Nemi Ships: Caligula's Floating Pleasure Palaces

How Caligula's Floating Pleasure Palaces Were Found and Lost Again. 

The Nemi Ships (wiki) - so named because they were discovered in Lake Nemi, south of Rome: The ships were destroyed during WWII, when the purpose-built museum in which they were held caught fire.

From Imperium Romanum:

"Why were the ships unique? The ships were monumental and full of amazing technology. They were over 70 meters long and 24 wide, a system of supplying hot and cold water (pipes with the name of the emperor), bathrooms and baths. Everything in marbles, gold and ivory. Undoubtedly they served the Emperor’s private pleasures – a large living room, kitchen or bedroom indicate that the ships were treated as mobile palaces. 

People queuing in 1932 to see one of the two ships
 of Roman Emperor Caligula, which were recovered
 from Lake Nemi, Italy, on Mussolini's orders.

They contained Archimedes’ screws (the oldest known to us), an extremely rare anchor of admiralty at that time; piston pumps (discovered again only in the Middle Ages). Both had a system of moving sculptures (modelled on the theatre) with a ball bearing system."

The ships were destroyed by fire during World War II on the night of 31 May 1944. Several shells of the United States Army hit near the museum around 8 pm, causing little damage but forcing the German artillery to leave the area. There are conflicting views on whether the bomb started the fire or the Germans set as they left. 

Much more on this at Wikipedia.

An artistic depiction of a Nemi Ship by CM Knight-Smith, c 1906

June Is Bustin' Out All Over and the frisky sheep problem

Read the whole thing at Mark Steyn's site...

Rodgers and Hammerstein's June Is Bustin' Out All Over was Mark Steyn's song of the week several years ago in early June (and is now completely stuck in my head), and I loved this bit of background information:

Traditional Northern New England roof-dancing
 as captured in Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel

In Carousel, "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" is, in essence, a paean to the mating season, and so at one point Hammerstein opted for a Maine version of the old joke about singing Gershwin in Wales or the Falkland Islands: "Embrace me, my sweet embraceable ewe." As Hammerstein wrote:

June Is Bustin' Out All Over!

The sheep aren't sleepin' anymore

All the rams that chase the ewe sheep

Are determined there'll be new sheep

And the ewe sheep aren't even keepin' score!

Etc. Everybody working on the show liked it. Then they started holding backers' auditions. And among the potential investors who attended a run-through of the songs was Mr G M Loeb, who subsequently sent Oscar Hammerstein a letter:

I do not think rams mate with ewes in June as they do in your lyrics but I am not really certain. We have been told to keep our rams separate at all times except when the ewes are in heat but we did not follow this precaution and in several years all mating seemed confined to September-October - no mounting whatsoever in June, or if so no results.

To modify a later Hammerstein song, the ewes were more likely to decline every mountin' than to exhibit the enthusiasm shown in "June Is Bustin' Out All Over". With the show slated to open on Broadway in April 1945, the author replied to Mr Loeb:

I was delighted with the parts of your letter praising my work and thrown into consternation by the unwelcome news about the eccentricly frigid behavior of ewes in June. I have since checked your statement and found it to be true. It looks very much as if in the interests of scientific honesty I shall have to abandon the verse dealing with sheep.

Sometimes, as Hammerstein liked to say, research "poisons" your work. And it seems to have done so in this case. But, after giving more thought to the matter, he decided to keep the offending quatrain. Which was just as well. A decade later, when Rodgers & Hammerstein were making the film version of Carousel, the Production Code Administration objected to certain "suggestive" sections and the author found himself running short of lyrics. The censors were relaxed about the four-legged friskiness but drew the line at those lines quoted above about the boys in Augusty feelin' lusty. Strange to think that a mere half-century ago, such a couplet was deemed too sexual for a Hollywood movie. But Hammerstein dutifully rewrote:

June Is Bustin' Out All Over!

The moonlight is shinin' on the shore

And the girls who were contrary

With the boys in January

Aren't nearly so contrary any more

- which the Production Code Administration graciously agreed to permit. As for the embraceable ewes, Hammerstein found himself fending off the occasional sheep breeder over the years and took to justifying himself as follows:

What you say about sheep may all be true for most years, but not in 1873. 1873 is my year and that year, curiously enough, the sheep mated in the spring.

Kurt Vonnegut's May 29, 1945 letter home after imprisonment in an underground slaughterhouse during the Dresden bombing

On December 19, 1944, twenty-two year old Kurt Vonnegut (wiki) was captured by Wehrmacht troops. Below is the letter he wrote to his family after the end of the war informing them of his capture and survival. Describing the capture and move to Dresden:

Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations -- the floors were covered with fresh cow dung. There wasn't room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year's Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't.

Under the Geneva Convention, Officers and Non-commissioned Officers are not obliged to work when taken prisoner. I am, as you know, a Private. One-hundred-and-fifty such minor beings were shipped to a Dresden work camp on January 10th.

In Dresden they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as "Schlachthof Fünf" (Slaughterhouse Five (wiki)), which, of course, he used 25 years later as the title and organizing principle of his best-known book. During the bombing of Dresden (wiki), which took place in four raids between February 13th and 15th, the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives: 

On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people* in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden -- possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me. 

After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city. 

Transcript below the scan - read the whole thing.

Transcript

FROM:

Pfc. K. Vonnegut, Jr.,
12102964 U. S. Army.

TO:

Kurt Vonnegut,

Williams Creek,

Indianapolis, Indiana.

Dear people:

I'm told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than "missing in action." Chances are that you also failed to receive any of the letters I wrote from Germany. That leaves me a lot of explaining to do -- in precis:

The location of the original Slaughterhouse Five
 is now a parking lot in front of an exhibition hall,
 but a stone statue of a cow that once marked
 the entrance to the meatpacking district
somehow survived the bombing. (more here)

I've been a prisoner of war since December 19th, 1944, when our division was cut to ribbons by Hitler's last desperate thrust through Luxemburg and Belgium. Seven Fanatical Panzer Divisions hit us and cut us off from the rest of Hodges' First Army. The other American Divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks: Our ammunition, food and medical supplies gave out and our casualties out-numbered those who could still fight - so we gave up. The 106th got a Presidential Citation and some British Decoration from Montgomery for it, I'm told, but I'll be damned if it was worth it. I was one of the few who weren't wounded. For that much thank God.

Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations -- the floors were covered with fresh cow dung. There wasn't room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year's Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't.

Under the Geneva Convention, Officers and Non-commissioned Officers are not obliged to work when taken prisoner. I am, as you know, a Private. One-hundred-and-fifty such minor beings were shipped to a Dresden work camp on January 10th. I was their leader by virtue of the little German I spoke. It was our misfortune to have sadistic and fanatical guards. We were refused medical attention and clothing: We were given long hours at extremely hard labor. Our food ration was two-hundred-and-fifty grams of black bread and one pint of unseasoned potato soup each day. After desperately trying to improve our situation for two months and having been met with bland smiles I told the guards just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came. They beat me up a little. I was fired as group leader. Beatings were very small time: -- one boy starved to death and the SS Troops shot two for stealing food.

Dresden after the bombing raid (wiki)

On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden -- possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me.

After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.

When General Patton took Leipzig we were evacuated on foot to ('the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border'?). There we remained until the war ended. Our guards deserted us. On that happy day the Russians were intent on mopping up isolated outlaw resistance in our sector. Their planes (P-39's) strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen, but not me.

Eight of us stole a team and wagon. We traveled and looted our way through Sudetenland and Saxony for eight days, living like kings. The Russians are crazy about Americans. The Russians picked us up in Dresden. We rode from there to the American lines at Halle in Lend-Lease Ford trucks. We've since been flown to Le Havre.

I'm writing from a Red Cross Club in the Le Havre P.O.W. Repatriation Camp. I'm being wonderfully well feed and entertained. The state-bound ships are jammed, naturally, so I'll have to be patient. I hope to be home in a month. Once home I'll be given twenty-one days recuperation at Atterbury, about $600 back pay and -- get this -- sixty (60) days furlough.

I've too damned much to say, the rest will have to wait, I can't receive mail here so don't write.

May 29, 1945

Love,

Kurt - Jr.

* via a commenter, the book The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940-1945, by Richard Overy (Viking 2013), asserts: "Recent estimates from a historical commission in Dresden have confirmed that the original figure suggested by the city's police president in March 1945 of approximately 25,000 dead is the best available estimate." The 250,000 figure came about via Goebbels' "judicial addition of an additional zero to the provisional casualty estimate."

Via the always interesting but not frequently-enough updated (that was a hint, you guys) blog of Letters of Note.

Previous posts: In 2006, Kurt Vonnegut sent this excellent letter to a high school class, and here's his 1944 letter from a German prison camp.

Cory Doctorow on right-to-repair, VIN-locking and kill-switching: John Deere (and many others)

Read the whole thing - Right-to-repair, VIN-locking and kill-switching: 

John Deere makes this claim: in its battles against the right to repair, Deere styles itself as the guardian of the world’s food supply, whose information security is all that stands between us and a Russian (or Chinese, or supervillain) shutdown of the world’s ag-tech.

They’re not wrong: John Deere’s decision to build ag-tech that can be remotely controlled, disabled and updated, along with its monopolization of the world’s ag-tech market, means that anyone who compromises its system puts the world’s food-supply at risk.

Which is a terrifying proposition, because John Deere has extraordinarily terrible information security. When Sick Codes probed Deere’s security, they found glaring, serious errors that put the entire food supply chain at risk.

Worse, John Deere seems to have no clue as to how bad it is at security. In the company’s entire history it has never once submitted a single bug to the US government’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. As far as Deere knows, its security is literally perfect.

V.E. Day: on May 8, 1945, World War 2 ended in Europe

May 8th is the anniversary of V.E. Day (for "Victory in Europe") (wiki, BBC) in 1945, which saw the German surrender and the end of World War II in the European theater

The beaten foe emerged.

Winston Churchill waves to crowds London on V-E Day.

All over the broad Atlantic, wherever they had been working or lying hid, the U-boats surfaced, confessing the war's end. A few of them, prompted by determination or struck by guilt, scuttled or destroyed themselves, or ran for shelter, not knowing that there was none; but mostly they did what they had been told to do, mostly they hoisted their black surrender flags, and stayed where they were, and waited for orders. 

They rose, dripping and silent, in the Irish Sea, and at the mouth of the Clyde, and off the Lizard in the English Channel, at the top of the Minches where the tides raced; they rose near Iceland, where Compass Rose was sunk and off the north-west tip of Ireland, and close to the Faeroes, and on the Gibraltar run where the sunk ships lay so thick, and near St. Johns and Halifax and in the deep of the Atlantic, with three thousand fathoms of water beneath their keel. 

They surfaced in secret places, betraying themselves and their frustrated plans: they rose within sight of land, they rose far away in mortal waters, where on the map of the battle, the crosses that were the sunken ships were etched so many and so close that the ink ran together. They surfaced above their handiwork, in hatred or in fear, sometimes snarling their continued rage, sometimes accepting thankfully a truce they had never offered to other ships, other sailors.

They rose, and lay wherever they were on the battlefield, waiting for the victors to claim their victory. 

~ Nicolas Monsarrat ("V.E. Day," from The Cruel Sea)

May 8th is the anniversary of V.E. Day (for "Victory in Europe") (wiki, BBC) in 1945, and commemorates the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied forces, ending World War II in Europe.*

With Adolf Hitler dead by his own hand, German military leaders signed surrender documents at several locations in Europe on May 7, capitulating to each of their victorious foes. Germany’s partner in fascism, Italy, had switched sides in 1943, though many Italians continued to fight alongside their German comrades in Italy.

Upon entering the war in December 1941, the United States had agreed on a “Europe first” strategy: concentrate on defeating Germany, Italy and their satellites rather than focusing the bulk of men and resources on the war in the Pacific. V-E Day, therefore, marked a major milestone for the Allies but did not end the war, as Allied governments pointedly reminded their citizens. Attention turned to finishing the war against Imperial Japan. More on that here:

It's V-J Day, the anniversary of the date of Japan's surrender in 1945 and the end of WWII.

* N.B. It's referred to as "Victory Day" in Russia and is celebrated on May 9th.

People dance in the streets of London on
VE Day, 8 May 1945

English novelist Nicolas Monsarrat (1910-1979) was born in Liverpool and earned a law degree at Cambridge. With the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and served on the North Atlantic convoys for several years. This experience led to his crafting perhaps the most highly regarded novel about modern naval warfare yet written - The Cruel Sea - which appeared in 1951 while its author was serving as a British diplomat in South Africa. An equally esteemed motion picture, starring Jack Hawkins, was made of the book two years later, and it remains a classic today. Several other Monsarrat novels followed, but none ever gained the stature of The Cruel Sea.

Below is a generous theatrical trailer for The Cruel Sea, which actually shows some of the best bits.

Here's the Youtube description:

The novel The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monserrat was an unflinching portrayal of life at sea during WWII on a boat tasked with protecting convoys and seeking and destroying U-boats. A runaway success, the novel had already sold over 4 million copies in just 2 years when Ealing decided to make the film version. Filmed aboard an actual Royal Navy corvette, The Cruel Sea tells the story of the sailors aboard the HMS Compass Rose: the bonds that form between them, the daily pressures they face and their epic struggle to overcome the enemy. Nominated for a BAFTA for Best British Film, The Cruel Sea stars Jack Hawkins, Sir Donald Sinden and Stanley Clarke, and is a gripping insight into the lives of unsung heroes at sea during the war, and the agonizing decisions and incredible peril they faced on a daily basis.

And a brief documentary:

Related posts:

It's V-J Day, the anniversary of the date of Japan's surrender in 1945 and the end of WWII.

Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches...we shall never surrender" speech: the evacuation of Dunkirk by a flotilla of small boats.

June 6 is D-Day: quotes, videos (footage, FDR's and Reagan's speeches), lots of links.

March 5 is the anniversary of Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech.

Churchill on governmental redistribution.

Before there was Laffer: Churchill on the fiscal cliff.

Parts of the text above are based on Ed's Quotation of the Day, only available via email - leave your email address in the comments if you'd like to be added to his list. Ed is the author of Hunters and Killers: Volume 1: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1776 to 1943 and Hunters and Killers: Volume 2: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1943.