Posts Tagged ‘World War II’

Shambling Towards Hiroshima

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

As she stood behind me on a stepladder, cradling the great head against her chest, I inserted my feet in the soft vulcanized leggings and my hands in the neoprene claws.  After activating the glowing eyeballs, Darlene descended to ground level, seized the pull-tab above my tail, and climbed the ladder again, thus bringing the teeth of the dorsal zipper into alignment.  So there I was, encased once again in my scales and talons, a Cretaceous visitation bent on teaching Admiral Nagumo how right he’d been to imagine that his attack on Pearl Harbor had awakened a sleeping dragon.

In his new novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima, State College scribbler James Morrow focuses more on weaving together gags, one-liners and B-movie lore than on hacking away at the props supporting our modern military-industrial technocracy – and that’s fine by me.  Not the trenchant satire I’d been led to expect, but a fun alternate history story, highly recommended if you’re into the Hollywood horror of the ’30s and ’40s or the kaiju eiga of the ’50s and ’60s.     

4/5 stars

Shambling Towards Hiroshima purports to be the suicide note/memoir of SF and horror convention favorite Syms Thorley, penned in a Baltimore Holiday Inn just before Halloween, 1984.  Having receiving the Wonderama Award the previous evening, Thorley looks back on his Halcyon days bringing characters like Kha-Ton-Ra and Corpuscula to life as the “Monogram Shambler”, working on the Navy’s Operation Fortune Cookie in 1945, portraying the mutant iguana Gorgantis in a series of Japanese flicks, and trying to educate monster movie aficionados about nuclear proliferation at conventions like Wonderama.  Thorley lingers on Operation Fortune Cookie, his one chance to use his talent for something that mattered: to prevent the Bomb, or the rampaging fire-breathing behemoths of the Navy’s parallel weapons program (“The Knickerbocker Project”), from being deployed against Japanese civilians.  With direction by James Whale, a score by Franz Waxman and Thorley in the starring role, the Navy’s production of What Rough Beast is conceived as a psy-op to intimidate the Japanese into surrender – but of course, things don’t quite work out that way.

Morrow can turn a clever phrase, and that’s mostly what kept me turning the pages, although there are two surprisingly moving scenes (one leveraging the emotional cachet of Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn”, the other… well, you can guess) in which Thorley receives visitors who quickly gauge the situation and try to persuade him to, you know, choose life.

I have to give Morrow props for running with such a silly idea, and it was nice to read Shambling Towards Hiroshima over the Halloween weekend; but, though often quite amusing, it isn’t really what I’d consider satire, so I can’t tell if his rep as a great satirist is deserved.  Once I read some of his longer, presumably more ferocious stuff, I’ll let you know.

Happy reading and cuídate.

Hitler’s skull bone of contention, Iran maybe shoots down 3 UFOs, etc.

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Good heavens.

Some historians expressed doubt that the Führer had shot himself, speculating that accounts of Hitler’s death had been embellished to present his suicide in a suitably heroic light. But a fragment of skull, complete with bullet hole, which was taken from the bunker by the Russians and displayed in Moscow in 2000, appeared to settle the argument.

Until now. In the wake of new revelations, the histories of Hitler’s death may need to be rewritten – and left open-ended. American researchers claim to have demonstrated that the skull fragment, secretly preserved for decades by Soviet intelligence, belonged to a woman under 40, whose identity is unknown. DNA analyses performed on the bone, now held by the Russian State Archive in Moscow, have been processed at the genetics lab of the University of Connecticut. The results, broadcast in the US by a History Channel documentary, Hitler’s Escape, astonished scientists.

According to Connecticut archaeologist and bone specialist Nick Bellantoni, it was clear from the outset that something was amiss. “The bone seemed very thin; male bone tends to be more robust,” he said. “And the sutures where the skull plates come together seemed to correspond to someone under 40.” In April 1945 Hitler turned 56.

Bellantoni had flown to Moscow to inspect the gruesome Hitler trophies at the State Archive, which included the skull fragment as well as bloodstains from the bunker sofa on which Hitler and Braun were believed to have committed suicide. He was allowed only one hour with the Hitler trove, during which time he applied cotton swabs and took DNA samples. “I had the reference photos the Soviets took of the sofa in 1945 and I was seeing the exact same stains on the fragments of wood and fabric in front of me, so I knew I was working with the real thing.”

Tests on skull fragment cast doubt on Adolf Hitler suicide story” by Uki Goñi, The Observer 9-27-09

via, um,

Since those titanic events in 1947 there has remained an “uneasy” truce between “New Berlin” and the current powers of the World but which Russian leaders, including Putin and Medvedev, know all to well are about to break into open warfare as the “new” Third Reich gains Global supremacy, once again, this time through its present vassal state, the United States of America.

The last American leader who set out to destroy this diabolical cabal between Nazi Germany and the United States was their first Secretary of Defense, James Vincent Forrestal, who upon his learning of the whole truth, and threatening to divulge it his fellow Americans, was summarily dismissed from his office by Truman on March 28, 1949, forced into Bethesda Naval Hospital, and then “suicided” as a “warning” to any others seeking to follow him on May 22nd.

To the current actions of “New Berlin” against our World we can see from Iranian reports where this past week one of their “saucer craft” were downed by Iranian forces, and as we can read as reported by Iran’s official news service:

“Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has targeted and downed an unidentified shining object after sighting it over Persian Gulf waters.

“Glowing objects were sighted over the Persian Gulf. IRGC air defense targeted one of the objects successfully, forcing it to plummet and sink in the seas off Boushehr (Province),” said top regional commander, Brigadier Ali Razmjou.

“The three bright objects were detected by our radars when flying over the Persian Gulf Islands of Khark and Khargou,” he added, according to a Monday report posted on IRNA.”

For their downing of one of these Nazi “saucer crafts”, Iran, of course, drew the immediate ire of the Americans whose President Obama then announced the “discovery” of a secret Iranian nuclear facility that, in fact, Iran had reported exactly as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty there are signatories to over18-months ago to the United Nations.

Important also to note about the Iranian downing of one of these Nazi “saucer crafts” is that their destination was Afghanistan, which besides the two poles of our Planet has the only other “entrance” to the “Inner Earth” and which is revered by the Nazis and their followers as the birth place of their Aryan (The word Aryan comes from the Sanskrit ārya meaning dignified person or of noble birth) “master race” who they believe by right should rule our World and all of its peoples.

New Reports Confirm Hitler Secreted To US With Nazi German Atomic Bomb” by Sorcha Faal 9-29-09

The source of the IRGC UFO thing appears to be this Press TV article, allegedly via IRNA, which currently doesn’t feel like loading in English, also quoted in Tehran Times.

Anyway,

State Archaeologist Nick Bellantoni is in the middle of an international dispute over whether a bullet-pierced skull fragment found by the Russians in a German bunker in Berlin in the final days of World War II belongs to Adolf Hitler.

Bellantoni, who was flown to Germany and Moscow in April as part of a new History Channel series, says that the skull fragment actually belongs to a woman between 20 and 40 years old, not to a 56-year-old man, as Hitler was in 1945.

The archaeologist’s conclusion has provoked a strong reaction overseas.

Russian and Ukrainian free-lance videographers plan to interview Bellantoni and his colleagues Thursday at the University of Connecticut, where he is an associate professor, to learn about the techniques Bellantoni and two UConn colleagues used during their analysis of the fragment, which is housed in the Russian State Archive in Moscow.

The archaeologist said he was permitted one hour to examine the skull fragment, some records, and a blood-stained couch where Hitler reportedly shot himself after taking a cyanide pill.

But now, according to several British news reports, the Russian government is disputing that Bellantoni even visited their archive.

According to a story published in the online Telegraph Tuesday, Vladimir Kozlov — deputy director of the Russian State Archive — told RIA Novosti, a state news agency, that there is no record that Bellantoni visited the facility this spring.

“None of the directors or people who grant permission for this kind of thing know this name,” Kozlov was quoted as saying.

On Tuesday, a representative from the History Channel said in an e-mail that the outlet received permission for the visit from the department head of the State Archive of the Russian Federation.

“We have documentation of this access including a historian who accompanied our forensic expert; a contract which allowed us free access to Russian documents pertaining to the death of Adolf Hitler and the subsequent investigations, including a receipt for the location fee (for shooting within the archive),” the e-mail states.

Bellantoni appeared on “Hitler’s Escape,” the first episode of the History Channel’s new series “MysteryQuest.”

The show, which aired Sept. 16., also featured UConn representatives Linda Strausbaugh — a molecular and cell biology professor and director of the Center for Applied Genetics and Technology — and Dawn Pettinelli, manager of the Home and Garden Education Center and Soil Nutrient Analysis Laboratory. Strausbaugh and Pettinelli did not travel to Europe, but analyzed some of the samples Bellantoni collected.

In an interview Tuesday, Bellantoni said his visit — part of a six-day trip — is indisputable.

“I was definitely there. I’m on camera there,” he said.

Bellantoni said he collected small bone chips that had previously fallen off the skull fragment. He also dug in an area in Germany where the Soviets were said to have buried Hitler, searching for evidence such as cremated bones. The Soviets, who reportedly buried and dug up Hitler’s body eight or nine times, fully cremated him in 1970 and scattered his ashes in a brook, Bellantoni said.

The general belief is that Hitler took a cyanide pill and then shot himself, dying with his 33-year-old wife, Eva Braun, on April 30, 1945, to escape being captured by the Russians as they closed in on Berlin.

Bellantoni said he found several inconsistencies between that claim and the skull fragment.

According to one account, Hitler supposedly shot himself in the right temple. But the recovered skull fragment had an exit wound in the back, which means that the person was shot in the face, mouth or under the chin, Bellantoni said.

Also, Bellantoni said the skull fragment was too small for a man Hitler’s size, about 5 feet 8 and 180 pounds. The skull was also very smooth, which is typically seen in women.

And as people age, jigsaw puzzle-like lines across their skulls grow closer and closer together until they’re barely detectable. The lines on the recovered skull fragment were “wide open,” he said.

Bellantoni said DNA evidence conclusively showed that the skull belonged to a woman. He said he doesn’t believe it was Braun’s because there are no reports that she shot herself or was shot.

“Many people died in that area in 1945,” he said.

Bellantoni said his conclusion — which he hopes to document in a scientific paper — only proves that the skull was not Hitler’s, not that the Nazi leader did not commit suicide in the bunker.

“He had a definite fear of being captured,” Bellantoni said. “He did not even want his body found because he was afraid they were going to mutilate him like they did Mussolini.”

The History Channel’s show has renewed interest in the events leading up to Hitler’s death.

“Now I’m getting e-mails from all over the world — people telling me they have artifacts from Hitler … they think Hitler’s in a nursing home in upstate New York,” he said. “We have to look at the legitimacy of some of these leads and see where it takes us.”

State Archaeologist In Eye of a Hitler Storm” by Monica Polanco, The Hartford Courant 9-30-09

Safest place to be in a Hitler Storm, I guess.  Updates as they emerge, if I feel like it.

Have fun and cuídate!