Via Instapundit, this Weekly Standard piece on the next Hezbollah-Israel war is a bit naive. Yes, it is wise for Israel to make preemptive PR efforts to justify its self-defense against the missile attacks that Hezbollah will certainly launch from densely populated civilian areas in any future war, with the intent of maximizing civilian casualties for propaganda purposes. However, a USA that is led by a Democratic administration that is at best lukewarm about Israel, and that may be predisposed to seek accommodations from Israel’s enemies, will not necessarily do much to help Israel in such an event. Obama was obviously hostile to Israel during the 2014 Gaza war, even though he was careful not to say so publicly and to frame his anti-Israel actions in deniable terms. Would a Hillary administration, anchored as Obama’s is in far-left Democratic Party politics, be much better? It might be, since Obama’s anti-Israel/anti-Jewish animus is extreme for an American president, and he was trying to appease Iran for much of his presidency. Hillary is unlikely to be so eager to accommodate Israel’s (and America’s) enemies. OTOH, the US Left is now thoroughly hostile to Israel as well as to any US action to protect its traditional overseas interests. So, who knows.
War and Peace
History Friday — Imperial Japan’s Philippine Radar Network 1944-45
It is amazing the things you find out while writing a book review. In this case, a review of Phillips Payson O’Brien’s How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II. The book is thoroughly revisionist in that it posits that there were no real decisive land battles in WW2. The human and material attrition in those “decisive battles” was so small relative to major combatants’ production rates that losses from them were easily replaced until Anglo-American air-sea superiority — starting in the latter half of 1944 — strangled Germany and Japan. Coming from the conservative side of the historical ledger, I had a lot of objections to O’Brien’s book starting with some really horrid mistakes on WW2 airpower in the Pacific.
You can see a pretty good review of the book at this link — How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, by Phillips Payson O’Brien
However, my independent research on General MacArthur’s Section 22 radar hunters in the Philippines proved one of the corollaries of O’Brien’s thesis — Namely that the Imperial Japanese were a fell WW2 high tech foe, punching in a weight class above the Soviet Union — was fully validated with a digitized microfilm from the Air Force Historical Research Agency (AFHRA) at Maxwell AFB, Alabama detailing the size, scope and effectiveness of the radar network Imperial Japan deployed in the Philippines.
The microfilm reel A7237 photoshop below is a combination of three scanned microfilm images of an early December 1944 radar coverage map of the Philippines. It shows 32 separate Imperial Japanese Military radar sites that usually had a pair of Japanese radars each (at lease 64 radars total), based upon the Japanese deployment patterns found and documented in Section 22 “Current statements” from January thru March 1945 elsewhere in the same reel.
This Section 22 created map — taken from dozens of 5th Air Force and US Navy aerial electronic reconnaissance missions — showed Japanese radar coverage at various altitudes and was used by Admiral Halsey’s carrier fleet (See route E – F on the North Eastern Luzon area of the map) to strike both Clark Field and Manila Harbor, as well as by all American & Australian military services to avoid Japanese radar coverage to strike the final Japanese military reinforcement convoys, “Operation TA”, of the Leyte campaign.
Forever
This is a long, old article about the Arab “refugees” in and around Israel (h/t – Architect Guy), but it’s still a useful exposé of the maddening hypocrisy that created and enabled Arab terrorism in Israel.
What indeed? Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and, en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?
THERE is no future in spending UN money to breed hate. There is no future in nagging or bullying Israel to commit suicide by the admission of a fatal locust swarm of enemies. There is no future in Nasser’s solution, the Holy War against Israel; and we had better make this very clear, very quickly.
A lot has changed since this was written over a half century ago, but sadly much remains the same. The system cemented in place to breed evil that ruthlessly murders innocent people generation after generation is flourishing. The United Nations and its international order are the enemy of Israel and the enemy of Jewish people. The Palestinian is not now a partner for peace and never was.
Related: The Smoking Gun: Arab Immigration into Palestine, 1922-1931
Like U.O. Schmelz, Roberto Bachi expressed some reservation about the virtual non-existence of data and discussion concerning migration into and within Palestine. He writes:
Between 1800 and 1914, the Muslim population had a yearly average increase in the order of magnitude of roughly 6-7 per thousand. This can be compared to the very crude estimate of about 4 per thousand for the “less developed countries” of the world (in Asia, Africa, and Latin America) between 1800 and 1910. It is possible that part of the growth of the Muslim population was due to immigration
Not only is it possible, but it’s likely that much if not most of the population of Arabs that now identifies as Palestinian originated in outlying regions such as Egypt and Syria prior to the 20th century.
This was confirmed by Mark Twain in his book The Innocents Abroad about his Old World travels in 1867.
No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is mournful, dreary, and lifeless. Palestine sits in sackloth and ashes Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies… Palestine is desolate and unlovely… It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land… [a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds – a silent mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… We never saw a human being on the whole route… There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.
Regardless of where the Arabs say they came from or think they came from or what they think they deserve, Jews have lived in the Land of Israel for over 3000 years. They have a claim to the land that stretches back long before Arabs even existed. The Jews of Israel took a barren and desolate desert and turned it into an oasis in the middle of a region otherwise cursed with war, strife, and misery. Israel thrives now while the Arab world is imploding. Israel lives and always has and always will.
June 6, 1944
Today, June 6, is the 72nd anniversary of the Normandy landings. See the Wikipedia article for an overview. Arthur Seltzer, who was there, describes his experiences.
Don Sensing points out that success was by no means assured: the pivot day of history.
Two earlier Photon Courier posts: before D-day, there was Dieppe and transmission ends.
See Bookworm’s post from 2012, and Michael Kennedy’s photos from 2007
A collection of D-day color photos from Life Magazine
Neptunus Lex: The liberation of France started when each, individual man on those landing craft as the ramp came down each paratroop in his transport when the light turned green made the individual decision to step off with the only life he had and face the fire.
The Battle of Midway took place from June 4 through June 7, 1942. Bookworm attended a Battle of Midway commemoration event in 2010 and also in 2011: Our Navy–a sentimental service in a cynical society.
See also Sgt Mom’s History Friday post from 2014.
General Electric remembers the factory workers at home who made victory possible. Also, women building airplanes during WWII, in color and the story of the Willow Run bomber plant.
Also, a very interesting piece on the radio news coverage of the invasion
Cyber Warfare
Col. Michael Brown, USMC, Retired:
The Russians and Chinese are the most active in offensive attacks. I worry a lot about the vulnerability of our electrical grid and even our water supply network.
Supervisory control and data acquisition SCADA refers to ICS (industrial control systems) used to control infrastructure processes (water treatment, wastewater treatment, gas pipelines, wind farms, etc), facility-based processes (airports, space stations, ships, etc,) or industrial processes (production, manufacturing, refining, power generation, etc).