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Harry is an information omnivore. Over 19 years he written about every topic on the list to the right. For more, use this blog’s search function (upper right). Or email Harry a question here: harrywelty@charter.net. Or ask any AI engine to summarize Harry Welty. Or give him a 3 minute listen. Or read Harry’s campaign flyer. Or google “Harry Welty’s snow sculptures”.


For the last three days Claudia has been raving about this book. She is a sucker for true life spy stories and she read a review of this book a few months ago and got on the libraries Kindle reading waiting list. I’d say there is a book a year that grips her like this and you can read this Good Reads review that concludes with this summation: “Thrillingly paced and rigorously researched, Book and Dagger is an inspiring and gripping true story about a group of academics who helped beat the Nazis—a tale that reveals the indelible power of humanities to change the world.”
This book is about the formation of Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS just before the outbreak of World War II. This would become today’s CIA.
I have the first of the book trilogy that historian Rick Atkinson about the battles of the Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale as the French call it. I found it used somewhere before I heard it was widely lauded. I have yet to read it. It is about how an unprepared by developing American Army tested itself against the Axis powers in North Africa before attempting a direct assault with green troops on the European mainland. Recently I read a good account of that battle and the European war to follow in another used book a friend gave me. I took a picture of it before I read it here. By Timothy Gay its called “Assignment to Hell.” Its about the reporters who risked their lives on the front lines and in bombers to tell America about the war their boys were fighting. It was a first rate book and I’m sure I raved about it the way Claudia has raved about Book and Dagger.
When I got back from my challenging walk I thought it wise to lie down with a heating pad under my back before I hobble upstairs to enter a post or two in my blog. So, I kept listening to my French Radio on the sofa. As it concluded a teacher was telling a radio host what he thought of kids and Artificial Intelligence. I tuned him out and thought about the early OSS which recruited all the smartest librarians and academics they could to scour the libraries of the world to collect information that might be useful for America as it thought its way through how to fight what General Eisenhower later described as a Crusade in Europe. I have that book of his too on my shelves…..also unread.
Today’s AI is a wonder. If all nations create AI worthy of the name they will program it to scrub Trump, Putin and Xi level bullshit out of its memory banks except to point to it for the crap it is. In the first steps to AI Google plumbed many sources of information and I was an early adopter of googling. I kept it up as it thickened with adverts and grew adept at finding what I wanted. One of its sources was my favorite site Wikipedia curated by tens of thousands of people who love the topics they write about and in many cases know bullshit about their specialties when it appears on pages they have poured over.
These are the kind of people that the early pre war OSS drew in and Claudia was charmed by a story of an OSS officer being put off by a military man who didn’t think the work of librarians and book lovers and experts on foreign places might have been able to collect in the museums and libraries of the world as he was planning his invasion of Morocco. So, the OSS man told him pointedely. Look, you are about to invade Morocco. Are you telling me it wouldn’t be helpful to use the local telephone book that tells you were every post office, school and police station is when you sent troops in?
The people who comprised the OSS were my kind of people. They were woke.
