War and Peace

Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

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A USAF jet fighter pilot flies a WWII P-51 Mustang.

An argument that China will never be as wealthy as America.  (‘Never’ is a long time, though)

A huge database of artworks, indexed on many dimensions.

An ethics class that has been taught for 20 years (at the University of Texas-Austin) is no longer offered.  According to the professor who taught it:

Students clam up as soon as conversation veers close to anything controversial and one side might be viewed as politically incorrect.  The open exchange of ideas that used to make courses such as Contemporary Moral Problems exciting doesn’t happen. It’s not possible to teach the course the way I used to teach it.

At the GE blog:  Direct mind-to-airplane communication…and, maybe someday, direct mind-to-mind communication as well.  Although regarding the second possibility, SF writer Connie Willis raises some concerns.

Also at the GE blog:  The California Duck Must Die  – a very good explanation of the load-matching problems created when ‘renewable’ sources become a major element of the electrical grid. Media discussion of all the wind and solar capacity installed has tended to gloss over these issues.

The Battle of the Bulge, December 1944 – January 1945.

MacArthur’s Pearl Harbor, December 8th 1941 – Plus 75 Years

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One of the important things to know about General Douglas MacArthur was that almost nothing said or written about him can be trusted without extensive research to validate its truthfulness. There were a lot of reasons for this. Bureaucratic infighting inside the US Army, inside the War Department, and between the War and Naval Departments all played a role from MacArthur’s attaining flag rank in World War 1 (WW1) through his firing by President Truman during the Korean War. His overwhelming need to create what amounts to a cult of personality around himself was another.

However, the biggest reason for this research problem was that, if the Clinton era political concept of “The Politics of Personal Destruction” had been around in the 1930s through 1950s, General Douglas MacArthur’s face would have been its poster boy. Everything the man did was personal, and that made everything everyone else did in opposition to him, “personal” to them. Thus followed rounds of name calling, selective reporting and political partisanship that have utterly polluted the historical record and require research over decades to untangle.

A case in point is the December 8th 1941 attack on Clark Field and the massacre of the American B-17 force.   This 2007 article by Michael Gough titled “Failure and Destruction, Clark Field, the Philippines, December 8, 1941″ is a good example of the accepted narrative of the Clark Field attack.

The real reason we lost those planes on Dec 8th 1941 was American bad luck, delusion and political ghost dancing meeting a very well prepared Japanese enemy.   Luzon was too close to the center of Japanese air power for the Far Eastern Air Force (FEAF) to survive.   Nothing MacArthur did or didn’t do would have made a real difference in that outcome.

 

Destroyed P-35 Fighters in the aftermath of the December 8th 1941 attack
Destroyed P-35 Fighters in the aftermath of the December 8th 1941 attack. (Source: USAF Photo via Hyperwar web site)

 

The following was posted to the Academic H-War listserve back in late May 2012 and addresses the timing of the raid on Clark and Iba fields Dec 8th 1941 —

“Hi Gang

I’ve refrained from commenting on this thread because of the subject’s
complexity, the dearth of primary documents, and a desire to avoid
replying to endless questions, but I will make a bit of an effort here:

From 0330 until 1014, HQ USAFFE specifically denied Brereton permission to
launch his bomber force at Clark (19 B-17s) against the Japanese
facilities on Formosa and did not allow him to speak directly with
MacArthur either in person or on the telephone.

FEAF dispersed the bombers to holding positions in the air at about 0800
to avoid an attack expected that morning. Most of the bombers were in the air
most of that morning.

MacArthur gave Brereton permission to attack Formosa during a telephone
call at 1014, and Brereton recalled the dispersed force which began landing
about 1100.

It took two to two and a half hours to refuel, load bombs, and prepare an attack,
thus FEAF’s aircraft were on the ground at about 1220 when the Japanese air
forces, delayed by fog on Formosa for roughly five hours, reached Clark.

USAFFE persistently denied Brereton’s efforts to conduct reconnaissance of
Formosa prior to 8 December, but the 19th Bomb Group’s target files
apparently contained enough information that, although dated, made an
attack on Formosa more than just a thrust into the unknown.

Who ignored MacArthur’s chain of command and in what way?

I am still working on my biography of Lt. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton.

Hopefully, it will get done.

Cheers,

Roger G. Miller, Ph.D., GS-14
Deputy Director
Air Force Historical Studies Office
HQ USAF/HOH
Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling
Washington, D.C. 20373-5899”

So the Far Eastern Air Force (FEAF) took precautions to protect their B-17s from a dawn Japanese strike on Dec 8, 1941, but as Dr. Miller mentioned, they landed out of fuel just in time for the delayed-by-fog Japanese naval air force strike from Tainan Airfield, Formosa.

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Pearl Harbor, December 7th 1941 — Plus 75 Years

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Today is the 75th anniversary of the December 7th, 1941 Imperial Japanese Navy’s (IJN) surprise aerial attack on the American Pacific Fleet’s “Battleship Row” at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.   With this air attack, and air attacks in the following weeks on Clark Field in the Philippines, and on the British fleet off Malaya — sinking the new British battleship Prince of Wales and the WW1 era battlecruiser Repulse — the Japanese established unchallenged air and naval superiority across the Pacific and ran wild for six months.

The key failure that day leading up to the attack —   A final point falure in a years long list of failures starting with the US Army Air Corps purge of fighter advocate Claire Chennault for his all too successful telephone-equipped ground observer air warning network that threatened the budget of the B-17 heavy bomber —   was the ignored warning from the US Army SCR-270B radar at Opana Point, Hawaii as the IJN Strike Force flew in.

Chennault's 1933 Ft. Knox Air Defense Observer Network
Then-Captain Claire Chennault’s 1933 Ft. Knox Air Defense Observer Network. It was so successful in catching bombardment formations that Chennault was black balled by the “Bomber Mafia” of two air chiefs of staff. This telephone based surveillance network was both effective and cheap…and a threat to the B-17 heavy bomber’s development budget.   Photo Source: Coast Artillery Journal Mar-Apr 1934, pg. 39

In 2012 I discovered the book  ECHOES OVER THE PACIFIC: An overview of Allied Air Warning Radar in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines Campaign by Ed Simmonds and Norm Smith that explained some of the reasons for that last failure. ECHOS is the story of Australian and wider Anglosphere efforts to field radar in the Pacific during WW2.   This year I also found John Bennet’s “SIGNAL COMPANY, AIRCRAFT WARNING, HAWAII ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY” which expanded on and clarified the background to those failures further.

US Army SCR-270 Radar used at Pearl Harbor and throughout the Pacific War by Army, Navy and Marine Radar detachments.
US Army SCR-270 Radar used at Pearl Harbor and throughout the Pacific War by US Army, US Navy and Marine Radar detachments.

 

ECHOS has these passages regarding the bureaucratic and political failings of radar deployment at Pearl Harbor:

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Book Review: The Road Back, by Erich Maria Remarque (rerun)

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The Road Back by Erich Maria Remarque

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(I had intended to rerun this post during the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, which took place from July 1 to November 18, 1916…missed that window, but of course the war lasted for two more years after the Somme)

The narrator is a young German who served in the First World War. The war is finally over, and Ernst, together with his surviving comrades, has returned to the high school from which they departed in 1914. The Principal is delivering a “welcome home” speech, and it is a speech in the old oratorical style:

“But especially we would remember those fallen sons of our foundation, who hastened joyfully to the defence of their homeland and who have remained upon the field of honour. Twenty-one comrades are with us no more; twenty-one warriors have met the glorious death of arms; twenty-one heroes have found rest from the clamour of battle under foreign soil and sleep the long sleep beneath the green grasses..”

There is suddden, booming laughter. The Principal stops short in pained perplexity. The laughter comes from Willy standing there, big and gaunt, like an immense wardrobe. His face is red as a turkey’s, he is so furious.

“Green grasses!green grasses!” he stutters, “long sleep?” In the mud of shell-holes they are lying, knocked rotten. ripped in pieces, gone down into the bogGreen grasses! This is not a singing lesson!” His arms are whirling like a windmill in a gale. “Hero’s death! And what sort of thing do you suppose that was, I wonder?Would you like to know how young Hoyer died? All day long he lay in the wire screaming. and his guts hanging out of his belly like macaroni. Then a bit of shell took off his fingers and a couple of hours later another chunk off his leg; and still he lived; and with his other hand he kept trying to pack back his intestines, and when night fell at last he was done. And when it was dark we went out to get him and he was as full of holes as a nutmeg grater.—Now, you go and tell his mother how he diedif you have so much courage.”

Not only Willy, but several other student/soldiers rise to challenge the tone of the Principal’s speech:

“But gentlemen,” cries the Old Man almost imploringly, “there is a misunderstandinga most painful misunderstanding—”

But he does not finish. He is interrupted by Helmuth Reinersmann, who carried his brother back through a bombardment on the Yser, only to put him down dead at the dressing-station.

“Killed,” he says savagely, “They were not killed for you to make speeches about them. They were our comrades. Enough! Let’s have no more wind-bagging about it.”

The assembly dissolves into angry confusion.

Then suddenly comes a lull in the tumult. Ludwig Breyer has stepped out to the front. “Mr Principal,” says Ludwig in a clear voice. “You have seen the war after your fashion—with flying banners, martial music, and with glamour. But you saw it only to the railway station from which we set off. We do not mean to blame you. We, too, thought as you did. But we have seen the other side since then, and against that the heroics of 1914 soon wilted to nothing. Yet we went through with itwe went through with it because here was something deeper that held us together, something that only showed up out there, a responsibility perhaps, but at any rate something of which you know nothing and of which there can be no speeches.”

Ludwig pauses a moment, gazing vacantly ahead. He passes a hand over his forehead and continues. “We have not come to ask a reckoningthat would be foolish; nobody knew then what was coming.But we do require that you shall not again try to prescribe what we shall think of these things. We went out full of enthusiasm, the name of the ‘Fatherland’ on our lipsand we have returned in silence,. but with the thing, the Fatherland, in our hearts. And now we ask you to be silent too. Have done with fine phrases. They are not fitting. Nor are they fitting to our dead comrades. We saw them die. And the memory of it is still too near that we can abide to hear them talked of as you are doing. They died for more than that.”

Now everywhere it is quiet. The Principal has his hands clasped together. “But Breyer,” he says gently. “II did not mean it so.”

Ludwig Breyer’s words: “We do require that you shall not again try to prescribe what we shall think of these things…Have done with fine phrases” capture well the break which the Great War caused in the relationship between generations, and even in the use of language. It is a disconnect with which we are still living.

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Human Emotions and the Nuclear Codes

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Two stories about Hillary Clinton:

1–Yossi Tzur, who lost his son, Assaf, in a terror bus bombing in Israel, described the meetings with a number of American officials  that he participated in when he came to this country as part of a delegation including other families of terror victims:

“We were welcomed with warmth, with empathy, all heard us and gave us their attention, well, almost everybody.”

Tzur went on to describe the delegation’s meeting with Rudy Giuliani. “You could feel the warmth of the man, his humanity, his care,” he wrote. “You could see tears in his eyes when he told the stories. The meeting was scheduled for an hour, it took almost two hours and then he stood with us patiently taking photos with each and every one.”

From New York, the delegation went to Washington for a series of meetings, one of them was in the Senate with NY Senator Hilary Clinton. Tzur recalled that “we arrived at her office in the Senate and were shown into a small meeting room, it could hardly fit all of us, it was dark, crowded, it didn’t even had water on the table. So we waited.

“Time went by, 15 minutes, 30, an hour. Her aides were embarrassed saying she is coming any minute now. After an hour and a half Clinton arrived.  

“She looked as us seeing the group in the room, we could see she is not really there with us, we felt she was impatient and just looking to finish it and go. We felt really uncomfortable… Even before we could speak she said, you probably want a photo, come let’s go out, leading us to the stairs. There she asked us to stand on the stairs and one of her aides took the photo. We still wanted to talk to her, people came ready to tell her their story, she didn’t intend to hear, it looked she didn’t want to hear. With inhuman coldness she went out amongst us all and disappeared in one of the corridors leaving us shocked and disappointed.”

2–Linda Tripp, White House secretary during the Bill Clinton administration, describes the reactions of Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton while watching the horrible Waco “law-enforcement operation” (in which 76 people died, including many children) unfold on television:

“A special bulletin came on [CNN] showing the atrocity at Waco and the children. And his face, his whole body slumped, and his face turned white, and he was absolutely crushed knowing, knowing the part he had played. And he had played the part at Mrs. Clinton’s direction.

Her reaction, on the other hand, was heartless. And I can only tell you what I saw.”

Indeed, it seems obvious that Hillary Clinton does not possess the normal human complement of emotional reactions, that she is cold and robotic.  Something is definitely missing there.

Democrats and their supporters keep arguing that Donald Trump must not be trusted with the nuclear codes.  In my view–if a decision for or against a nuclear launch must be made, I’d prefer it to be made by someone that can understand at a visceral level what it means for real people.  Which would not be Hillary Clinton, who really does not appear to see other human beings as anything other than tools in her unending power games.

There has been much discussion lately about whether decisions in war can be entrusted to intelligent robots.  I’d rather not see the most important military decision of all time made by a human robot.