18 Miles

by Christopher Dewdney

  In fact, the weather was so calm that the British Admiralty took the unprecedented step of using two stone-and-concrete breakwaters (previously considered too dangerous for docking) as piers to load even more soldiers. It took four hours for the HMS Sabre to load 200 troops wading out from the beach; from the improvised piers, larger craft could now load 1,000 troops per hour. And still the low-pressure system that had stalled over Dunkirk delivered calm seas and clouds. The Admiralty upped the ante: perhaps they could attempt the impossible and leave not a single soldier behind.

  In England, the navy put out a renewed call for assistance and by May 31, hundreds of private boats — motor boats, lifeboats, barges, pleasure craft and fishing trawlers — made the crossing to Dunkirk. With their help, every last soldier was evacuated by June 4, some 338,226 Allied troops. Because most of these troops had seen action against German soldiers, they became an invaluable military asset to the Allied forces, and Hitler would rue the day they slipped beyond his grasp. On June 5, the wind returned to Dunkirk, but the waves that now broke on shore disturbed only a long empty beach where a few German officers stood, their binoculars trained on the misty horizon over which their enemy had escaped.

  Russia Redux

  After capturing western Europe, Hitler turned his sights on Russia. On June 22, 1941, he abrogated the non-aggression pact he had signed with Stalin and invaded with the largest land army the world had seen. The campaign, Operation Barbarossa (“the red barber”), was to be finished by early fall, but the Russians put up fiercer than expected resistance. The German advance under the command of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock didn’t reach the outskirts of Moscow until the beginning of December. Hitler, like Napoleon before him, had been expecting a short campaign and had failed to provide his Wehrmacht winter clothing.

  Stalled just outside of Moscow, the German troops dug in and predictably began to suffer the frosty wrath of the Russian winter. On November 30, the temperature dropped to -45°C. As Stalin wryly observed, “General Winter has arrived.” In December, temperatures regularly fell to -28°C and sometimes as low as -41°C. Inoperative engines grounded the Luftwaffe, aviation fuel lines froze solid and even trucks and tanks were immobilized by the cold. The Wehrmacht reported 130,000 cases of frostbite. The Russians regrouped and counterattacked on December 5, eventually driving the Germans all the way back to Smolensk in early 1942.

  But the Germans were obstinate. Operation Barbarossa continued and in the summer, the Germans invaded Russia again, this time from the southern flank. General Friedrich Paulus’s 4th Panzer division, on its way to take Stalingrad, had enjoyed tremendous early success in their summer campaign. Unlike the wet August of 1917, the weather had been perfect, and the Panzer division advanced so quickly that they outstripped their supply lines and were forced to stop to wait for fuel. It was frustrating for Paulus because they were ahead of schedule and within striking distance of Stalingrad by the first of September. The Russians, blindsided by the speed of the Panzer advance, didn’t have enough time to mount an adequate defense. They knew the city could be lost; if Stalingrad fell, Moscow would most certainly fall as well. But as it happened, the late summer halycon days played into the defenders’ hands.

  Paulus decided to give his war-weary troops a weeklong furlough to enjoy the sunny, warm weather. They had to wait for supplies anyway, and they had easily bested the Russian troops they’d encountered on the way. Surely they could afford a rest, especially as other German divisions were already engaging the Russians on the outskirts of Stalingrad.

  Almost certainly, the furlough cost the Germans Stalingrad. It gave the Russians just enough time to reinforce the city before Paulus joined the battle on September 7. By early October, the Germans controlled 80 percent of Stalingrad, but again the weather came to Russia’s rescue. Heavy October rains bogged down the German supply convoys and then, in a second stroke of meteorological fortune, the rain turned to snow on October 19. The winter that followed played into Russian strategies, just as it had the year before on the outskirts of Moscow.

  By November, the Soviets had surrounded the German army in Stalingrad and the only way of delivering supplies to the embattled German troops was by airlift. But January was unkind to the Luftwaffe. Temperatures regularly dropped below -30°C and hundreds of German resupply aircraft were disabled by the cold. Although the winter of Stalingrad was not as terrible as Moscow’s winter had been the year before, there were a sufficient number of extremely frigid days in December and January that the German soldiers who hadn’t been shot, captured or starved simply froze to death in their redoubts. If the summer weather hadn’t been so fine and if winter hadn’t arrived so early, it is likely the Germans would have gone on to take the rest of the country. Despite the terrible toll of the siege of Stalingrad, the Russians held on for 900 days, and Hitler’s occupation plans were ultimately thwarted.

  The Summer of Love

  Not all the reversals wrought by weather involved military invasions, thwarted or otherwise. Sometimes the weather gods smiled on the cultural affairs of humans. For example, during June, July and August in 1967, a series of high-pressure systems parked themselves over North America and Europe and provided the perfect growing medium for a social revolution that had started months before in the Californian winter.

  On January 14, 1967, an extraordinary “gathering of the tribes,” as the San Francisco Oracle referred to it, took place in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. It was an unprecedented development in American youth counterculture. The organizers called it the first Human Be-in, and the event brought together the various hippie chapters from all over California and beyond, dressed in their counterculture regalia for a spontaneous celebration of their “freak” identity. The Be-in was partly to protest the criminalization of LSD by the state of California and partly to show the flag. Some 20,000 hippies attended, and the media took notice.

  John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas was there and was so inspired by the heady zeitgeist that he became one of the central architects of the psychedelic revolution. Over the next few months, he wrote the movement’s first anthem, a song that Scott McKenzie released as a single on May 13, 1967 — “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).” By July, it was at the top of the charts in the U.S. and Canada and went on to become number one in England and much of Europe, eventually selling seven million copies worldwide. Talk about an invitation. Three days after the song was released, the temperature in San Francisco reached 30°C. The normal high for that time of year was 19°C. School ended in late June and the hippies descended on the city. And not just from the United States. It’s estimated that 75,000 souls migrated to San Francisco, Berkeley and the Bay area that summer, looking to join a revolution that was poised to sweep the world.

  Now that John Phillips had written the anthem, he realized another bigger flagship event was needed to kick off the summer. With Lou Adler, he coproduced a music festival for the tribes in Monterey, south of San Francisco, that ran three days, from June 16 to 18. The Monterey International Pop Festival showcased Jefferson Airplane, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Ravi Shankar among others. By the last day of the festival, the audience was 60,000 strong and segments of the concert were rebroadcast on television around the world. The Summer of Love, as it became known, had begun.

  The timing was extraordinary. Two weeks before the Monterey festival, on June 1, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It turned out to be the psychedelic summer’s soundtrack. Also that June, Van Morrison released “Brown Eyed Girl” featuring a couple making love in a grassy field behind a stadium. Sensuality al fresco.

  Outdoor rock festivals and spontaneous outdoor gatherings called love-ins sprang up like psilocybin mushrooms all over North America and Europe, turning the Summer of Love into the greatest open-air party the world had seen. Thousands of aspiring hippies were suddenly thumbs-out on roadsides everywhere, hitchhiking from New York to Vancouver and
from Amsterdam to Morocco. Any patch of nature, from a park to a beach to an empty field became the living room and bedroom of these nomadic revelers. The summer landscape was transformed into a vast, outdoor living room: ecstatic, glamorous and lascivious.

  And the high-pressure cells delivered perfect weather. In the American Midwest, June was very hot, with an average month-long temperature in Chicago of 26°C. June was also hot on the East Coast, from Halifax to Florida. July wasn’t abnormally torrid that year in North America, but then again it didn’t have to be. July is always hot.

  England and northern Europe had an unusually sunny and warm summer as well. Both June and July were unseasonably sunny, and August was not only drier than usual, it became warmer toward the month’s end. In August, the English band Small Faces released “Itchycoo Park,” a song about skipping school and getting high in a park. But the best was saved for the last month of the Summer of Love, where it all began, in San Francisco.

  Northern California’s August and September had been somewhat cooler than normal, but by that time the denizens of the Bay Area were in such an altered state they might not have noticed. The thermostat got cranked up again for October, with an average high temperature of 23°C, in a month that usually has difficulty reaching 21°C. Even November had almost 21 days with a higher-than-average temperature. It’s as if the Summer of Love just didn’t want to let go.

  The Long, Hot Summer

  The series of summer highs that dominated the weather over North America that year had quite different consequences for another demographic of inner-city dwellers. Large metropolitan areas create their own weather if they are big enough, referred to by meteorologists as thermal islands. The heat absorbed by concrete buildings and asphalt surfaces during the day is radiated out at night, raising urban temperatures until they are significantly warmer than adjacent rural areas. This “heat island” effect means that at night, a large city is usually 2.9°C warmer than the surrounding countryside. On calm nights, the temperature differential is often augmented over urban areas by a thermal inversion that traps pollution and heat in a dome. A comfortable night in the country at 19°C would be closer to 22°C in the city. Add in a humidex, which is usually high during a midwestern summer, and downtown you have subjective temperatures of 28°C. That’s sweating-in-your-sheets-at-night hot. So the Summer of Love was not quite as pastoral for the citizens of impoverished urban neighborhoods with little access to air conditioning. Their ghettoes became claustrophobic ovens that eventually reached the ignition point in a series of riots that became known as the “long, hot summer.” Decades of inequity and oppression had reached the boiling point.

  Throughout June, riots broke out in Cincinnati, Buffalo, New York and Tampa. In July, there were even bigger riots in Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Newark. Yet none of them compared to the insurrection that took place from July 23 to 28 in Detroit: the largest urban riot in American history, the 12th Street Riot.

  On Saturday night, July 22, Detroit was sweltering, and the downtown residents were outside in numbers to take advantage of the relatively cooler air. At an after-hours club called Blind Pig on 12th Street, a party was in session during the early morning hours of July 23 when a police raid cut the festivities short. They arrested 82 patrons, in some cases using excessive force. Word got out quickly and by the time the police began to ferry their prisoners to the local precinct, an angry crowd of 200 had gathered in front of the club. At some point, an empty beer bottle was thrown through the rear window of a police car, then someone threw a trash can through a store window. Then all hell broke loose.

  The violence spread and lasted through the night. The next afternoon was windy. Not good news. Dozens of buildings were burning, and the 25-mile-per-hour winds fanned the flames into raging infernoes. Citizens of Windsor, Ontario, gathered on their side of the Detroit River to watch as great black plumes of smoke began to billow from Detroit’s west side. The Detroit police and fire departments were unable to maintain order and the riot spiraled completely out of control.

  By Tuesday, July 24, the situation had become international front-page news. Something had to be done. Michigan Governor George Romney ordered in 8,000 National Guardsmen, and a few hours later President Lyndon Johnson mobilized 4,700 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. Even then, it would take another two days to restore order, by which time 43 people had died and 1,400 buildings were burned. In the two years following the riot, 193,000 citizens left the city. Detroit, once the headquarters of a prosperous automotive industry, became an economic disaster zone. The long, hot summer of 1967 had underwritten an entirely different scenario for the citizens of Detroit than it had for those in San Francisco.

  Postscript

  Fire, Water, Earth, Air

  A Visit to Earth’s Core

  Aristotle claimed the world was made of four elements: fire, water, earth and air. It’s fair to say his quartet still stands, although it seems that none of them stands wholly alone. The air is filled with water vapor and the oceans hold 50 times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere does. Deep in the Earth, the rock is on fire, and when volcanoes erupt, they spew finely pulverized lava that drifts high in the atmosphere as ash, sometimes spreading around the world. Earth in the air.

  We know there is earth dissolved in the ocean: seawater is 3.5 percent salt and 70 percent of that is sodium chloride (table salt), while the rest contains significant amounts of sulfate, magnesium, calcium and potassium, as well as traces of all the important metals. Indeed, the seas contain a dissolved continent of rock, enough that mining magnesium nodules off the ocean floors could soon be economically feasible. And as far as water in earth is concerned, there are oceans locked far down in the Earth’s mantle.

  As intermingled as they are, Aristotle’s elements are still primarily arranged in a spectrum dictated by mass, with the densest at the center and the lighter elements above. The molten interior of the Earth is heavier than the rocky crust, which in turn is more compressed than water. Water, of course, is denser than air, and air is more substantial than the vacuum of space. Aristotle’s elements blend into each other vertically. The earth dissolves into water, the ocean dissolves into the atmosphere and the atmosphere dissolves, ultimately, into space above the thermosphere.

  Even though 900°C magma is just 40 miles beneath our feet, it has less thermal impact on us than the sun, which is 93 million miles away. The rocky continents of Earth’s surface insulate us from the heat of the interior, so that even though we exist on a relatively thin skin of congealed rock, we are happily unaware of the blast furnace below. Other than the occasional volcano, our hot planetary core usually isn’t a main player in the heat economy of the atmosphere. Yet the sticky, flowing magma beneath us contributes to our climate in other more indirect ways.

  The Moho Project

  The seismic waves caused by earthquakes are similar to sound waves — they reflect off any surface they encounter and bounce back. Returning sound waves are what bats use to map their surroundings in the darkness, and by the turn of the nineteenth century, scientists were using simliar principles to analyze the shape and depth of seismic waves from distant earthquakes to map out the interior of the Earth. Perhaps the greatest discovery came in 1909, when the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovičić discovered a discontinuity just below Earth’s crust, which is known today as the Moho discontinuity. Using seismic waves, he plumbed the thickness of the continental crust and found that it was about 10 to 60 miles thick, averaging 22 miles thick beneath continents and three to six miles thick beneath seafloors. We are, he discovered, afloat on an ocean of lava.

  Of course, this set the stage for the continental drift theory of the mid-twentieth century: that the immovable continents weren’t just drifting, they were also colliding. The theorists also claimed some continents were being sucked into the Earth’s core in regions they called subduction zones. Despite much initial skepticism, they were proven ri
ght. Continents are part of larger pieces of crust called tectonic plates, and these are propelled by convection flows, like slow-motion sea currents, in the viscous magma beneath them.

  In the early 1960s, National Geographic was pretty exciting. At that time, there were two ambitious races underway: the X-15 project had pilots flying rocket planes to the edge of space; the other, Project Mohole, featured a drilling rig off the coast of Mexico that was chewing through the Earth’s crust to reach deep into the magma below. National Geographic covered both, and both fascinated me, but Project Mohole especially. I had seen the movie Journey to the Center of the Earth and could imagine exactly what it would be like when they reached magma — like an oil well gusher only with lava. How would they cap such a gusher? I envied the workers on the deck of the drilling ship. They might start a new volcano!

  The idea behind the Mohole was sound. According to Mohorovičić, the crust would be thinner at the bottom of the ocean. All they had to do was lower a drill from a stationary ship through 14,000 feet of ocean then drill through a mere 17,000 feet of crustal rock. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the stabilization equipment that drilling rigs use today. One oceanographer said it was like “trying to drill a hole in the sidewalks of New York from atop the Empire State Building using a strand of spaghetti.” By 1966, the project was abandoned after digging a paltry 601 feet into the seafloor.