Military Affairs

In the Field

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Sometimes, long after first reading a book or watching a movie and enjoying it very much, I have come back to re-reading or watching, and then wondering what I had ever seen in that in the first place. So it was with the original M*A*S*H book and especially with the movie. I originally read the book in college and thought, “Eww, funny but gross and obscene, with their awful practical jokes and nonexistent sexual morals.” Then I re-read after having been in the military myself for a couple of years, and thought, “Yep, my people!”

The movie went through pretty much the same evolution with me, all but one element and that was when I began honestly wondering why the ostensible heroes had such a hate on for Major Burns and the nurse Major Houlihan. Why did those two deserve such awful, disrespectful treatment? In the movie they seemed competent and agreeable enough initially. In the book it was clear that Major Burns was an incompetent surgeon with delusions of adequacy, and that Major Houlihan was Regular Army; that being the sole reason for the animus. But upon second viewing of the movie, it seemed like Duke Forrest, Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre were just bullying assholes selecting a random target for abuse for the amusement of the audience.

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The Imperial Japanese Surrender in Tokyo Bay, Sept. 2, 1945…Plus 75 Years

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On September 2, 1945, the surrender ceremony for Imperial Japan occurred in Tokyo   Bay with General Douglas MacArthur officiating.

There are several films of this event. There was the official one MacArthur’s Signal Corps camera crew recorded.   There is a film from war correspondent William Courtenay and a finally a film taken by Commander George F. Kosco of the US Navy.

I have included in this post several versions of each of these films in black and white and color below.

The end of this ceremony marked the close of the most destructive war in human history whose 75th anniversary passed today.

 

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Happy VJ-Day, Plus 75 Years.

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Happy VJ-day!

Seventy five years ago today the Imperial Japanese Government broadcast their unconditional acceptance of the terms Potsdam Proclamation.   It would take several weeks to arrange the surrender in Tokyo bay and more time to land an occupation force to begin disarmament.   Yet it is this day that is remembered.

Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 Imperial Japanese Surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.
Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.

Chicagoboyz has commemorated this day — more or less — since 2010.

Below is a link list with thumb nail descriptions of the columns.

2020 – Hiroshima and the Atomic Bomb…Plus 75 Years.

This column speaks to how the US military use it’s secret SIGSALY digital radio-telephone system to communicate about the Atomic Bomb.

2019 — The Collapse of Atomic Diplomacy…Again?

This months delayed column was on a 2011 NHK documentary titled as follows:

“Atomic bombing top secret information that was never utilized

原爆投下　活（い）かされなかった極秘情報”

The NHK documentary answers questions that “Atomic Diplomacy” has never bothered to ask. Specifically “What did the Imperial Japanese Military & Government know about the American nuclear weapon program, when did it know it, and what did it do about it.”

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Hiroshima and the Atomic Bomb…Plus 75 Years.

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Today’s date, 6 August 2020 marks the 75th Anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Some where in the neighborhood of 70,00080,000 people in Hiroshima were killed by the blast and resultant firestorm that reached it’s peak three hours after the detonation.   Japanese military personnel made up 20,000 of the 70,00080,000 immediate deaths.    This bombing set in motion a train of events including the subsequent atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the Soviet Union’s accelerated invasion of Japanese occupied Manchuria on 9 August 1945 and Emperor Hirohito’s 15 August 1945 broadcast of Japan’s surrender under the terms laid out by the Potsdam Declaration.

Much has been written on these events and I’ve revisited them here on Chicagoboyz annually from 2011 to 2018.   This year, 2020, I’m going to address a different part of the Atomic attacks.   Namely, how the American military electronically communicated about the Atomic bomb.   How the secrecy and limitations of that communications system meant Admiral Nimitz knew about the Atomic bomb long before General MacArthur. And how General   MacArthur was working to change that for the proposed and cancelled by A-Bomb invasion of Southern Japan

Figure 1 – This is the mushroom cloud marking the use of the “Little Boy” uranium-235 atomic bomb dropped from the B-29 “Enola Gay.” This photo was taken from the B-29 “Necessary Evil” which was piloted by Captain George W. Marquardt.

 

AMERICA’S SECRET TALKER

In World War 2 many of the major powers developed strategic level code & cypher radio electronic communications systems between it’s top level political & military leaders and the various theater commanders.   The German Geheimschreiber (secret writer) is the best known of these systems because British crypt-analysts at Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park with the the aid of eventually ten Colossus computers.

Much less well know is the Anglo-American equivalent of the  German  Geheimschreiber,   The US Army Signal Corps and Bell Telephone Laboratories SIGSALY.   This system was the only form of secret broadcast radio-electronic communications the American and British government trusted to transmit information on the Atomic bomb in the World War II.    It was due in large part to that level of communications security that Admiral Nimitz was informed of the atomic bomb before General MacArthur.   Admiral Nimitz in Hawaii and later Guam was reachable by SIGSALY after his initial courier briefing.   General MacArthur between October 1944 and May 1945 was not, for a number of reasons I’ll get into a little later.

First, a quick introduction: SIGSALY was a highly secret WW2 digital voice communications system that used a special one-time pad encryption.   There were only 12 station made in all of WW2 and MacArthur’s had two.   The first in Brisbane was sent to Manila.   The 2nd SIGSALY meant for Hollandia was instead placed in a Australian built barge barge in the SWPA “Signal Corps Grand fleet,” a motley collection of small ships and barges with powerful Signal Corps radios.   The barge mounted SIGSALY   was intended for quick sea movement and it was key for MacArthur’s communications at Okinawa and Kyushu during the planned invasion of Japan.

Figure 2 – This is a SIGSALY digital radio-telephone system screen captured from the Crypto Museum web site.    

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Oh, FFS!

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As if it wasn’t enough for the joyless, bitter scolds among the wokerati to have an absolute tizzy over the head of Goya Foods being civil and respectful of the office of the President of the US, another provider of excellent and relatively inexpensive foodstuffs is in their cross-hairs. Unlike the president of Goya Foods who basically told them to pound sand and is now enjoying the economic benefits of having defied the wokerati the management of Trader Joe’s is beating a sniveling and apologetic retreat, and promising to redo their policy of labeling their various ethnic food items with a suitably ethnic variation on ‘Trader Something-or-Other’. This was a bit of light-hearted bit of humor on their part, playing with naming stereotypes, but good lord, the grim and determined wokerati cannot abide any humor at all and so the whole concept must go. The Daughter Unit tells me, and the above link conforms, that the whole thing started as a petition by high school students, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. I suspect the responsible students are the earnest and censorious sorts, desperately trying to out-woke each other.

Frankly, the whole ‘Trader Joe’s’ South Sea Island Tropical Paradise motif always struck me as a last gasp of the 1950s ‘Tiki Culture’ and about the only one which didn’t involve a bar decorated with fishing nets and dried starfish, and fru-fru drinks with little umbrellas in them. Trader Joe’s various products are high quality, reasonably priced, and the social-consciousness is laid on with a light hand, in pleasant contrast with the mountain of ostentatious correctitude and high prices offered at Whole Foods. There is a reason the latter is derisively known as “Whole Paycheck.” I can only think it’s only a matter of time before the social justice warriors go after Trader Joe’s for that bit of cultural appropriation as well.

At least the providers of groceries are not having as rotten a year due to the Chinese Commie Crud as Hollywood is. Theaters shut down, premieres cancelled, top-flight releases like Greyhound, with Tom Hanks and based on C.S. Foresters’ war novel The Good Shepherd diverted to release on streaming video, the fall-out from “Me Too” and Harvey Weinstein’s wholesale-level practice of the casting couch, the apparent urge among our producers of entertainment to whore after foreign audiences, and now looking to curry favor with the hot new trend of ‘anyone but white heterosexuals in front of the camera and behind it as well as behind it in any capacity’ … well, Establishment Hollywood has earned the foul reputation they richly deserve. Those of us in flyover country are watching old movies on DVD (from our own libraries, let it be known) or on streaming video, watching foreign films or series practically anything other than grim parables and lectures by the wokerati.

Comment as you wish: what are you going to watch, now? The Daughter Unit and I are watching episodes of Are You Being Served? Which has the side benefit of being gloriously politically incorrect, and not featuring any masks or six-foot apart social distancing. (The Daughter Unit and I temped for a few months at an upscale department store over the holiday season some years ago. We consider ‘Served’ as nearly a documentary on retail sales at a certain level.)