Flying Tigers

I visited EAA a couple of weeks ago, and got excited about planes; so I'm taking a short break from the Gold topic to discuss one of history's most famous aviation groups. 

 

Everyone is pretty familiar with the shark's mouth paint scheme on fighters; the Flying Tigers were the group that made it famous.  How did that happen?  In 1941, Japan was at war with China, and was invading and occpying area in mainland Asia.  America was against the Japanese expansion, and China appealed to the US for support.  The US was not willing to go to war, but Roosevelt authorized payments to a private military contractor named CAMCO and provided one hundred P-40 fighters to them.  US military pilots were allowed to resign to receive "training and instruction" from CAMCO. 

 

That "training and instruction" would come in the form of combat with the Japanese.  Claire Chennault, an ex-US officer who was serving as an air advisor to the Chinese army, commanded the group, and taught them to use tactics that featured the strengths of the P-40 while minimizing its weaknesses.  The P-40 was a heavy fighter with armor for the pilot; Japanese fighters did not have that armor, so they were lighter and more maneuverable.  Chennault emphasized diving for attacking and escaping and head-on attacks when possible.  The group had an astonishing success rate in individual combat; numbers are difficult to assess accurately, but a recent estimate was 115 enemy planes downed compared to 14 pilots killed (from Wikipedia).

 

The military campaign fought by the group is interesting; it could be described as an insurgency with very good weaponry (imagine Iraqis in Blackhawk helicopters).  The Tigers received significant support from the Chinese, including the "Early Warning Net" that consisted of spotters radioing air activity from all over the countryside.  Further, it provided a great boost to morale.  When America entered the war at the end of 1941, they had suffered a major military defeat and wouldn't be able to make traction for sometime; but the Flying Tigers had already been organized, were in operation, and pronvided headlines that captured the nation's attention during a tough time.  In 1942, the AVG (American Volunteer Group, the official name) was brought into the US Army Air Corps, though many of the pilots refused to join, believing they were disrespected and treated unfairly. 

 

I'm reading an autobiography on the subject called "God is my co-pilot", written during WWII by a pilot named Robert Scott.  The book is a historical artifact itself; its racist characterizations of the Japanese are an anachronism in sync with the xenophobia of the time.  But the stories are jaw-dropping, from his time flying a WWI-surplus plane as a teenager to his years flying the mail and training pilots in the 1930s to his quest to see action despite his age during the war.  It's a pretty quick read, I'd recommend it during the next EAA.

Cow-Unit

For people of Europe and Asia before the Greek and Roman empires, the cow was the standard of exchange.  With the Egyptians and the Greeks, gold starts to be used for exchanges, though it is valued or "backed" in cows.  Gold was more portable than a cow, and it could be divided less messily than a cow.  This allowed for taxes to be collected by leaders over larger areas, which became a key in the formation of greater civilizations.

 

Gold left European scene of exchange at the end of Roman empire, but reemerged as trade picked up around the Mediterranean at the end of the Middle Ages.  An interesting historical artifact is the passion with which the Spanish pursued gold in the New World from 1492 through the sixteenth century.  Columbus and those that followed after did everything they could to find gold, plunder it, or demand gold in tribute from natives, often in cruel ways.  At this point in Europe, gold was the preferred currency, so if the Spanish could find it, it was like picking up money from the ground. (inflation due to oversupply wasn't a concern for them).

 

Beyond its use as currency, at this time there was growing competition between nations in Europe, and gold was the metric by which they measured success.  The name for the economic system of the time is Mercantilism, of which bullionism (ascribing intrinsic value to precious metals) was a component.  Nations in Europe believed that there was a fixed sum of wealth, and competed with each other to get a bigger share of that wealth.  This resulted in the erection of trade barriers and laws governing the export of gold and silver to other nations.  It is the system that Adam Smith would condemn with his 1776 book "The Wealth of Nations", helping to usher in a free-market economy.  As we will see in future blog posts, bullionism took a while to be discounted.

Gold

I'm reading the book "Two Sides to the Coin" by Adam Wasserman, which discusses the history of human interactions surrounding gold.  It's a relevant book as the price of gold has increased and politicians are talking about going back to a gold standard.   A faithful reader mentioned that he was curious about the topic, so you may see a few history tidbits on currency.

 

In prehistory, people picked up gold nuggets from streams and fashioned them into earrings, bracelets, and other ornaments.  Gold is malleable so it was easy for them to work with, and it is shiny, which has a universal value to humans.  There is no evidence that it was particularly valued over other materials before Egyptian civilization; in the fifteenth century, natives in the caribbean freely traded gold for glass, beads, and tin with Christopher Columbus. 

 

There are several examples of gold being valued more highly as civilizations began to form.  Gold was associated with the sun by the Egyptians, Aztecs, and Inca, and the word for Gold in Greek, Celt, and Roman is derived from a word meaning "color of the sun".  In Egypt and other civilizations, gold was associated with divinity; it didn't tarnish and seemed to last forever.  Egyptians worshipped the sun and so that association was strengthened.  Thus, pharaohs and kings would accumulate and display gold to prove their divinity and their mandate to rule.  

 

So the theory goes, of the origin of gold valuation--as civilizations begin, they seem to use gold to demonstrate who has the power.  My favorite part is what the Aztecs and Incas thought of gold; the Incas believed it was the "sweat of the sun", and the Aztecs thought it was "the excrement of the sun".  Kind of an interesting picture.

Today's history tidbit

Today's history tidbit discusses one of the first times an invasive species was recognized and considered harmful.  I've been reading Bill Bryson's book "At Home", in which he describes how it became popular in Victorian England to collect species of plants from around the world.  In the 1850s, the English imported some vines from North America that contained (and were partially resistant to) an aphid.  This aphid spread across the European continent and destroyed between 2/3rds and 9/10ths of the wine industry there.  The europeans were forced to graft their vines onto American roots; and a debate has raged since about whether the wines have ever been the same.  Only a few regions were resistant and still have the original roots.  Wines from these regions are more expensive today.

 

The aphids were shipped prior to this time period, but one thing changed that allowed them to arrive alive: the steamship.  And that is the history tidbit of the day.