Month: February 2021

Welcome to “Section 22 Week” on Chicagoboyz, Day One of Six

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General Headquarters, South West Pacific Area, Section 22 was a secret radar intelligence organization established under General Douglas MacArthur in World War II.  This posts is the first in a series of six that will include the entire 82 slide information packet that I sent to the CIMSEC Bilge Pumps pod cast which was recorded this morning (Feb 19, 20201) and will “air” Feb 24, 2021

Since March 2015 I have been administering an international e-mail list being named “The Section 22 Special Interest Group” with my role being both administrator and cloud drive guru.  This link was my announcement on Twitter of the list completing it’s 5-year mission in mapping the multi-continent archival history of General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Area, Section 22:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1310390667781210117.html
Section 22 Field Units Map, 7 Oct 1944 (Alwyn Lloyd).jpg
Section 22 Field Units Map, 7 Oct 1944 (via Alwyn Lloyd)
And especially this PhD Thesis by Craig Bellamy:

The beginnings of the secret Australian radar countermeasures unit during the Pacific War Feb 2020
Student thesis: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) – CDU

https://ris.cdu.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/34166746/Thesis_CDU_34148737_Bellamy_C.pdf

 This is my “2-minute elevator speech” thumb nail of Section 22’s historical role in WW2 in the Pacific theater versus Japan that I sent to the Bilge Pumps pod cast crew.

THE BIRTH, LIFE & DEATH OF MACARTHUR’S SECTION 22 RADAR HUNTERS
In the aftermath of the “Channel Dash” or Unternehmen Zerberus (Operation Cerberus) in February 1942, the Royal Australian Navy decided after a series of meetings that it needed a radio/radar countermeasures (the modern term of art is “electronic warfare”) section to prevent the Japanese from doing to them what the Germans did to the UK Royal Navy when it snuck the fast battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen through the English Channel with the assistance of radio and radar jamming.
(See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Dash)

This RCM section was based in Sydney and administered from the RAN Office in Melbourne. It’s commander was Lt. Cdr. Joel Mace, RANVR(sp)  (RANVR decodes as – “Royal Australian Navy Voluntary Reserve” special)
There was then a decision made — either supported or stage managed by Mace, according to one of the scholars on the E-mail list I administer — to move the organization to Brisbane under the control of the USN’s 7th Fleet in or before May 1943.

Bellemy - Joel Mace Service photo.jpg

Then in June 1943 this “Radio and Radar Countermeasures Division” was taken over by MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area General Headquarters (SWPA GHQ) under the direct command of General Spencer Akins, MacArthur’s Chief Signals officer and one of the “Bataan Gang.”   A group of trusted American officers who were at Bataan with MacArthur.

This informal decision was ratified in GHQ Operations Instructions No. 36 issued by MacArthur on 5 July 1943 and in November the group was christened “Section 22” based on it’s officer number in a Brisbane office building.

Section 22 encompassed and organized disparate RCM elements in the US Army, US Fifth Air Force, US 7th Fleet, Royal Australian Air Force, Royal Australian Navy, Australian Army into a coherent whole to deal with the Japanese deployment of radar in the Rabaul and South Pacific areas in 1942-1943.

The organization reached its full maturity in the Summer of 1944 (see photo above) after it absorbed the South Pacific theater’s RCM organizations, primarily in the 13th Air Force, Royal New Zealand Air Force and Royal New Zealand Navy.  South Pacific Theater having become a rear area by that time.

Section 22 supported General MacArthur’s drive to the Philippines and had a role in mapping Japanese radar networks throughout New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, South China, Formosa and the Ryukyus (including Okinawa) and the Japanese home islands (See May 1943 Rabaul map below).

Bellamy -- Aussie RCM Map May 1934.jpg

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Belated Valentine’s Day

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Without Wi-fi since Sunday, I’ve spent the last two hours going through e-mails and trying to catch up on Chicagoboyz. One e-mail was a Valentine’s Day greeting from a charming friend, whose later-in-life marriage and three children have been as deeply fulfilling as her scholarly career. She is often a contrarian in the bitter world of academia – partially because of the joy she finds in uniting these passions. So, here is an intro to her article, from a more casual forum than she usually chooses:

As a chivalric literary historian who has studied the origins of the holiday, I find this [“for the birds”] a shame. When the notion of Valentine’s Day as a day for romance emerged in the 1380s it was all about love as a natural life force – birds choosing their mates, the freedom to choose or refuse love and the arrival of springtime. But even then many people did not understand or value these things. In fact, that is why it was invented.

The first to write of Valentine’s Day – a feast day with ancient pagan roots – as a holiday celebrating love and lovers were the 14th-century English squire Geoffrey Chaucer and his friend, the internationally admired knight and poet Oton III de Granson, from Savoy in modern-day France. Both poets were recognized in their own time as chivalrous advocates for human rights. And in tandem, they seem to have concocted Valentine’s Day as a day for lovers.

Chaucer and Granson encountered one another in the service of Richard II of England and admired one another’s poetry. Their poems about Valentine’s Day show them operating as an international chivalric team to address pressing issues in the theory and practice of love, then and now.

Some Actual Data on the Texas Electrical Debacle

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Here is the overall generation mix from February 11–17.  The upper light brown line is gas-fired generation.  The brown line starting at about 10,000 is coal.  Green is wind, the yellow is solar, as is apparent from the daily pattern, and the almost-straight line starting at about 5,000 is nuclear.

Source is EIA…they have a lot of useful data, but you have to poke around a bit to find it.

Saving Our Democracy: The Second Trump Impeachment

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As with the first, all Democratic members of the House of Representatives argue that it is their Constitutional duty to impeach former President Trump a second time to “save our democracy.” That’s the rallying cry heard often during the Trump term, particularly in response to those who suggested a desire that election irregularities be investigated. This is surprising for two reasons. First, the Founding documents are restrictive – limiting political action – rather than proscriptive, requiring political action. Second, progressive democrats have chafed at these restrictions for over a century. With the battle over the Trump Supreme Court nominees still fresh, what explains this new found reverence to the Founding Documents. . .

[To read the doc, scroll in the box or click the arrow in the upper right corner to expand it.]