I have just posted a guest post from Dr Tim Furnish on Zenpundit.
Dr Furnish holds a doctorate in Islamic history, and “wrote the book” — Holiest Wars
Month: March 2015
History Weekend — MacArthur’s Section 22 Submersible Radar Hunters
One of the more frustrating things in dealing with General Douglas MacArthur’s World War 2 (WW2) fighting style was how many ‘will of the wisp’ intelligence, logistical and special forces operations he created and that were buried in post-WW2 classified files in many military services of several nations, located on several different continents. Often times, when you go looking for one of these outfits, something completely different turns up. Such was the case with “Submarine Field Unit” of Section 22, General Headquarters, South West Pacific Area. And as it turned out, the submarine that the Field Unit operated on is sitting in a museum four hours drive from where I live in Dallas, at Muskogee, OK!
As I stated in my “MacArthur’s High Tech Radar Commandos” column, I have been on the trail of Section 22 for some time. Section 22 of MacArthur’s General Headquarters (GHQ) South West Pacific Area (SWPA) was his radar intelligence branch — what is referred to today as electronic intelligence or “ELINT” — under his Chief Signals officer General Aiken. It was made up of personnel from Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, as well as the United States Army, US Army Air Force, US Navy and the US Marine Corps. Most Section 22 personnel were Australian Military Forces (AMF) and not Americans. So most day to day reports — for instance casualty records — with which you build a unit history, will be in the Australian archives.
It turns out that the National Archive of Australia (NAA) has digitized and posted on-line a significant portion of Section 22’s analytical work in the form of a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) copy of the Section 22 “Current Statements,” AKA reports on Japanese radar site locations and excerpts of technical analysis of captured radar documents or components, covering the period of 14 January 1945 to 20 March 1945. In those 66 days Section 22 generated 43 “Current statements” numbered 0260 to 0302. What I read of the file demonstrated a high pressure, fast paced, operational intelligence organization providing timely “actionable” intelligence to fighting units across the SWPA.
A Fantastic Article on Greece
At Business Insider (an app I read every day) I found this great and interesting take on the events in Greece.
Basically the article says that
1. The Greeks don’t pay taxes (tax evasion is chronically high)
2. The Greeks don’t keep their money within Greece (they move it to havens both to protect it from taxation and to earn higher returns)
3. The Greeks don’t invest in their own governmental debt (it is Euro-zone and international entities)
The article compares Greece with Japan – while Japan has much higher levels of debt, the Japanese debt is funded by Japanese individuals, companies and government entities and they have only 5% of their debt in the hands of outsiders.
I never thought about the issues in this manner but it makes sense; the Greek people “know” that it will turn out badly if they trust their poorly run and corrupt government and make their own individual decisions about how to hold their money. Why would other countries and investors “invest” in a government that their own people have no faith in (when it comes to “putting your money where your mouth is”, so to speak).