The Guadalcanal Air Campaign’s “Horseshoe Nail of Victory”

It’s damned rare, when you read the histories of the Second World War, that you can definitively find a place where one man, with the right skills, at the right place, at the right time, provided a make or break/victory or defeat   level of difference in a military campaign with his contributions.   Let alone one so central to the identities of the US Navy and US Marine Corps as the Guadalcanal campaign. Yet, for the period of September 1942 and March 1943, there was one US Marine non-commissioned officer who did just that.

He was Master Technical Sargent Dermott H. MacDonnell.   His performance as chief radar operator for Marine Air Group 23’s (MAG-23) SCR-270 radar made the difference between keeping and losing daylight air superiority over Henderson Field in the darkest days of the Guadalcanal campaign.   He was the Guadalcanal Air Campaign’s “Horseshoe Nail of Victory.”

MTSgt Dermott H. MacDonnell at base of SCR-270 radar on Guadalcanal
MTSgt Dermott H. MacDonnell at base of SCR-270 radar on Guadalcanal.   His performance with this radar won and kept air superiority in the darkest days of the Guadalcanal campaign Source:   Marine Corps Historical Archives, courtesy of MACCS History

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An Unexpected Defeat

‘When the crocus blossoms,’ hiss the women in Berlin,
‘He will press the button, and the battle will begin.
When the crocus blossoms, up the German knights will go,
And flame and fume and filthiness will terminate the foe…
When the crocus blossoms, not a neutral will remain.’

(A P Herbert,  Spring Song, quoted in  To Lose a Battle, by Alistair Horne)

On May 10, 1940, German forces launched an attack against Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Few people among the Allies imagined that France would collapse in only six weeks: Churchill, for example, had a high opinion of the fighting qualities of the French army. But collapse is what happened, of course, and we are still all living with the consequences. General Andre Beaufre, who in 1940 was a young Captain on the French staff, wrote in 1967:

The collapse of the French Army is the most important event of the twentieth century.

If it’s an exaggeration, it’s not much of one. If France had held up to the German assault as effectively as it was expected to do, World War II would probably have never reached the nightmare levels that it in fact did reach. The Hitler regime might well have fallen. The Holocaust would never have happened. Most likely, there would have been no Communist takeover of Eastern Europe.

This campaign has never received much attention in America; it tends to be regarded as something that happened before the “real” war started. Indeed, many denizens of the Anglosphere seem to believe that the French basically gave up without a fightwhich is a considerable exaggeration given the French casualties of around 90,000 killed and 200,000 wounded. But I think the fall of France deserves serious study, and that some of the root causes of the defeat are scarily relevant to today’s world.

First, I will very briefly summarize the campaign from a military standpoint, and will then shift focus to the social and political factors involved in the defeat.

France’s border can be thought of in terms of three sectors. In the north, the border with with Belgium. Early French military planning had been based on the idea of a strong cooperative relationship with Belgium: however, in the years immediately prior to 1940, that country had adopted a position of neutrality and had refused to do any joint military planning with France. In the south, the border was protected by the forts of the Maginot Line (the southern flank of which was anchored by mountainous territory bordering on Switzerland and Italy.) In between these regions was the country of the Ardennes. It was heavily wooded and with few roads, and the French high command did not believe it was a feasible attack route for strong forceshence, the Maginot Line had not been extended to cover it, and the border here was protected only with field fortifications.

The French plan was based on the assumption that the main German attack would come through Belgium. Following the expected request from the Belgian government for assistance, strong French forces were to advance into that country and counterattack the Germans. In the Maginot and Ardennes sectors, holding actions only were envisaged. While the troops manning the Maginot were of high quality, the Ardennes forces included a large proportion of middle-aged reservists, and had been designated as lower-class units.

The opening moves seemed to fit expectations. The Germans launched a powerful attack through Belgium, and the Belgian government made the expected requests for help. Andre Beaufre:

Doumenc sent me at once to Vincennes to report to General Gamelin (the French supreme commander). I arrived at 6.30 AM at the moment when the order had just been given for the huge machine to go into operation: the advance into Belgium. Gamelin was striding up and down the corridor in his fort, humming, with a pleased and martial air which I had never seen before. It has been said since that he expected defeat, but I could see no evidence of it at the time.

There was heavy fighting in Belgium…but the German attack on this country had served to mask their  real  point of maximum effort. Early in the morning of the 13th, it became clear that massive German forces were moving through the Ardennes, which had turned out to not be so impassable after all. A massive German air attack paved the way for a crossing of the Meuse river and the capture of the town of Sedan. French officers were stunned by the speed of the German advancethey had expected delays while the Germans brought up heavy artillery, not understanding that dive bombers could play a role similar to that traditionally played by artillery. And the bombing was psychologically-shattering, especially for inexperienced troops. The famous historian Marc Bloch had been exposed to many artillery barrages while fighting in the First World War: in reflecting on his service in 1940, he observed that he found aerial bombing much more frightening even though it was, objectively, probably less dangerous. (Bloch later joined the Resistance and was captured by the Germans and shot.)

The French command never really recovered from the unexpected thrust through the Ardennes and the fall of Sedan. Beginning on May 27, the British evacuated their troops at Dunkirk. On June 14, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned. He was succeeded by Philippe Petain, a hero of the First World War, who immediately sought terms with the Germans. The “armistice”basically a surrenderwas signed on June 20. By Hitler’s order, it was signed in the same railway car where the armistice of 1918 had been signed. Hitler was present in person for the ceremony: William Shirer was fifty yards away, and was studying his expression through binoculars:  It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.

Many military factors were involved in the defeatobsolete doctrine on armored forces, inadequate use of radio communications, a strange and cumbersome military organization structure. But the roots of the 1940 debacle are not to be found onlyor perhaps even primarilyin strictly military matters. A major role was played by certain characteristics of French society and politics of the timeand some of these factors are spookily similar to some of the things that are going on in America today.

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Technology, War, and Education

From NBCLearn, here’s a series of short videos focused on WWII aircraft, technology, and people and intended for K-12 classroom use.  Each video is accompanied by two lesson plans, one focused on relevant STEM topics and the other with “social studies” topics.

For example, the STEM lesson plan that goes with the Pearl Harbor video is mainly about the attributes of the Zero Fighter .  The “social studies” lesson starts with the teacher asking students “Who wants to tell the class what has been happening in Europe since World War I” and “Who wants to tell the class what has been happening in the eastern hemisphere?”  (it would be interesting to hear some of the answers) and then progresses to other related topics, including a comparison of FDR’s speech after Pearl Harbor with the speech of GWB after 9/11.

I thought it was an interesting and worthwhile approach.  I would have preferred the videos to be a little longer (they’re about 5 minutes each), and thought there were some missed opportunities, misguided emphases, and a few apparent actual errors in some of the lesson plans.  For example, the “social studies” piece on the Night Witches (female Russian night bomber pilots) could have included something about the situation in the Soviet Union at the time, and the Eastern Front War in general…same point for The Flying Tank, the video about the Sturmovik ground attack plane.  The lesson on the B-17 Ball Turret could have usefully included a link the Randall Jarrell’s brutal poem, Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.  The STEM lesson plan on the ME-262 jet fighter talks about the benefits of the swept wing for “balance on its nosewheel”…”it also made the ME-262 faster”–but didn’t really get across the reasons why a swept wing is important as airspeeds get near the speed of sound.  The discussion of the Po-2 biplane used by the Night Witches implies that the plane had good gliding capabilities:  I seriously doubt this, given the low wing aspect ratio (as noted in the lesson plan) and the high drag generally characteristic of the biplane types. It would glide fine, but not for far…which was appropriate given its mission.

I thought that, overall, this was a very worthwhile effort.  The videos were co-produced with Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions.  NBCLearn also has a whole lot of other educational videos.

General MacArthur’s Bataan Gang Radio Man

One of the minor mysteries of World War II is why President Franklin Roosevelt not only ordered General Douglas MacArthur to abandon his troops in the Philippines, but went out of his way to cover up the $500,000 payment from Philippine Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon to MacArthur.

See:

MacArthur Given $500,000
By Jim Warren and
KnightRidder; Copyright (c) 1980 Lexington Herald
January 29, 1980
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/01/29/macarthur-given-500000/3ad863a3-8caa-4792-b038-d91bb3f804b4/?utm_term=.241d49fd22bd

 

The Secret Payment
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/macarthur-secret-payment/

The best place for a man as difficult, politically powerful and utterly troublesome as General MacArthur is as far away from Washington, DC as possible.   What is farther away than the inside of an Imperial Japanese prison cell in Manchuria?    Yet President Roosevelt went out of his way to give the order to General MacArthur to run to Australia.

Why?

The general answer from historians like Ian Toll and  Geoffrey Perret is that MacArthur became an immensely popular heroic figure during the fall of the Philippines.   And that fact combined with the fallout from Pearl Harbor made MacArthur’s loss a political danger to the Roosevelt Administration.   This deus ex machina explanation has always been very unsatisfying to me as it’s just assumed with no underlying “why did that happen.”

It turns out there is in fact an easy explanation which the likes of Toll and Perret missed because there has never been a book-length biography of MacArthur’s chief signal officer, General Spencer Ball Akin, who was MacArthur’s “Bataan Gang Radio Man.”    

General Spencer Ball Akin

It turns out that between the beginning of the war and MacArthur’s evacuation from Corregidor, then-Colonel Akin’s radio program, “The Voice of Freedom,” was broadcast to the world, three times daily.   The Corregidor based broadcast facilities could and did reach San Francisco, California.   These radio programs were then picked up by the Hearst papers on the West Coast and later by the American radio broadcast networks.   These messages also reached Australia,   when the radio atmospherics were good, either directly or rebroadcast from America.

In the utter desert of good war news in the first months of WW2, then-Colonel Akin’s stirring propaganda broadcasts of American and Filipino resistance to the Japanese onslaught — when compared to the fall of Hong Kong, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, plus the German Operation Drumbeat U-boat attacks off the US East Coast — was drunken down in the English speaking world like artesian spring water.

It was this turn of events shaping the publics of America and Australia that made General MacArthur’s loss to the Japanese a danger to President Roosevelt’s power as a wartime leader, thus forcing his hand to save the general he would have liked to do without.

While MacArthur’s quietest and most spectacularly talented member of his “Bataan Gang,**General Spencer Ball Akin, went on to become Chief Signal Officer of the US Army from 1947 – 1951.   Akin  never got the wider public recognition his wartime accomplishments warranted…but that was pretty much as both Generals Akin and MacArthur preferred it.

-End-

 

** The “Bataan Gang” refers to the 18 military personnel including General Douglas MacArthur, who were  rescued from Corregidor by four PT Boats in March 1942 and eventually traveled to Australia by B-17 Flying Fortresses and then by train to Melbourne, Australia.

 

A Thumbnail History of the American Fighter Drop Tank 1923-2000

The flying services of the American military pioneered the use of fighter drop tanks, but there is no one place where you can go to get a historical ‘thumbnail sketch’ of their introduction and history of use.   This blog post is my attempt to answer that need.

Drop tanks have been around over 90 years in American aviation, but their history prior to the 19421945 Combined Bomber Offensive is very obscure for a lot of reasons. The biggest historically American manufacturer of drop tanks Sargent Fletcher only reaches back to its 1940 founding. (It was bought by a British company in 1994.) So the recorded American aircraft drop tank history looks as follows:

Sargent Fletcher drop tank history from 1940 to 2000
Sargent Fletcher drop tank history from 1940 to 2000

The problem with the history above is that the first operational use of drop tanks pre-dated the founding of Sargent Fletcher by almost 18 years.

On March 5, 1923 the 1st Pursuit Group of the US Army Air Service flew their Boeing MB-3As Pursuit planes with 37 gallon centerline drop tanks and achieved a radius of action of 400 miles!

Boeing built and Thomas-Morse designed MB-3 assigned to Billy Mitchell, at Selfridge Field, Michigan, Source: Wikipedia.
Boeing built and Thomas-Morse designed MB-3 assigned to Billy Mitchell, at Selfridge Field, Michigan, Source: Wikipedia.

 

See article link and text:

Selfridge ANGB: Home of the Drop Tank

https://www.127wg.ang.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/865880/selfridge-angb-home-of-the-drop-tank/

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