Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
…and the Obama Administration is having a worse than “Hurricane Katrina” class credibility meltdown unseen in the West since Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s political collapse in July 2008.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made the outrageously untrue statement in Congressional hearings today about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that: ‘The website has never crashed.’
As this Instapundit link makes clear that the split screen between her testimony and objective reality is well into the Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf AKA “Baghdad Bob” territory in terms of “Who are you going to believe, me? Or your lying eyes?”
The bottom line of Pres. Obama’s spokesman for his signature achievement as President getting laughed at as a Democratic Party version of “Baghdad Bob” is a “Pres. George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina” moment.
The Obama Administration’s credibility on domestic policy is now as crippled as his foreign policy was after his Syrian Nerve Gas “Red Line” misadventure. It is all downhill from here.
Previous Pacific War columns on Chicago Boyz have explored all sorts of World War 2 (WW2) narratives. This column, like the earlier “History Friday: MacArthur, JANAC, and the Politics of Military Historical Narrative” column is about exploring a historical narrative that should be there, but is not. One of the issues I have never seen addressed to my satisfaction by either the academic “Diplomatic History” or “Military History” communities were the command style & service coordination issues for the proposed invasion of Kyushu, AKA Operation Olympic. They were going to be huge.
The US Navy’s Central Pacific drive and MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area drive had much different command and communications styles that had to mesh for Operation Olympic (Which was about to be renamed ‘Operation Majestic’ for security reasons as the war ended). While both commands had multiple staff groups working on current operations, future operations and the evaluation of combat reports of past operations for lessons learned _simultaneously_. Adm Nimitz and Gen MacArthur had fundamentally different approaches to running those staffs and this caused conflicts. MacArthur effectively won this “staffing style war” — at a cost to the Olympic planning that will show up in a future column — by staying in Manila rather than moving his headquarters to Guam and forcing the US Navy to come to him to do the planning for Olympic. That however was not the end of the fun and games. It was only the beginning.
Operation Olympic would not only force those two Pacific Theater commands to work together, it would effectively see a third major institutional & service player added to the mix for the first time. The US Army Air Force “Bomber Mafia” in the form of the 20th Air Force and Eighth Air Forces under General Spaatz was to come calling. The “Bomber Mafia” wanted as much of the action as they could get to justify a post-war independent air force and they were not shy in bending the rules or out right lying to achieve their aims, as a detailed examination of the “Operation Starvation” sea mining campaign will made clear. Gamesmanship between the US Army Air Force and the US Navy broke out over the execution of “Operation Starvation” with an eye towards post-war budgets rather than the Invasion of Japan. This competition contributed to the huge Japanese build up on Kyushu by not blocking the smaller wooden hulled Japanese sea traffic moving troops to met the expected American amphibious landing and guaranteed having to repeat the majority of the mining campaign had the war dragged into March 1946.
During the war in the Pacific, 17,875 mines were laid by U.S. aircraft, 7632 defensive mines by surface ships, 3010 offensive mines by surface ships, and an additional 1020 by submarines — Source: Report of Surrender and Occupation of Japan
Historical Background
At the beginning of WW2, The US Army Air Force (USAAF) really didn’t want to do sea mining at all. This was not seen as a “strategic mission” for it’s heavy bombers. MacArthur’s SWPA theater was a perfect example of those bias. General Kenney allowed only a single mine mission with his American B-24 heavy bombers in 1943 using spare aircraft with scratch crews, delivering a total of 24 sea mines. Similarly Admiral Kinkaid, commander of the 7th Fleet, didn’t use any of his PBY Catalina or PV-1 Ventura patrol planes to lay mines. It fell to the PBY patrol planes of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) to fill the SWPA mine laying role for MacArthur the whole war. The most strategically important of those Australian mining raids being a really spectacular night time Manila Bay mission done during the Oct. – Dec. 1944 Leyte Campaign, which was supported by one of MacArthur’s “Section 22” Radio-Countermeasures PBY “Ferret” aircraft.
The US Navy, like the USAAF at the beginning of WW2, was just as disinterested in air-laid sea mining. US Navy Rear Admiral Hoffman in a May 1977 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings article “Offensive Mine Warfare: A Forgotten Strategy,” described US Navy mine warfare readiness at that time as “pathetic…not much different from that existing at the end of the previous war.” This can be measured by the fact that the total supply of US Navy aerial mines on December 7, 1941 consisted of 200 Navy Mk. 12 magnetic mines, which were based on a German magnetic mine captured by the British, that itself dated from a 1920’s design!
One of the focal points in my writing these History Friday columns has been trying to answer the question “How would the American military have fought the Imperial Japanese in November 1945 if the A-bomb failed?” Today’s column returns to that theme by examining one of many “reality lives in the detail” changes in material, training and doctrine that the US Army was making for the invasion of Japan. Details that have been overlooked by historians of that era, mainly because the people involved really were not interested in their failures being exposed in the historical narrative. The failure I am referring to in this column is “Tentative Specification, Engineering Board Project No. 855, Bulldozer, Rigid, Landing Vehicle, Tracked, LVT Series.” A bulldozer kit that could turn any amphibious tractor or tank into a amphibious bulldozer. And how US Army politics and procurement priorities in developing and deploying this kit denied the US Marine Corps a vital tool that could have easily saved hundreds of lives in the first days of the assault upon Iwo Jima, and rendered a potentially very useful weapon into an obscure footnote in even the most detailed histories of WW2.**
A 1944 Prototype LVT(A)1 with Bulldozer Blade Kit whose further development, and deployment to the Pacific, was delayed by US Army procurement politics.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Theoretically the US Army Corps of Engineers and Ordnance, like all US Army branches, were abolished for the duration of World War 2 (WW2) and their functions were placed inside a “Army Service Force” (ASF). The Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery “Combat Branches” were similarly abolished and moved into the “Army Ground Forces” (AGF). The reality, however, was different. All that really changed for the branch bureaucrats were titles and institutional reporting channels. The US Army Corps of Engineers and Ordnance procurement pretty much existed as before with a lot more money to spend and just as before the combat branches got to comment after projects were “thrown over the wall” between ASF and AGF. This affected many decisions made as pre-war ideas of “bureaucratic turf” were only minimally affected by the additional money. One of these areas of turf war was the development of the M4 Sherman Tankdozer, one of the few armored engineer vehicles or “Funnies” the US Army developed in WW2.
A M4 Sherman Tankdozer in France on August 7, 1944
Secretary of Defense Hagal has recalled most Department of Defense (DoD) civilians back to work Monday. The legal reasons why were in the NY Times Sunday 6 Oct 2013 edition this morning.
The following is the fine print behind the “Mostly” —
“I expect us to be able to significantly reduce — but not eliminate — civilian furloughs under this process,” Mr. Hagel said.
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Mr. Hagel warned that “many important activities remain curtailed while the shutdown goes on,” and he cited disruptions across the armed services.
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Late Saturday, the Defense Department comptroller, Robert F. Hale, said that Mr. Hagel’s order would recall Pentagon employees who work in health care, family programs, commissaries and training or maintenance.
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Additionally, the order will recall to work those civilian Pentagon employees whose jobs, if interrupted, would cause future problems for the military; those categories include contracting, logistics, supply and financial management.
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While the numbers have not been finalized, officials estimated that only 10 percent of the furloughed employees would not be recalled, including Defense Department civilian employees who work in auditing, some in legislative and public affairs, and Pentagon employees who service other government agencies.
Most of DCMA will be back to work Monday, as will DFAS, DCAA and DLA.
The DoD Inspector General (I.G.), civilians in the various uniformed Service I.G. offices and DoD civilians involved in things like planning DoD assistance to disaster relief efforts are still going to stay home.
It is a well establish principle when doing historical research that a source is regarded as “more reliable” the closer it was to the actual event, in both time and space. For example, if MacArthur’s chief of air operations General Kenney reported on Leyte Operations on December 1944 in a combat diary, that record is simply closer to the actual event than a statement made about those operations in his memoirs ten years later. Obviously this is not the only factor that decides the reliability of a source, but it is one of the more important. All other things being equal, a researcher should access and weight the former far more than the latter.
What I have found time and again — and written about here in my column — is that most World War 2 (WW2) histories, whether academic or popular histories, don’t bother to evaluate those wartime documents and they repeat the easier to access institutional narrative histories. This is becoming an increasingly problematic approach to history writing as the massive digitization of past primary source records and film material are now readily available outside traditional national archives.
It is in that vein that I am using this column to “lay down a marker” for evaluating US Army Air Force/US Air Force post-war institutional and oral histories using Sphinx Project official project result films from the Critical Past web site video service. The Critical Past web site has taken official government films and packaged them as video and digital photo content for purchase, but has left samples of the video content on-line.
Historical Background
The Sphinx Project was a post-German VE-Day surrender, pre-Japanese VJ-Day surrender US Army crash project to take every weapon and tactic it had to create a uniform combat doctrine template to apply to Japanese “cave warfare tactics” seen in Biak, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. There were several separate Sphinx Project exercises by different parts of the Army. The best known of those exercises were the Army Ground Forces (AGF) exercises at then Camp Hood, (Now Ft. Hood) Texas in June-July 1945 hosted by the Tank Destroyer Command, and the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) exercises with live lethal chemical agents at the CWS Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. There were also two other exercises that are less well known by WW2 researchers that I intend to write on in this and future columns. The CWS and the US Army Armored Command’s Medical section did testing with a one-two punch of aircraft delivered defoliant and Napalm at Ft. Knox Kentucky, and the Army Air Force (AAF) did an exercise which was a round of conventional weapon air strikes on the same Dugway Proving Ground caves the CWS used in its lethal chemical tests.
What follows is a listing of the seven videos that were clipped from that AAF test report film with comments on content and their relation to U.S. Army Air Force politics/doctrine.
