Dim view of a Desert Fox
QUESTION Did Field Marshal Erwin Rommel have poor eyesight? ERWIN ROMMEL (1891-1944), known as the Desert Fox, won the respect of his enemies with his victories as commander of the Afrika Korps in the Second World War.
In post-war popular culture, he was cast as a brilliant commander and victim of the Third Reich, forced to commit suicide to save his family after having been associated with Operation Valkyrie, the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
This assessment has been contested by some historians who believe this legend was used as a post-war prop to help warm the public to Germany’s reconstruction by showing not all Germans were bad.
Rommel was a vain man. At cadet school in Danzig, he was known to affect a monocle in the Prussian fashion. His fiancée Lucie Mollie said that when they encountered a senior officer, he would tuck this forbidden item out of sight.
He was short-sighted in at least one eye. Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Goering’s right-hand man at the Luftwaffe, recalled how Rommel was thrilled by an increase in fighter plane strength in North Africa ‘as he was one of our more air-minded generals’.
This made him ‘quite starry-eyed about his prospects ... bending very close to his maps – he was desperately short-sighted – he exclaimed: “Look, Milch, there’s Tobruk. I’m going to take it. There’s the Halfaya Pass. I’ll take that, too. There’s Cairo. I’ll take that. And there – there is the Suez Canal: I’m taking that as well.”’
Rommel’s vanity meant that his short-sightedness was rarely revealed to the public. Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann remarked: ‘He had himself photographed from dawn to dusk... He is so vain he does not wear glasses.’
Ralf Georg Ruth, in Rommel: End Of A General, describes how his entourage included cameramen and film-makers. They were banned from taking photographs of him away from the battlefield and pictures were re-shot if he felt they did not show him to his best advantage.
To keep him in a good mood, his cameramen were said to carry on filming even when they had run out of film. Steye Myers, by email.
QUESTION
Several years ago, the Russians planned to reverse the flow of some rivers. What happened? THIS was an ambitious Soviet scheme to divert the flow of northern rivers southwards towards the populated grain belts of Central Asia and Europe, which lacked water for irrigation. First mooted in the Thirties, the plan was revived in the Seventies – before political considerations saw it cancelled in the Eighties.
The USSR was the prime example of imbalance between the distribution of water resources and population and industry.
It had 80% of its water in Asia with 70% of the population in Europe, with the main rivers draining into the Arctic.
In 1971, the Supreme Soviet authorised a plan to divert the Pechora River through the Kama River toward the Volga and the Caspian Sea in the south-west of Russia, damming and blasting out a route through the mountains using controlled nuclear explosions.
Slow progress saw the project grind to a halt. It would have taken 250 more nuclear detonations to complete the levelling for the channel had the project been continued. Political pressures saw the prospect of it being revived on a grand scale. In 1972, the USSR was forced to buy 16million cubic metres of grain from the US on the open market.
This drove up wheat prices worldwide. The USSR was forced to sign an agreement to limit the size of future purchases. In 1975, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan saw the Carter administration prevent the sale of grain.
In 1982, the Supreme Soviet sanctioned a plan to reverse 12 of the Arctic-bound rivers using dams and nuclear blasts.
Gorbachev won a vote to shelve the scheme in 1986, arguing that communist agricultural methods were the cause of the failure. He argued that making the agricultural system more efficient by introducing incentives for workers would be a more workable and cost-effective solution.
Andrew Glen, Salisbury, Wiltshire.
QUESTION
Did Lionel Bart help Mick Jagger and Keith Richards write some of their early songs, but was uncredited? LIONEL Bart, lyricist of the hit musical Oliver! was fond of hanging out with Sixties celebrities including The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He helped the Stones’ young manager Andrew Loog Oldham find his feet and later claimed he worked on the lyrics of As Tears Go By and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.
This seems unlikely. Describing As Tears Go By, Jagger told an interviewer in 1995: ‘I wrote the lyrics and Keith wrote the melody ... It’s like a metaphor for being old: You’re watching children playing and realising you’re not a child. It’s a relatively mature song considering the rest of the output at the time.’
A possible explanation for the confusion was that in 1964, Oldham offered As Tears Go By to Marianne Faithfull after it was considered too soppy for the Stones. It was chosen instead of the Lionel Bart song I Don’t Know. As Tears Go went on to become Faithfull’s first Top Ten hit.
The idea that Lionel Bart wrote Satisfaction is fanciful. Keith Richards came up with the famous riff in an American hotel room. In his autobiography Life, he said: ‘I wrote Satisfaction in my sleep. I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player.
‘The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I’d put a brandnew tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was Satisfaction.’
The Rolling Stones recorded the track in May 1965 and it became their first US Number One. George Nicholson, Bristol. QUESTION Who is the greatest ever Irish badminton player? FURTHER to the earlier answer, the badminton hall on Whitehall Road is actually located on the Dublin 12 side of Terenure, not to be confused with Whitehall on the northside of the city.
Additionally, as I used to cover badminton, I know Scott Evans’s father, Martyn, who was a very decent player of racquet sports himself. Philip Quinn, via email.
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