USA

A Machine for Preventing Civil War

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Scott Alexander, in a 2017 post at Slate Star Codex:

People talk about Liberalism as if  it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell : the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable, until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of  alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the  “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.

Very insightful and correct, I believe, if by liberalism one means free speech, freedom of religion, and limited government, rather than the cluster of ‘progressive’ believe that often fly under the ‘liberalism’ brand today.

And when the above attributes of a society do not exist or are eroded, then live-and-let live  become difficult to impossible, and all questions become politicized, because political outcomes determine everything.

When the government controls everything, there is no constructive relief valve for all this pent-up tension.  It all boils down to a ‘historic’ election once every couple of years, upon whose outcome everything depends.  They’re all going to be  ‘historic’ elections from now on. That’s not a good thing.

Ultimately, the game of politics becomes like those Aztec ball games in which the losers are said to have been sacrificed.   Indeed, some of this is happening in America already today, with Democrats demanding that Trump and his supporters be pursued post-election in almost every possible way.

If the machine of liberalism (as defined above) is destroyed, then another kind of machine will quickly take its place…the machine described by Jean Anouilh in his version of Antigone:

The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job . . . The rest is automatic. You don’t need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction

 

 

 

 

Welcome to Section 22 Week’s Sixth & Concluding Post

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Welcome to the sixth and final Chicagoboyz post (Feb 24, 2021) in the “Section 22 Week” count down to the 24 Feb 2021 premiere of the Bilge Pumps podcast with the Section 22 Special Interest Group e-mail list. Today’s post will include slides 72 through 82 of 82 of the Section 22 Powerpoint information packet.
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These “back up slides” slides cover Section 22’s interactions with the US Navy over IFF and the utter disaster of the capture of the submarine USS Darter’s technical library by the Imperial Japanese Navy in October 1944.
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You won’t find that disaster in any US Navy institutional history, classified or unclassified, on what the US Navy lost that day.   That is not how institutional histories work.   Institutional histories are all about glorifying the institution and its leaders while naming scapegoats and throwing shade at other institutions, with the classified histories detailing the “shade.”   That is why you have to go to the declassified US Army ULTRA history “SRH-254 THE JAPANESE INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM MIS/WDGS 4 September 1945”, to find any details on the   Japanese haul of intelligence from the grounded US Navy submarine USS  Darter.
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      Page 53 (62)

    “One of the most important discoveries of captured documents was made
by the Japanese Navy from the U.S. submarine  Darter, which ran aground
west of Palawan on 23 October.  The Japanese recovered many documents
      dealing with radar, radio, and communications procedure, as well as
      instruction books, engine blueprints, and various ordnance items.

 

It is difficult to evaluate the intelligence which the Japanese have
obtained from documents,  but in those cases here it has been possible
      the information has been found to be relatively accurate.“

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USS Darter (SS-227) grounded on Bombay Shoal off Palawan on 4th patrol, 24 October 1944

Figure 1:  USS Darter (SS-227) grounded on Bombay Shoal off Palawan, the Philippines on 4th patrol, 24 October 1944. The shell holes from a Japanese destroyer, several US Navy submarines, and a Japanese air attack. This included 55 point-blank hits from the 6-inch deck gun of the  Nautilus  (SS-168)  on 31st October 1944.   Unfortunately, Darter was boarded prior to that shelling by an away team from a Japanese destroyer and  the entire unburned contents off her classified   technical library were seized for analysis by Imperial Japanese Naval Intelligence.  Visible on the top of the conning tower are the undamaged radar, radio and identification friend or foe antenna’s. Photo credit — Navsource.org

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See my Chicagoboyz post here for a more complete telling of the Darter’s lost classified documents story:

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The Grounding of USS Darter — A Case Study of an Operational Security Disaster
October 29th, 2017
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/56192.html

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The Bilgepumps podcast is now posted, see–

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Bilgepumps Episode 38: Section 22 – The Forgotten Electronic Warfare Superstars of WWII and the Historians who are changing that
FEBRUARY 24TH, 2021

Welcome to Section 22 Week, Day 5

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Welcome to the fifth Chicagoboyz post (Feb 23, 2021) in the “Section 22 Week” count down to the 24 Feb 2021 Bilge Pumps podcast with the Section 22 Special Interest Group e-mail list. Today’s post will include slides 61 through 72 of 82 of the Section 22 Powerpoint information packet.
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These slides cover Section 22’s part of the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands called “Operation Olympic,” the last RCM flight of WW2 by the successor of Field Unit #6 that ended in tragedy, the “Defenestration”   (being “thrown out the window” of the official historical narrative)   of Section 22 by the American Joint Chiefs of Staff with the “Seventeen guys on an e-mail list” credits and resource links for further research for naval history academics.
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The 82 slides worth of material being published in “Section 22 Week” are a “picture book highlights reel” of what the between 500 to 1000 men involved in Section 22 radio counter measures operations did between May 1943 and August 1945.   Tomorrow’s concluding post will include the back up slides explaining the role of the Mark III identification in the Pacific war and other elements not central to the Section 22 story but important to the war for the electromagnetic spectrum from March 1944 to August 1945.
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Today’s “extra” involves the dysfunctional intelligence system inside World War II’s Washington DC that lead to Section 22’s “Defenestration.”
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The following are screenshots from SRH-130, MIS Intelligence Processes Relating to Japanese, Science Branch Project No. 2528A, 14 Sept 1945.    This “SRH-130” was the smaller of the two documents with the “SRH-130” cover page at 83 pages vice the 975 of the other.   I’m going to use “Project No. 2528A” to refer to the smaller document and SRH-130 to the larger document.
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First, see the conclusion on how effective the War Department’s G-2 Military Intelligence Division   (MID) electronics section that did “Scientific intelligence”   which was the official D.C. name for the radar intelligence Section 22 provided:
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SRH-130 MIS Scientific Intelligence on Japanese Radar July 1945 - part 2, Tab A , pg 4 of 975.jpg
Next, this is the recommendations section in “Project No. 2528A” where they list all the things they did wrong in WW2:
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SRH-130 -- Everything the MID G-2 Science Branch got wrong in WW2.jpg
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And finally this is the floor plan of the MID “Science Branch” from “Project No. 2528A” on VJ-Day to give you an idea of the scale of effort put into radar intelligence work at the War Department G-2 compared to Section 22 in Brisbane, Tacloban and Manila.
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SRH-130 -- Science Branch maximum effort foot print VJ-Day.jpg
The defenestration of Section 22 from the public eye in the immediate post-war makes a great deal of sense, given the level of effort demonstrated by that office plan .   Section 22’s offices in May 1943 Brisbane were larger than the electronics section you see above.
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The War Department was facing Congressional accountability hearings & investigative reports for the Pearl Harbor intelligence failure.   That level of “Scientific Intelligence” performance about radar for the duration of WW2 cannot be in anyway excused, if the story of Section 22 in the SWPA was generally known.   There were assets to cover,   budgets to shield, and careers to protect.   So “out the window” of public acclaim and deep, deep, into the unaccountable hidey hole of decades long classification Section 22 went.
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Helter Skelter Redux?

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The stated aim of that murderous freak Charlie Manson and his deranged family of dropouts and druggies in committing the brutal slaughter of seven people in 1969 was to incite a race war. The murderers deliberately left bloody graffiti at the murder scenes, attempting to frame the Black Panthers yet another set of murderous and equally racist freaks active in that period. In Manson’s twisted vision, the Tate-LaBianca murders would set off a brutal race war; black against white, in which whites would be enthusiastically genocided. During this mayhem Manson and his followers would hide out in a vast underground city. They would then emerge to take command over what remained of society. Manson was a particularly noxious racist, unsavory qualities which were veiled by the last putrid remnants of the hippie commune culture, which let his cult family fly under the social radar as it existed in the afterglow of the so-called “Summer of Love” in the formerly golden state of California. (Jim Jones was another one of those super-organized racist-cult freaks of the era, whose’ commune was slightly longer-lasting and successful, until suddenly it wasn’t. Yeah, a supposedly race-prejudice-free socialist commune, with a white leadership cadre and mostly dead black bodies when it all came crashing down some years later.)

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Welcome to “Section 22 Week,” Day Three

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Welcome to the third post in the “Section 22 Week” count down to the Bilge Pumps podcast with the Section 22 Special Interest Group e-mail list.   By way of background, the Section 22 ‘SIG’ started in March 2015 with myself as list administrator and later as the groups cloud drive guru. The list accomplished it’s goal of mapping the Australian, New Zealand and American archives for Section 22 materials in early 2020 with the publication of Craig Bellamy’s doctoral thesis.

Since early 2020 my goal for the list has been to get this material wider visibility in the WW2 history community.   By posting Section 22 materials from that thesis, and other list research, consistently on Twitter, I earned the list an invitation to the Bilge Pumps naval affairs podcast on the CIMSEC web site.   That podcast is due to go up on their site 24 Feb 2021.

Today’s post will include slides 30 through 48 of 82 of the Section 22 information packet.   This will include a spotlight on Section 22’s third Assistant Director, Cmdr. J.B. Jolley, USN reserve.

Cmdr. J. B. Jolley US Navy Reserve, Asst Director Section 22
Cmdr. J. B. Jolley US Navy Reserve, Assistant Director Section 22

Commander J.B.  Jolley USNR was with Section 22 early – at least from Oct 1943 from documents Craig Bellamy found in the Australian national archives.    Current Statement #48 dated 24 October 1943 states that USN submarines (unnamed, darn it!)   were being fitted with radar intercept receivers at that time.    Cmdr. Jolley then ran Section 22 for a short time before and during the Leyte campaign (from about 4 September 1944 until at least the 10 Nov 1944) until his health failed.   Yet that time, Section 22’s efforts under his leadership made its biggest contributions of WW2 and Jolley demonstrated a level of moral courage in his leadership that was unmatched in the Pacific War.

Yet, despite much research, our list has never found Cmdr Jolley’s first and middle names to go with his initials.   This anonymity was part of the price Jolley paid for his moral courage as a leader, for he crossed Admiral Ernest King on the issue of Japanese radar tracking US ships and planes through their Mark III identification friend or foe (IFF) systems.

See Jolley’s IFF procedure at this link — ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/r at paragraph 11. IFF PROCEDURE sub-paragraph f. which is named in slide 30 below.  

Adm. Turner, CENPAC’s amphibious forces commander, did not include anything like it in his Iwo Jima or Okinawa attack plans.   And he knew far better…but did not want to draw Adm. King’s attentions.

To understand the context here, you have to know that electronic IFF was the US Navy’s technological turf in WW2. The U.S. Navy had created an IFF system before WW2, but the UK’s Mark III IFF was chosen for the sake of Allied commonality. And with radar centralized under Adm. King, IFF was part of his personal fief. King’s actions in the “Great South Pacific IFF Visitation” in Jan – Mar 1944 versus Section 22 made the combat failure of the Mark III IFF a failure in the same class as the Mark 14 torpedo and his own very personal tar baby.

Adm. King’s CIC magazine did not admit to what Jolley wrote into the Sept 1944 7th Fleet Leyte invasions until the March 1945 issue.   Far too late for the intimidated Adm. Turner to add Cmdr. Jolley’s technique into the Okinawa invasion plans.

The combat failure of the Mark III IFF had to be made to go away…and it did…but that story is for coming “Section 22 Week” posts and slides.

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