Again (see here), futuristic sf is not necessary to address the effects of technology on society. Stirling describes a Siemens plant or "...sprawling complex of plants..." in 1916 (B):
the size of a small city;
a redbrick admin tower;
giant, brilliantly lit, steel-framed, brick buildings;
smaller buildings;
warehouses;
a powerhouse with towering chimneys;
whining turbo-generators;
roads;
trams;
railways;
canal docks;
horses and wagons;
motor trucks;
thousands of pedestrians;
working prisoners of war with military and civilian supervisors;
fewer conveyor belts, hoists etc than in an American factory.
Industrial Hell on Earth.
16 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Very interesting! I'm so eager to get my copy of THEATER OF SPIES!
But, can the Siemens plants be called TRULY hellish? Not if the people working there are, I hope, working in decent conditions and with reasonable hours per shift (say, no no more than nine).
Sean
Sean,
Don't forget there are pows (prisoners of war), not being treated with respect. I am just going to the CAPTAIN MARVEL film so I can't post about a "The Queen of Air and Darkness" sequel till later.
Paul.
In peacetime it's no more hellish than any other factory, and Siemens was regarded as a good employer. In a total-war situation, using a lot of forced labor, not so much.
(There was an extensive forced-labor program in Germany in WW1; not as big as the WW2 one, but big, both in the occupied areas and in Germany proper.)
One thing that 20th century "total war" showed was that -everything- becomes in desperately short supply, including the most basic sorts of unskilled labor, because you're stretching the basic fabric of the economy to the breaking point.
NB: one of the reasons the Germans had a bad reputation as overlords was not that they were rapacious or brutal (though they were) but that they were obsessively anal-retentive and picky and insisted on very high standards of punctuality, etc..
Slacking and messiness really offended them at a deep psychological level, and they lashed out.
There was a series of cartoons in a German satirical magazine just before 1914 that showed various European countries in their colonies.
The Frenchman was making out with a local woman, King Leopold was feasting on human flesh with corpses hanging in the background, and the British had two soldiers squeezing an African in a press while a trader poured cheap gin into his mouth while gold ran out the other end and an Anglican missionary folded his hands in prayer in the background.
In the German colony, the Germans were putting muzzles on the crocodiles, painting identity-numbers on the zebras, and teaching the giraffes to do the goose-step in unison, while hanging up "It Is Forbidden To Walk On The Grass" signs on the palm trees.
This is an exaggeration, of course, but like most stereotypes it has an element of truth.
In 1919, during the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, right-wing Freikorps troops opened up on a mob of Spartacists with machine-guns.
The leftists ran away through a park... but kept carefully to the paths, because there were "It Is Forbidden To Walk On The Grass" signs.
NB: one reason the US had a "good war" in ww2, apart from not being invaded, was that there was so much slack in the economy, so many unemployed workers and idle plant and deliberately uncultivated land and spare capital that had been immobilized by the lack of profitable outlets.
Up to 1943, US mobilization basically just put everything and everybody to work... and there was a lot of "everything and everybody".
You get something of the same effect at the peak of an up-cycle, as we're having now. Unemployment starts falling in areas and among groups where it's usually higher than the rest of the country (rural areas, racial minorities, people with limited education, 'discouraged' workers who'd dropped out of the labor force) and wages start rising faster at the bottom end of the income curve. It's an infallible sign that you're starting to reach the limits.
In the 1930's, someone commented after a visit to the USSR and Germany that both countries talked about forward planning and efficient management and so forth.
But the Germans really meant it, while with the Russians it was "like a chorus of whores singing a hymn to virginity".
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I agree it was wrong for Germans to treat POWs with little or no respect. But, if they were not being actually tortured and brutalized, I see little grounds for complaint.
Mr. Stirling: Many thanks for your fascinating comments. Germans were obsessive and anal retentive about rules? I recall some of the immigrants to Nantucket in your ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME books complained were like that too, rule obsessed anal retentives!
Yes, the US was darn lucky in WW II!
Sean
Sean: compared to preindustrial people, everyone today is. They were burst workers who paced themselves by the task -- working very hard indeed at time-critical points (like the harvest) and loafing along and stopping as they pleased at other times. Most, weren't used to working regular hours under supervision, either; most work had been organized on a family/household basis.
During the early industrial period, employers had terrible problems with labor discipline, getting people to put out a steady level of output at a set series of tasks done over and over again from the beginning to the end of the working day. A lot of the workplace brutality of the time was devoted to overcoming slapdash preindustrial habits -- coming in late, taking off early, stopping for a chat, drinking on the job, that sort of ting.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I should have remembered that! Before modern industry most workers were "burst" workers, working hard at time critical points but not like the kind of workers a modern industry needs. And the good Lord knows we still have problems sometimes of the kinds you listed!
Sean
Running for you life but keeping off the grass! That is how our brains work. I would probably have done that unless the path was blocked.
My Fascist friend, Andrea, studied German WWII production of bullets, tanks etc and concluded that, without carpet-bombing, the Allies would have lost the war.
During WWII, Brits said that the GIs were "over-paid, over-sexed and over here!"
Kaor, Paul!
I'm not so sure Andrea was right. I think the sheer weight of numbers and metal alone, esp. as the US exerted its full power, would have brought down Hitler's Germany. Esp. if you recall how much effort needed to be devoted to the Eastern Front after Operation Barbarossa began. It might have been different if Hitler had decided it was better to remain allied with the USSR till the war in the west was over.
Also, I'm not sure Anglo/US carpet bombing of Germany was that EFFECTIVE. I recall reading of how, after the war, when Allied air force officers questioned Albert Speer (Hitler's Minister of Munitions) and other German officials, they were disappointed to find out how LITTLE their bombing had affected war production.
Sean
Sean,
I can't argue against Andrea because he is so well informed but I would like to think that carpet-bombing was a bad idea whatever way you look at it.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, carpet bombing was a bad idea, and it was INEFFECTUAL as well. I don't think that was what finally broke the will of Germany and Japan. Sheer weight of numbers metal were what ground down Germany. And the atomic bombing of Japan made it unnecessary for the US to carry out a massive invasion of Japan that some estimates feared would cost half a million American lives (to say nothing of permanently wrecking Japan).
Sean
Bombing did considerable damage against Germany in WW2, but was probably not cost-effective -- that is, devoting the same resources and personnel to other uses like antisubmarine work and close-air support would almost certainly have worked better.
In both the US and the UK, the respective air forces were deeply, deeply committed to strategic bombing before WWII.
This was partly due to genuine intellectual conviction - the arguments that it would be decisive were persuasive, if wrong, and there was no experience to show otherwise.
Interwar uses of bombing tended to reinforce the theorists of strategic bombing because they were -unopposed- uses of air power against primitives, often combined with dropping poison gas as in Ethiopia, which was expected to happen in a European war too.
That -did- work.
What nobody realized (until the Spanish Civil War gave some hints) was how limited conventional bombing with explosives against modern Western cities was. The accuracy was low, the defenses took a much greater toll than was expected, and the resilience of the modern nation-state, the morale of the mass of the population and the ability to compensate and work-around damage were all grossly underestimated.
Much of the "bomber barons" blind faith in bombing was due to "motivated reasoning" and "confirmation bias" -- because the institutional independence of the air forces depended on believing that.
Even today, the USAF is often accused by the other services of avoiding close air support as much as it can, or at least of having done so until it could be done precisely from 35,000 ft. and at high speed (with precision-guided munitions). Dedicated ground-support airplanes like the A-10, which are highly effective, remained a low-status cul-de-sac, and drones as well.
The Marine Corps is envied because it has its own air arm; combat helicopters were developed in the US largely so the US Army could work around the USAF's refusal to do the things they considered necessary.
At the same time, by the end of WWII, bombing was -starting- to do as much as its 1930's prophets had said it could do; LeMay's raids on Japanese cities were staggeringly effective.
The one on Tokyo killed 100,000 in a single night, and Dresden was almost as effective in Europe. Those are nuclear-level casualties, more than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki attacks killed. It's unlikely any urbanized country could stand that for long, but that level of capacity and of suppression of enemy defenses just wasn't there until right at the end of the war.
If the air forces of 1940 had been as devastating as those of 1945, air power might well have been decisive. Or if they'd been willing to use gas, particularly nerve gas, which the Germans had but we didn't. (The Germans didn't know we didn't, though.)
Or if precision munitions had been available; they increase the impact of bombing by about 25-50 times, as the Serbs found out in the Kosovo intervention. With those, you can really interdict the infrastructure of an industrialized country and keep it non-functional despite all attempts at repair.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Wow! This was a short essay all by itself! Many thanks!
I did know some of what you wrote about here, from other and more scattered sources. But you brought it all together in a coherent, unified way. E.g., I had known of the USAF's puzzling, to me, refusal to take seriously close air support of ground forces.
I was aware of how the Germans did not use nerve gases in WW II, certainly not for humanitarian reasons, but because they were afraid doing so meant the UK/US would retaliate similarly. But not that the Allies did not have those nerve gases.
Yes, the air raids on Dresden and Tokyo were devastating, but mostly because enemy defeneses had been worn down or suppressed. And happened near the end of the war.
Sean
I had no idea that there was so much to learn about war.
Kaor, Paul!
And that rather surprises me! The quarrelsomeness of human beings and the wars that so often leads to, plays such a major role in human history. And Churchill's histories of WW I and II, in particular, covers some of the details Stirling mentioned.
Sean
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