TWO FINGER SALUTE

Steve McQueen gives the "Two Finger Salute" at LeMans

TWO FINGER SALUTE, Le MANS 1971

Where did Steve McQueen get the idea for the "Two Finger Salute" at Le Mans?

Apparently, Maston Gregory, who was a friend of Steve's, seems to have used this gesture after winning Le Mans several years before the movie was released. Maston Gregory won in 1965 but the film was made in 1971. I wouldn't say McQueen was copying Gregory, but maybe there was an element of an in-joke in the gesture, especially as Gregory was driving in the race that year and is credited in the film. Why Gregory was pulling a V sign in 1965 - who knows?



Being from the Commonwealth, I can explain: this gesture is English in origin, or more correctly, Welsh, from hundreds of years ago when the French and English were at war.

Following the rout of French knighthood at Crecy and Agincourt, the French so hated and feared the Welsh Longbowmen (in the employ of the English Army) that if they ever captured one of them, they would cut off the first two fingers so they could no longer draw their bows. Therefore, on the field of battle, the Welsh bowmen would taunt the French across enemy lines, as a way of mocking the French by saying "I've still got my fingers".

The tradition continued long after the relevance of having a middle finger to draw a bow. The "Two-Fingered Salute" essentially became the British gesture for "F*ck You".

A proper English gentleman expressing his patriotism.

By World War II it took on a second meaning: "V" for Victory.

During World War II Winston Churchill used the gesture during the height of the Blitz, to tell the Germans F.U. - We Won't Quit!

Churchill - two-fingered salute.

It is the opposite of the Victory sign, which Churchill used when England won a battle:

Churchill - V for Victory.

The Two Fingered Salute is well known in the European military and all of the drivers at La Mans in the 1960s would have understood it. As the Second World War was within living memory, it was a fitting salute for when McQueen beat a German, in such a close race.

Many people also believe that the modern "middle figure" gesture is derived from that "V":

The Man in Black, tellin' it to the Peaceniks

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HUMOR FOR ENGINEERS

Here's one that's been going around the Internet for a couple years . . . a colleague of my Dad sent it to me - like myself, a soldier and an engineer - and I knocked it back, said, "Yeah, I've seen that - but when I checked up on it, there was something wrong with it . . ."

Scroll all the way through it, and get to the investigative part at the end.

Cheers,
Sean Linnane

Railroad Tracks.

The US Standard Railroad Gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England , and English expatriates designed the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.




Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.





So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.




Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?' you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)




Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah





The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.




So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.



And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important?




OK now we've had our little laugh - I first saw this one come across the email machine a couple years back, and I remembered there was a problem with it then . . .

So I gave the STORMBRINGER Operations and Intelligence Organization a research assignment:

The Width of Railroad Tracks based on a History that Extends Back to Roman Chariots

. . . and this is what they came up with:

Fiction!


The Truth

There is no evidence that we could find that this is true. An article on www.railway.org by D. Gabe Gabriel says this tale has existed since shortly after World War II but that history does not support the claims of the story. The Roman ruts, according to Gabriel, were not for chariots but for narrow, hand-pulled carts. Although there are many places where the ruts are visible, Gabriel questions that they played a role in English railroad standards 1400 years after the last Roman legions. One of the claims is that the width of the ruts was affected by the need to make the chariot and it's wheels the same width as the combined rears of the horses pulling them. Gabriel says there's a statue by Franzoni in the Vatican museum that is regarded as the most accurate known depiction of a Roman chariot. The two horses are wider than the chariot and the chariot wheels behind them.

Where did the four-foot, eight-and-a-half-inch standard originate? Gabriel says it was from a Englishman named George Stephenson. Carts on rails had been used in mines in England for years, but the width of the rails varied from mine to mine since they didn't share tracks. Stephenson was the one who started experimenting with putting a steam engine on the carts so there would be propulsion to pull them along. He had worked with several mines with differing gauges and simply chose to make the rails for his project 4-foot, eight inches wide. He later decided that adding another six inches made things easier. He was later consulted for constructing some rails along a roadway and by the time broader plans for railroads in Great Britain were proposed, there were already 1200 miles of his rails so the "Stephenson gauge" became the standard.

Interestingly, the 4-foot, eight-and-a-half inch width has not always been the standard in the U.S. According to the Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography, at the beginning of the Civil War, there were more than 20 different gauges ranging from 3 to 6 feet, although the 4-foot, eight-and-a-half inch was the most widely used. During the war, any supplies transported by rail had to be transferred by hand whenever a car on one gauge encountered track of another gauge and more than 4,000 miles of new track was laid during the war to standardize the process. Later, Congress decreed that the 4-foot, eight-and-a-half inch standard would be used for transcontinental railway.

So now you know . . . hope this clears things up for you.

-S.L.



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Friday Filly HERE

Armistice Day - Remembrance Day - Veterans Day

On this day in 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month . . . the guns fell silent on the War to End All Wars . . .





Veterans Day was originally known as Armistice Day; the original intent of Armistice Day was to honor the Dead.


In the British Commonwealth, November 11th is known as Remembrance Day. Poppies are displayed to honor to the Dead of all wars.


The Field of Remembrance in front of Westminster Cathedral, London.


The poppies represent the blooms across some of the worst battlefields of Flanders in World War I, their brilliant red color is an appropriate symbol for the blood spilt . . .

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

This Armistice Day, STORMBRINGER honors Benjamin Floyd Leavell, World War II veteran of the Grey & Simcoe Foresters and First Hussars Tank Corps (CANADA).


Ben Leavell was a hero in Normandy; on 25 July 1944 he was severely wounded by a German machinegun while trying to rescue his crew from the burning hulk of their tank - his story has been told many times in the newspapers of his native Province of Ontario, and also here in STORMBRINGER.


Canadian forces going ashore in Normandy, June 1944


Ben passed away peacefully this past summer, July 27th, 2010, in his 92nd year; sixty-six years almost to the day of when he was wounded in France. He was survived by his wife Florence (nee Burgess) of 62 years, children Alice, Robert, Helen and Susie; grandchildren Melanie, Miranda, Allison, Ainsley, Lincoln; and six great-grandsons.








STORMBRINGER also honors Sgt. Phillip G. Crittenden, RAAF, KIA 20 October 1941; shot down over Charleroi, Belgium while piloting the lead plane in the first British Bomber Command mission of the war that was led by the Royal Australian Air Force.

The crew of Crittenden's plane, Wellington bomber #FU-D,
just before take off. There was only one survivor.

Sergeant Crittenden was twenty years old at the time of his death.

To Veterans everywhere: Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for the Freedom we enjoy.

And to the Honored Dead -

We will never forget you.

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THE BALLOON NEVER WENT UP

The Berlin Wall fell twenty-one years ago this week.


Back in the Eighties there was a protest song by the German singer Nena: "Neunundneunzig Luftballons". Originally sung in German, it was later re-recorded in English as "99 Red Balloons".




The song tells a story of 99 balloons floating into the air, floating over the Berlin Wall to the Soviet sector and triggering an apocalyptic overreaction by military forces.




In the U.S. Army we have a saying: "When the Balloon goes up." This means when war breaks out, and we strap on our chutes, load up onto the C-130s and take that famous one-way trip:




I don't know where that saying comes from. I always wondered if it was from the time frame when they used hot air balloons for aerial observation posts.





In 1989 I was working with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Royal Regiment, a.k.a. the Berkshire & Wiltshire Regiment (the famous “Berks and Wilts”) when The Wall came down. Everyone was totally amazed, incredulous. The general feeling was none of us expected to ever see that thing come down without a shot being fired.





Fast forward to Bosnia, mid-nineties: I was entertaining my counterpart, Lt. Col. Leonid K_______ of the Ukrainian Army. I asked him where he was from, he replied; Odessa. I proceeded to lay out a map of Odessa with a pen and paper. I drew the esplanade, from the north where the Black Sea fleet was docked to the sand cliffs to the south, the east-west running main avenue where it went up past the Railway Station, I sketched in the rail lines came in from the north to the coal depots by the power plant. Leonid stared at what I was doing, and asked, “You have been to my country?”

“No, never,” I replied.

“Then, how?”

I shrugged and said that he knew what I was – “Spetznaz Amerikanski” – American Special Forces. I told him that if the balloon had ever gone up, I had a one-way ticket to his country.

Then he realized what I was saying – if the balloon had ever gone up, we would have both been hamburger.

And one more thing: America still IS the best country to live in, and it WILL be, for centuries to come, unless we continue on this path of giving it all away, and letting the illegals swarm in and infest.

I know – I’ve lived in more countries than most people visit in a lifetime; and a lot of those countries had great potential, only to be wasted by their own political leadership.


The smartest guy in Eastern Europe - making a break for it . . .



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Wednesday's Wench HERE



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