Massacre of the sparrows
QUESTION
Did Chairman Mao hate sparrows? In 1958, nine years after the Communist Party of China took power, the leader Chairman Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward, his disastrous attempt to transform the nation rapidly from a rural, agrarian society into a modern, industrial one.
The first action was the Four Pests campaign, a movement to exterminate mosquitoes, flies, rats — and sparrows.
The first three may be understandable, but Mao added the Eurasian tree sparrow ( Passer montanus) because it had been calculated that each bird consumed 10lb of grain a year. For every million sparrows killed, it was thought there would be food for 60,000 people.
The public was mobilised by posters depicting children aiming at the sky with catapults and the four creatures impaled together on a knife blade.
The populace took to the streets clanging pots or waving flags and coloured sheets to prevent the birds from landing. nests were torn down, eggs broken, chicks killed and sparrows shot from the sky.
An excerpt from a Shanghai newspaper captured the excitement: ‘In the parks, cemeteries and hot houses where there are fewer people around, 150 free-fire zones were set up for shooting the sparrows. The nanyang Girls Middle School rifle team received training in the techniques for shooting birds.
‘Thus the citizens fought a total war against the sparrows. By 8pm tonight, it is estimated that a total of 194,432 sparrows have been killed.’
The killings ended after a year when the Academy of Sciences demonstrated that three- quarters of the contents of an autopsied sparrow’s digestive tract contained pest insects.
Unfortunately, it was too late. Millions of sparrows had been slaughtered and insect populations boomed. Locusts swarmed over the country, devastating agriculture. In the ensuing famine, it’s estimated more than 30 million people died of hunger.
Gerald Lee, Bournemouth.
QUESTION
Was Napoleon afraid of rabbits? nAPoLEon wasn’t scared of rabbits. There was a notable incident, however, when he was attacked by a large colony of rabbits. This bizarre event took place in July 1807 after napoleon signed the Treaties of Tilsit, officially marking the end of the war between the French Empire and Imperial Russia.
The episode is recorded in the memoir of General Paul Thiebault. Returning to Paris, napoleon went hunting, a pursuit that Thiebault struggled to comprehend:
‘I could not understand this similarity in taste between napoleon, busiest monarch in the world, and his predecessors the Bourbons, the idlest of existing princes and the most imperturbable sportsmen.’
Marshal Alexandre Berthier invited napoleon to a rabbit shoot on his estate just outside Paris. He had bought 1,000 rabbits to ensure a satisfying kill rate.
Thiebault explained what happened when the rabbits were released: ‘But how can I tell it or be believed? All those rabbits, which should have tried in vain, even by scattering themselves, to escape the shots which the august hand destined for them, suddenly collected, first in knots, then in a body.
‘Instead of having recourse to a useless flight, they all faced about and in an instant the whole phalanx flung itself upon napoleon.
‘The surprise was unbounded, as was Berthier’s wrath. At once he assembled a force of coachmen, with long whips, and darted forward at their head.
‘The rabbits put to flight, napoleon was delivered, and they were looking on the incident as a delay — comical, no doubt, but well over — when, by a wheel in three bodies to right and left, the intrepid rabbits turned the Emperor’s flank.
‘They attacked him frantically, refused to quit their hold, piled themselves up between his legs till they made him stagger and forced the conqueror of conquerors, fairly exhausted, to retreat and leave them in possession of the field.’
Thiebault explained the rabbits had been bought from a hutch instead of from a warren and that ‘the poor rabbits had taken the sportsmen, including the Emperor, for the purveyors of their daily cabbage, and had flung themselves on them with all the more eagerness because they had not been fed that day’.
Richard Maybrook, Much Wenlock, Shropshire.
QUESTION
Is it true V1 and V2 flying bombs were not launched against Russian targets during World War II? FURTHER to the earlier answer, while no V1 flying bombs or V2 rockets were launched at the Soviet Union, as I point out in my book War over The Steppes, a month after V1s began landing on London the Soviet Union reorganised its air defences to meet such a threat.
Like the British, they created barrage balloons, ack-ack artillery and fighter zones behind the front, with similar ones around Leningrad and Moscow.
However, the lack of high-speed fighters such as the Hawker Tempest and later models of the Supermarine Spitfire meant the Soviet fighter regiments would have been an unreliable shield.
During the Red Army advance into Silesia, they captured the V1 test site near Katowice (now in Poland).
In February and March 1945, the Germans deployed Hs 293 air-to-surface anti- ship missiles against Red Army bridgeheads across the oder.
But more effective were the remotely controlled Mistel (Mistletoe), which were unmanned Ju 88 bombers packed with explosives and controlled from a fighter that launched it towards the target.
E. R. Hooton, Slough, Berks.
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