OneManGang
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Tennessee vs The Maxims vs South Carolina
“IT'S FOOTBALL TIME IN TENNESSEE!”
Those words, echoing across the VolNation are among the most welcome heard in this year of the Wuhan Flu and other social disruptions.
Our Beloved Vols teed it up Saturday in Columbia, SC, in front of about 20,000 fans and a very busy sound man trying to match the action on the field to the canned crowd noise being fed into the confines of Williams-Bryce Stadium.
In a hard fought, close game the Boys in Orange #PMS151 walked away with a four-point victory. Errors abounded on both sides, which was to be expected given the crazy practice schedule, limited contact and other gifts flowing from the Chinese government's perfidy and incompetence during the early days of the “pandemic.”
Be that as it may, due to the fact that the Vols weren't winning by 200-0 at half, a quick perusal of the in-game thread revealed that the “Farh Pruitt!” crowd was in full throat.
Now, I've been listening to these idiots and their intellectual forbears since the days of Bill Battle and quite frankly, the bloom is well off that particular rose. “Fahr Battle! Farh Majors! Farh Fulmer! Fahr …!” Well, you get the idea. As I've said before, if these clowns would hold themselves to the same standard they hold coaches and players East Tennessee would be home to the single largest concentration of millionaires on the planet.
But Saturday, something more disturbing appeared. A poster, allegedly a Vol fan, wrote that as Guaratano was making his nifty run in the first possession of the third quarter that he (the poster) was hoping the the SC defense would “put a kill shot” on the Tennessee quarterback. I initially went past it as UT went on to score. It was during a timeout that I went back and looked at it again and one word came to mind: despicable.
Absolutely despicable.
* * * * * * * * *
It was called the MANHATTAN Project and to even know that required a high-level security clearance. The task of the project was to investigate the possibilities, and, if feasible, design and then manufacture atomic weapons which offered the chance to end the war quickly. Several out-of-the way places were screened and then three main complexes were established. About twenty miles as the crow flies from Neyland Stadium was the Clinton Engineering Works, more popularly known as Oak Ridge, which would produce U235.. The sleepy desert town of Los Alamos became Site “Y” which would host the final assembly of any weapons. Finally, in the high desert of eastern Washington state was Site “W” which occupied the area around the small town of Hanford and would produce plutonium. All of these places were soon known by the names of the towns.
All of the facilities used vast amounts of electrical power. Oak Ridge, for example, drew from no less than five TVA dams, the huge Kingston steam plant, AND had a another steam plant on site for even more power. Hanford drew from the massive Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams on the Columbia River. Given the extremely dangerous materials being used, engineers designed “fail safe” mechanisms to shut down the nuclear teakettles in the event of any interruption of the power supply.
On 18 April 1945, the Hanford site was humming along when suddenly the power failed but just for an instant. The fail-safes kicked in and shut the whole place down cold. It took most of a week to get things back up and running. The engineers were pleased their precautions had worked but were puzzled by what caused the failure. The cause would not be disclosed until long after the end of the war.
About three weeks later, Rev. Archie Miller, pastor of a small church in tiny Bly, Oregon, decided that the weather was perfect for a picnic on the banks of Leonard Creek which flows out of Gearhart Mountain and get in a little fishing. He got five of the kids from his Sunday School class and loaded them into his car along with his wife Elsye who was five months pregnant with their first child.
They were nearing the creek along a dirt road at the bottom of the mountain when they came upon a road crew and their pickup truck pulling a grader out of a mud hole. The men told them the road was impassable. Archie let Elsye and the kids out to find a picnic site while he took the car a couple of hundred yards back down the road to park. The grader and its crew followed. As he left he heard Elsye call out, “Hey, look what I found!”
As he stopped to look there was a shattering explosion. Archie and the three workers ran up the hill to find a scene of carnage. Mangled bodies lay everywhere. Only Elsey was still alive but she had been blown several yards and her clothes were on fire. Archie desperately beat out the flames on his wife, but she died before he could begin to treat her wounds.
Two of the workers then took the pickup and sped to town to get help. Soon local deputies and forest rangers were on the scene. By evening a bomb disposal squad from a nearby naval base was there and shortly thereafter Army Security types flooded Bly telling everyone that the incident never occurred and that they were never there.*
There was a brief story in the Bly paper but nobody picked it up and the whole thing was buried when Germany surrendered two days later. The dead were buried and later, in 1950, the Weyerhaeuser Company, which owned the forest, erected a small memorial at the site and life went on.
The culprits in both these incidents were “balloon bombs” launched from mainland Japan against the western United States.
To understand these two incidents, one has to go back to the Doolittle Raid in April, 1942. The psychological impact on the Japanese was immense, far beyond any physical damage inflicted by a handful of bombers and a few tons of bombs. The Japanese military had repeatedly assured the Emperor that Japan was immune to direct American attack and now, just five months after Pearl Harbor, they had to apologize to him with all the attendant embarrassment.
Directives went out: find a way to strike back at those impudent Yankees directly. In response the Imperial Navy sent a few submarines to sit off the west coast and use their deck guns against installations in California, and in one case actually sent an airplane from a larger boat to drop random bombs in the hills above Los Angeles. But in retrospect those subs could have done a lot more damage sitting off San Francisco, Puget Sound or San Diego torpedoing ships entering or leaving those sprawling naval bases but the higher-highers wanted impacts on American soil, dammit.
Another response came from a meteorological research station. They had been investigating the jet stream, a 300 mph river of air at 30,000+ feet flowing eastward across Japan to the United States. Some bright spark there had the idea of building large hydrogen balloons that could carry a few small bombs, letting them rise into the jet stream, and install a timer to release the munitions when the balloons reached the West Coast.
This hare-brained idea gained official approval and the whole thing got the code name Fu-Go. In effect, the Japanese were about to unleash the first inter-continental weapons systems. The first of what would eventually be well over 9,000 balloons was launched on 3 November 1944.
Most of them fell harmlessly into the Pacific but somewhere between 300 and 500 of the devices made it to the Pacific Northwest, including the one which caused the Hanford shutdown and the other which killed Rev. Miller's little group.
The Americans had imposed a complete news blackout over the incidents and a lack of confirmation that any of the craft had actually made it plus a B-29 raid that blasted the assembly buildings and the hydrogen plant nearby put a halt to further attacks. Fu-Go was called off in April, 1945.
Logically, there is no doubt that to this day, still scattered in the giant forests of the Pacific Northwest, are several of these things waiting for an unwary soul to disturb them.
It is also a fact that Elsye Miller (26), Edward Engen (13), Jay Gifford (15), Sherman Shoemaker (11), Joan Patzke (13) and her brother Dick (14) were the only Americans killed by direct enemy action in the continental US in World War II.
In a sad coda to all this, Archie Miller later married the Patzke's older sister Betty in 1947. They had four children. Archie took an interest in missionary work and made two visits to Vietnam. During his second five-year assignment he was chaplain at a small hospital/clinic treating lepers near the village of Ban Me Thuot. Betty and the children were there as well.
On 30 May 1962 a platoon of Viet Cong entered the compound and kidnapped Archie and two of his colleagues.
They were never seen again.
*********
So how did the team do compared to the Maxims?
1. The team that makes the fewest mistakes will win.
Saturday's game featured numerous errors by both sides. In the end it was a corollary to this maxim that came into play. The team that made the LAST mistake lost.
2. Play for and make the breaks. When one comes your way … SCORE!
Henry T'oo T'oo now has his name emblazoned here. But also the team overall played well enough to emerge with the win. Something we fans have not been able to say for the last two seasons.
3. If at first the game – or the breaks – go against you, don’t let up … PUT ON MORE STEAM!
Past Tennessee teams would have folded as the Chickens staged their comebacl run in the second half, but they didn't. They kept fighting and clawing through the mistakes and penalties. As we saw last year, and in contrast to earlier coaching tenures, Pruitt's guys don't fold. Our Beloved Vols may not win them all, and with all the uproar this year I doubt seriously any SEC team will emerge unscathed.
4. Protect our kickers, our quarterback, our lead and our ballgame.
Tennessee's vaunted offensive line came up short in this part of the game. Guaratano was rushed far too many timesand Tennessee's ground game was blown up way too many times.
5. Ball! Oskie! Cover, block, cut and slice, pursue and gang tackle … THIS IS THE WINNING EDGE.
OK, this has been going on in your fearless scribes head for a while now, so here goes. To this writer it seems that much of the Vol fanbase's problem with Jared Guaratano is that he is not an innate leader a' la Josh Dobbs, Condredge, Casey or St. Peyton of New Orleans. I think we can stipulate that. But then the question becomes, “Is he good at what he does?” Admittedly his career here has been filled with ups and downs. BUT with him at QB the Vols have won seven in a row. Not bad, not bad at all. The thing is the 2020 offense needs a new and different emotional leader to emerge. JuJaun Jennings filled that role last year. Ty Chandler, Trey Smith or Josh Palmer may emerge this year or perhaps all three.
6. Press the kicking game. Here is where the breaks are made.
There is a reason The Gen'rul referred to the breaks being made here. That last UT punt proved his point perfectly.
7. Carry the fight to South Carolina and keep it there for sixty minutes.
Right on the dot. Well done, Vols, well done.
It is axiom that a team makes the most improvement between games one and two. Saturday's tilt with the Show Me Kitties will speak volumes. Let's all hope it's a good read!
As always, I am NOT a Vol fan. I AM a Vol!
MAXOMG
© 2020 Keeping Your Stories Alive
Suggested Reading:
Stephane Groueff, The Manhattan Project
John Toland, The Rising Sun
Bert Webber, Silent Siege II
* Bonus points if you get the reference.
Monument to the victims of the Japanese balloon bomb. (State of Oregon)
