Received the following from a highly resected Brother Marine referred to as “Mustang,” which many of you know what that moniker means. Anyway, I don’t watch TV except Netflix and Amazon Prime. Would enjoyed watching this episode however. Enjoy and thank you Mustang, it is definitely blog worthy! Really there isn’t much to enjoy as it is all so true and scary as hell.
“Real-Time” host Bill Maher closed his show Friday night by sounding the alarm on China’s growing dominance over the United States. Why are Americans sleeping?
We aren’t sleeping, we are spending our time teaching and assisting little boys how to become little girls! And, if we aren’t busy doing that we have the Sec of Defense, responding to an order from the ‘commander’ in chief, designing stylish new uniforms for pregnant ‘soldiers’.
“You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are such silly people. And Americans are all silly people,” Maher began the monologue, alluding to a “Lawrence of Arabia” quote.
Do you know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China,” he said. “All 1.4 billion of them couldn’t give a crouching tiger flying f— because they’re not silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight.”
Maher acknowledged that China does “bad stuff” from the concentration camps of Uyghur Muslims to its treatment of Hong Kong. But he stressed, “There’s got to be something between an authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can’t do anything at all.”
“In two generations, China has built 500 entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals. Oh, and they bought Africa,” Maher said, pointing to China’s global Silk Road infrastructure initiative.
He continued: “In China alone, they have 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. America has none. We’ve been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009 but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they’re eating babies. We are such silly people.
“Nothing ever moves in this impacted colon of a country. We see a problem and we ignore it, lie about it, fight about it with each other, endlessly litigate it, sunset clause it, kick it down the road, and then write a bill where a half-assed solution doesn’t kick in for 10 years,” Maher explained. Then the half-assed bill is forgotten.
“China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it.”
The HBO star cited how it took “ten years” for a bus line in San Francisco to pass its environmental review and how it took “16 years” to build the Big Dig tunnel in Boston, comparing that to a 57-story skyscraper that China constructed in only “19 days” and Beijing’s Sanyuan Bridge, which was demolished and rebuilt in “43 hours.”
“We binge-watch, they binge-build. When COVID hit Wuhan, the city built a quarantine center with 4,000 rooms in 10 days and they barely had to use it because they quickly arrested the rest of the disease,” Maher said. “They were back to throwing raves in swimming pools while we were stuck at home surfing the dark web for black market Charmin. We’re not losing to China, we LOST. The returns just haven’t all come in yet. They’ve made robots that check a kid’s temperature and got their asses back in school. Most of our kids are still pretending to take Zoom classes while they watch TikTok and their brain cells fully commit ritual suicide.” Our teachers unions are finding every single way to keep themselves on the payroll, but keep students out of the classrooms. WAKE UP AMERICA! That means ALL of YOU.
Maher then blasted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, accusing him of degrading school standards by eliminating merit and substituting a lottery system for admittance to schools for advanced learners. Our country is going down the toilet.
“Do you think China’s doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest?” Maher continued. “Do you think Chinese colleges and universities are offering courses in ‘The Philosophy of Star Trek, ‘The Sociology of Seinfeld,’ and ‘Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse’? Can this be real? Well, let me tell you, China is real. And they are eating our lunch. And believe me, in an hour, they’ll be hungry again.”
A somber message, isn’t it? But, where is Maher wrong? I guess the good news is that unlike the Chinese our young people have free text messaging and iPhone games.
Another great one from Greg, thank you sir. Folks, fasten your seat belts as this coming election is shaping up to be the biggest scandal America has ever experienced. At least in my lifetime. This one will make the Florida “hanging chads” incident look like child’s play. I voted yesterday and I was very impressed with the way my early voting precinct in Lee County, FL handled everything. from social distancing, not allowing entrance without a mask — who in their right mind would even think of coming to vote without a mask, maybe they needed a new one knowing they would have masks to provide — to the layout, organization, and politeness of the workers. Well done Lee County!!
Yes, I stood in line in the hot sun for about twenty-five minutes, but hey, this my duty, a duty I served to protect. So, get off your ass and go vote in person, wear a mask, social distance, wash you hands when your done, and wear your little “I Voted” sticker on your shirt with pride.
I believe in my heat of hearts that Trump will win this election, I mean he has God on his side. Surely if the other side wins, He may find himself restricted in America like never before.
I’m remined of the story, if I may digress, about the homeless man who showed up in a church wearing rags. The pastor told him he was not welcome in this church dressed like that. He was instructed to go home and pray to God and ask what the proper attire should be to come into this church. The following Sunday the homeless man showed up, of course in the only clothes he had – rags. The Pastor stopped him and asked if he had done what he was instructed to do last Sunday, The man replied that he had. The Pastor asked, “Well what did God say”? The man politely replied that God said he didn’t know, He’d never been in this church.
May be a funny story, but with true meaning. This election is about much more than politics, personalities, and policies. It’s about the future of our country as a Nation.
By: G. Maresca
There are some Americans who have received numerous ballots in the mail over the past month that you’d think they were already deceased. Who among us has not read or heard about mail-in voting shenanigans occurring throughout our fruited plain?
For Democrats there are no wrong addresses, only misplaced and uncounted ballots. Covering elections years ago, the standard refrain throughout the Pennsylvania Coal Region was the Democrats always had a 500-vote advantage before the polls ever opened their doors
Recently, military members from Pennsylvania had their ballots recovered along the side of a road, while trays of ballots were found trashed along a highway in Wisconsin. The Newark, N.J. Star-Ledger reported a mail carrier was arrested by the FBI after being caught on camera tossing ninety-nine ballots in the garbage.
Supposedly all those ballots cast were for Republican Richard Nixon. Okay, they weren’t for Nixon, but the point is this election could be another 2000 Florida-election fiasco on steroids.
Project Veritas, a non-profit organization of investigative journalists, reported stolen ballots from senior citizens and public housing in Minnesota were confiscated among supporters of Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar. They also released a video documenting a Hispanic woman in Texas, who claimed she was “bringing at least at least 7,000 votes to the polls.”
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton reports eight states including Pennsylvania have registered voters totaling in excess of 100% of those eligible, which violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Accordingly, the counties of Chester, Delaware and Bucks have failed to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from their rolls.
A federal judge in Wisconsin has allowed for an extra week to count mail-in/absentee ballots. Another judge did the same for Michigan, but consenting for two weeks — both states in 2016 were won by razor-thin margins by Donald Trump.
According to David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, Nongovernmental groups have inundated Pennsylvania voters with mail ballot applications that has contributed to a deluge of duplicates sent to dead folks, prior home owners and stray cats.
Pennsylvania Republicans have filed an emergency request with the U.S. Supreme Court hoping to undo a State Supreme Court ruling mandating that state election officials accept all mailed ballots up to three days after the election. With 20 electoral votes of the 270 needed to win the presidency, Pennsylvania, like Michigan and Wisconsin are among the most hotly contested states with Trump winning Pennsylvania last time by 44,292 votes out of more than 6 million cast.
These ballot tales are as numerous as the votes they supposedly represent.
Properly applied for and submitted, absentee ballots are legitimate, but are often not counted unless in sufficient numbers. Normally, one percent of mail-in ballots are disqualified. According to the Wall Street Journal, in April’s Wisconsin Democratic primary, 2.5% of ballots were disallowed – the equivalent of three times Trump’s victory margin in 2016, where 134,000 Wisconsinites voted by mail. This year, 1.8 million ballots are expected.
By voting in person, your vote is much more likely to count.
The risk of not getting counted is higher for absentee and mail-in ballots that are subject to challenge and disqualification that include questionable signatures and witnesses. Who marked that mail-in ballot and were you unduly influenced or mentally competent when you did? What about your elderly mother’s ballot at the nursing home? Did she really make the choice, or was she helped? When mailing did they offer to help others as well, or perhaps accidentally forgot to deposit them?
If Democrats lose the election, they will blame someone besides themselves.
Will it be a mere coincidence, or a calculated “discovery” of missing ballots in heavily Democrat areas, where the race is just too close to call? Expect an army of Democrat lawyers to file lawsuits as these “missing ballots” are ripe for harvesting.
Examples of such subterfuge have existed before, and it defies logic to think that unscrupulous players will not be at it again.
Many voters have been influenced to believe that you should skip voting at the polls for fear of contracting COVID-19.
When the sanctity of casting one’s ballot becomes increasingly questionable, voter fraud escalates resulting in a direct threat to any election’s integrity and taints the democratic process.
The most important civic duty one can do is vote – and vote in person if at all possible.
Ok, it’s time to take a break from what the insane liberal thugs are doing. I’ll give them time for their heads to stop exploding. They now have a new thing to rant about with Ruth Ginsberg expiring. Let the battle lines be drawn on this one.
Have you heard the press conference from our Governor here in Florida? LOVED it. I seriously doubt you’ll see any November riots and destruction here; if only your governor has the set he has!
For those of you who have read my book, you may or may not recall in Chapter 41—Lemoore— I was absolutely bored to tears during my last year there. Sergeants were running the command, we did away with the Commander of the Guard. SNCO’s and officers stood Officer of the Day (OOD)—at home. The only time they got involved was when some airwing Command Duty Officer of the base (Navy Lt Cmdr) found it below him to have to speak to a lowly E-5, our Sgt of the Guard, and demanded to speak to me. Of course, that never happened, the OOD took care of him.
Bored beyond belief I began reading a lot and filled my library with books—mostly of military genre; one of books was the one titled here. Once the tour ended, it was back to the Corps and the reality of the hectic schedule of a field grade office—reading ceased.
After retirement came my book. Five and one-half years of constant 24/7 my editor and I beating ourselves to death. He was 2,500 miles away and we burned up the internet and telephone lines daily over grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. More often than not he was correct—without him the book would never have happened. Bless you Denny! When the book finally came to fruition in December 2012, the last thing I wanted to do in my life was read a damn book.
During the ensuing four more moves and garage sales I pretty much emptied my library. For some reason I saved the title book. I believe the reason was I grew up there—Baltimore. Now in my forever home and not much to do, I plucked this book off the shelf and read it. My first read since 2012, and it was great.
I leaned much from the book. One thing was I finally found someone who agreed with me—Baltimore and Fort McHenry are not on the Chesapeake Bay as everyone seems to believe. In fact, I’ve gotten into some heated discussion with folks, even some from Baltimore, who were convinced they were both on the Bay, some said they never heard of Patapsco River—really? They are on the Patapsco River. I grew up on Bear Creek which empties into the confluence of the River and the Bay at Sparrows Point. I spent my childhood camping, hunting, fishing, and crabbing the two with Dad and my friends. I know the area like the back of my hand.
As a retired military officer, I was amazed at the incompetence, sheer ineptness expressed by both Americans and British during this war. For those of us who have spent our time in hell—combat—we all know too well the best laid plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired, and adjustments are made in the heat of battle. However, during this war, there were no “best laid plans.” It amazes me we even came out of the war as survivors.
Not far into the book I got the shock of my life! Who on the British side orchestrated, planned, provide forces and orders for the conduct of the War of 1812? It was the Secretary of War and the Colonies—none other than Lord Earl Bathurst. Yes, he is one of my ancestors. I have a loose-leaf binder given to me by a Canadian named Bathurst who was for many years a diplomat in Washington, D.C. I befriended him through a strange set of circumstances while on active duty. He compiled an amazing history of the Bathursts all the way back to the 15th Century. I dug out his binder and sure enough there is Lord Bathurst. Sorry about that folks! LOL
If you are a reader I highly recommend the title book. It was printed in 1972 and is still available. I’m not making this recommendation because of the Lord. LOL I recommend it for its detailed study of the battles of Bladensburg, Baltimore, and Washington. There are amazing examples of the “Fog of War” often fraught with confusion, incompetence, and sheer luck—both good and bad. If you are a military person and a reader I believe you will enjoy it.
Footnote: As a young Marine I remember being told the reason the Brits didn’t burn Marine Barracks and the Commandant’s house was their respect for the bravery and soldierly virtues of the Marines at Bladensburg. Not true Marines. Sorry. LOL
For those of you who do not know who Victor Davis Hanson is, here is what Wikipedia says about him:
“Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets. ”
For someone born, raised, and educated in California he certainly has his stuff all in one bag — as we used to say in the Corps. He will be 63 in a week
The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities go on with their ritual self-destruction.
n February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.
When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.
You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.
You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.
Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”
Old Liberal Ideas Are Being Destroyed
We are living in the most racially polarized climate since the 1960s. America’s past, present, and future are in the process of being recalibrated entirely through the lens of one’s skin color. Columbus is reduced to nothing more than another racist white Italian sailor of a half-millennium past. Grant might as well have fought for slavery in the mind of today’s campus ignoramus. Apparently, the Antifa thug thinks he could just as easily have written the Gettysburg Address or sculpted a statue of Frederick Douglass.
The old liberal ideas of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are being destroyed by the Left under the specious doctrines of cultural appropriation, or “acting white” or “how we look is who we are.”
A new fuzzy Jim Crow returns with racially segregated campus safe spaces and theme houses or the race-based reeducation and training sessions in the workplace—all predicated to stop racism! Somehow selecting strangers on the basis of their race to bully in a restaurant, or targeting old anonymous men and women to beat up in the street by their race, or singling out suburbanites by their race for racial taunts and profanity is redefined as reparatory justice or overdue payback—on the assumption that no one would dare say that the arson, looting, and rhetoric are descending into ever more hate-filled nihilism.
Our collective future of nationalized tribalism will become what always results when citizens identify by superficial appearance or shared religion. Just go to Lebanon, the Balkans, or Iraq to see what is in store first hand.
Tribalism Rising
To survive, all groups will self-identify, at first quietly, but eventually unapologetically. Some will form alliances of self-preservation, others will war with each other. Tribal gangs, as they already do now in our streets of fire and looting, will assume they are exempt from consequences; and so will their antitheses of vigilantes who band together to guard their stores in the absence of a defunded police.
Liberal elite whites themselves are now uneasy, since the abstract doctrines they so nihilistically advocated, from defunding the police to recalibrating looting as “redistribution,” are now becoming reified and closer to home. They see that when BLM protestors jam a restaurant to demand fealty or lecture on “white privilege” or march into a suburb to wake up the commuter to apprise him of his immorality, the racialists will not qualify their agendas with “except for woke whites.”
When tribalism is distilled to its innate and terrifying essence, there are never exemptions for individuals: you are reduced to what you appear superficially as to strangers. The white felon is no different than the white Harvard president, the black shoplifter is the same as the black physicist. We are all condensed to a sort of collective nothingness, or rather a racial “allness.”
The Self-Immolation of Pro Sports
Professional sports, once an integral part of American life, appears to be nearly in ruins. Professional baseball, basketball, and football might have survived the virus, the lockdown, and the recession—and then maybe they might not have. After all, millions of the bored more quickly than expected got acculturated to the idea of soon not listening to a boring rant from LeBron James or the sad confessionals of Drew Brees.
But what the NBA and NFL, and perhaps MLB won’t survive is cultural suicide as players fragment into causes. The NBA existed on the premise that billionaires were willing to pay multimillionaires to lose billions as a prestige lark—as a franchise became a sort of a huge, showy Louis Vuitton bag. But even billionaires have limits. Snobbery and appearing cool do not always trump losing the equivalent of a Ferrari every hour or a Gulfstream each week.
The NBA, we are told, is a woke industry.
But it’s also the strangest, most nondiverse, right-wing, money-obsessed woke institution in America. More than three-quarters of the multimillionaire players are African-American. Over 90 percent of the billionaire team owners are white.
Yet the entire industry—players, coaches, owners, staff—lecture Americans ad nauseam about their supposed sins. The monotonous sermons have become transparent medieval redemptions—given the mortal sin that the NBA sold its very soul to a racist, genocidal, and totalitarian China—to recover billions abroad for the billions lost in viewership and attendance at home.
Nondiverse multimillionaires, working for even less diverse billionaires, finger-pointing at middle-class Americans on the evils of privilege, in the pay of the Chinese Communist Party, is not a way to win back fans.
Institutional Crack-Ups
Universities are in for hard times. The federal government eventually will get out of the $1.5 trillion student loan subsidy business, and force spendthrift colleges to accept their own self-created moral hazards. Charging $30,000-40,000 for tuition over Zoom is a bad business model in a recession. And the alphabet soups after the names of professors and deans will not make a bit of difference.
Thousands of college-educated protesters and rioters are not especially good advertisements for the building of lifelong character on woke university campuses. Once undergraduate institutions decided to make students socially conscious rather than educated, and once their graduates seem to be neither, then who really finds their mentors essential?
Our major cities, emerging from lockdown, and on the edge of nightly violence, remind us of what Procopius, the Byzantine historian, saw of Rome in AD 538, once the cultural and political megalopolis of the world: a mostly deserted shell of weeds, deserted streets, collapsed stone, choked fountains, and fortified villas where lawlessness reigned and feuding tribes were what was left of a government that once had enshrined habeas corpus.
No city gets a pass from history, not Athens, not Rome, not Alexandria—not Detroit, Baltimore, or Chicago.
After all, there is no rule that just because Bill Gates and Amazon headquartered in Seattle that its mayor, city council, and state governor will not abandon its signature downtown. What once made Portland great can be undone in a few weeks.
Wall Street may run the world, but it certainly does not run the New York City government. Electronic capital really does still have human legs and when the proverbial suited investor thinks he will be infected, short of toilet paper, or assaulted on the street, he leaves, taking his laptop with him. Bill de Blasio is left to govern, like a horned and bearded Visigoth, over an increasing shell of former grandeur.
To venture into San Francisco is to return in a time machine to 1855, a boomtown based on silicon chips, not gold dust, but one likewise lawless, fetid, and safe only for those with private security guards. To the casual visitor, it appears a lunatic place now recalibrated for the homeless, the looter, the assaulter—and the very rich. Crimes like public defecation and drug use, or shattering the windows of a parked car window to steal its contents are not crimes unless the targets are the well-connected.
The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities to go on with their ritual self-destruction.
So it has begun to seem this endless summer.
My personal view is we have the gun to our head right now. It only has two cylinders, one has a round it it, the other is empty. In November the trigger will be pulled.
I read this piece of Trivia several years ago, and found it very interesting. I received this copy from one of my fellow Marines, who, BTW was one of my recruits back in the early 60’s. And I thought I’d share it with those who perhaps never heard the story. IT IS TRUE!! What I found interesting though was those same ignorant, highly educated, useless bureaucrats who existed back in that day, are still here! LOL That damn can is still in existence today. . . . . Amazing .
During World War II the United States exported more tons of petroleum products than of all other war material combined. The mainstay of the enormous oil-and gasoline transportation network that fed the war was the oceangoing tanker, supplemented on land by pipelines, railroad tank cars, and trucks. But for combat vehicles on the move, another link was crucial—smaller containers that could be carried and poured by hand and moved around a battle zone by trucks.
Hitler knew this. He perceived early on that the weakest link in his plans for blitzkrieg using his panzer divisions was fuel supply. He ordered his staff to design a fuel container that would minimize gasoline losses under combat conditions. As a result the German army had thousands of jerrycans, as they came to be called, stored and ready when hostilities began in 1939.
The jerrycan had been developed under the strictest secrecy, and its unique features were many. It was flat-sided and rectangular in shape, consisting of two halves welded together as in a typical automobile gasoline tank. It had three handles, enabling one man to carry two cans and pass one to another man in bucket-brigade fashion. Its capacity was approximately five U.S. gallons; its weight filled, forty-five pounds. Thanks to an air chamber at the top, it would float on water if dropped overboard or from a plane. Its short spout was secured with a snap closure that could be propped open for pouring, making unnecessary any funnel or opener. A gasket made the mouth leak proof. An air-breathing tube from the spout to the air space kept the pouring smooth. And most important, the can’s inside was lined with an impervious plastic material developed for the insides of steel beer barrels. This enabled the jerrycan to be used alternately for gasoline and water.
Early in the summer of 1939, this secret weapon began a roundabout odyssey into American hands. An American engineer named Paul Pleiss, finishing up a manufacturing job in Berlin, persuaded a German colleague to join him on a vacation trip overland to India. The two bought an automobile chassis and built a body for it. As they prepared to leave on their journey, they realized that they had no provision for emergency water. The German engineer knew of and had access to thousands of jerrycans stored at Tempelhof Airport. He simply took three and mounted them on the underside of the car.
The two drove across eleven national borders without incident and were halfway across India when Field Marshal Goering sent a plane to take the German engineer back home. Before departing, the engineer compounded his treason by giving Pleiss complete specifications for the jerrycan’s manufacture. Pleiss continued on alone to Calcutta. Then he put the car in storage and returned to Philadelphia.
Back in the United States, Pleiss told military officials about the container, but without a sample can he could stir no interest, even though the war was now well under way. The risk involved in having the cans removed from the car and shipped from Calcutta seemed too great, so he eventually had the complete vehicle sent to him, via Turkey and the Cape of Good Hope. It arrived in New York in the summer of 1940 with the three jerrycans intact. Pleiss immediately sent one of the cans to Washington. The War Department looked at it but unwisely decided that an updated version of their World War I container would be good enough. That was a cylindrical ten-gallon can with two screw closures. It required a wrench and a funnel for pouring.
That one jerrycan in the Army’s possession was later sent to Camp Holabird, in Maryland. There it was poorly redesigned; the only features retained were the size, shape, and handles. The welded circumferential joint was replaced with rolled seams around the bottom and one side. Both a wrench and a funnel were required for its use. And it now had no lining. As any petroleum engineer knows, it is unsafe to store gasoline in a container with rolled seams. This ersatz can did not win wide acceptance.
The British first encountered the jerrycan during the German invasion of Norway, in 1940, and gave it its English name (the Germans were, of course, the “Jerries”). Later that year Pleiss was in London and was asked by British officers if he knew anything about the can’s design and manufacture. He ordered the second of his three jerrycans flown to London. Steps were taken to manufacture exact duplicates of it.
Two years later the United States was still oblivious of the can. Then, in September 1942, two quality-control officers posted to American refineries in the Mideast ran smack into the problems being created by ignoring the jerrycan. I was one of those two. Passing through Cairo two weeks before the start of the Battle of El Alamein, we learned that the British wanted no part of a planned U.S. Navy can; as far as they were concerned, the only container worth having was the Jerrycan, even though their only supply was those captured in battle. The British were bitter; two years after the invasion of Norway there was still no evidence that their government had done anything about the jerrycan.
My colleague and I learned quickly about the jerrycan’s advantages and the Allied can’s costly disadvantages, and we sent a cable to naval officials in Washington stating that 40 percent of all the gasoline sent to Egypt was being lost through spillage and evaporation. We added that a detailed report would follow. The 40 percent figure was actually a guess intended to provoke alarm, but it worked. A cable came back immediately requesting confirmation.
We then arranged a visit to several fuel-handling depots at the rear of Montgomery’s army and found there that conditions were indeed appalling. Fuel arrived by rail from the sea in fifty-five-gallon steel drums with rolled seams and friction-sealed metallic mouths. The drums were handled violently by local laborers. Many leaked. The next link in the chain was the infamous five-gallon “petrol tin.” This was a square can of tin plate that had been used for decades to supply lamp kerosene. It was hardly useful for gasoline. In the hot desert sun, it tended to swell up, burst at the seams, and leak. Since a funnel was needed for pouring, spillage was also a problem.
Allied soldiers in Africa knew that the only gasoline container worth having was German. Similar tins were carried on Liberator bombers in flight. They leaked out perhaps a third of the fuel they carried. Because of this, General Wavell’s defeat of the Italians in North Africa in 1940 had come to naught. His planes and combat vehicles had literally run out of gas. Likewise in 1941, General Auchinleck’s victory over Rommel had withered away. In 1942 General Montgomery saw to it that he had enough supplies, including gasoline, to whip Rommel in spite of terrific wastage. And he was helped by captured jerrycans.
The British historian Desmond Young later confirmed the great importance of oil cans in the early African part of the war. “No one who did not serve in the desert,” he wrote, “can realize to what extent the difference between complete and partial success rested on the simplest item of our equipment—and the worst. Whoever sent our troops into desert warfare with the [five-gallon] petrol tin has much to answer for. General Auchinleck estimates that this ‘flimsy and ill constructed container’ led to the loss of thirty per cent of petrol between base and consumer. … The overall loss was almost incalculable. To calculate the tanks destroyed, the number of men who were killed or went into captivity because of shortage of petrol at some crucial moment, the ships and merchant seamen lost in carrying it, would be quite impossible.”
After my colleague and I made our report, a new five-gallon container under consideration in Washington was canceled. Meanwhile the British were finally gearing up for mass production. Two million British jerrycans were sent to North Africa in early 1943, and by early 1944 they were being manufactured in the Middle East. Since the British had such a head start, the Allies agreed to let them produce all the cans needed for the invasion of Europe. Millions were ready by D-day. By V-E day some twenty-one million Allied jerrycans had been scattered all over Europe. President Roosevelt observed in November 1944, “Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitz of 1940.”
In Washington little about the jerrycan appears in the official record. A military report says simply, “A sample of the jerry can was brought to the office of the Quartermaster General in the summer of 1940.”
Richard M. Daniel is a retired commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve and a chemical engineer.
