In May 1945, the U-234 ended her first and only mission of the war. Assigned to deliver uranium and the most advanced Nazi weapons technology to Japan, her crew decided, upon hearing of the German surrender to turn over its secrets to the United States. Her cargo was, to put it mildly, interesting.
The cargo included technical drawings, examples of the newest electric torpedoes, one crated Me 262 jet aircraft, a Henschel Hs 293 glide bomb, and what was listed on the US Unloading Manifest as 560 kg of uranium oxide. As evidenced by Hirschfeld and Brooks in the 1997 book Hirschfeld, Wolfgang Hirschfeld reportedly watched the loading into the boat’s cylindrical mine shafts of about 50 lead cubes with 9 inches (230 mm) sides, and “U-235″ painted on each.
It was from the secrets of the U-234 that the USN eventually learned that U-boats had been homing in on convoys using unintentional leakage from electronic devices. Radio silence had not, after all, been completely attained. Despite its best efforts to conceal itself the convoys crossing the Atlantic still emitted some kind of signature, telltale, or indication of their passage that the cunning foe could detect. That concept has been been developed since. The discipline of putting together ‘all the sidelobes’ of an activity and inferring facts from unintentionally transmitted information is called MASINT, or measurement and signals intelligence. MASINT is a way of fusing intelligence; it is the art of fusing technical intelligence and human espionage and from these clues deducing the location of an IED or the identity of an al-Qaeda cell. The Wikipedia article describes it thus:
Another way to describe MASINT is as “a “non-literal” discipline. It feeds on a target’s unintended emissive byproducts, or “trails” – the spectral, chemical or RF emissions an object leaves behind. These trails form distinctive signatures, which can be exploited as reliable discriminators to characterize specific events or disclose hidden targets.”
While there are specialized MASINT sensors, much of the MASINT discipline involves analysis of information from other sensors. For example, a SIGINT sensor may provide information on the specific characteristics and capabilities of a radar beam, which would be part of ELINT. That same sensor, however, may provide information about the “spillover” of the main beam (side lobes), or the interference its transmitter produces. Those incidental characteristics are part of MASINT.
Putting these concepts together is challenging; MASINT specialists themselves struggle with providing simple explanations of their field. One attempt calls it the “CSI” of the intelligence community, in imitation of the television series Crime Scene Investigation. This is useful only to the extent that it emphasizes how MASINT depends on a great many sciences to interpret data, where COMINT would deal with the meaning in an intelligible human message. Interpreting that message is not trivial, in that it would require idiomatic knowledge of the language involved, any specialized terminology being discussed, and inferences about emotional states and other subtle clues.
That’s just a way of saying that MASINT is way of inferring the truth in the way that early 20th century astronomers found new planets. A shadow across the sun, the perturbation of the known orbit of another planet, the measurement of some heretofore unknown spectrum allowed the astronomer to find a new celestial body “at the point of a pen”, that is, by inference and deducation. The art has not wholly atrophied.
Recently the Daily Mail alluded to a mysterious US IED-finding technology that America would not share with its allies. But the technology may not a secret gizmo at all so much as the result of an enormous intelligence fusion effort that would be impossible to “share” in all except the most superficial sense.
The United States was accused last night of refusing to share with Britain the latest technology it uses against roadside bombs which have killed scores of Allied troops in Afghanistan. US Army Lieutenant-General Thomas Metz, who retired last week as the chief officer specialising in counter-measures against the attacks, claims the UK and other coalition forces have been denied information which could save lives.
Lieut-Gen Metz has urged the Pentagon to share top-secret methods used by US forces to detect the so-called Improvised Explosive Devices and the terror networks which build them. … The officer said IEDs were often located using unmanned drone aircraft equipped with sensors to detect where ground has been disturbed to bury explosives. It is understood Britain does not possess this technology.
The Americans also use robotic helicopters to track the vehicles of insurgents planting bombs.
Military sources say there is no question of the US refusing to use its superior technology to help save the lives of British combat troops.
Last night, Shadow Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox said: ‘Information is key to operational success, and in any coalition operation if we expect better burden-sharing, we must have information-sharing.’
The MoD said last night that information exchange is regularly reviewed, adding: ‘To suggest that information vital to completing specific tasks is not shared, is untrue.’
And the key to extracting information it may turn out, isn’t some whiz-bang machine but people. The New York Times describes how the flood of raw data being downloaded from drones is now overwhelming the intelligence bureaucracy’s capacity to fully exploit it.
As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up. Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.
A group of young analysts already watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside bombs to troops in the field.
But military officials also see much potential in using the archives of video collected by the drones for later analysis, like searching for patterns of insurgent activity over time. To date, only a small fraction of the stored video has been retrieved for such intelligence purposes.
The drones, backed by their serried ranks of human analysts, are collecting information across the spectrum and generating measurement and signals intelligence. A database is being constructed in which every electronic squeak, movement, signal leakage and signatures that we may not even know are visible is being logged, capable of being played back and any speed and joined to events elsewhere in the system. They are out there listening, as combatants once listened for each other in the Battle of the Atlantic, for the stray oscillator hearbeat, the odd word spoken into a cellphone, the ground penetrating radar signature showing disturbed earth, or the reversed track of a vehicle that was once parked beside it.
But it is the human analysts who make it all work. The ones capable of understanding regional languages, who can recognize the significance of an event, tie things back to a pattern of signatures, emissions and trails. Technology has advanced a great deal since 1945. But the dark heart of man remains largely as it was. And defense rests largely on those traditional qualities: resource, mental agility and courage. It is ironic that human beings rise to their greatest heights in order to destroy or defend each other. The U-234 was sunk off Cape Cod as a torpedo target in 1947. But the memes that were held in her secret hold have escaped to join the evils of the world.
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Fascinating stuff. “The dog that did not bark.” F
The world came awefully close in the 1930s …
This reminds me of what Joy Davidman wrote:
And the genie won’t go back in the bottle will he?
For those who missed it the first time around: In 1945, “defeated” Japan had seven atomic bomb factories ready to go, lacking only fissionable material. When their IU 92
was sunk, delivery of the U235 fell to the German U234. I have seen U234 survivors interviewed on TV. They are to a man happy that their cargo did not get through.
“Battleground Atlantic” is the book to peruse on the submarine delivery plans. “Japan’s Secret War” details the science and technology of their nuke program.
Japan also had 8000-10000 combat-worthy aircraft stashed in various parts of their homeland. This does not include pure kamikaze planes. 3500 of the piston-engine variety were hidden at one unobserved airfield.
Their most probable course of action would have been to assault the blockading fleet with conventional kamikaze attacks and then mix a few nukes in. Then hit the landed troop concentrations with their version of the dirty bomb.
Any attacks on Honolulu, Los Angeles or San Francisco? Yes. Had aircraft strapped to
submarines. Doubt if said aircraft would have had purely conventional weapons.
It was one close race and Enola Gay won by half a nose, no more.
Even after losing their U235, even after Hiroshima, even after Nagasaki, no more than half of the Japanese power elite were willing to give up the flight.
There was a coup attempt to prevent the Emperor’s surrender speech from being broadcast and instead replace it with the orders to begin final fanatical defense of homeland.
Coup failed only because a diverted flight of B29s passed over Tokyo and caused a blackout in the one 20-minute time frame where said blackout could prevent that coup.
This story is detailed in “The Final Mission” which is also a History Channel film.
Of the bombers, 48 took off. Every one of them had near misses and close calls on their way. And every one of them made it home with 192 R3350s quitting for lack of fuel as they taxied in.
What do YOU think kept those evil spirits from running wild that night and doing even more damage to the world?
What do I think? Divine Navigation.
He does help those who help themselves. And that is why we came through in good shape after all.
In the silence of the ocean deeps
Her mines now stored ashore
The last of Hitler’s U-boats creeps
The U-234
With two enigmas now aboard
One for the messaged code
The other cased in lead and stored
Inside the precious load
Their destination the Far East
They never did arrive
For war in Europe had now ceased
While crew was still alive
Relieved, they turned their boat around
New Hampshire bound they were
With crated Swallows soon aground
Creating quite a stir
But think about it if you will
The U-234
Was just a boat, of course, but still
It could have been much more
Had Heisenberg been there the first
But no, he was too late
And 234 the flaring burst
Of U-238
Amit Green, Joy Davidman wasn’t too bright. You might read the wikipedia article on Steam turbine. You might want to notice the part where it says “about 80% of all electricity generation in the world is by use of steam turbines.” Davidman seems to think that steam is done, in favor of Petroleum and Nuclear. Not quite.
W,
I guess the enemy is watching our videos also, giving them the opportunity to “us the archives of video collected by the drones for later analysis.” Undoubtedly the Iranians have tons of our videos from Iraq and Afghanistan that they’ve recorded. I can only hope that our analysts are smarter than theirs.
Reminds me of Jonesy, the from Hunt for Red October.
Joy Davidman (1915-1960) is probably better known nowadays as the wife of C.S. Lewis than in her own right as a poet. Her untimely death from bone cancer led to Lewis’s writing his classic account of bereavement, A Grief Observed.
Walt from the Belmont Club roster
recounts (like a salty from Gloucester)
the tale of a boat and her crew
who sailed cubes of Uranium Two
Thirty Five (not the Two Three Eight foster).
Mr. PA Cat, sir, i wish to speculate that had Old Baldy and his fast marchers not been too exhausted to not misread the scribbled note from Marse Robert on The Second Day, y’all ass’d be eatin’ grits n ham gravy fer breakfust in the mawnin.
Utopia Parkway,
The entire story, not just the MASINT, reads like it inspired The Hunt for Red October, right down to seeking refuge in New Hampshire.
[last lines]
Captain Ramius: “… and the sea will grant each man new hope, as sleep brings dreams of home.” Christopher Columbus.
Jack Ryan: Welcome to the New World, Captain.
There are wheels within wheels in the world of unintended consequences. In conventionally powered naval operations;
weight equals fuel consumed,
fuel consumed equals operational range,
operational range equals combat effectiveness (1), also
fuel consumed equals ordnance storage capacity lost
lost ordnance storage equals lost combat capacity (2).
The pressure to reduce the weight and expense in ship design is intense. In this it probably resembles the engineering pressures felt in the automotive design industry. One way to reduce a ship’s weight is to replace the steel superstructure with one made of aluminum. Reducing the weight of the topside mass has the added advantage of lowering the ship’s center of gravity and making it a more stable platform. There is of course a problem. By placing two different metals next to each other in the presence of salt while moving through the water you have created an enormous battery. The ship literally generates electricity as it moves. In fact the transfer of electrons between the two metals creates a corrosion problem as the ship literally eats itself. Unfortunately this does not produce energy to perform useful work. The energy is emitted as radio signals telling God and the world “Here I am.” Grounding straps and sealants can reduce the problem.
So, by “share top-secret methods” with the Brits what Metz really means is “give them scarce equipment” they don’t have and refuse to spend money on. Equipment that we probably don’t exactly have a surplus of ourselves, so for every road in a British area covered by a drone, a road in an American area probably goes un checked. Not to mention those “serried ranks of human analysts” needed to make sense of what the drones find. Guess we need to “share” those with the Brits too. They have “the technology.” What they don’t have is the budget to build the equipment and staff the units.
I recall the Brits kicked Michael Yon out of his embed for reporting their shameful lack of regular old manned helicopters.
It really is a shame. The Brits have some great soldiers doing their damndest to make a contribution to this one last effort to civilize a part of the world that is headed for a nasty reconing otherwise, and their dipwit politicians back in Old Dreary won’t make supplying them with equipment a top priority. But what’s up with this three-star Metz getting on his soapbox and making such an undeserved charge? Does he think Gordon Brown has a bunch of factories lined up ready to start cranking out the drones if only the U-Boat can get through with the plans?
Would a portion of this MASINT capability include the capability to decipher local dialects from “foreign” accents, to distinguish a high-value target from a low-level Taliban? I wonder how far we can trust our linguists for these translations?
I have been involved in the periphery of Signals intelligence ( SIGINT). There was another discovery that the grease of the propeller also left a trail that could be tracked. Germans figured this out when they tried to figure out how we knew where their convoys were. The real reason was that Enigma was broken and we had broken their codes. However the German research led the US to change grease because it did leave a trail.
Montgomery refused to believe in the intelligence and had poor success. Rommel was suspicous of the codes broken and used couriers as much as possible.
AQ and Taliban use couriers as much as possible due to a lack of sophisticated systems. The report of a OTC software that tracked drones that the Taliban uses was interesting.
Necessity is the mother of invention. The Taliban and AQ has been hurt by drones and they have used man’s natural ingenuity to try to correct that deficiency.
Primitive or less sophisticated systems do work. The war between Russia and Georgia had that factor. Georgia had never centralized the links on the anti aircraft Sams systems and Russia had assumed that they were centrally controlled. When they hit the central control it did not take out the other sites and Russia lost planes.
Russia corrected by bombing all radar installations and the attacks on their planes stopped. Plus the US had entered Georgia with the C17 and Russia refused to use military planes when the US entered.
That was a classic bluff by GW Bush. He sent in a unarmed C17 and dared Russia to shoot it down. The Russia did not dare and retreated.Plus GW used the human shield by getting Sec of State in the capital of Georgia and other heads of states did the same. Russia did not dare attack the capital once those stakes were raised.
It was an interesting use of power. GW managed to stop the Russian advance by raising the stakes. GW Bush is a noted poker player and he used that talent to circumvent the Russia invasion.
So all war is still managed by the human equation. We can adapt quickly without massive reprogramming. When we develop systems and beauracracies they are less able to change quickly.
The superior capability of the human was demonstrated in 9/11 and 12/25/2009.
The attack on the US Capital failed since the passengers were able to process the information that we were under attack and accepted that their plane was used for a weapon and decided to deny that weapon to the enemy in Shankesville PA.
The same thing happen on 12/25/2009 when a passenger decided the bomber was trying to kill the plane and passengers and reacted by jumping him and putting out the fire.
Human intelligence was able to grasp a new threat and come up with a plan to counter that threat.
Information overload is a problem but all of us can see the red flags on the underwear bomber. Nigerian was in Yemen , no luggage and one way trip paid with cash. Add in the warning from father and it was slam dunk that the bomber meant no good.
The example where databases and the systems did work was the capture in NY of suspects terrorists from a common car accident. The drivers were on a list and were detected rather than slip through.
There is massive publicity from failures but not from successes.
Information overload is managed by filters. Just as a human filters information as to what to pay attention to and what to ignore from all the information comes in. The same happens with intelligence overload to see patterns and filter out the garbage.
Sometimes that leads to important details being ignored and better filters are designed. We learn from failure rarely from success.
Pattern Recognition. It is the ultimate human talent to detect a pattern from dispersed and seemingly unrelated data streams that lead us forward across a wide array of knowledge fronts. That war makes it a more intense effort is an obvious necessity.
It is possible to have machine assistance, most notably in its ability to remove known patterns by whatever algorythym works. Even then, however, a human needs to review the machines work to find the ruse hidden by the known pattern.
The hard part is to avoid the boredom.
Veery interesting, says I.
The VC could track an American patrol in the Vietnamese jungle by simply using their noses. The US Army issued mosquito repelent had a unique “smell signature” . A patrol or larger force would “radiate” a cloud of repelent as the grunts sweated their way through the “bush”. SMELLINT works a lot like MASINT does whereby the “sniffers” are tuning to detect RF while also looking for front and side lobe signal levels that indicate direction. The drones are an ideal platform for sniffers as the pilot can triangulate a signal source by direction and intensity. The technology must be to the point where we can simply target a signal based on a set of characteristics (signal strenght, direction, frequency, and voice recognition (for phone links) defined by computerized SIGINT. Since there’s not a lot of MASINT radiation coming out of the Afgani countryside, listening on conventional frequencies(HF, VHF and UHF)would seem to be fairly sufficient for tracking the rag heads. What’s Amhed likely to have out there ? A radio, GPS or an iPod? Not much else.
…or the could have a Stinger which would definetly radiate RF.
One of the often unnoticed effects of MASINT is that it affects not only how you do your operations but how the enemy does his.
In order to detect Allied radar the Germans equipped their U-boats with Metaxa receivers, supposedly tuned to the radar frequencies. But the Germans did not appreciate Allied advances in microwave radar and when Metaxa – made by a French factory – did not give adequate warning, U-boat captains concluded that emissions from the sets were leading the Allies to them and refused to turn them on.
RAF Bomber Command crews became convinced that their IFF sets could jam German radar. That was totally untrue, but jammer buttons were added to the IFF sets to placate the crews.
But what was happening was that the H2S radar emissions for RAF bombers served as such a fine source of tracking signals that the Germans practically did not need radar to perform intercepts. They could have knocked down far more RAF bombers if they had equipped all of their day fighters with H2S homing receivers and sent them up at night but they did that with only trivial numbers of fighters.
Meanwhile, the RAF captured a German night fighter (something they seemed to do with impressive regularity, and usually just in the nick of time, too) and figured out how to home in on German night fighter IFF. Some German scientists became suspicious that this was occurring but the Luftwaffe refused to listen to them.
I think the next level of MASINT would be figuring out how the enemy is reacting to your analyses and then amplifying their own misconceptions.
Siggy,
Yes I remember smelligence. IIRC one of the responses was shakigence; we dropped small probes, made to look like plants, along known trails, that detected the vibration of foot steps. Kind of a land based sonobouy.
Now, I know we can build fake rocks.
…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdQ9jh5GvQ8
“…the key to extracting information it may turn out, isn’t some whiz-bang machine but people.” –Wretchard
I think Wrechard is correct. It’s probably just a collection of facts that allows the US to find buried bombs.
I would guess recorded visual surveillance by drones plays a role. Maybe some mineral exploration type of equipment is used to probe the soil. It’s possible that high amount of explosives or high amounts of nitrates gives-off a signature.
It just takes a dedicated bunch of analysis to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together. If there is some secret device I would bet the NYT would have leaked it by now.
As for the British bitching about not finding hidden bombs they should first find all of jihad bomb makers in the UK before complaining. They have got a basket full on their own soil.
Also, they should not allow their navy personnel to be captured by the Iranians. It poses a security risk. When they clear those problems up maybe we should give them some sensitive intel.
Lieut-Gen Metz has urged the Pentagon to share top-secret methods used by US forces to detect the so-called Improvised Explosive Devices and the terror networks which build them.
He also requested that American forces share the “cold pills” that they take so they do not get too hot in their gear.
Meanwhile, speaking of lo-tech, from the Independent in the UK:
Taliban fighters have developed a deadly new generation of their most lethal weapon, the improvised explosive device, or IED, which is almost undetectable because it has no metal or electronic parts, military experts said last week.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/taliban-make-undetectable-bombs-out-of-wood-1863353.html
Sorry for OT but the following from the book “Muslim Mafia” by Gaubatz and Sperry is scary!
Chapter 11 “We will focus on influencing congressman responsible for policy that directly impacts the American Muslim community-for example, congressmen on the judiciary, intelligence, and homeland security committees.” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) 2007-2008 Strategic Plan
We need to pay attention to what is happening in this country by the Muslim Brotherhood which CAIR was founded and is allied. The muslim fifth column has arrived and is operating throughout our national, state and local govt including our FBI, State and local police. This book will open your eyes to the problem we face in this country.
Utopia Parkway:
Steam turbines do not exist in some vacuum; steam is raised by burning something: coal, oil, natural gas, or atoms. That 80% figure *includes* nuclear plants, by definition.
The other 20% is hydroelectric (with nugatory contributions from geothermal, solar, and wind).
“In fact, we were the first to defend Western civilization against the attacks of Muslim fanatics.”
“It is true that Soviet troops committed serious errors in Afghanistan. We had no teachers.” http://bit.ly/7693EO
“As people in the West count the coffins of NATO soldiers from Afghanistan, let them not forget to include the coffins of Americans and Europeans who were killed by Taliban heroin in their own countries”
from Boris Gromov, governor of the Moscow region, commanded the 40th Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Dmitry Rogozin is Russia’s ambassador to NATO.
(via Dangerrroom)
.
“Does he think Gordon Brown has a bunch of factories lined up ready to start cranking out the drones if only the U-Boat can get through with the plans?”
For several years now the Brits have been developing a UAV system based on the Israeli Hermes 450 called Watchkeeper”. It will be a work of art when it is finally deployed but the Brits, methodical as they are, aren’t racing towards the finish line.
“It’s probably just a collection of facts that allows the US to find buried bombs.”
Multispectral imaging works pretty good too. Especially IR. Distrurbed earth kicks out a pretty noticicble signature.
Humans have the ability for pattern recognition. The primary expertise in discovering IEDs from the ground was from the soldiers that were able to pick up on freshly disturbed dirt or out of place debris. The best are people who hunted and are outdoor types rather than the gamers.
Women were the best in code breaking during WWII and it was boring work but they did manage to see the patterns and break the codes.
Once we developing the recognition patterns then we can program computers, but it is the human that detects a variance when the pattern changes not a computer.
McIntrye who was dogged in getting to the truth in Climate gate is a statistical analysis and he saw a pattern he was familiar from stock fraud. That is what sparked his curiousness, he recognized a pattern. He then used the tools of his trade to check his recognition. He debunked the hockey stick, It all started from pattern recognition.
I think project ‘Able Danger’ would quality as MASINT. This data mining program identified and had pictures of some of the leaders of the 9/11 attacks before 9/11. Turf wars, the Gorelick Wall and pre-9/11 politics suppressed the transfer of this information to the FBI and ultimately the program was stopped and suppressed. Now of course we have the terrorist attacks at Ft Hood and in Detroit.
None are so blind as those who choose not to see.
Dave
“What do I think? Divine Navigation.
He does help those who help themselves. And that is why we came through in good shape after all.”
Damn, your sounding more like my Mama every day. Do you also believe in reincarnation?
Just a fleeting thought.
She only had a third grade education but was the most gifted, informed and kind persons to ever grace this good earth.
Of course I’m very partial to her and proud of it. I regret every day that my grand kids never knew her.
Papa Ray
10-15 years ago I worked on a prototype mine sweeping vehicle that had an array of coils that could detect a single firing pin backed up by a neutron backscatter array that could detect nitrogenous material. It created a waterfall plot display and had a paint jet array that would mark everything that it passed over. Parking lot tests showed that it could pick up a paper clip or any amount explosive. Sadly during a fly off against our competitors a Colonel who didn’t want us to win the contract blew it up with 60lbs of HE under the axle. It was enough to send the vehicle 45 feet as it tumbled through the air.
The Achilles heel of Us intelligence is lack of language skills. There is not enough people knowing Arabic, Farsi or Pushtu even for translator job, much less for field operative jobs. But Brits once were able to use military officers capable fluently speak several Arabic dialects, even impostor themselves as Arabs. Colonel Lawrence of Arabia was not an isolated episode, there were dozens others with comparable successes.
off topic – but the phrase “pattern recognition” reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the book of the same name by William Gibson:
[W]e have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. … We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.
—Hubertus Bigend, Pattern Recognition, pages 58–59.
Bombs made of wood, eh? What’s next, the infamous bomb made of straw?
Giving up metal and the damage value of shrapnel requires a much greater initial blast to do an equivalent amount of damage, which means a bigger hole in the ground. It’s not “undetectable” if there’s a big pile of fresh dirt in the middle of the road. If it was me doing the planning, I would have stuck with the metal parts and just strewed a dump truck load of nuts and bolts on the road for half mile on either side of the real deal.
but I suppose that I shouldn’t be giving them ideas.
They are out there listening…for the ground penetrating radar signature showing disturbed earth, or the reversed track of a vehicle that was once parked beside it.
Perhaps I’m simplifying matters, but couldn’t the enemy rather easily nullify the advantages gained by this intelligence merely by digging a bunch of empty holes and by driving their vehicles back and forth over BFE, such that we could no longer tell the real threats from the dummies? Spraying some cheaply available nitrate base up and down the embattled roads would overwhelm the sniffers, too.
From the dugouts of conservative talk radio to the doyens of the real intelligence community, much has been made lately of the terrorists’ ability to induce paralysis in the machinery of American society simply by prompting us to overpolice ourselves in response to the odd pantybomber. By collecting so much intelligence via drones, it seems like we have given the terrorists a massive information “tail” with which to wag our strategic “dog” – something they already know how to exploit (especially given the prevalence on our part of the precautionary principle, which mandates that we treat every apparent threat as serious).
W,
Very good thread. I especially enjoyed your conclusion:
Technology has advanced a great deal since 1945. But the dark heart of man remains largely as it was. And defense rests largely on those traditional qualities: resource, mental agility and courage. It is ironic that human beings rise to their greatest heights in order to destroy or defend each other. The U-234 was sunk off Cape Cod as a torpedo target in 1947. But the memes that were held in her secret hold have escaped to join the evils of the world.
W, great thread. I especially enjoyed your conclusion:
“Technology has advanced a great deal since 1945. But the dark heart of man remains largely as it was. And defense rests largely on those traditional qualities: resource, mental agility and courage. It is ironic that human beings rise to their greatest heights in order to destroy or defend each other. The U-234 was sunk off Cape Cod as a torpedo target in 1947. But the memes that were held in her secret hold have escaped to join the evils of the world.”
Time for a morning interlude away from today and to find a lesson from yesteryear.
You can decide what that lesson is.
From a guy that I knew back in the day and who was a exceptional man among other exceptional men (I don’t include myself as I was always scared shitless).
“I’m OK, but, you know, you’ve been shot.”
Remember now…this is not fiction.
Papa Ray
I also believe that the techniques that pin-pointed and broke the Soviet and atomic spies in the United States amounted to MASINT.
In the more traditional Spy vs Spy arena, we were beaten by the KGB at many levels. Philby being a major example.
The anti-IED campaign in Iraq, has been a major unheralded victory. Thousands of IED makers and planters have been killed. These skills and personnel are being transitioned to Afghanistan and this plus our battle-tested generals and troops give reason for optimism.
#20 Teresita:
Your UK Independent reporter is both ignorant and too lazy to bother with a google search.
The Taliban is doing something that the Germans did in WW2:
http://www.efour4ever.com/mines_german.htm
Fragmenting AP Mines: The Schu or Shu-Mine is a small wood box fragmentation mine. It measures six-inch by six-inch and contains a detonator and a solid charge. Another name or spelling of this mine is “Shoe Mine” or “Shoe Box ” mine. The “Shoe Box” was a favorite among the Germans. Small in size and constructed primary of wood, the Schu is next to impossible to discover with a normal metal mine detector. It seldom kills instead the sinister device mutilates the unfortunate victim.
and the Russians copied the German mine after WW2:
http://www.nolandmines.com/PMD6.htm
The PMD-6 is a rectangular wooden anti-personnel blast mine sometimes called the “Shoe-box” mine. It has been found in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Honduras, Iraq, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Western Sahara, Yemen and Zimbabwe. Relatively easy to manufacture locally, its dimensions and colour may vary. It is usually either unpainted wood or olive green in colour.
Height: 65mm
Length: 190mm
Width: 90mm
Main charge: 200g TNT
Fuze: the fuse is usually an MUV type deployed so that pressure on the lid of the box pushes out the pin. The detonator is usually a stab-sensitive MD-2.
The Taliban is simply putting more explosives in the wooden box.
3. Dave:
“For those who missed it the first time around: In 1945, “defeated” Japan had seven atomic bomb factories ready to go, lacking only fissionable material.”
Japan hardly had 7 buildings left standing in 1945, let alone factories. “Ready to go”??? Is a car with an empty petrol tank ready to go?
“Japan also had 8000-10000 combat-worthy aircraft stashed in various parts of their homeland. This does not include pure kamikaze planes. 3500 of the piston-engine variety were hidden at one unobserved airfield.”
What a bunch of bullshit. They had no place left to hide airplanes, no pilots to fly them. Is there anybody stupid enough to believe that there was one virgin Jap airbase left and that there were 3,500 planes on it. That is idiot stuff.
We had firebombed their cities, destroyed their factories, sunk their navy and their merchant ships, mined their harbors and you reckon they had thousands of planes sitting around doing nothing while we pounded them back into the stone age?
Good grief, man.
Get a grip.
My guess would be that those government workers being overwhelmed with the photo product are working at NGA the follow on to NPIC.
Ms. T ..yeah you guessed it , they have a website! Enjoy.
The National Photographic Interpretation Center, whose functions have since been absorbed into the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), was formerly a component of the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T). NPIC produced imagery interpretation reports, briefing boards, videotapes for national-level consumers, and provided support for the military.
http://www.fas.org/irp/overhead/npic.htm
https://www1.nga.mil/Pages/Default.aspx
Have a nice day.
38. Robinsolana
“The anti-IED campaign in Iraq, has been a major unheralded victory. Thousands of IED makers and planters have been killed.”
There was an interesting little aside in an article about a recent successful IED attack.
After the event they found that the cell phone detonating device had been put on a long extension lead from the actual IED getting it outside the range of the convoy’s jammer.
The innovation never ends.
Mongo BL Santamaria
BUDDY, IS THAT YOU? If it isn’t, somebody is stealing your limerick. Speaking of Gettysburg, many years ago, while still single, I lived in the second floor front apartment of a house that the City of Philadelphia gave to a native son, General George Gordon Meade, for winning the battle. The good general died many years later, peacefully and in his sleep, in the bedroom that one day became my living room. I talked to General Meade on several occasions, and asked him about the battle. He said he had it all the way. I wrote a short story of one such encounter and dedicated it to my next door neighbor. The title was, GENERAL MEADE AND THE FABULOUS SWEDE. Which tells you all you need to know. Ah, the day will never be recovered, but the memories will never die.
Walt
Perhaps the reason we didn’t share the technology with the Brits that Lieut-Gen Metz wants us to is that nobamas people still haven’t figured much out. I mean they did give PM Brown a DVD that wasn’t regioned for the UK.
Or it could be that just as our recently lost CIA people, who thought they were dealing with a friendly , were in fact being duped. Maybe, just maybe, our intel is too valuable to share at this time because we may know of some breach in the Brits system…who knows? I guess I’ll have to wait for my next issue of Soldier of Fortune to find out.
The anti-IED effort in Iraq was successful. That’s the bottom line. This was a multi-billion dollar effort and thousands of IED planters and makers were killed. It was a fusion of data and an exploitation of MASINT. There was no magic bullet. It took an adaptive campaign. Now all that moves to Afghanistan.
But that is all tactics.
The real issue is politics and political will.
Will our winning generals and courageous troops be allowed to win in Afghanistan?
For 7 years, our bumbling CIA and TSA somehow kept us safe. Now, things have changed and we have had 2 terrorist attacks and 40 killed and wounded in Texas.
What has changed?
Will new scanners or diaper powder fix it?
“but couldn’t the enemy rather easily nullify the advantages gained by this intelligence merely by digging a bunch of empty holes”
This would be precisely what we’d want because we could detect and neutralize these threats easier so it works both ways. The successful technician will dig one hole and hope not to be detected. His chances are better this way.
43. Walt
Too cool. I am a Civil War buff and have walked Gettysburg’s Battlefield four times and spent countless hours studying that war.
How fortunate for you to have been so close to that history. Meade did it all right for those four days.
I am currently finishing Rebel Raider, the life of General John Hunt Morgan, CSA Cavalry of whom I am a direct decendent.
Terrible war but the outcome was inevitible.
Best,
Habu
Bob Murphy #40:
Oh, Japan had a lot more than 7 buildings standing in 1945, but in any case their nuclear bomb project was moved to Korea sometime before that. Japan did not make the same error in theory that the Germans did and essentially duplicated the Manhatten Project in concept if not in successful practice. They did not lack fissionable material but simply screwed up the industrial processes required to refine it.
As for aircraft suitable for Kamikaze missions, I think they had more than 10,000, counting trainers a and purpose-built wooden sucide planes. I have a book that shows acres of Japanese aircraft we captured on the mainland after the war, and those don’t count the ones hidden in caves and forests.
Habu,
We gave them all the details in a PowerPoint deck. Unfortunatley, it was in Office 2007 format, and the Brits haven’t paid for the upgrade yet.
The anti-IED campaign in Iraq, has been a major unheralded victory. Thousands of IED makers and planters have been killed.
Um, is any of this true?
I mean, sure, we’ve killed some planters, who were mostly guys earning a hundred bucks for doing so. But aren’t most of the makers of the good IEDs, the shaped charge version, still going home to their burkas every night, in Iran?
We developed various technical means, but I thought it was mostly the overall “peace” in Iraq that slowed the IED placements and success.
Might be that the anti-IED movements in Iraq happened under Bush under ROE that allowed more direct action, than under the Obamanation in Afghanistan. But there’s little secret about how *that* works.
WRT to IED info. I read the other day that the Brits problems with Israel means they get no Israeli data on IEDs.
Japan is the size of California on the map but is three-quarters rather steeply mountainous. if you ironed it out flat it’d be what, three times as big on the map? I don’t mean to be contentious, but if i had to guess i’d bet General LeMay and company overflew well enough to know what was below, maybe a quarter of it.
Walt, yep, it’s me, thanks for recognizing the lyrical style (har har). The site still won’t tolerate my name so i picked the character from “Blazing Saddles” for some reason. That Gen’l Meade story is a doozy –what are the odds? I was joshing PA Cat, as he is a known defender of the relative prowess of Mr. Lincoln’s army. It is said that the general received written notice of his appointment to command via courier in the dead of night, and assumed before reading the slip of paper that it was notice of his arrest and court martial for his performance in the prior campaign. Instead it was a promotion to Commanding General of the Army of the Potomac –quite a switcheroo for your future roomie! Anyhoo, it’s a good thing your forbears weren’t born further south, as you’d have had to room in France and write MARTIAL PETAIN AND THE FABULOUS DANE
Habu/47
I too am a Civil War buff, and have just started re-reading my complete Bruce Catton series that I haven’t read in 40 years. Just bought John Keegan’s Civil War that I am looking forward to reading. A fascinating period. One of my favorite might have beens occurred during the Battle of Chickamauga, where a Union regiment of mounted infantry, armed with repeating rifles, was assigned to guard the fords in the rear. As the Confederate tide rolled up the Union right the officer commanding the mounted infantry was about to order his men to take the Rebs in the rear, when a staff officer galloped up and ordered him to get his men to Thomas’s HQ. What might have happened if that staff officer had not shown up? What would have happened to the history of warfare if that Union regiment had fallen on the Confederate rear? Think about it. Mounted infantry equipped with automatic weapons. In 1863!
Walt
Buddy/52
That lyrical style of yours would be recognizable in the dark. I thought you picked Santamaria because your Swedish forbear sailed with the Navigator in 1492 and jumped ship in Hispaniola.
Walt
Bob Murphy,
Don’t know where you’re getting your facts from, but you should find another source. The Japanese were just getting going with the kamikaze effort. We hadn’t seen anything close to their full capability.
Teaching a pilot to fly a kamikaze was very simple (you should know that after 9/11). It’s not hard to teach someone how to takeoff, and perform very simple navigation.
49. JMH:
Many thanks for the update.
( I did enjoy taking a cheap political shot at POTUS though)
53. Walt
It was a facinating war and Mr. Catton and Mr. D.S Freeman have written some great stuff as have many other fine writers.
I have Shelby Foote’s Gettysburg and Vicksburg orals and just his voice is magic.
I’ve managed to study and tour many of the main battlefields and it must have been horrid. The repeater was a real “load on Sunday and shoot all week” weapon.
What I can’t figure out is why Custer at Little Big Horn didn’t have repeaters but the Indians did. If you ever get to eastern Montana it’s a battlefield worth seeing.
Best,
Habu
That Devil Forrest is a great read, written cotemporaneously during his time.
Walt/53; one more off thread and i’ll quit, but got to say, that Henry Repeating Rifle in the hands of the 500 strong brigade of none other than George Armstrong (“Headstrong”) Custer blocked –mounted vs mounted –an attempt by J.E.B Stuart’s 5000 strong division to hit the rear of the union line with a cavalry charge timed to arrive just as Pickett’s Charge hit that line in front. a little-known action but very significant, as without the Henry the line may have broken, with consequences blue sky from there.
Habu/47; re “inevitable outcome” –not so. had Sherman been held outside Atlanta (and without a spate of extraordinarily subpar Confederate generalship in the defense, he could well have been), McClelland wins the 1864 election on a peace platform, and soon ratifies the secession.
Mongo BL Santamaria,
Hope all is well.
I’m currently mapping my trip to Montana. We need to once again call on Mr. W to see if he will pass one of us our email address.
I’d enjoy meeting you after sharing the pages for what 5-6 + years….I’ll even bring all my back issues of SOF! Nope they won’t fit in the 350Z … heck I barely fit in the Z.
And ya know MongoBL Texas is really a great place to live …. A few weeks ago when in Montana I was reinforced in my thoughts of retaing a second home here in FL or moving to Arizona in the winter…
Habu
RWE: According to Paul Tibbets, six of their cyclotrons were still in mainland Japan, were found and sunk. The seventh was the one in Wonsan, which certainly was the most advanced of their facilities.
And while the Rosenbergs et al were guilty as unmitigated sin, they were not very effective. Joe Stalin got his bomb out of that Wonsan place.
Bob Murphy: Are you now standing properly corrected?
The other thing about the last mission (which was out there to bomb a refinery that was still operating fulll blast);
The Emperor did not go on the air to braodcast his message. Instead he made recordings stored in the Palace overnight.
The coup was to seize those recordings and hold the Emepror hostage.
The Japanese Diplomatic Corps told the Swiss
to please pass the word about the message. They did, BUT in the passing, something got lost. So when Harry Truman went on the air and announced that Japan had already surrendered, he was 12-16 hours premature.
So remember all the wild rejoicing that went on? It could have been rudely interrupted.
And try to imagine the American reaction.
There might not be much of a Japanese race left today—–here or there. The consequences of that would be very destructive of us, no matter how understandable the 1945 reaction would have been.
Remember that those B29s made it over Tokyo unplanned and in the precise twenty minutes that their arrival could keep the coup from succeeding.
I say again: Divine Navigation. (Accruing to those who had proven themselves worthy.)
Civil War Buffs, I live on the banks of the Rapahannock in Fredricksburg, VA. It is only 35 miles along what used to be called the Germanna Plank Rd (now state rt 3, paralell to the river) from Fred to Culpepper. It is a good three week vacation just to understand what the line of the Rappahannock meant.
I suggest spring, when the azalea’s are in bloom.
Buddy
Martial Petain was really martial in WW1, but 20 years later he was just able to sugar strawberries, though in choosing him the new authorities were sure that France wouldn’t revolt against such a (former) valorous warrior, though he managed that no french army were enrolled into wehrmacht, only volontaries could, but very few comparing to the other occupied european countries (ie Holland, Danemark, Norway, hungarish, Ukranians, Italians, spanish…)
Walt, I think you’re talking about Wilder’s brigade. Wilder personally signed for a bank loan so that his men could all carry new 7 shot Spencer rifles, and it made his unit one of the best in the war. (Many Union staff officers at the time didn’t like the idea of repeating weapons since they thought it would just make the soldiers waste bullets.) Rosecrans was an idiot and never had any idea of how to make use of Wilder and his men.
I’ve been to the battlefield, like all battlefields it’s a fascinating walk. I could easily feel why Thomas made his stand where he did on the end of that second day, on the top of three small hills where the surging confederates were funnelled into deep ravines subject to intense crossfire.
One of my ancestors was the Colonel in command of the 21st Wisconsin, taken prisoner when his unit was overrun on the 2nd day of Chickamauga. A few months later he became one of the leaders of the famous Libby jailbreak in Richmond, a legendary tale.
57) Habu,
“What I can’t figure out is why Custer at Little Big Horn didn’t have repeaters but the Indians did.”
About a year ago I read “American Rifle – A Biography”, which traces the developemnt of the rifle and it’s role in American history, particularly the military. It goes into the above issue – basically a combination of bureacracy, expense, and a struggle between the single-shot and repeater camps. (Overall it’s a pretty good book, probably worked too hard at drawing parallels between development of rifles and the psyche of the American populace.)
wws/63
You are correct. Wilders it was. Thanks for the memory jog. I toured Chicksmauga battlefield several years ago, in the Fall, so the battlefield looked much as it did in 1863, and the wonder of it is how anyone could have fought in such heavily wooded terrain where units could not have had much idea of what was happening 50 yards away. The southern states do a great job maintaining the battlefields. As to Habu’s previous remark that the outcome was inevitable, I believe it was not. The South lost the war in September 1862 when Johnston was mortally wounded during the Seven Days and Davis plucked Lee out of the Richmond office and gave him command of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee was an aggressive genius, and had he not been in command the South might well have played a defensive war in depth. Had they done so they probably would have secured their independence, to the detriment of us all.
Josh – “sure, we’ve killed some planters, who were mostly guys earning a hundred bucks for doing so”
What do you suppose you do after you spot some guy planting an IED? Well, after warning coalition forces of the deed, you follow him home, and later, pay him “the ol’ surprise visit”. After that you ply him with biscuits and tea and hope that he rats out his network peers.
I toured Chickamauga again last spring, and the Visitor’s center contained a nice hidden suprise that you would never imagine being stuck out in the Georgia woods. In a large, temperature controlled room is a display (on loan from the national collection) of a working original model of *every* rifle ever used militarily on the north american continent, starting with a 1599 arquebus. About 500 rifles, iirc, and a host of one-offs, specimen types, and experimentals from the various manufacturers. Amazing how many different types of repeating fire designs were tried in the 19th century before a reliable design was found. ALmost every European design is there as well, since most of those ended up being carried here.
Gotta be the most complete collection in the country.
Speaking of the Civil War, can’t seem to find an answer, but does anyone know why so many Civil War battles were fought in National Parks? There has to be a reason!
Quelle,
Because of the bathroom facilities. That way they didn’t have to dig latrine trenches.
68. Quelle
It was a set up so Teddy Roosevelt would have something to do ….. he was a prodigious man.
Ok, a bit of defense of my statement that the outcome was preordained in the Civil War.
The South had no manufacturing for heavy weapons of any note, Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond the exception. They did not have much , if any support from the outside world.
No less than Shelby Foote stated that the North fought the entire war with one hand tied behaind it’s back , which was basically true.
The “help ” the South was counting on was to come from England where several towns had sponsored statements that a cessation of the fighting should take place …those sentiments due to slavery never moved forward.
Yes , had Lee won at Gettysburg and Grant failed at Vicksburg the picture would have changed but history is overloaded with BUTS.
The South was not prepared for war and had not the means to sustain any offensive campaigns. They relied almost solely on fighting a defensive war in hopes that the North would tire of the war and let the South go. Lincoln didn’t buy it and with his reelection finally unleashed Grant and Sherman and a “no quarter” philosophy.
Finally the South, wanting a Confederacy was actually fighting political wars between each of the southern states to maintain their rights. They had no control over Gov. Brown of Ga. and several others. Yes Jefferson Davis was the titular president of an internally divided confederacy determined to remain so
There are many other reasons however the eventual outcome was, as I have stated preordained by the lack of both men and material to fight a war, particularly when you’re pushing a coffle of slaves. Heck even Russia by this time had freed the serfs.
The South fought magnificently and had the best generals. They had guts and courage. What the didn’t have was a cohesive group.
I say this as someone whose entire family comes from Ala. TN., GA. and the south supporters of Kentucky.
They could not have won without a strong ally from the outset and they had none.
What do you suppose you do after you spot some guy planting an IED? Well, after warning coalition forces of the deed, you follow him home, and later, pay him “the ol’ surprise visit”. After that you ply him with biscuits and tea and hope that he rats out his network peers.
I dunno, might try that on occassion but more commonly, if he’s spotted from a predator, I suspect his piehole becomes nonfunctional and the biscuits thing would be inappropriate.
#60 Dave,
>And try to imagine the American reaction.
>
>There might not be much of a Japanese race
>left today—–here or there. The consequences
>of that would be very destructive of us, no
>matter how understandable the 1945 reaction
>would have been.
The Imperial General Headquarters had planned to sequester the Emperor effective upon the British amphibious assault on southwestern Malaya, which the British planned for late September 1945.
That would also have been when the orders would have gone out to massacre all Allied POW’s, interned civilians, and any other Allied civilians Japanese forces could catch in China and all of Southeast Asia (Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, any Phillipine islands still held by the Japanese, etc.).
Check out the reference to Field Marshal Terauchi (CinC of the Japanese army group – Southern Group of Armies) in the index (page 573) of George Feifer’s Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb.
Allied signals intelligence (MAGIC) intercepted and decoded the late July 1945 order from Imperial GHQ to Terauchi to prepare for this.
The Imperial Japanese Army was every bit as evil as the Nazi SS, and more lethal. They’d probably have killed at least an additional 50 million people, more than had died in all of World War Two to that point, before Allied armies could eliminate Japanese forces overseas.
The horror would not have stopped there. An estimated ONE THIRD of the Japanese people (25-30 million) would have died of starvation, disease, poison gas and conventional weapons during a prolonged ground conquest of Japan.
See:
The Most Deadly Plan, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Proceeding of the US Naval Institute, January 1998 edition, pp 79-81
and
“Gassing Japan”, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, MHQ: the Quarterly Journal of Military History, vol 10 no 1 (Autumn 1997), pp 38-43.
Allen and Polmar ran across references to a plan to gas Japan and put in a FOIA request. Eventually they got a copy of a document labeled “A Study of the Possible Use of Toxic Gas in Operation Olympic.” The word “Retaliatory” was PENCILED in between “possible” and “use.”
Apparently there were only five of these documents circulated during WW2. After the war in 1947, the document was requested by the Chemical Corps for historical study. In an attempt to “Redact” history, another document was issued to change all the copies to emphasis “Retaliatory” rather than the reality of the US planning to use it offensively in support of the invasion of Japan.
The “Retaliatory” plan called for US heavy bombers to drop 56,583 tons of gas in the 15 days before the invasion of Kyushu than another 23,935 tons every 30 days after that, and that was just the STRATEGIC bombing campaign.
Tactical air support was in addition to that.
The ground weapons would contribute and additional 1,400 tons of gas shells and there was 8,000 tons on invasion ships.
By way of reference, In shelling Okinawa, 126 4.2 inch mortars on US Navy landing craft fired 28,000 4.2 inch mortar shells in one hour. Since the 4.2 inch mortar shell was the primary gas weapon of the CWS, that represents 400 tons of shells with 98 tons of lethal gas.
At the time of the invasion, 144,762 tons of gas shell munitions were available to the USA for the invasion.
Another 9,356 tons would arrive every 30 days after the invasion.
Chemical Corps casualty estimates for this attack plan were 5 million dead with another 5 million casualties.
Ultimately, it looks like the plan was not approved, but prepared for by General Marshall, since the gas to implement the plan was sent to the Pacific in very scarce shipping space, likely as a back up to the A-bomb.
The US Army Chemical Warfare Service was planning using captured stocks of German chemical weapons and it had transported many of those stocks to the USA. It was in the process of placing many of those chemical agents in US weapons as the war ended.
See:
http://www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/published_volumes/chemwarfare/CHAP2_Pg_09-76.pdf
According to Allen and Polmar, the June 18, 1945 meeting where Harry Truman was briefed on Operation Downfall, the over all plan to invade Japan, by Adm King, Gen Marshall and the rest of the Joint Chiefs was when the topic was broached.
We know now that the decision to drop the atomic bomb was made then, although the notes for the meeting only referred to “undisclosed topics.”
This was our backup to nuking Japan into surrender. If the A-bombs didn’t work, the US military wase going to gas the Japanese people from the air like bugs, and keep doing so until Japanese resistance ended or all the Japanese were dead.
Thank God for the atom bomb – killing 150,000 – 200,000 Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved 75-80 million lives.
64. exhelodrvr
Thanks for the heads up on the book. It sounds like one I’d enjoy.
I saw a PBS (I think) program several years ago about the LBH battle and the anthropologists made all kinds of interesting discoveries regarding the calibers the Native-American-Redskin-heathen-murdering la la …had at the battle. It was a real stew but many of their long rifles were repeaters…not to be confused with the repeaters around the campfire in Blazing Saddles.
#40 Bob Murphy:
There appear to have been two Japanese equivalents to the Manhattan Project. The one based in the Home Islands was about as screwed up as current American defense procurement, between the politics and academic idiocy. However there have been reports of a second program being run in North Korea by the zaibatsu who really ran the economy of the Japanese colony/slave state of Korea. I offer as indicative, but not probative the book:
“Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb”
by Robert K. Wilcox
ISBN-10: 156924815X
ISBN-13: 9781569248157
It seems that the 6 major hydroelectric plants in the rivers of North Korea may have been built by the Japanese zaibatsu for the same reasons that we built those on the Columbia River, to provide power for isotope separators. When we had our brief excursion to the area in the early 1950′s, there were further reports of the discovery of large, underground industrial complexes. Our attention was forcefully redirected to the activities of the Chinese Army in the vicinity of the Chosin Reservoir and hydro plant within days, and the reports were just filed.
Finally, there are what purport to be debriefings and eyewitness reports of what may have been a nuclear test on a small island off of the port of Hamhung on August 12, 1945 under the code name “genzai bakudan” [greatest fighter]. This was after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and before VJ day on August 15.
That last is subject to confirmation, but one could conceive of the possibility of Japan refining enough U-235 for one device. An examination of the islands off of Hamhung someday may reveal the truth of it, as even if it was a squib, it would leave signs.
I view us as possibly having won a race by a few months. If they had been faster, even one or two nuclear armed kamikazes would have been disasterous.
Of course YMMV.
#9 LoTM
There is of course a problem. By placing two different metals next to each other in the presence of salt while moving through the water you have created an enormous battery. The ship literally generates electricity as it moves. In fact the transfer of electrons between the two metals creates a corrosion problem as the ship literally eats itself. Unfortunately this does not produce energy to perform useful work. The energy is emitted as radio signals telling God and the world “Here I am.” Grounding straps and sealants can reduce the problem.
I knew of the corrosion problem, and also the damage control problem caused by the fact that the aluminum superstructure burns quite enthusiastically, but I had not heard of the RF radiation. Is there anything open source on this?
#57 Habu
What I can’t figure out is why Custer at Little Big Horn didn’t have repeaters but the Indians did. If you ever get to eastern Montana it’s a battlefield worth seeing.
Little Big Horn is definitely worth the visit. We made an unscheduled stop while passing through when I saw the sign for the town of Garryowen, and just had to stop.
As far as the reason for the arming of the 7th Cav. with single shot Springfield M1873 Trapdoor Carbines in .45-70 caliber; the Army had always been reticent to increase the firepower of the individual soldier because they were afraid of the logistical burden. They were afraid it would cost too much if the soldiers could do rapid fire, and that they would have supply problems.
As an example, I do living history, Co ‘I’, First US Dragoons [later became 1st Cav.] They were originally [1833] equipped with the most modern long gun issued by anyone; the Hall-North Carbine. It was a breech-loading percussion cap weapon. It could be rapidly reloaded, even on horseback, although they fought mostly dismounted. The War Department, in its infinite stupidity, replaced it with the 1851 Musketoon, a flintlock muzzle-loading smoothbore of dubious utility. It was described as:
It had an effective range of less than sixty yards. Inspector General Joseph Mansfield reported in 1854 that the musketoon presented “no probable certainty of hitting the object aimed at, and the recoil is too great to be fired with ease.” Mansfield concluded that the weapon was “a worthless arm” and that it had “no advocates that I am aware of.”.
The reason for the change was the belief by the staff weenies that if they could reload too fast, soldiers would waste ammunition. Further, they stated that while it may not always be possible to supply percussion caps, they could always find flint somewhere. Note that this is after the Mexican War, where under wartime conditions they were able to keep the Dragoons supplied with ammo.
Not much has changed.
Subotai Bahadur
A stimulating thread as usual.
I have been fortunate to visit both the park at Gettysberg as well as the Normandy American Cemetary. I have not been to finer or more solemn US monuments than these two historic places.
73. Trent Telenko
Very,very nice piece of work, truly inspiring. I also like the fact that my call for nukes seems rather humane.
75. Subotai Bahadur
I learn from you daily. Thanks for your time and contributions.
Now I must go play chef. Cobb salad & steak.
I don’t reck’un you dang folks ev’r give a dang brain to how many critters dun got et by dem fighters. Why da entire Hoochie tater Clan dun got et up in one day.
79. Possumtater:
man’s gotta eat ..cancel the steak, it’s possumtater time !! and
http://tinyurl.com/y8d2t5c
sound
260 US Calvary men (and 100 Indians) lost their lives at the Battle of Little Big Horn. I wanted to grab a picture of Custer’s tombstone but I couldn’t find it in the snow. The visitor’s center, however, was interesting. There was a display of the weapons used by both sides, and the story was laid out. The Indians, of course, were right. The government had promised that the Black Hills would be theirs forever, but the instant gold was found there, we wanted it back. Some things that happened in our American history were not so nice. Then again, by the time of the Navaho code talkers in World War II, we were all fighting as one people. The monument was staffed by Native Americans who lived nearby on the Crow Reservation, but they were just ordinary Americans like me, also worried about driving in the snow. Pictured below is Custer’s actual dress uniform (the piping yellowed by age) and a picture of him wearing it. I love things like this.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8fCBPQZ2TQ4/StKCn3SWtKI/AAAAAAAACXs/n3rBvtCt-3g/s1600-h/100_0019.JPG
#75, Subotai Bahadur,
>There appear to have been two Japanese
>equivalents to the Manhattan Project. The
>one based in the Home Islands was about as
>screwed up as current American defense
>procurement, between the politics and
>academic idiocy.
The first IJA/IJN A-bomb program is reported to have been destroyed in a B-29 fire bombing. Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen mentioned this in their book on Operation Downfall.
74. Habu,
I watched a special (may have been the same one) where they tracked the path of individuals (cavalrymen and Native Americans) through the battle by doing forensic analysis on the cartridge casings that were found. Apparently it was not an orderly retreat, as had always been stated, but more of a rout. (The government put a good PR spin on it to make it sound like a heroic defeat.)
83. exhelodrvr
Yep , sounds like the same one..it was interesting to me. Kinda smashed the Errol Flynn version.
The funny thing about my visit was that the wife and I decided on the spur of the moment to drive from our place outside of Helena over to the battlefield. It was a Wednesday and I figured OK a few tourist etc.
Well we get to the place and cars are backed up and real Indians are on horseback with warpaint etc. I figure , neat-o….but we couldn’t find a parking spot anywhere nearby so we went into the gift shops across the road. It was there I noticed on a T-shirt that it was the anniversary of the battle … we had a good laugh about our historical timing.
Thank you all for a fascinating thread both on and off topic.
Subotai Bahadur,
I had not heard of the RF radiation. Is there anything open source on this?
At first you had me worried that I was due for a knock on the door but a search on “electromagnetic emission by naval ships due to galvanic corrosion” came up with http://www.earth2.net/parts/basics/milstd1310g.pdf on preventing EMI in naval construction.
Staff fretting about the troops shooting to many bullets is a good reason to issue them rifles and send them up the line for 30 days in a two year cycle.
Trent Telenko,
I have generally gone with the report that Harry Truman believed that operations Olympic and Coronet would result in 1 million American dead and 10 million Japanese killed.
Habu,
Concur on the Civil War. In order to fight the war the South had to become what they had started the conflict to avoid. They were in a no win situation from the beginning. If they had welded into a unified state with a rational industrial economy based on free labor then what would they have gained?
History is full of “what ifs.” It might have been rational for the South to try to draw out the War for a negotiated settlement prior to the fall of Vicksburg but they had every reason to terminate the conflict as fast as possible after the loss of the Mississippi and the retreat from Gettysburg. Their biggest problem was starting the conflict at the behest of the fire breathers of South Carolina. Governor Brown of Georgia was a pain in the south forty but nobody could feel good about bleeding for the pretensions of the oligarchs of Columbia.
My assumption is that Obama’s boorish behavior towards the English is not due to cluelessness but shows a pattern of deliberate adolescent offense. When they get a chance to tell him to piss off they will do so with a thousand years of skill. Unfortunately, in this as in everything, he is writing cheques for the rest of us to cash.
Mongo BL Santamaria,
Wasn’t the Great Dane the enemy alien that Jack Kennedy was dating until his family got him shipped out to the relative safety of the South Pacific? Also I believe that David Niven had a torrid encounter with a similar Nordic security threat, in his case complete with a need to explain what the “secret weapon” was that he was bringing to her.
michaelhoskins,
Pattern recognition is everything. Being an inspecting officer is easy, you just look for what stands out as not fitting the pattern.
Smelligence can be defeated. In Vietnam the VC could track westerners by our distinctive odor. When we tried to track human movements on the trails with sensors they could hang a bucket of urine on a tree and watch the 50 million dollar airplane drop the 10 thousand dollar bomb on the 2 dollar bucket. Giving off distinctive emissions can be a good thing. The South Koreans had established a strong enough reputation in Binh Dinh Province that they would patrol with their transistor radios turned up. Where they patrolled there was peace. They managed to fight a war without any support from the lawyers.
81. Teresita
The first letter I ever wrote to a public official was to President Eisenhower encouraging him to give the Indians a break.
The WH did reply and promised me they were working on it. I was in the second grade so my mother actually did the heavy lifting but she encouraged me to give ‘em exactly how I felt about the situation …..I think I said something like, “please help the Indians” ..it was vicious.
Found this after trying (and failing) to find my copy. Long gone after I was kicked out, I recon.
This is for S B and Habu and anyone else that wants a different perspective on the story of Custer’s Last Stand. I got interested as a boy when living near Shiprock, N.M. and going to school with the Navajos and read everything I could on the Injins and the U.S. Cavalry. Only later in life did I find this:
Archaeology, history, and Custer’s last battle: the Little Big Horn reexamined
Comparing this to some of the books already mentioned or that I read I have come to believe that this guy figured it all out as best that could be so long after the actual battles.
Just glad that I wasn’t there and I’m not sure repeating rifles would have made much difference in the end. Except maybe there would have been more Indian casualties.
It appears that in the real life event, the troops and their commanders made bad decisions and that panic and other little known factors contributed heavily in that faithful day’s events.
Murphy’s laws and unintended consequences were rampant that day, as they always are in battle.
Papa Ray
I literally grew up climbing around and sleeping in Civil War forts. Fort Barrancas in Florida was where the REAL first shot was fired as the Federals evacuated to Fort Pickens guarding the entrance to Pensacola Bay. I’ve rowed over the submerged ruins of Fort McCrae, blasted to bits in the exchanges between Rebels and Feds and climbed amongst the unrestored Fort Reboubt guarding the land approach to Fort Barrancas and the Warrington Navy Yard.
Yep, those Rebels had more heart than brains.
In Viet Nam, the US had GE develop a portable VC sniffer. A buddy of mine and long-time GE employee was sent there to field test it in combat. I guess he appreciated the extra pay. I’m not sure it worked very well.
The hardest thing about intelligence to explain to the layman is that it’s not the information gathering that’s important, it’s determining which bit of information is important.
You’re buried in information. It’s conflicting. And you can’t just go by numbers– there may be 10 pieces that say one thing, and one another. But the one may be correct. And failing to choose the right one can be catastrophic.
This is so, so hard to get across to people. Most people think getting the information is the hard part. When we think about intelligence, we’re used to the narrative world of fiction where every bit of information plays a part in the story. Reality is a lot different. Most information is meaningless, and only great effort will torture significance from the rest.
One of my favorite things is reading about how a scientist finds a way to get usable information out of almost nothing. The people who find exoplanets are stealing a great deal of information out of the tiny opening the universe gives us. The whole world is like that, a big void that we have barely lit with science and engineering.
Intelligence is messy and the world doesn’t cooperate, much less the enemy.
To combine the current discussion with the topic of the post, imagine fighting the Civil War today….open, armed rebellion against the federal government given its technological advantage over the common citizen would be a huge folly.
Absent some Divine Navigation/Intervention, of course.
Morgan’s Christmas Raid
Willie G@90:
open, armed rebellion against the federal government given its technological advantage over the common citizen would be a huge folly
Hmmmmm, probably not! Sit in zazen and ponder these things: Just in Time Resupply. Power Grids. Cloud Computing. Cell Towers. Water Supply. Gas lines. Fuel Tanks. Living off the land versus living off the labor of others. Host versus parasite. Sherman in reverse.
Trent Telenko — fantastic posts. Thanks.
Whitehall #88: That misbegotten gadget was “The Backpack Man Detector” which weighed about 30 pounds, required earphones, the detector hooked onto the bayonet stud, and it would alarm upon detecting any warm-blooded animal. Troop commentary on the device was a bit unprintable. Next step was to order it hooked under bubble-type helicopters where it would supposedly direct the foward-firing M60s. Pilot commentary was also on the unprintable side.
And like other things, such as Starlight Scopes and the 1St Cavalry Division it was n-o-t designed with VN in mind but with Europe. It might have been useful detecting Krauts back of hedgerows before they could light off their panzerfausts. But for point men in thick terrain it would have been an exotic means of suicide.
Have to go with Programmer on this on Willie. The metros and progressives still need all those rednecks to do their distasteful labors for them, drive the vehicles that transport the arugula, turn the valves, carry the rifles, mow their golf greens, weave their sweater vests and make the magic little electrons flow out of the wall socket.
One man, on a 6000.00 budget could really, really cause some problems for any of the greater metro areas. Would have to be from one of the “watch lists” though. You know, those trouble making 25-66 year old, protestant, tax-paying veterans.
Mr. D, whatever got a loving man like you in the dynamite business?
Well, I’ll tell you. I was born with a powerful passion to create. I can’t write, can’t paint, can’t make up a song…
So you explode things.
Well that’s how the world was born. Biggest damn explosion you ever saw.
Dynamite in the hands of a fool means death.
In this case, it could mean life. Ours. If we’re lucky enough to get back to this rat trap, it might be touch and go. All you gotta do is light this fuse. You got ten seconds to run like hell. Then dynamite, not faith, will move that mountain into this pass. Peace, brother.
Wow, this is a hornet’s nest (so to speak) that I’m stepping in, but the South may have had the best tacticians, and probably had on average better generals, but in Grant and Sherman, the North had the best strategists. They understood what was necessary to defeat the South, and did it.
>Trent Telenko,
>I have generally gone with the report
>that Harry Truman believed that
>operations Olympic and Coronet would
>result in 1 million American dead and
>10 million Japanese killed.
It is time to update your estimates.
The American Chemical Weapon Service was planning to use _40,000_ German 250 kg nerve gas bombs in American B-29′s as a part of its chemical attack plan.
From the link I posted earlier:
“Between 1945 and 1947,
some 40,000 of the 250-kg tabun bombs, 21,000 mustard
bombs of various sizes, 2,700 nitrogen mustard
rockets, and about 750 tabun artillery shells of various
sizes were shipped to the United States.”
Subotai:
It seems that the 6 major hydroelectric plants in the rivers of North Korea may have been built by the Japanese zaibatsu for the same reasons that we built those on the Columbia River, to provide power for isotope separators.
Now you are in my neck of the woods. The Manhattan Project was from 1942-1945, and it was a twinkling in some researchers’ eye as early as 1939. There were three dams where construction begun before that time, Bonneville in 1934, Rock Island in 1930, and the (huge!) Grand Coulee Dam in 1933. The next dam to be started was the (big!) Chief Joseph Dam in 1946. Therefore, no dams were built to provide power for isotope seperators. We built the Hanford site where it is to be close to the dams.
As for the possibility that the Japanese were close to having the Bomb: HOGWASH. They didn’t even have radar for night-time fire control. Their much vaunted “Zero” was in the starring role in the Marianas Turkey Shoot, as the turkey. By the Battle of Leyte Gulf they unveiled their latest creation, the manned missile. In Imperial Japan, science took a very distant back seat to the military, which thought itself invincible. This crap about Japan nearly getting the Bomb is some weird psychological thing to assuage guilt for zapping Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There’s more evidence for UFOs, Bigfoot, or Habu being in the CIA.
From W’s post:
“But it is the human analysts who make it all work. The ones capable of understanding regional languages,…”
I’m sure that this is is not what you had in mind.
Twice burned?
Papa Ray
oops, can’t refrain from a further off thread despite earlier promise, because somebody has to mention that all those well-reasoned and perfectly correct analyses above re whether the Gray had a chance against the Blue, are based on the material factors, and those as seen in hindsight. Truth is, southern seperatism got very far along, as far along by late 1864 as the top of the ticket of one of the two contending USA political parties, and this party came closer than the numbers tell to winning the election, to the point that Mr. Lincoln left us several burning quotes illuminating his own appreciation of his position in the run-up. One of these was in response to advice from the trusted kitchen cabinet to disarm the McClelland position that southern hatred of Lincoln was prolonging the war (familiar circular, there) and that Lincoln should counter with an opening of some sort, some show of sympathy for (if not open a debate with) ‘the secessh’. Lincoln was quoted as answering something along the lines of if he had to get down to where he had but one friend left in the world, he wanted that friend to be himself.
9. Teresita!!!
Now, now.:)
I don’t know what it is either but it’s far wider than assauging guilt for nuking Nips.
There is no end of people looking for an angle, like amateur journalists, to build up what ifs.
The left does it to avoid doing anything decisive in the real world.
But other people do it by coming up with all sorts of what ifs for the Nazis or sometimes the Japs.
Quite simply by the time America’s industrial might in the form of strategic bombing, overwhelming naval power, a huge number of supply ships and inexhaustible supplies of tanks, fighter planes and the guys to operate them got through with their enemies they weren’t in a position to be able to deploy any game changing technology even if it were sitting there in one place ready to go like the mythical multi-thousands of airplanes on a virgin Jap airfield, or a Nazi nuke (hey they got sidetracked and paddled up the wrong river technically because their ideology had seen their best and brightest nuclear scientists shoot through).
It never ends but at least all the obvious and plausible what ifs have been exhausted so the fantasists are grasping at straws now.
There is NOTHING the Nazis or the Nips could have done in the last year of the war to affect outcomes to any significant degree.
The results were in train and we and the Russians were driving the train.
This is off topic as heck, other than the Japanese tie-in, but when a clear sign of the Apocalypse occurs, it’s worth noting.
Japanese man ties record for biggest largemouth bass
A man was being credited with tying the 77-year-old world record for catching the biggest largemouth bass. The International Game Fish Association announced Friday that it had confirmed the 22-pound, 4-ounce fish caught by Manabu Kurita. The Florida-based group said Kurita caught the fish July 2 on Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest lake.
Kurita’s fish tied the record of George Perry, who caught his bass on Georgia’s Montgomery Lake on June 2, 1932.
Kurita used 25-pound test line and a live blue gill as bait.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_odd_largemouth_bass_record;_ylt=AhUegnMs0LqwAVsFwKPXrF7lWMcF
George Perry’s record tied. And in Japan yet. Dang.
Cannoneer #4: Burt Lancaster in The Professionals.
This was after he was rescued from the chain gang wearing only his longjohns. But before he taped dynamite sticks to Woody Strouds arrows.
After “rescuing” Claudia Cardinal against her will and returning her to her less-than-loving husband who had hired them (this fulfilled their contract) they let her take her wounded True Love back home in a buckboard.
Burt, ever the discerning one, had a big crush on Lieutenant C. C. Chiquita who also had the hots for him. It was understood that if they managed to live through being on different sides they would enthusiastically renew their Vows of Passion.
Darned Good Movie.
wonder why I’m thinking that truman’s a bomb over hiroshima and nagasaki was like the supply planes that bush sent to georgia’s capital. one established what in a discussion a year or so ago was called by the brits “prestige”. the other used “prestige” judiciously.
why we be talking this way?
Americans usually talking about having an edge or lack thereof.
Judging by Brown’s performance at this evening’s debate–Ted Kennedy could be the Henry Cabot Lodge of the democratic party in Massachusetts.
The CSA had a chance until Atlanta fell. That got Lincoln reelected. They had a shot until fairly late, not because of military factors but because of antiwar sentiment in the North.
Hate to rain on the parade, but neither Germany nor Japan ever developed the capability to refine uranium hexaflouride into weapons grade U-235. That was a huge industrial operation using 1940s technology. The facilities at Oak Ridge were buildings as large as football fields and it took months to get them up and running and debugged. The Manhattan project at its peak was using something like 20% of all the electricity generated in the US, and a very substantial portion of that was for uranium enrichment. No way did Germany or Japan have that capability.
Japan also did not have any aircraft capable of delivering a uranium bomb with 1945 technology, even if it had such a bomb. Little Boy weighed almost 9,000 lbs and was 10 feet long, and nothing much smaller was possible at the time. Japan only had medium bombers with payloads of about a metric ton, and no bomb bays that big. It would have had to have been used as a mine or on a suicide ship, presumably a freighter (no way could it fit in a submarine, even the big Japanese ones), and the ability to get it to the target would have been suspect–maybe at night if it could be set up in secret a few miles away and not get the crap bombed out of it.
Such an A-bomb program as Japan had, which was never much, was shut down in early 1945 when it was bombed to smithereens (I think in the March 9-10 firebombing of Tokyo), but it was really just theoretical work, they never even had a decent cyclotron, hadn’t a clue how to separate the isotopes on an indstrial scale, and the budget was trivial with no industrial commitment at all.
An invasion of Japan would have been hell, and Marshall was considering using nukes in a tactical role as part of it, but those would have been the only nukes in the world.
of course, having won the election, he was able to take the advice (a sequencing wherein bull-headed mulishness was made toweringly sublime by virtue of having guessed right [see "Dave/Divine Navigation"]) in the incandescent Second Inaugural.
Soon after Leyte Gulf was the proper time for the Tojo gov’t to step down. That’s the problem with governments that can’t be un-elected. Everything might go along fine for the longest time, but it’s that situation where the people need rid of but can’t be ridded of their government, that makes for most all the history of hellishness to date in the human book.
Trent Telenko
thanks for your link,
I learnt quite a few things
I didn’t measure that WWI was so important for chemical weapons research
It must have been horrible for the soldiers.
Anyway this war is still labelled as the most crual one
BTW John Kenneth Galbraith interviewed Albert Speer in that never never world situation just before the end of the war when there was a provisional government of sorts with Doenitz in charge in northern Germany (following the suicide of Hitler in Berlin). There were armed German and armed British soldiers guarding the place at the time. Speer wasn’t arrested until later, after the surrender I think.
The purpose of the interviews was to find out just what we had bombed that had the most telling effect on the Nazi war machine. They wanted to apply any lessons learned to the strategic bombing of Japan then underway.
Turns out that Galbraith wasn’t all that impressed with Speer’s strategic grasp of events.
Dave, I just watched it for the 30th time on Encore Westerns cable channel.
I read somewhere that Lee Marvin modeled his part after Emil Holmdahl, who died only three years before The Professionals came out.
Buddy@ Also others interested in THE WAR OF NORTHERN AGGRESSION;
If Johnny Reb had broken through at Glorietta Canyon New Mexico and secured the supply depot at Ft Union he could then have chopped that relief column from San Francisco to pieces.
In turn that means he would have reached Los Angeles which was full of Confederate sympathizers.
With a coast line free of any possible blockade, some gold to back the Confederate Dollar, and some other West Coast resources
as well, it would have been a different war. Who knows what would have happened. But it would have been different logistics for sure, for sure. Canby would have been contained in the Indian Territory and Kirby Smith’s Trans Mississippi Department might well have been able to bushwhack the Union Army of Tennessee, secure the Texas coastline
which could then have procured enough ships
to occupy the US Navy’s attention. With the
Gulf Coast either in Confederate hands or at least partially open, the Confederate Army of Tennessee would then have possibly been able to reinforce Army of Northern Virginia, thereby giving Army of the Potomac a royal headache.
All of this is speculation of course. But as is pointed out in Texas, CSA, Glorietta Canyon is a vastly underrated engagement.
In Gordon Thomas’ book “the secret arms of CIA”, it is said that after WWII the focus was more on mind manipulation researches, that some virus and chemical weapons had been used in Korea war, but that that the results weren’t enough significative to be carried on, one wanted more to know about “brainwashing” that, that apparently was more efficient, after that soldiers returning from Korean and Vietnam wars had changed their behaviour at 180°, became anti-war defensors
researches also abandonned nowadays
Good thing Colorado militia stopped the Confederates, then.
Seriously, though, without a railroad access to California would have been fairly meaningless for the CSA. The Southwest was desert that took months to cross. There was really nothing there, which is why the Confederate force sent to conquer New Mexico mostly starved to death.
Well, as Harry Turtledove wrote in Guns of the South, if a group of time travelers showed up in 1864 and began supplying Lee’s Army with Ak-47′s things would have turned out quite differently.
Trent Telenko,
No conflict between our positions. I referred to what Harry Truman is reported to have been briefed on and believed while you were noting the subsequent reports on our capabilities and plans that could have lead to an even more existential conclusion.
Mongo @ 108,
I think Tojo’s govt fell after the loss of the Marianas, several months before Leyte Gulf.
Japan could easily change governments, but they were just figureheads. The Army and Navy really ran the show and they had to be blasted out by 2 A-Bombs, Russia entering the war and removing their last hope of mediation, the Emperor making surrender an issue of loyalty to the Throne, and even so there was a coup attempt.
Marty: Little Boy was a sawed-off Navy 5 inch gun. Weighed 9700lbs. Fat Man somewhwere around same total weight. Reason for all that weight was not the bomb. “Twas the padding and shielding that it (a) kept the work force from being poisoned and (b) gave the air crews
a round-trip ticket.
A Jap version could have easily come in at around 100 kilograms and given sufficient yield to capsize blockading ships. They had no need for strategic bombers as we knew them. Any attempt to terrorize US soil would
have been a secondary mission and accomplished by aircraft aboard submarine.
The Japanese diehards gave lip service to repelling and rejecting an invasion. Their actual compulsion gives every indication of arranging nationwide seppukku.
And if you use bullet ignition as compared to implosion, 560kg of pitchblend yields enough quite a few bombs. The residue can also go into dirty bombs. If U234 had been dispatched a bit earlier and gotten through,
we would have had quite a problem on our hands.
wws, that’s nuts. let’s just settle for jeb Stuart having a squadron of Fokker Triplanes.
marty, yep –sorry –i got sloppy. what i meant was, after “MacArthur (was) Back” Japan was without any chance of winning anything at all from the war and a government that was not insane would’ve spared the ared all the great killing yet to come, in what amounted to no more than coda –except for the hope of another Divine Wind via ‘wonder weapons’. hmm, call me captain obvious –i thought i had a point –but…
Cannoneer #4: I’ve got a crush on Chiquita too.
I’m sure you have a completely celibate reason for watching 30 times. (ahem)
Owing to the comments on WWII, this link might be of interest. It shows VJ Day in San Francisco, on Market Street. It was just a spontaneous celebration. As word spread, it grew:
http://westcoastspecial.com/marketvj.html
RE Civil War, may I suggest–
“How the South Could Have Won the Civil War,” available at Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/How-South-Could-Have-Civil/dp/0307346005/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263269715&sr=8-5
VERY interesting book. Author holds that Davis’s strategy of holding out until Europeans intervened was too passive and surrendered the initiative, but Lee was too aggressive, trying to destroy the enemy by direct attack when the technology of the time made attack very expensive for the smaller army, and very hard to achieve full destruction of even a defeated enemy.
He feels Jackson had the right idea and had his advice been followed, the South might have been able to take Washington or lay it under siege, and got its independence. Briefly, Jackson understood that the defense was tactically superior, and wanted to use the Army of Northern Virginia’s superior mobility to get it into a position threatening Washington, Baltimore or Philadelphia, where the Army of the Potomac would be forced to attack it on prepared ground of the ANV’s choosing. He had very specific ideas as to how such a campaign would unfold, down to the places he would try to secure and use for the decisive battlefield.
Highly recomemnded for Civil War buffs who like the “what ifs”
Marie Claude @ 109
I have no desire to take anything away from the Algerians. It was a new and savage weapon. C’est histoire.
The first gas attack into unprotected lines.
2nd Battle of Ypres
http://canada-at-war.suite101.com/article.cfm/canada_at_second_battle_of_ypres
Ypres, known to the Brit soldiery as “Wipers”
wws,
“began supplying Lee’s Army with Ak-47’s things would have turned out quite differently.”
Not really. There wouldn’t have been any ammunition for them.
wws; Buddy: While Guns of the South is pure speculative fiction as refers to time-tripping Afrikaners, it does have some important points.
After Battle of the Wilderness, Lee points out to his staff that while those repeating rifles were nice, the victory came about because the time-travellers knew every move Grant was going to make. That was the key.
In the meeting between Robert E Lee and Abraham Lincoln, Honest Abe just cannot grasp why being a Virginian would motivate Marse Robert to resign his comission and join the Confederacy. To him the existence of a central government means that it must at all times remain an unchallenged and unchallengeable authority.
Yes, Lincoln can say that “the people” have a right to rise up and change their government, a night of the long knives is okay, but not SECESSION! Good look at the mindset that regards the state as deity, or close to it.
Now the next Turtledove boook is “How Few Remain”. About the SEcond War Between The States. How did the South win the first one? Well, those orders wrapped around cigars fell out earlier, were seen by friendlies, restored to the courier who properly secured them and got them to D. H. Hill on time. D. H. and Old Jack proceed to hand Tardy George his head on a platter at Sharpsburg. (Antietam to the Yankees on the thread.) A. P. Hill and Longstreet
vigorously pursue with their respective Corps and the Army of the Potomac is defeated in detail. Nothing but remnants left. English and French weigh in with Diplomatic Recognition of the CSA and (reluctantly) tell Lincoln to eitheir lift the blockade or fight their navies.
Plausible scenario.
That book, while a stand-alone tome, also serves as background for Turtledove’s “Great War” series. With the CSA allied with England and France, President Theodore Roosevelt makes friends with the Kaiser.
By early 1915, WW1 is in full swing over here as well as over there.
The end of that war is much, much uglier than even what happened. Homegrown Bolshievks and Nazis take over thiis continent as well as that and things go to hell in a handbasket. And God Help anybody in the Asia-Pacific region. One massive Unit 731 everywhere.
An all too plausible scenario. And it illustrates my point that the one ending we could not have afforded to 1861-65 was for either side to feel it had been sold out.
That could have been the case if Lee had run wild in Pennsylvania, or if McClellan had won the 1864 election. (A President who was anti-secession while being staunchly pro-slavery? Shudder.)
Think we ought to count our blessings?
Dave @ 118
Much of Little Boy’s weight was as you say, tho I doubt that a functional device could have been brought in at 100 kg. The U-235 core alone required 15 kg absolute minimum, and that had to be surrounded by a shell of U-238 several times as heavy. Add the gun and supporting hardware and you have something that could have been put in a freighter, maybe a cruiser, but no airplane the Japanese had (then you get back a lot of the weight your argument dismissed) and no submarine, tho maybe something a sub could tow.
Little Boy was a bullet or gun device, Fat Man was an implosion device (as was Trinity).
Doesn’t matter, tho, they had virtually ZERO weapons grade U-235, and no way to get it. At most they could have made a “dirty” bomb, but U-238 which they could have chemically extracted isn’t all that hot and we didn’t yet know enough about radiation sickness to be very scared of it, so the presence of U-238 would have been noted but it would have had no tactical effect beyond the initial TNT explosion. Thirty years later there might have been a slightly elevated incidence of some cancers among the troops who had been exposed, if anyone was looking for it. Maybe.
Just because the Germans labelled something U-235 doesn’t mean it was 98% pure metallic U-235.
Hell, just follow the Wikipedia link Wretchard gives you—per that article, it was uranium oxide, not highly enriched metallic U-235, and if refined at Oak Ridge might have yielded about 3.5 kg of the good stuff, 20% of what was needed for one minimal Little Boy bomb. Yeah, it’s Wikipedia, so it’s not necessarily the final word, but the Germans and Japanese simply had no industrial scale ability to separate uranium isotopes, and that’s a fact, so the article is broadly consistent with the known facts.
It’s a fine romantic conceit that maybe we just missed Armageddon by a hair’s breadth, but it isn’t factual in this case. If you want to think on Armageddon barely missed, get “Hell to Pay” about what the invasions of Kyushu and Honshu would really have been like. Scary enough.
exhelodrvr: If you have time machines, you have time machine resupply.
That would include RPG2s to break through Washington DC fortifications.
Harry Turtledove is darned good at alternate histories.
Trent Telenko @ 98:
Links please. Or go home.
Dave @ 112
Get real. Texas had a total white population in 1860 of 421,000, and no industry whatever. It could more or less defend itself, it was tough terrain with plenty of strategic depth and poor communications, the population was rugged and well-armed… not that there was any reason why the Union would want to devote major resources to it, anyway. But it could never be anything but the smallest sideshow.
If you really want to think on how a Confederate victory could have happened, get the book I recommend at 122, above. To my mind, it makes a very credible case that Stonewall Jackson had conceived a strategy with a reasonable chance of success.
Marty: Let’s agree to disagree.
Point is that it is easy to say “no threat”
60 years later. (Conventional or nuclear)
On the other hand if it is 1945 and your name is Curtis LeMay, or Chester Nimitz, you might have a different point of view.
And if you are a grunt with memories of the Canal, Tarawa, Okinawa, or Iwo you certainly do not care about some of the theories you hear bandied about today.
My gripe is with the nonsense that a Japanese conspiracy to attack America (which is discernable as early as 1923) came about because of FDRs attempts to get them out of China or that they would have been so happy to negotiate a peace just so long as their nearsighted horticulturist could continue
supervising Unit 731 or that they were actually trying to surrender, etc etc etc.
Marty: How come there were so many attempts to invade Texas? Not from the El Paso side where Canby wisely decided to simply hold
the Ft Bliss to Ft Davis area and prevent
any more attempts to use Texas as a springboard for invasion. No, rather from the New Orleans and Baton Rouge axis.
Might not have been necessary but they sure kept trying.
Are you trying to say that Glorietta Canyon
had negligible impact?
Or that acess to the Pacific does not put CSA into formal alliance with the French in Mexico? Or that the Port of Bagdad does not shift from Benito Juarez and Porifirio Diaz to the Emperor Maxmilian and the Fey Carlota
thereby maximizing the Texas cotton trade
and channeling an enhanced flow of material into Texas. That there cannot be a counterstrike back to BaAton Rouge/New Orleans?
Nope I am sticking with the Hoss Sojer what wrote the book. Glorietta Canyon was VERY important.
Re: #91 Morgan’s Christmas Raid
My G-G Grandfather served briefly under Morgan. As a Private in Cobb’s Battery he went along on a raid just a couple of weeks earlier (Battle of Hartsville). The weather turned bitter cold and after crossing the freezing Cumberland River many of the men suffered frostbite. My GG Grandfather was captured while helping to wrestle a gun across the river. He was paroled and released that same day, and I imagine he was happy to go home.
Marty/130; clearly you have not caught up with the July 06, 1861 edition of Harper’s Weekly nor seen the rendering drawn therein.
Dave,
fine, agree to disagree, but you’re insisting on a scenario that was impossible. If you haven’t read it, by all means get “Hell to Pay.”
I am by no means making light of what the Japanese were capable of, the horrors they perpetrated throughout the areas they occupied, or the viciousness with which they fought. I believe not only that Truman was right to use the Bomb at the time, but knowing what we know 60+ years later, it was still the right thing to do. I have no sympathy for revisionists who want to say America was uniquely immoral for doing what it took to end the war, when approx. 400,000 people were dying every month in areas still occupied by Japan, let alone the Americans and Japanese lives saved by using the Bomb.
Among historical figures that I admire, LeMay ranks near the top. If only he had kept a sock on it in 1968!
We (US) never really thought the Japanese had a serious A-bomb project, unlike the Germans, but of course that wasn’t confirmed until after August 15 when we got some people in there. Had we thought so we would have done everything we could to stop it, which was considerable by mid-1945.
Of course they weren’t “trying to surrender” in July, 1945. Their Ambassador in Moscow was trying to start something but his goverrnment was giving him nothing to work with because they had no intention of surrendering. It took 2 A-bombs, Molotov telling Sato to go to hell as the Red Army moved into Manchukuo, and an Imperial edict to end it, and a die-hard colonels’ coup almost succeeeded, anyway.
By all means get “Hell to Pay.” The reality was bad enough. It is a great, great book.
I’m currently reading “Japan Prepares for Total War,” also very good about the Japanese govt and military mindset in the 1930s. They took as the lesson of the Great War that they must make their economy autarkic, feeling it was the British blockade that did in Germany, and their entire foreign and much of their domestic economic policy was to that end. Which led them into Manchukuo, then northern China, then southern China, then Indo-China and finally Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. While US policy re the Open Door in China irritated them, their expansionist motivations ran much deeper and they would have eventually made the lunge for East Indies oil and Malayan rubber and tin, and Singapore to control the choke point at Malacca, regardless of whether or not the US gave them a pass on China. They needed the Philippines and New Guinea to secure their flank, and attacked Pearl Harbor so the US Fleet would not be able to intervene in the Western Pacific. All that was pretty much inevitable. Like you, I have little to no patience with people who deny those realities.
#97 JMH “the South may have had the best tacticians, and probably had on average better generals, but in Grant and Sherman, the North had the best strategists. They understood what was necessary to defeat the South, and did it.”
Grant and Sherman were competent soldiers and understood strategy. But they outnumbered the Rebels so greatly that they could repeatedly split their army in half, leaving one half in position facing Johnston, and taking the other half along to outflank him and force him to retreat. Good strategy, but they couldn’t have done it without the greater number of troops that they had.
Louie/136; as they say, “quantity has its own quality”
So true Mongo.
And every Union general in the same situation previously had failed to make any progress on winning the war. Grant knew what his advantages were, and what his weaknesses were. He pinned Lee and forced a series of engagments while Sherman destroyed the Confederacy’s will to fight. Sherman didn’t have overwhelming numbers, BTW.
Every (good) strategy is based on using your strengths and denying the enemy his. It wasn’t “easy” for Grant because he had numbers. If so, the war should have been over before Grant ever got done with Vicksburg.
Other generals had won some battles, but that’s tactics. Grant focused on winning the war. He didnt’ let Lee dictate when and where battles would be fought, Grant forced action on his agenda. Sherman didn’t worry about bad press or unkind references for making life difficult for the people at the ideological heart of the Confederacy.
Of course, Lincoln famously supported Grant because he fought, and the latest POTUS from Illinois doesn’t quite have the same point of view, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a couple of generals like that running the war today? Bah, we have the Copperheads running things.
Folks think Grant & Lee slugged it out for years –wrong –they first fought each other at the Battle of the Wilderness in May of 1864. Grant took a severe mauling (nearly 20,000 casualties in a two day fight during which only nighttime and forest fires saved his army from being unhinged completely out of position) and AOP was expected to fall back –in the usual way –on the supply base across the Rapidan. In what had to’ve been a nasty shock to Lee, he didn’t; instead he issued a statement saying he “…proposed to fight it out along this line if it takes all summer.” Lee would be surrendering the ANV to “Butcher” Grant less than a year later. Grant was not only hard, but fast.
133. Louie723
John Hunt Morgan was my G-G grandfather as I recently found out from another family member, an attorney in TN who is heavy into geneology.
I had several old tin types from the family and bingo, there he was as a young rebel. From his life story I am reading Rebel Raider he was definitiely a guerilla fighter but did fight with Forrest on many raids. He fought at Shiloh too.
He raider further north than any Souther unit during the entire war, making it to Ohio and indiana.
Send up a prayer to your kin with a big Thanks.
99. Teresita
There’s more evidence for UFOs, Bigfoot, or Habu being in the CIA.
No Ms Merkin, I believe the proof of veracity is in the fact that you ran/run a lesbian site that solicited lesbians. You authored lesbian fantasy letters and really had the site all very pretty.
If ever possible I’ll have you chewing on enough documentation that I was in the CIA than merkins you’ve worn.
Now you want us to believe that nuclear power is your forte …jeez, if a known publishing lesbian isn’t a security threat then this nation has really lowered it’s standards.
Noun
merkin (plural merkins)
A women’s pubic wig. Worn for nude stage appearances and by women after shaving their pubic hair (originally to eliminate lice, etc.; now often as a fashion item).
It was the lice wasn’t it?
The Boss Wants A Smartphone, Or Else
Strategy Page ^ | January 11, 2010
A French firm has developed a cell phone cryptography technology strong enough to satisfy French government and NATO security standards. The president of France was pleased, and his subordinates were relieved, because their boss is an enthusiastic smart phone user. Smartphones are popular because they can do so much, particularly accessing the Internet. But wireless devices, especially cell phones, give military and government security officials a very bad feeling. Moreover, in the last few years, several prominent heads-of-state (including the current American president), who were avid smartphone users, came to power. They were all told by their security personnel that smartphones were not secure enough (from eavesdropping) for the head of a major nation to use. But when you are the top guy in the government, you can order subordinates to find solutions, or else. The secure smartphones soon appeared, and are starting to show up from a lot more companies. By next year, some 20,000 senior French government officials will have the new, secure, smart phones.
This bodes well for the troops, who have been agitating for something like the iPhone, that they could use on the battlefield. That is in the works as well.
V’s question… what’s the side lobe on a smart phone (even with super french encryption)???
Somewhat germane to the original topic:
“But the memes that were held in her hold have escaped to join the evils of the world”
Discernment will be a skill much in demand shortly, particularily in light of the Walt O’Brian comment on January 11,2010 @ 4:18.
That Oliver Stone…what a card.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/6967126/Oliver-Stones-history-so-banal-and-yet-so-offensive.html
Remember that the world was much different in the first half of the century. I see a lot of projection of the current situation of U.S. dominance in technology that did not exist back then. Consider that it was a German chemist (Otto Hahn) that did the original work that discovered fission decay products (from Fermi’s work in Italy). And most students pursuing advanced degrees, especially in chemistry and chemical engineering took their degrees in German. The great chemical companies and processes were all German. And the Japanese were not a backwater either (nothing quite the stress of restricted access to oil and other scarce resources to make a resourceful people inventive).
p.s. The U.S. came very close to failing for a lack of German chemical engineering competence. We ended up destroying both of our uranium and plutonium production facilities in desperation just to scrape out and recover from the detrius the materials required for the first bombs (General Grove and the contractors took a few too many shortcuts and we were not capable of doing German-quality manufacturing of tools and tooling). Generation 2 of those same facilities took a few more years to come online. Which made the Soviet success a double shock.
But for the Grace of God…
I have been remiss. At 144 I neglected to tip my hat to:
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/
Where every day is another day of “Day of the Triffids”
Dave at 126:
“Count our blessings” for the Union victory?
Let’s raise a monument to Abraham Lincoln!
Oh, we already did!
It was clearly Lincoln’s leadership and moral clarity that won the war. He was not fighting slavery; he fought to preserve the Union which benefited EVERYONE on both sides.
Booth’s murder hurt the South more than the North. The Radicals ran wild in corruption during Reconstruction and meant a 100 years of bitterness within the union.
Visitor
uh, may-be it’s all about the SIM card
some infos and comparisons about smatphone here, in french
http://android.smartphonefrance.info/
now, when we were in Spain and Portugal my hubby had the bad surprise to see his iphone fees incresing badly when he was wandering on internet on free access places, thus he look at forums about the subject and a french guy on travel in Russia had put this advice to take off the SIM card, which he did, and his internet access became free
Well I’m not an expert of the thing, just I kie that it works for what I need
“kie” just I like… (sorry)
Ari Tai @ 145
I don’t sense that projection you’re talking about—the subject of US technical expertise in the first aprt of the 20th C hasn’t come up in this comment thread until now.
I don’t know why anyone would deny that US physics was second tier before the refugees from Naziism came here in 1933-34. The real action was in Germany and Britain until then. The Japanese were no better than the Americans, tho.
The Manhattan Project problems you allude to cost months, not years, the whole project was only going for 3 years and there was a lot of redundant efforts so if one failed another might succeed.
Mongo @ 134
Good one! Like I said @ 130, “rugged and well-armed.”
Dave @ 132,
Well, we can play at counter-factuals a lot.
Much of the Federal interest in the Trans-Mississippi was driven by 2 things:
1. Greed for cotton, as in the big Red River Expedition and any number of lesser operations more accurately called “raids” than “campaigns”
2. Fear of the French presence in Mexico.
As far as that theater being a potential game-changer for Confederate independence, #1 is pretty irrelevant.
If we are to assess #2, it’s hard because we know how the French (Maximilian) folded as soon as the Union was restored and chose to look cross-eyed at them. We have to try to look at it based on how the world appeared in 1861-5.
My conclusion, and you certainly might disagree, is that the French were never a threat to the Union, but were a threat to peeling Texas back from whomever (Richmond or Washington) and re-uniting it with a French-dominated Mexico. With benefit of hindsight I can say that threat was overdrawn, but at the time it appeared real and it complicated grand strategy for both the Union and Confederacy.
But I would still maintain that even a united Mexico-Texas was not going to be a major player in determining the outcome of the Civil War (or, whatever you prefer to call it). After the whipping the US gave Mexico in 1848, and the French giving up in 1866 with hardly a shot, it’s hard to imagine the consequences of Union reverses being more than the temporary loss of Texas and New Mexico Terr., which included present-day Arizona, and maybe the southern part of California. All of which would have been regained within a few years, certainly not much longer than the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870.
Now, that’s with the benefit of hindsight. No one at the time knew how hollow was Napoleon II’s power, nor, until 1863, could the Union be confident the Brits would not weigh in, and that was the real fear.
So I don’t think I’m denigrating the efforts of Canby and others, or denying that those small battles were important. I just disagree that the entire outcome of the war plausibly hinged on them.
“2. Fear of the French presence in Mexico.”
the poker coup could have worked if only your civil war had lasted longer
Now, it wasn’t only a mere french intervention, but rather a scenario that was plotted in Biarritz Cure hotels, where the eminent monarques of Europe were resting. It appears that Victoria (of England)and Eugenie (of France)had sort out the idea that it would be a good to restaure the catholic kingdom in Mexico as a counter power to the US’ growing one, (say that the Brits had still the envy to stirr the sh*t in their former subjects land, and manipulated the French to do their job))idea then relied by their husbands, that finally agreed to send a alliance army there, but France partners deserted soon leaving the French alone, that had send her best legionnaires there though, who died until the last for their duty at Cameron, which has become a motto for the legion since then.
Marty,
It was Napoleon III.
Civil War Women: Martha Ready Morgan
The dog that didn’t bark –oftentimes what appears small in the history book was on its way to being large had not some force acted to keep it small –”I walked across the street” would not be much of an entry in your book, but “I was walking across the street when the bus hit me” would be a whole chapter if not the last one.
how circular, the story of Mexico,Texas, and France in the Civil War –that the ‘collapse of the Second Empire in 1870′ (Marty mentions above) was at the hands of the Prussians, proximate cause being a Spanish royal succession (almost a replay of the early 18th century War of the Spanish Succession –which due to the victory at Blenheim by direct ancestor John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, inspired Winston to come out of retirement to fight Hitler).
Spain, which had ruled Mexico for 300 years until Mexico revolted and brought forth the government that wrote the Constitution of 1828, which the breaking of by Santa Anna set off the Texas war of independence (the Alamo war) in 1836, which led to Texas’ entry into USA in 1846 for all of 15 years until its attempt to get back out of that deal brought Maximilian to Mexico!
MC @ 153: Yes, absolutely, I suppose from the French point of view, another example of “Perfidious Albion?”
Of course, whatever the “ladies” were plotting, the real power in England saw it otherwise. If it wanted to intervene militarily, England could have treated the Trent Affair as casus belli. England was quite torn, the aristocrats had a natural sympathy with the South and the textile mills wanted the cotton, but anti-slavery sentiment was very strong and the shippers and Royal Navy were not keen on dealing with American privateers interfering with British trade. Maybe Palmerston et al were happier to sit back and see if the French could do anything to obstruct the Yanks, without getting their own hands even slightly dirty?
exhelodvr @ 154: Thanks; my bad.
Mongo @ 156: Yes, thanks for additional perspective on circularity; my son would say, “Sweet!” Of course, I was assuming that whatever happened in Mexico/Texas would not have materially affected Bismarck’s drive to unify Germany, and the approximate timing and outcome of the Franco-Prussian War.
…not to mention that the collapse of the Second Empire manifested in Paris with a short-lived municipal government called the Paris Commune, which is memorable as the conduit onto the world stage of the obscure scribblings of a London-based German nutjob named Karl Marx.
***(i just love this editor thingie, warts and all!)
marty, ouch, right, tail vs dog, i hear ya. But consider a smaller circle within the circle, that while France attended the first mexican revolution, who was in there next, manipulating the next one, but them same Bismarckians -?
Mongo @ 158–
I like the cut of your jib!
You trying to tell me there was a connection between the German Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and the Prussians???? All in cahoots to take Nap III down a peg, until Prince Albert went and died??
Cute, but a unified Germany replacing France as the main Continental power may not have looked like a huge improvement in London… or, given the recency of the “real” Napoleon, and Germany’s poor access to the world ocean, maybe it would have???
Now I’m out of my knowledge base…
JMH wrote “Grant knew what his advantages were, and what his weaknesses were. He pinned Lee and forced a series of engagments while Sherman destroyed the Confederacy’s will to fight. Sherman didn’t have overwhelming numbers, BTW.”
Well you can’t argue that Grant didn’t greatly outnumber Lee in Virginia.
In the west, Grant had at Chattanooga, for instance, basically three armies: Rosecrans (Thomas), Sherman’s, and Hooker’s 20,000. He was able to flank Bragg repeatedly. As Sherman slowly continued south, and continued his flanking movements, he did outnumber Johnston. And during his famous March to the Sea, Sherman was basically unopposed.
So yes, Grant and Sherman used their advantages and continued to bang away, but they couldn’t have done so without continual reinforcements, while Lee and Johnston had all the troops they were ever going to get.
LOL — don’t let being “out of (your) knowledge base” slow ya down –i never do, and yet my fridge stays full anyway, so…
no, seriously, you have to work the Crimean War into that –the first time (not counting a few feudal-era sub-national fractious odds and ends) that Frenchmen and Englishers fought a war not against each other but in alliance against a third party. It ended only a decade and change before the Franco/Prussian War. i think the F/P War might –very broadly and probably very wrongly –answer your “maybe it would have???” query, when you note, during the fighting of it, the chirping of crickets from the once and future partner across the Channel.
***
got to agree with Louie above –despite Sherman’s dazzling blitzkreig, the war was a classic war of attrition. What Sherman did was knock a merciful year or two out of the final phase.
That’s not to minimize his effort at all –for as we’vbe said above, as long as the thing was ongoing, something could’ve saved the south –maybe the copperheads.
Well still Mexico owed money to Great Britain, France and Spain, that thes 3 counties couldn’t recover cause of the ambiant anarchy and civil unrest, mostly because Mexicans were cheating and despoiling over the expat european citizens there, if not simply of robbing them, with many vexations.
Anyway the 3 governments had enough of waiting for a resolution, La dette mexicaine à l’égard des trois pays qui devaient intervenir militairement s’élevait à environ 82 millions de pesos, soit 70 envers l’Angleterre, 9 envers la France et 3 envers l’Espagne
So the military intervention was decided in Biarritz, at the begining it was only ment to recover the debt, or getting a calendar for it, and to protect the expats.
The Brits and the Spanish got their calendar and resigned their presence on the mexican soil. The French stayed with the excuse of having sick soldiers, but that wasn’t counting with the stubborness of a general, and the disguised ambitions of Napoleon III. Therefore they estimated that a new arrangement wasn’t in their calculs.
Then followed the very war events. Probably that some european well intentionned governments were monitoring the happenings too. Though it was considered by the US as an intervention into their own flowers beds, as they were supporting a republican Mexico, a monarchy was contrary to their wishes, so when the US troops found a window during the civil war they decided to align on the mexican borders, showing by that “don’t touch my lawn”
a scan of an old book about the events in french
http://cdigital.dgb.uanl.mx/la/1020002502/1020002502_012.pdf
a good resumé of the pre-war events in french
http://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_REVUE=GMCC&ID_NUMPUBLIE=GMCC_214&ID_ARTICLE=GMCC_214_0029
And on the border we have the story of Chino Cortines and Rip Ford. They had been introduced before the war and each thought the other a solid person.
As Chino was a Juarezista, his official friends were the yankees. Some less than ethical Yankee got the idea of sending a raiding party to kidnap Ford’s wife and children. Cortines as appalled and had his riders get them to safety at his place.
Ford was of course appreciative and felt obliged to let Cortines know what his official friends, the French, were up to.
Cortines reciprocated by letting Ford know what his official friends the Yankees were planning next.
Neither Yankees nor French ever figured out what was going on, how come all their plans failed and how come their raiding parties kept getting ambushed.
As a result, adequate amounts of Texas cotton made their way across the Rio Grande to the impromptu port of Bagdad where blockade runners ran in enough trade goods to keep Texas from starving and enough munitions to enable the coastal forts to keep Texas from being invaded.
And Cortines portion of Mexico escaped major damage/casualties, not to mention some nice cash flow and desirable goods.
Great example of two guys from two different
cultures who managed to take care of their homefronts under trying circumstances.
And who introduced these two? Robert E. Lee.
Dave,
And who introduced these two? Robert E. Lee.
In his capacity as the commanding officer of a Union fort in Texas while serving in the US Army.
fascinating stuff, folks –y’all put life in these stories –and the people in them –a glimpse into the great beyond where they all are still with us.
Another circle, the port of Brownsville, on the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Rio Grande and where the so-called (by the yankees) contraband cotton left for Europe, twins with a sister city across the river in Mexico: the city of Matamoros, which in Spanish means “Kill the Moors”, and which was founded by Spanish veterans of the Moor Wars, who happen to be the ‘crusaders of Andalusia’ to whom Osama bin Laden often bitterly refers, notably in his declaration of war on the USA.
#129 RagnarD:
I can go you one better, see this passage from the article:
Army Chemical Review
Jan-June 2006
Nerve Gas
America’s Fifteen-Year Struggle for Modern Chemical Weapons
By Mr. Reid Kirby
“GA: The Interim Nerve Agent
Chemical warfare plans for the European theater depended on a chemical arsenal located in England. Within 24 hours, Army Air Force units could conduct attacks on tactical and strategic targets. Although these plans initially called for large-scale strategic employment, by September
1944 the Allies had scaled back plans to include only immediate tactical support for the Normandy invasion.3
The retaliatory plans for the Pacific theater were more problematic. Despite requests from the CWS in the mid-Pacific, appropriate stocks were not located closer than the California coast. This meant a retaliatory response time of 30 to 60 days. More importantly, plans for chemical retaliation against Japan called for quantities of chemical weapons that were not available. A survey of the zone of interior (Asiatic-Pacific and European-Mediterranean theaters) showed that only 855,000 persistent and 271,000 nonpersistent bombs were available. The retaliatory requirements against Japan called for 5,181,000 persistent bombs and 776,000 nonpersistent bombs. The CWS believed that the German arsenal could fill the gap and embarked on a crash program to evaluate the utility of these weapons.
The United States had captured 23,000 tons of GA in aerial bombs and 6,000 tons in 10.5-centimeter projectiles. The Army Air Force could deliver the aerial bombs without modification, but the 10.5-centimeter projectiles were too wide for Army 105-millimeter artillery. The CWS sent 3,000 tons of aerial bombs and 5,000 tons of projectiles to Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, for further evaluation.
The German ordinance was punched and drained at Edgewood Arsenal to evaluate GA in the 4.2-inch mortar rounds and the M70 (E46) aerial bomb. Field trials showed that standard bursters were too small to disseminate GA due to the low volatility of the agent. Only 10 to 20 percent of the agent was dispensed as aerosol or vapor. Furthermore, the CWS initially believed that the LCt50 (median lethal dosage) of GA was about 800 milligram minute per cubic meter (mg-min/m3). The conclusion was that GA was useful for harassment but was not suitable for chemical retaliation.4″
The “retaliatory plan” mentioned in the Kirby article was the one I mentioned earlier here:
See:
The Most Deadly Plan, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Proceeding of the US Naval Institute, January 1998 edition, pp 79-81
and
“Gassing Japan”, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, MHQ: the Quarterly Journal of Military History, vol 10 no 1 (Autumn 1997), pp 38-43.
As I said up thread, Allen and Polmar ran across references this plan to gas Japan and put in a FOIA request. When they go a copy of the plan after their Operation Downfall book went to the printers, it was a document labeled “A Study of the Possible Use of Toxic Gas in Operation Olympic.”
The word “Retaliatory” was PENCILED in between “possible” and “use.”
The planned US Military use of the German nerve gas bombs against Japan would have been a flipping disaster as the CWS thought the toxicity of Tabun was eight times less lethal that it actually was.
A shipboard handling accident or a B-29 crash with a full load of tabun bombs would have killed hundreds of American sailors or airman on ship or the crowded airfields of the Marianas islands.
From the link I posted earlier:
http://www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/published_volumes/chemwarfare/CHAP2_Pg_09-76.pdf
The lethal dose for oral ingestion of tabun is roughly 100 to 200 mg min/m3, and 50 to 100 mg min/m3 for sarin. Only 200 to 1000 mg of tabun applied to the skin is sufficient to kill an adult human. The 12,000 tons of tabun stocks alone that were reported at the end of the war could kill 60 billion individuals.
For the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I posted a collection of comments and testimony discussing the means that brought the War in the Pacific to an end, comments from all eras, modern as well as for the past 60 years…
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2005/08/hiroshima-60-years-later.html
These are from Japanese citizens (or from a descendant of a Japanese citizen):
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2007/07/political-correctness-in-japan-comment.html
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2005/08/lance-or-spear-practice-was-regular.html
And this post concerns some common charges against the Americans regarding the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki…
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2005/08/examining-issues-surrounding-dropping.html
Victor Davis Hanson puts it best: If Western elites cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all; most never learned the narrative of WW II, only what was wrong about it…
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2005/07/if-western-elites-cannot-find.html
It is said that after one official post-war visit to Hiroshima, during which the Americans present had gotten browbeaten by their Japanese hosts, the Yanks, as they left, their chins down, got caught up by one Japanese, who looked around to see nobody (Japanese) was listening and who whispered intently: I want to thank you so much for dropping the bombs on Japan. It saved my life. If you hadn’t, we would have had to fight you on the beaches and in the towns, and we would have all been killed…
Life of the Mind: Marse Robert was in Texas as the first Lieutenant Colonel and second Colonel of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment.
This was the first actual cavalry regiment the US Army ever had in peacetime and was the work of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.
(Jeff Davis also came up with the US Camelry, but that is a different story.)
The first Colonel of the 2nd Cavalry was Albert Sidney Johnson.
Other names for the regiment include Sheridan, Hood, Thomas, and many other notables.
The regiment became the first white men to actually travel between San Antonio and El Paso since De Perala lost his cannon to the Commanche in 1759. They mapped the region,
enabled the start of the Butterfield Stage
and saw the establishment of the Loving-Goodnight Ranch.
Then these young officers and staunch comrades became great generals and bitter enemies.
So mote it be.
Dave,
Robert E. Lee left Texas for Washington and accepted an appointment as Colonel of Cavalry signed by Abraham Lincoln. Two days later he resigned and crossed the Potomac to join his beloved Virginia in secession. If Virginia could have been held for the Union, a possibility as she did not leave the Union until after the siege of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for volunteers, then North Carolina would have held. If the Upper South had rejected secession then the whole misguided enterprise might have unwound with over half a million fewer deaths. The “what ifs?” of history.
LOTM: Texas was the one state whose secession was actually illegal. The Republic of Texas had agreed to never join with any entity other than the USA. Therefore, joining with the Confederacy was definitely a no-no.
Biggest opponent of Texas Secession was Sam Houston. What he hit on was to secede from the secession, for Texas to again become the Republic of Texas. That would get around the legality problem, and as a practical matter there was nothing either Abe Lincoln
or Jeff Davis could have done about it.
Houston’s efforts were for naught and his
pleas fell on deaf ears. Now when Texans refuse to listen to Big Sam, you know that the devil is afoot.
The devil in this case was definitely the Knights of the Golden Circle. Their rabble-rousing escalated already tense emotions to uncontrollable levels.
Odd thing about the KGC: While they promoted a great slave-owning empire down to Tierra del Fuego and got their adherents primarily from the South, they were headquartered in the North and their financing and organization was definitely northern/European. Not enough research has ever gone into tracking down this genuine, dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy.
Also: The senior officer in Texas was Major General David Twigg. Number 2 was John MacGruder. Twigg committed treason. He conspired with KGC et al to turn military supplies and installations over to them, and to force the withdrawal of soldiers. He later became CSA Senator from Georgia until his alcoholism caused his demise around 1863.
MacGruder on the other hand, submitted his resignation. While waiting for it to come through, the KGC rabble insisted that he join with them and with Twigg. “Prince John” gave them five minutes to run away. They made it in three. (More is the pity.)
John MacGruder later distinguished himself in the defense of Texas throughout the war.
What if Houston had succeeded? What if Twigg had been sober enough to behave honorably? Been some kind of differences
but what?
LotM/168; –Half a million in a population one tenth the size of todays is equivalent to five million –or more than the present population of any one of about thirty of the united states.
Knights of the golden circle tried to bring the so-clled masonic conspiracy to life –an activity some believe is once again in motion. All sorts of mischief caused by that treasure looted from Solomon’s Temple and stored where no French kings or renegade popes could take it –that is, high in the Alps (where all them *cough* Swiss banks are).
Mongo, Mongo, How many times do I gots to told you: It was the Knights Templar that looted Solomon’s Temple and hid it in the Alps.
It was the Illuminati that found it there and gave it to Louis Napoleon who gave it to Maximillan fer safekeeping in Mejico. Carlota
got nervous and had it sent through Juarez’s Army and the Apaches to fund her shopping spree in Washington. The escorts got a bit confused and hooked a left turn at Saltillo and wound up at Castle Gap west of Concho. They hired Quantrills Raiders to guide them back to the right track. These guys found out what was in the wagons and massacred all the French. They took off with the treasure except for one sick guy they had to leave behind. When he got well, he caught up to where his cohorts had been wiped out by the Commanche who, not knowing the value of precious metal, had left all the gold and silver laying on the ground. He buried that treasure and made a map. A relapse of his illness cause him to expire shortly thereafter but not before he left a copy of that map in the possession of the only MD in 500 miles who thought it to be fantasy and gave it to my great-great granduncles niece twice removed. I have recently gone through her belongings in the county museum. Normally I would not consider revealing what I have found. However I find myself in somewhat embarassing financial straits so for the modest sum, say $25000 I will be happy to foward the document to your
bank if you will just give me your account number and social security card.
(So much for Max’s Gold. Now about that Catholic Cross treasure.)
Who knew Dave was from Nigeria?!
Dave, we may have a trade. I happen to know precisely where the Lost Dutchman mine is, and will be glad to let you know as soon as i get back from the Chiricahua desert with the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant which you have located among yore great grandniece’s durable goods. ah hell, i caint keep a secret from someone fixin to send me the map and a little old IOU for me to sign and send back to yez, and besides i know you won’t let it out, so i’ll go ahead and tell you where the Lost Dutchman is: juust north of the Rio Rio Grande and a leeetle ways west of the Pecos, and juuust a few days route march to the south/southwest from the last set of hills in the southern reach of the east slope of the front range of the Rockies. now durn it keep a LID on it willya?
Mongo BL Santamaria,
Hey wait a minute. I already bought that map from a Benedictine Monk who looked just like Derek Jacobi.
hmm, well, Dave’s 25 long just went into renegotiation
Oh heck, I already know where the mine is.
It is the Dutchman that I can’t find.
So-and-so done went and eloped with Emily Morgan. Said something about meeting up with Sam McCord and Jenny below that old white mountain just a leetle southeast of Wasilla.
Ain’t Wasilla Tonkawa fer San Saba?
i don’t think anybody knows. The Tonkawas being cannibals, their language never dissiminated much past their own tribe or lunchtime, whichever came first.
Marie Claude
C’est possible ils ont existe en Francais, mais je connais pas. Mais je pense c’est non.
Tim Cook
Vol. I “At the Sharp End”
Vol. II ” Shock Troops”
http://www.amazon.ca/At-Sharp-End-Tim-Cook/dp/0670067342
Buddy, had better close off this line with some serious comments about some redskin dietary habits. Got innocent eyes reading and some of them non parlez Lone Star.
The notorious cannibals were the Karankawas, who were found close to the Gulf Coast. They would carry off prisoners for the purpose of chewing on their anatomy while the prisoners were still alive. Made the Kronks very unpopular with everybody else. Things wound up with them doing their version of a grand banzai charge. Very few left alive after that. Some surrendered to other tribes or to the white eyes. REst retreated deep into the swamps and were never heard from again.
The Tonkawas were a smallish tribe of Plains
Indians who never could come to any kind of modus vivendi with the Commanche. Before the war, the Rangers and the 2nd CAv made some arrangments with them. After the war, they were happy to serve as scouts for McKenzies 4th Cavalry, the unit that finally vanquished the Commanch around 1874. After a battle, the Tonks would eat portions of dead Commanche so that they might be as brave as their enemies. Quite a bit of difference between the two tribes.
According to Fehrenbach and others, the only injuns in Texas that completely avoided any and all consumption of human flesh were the two invasive species, Commanche and Cherokee.
But it was only the Kronks whose practices led to tribal demise.
FWIW: The first human beings into what is now Texas (and maybe the first humans on the North American Continent) were a causacoid
people from Asia. A few thousand of these were the first to make their way across what was then the Aleutian Land Bridge. They were certainly a short-lived species as their men died in their early twenties and women did not live much longer. They were also cannibals, not for ritualistic purposes but for food.
Nobody knows what happened to them. Could have intermarried with the later but much more numerous Amerindians or they may have become extinct. If the latter, I would estimate that cannibalism played a role as they did not eat the young and healthy but
consumed the old and sick instead.
Anyway, just wanted to be sure we did not confuse any passerbys that dropped in on our
discussion.
How did we go from U Boats, to Jap nukes, to
treasure legends to paleo-Bubbas anyway?
oops –i sure did goof –and i feel the same way about a written record, no matter how obscure –if there’s any chance that it’d mis-inform someone it’s worth correcting. And even if that weren’t so, the human urge to know his ground is certainly worth supporting in that as we may need them again someday we don’t want to fade our survival mechanisms.
Besides, no horse tribe of the open plains deserves being confused with them coastal scalawagss who were as you say by all accounts an unpleasant and treacherous bunch.