War and Peace

History Weekend — The Darwin Air Campaign’s “End of the Beginning”, Plus 75 Years

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Starting seventy five years ago in March 1942, in the aftermath of the February 1942 raid on Darwin by Japan’s dreaded Kido Butai Carrier Fleet, land based air units of the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army Air Forces began a sustained campaign to keep Darwin suppressed as a forward operating base for the Allied militaries in Australia.   To stop this onslaught, the newly formed and radar equipped Australian No. Five Fighter Sector, RAAF, together with the US Army Air Force 49th Fighter Group fought a lonely and forgotten campaign of aerial attrition that was a tactical draw and an operational victory for General Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Theater.

This operational level victory saw the first aerial combined-arms team in the Pacific theater with a radio-telecommunications based command and control organization that melded radar, signals intelligence, ground based observers, ground based air defense, combat engineering, and logistics to meld into an aerial fighting style unique to MacArthur’s theater.   A style tactically years in advance of the USAAF in North Africa and Northwest Europe and months in advance of USMC air units over Midway and Guadalcanal.   The isolation of this campaign from the USAAF high command also highlighted the fact that the US Army Air Force’s  pursuit — AKA fighter pilot — faction was well aware of how to get and maintain air superiority…without the interference of the bomber-faction-dominated USAAF high command.

Figure 1 — 49th Fighter Group P-40 fighters in Darwin,   Photo Credit —  Australian War Memorial.

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Happy VJ-Day, Plus 72 Years

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Happy Victory over Japan Day!

On August 14th in 1945 Imperial Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and averted Operation Downfall, the two stage invasion of Japan. On Sept 2, 1945 the surrender was signed on the USS Missouri in Tokyo bay, This invasion would have resulted in at least a million American casualties (see below) and likely millions of Japanese dead from direct effects of the invasion plus the mass starvation that would have been sure to occur in its aftermath.

Since August 2010, it has become an eight years and counting tradition (See link list at the end of this post) for the Chicagoboyz web site to commemorate the major events closing out World War II in the Pacific and address the leftist agitprop surrounding those events. Where the worst recorded war in human history became a nuclear war via the August 6th and 9th 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the Imperial Japanese acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and the Sept 2, 1945 formal surrender on the battleship USS Missouri.

This years year’s Chicagoboyz commemoration will focus on the academic “revisionist history” controversies regards American casualties in an invasion of Japan versus the use of two Atomic Bombs.

  • The controversy traces from the rise of the leftist “Atomic Diplomacy” revisionism in 1946-1965.
  • Atomic Diplomacy’s subsequent credibility collapse of  “Atomic Diplomacy” historical underpinning in the 1995 Smithsonian Enola Gay Exhibit controversy.
  • Its enshrinement as a leftist academic virtue signaling cult in the aftermath.

 

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.

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From Ancient Grudge

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(An archive post from 2012, from my Celia Hayes blog – which I believe has relevance this week, considering the ongoing ruckus regarding Confederate memorial statuary.)

“From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

When I was deep in the midst of researching and writing the Adelsverein Trilogy, of course I wound up reading a great towering pile of books about the Civil War. I had to do that even though my trilogy isn’t really about the Civil War, per se. It’s about the German settlements in mid-19th century Texas. But for the final volume, I had to put myself into the mind of a character who has come home from it all; weary, maimed and heartsick to find upon arriving (on foot and with no fanfare) that everything has changed. His mother and stepfather are dead, his brothers have all fallen on various battlefields and his sister-in-law is a bitter last-stand Confederate. He isn’t fit enough to get work as a laborer, and being attainted as an ex-rebel soldier, can’t do the work he was schooled for, before the war began. This was all in the service of advancing my story, of how great cattle baronies came to be established in Texas and in the West, after the war and before the spread of barbed wire, rail transport to practically every little town and several years of atrociously bad winters. So are legends born, but to me a close look at the real basis for the legends is totally fascinating and much more nuanced the Civil War and the cattle ranching empires, both.

Nuance; now that’s a forty-dollar word, usually used to imply a reaction that is a great deal more complex than one might think at first glance. At first glance the Civil War has only two sides, North and South, blue and grey, slavery and freedom, sectional agrarian interests against sectional industrial interests, rebels and… well, not. A closer look at it reveals as many sides as those dodecahedrons that they roll to determine Dungeons and Dragons outcomes. It was a long time brewing, and as far as historical pivot-points go, it’s about the most single significant one of the American 19th century. For it was a war which had a thousand faces, battlefronts and aspects.
There was the War that split Border States like Kentucky and Virginia which actually did split, so marked were the differences between the lowlands gentry and the hardscrabble mountaineers. There was the war between free-Soil settlers and pro-slavery factions in Missouri and in Kansas; Kansas which bled for years and contributed no small part to the split. There was even the war between factions of the Cherokee Indian nation, between classmates of various classes at West Point, between neighbors and yes, between members of families.

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“Full transcript: Defense Secretary James Mattis’ interview with The Islander”

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Secretary Mattis responds to an interview request from a high-school student. The interview is worth reading and more informative than much of what appears in the adult press.

(via Lex)

Worthwhile Watching

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A good video on the women who flew military aircraft in Britain during WWII.  Title is a little misleading, lots of airplane types other than Spitfires were involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez81N-YFGtM