.  I felt good and rode hard out of the city and up the first long climb and all the way to the top of the three-mile climb at the end.  Eight miles into the ride there is a speed indicator telling people to slow down for construction.  It is on the far side of a bridge and slightly uphill.  Yesterday I first lit the sign up at 22mph then was down to 20 as I passed it.  By the time I stopped at the turnaround, I had covered the 12.5 miles in 48 minutes with more than a thousand feet of climbing. The ride back was a slow slog in a headwind. On the steepest part of the 3-mile descent, I only reached 37mph. 

There are 14 Strava segments on the route, seven in each direction. Yesterday, I made five PRs on the ride south. 

Today, the wind was 10mph out of the SouthWest.  It was a grinding headwind. I rode hard up the the big hill, but it was just over an hour when I reached the turnaround point.  On the way back my top speed was 51 mph, but with the wind 45 degrees off of a straight tail wind. I did not have any record segments on the way back. At the construction sign where I went 20mph and 22 yesterday, I first lit the sign at 13 mph, then 12 today.

Same road, consecutive days, about the same temp, but such a different ride.  Using my heart rate as a relative indicator of effort, yesterday I set all those PRs and had a high heart rate of 143. Today my highest heart rate was 155. 

Salary as an Expression of Equality: Democracy in America

I was listening to a translator of "Democracy in America" talk about how carefully Alexis de Tocqueville chose words to express the depth of equality in America. Harvey Mansfield, the translator, then spoke about salaries in America.

Tocqueville explained how important it is that in America everyone receives a salary, bosses and workers. In an aristocracy, the nobles do not receive a salary. Receiving wages, being a hireling, is something nobles cannot do. The recent royal couple move to North America is confirmation of this. 

Before listening to the talk, I saw a member of Cult45 who was angry that the media do not give her idol credit for donating his salary. After being reminded of Tocqueville's view of salaries, Trump refusing his salary could be yet another indication of how superior he believes he is to everyone else. 

His own words about his intellect would make a peacock blush.In America we are all equal and our salaries, even if those salaries can be described as "princely," are an indication of how class distinction has no place in the America.

Tocqueville visited America for nine months in 1831 to write about prisons. Before the end of the decade he wrote a thousand-page two-volume work that is still the best summary of politics in America in print.

Tocqueville admired much about America, but was also clear about our faults. He visited during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson and found him loathsome. It is no wonder he is Trump's favorite President. Tocqueville wrote sadly and compellingly about the terrible treatment of Native Americans and slaves in America. Tocqueville's companion on the trip, Gustave de Beaumont, wrote about the horrors of slavery after he returned to France.

He also predicted accurately that the 20th Century would be dominated by the conflict between the US and Russia.

Two Rides in Paris; Two Decades Ago

In September 2000 I made two trips to Europe to attend several business meetings.  Both trips took me to Paris, first for three days, then for two.  Because of where I stayed and my schedule, the rides were very different.

On the first trip, I had meetings only on the west side of Paris so I picked a hotel between the meeting site and the best place in Paris for bicyclists: L’Hippodrome:  the horse-racing track next to the River Seine on the southwest corner of Paris in the huge park called Bois de Boulogne.  There is a two-mile road around horse track that is closed every day, year-round from 10 am to dark for bicyclists.  The road varies from one to three lanes wide and actually has about fifty feet of elevation change—uphill on the east side, downhill on the west.  Every day, local cyclists circle this loop in groups varying in speed from casual commuters taking a lap, to groups of fifty or more averaging 25 to 27 mph. 

The fast group is local racers from teenagers to 50+, but as in America, more old guys than young.   These guys ride very orderly pace lines when the groups are smaller than 20.  Bigger groups tend to have three or four guys up front doing about 90% of the pulls.  Once in a great while, in the off season, a current or recent Tour de France rider who lives in Paris will drop in on the ride and take the pack to some painful speed above 30 mph.  I always ride American-flag jerseys or my team kit.  Parisian bike racers are as friendly as American Cat. 1,2,3 racers so no one talks to you anyway, but with the American-flag stuff on, they know I can’t speak French—especially at 27 mph.  Most bike racers in Paris are blue-collar guys who don’t speak English, so the ride is not a social event for Americans.

But it is a great ride—no square turns, and just about any pace you could want will have a group you can ride with.  I was in Paris three days in early September and managed to ride four times.  My hotel was in Suresnes, just across the river from the training ride and half the price of a Paris hotel just because it is outside the city.  From my hotel, I rode down through the center of town, crossed the Suresnes bridge and turned right at the second road to get to the ride site.

On my second trip to Europe in September, I spent two days in Paris and did not ride in the training race.  In fact, I stayed in a hotel near the airport 12 miles northeast of Paris.  One of the days, I had a meeting in the center of Paris and one in a suburb just south of the city.  I rode from the airport to the city center then to the south side and back.  The road to the city is a 4-lane highway.  It was like riding from Paoli to Philadelphia on Route 30—EXCEPT, no one screwed with me at all.  It was flat and dull but not dangerous.  At the city line at the town of Porte de Villette, the way into the city was through a cobblestone traffic circle with 6 intersecting roads and a railroad overpass.  Once through the circle, I rode straight across Paris splitting lanes with the scooters and couriers and having a great time. Again, lots of traffic but no Neanderthals in SUVs trying to kill you.  On the second day, I took a ride through the suburbs of Paris near the airport.

Of course, the best place to ride in Paris is the training race but riding in the city is great if for no other reason than experiencing heavy traffic without the small-minded people with big engines that we put up with on nearly every ride. 

Holocaust Remembrance Day 2020

April 21 is Holocaust Remembrance Day.  If you do not know the history of the Holocaust in some detail, you may think of the Holocaust as the death camps, particularly Auschwitz, where a million Jews died. 

During the last four years I have visited Holocaust sites and Holocaust memorials and read the history of the Holocaust in country-by-country detail.  The numbers tell a much different story than the Auschwitz-centered narrative of the Nazi death camp.  Auschwitz went into operation as a death camp in 1942. Previously, it was a slave labor camp. Half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust, more than three million, were already dead by 1942.

Beginning with the invasion of Poland in 1939, Jews were rounded up and killed by the SS, by German police and by local police in Poland.  When the Nazis invaded Russian in June 1941, SS units spread out in conquered territories. The Nazis told local people in eastern Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Belarus and Russia that the property of Jews could be seized by those who killed its Jewish owners.

Jews were dispossessed and murdered by their neighbors.  Some were killed on the spot, others were rounded up and shot over pits, sometimes the victims dug the pits.  Lviv, Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Vilnius and other cities in the east were the sites of mass shootings of hundreds of thousands of Jews.  The shooting was done by tens of thousands of German police, SS men, local police and sometimes German regular army units.  Thousands and thousands of men pulled the trigger on a rifle or a pistol and watched a Jew die in front of them. 

Almost no one survived the early personal slaughter. By contrast, every death camp had some survivors.  There are tales of survivors of Auschwitz. There are almost no survivors of the murders over pits at Babi Yar and other pits of slaughter.

Also, on this day, those who sheltered and saved Jews are honored.  They deserve the honor, partly because they are vanishingly rare.  There were thousands of these heroes, but they represent less than one in one thousand of the 400 million people who identified themselves as Christians in the lands conquered or controlled by the Nazis during World War II.

In his book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” Timothy Snyder says, “The Christians who showed mercy to Jews … were exceptions in the moral catastrophe that was Christianity during the Holocaust.” 

The complicity of Churches began in Germany in 1932 when German Christians supported the openly racist Adolph Hitler who was stoking fear of communism.  German Churches followed Nazi racial laws ejecting Jewish Christians from Churches who had converted, sometimes generations before.  Jewish Christians were almost totally wiped out in The Holocaust with the full complicity of German Churches. 

The Holocaust is a story of mass murder of six million Jews, but from the beginning, the story of the Holocaust of a story of government stripping citizens of rights, it is a story of theft of property, betrayal by neighbors, deportation, enslavement and murder.  The Holocaust was not done by machines. The theft and murder was done by millions of men and women who betrayed, robbed and murdered a person right in front of them. 

Corona Movie Five: Kelly's Heroes

Donald Sutherland as "Oddball"

My youngest son and I have been watching movies every other day the past week and a half.

The most recent movie, the fifth, was "Kelly's Heroes" a movie celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  The movie is as funny as I remember it. The movie opens with Clint Eastwood (Kelly) capturing a German intelligence officer in a town with at least a battalion of German troops. Eastwood drives through the town and the all those German soldiers in a Jeep never gets a scratch.  The officer tells Kelly about 14,000 gold bars 30 miles behind enemy lines.

Kelly, along with Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas and Don Rickles drive and walk that 30 miles, capture the town and get the gold.  In a gunfight at the OK Corral sequence, they make a deal with a German tank commander guarding the bank and get away with all the gold.

I first saw it in the theater my senior year in high school.  Five years later, after four years in the Air Force, in 1975, I was in Armor School at Fort Knox and served a decade on active duty and in the reserves as a tank commander.  then in 1999, when I had been a bearded civilian for a decade and a half, I got my last tanker nickname.  The company I worked for acquired a subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Several of a us flew there to meet the staff.  We got picked up at the airport by a company driver who spoke fluent English he learned from movies.

On the slow trip to the office in Sao Paulo traffic, our CEO told the driver, "Neil used to be a tank commander." At a traffic light he turned around and said, "Oddball! You look just like Oddball.  I love Kellys Heroes."

And that nickname stuck till I changed jobs.

The other movies so far:
Midway (2019)
Ford vs Ferrari
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Wild Bunch

Corona Film Festival Movie Four: The Wild Bunch

My son Nigel and I are having a Corona Film Festival. The most recent and fourth film on our list was "The Wild Bunch."  The movie just before this was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." 

Both movies were made in 1969--the year I got my drivers license.  Both are set at the end of the 19th Century and represent the end of the frontier and "The Old West." They are the farthest extremes of the cowboy movie genre and represent the end of cowboy movies.  Traditional Good Guys and Bad Guys were out of fashion.

In The Wild bunch, three groups are set against each other in this movie.  All of them are bad. All of them end up slaughtered in the final Sam Peckinpah gun fight or shortly after.  There are no good guys.  The group we follow through the movie are bank/train robbers.  They are pursued by a vile, incompetent set of vigilantes led by a former member of the gang, and in Mexico they fight against and ally with a Mexican rebel army led by a bandit general. 

By contrast, in "Butch Cassidy" nobody is bad.  Butch and the kid are robbers, but they are amiable, honorable and kill only when threatened.  The posse that pursues them is relentless, again honorable men upholding the law.  The rest of the Hole in the Wall Gang are decent men. When Butch and Sundance escape to Bolivia, they rob banks and are pursued by Bolivian police and soldiers who are also decent men. No bad guys. 

The final scenes are a stark contrast.  In both the robbers at the center of the drama are killed in a hail of bullets. But Butch and Sundance die off camera.  The gang in the Wild Bunch die on camera surrounded by the bodies of their enemies. At the nearly everyone is dead, except the Mexican villagers oppressed by the rebel general. They come to the scene of the carnage and collect the guns to protect themselves from other bandits.

Neither movie is anywhere close to the white hat hero versus the black hat outlaw of the traditional cowboy genre.  At the end of the 1960s, America was protesting war. There was violence in the streets. The top movies of the following year, 1970, were anti-war war movies.  Nigel and I will be watching these also:  "M*A*S*H,"  "Kelly's Heroes," "Catch-22," "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and "Patton" debuted during the first year of the 1970s.

"Patton" may not seem like an anti-war movie, but the character of General Bradley is a foil to Patton--the General who cares vs. the General who dares--at the expense of his men.

The return of Good Guys and Bad Guys would be the 1977 movie Star Wars--which used every trope of the traditional cowboy movie right down to the bar scene to bring back the Good Guy/Bad Guy Hero/Villain theme to the movies.  The full title of that 1977 movie is "Star Wars--A New Hope" a title more appropriate than ever looking back over almost five decades. 

Movie one of Corona Festival was Midway which I wrote about here. Nigel and I will watch the 1976 version starring Charlton Heston. 

Movie two was Ford vs. Ferrari, which I first saw in Paris in November with the title "LeMans 66." I was so taken with the movie I visited LeMans, France, a few days later and the museum at Circuit de Sarthe where the race is held. 

All My Passport Stamps--Memories Rebuilt

After I returned from my most recent trip to Europe and Israel, I decided put together a spreadsheet of the stamps in my passports.  Like so much of my life, I start late and then become obsessed.  I got my first passport just after my 44th birthday in 1997.  I had been overseas before that. I was stationed in Germany for three years with the U.S. Army and had seen a lot of Germany and some of France and Portugal with no passport. American soldiers could travel Western Europe without a passport during the Cold War. 

The second reason I persisted in putting together the 170-line document is that I have a five-year gap in my bicycling records, in fact in all of my records.  I started riding a bicycle seriously in 1988 two years after I quit smoking. In 1989, I started keeping track of miles and races and big ride. From 1989 to 1996 I have paper logs I got from Runners World magazine every year. 

Then in 1997 I started using Microsoft Excel to keep track of mileage.  In 2002 I switched from a PC to a Mac and somewhere in my digital history I managed to lose all records and files from 1997 to 2001.  I have a lovely spreadsheet of all my miles from 2002 to 2017.

In that five-year period from 1997 to 2001 were some of the best rides I ever had. Although passport stamps have their own problems as records, the stamps from trips gave me a pretty good record of where I was which has helped me to reconstruct some of the memories of that time.

Between April 1998 and November 2000, I worked for a multinational company whose main product was white pigment. During those 2-1/2 years I traveled to seventeen countries on five continents--I was supposed to go to Africa on one trip, but the trip got cancelled--traveling nearly every month for a total of 28 trips I could piece together from the stamps.  On all but two of the trips, I took a road bike with me.  Before September 2001, taking a bike was free on an overseas trip and only $50 per flight in America.  There was still the hassle of oversized baggage, but no charge back then.

Five of the trips were Round the World trips, usually somewhere in Europe first, then Singapore, Australia and/or Hong Kong, then back to America.  Two of the trips were more than half-way round the world going from the US to Europe to South America then back to America.  I also made trips directly to Asia and back: to Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore. 

According to the passport stamps, the top countries I have visited are France, Germany, the UK, Brazil, China, Singapore and Hong Kong.  For each of these countries I have more than ten stamps.  But I have made more trips to Italy than all but the top three countries and I only have two stamps.  I have, for instance, been to Turin, Italy five times since 1999, but I have traveled there from France twice in a train through the Alps (an amazing trip), twice in a car and once in a regional jet.  I went to Florence and Padua by driving from Switzerland--no passport stamps. 

I have been to eighteen countries for which I have no passport stamp. Many of the 53 countries I have visited are in the European Union. Some I passed through in a car or on a bicycle or a train and never passed through customs. I have no stamp for Portugal, Ireland, Andorra, Monaco, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Kosovo, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Lithuania or Estonia. 

During my first long overseas ride in 2017, somewhere between Serbia and Ukraine, I quit keeping tracking of mileage. I became a regular user of Strava. I got so much data out of Strava that keeping spreadsheet seemed redundant. 

I'll write about rides I can fill in using passport and other travel information I have.  With coronoa virus, it could be a while before I add more stamps to my current passport. 

Trump and the Death of Honor

I loved being a soldier and hate what is happening to the American military

In the 44 years I was in the military between 1972 and 2016, I saw racial equality become reality just eight years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Not perfect, but way better than the civilian world. I grew up hearing my Dad talk about being the Jewish commander of a Black Company during World War II, and then he became commandant of an Afrika Korps Prisoner of War Camp.

When I re-enlisted in 2007 women were part of the force, not marginal. By the time I left women were being accepted in combat leadership and gay soldiers served openly.

And then Trump was elected.

Since 2017 Trump has insulted the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, dismissed the intelligence chiefs in public in Helsinki just to kiss Putin's ass, insulted every NATO ally, betrayed the Kurds to suck up to the dictator in Turkey, pardoned a war criminal causing the Secretary of the Navy to resign and now he fires the Captain of an ship who tried to protect his sailors, then sends the new sycophant Secretary of the Navy to insult the Captain on his ship.

During those 44 years, the country went from hating the military to loving the military. Now Trump is bringing the military down to his own dishonorable level.

"Midway" Movie Shows How Great American Leadership Can Be

My son Nigel and I just finished watching the movie "Midway." I first saw it in a theater in Paris in November. I cried three times during the movie at the beginning listening to the voice of President Roosevelt, at end watching the dive bomber pilot Dick Best leave his ship in a wheelchair and in the middle watching the defiant death of gunner Bruno Gaudi.

This time I just teared up at the end.

My initial response to the movie, which begins with the attack on Pearl Harbor, was deep sadness listening to the President we had versus who runs the country now.

Today was the first time I saw the movie since the beginning of the pandemic. From Pearl Harbor to victory, America led the fight against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Now we can't even nationalize the response to the virus, nor the distribution of medical supplies.

It was also more stark this time that the key to victory was the way Admiral Nimitz believed his intelligence officers and listened to evidence--not on idiotic gut feelings and wishes.

The movie has been criticized for using too many speeches both by the Japanese and American leaders. It is the starkest contrast with the movie "Dunkirk" which explains almost nothing and presumes great tactical and strategic knowledge on the part of the viewer.

If you watch the movie at home and don't like spectacular war scenes, fast forward through the fighting and listen to the conversations. It's a brilliant example of leadership at many levels on both sides of the battle.

The distance between President Roosevelt and the current President could be measured in light years.