THE WARBIRD'S FORUM

Oh yes, it's cold in Vermont!

This has been a bitter winter in the North Country, and Vermont is having a particular problem with its heavily subsidized fleet of electric busses. They are manufactured in Canada, which is even colder than Vermont, yet it seems the batteries can't be charged below 41 deg F, nor can they be charged indoors because they're a fire hazard. National Review has a hilarious article about how Bernie Sanders's home state is coping or trying to cope with the problem.

A quick solution, of course, would be to replace the batteries. The manufacturer seems willing to do that, but has "indicated" (why do we use such words?) that the process may take as long as two years.

Perhaps Vermont's climate will have moderated by then.

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War Is Beautiful

James Neugass's journal of his months as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War didn't find a publisher in the 1940s. One reason for that, I suspect, was its title, which some say was a motto of Spain's rebel general and future dictator, Francisco Franco. Jim Neugass, of course, favored the other side, the embattled and Communist-supported Spanish Republic, as one of 2,800 Americans who joined what we now remember as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. War Is Beautiful is presented as the diary he kept during his months in Spain, from the heady days of 1937 to the Great Retreats of 1938.

In fact, it's the book he wrote upon his return and shopped around in the 1940s, before he died from a heart attack in 1949. Weirdly, the typescript was discovered in a secondhand bookstore in Vermont in the year 2000, a quarter-century after Franco's death and his replacement by a parliamentary democracy, and even after Communists (though not dictators) were evicted from the Kremlin. It's a wondeful book. Read more about it in the Warbird's Book Club.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford. Support Ukraine by contributing to Razom (a tax-deductible US-based charity). Or its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

And welcome to the Warbird's Forum!

Here are a thousand or so files about the the planes, pilots, and warfighters of the past hundred years, grouped under these headings: