Sanctuary
One of the questions the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City, the Pentagon and possibly (but for the actions of the passengers on Flight 93) on the White House raised was whether the enemy in the War on Terror considered any place sanctuary. Sanctuaries are an essential part of limited war. Without sanctuaries, limited war becomes a fight to the finish. The immediate question after September 11 was whether what ensued was going to be limited war. It was a hard question, for after World War 2, America’s first experience with limited war — and sanctuaries — was in Korea.
In Korea, each side had its own “safe areas”; its own sanctuaries. The fighting on the ground reflected these strategic realities. Since nobody was going for the knockout, no one was knocked out. Each side was scoring points before the judge of history.
To have pushed it [the war] to a conclusion would have required more trained divisions and more supporting air and naval forces, would have incurred heavy casualties and would have necessitated lifting our self-imposed ban on attacks on the enemy sanctuary north of the Yalu.
So argued General Clark some months after the signing of the armistice. What he was saying, in effect, was that there was no disposition in Washington toward undertaking the risks or the losses that military victory would have demanded during the year when he was in command. The limitations within which the Far East Command had to operate and the strength ceilings imposed upon the Eighth Army insured that no all-out effort against the enemy could be mounted. On the other hand, the Communist forces of Kim and Peng evidently labored under similar restrictions. They made no attempt to strike at the Japanese base area, giving it the same inviolability that the UNC granted Manchuria. At the front, Communists troops reacted strongly to attack, yet showed no signs of preparing to resume major offensive operations of their own. The rules were tacit, but nonetheless observed in mid-1952; this was a sparring match and not a fight for the championship.
If the public can name any hill fight of the Korean War it would probably be the Battle of Pork Chop Hill, largely because of the movie starring Gregory Peck by the same name. Like the battle itself, the movie presents an ambivalent narrative of a fight waged solely by each side to improve their respective negotiating positions at Panmunjom. Of course the Chinese were hoping for a US slip-up, for if sanctuaries existed their relative size was often determined by long term positional maneuvering. The Chinese were playing the game of inches in 1952-53 and so was the US.
War in a world of sanctuaries is a Game of Inches.
The problem with the Game of Inches is that the inches that are sought are not always the inches that emerge. One interesting example of this was an engagement little known to the movie-going public: the Battle of White Horse hill in late 1952. The Battle of White Horse hill dwarfed the Pork Chop engagement in every degree. The Chinese 38th Corps decided to push the Korean 9th division off a hill in order to threaten the road complex behind and thereby force a retreat of the UN line. In the epic struggle that followed the ridge of the hill changed hands approximately 24 times over ten days and resulted in the overwhelming defeat of the Chinese 38th Corps. About 500 South Korean soldiers died in the engagement and over 8,000 Chinese “volunteers” never returned home. Many of these Chinese casualties were inflicted by the tremendous volume of US artillery fires which had, by this stage, become a major feature of US tactical doctrine in Korea. A somewhat dramatized account of the battle, from the viewpoint of American artillery observers, A Hill Called White Horse, depicts the experiences of a forward observer team on the ridge itself, and their desperate attempts to defend themselves after the Koreans had been driven off for the first of 23 times.
They did this largely by calling down fires on their positions. As the team defended the entrance of their bunker against Chinese infantry the entire sky above it was alive with continuous airbursts which by the end had reduced the piles of sandbags in the area to the appearance of a corpse-covered dune. This enabled the observer team to survive until the Koreans arrived on one of their many counterattacks. The Korean 9th Infantry division became known as ‘White Horse’ thereafter, and the monument to its epic victory is now a revered site.
The reason White Horse is so significant is that in one sense, it represented the birth of South Korea. But no one could see this clearly at the time. Contemporary US periodicals could only express relief that the ROKs did not do as badly as the journalists expected. But in fact the ROK was achieving the miraculous.
Today it is possible to conclude that the Chinese gambit in Korea has failed disastrously; the invasion forged a new national identity where only a tenuous one existed in the South. Mao Tse Tung created a dragon on its doorstep while saddling Beijing with the useless and parasitic North Korea regime. And that fact was made evident on the White Horse hill, where the ROK outkilled the 38th Army by 16 to 1 — with a little help from their friends.
White Horse also marked the moment when the US had both solved the tactical problem in Korea and finally realized it had entered the Cold War. As Peter Lane explained in his 1990 Command and General Staff thesis, the Far East Command had long been laboring under an artillery ammunition supply problem. After the rapid demobilization following World War 2 there was actually not enough ammunition on hand to sustain the kinds of volumes that were required in the Korean War. The reason was that everyone was retooling and gunning for a slice of the booming civilian economy.
Nobody wanted to build weapons for government contract any more. But without support weapons, American infantry had only slightly more combat power than the ‘Chinese hordes’. In a war of movement such as World War 2, this insufficiency in infantry superiority could be offset by maneuver. But in the confines of Korea, a hard truth emerged. Without a definite superiority in heavy weapons, many Chinese soldiers could beat the not so many US soldiers they encountered. MacArthur had at first believed that tactical airpower could level the field. By the time of the Chinese intervention he was disillusioned.
MacArthur did reveal a new view of air power. A month earlier he had credited his air forces with a high degree of effectiveness; now he cautioned Ridgway that tactical air power was much exaggerated, that it could not stop the southward flow of enemy forces and supplies. When Ridgway asked near the close of the meeting whether MacArthur would object to a decision to attack, MacArthur replied, “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.”
Ridgway concluded that the answer was artillery and more artillery. Artillery, the King of Battle, would make short work of the human wave attacks. Thus the Battle of White Horse provided not only a validation of the ROKs, but proof positive that artillery could beat ‘hordes’.
But if the Chinese game of inches produced unexpected results, so did the American. Korea demonstrated that the public could be affected by foreign wars in unexpected ways. If few members of the public can remember White Horse, fewer still can recall that the Korean crisis produced Harry Truman’s Proclamation 2914, apparently the only time since the since the Civil War that a state of emergency has been declared in the US.
During the Watergate scandal which erupted in the 1970s after President Richard Nixon authorized a variety of illegal acts, Congress investigated the extent of the President’s powers and belatedly realized that the U.S. had been in a continuous state of emergency since 1950.
Proclamation 2914 stayed on the books so long that ironically, President George W. Bush was still rescinding the last aspects of Proclamation 2914 as late as 2008. If you want to win a bet with a liberal friend, ask which American President proclaimed a state of emergency and which rescinded it. Then knock him down with a feather while you collect your hundred dollars. History is full of surprises.
The reason for Truman’s proclamation, as Peter Lane explains, is because Truman couldn’t get the economy to produce enough ammunition and other munitions for the Korean War. Truman used powers under the State of Emergency to get industry to do what he felt was needed, without angering the unions. The crisis, now remembered by history as the 1952 steel strike, is little remembered by the public today.
President Truman chose not to impose price controls, as the federal government had done during World War II. Instead, the administration attempted to avoid inflationary pressures through creation of a Wage Stabilization Board that sought to keep down the inflation of consumer prices and wages while avoiding labor disputes whenever possible. Those efforts failed, however, to avoid a threatened strike of all of the major steel producers by the United Steel Workers of America when the steel industry rejected the board’s proposed wage increases unless they were allowed greater price increases than the government was prepared to approve.
The Truman administration believed that a strike of any length would cause severe dislocations for defense contractors and for the domestic economy as a whole. Unable to mediate the differences between the union and the industry, Truman decided to seize their production facilities, while he kept the current operating management of the companies in place to run the plants under federal direction.
History’s jury is still out on the emergent effects of the September 11 attacks. But one possible narrative that could emerge is this: the attacks by Islamist forces on sanctuaries within the United States destabilized the strategic situation in the first years of the 21st century. The response of the Bush Administration was to demonstrate to the Muslim world that if American sanctuaries were not respected, then neither would the sovereignty of Muslim countries be sacrosanct. The long term effect of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was to restore somewhat the status quo ante principle of respecting sanctuaries.
However, the September 11 attacks themselves and the American reaction to them started a series of events which destabilized both the the Islamic World and the West. September 11 marked the start of the downfall of Sunni power. The Shi’ite faction of the Islamic world, encouraged by the defeats the Sunnis had sustained in Iraq, increased their aggressiveness abroad. The Sunni world, in the meanwhile, was running out of oil. The joint effect of renewed Jihadi militancy and increasing resource scarcity reflected itself in the Arab Spring, which represented the sunset of the old Sunni regimes.
But the West was not immune from unintended consequences. Following the Bush Administration’s failure to explain the new Cold War that had begun on September 11, a number of opportunistic politicians began to advocate the abandonment of the a forward foreign policy in preference to domestic entitlement programs. Once again, as in the case of the Steel Crisis of 1952, foreign policy was used to justify domestic social engineering. Americas retreat from the world had begun.
The story is still unfinished and as is the way with such things, the ending is kept hidden until the very end. The ending of the story which begans with epic defense the White Horse was written at the Fall of the Berlin Wall, but the tale which begins with the attack on September 11 is still being played out. Unlike the first Cold War, we cannot say how it will end. Who will write the words, at first tentatively and then completely?
My Diary.My Unexpected Journey.There and Back Again. And
What Happened After.
Adventures of Five Hobbits.The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled by
Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and the accounts of his friends.
What we did in the War of the Ring.THE DOWNFALL
OF THE
LORD OF THE RINGS
AND THE
RETURN OF THE KING
To write the ending to a tale and stick around to read it is what humanity knows in history as triumph. It has another name, though; one far more urgent. That other word is survival.
How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99
The long term effect of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was to restore somewhat the status quo ante principle of respecting sanctuaries.
Unfortunately, this respect only runs in one direction. Osama bin Laden hit the World Trade Center sanctuary, but we didn’t go after him in the Tora Bora sanctuary. Every time the CIA hit the terrorists in their sanctuary with a Predator drone strike, the libstream media let everyone know we actually just killed 42 civilians who were simply attending a wedding and we apologized profusely. When Muslims take over a mosque and turn it into a AAA site, we don’t dare take out a house of worship. When Muslims take over a school and turn it into a giant pillbox we don’t dare take out a house of learning. Prisoners in Gitmo must be handed their Qurans with white gloves lest they be sullied by infidel hands (ironic, since Americans use toilet paper, not their left hand, to wipe their bottoms). But we have a long tradition of respecting sanctuaries when the enemy didn’t respect ours. In the Vietnam war, we didn’t dare occupy the Laos or Cambodia sanctuaries, nor bomb the Haiphong Harbor sanctuary when the Soviet ships were tied up there. In World War II Ike told Patton to halt before he liberated Prague, because that city was destined to be behind the Iron Curtain sanctuary.
H.W. Brands, an American historian, spoke once about history on C-SPAN a few (maybe more?) years ago. He noticed that a narrative never emerges while history is “taking place”, as it sometimes seems like just so many random and disconnected actions. And that historians sometimes fall to the conceit that certain things were “inevitable” by imposing a narrative and linking together a chain of events that makes it all seem like a story, instead of life, which is what we live.
I’d like to think that it all has purpose, in some way or another. Because we want our lives and our thoughts to have purpose. We want our existence to have purpose. Because other wise it would seem like a horribly pointless existence, at times. I would like to think that the lives of American (and other allied) soldiers that have been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan actually will lead to something. That the loss of Jeffery Smith, Jason Dunham and others will actually mean something. Someday.
I wonder how they are weaving the narrative in Baghdad this summer? Or Damascus? Or Cairo? Or Riyadh? Because we are all human, we want the narrative to re-inforce our own hopes and quash our fears and tell the story of how our side won.
I wonder if the Arab is particularly gifted in creating a rationale and a story to tell himself and his tribe? How all the tragedies and defeats of the last few decades are actually leading to a final victory?
Perhaps that explains the madness of Hamas, al Qaeda, al Fatah, and all the rest. They must be half – mad to tell themselves they are winning and to keep on fighting when objective evidence might say they are destined to be history’s biggest losers.
Speaking of the rings and sanctuary, a couple of months ago Telstar was posted,
Telstar was a 1962 instrumental that celebrated satellites. Here it is again. (click to knock out any advertising.)
Now compare that to a recently released utube that sets NASA pictures of the earth to music. (You may have to play it twice for it to load properly. If you have a dog, play the music for him. See if he doesn’t raise his muzzle to the sky and go oooo.)
Yellowstone park was created in 1871. From 1880 to 1900 Yellowstone was the hip place for millionaires of the age to go. However cars changed that. By 1910, 1000 cars a year were entering the park.
Just so for the last 10 years a space voyage satellite style has been the hip thing to do for millionaires. I think it will be about 20 years before the price comes down far enough for the middle class to do the same thing. What will the roads look like? What will the cars look like? Beats me.
No sanctuary for terrorists; no sovereignty for countries that harbor them.
Richard, I envy your abilities and value your efforts.
The response of the Bush Administration was to demonstrate to the Muslim world that if American sanctuaries were not respected, then neither would the sovereignty of Muslim countries be sacrosanct.
Well I dunno about that, we’d already been bombing Iraq continuously for ten years, and Bubba had fired off missiles into Afghanistan a few years earlier. The tradition of the assassin hardly recognized sanctuary, the doctrine of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb hardly does either. And bin Laden famously complained that it was profane western boots on holy Saudi soil that motivated his attacks in the first place.
The eastern game of Go features sanctuaries, it’s the western game of chess that does not. Yet it’s the western Westphalian, uniformed war that limits battle to these guys and those places, on the one hand, while on the other hand Westphalian war puts your entire nation at risk in a war, there were no “sanctuaries” in Dresden or Tokyo or Hiroshima. Japan did have the “decency”, I suppose, at the start to attack a military target, Pearl Harbor, though I’m not sure that impressed us or worked out very well for them. OTOH we have at least a tacit agreement in Westphalian war to not decapitate the opponent, one of the rules we apparently put aside when the opponent is a “terrorist”, which I guess means not wearing uniforms, and on their part already not showing any obvious restraints on targets or locations, famously the terrorists chose “soft” targets of civilians, women and children, as often as not.
bin Laden expected the US to nuke Afghanistan and perhaps we should have, the next targets being Riyadh and Mecca. If we had wanted to demonstrate something, that would have been the way to go about it.
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d @ 2: Perhaps that explains the madness of Hamas, al Qaeda, al Fatah, and all the rest. They must be half – mad to tell themselves they are winning and to keep on fighting when objective evidence might say they are destined to be history’s biggest losers.
The Koran is their narrative, and the Arab culture the origin of Islam is basically tribes living in subsistence conditions in the desert, losers all, they celebrate being losers, even with trillions in oil revenues. It has proven a powerful “narrative”.
They are mad, by our standards, and proud of it.
I agree with #2. A logical prediction would go something like: a) we become energy-independent and a major exporter; b) we are therefore no longer shackled to the Saudis by our presumed need for their oil and good will; c) we substantially disengage from the Persian Gulf on the ground, keeping track from afar and pinging anybody with drones if they threaten our safety; d) the Sunni-Shia conflict moves into high gear, with all involved killing everyone in sight; e) the Euros, now deprived of our military protection of their energy supplies, do what?
(choose one)
1) fall prey to the russkis, who cut off their gas whenever they damn well please
2) fed up with the russkis, they start fracking their own shale gas
3) they build up their own militaries and the Foreign Legion takes over the administration of the Saudi kingdom
4) all the above
5) none of the above
Correct answer: 4 and 5
As #2 said, ”history” unravels in a chaotic, random way, with the principal actors believing all along that it is a logical, linear process. Therefore the historians, with 20-20 hindsight, see the patterns of history and teach us how to avoid all this next time.
And so it doesn’t happen the next time … right?
Sanctuaries? The Cliff Notes version of the Korean conflict was that the communist North Koreans attacked the South. The United Nations (perhaps the only time that bunch of self-satisfied elite losers ever got something right) authorized force to eject the North Koreans. UN (really, US and British) forces succeeded in doing that; then MacArthur got carried away and went north of the line. At that point, the Communist Chinese entered the conflict, fighting against the UN.
This was not so much a story of Sanctuaries as a story of confused command in the UN forces, especially at the political level. They allowed MacArthur to go north, and then failed to treat Communist China as an enemy when the Chinese forces poured across the border. Similarly, China & the USSR were not treated as enemies in Vietnam, despite their arming the North Vietnamese. The Saudis were not treated as an enemy after 9/11. Etc, etc.
Sanctuaries? No! Western liberal political elites wasting their citizens lives & treasure because they lack any mental clarity.
The Political Class’s failure in Korea is exactly analogous to their failure in border control — pass laws to make it illegal to enter the US without proper permission, and then reward those who do enter illegally with more protections than citizens get. At least the body count for the Political Class’s border failure was less than for their military misadventures — until Obama’s Fast & Furious.
It seems to me less a matter of sanctuaries than a matter of keeping al Qaeda watching its back so that it’s unable to organize anything big.
The international law aspect is that if your country can’t control activities within its borders, you’re not sovereign in your borders and we come in and take care of it. (If your country itself were sponsoring those activities, then it would be a matter of diplomacy and normal war.)
It takes a certain size to pull off serious damage to the US, as opposed to nightly news coverage style damage. But the bigger the bad guys get, the easier they are to detect, owing to informers and financial footprint and so forth.
So long as the detect size is smaller than the serious damage size, the US wins. We keep assassinating them.
It does have to be kept up indefinitely, however. It would be helpful to explain this to the US public.
Nation building is just an exit strategy, so that we don’t stay forever. The nation itself controls activities. But we must stay forever if it doesn’t work out.
Anyway there can be no sanctuaries, and no need for a sanctuary in the US so long as the keep-it-small strategy works. They can’t pull off anything big.
Good column, as usual.
” The Sunni world, in the meanwhile, was running out of oil. The joint effect of renewed Jihadi militancy and increasing resource scarcity reflected itself in the Arab Spring, which represented the sunset of the old Sunni regimes.”
The Shiites may end the Saudi oil economy by attacking Israel. According to Tony Cordesman, an Iran Israel nuclear war would end the age of petroleum. That was written before fracking and probably just means the US would again become the oil source it once was.
Another great column, Richard, thanks.
“Tony Cordesman, an Iran Israel nuclear war would end the age of petroleum.”
Tony is a fruitcake. With extra nuts. He is also wrong. You can drill and pump OIL from a nuclear blast crater. The main Mazda plant is in Hiroshima. They built it at ground zero almost.
http://www.mazda.com/profile/group/domestic_base.html
Why not, the ground had already been cleared. So far there has been no increase in cancers, or other blast related medical conditions in the long term.
This URL is to an article about a man who survived BOTH atomic bombs;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/25/hiroshima-nagasaki-survivor-japan
They are just weapons. Really powerful ones but in the end, just another weapon.
During the Korean war, Japan wasn’t attacked because the Chinese and the Norks had no means to attack it. No PLA navy back in the early 50′s. China didn’t have any strategic aircraft. Most of the MiGs in Korea were Soviet.
As a point of fact, the UN resolution was passed because the Soviet Ambassador got in a huff and left the room. The vote was passed before he could get back to veto it. That resolution is still in effect. It was never rescinded and the Korean war is still open. There has been a TRUCE in effect since ’52, IIRC. A truce is NOT a peace treaty. Either side can resume hostilities with a 24 hour notice.
I think that Korea was the first step of a Cold War thought process that promoted the idea that that stalemates were “normal.”
So our overall strategy was to oppose the Communists step for step, move for move, from burning deserts to rain-soaked jungles, from the depths of the oceans to the seas of the Moon. Anything they could do we had to do better and preferably, first.
But this also fostered the idea that direct confrontation was to be avoided and that fighting to a draw was a desirable situation. And this might not have been right all the time, but it was not wrong, either. Sonofagun, we did not blow up the world.
The problem is, today fighting to a draw is still not seen as a bad approach; it seems all too normal. Thus Desert Storm proved to be a military triumph but a political do-over. So Pakistan and Iran and North Korea and Syria what have you get to roll right along, lest we have a violent confrontation, all of which by the Cold War rules is “normal.” This is rather like framing our relationship with Germany and Mexico based on the Zimmerman Letter.
Back when I sat in planning sessions at AF Space Command in the 90’s, people would caution one another, “Careful, that’s an example of Cold War thinking.” But that was inevitably directed at someone who was adopting a “be tough” attitude rather than a “war’s over” approach. The idea that our Post Cold War attitude might be “So who’s gonna stop us if we do?” was Thinking the Unthinkable.
Josh
I don’t know if I would be entirely sure that the Koran is the total narrative of the Arab world. Much of the Arab world is functionally illiterate. The Koran and its pertinent verses are taught and made functional by wrote memorization. I have no idea how many Muslim Arabs have actually read the Koran (I would be that we would all be surprised by how few, relatively, have actually read it).
It’s what they THINK is in the Koran that is their narrative. I know this may seem like picking a nit, but it is their own perception of what they are that leads them time and again into their abyss of failure. They are cynically led by people that profess belief but really are in it for the their personal gain.
Perhaps the height of success and unity in the Muslim world was after the conquests and unifcation of Saladin (Saleh eh Din), who was actually a Kurd. He actually read and practiced the commandments of the Koran, donated much of his wealth to the poor, governed with humility and piety. And everything he built pretty much fell apart a few years after he died. They all started to fight amongst each other again. As always.
The Koran and its teachings are just used as an overlay and a justification of the tradition Arab/Bedouin (and Scythian/Afghan) life style, of being on razza and raiding and pillaging to get what you want. The Iranian/Persian is different and could actually build a coherent modern civilization (but probably won’t).
Agreed that they have, for the most part, squandered the opportunity of the vast oil wealth found in the Arabian Peninsula.
d @ 14: The Koran and its teachings are just used as an overlay and a justification of the tradition Arab/Bedouin (and Scythian/Afghan) life style, of being on razza and raiding and pillaging to get what you want.
That’s what I meant, that the Koran just codified what was already standard Arabic culture, warts and all.
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s @ 12: Either side can resume hostilities with a 24 hour notice.
LOL. What happens if they start 5 minutes early?
If we have a drone in every county, then perhaps the Iraq and Afghan wars will merely be footnotes to the feared American collapse. This is the theme of Subotai’s ruminations, no?
The Korean war was also one of major intelligent blunders on the US part. From the US to the UK to Kim Philby to the Russian to the Chinese. The Chinese were assured that the US was not going to attack China no matter what. So the Chinese headed South.
@ 17 toadold
True enough. In 1990 I met a guy who was an elder at the church where I was married, who was a Korean War veteran. He was an artillery NCO, and was talking to me and my best man about how they had gotten up in Northern Korean, the NoKo army had pretty much dissolved (either dead, deserted or gone over into China), and they pretty much thought the war was over. They were packing up their artillery in cosmoline to ship it south and waiting for withdrawal orders, when the Chinese came boiling over the border.
The histories like to mock MacArthur, but I think that was just revisionism to make Truman look comparatively better than he was (by belittling MacArthur). I don’t know what kind of intelligence they had on what the Chinese were up to, but they were all surprised when the Chinese came south over the Yalu.
Sanctuaries. And I don’t think they would let the Air Force bomb Chinese Army assembly areas too close to the border, even on the Korean side of the border. Too risky in starting “WWIII”, even after the Chinese had come over the border to attack. Funny stuff, that political leadership.
9/11 is simply the latest installment of an eternal Jihad. Civilization’s conflict with Islam goes all the way back to its inception.
The 9/11 atrocity was the inevitable result of a half century of unimaginable, unearned, and undeserved wealth flowing back into the ravenous maw of Islam. That gorging beast used the wealth, along with the foolish gifts of medicine, food, and technology from the West – to create more than a billion nodes of Jihad. This is barely the beginning of what the world will see unfold as Islam slithers its way back onto the world stage. Don’t provide Muslims access if you want to stop Islamic terror from harming us.
Here is what I know as certainly as I know anything:
Terrorism will metasticize as the Muslim population metastasizes.
The heinousness of Muslim terror will also escalate as opportunity, and resources permit.
9/11 was the rape of the West by Islam. We wont stop suffering Islamic rape and Islamic genocide won’t stop until the beast is starved of access and resources.
We have not yet begun to have that fight with Islam.
We have not even begun to have the discussion about that fight.
What happens if they start 5 minutes early?
People die sooner. The “rules” regarding truces go back centuries. IIRC, most were developed during the Condottieri period in 13th and 14th century Italy. Condottieri were mercenaries hired by city states. Killing each other was bad for business so they had informal rules. An early attempt a laws of warfare.
It was mostly maneuver warfare and when a mercenary band was in a bad spot, it was expected to surrender. This is a few posts late but here goes;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary
“The Protocol Additional GC 1977 (APGC77) provides the most widely accepted international definition of a mercenary, though not endorsed by some countries, including the United States.”
Mr. X, nobody fears an American collapse. First you need to think of it as a rebirth.
My Nephew got back from Afghanistan in May. Him and his wife and Kid spent last week here.
I asked him what he would do if ordered to fire on protesters. He said he would never hear that order. My Nephew is an E-6 with 3 years of college. He will leave the army next March and finish his BS at Florida. The thing is he is more or less typical of the modern US Army. Most enlisted men are better educated then the officers of WW2 were.
The Officers of today’s army need a Masters to advance in Rank. A PhD to reach Flag Rank.
The US Army is no longer the home of the incompetent, the stupid or the lazy.
Officers KNOW what an Illegal Order is. They will not give one, they will not accept one.
Everybody in the Army knows that ‘obeying orders’ is not a legal defence.
While the US Army has been used several times in history to put down protesters, I doubt that it will happen in the future.
Toadold @ 17 — that was not an intelligence blunder; it was a strategic blunder. The real issue was that the Political Class was not prepared to fire back at anyone who interfered with the UN-approved mission. Leaking that info to the Chinese was merely the icing on the cake.
It is all part of the constant Leftie desire to have their cake & eat it too — the unwillingness to make choices. It is the same thing we see on the Welfare State (as the Brits call it). Lefties want to distribute the kind of rich hand-outs that only a wealth-producing industrial economy can provide; at the same time, they want to choke off the wealth-producing industrial economy, to protect the environment or some such. To paraphrase Wretchard, that kind of schizophrenia eats up the design margin that initially made the schizophrenia possible.
Being a Leftie means never having to say sorry for having made a choice.
s @ 20: A PhD to reach Flag Rank
Seriously? I hope not. Nobody passive enough to get a PhD is going to make a decent flag officer, even if 80% of their duties seem to be diplomatic the critical element is a certain gritty realism that is counter to what it takes to be a PhD, much less to negotiate the academic maze. Though now that you mention it, it might explain stuff like our recent ROE. You wouldn’t happen to have had any conversations with your nephew about the subject of ROE, that you could share here, by any chance?
“While the US Army has been used several times in history to put down protesters, I doubt that it will happen in the future.” Yes Stoch, I agree with you, this is the thing that gives me hope that all plans for locking down this country will come to total failure — along with the number of guns flying off the shelves that make any mass looting/rioting a very short lived thing indeed if people are allowed to stand their ground and not starved out.
Anyone who tries to set up a SkyNet type factory where robots can make more drones to put us down is going to find those plans leaked and risk exposure themselves. Anyone who thinks Homeland Security or some politicized Santa Muerte worshipping street gangs are going to force the American people to submit to an unconstitutional police state is also delusional.
But in the meantime there are still all the measures being attempted to see just how far they can go before the number of Americans who are truly awake (not we hate all those damn Ronulans and hoorah for Mittens and the Federal Reserve fake coopted Right) reaches critical mass and they all go to jail for their scams.
@12. stoicheion
I don’t know about a Mazda plant, but in 1989 I ate lunch with some squadron-mates at a soba shop that was 20 long steps from the T-shaped bridge aim-point for the Hiroshima device. The elderly proprietor had all his appendages and sensory organs in the proper places, as far as I could tell.
Close inspection of the bridge was a dangerous propsition, though, on account of all the traffic…
My chief concern is that they try to starve the American people into submission (I witnessed the Russian heat wave/wildfires of 2010 firsthand and find those who told me they believed in weather weapons highly credible, as insane as that may sound to some of ya’ll) or use a false flag to justify the police state.
I’m sure Teresita is familiar with the quotes from several flag officers who’ve gone on record as saying the Constitution is gone if a nuke goes off or a bioweapon is released…or the recent idiotic/fascistic ramblings from that jackass Gen. Odierno in the pages of Foreign Policy (as in please dear globalists, make me the next Gen. Petraeus).
[I personally don't think it has to be that way, the Japanese survived getting nuked twice and most of their cities being turned to ashes and rebuilt a reasonably free society on the ashes, or modern Russia being the most free and prosperous society Russians have ever enjoyed in a 1,000 year history mostly marked by misery]
I do NOT want or look forward to an American Caesar, nor do I have war porn fantasies of toe to toe nukyulur combat with the Russkies/Chinese (paging Buddy’s hero J.R. Nyquist) or an American Civil War (referring to the thread Wretchard understandably had to close down a few threads back).
And for those of you who dub me the resident Lubyanka plant or say I’ve listened to too much Alex Jones, go read The Ulsterman Report’s ‘White House Insider’ who refers directly to ‘globalists’ and ‘George Soros’ as POTUS’s bosses. Did AJ mind rays take over WHI’s brain? How about Drudge’s? The controlled Right is losing control over the nice, safe neat non-conspiracy theory narrative. Wretchard has alluded to this indirectly with his recent Edward Jay Epstein/Kennedy assasination posts. The Narrative is breaking down and it’s the so-called mainstream that’s more to blame than the likes of Alex Jones that not just Cass Sunstein (judging by @ReginaldQuill and others) dreams of shutting up for good.
And how do the controlled Right talking points account for George Soros simultaneously funding all of those anti-Kremlin Colored Revolutions while funding the Left in the U.S.? Something does not compute with that essential contradiction and the Clifford Kincaids and @ReginaldQuill low level minions can’t make it go away. If the USSR never truly went away then shouldn’t Vladimir Putin be sending valentines to Soros for giving him such a nice enemy in Misha the Tie Eater or such incompetents to run the Ukraine that it fell into the arms of Gazprom by default? Instead the Soros-funded Media Matters hates Russia Today and Cass Sunstein would love to shut them down for putting on so many ‘Birthers’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’. Things do not compute and reality does not fit safely into any grand unified theory (my chief beef with Brother Jones, though he has many good points).
Thank God there are the likes of the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte bringing the question of whether transnationalist/corporatist globalism is a real ideology with clout like the Commies and Fascists of old into the mainstream, sans the Brother Jones rants/Birch Society excesses.
EOT for me, the above three (one big rambling broken up into two) counts as four comments. Talk amongst yourselves.
18. David—no, there was ample warning that the Chinese were amassing a huge number of divisions across the Yalu. MacArthur, a legend in his own mind, chose to ignore this, misinterpret it, or something because it is correct that those in the area did have no warning of the coming attacks. This was not an intelligence failure, it was terrible leadership. MacArthur only visited Korea once, getting off his personal plane briefly at the airstrip, then back to his palace in Japan.
I refer you to two (of the many) histories of the Korean War: those by Fehrenbach and Halberstam, which make this very clear.
And this is not to mention dividing the forces in Korea: Army west, USMC east with virtually no cross-communication between them. It goes on and on …
And (excuse the piling on) the same MacArthur who, having been informed of the attack at Pearl Harbor, left all his B-17s neatly lined up on the runway, thus losing them the moment the Japanese attacked the Philippines.
No, Truman did OK–it was MacArthur who got all the hagiography.
Depth.
Depth is what enables Maneuver. Depth is what enables adversaries to recognize Sanctuaries.
There are many kinds of depth. Strategic tactical resource demographic financial intellectual moral and emotional depth come into play when nations/civilizations clash. Other terms for Depth are the Reserve (strategic or tactical) or our friend the Design Margin. We have reduced our depth in many categories. Other parties are also constantly losing or gaining depth. Keeping an accurate record of where everyone stands in those categories and making predictions as to where they are going is what Intelligence is supposed to do. For example the Muslims Chinese and Russians have vastly increased their financial depth but that may be temporary. Demographic and other forms of depth may not be aligned with those possessing financial depth, as with Russia, or may be expected shift from increasing to decline, as with the Arabs. What is certain is that the US and The West As We Knew It (TWAWKI) have recklessly reduced their depth in many areas.
Sanctuary as provided by Charles Laughton. My pity and contempt for those who prefer Disney. The conduct of the Pakistanis brings to mind Sanctuary as envisioned by Faulkner.
The Mouth of Sauron has once again issued forth from the Black Gates to treat with us. Spengler called him “a looney” but I prefer my moniker.
As long ago posted — the ChiComs DELIBERATELY chewed up their formations in the Korean conflict — because they were exclusively SOUTHERN CHINESE BOYS.
Mao NEVER used his own crew, except as back-stop formations.
The southern boys were equipped with American Thompson machine guns — entire factories had been sent there from America — after WWII.
It was in Korea that the TO&E of American artillery formations dropped the 105mm howitzer in favor of the 155mm howitzer. Further, in Korea the US Army increased the number of artillery tubes, per division — to include corps level guns — about six times the level of WWII. These additions were had by transferring essentially all of the 155mm howitzers in CONUS to Korea. It was the need for 155mm rounds that blew up US Army logistics. The old 105mm howitzers — the previous backbone of the defense — were deemed too range limited.
In Korea, the US Army buddied-up Korean formations with Americans — since in the beginning they had no heavy weapons to speak of. ( This has been repeated in Iraq, by the way. )
——-
Gordon @26
FDR explicitly instructed MacArthur to take the first punch. His air staff assured him that Clarke was out of range from Taiwan — an unsinkable Japanese aircraft carrier.
Oops…
The Japanese strapped on fuel tanks – a rarity for them – and proceeded to smash up Clark Field.
That’s why that fiasco didn’t sully MacArthur’s reputation. He was following orders TO THE LETTER.
This last aspect has remained unexplored since it would cross paths with the fiasco at Pearl Harbor — and FDR’s successful gambit to get America dragged into the war the long way round.
===
The early North Korean air force was 100% Red Guard pilots courtesy of Stalin. It took years to train a jet pilot — with many washing out.
===
As for discovering Chinese intent: they were PUBLIC about it!
Sheesh!
Just how many megaphones did they have to use?
===
Left unsaid: America had mothballed its atomic program after WWII. Systems were just ticking over. The 1949 atomic blast by Stalin was a shock. By 1950 America was in a panic.
Had Stalin swept on by our atomic program?
===
We now know that Stalin had cloned our Fat Man design — to the point of using American, not metric, tooling/ dimensions. (!)
He was also replicating our B-29 as the Tu-4 — making more of them than we did. (!)
This atomic crisis is the root of the Korean fiasco.
The war was ended as much by the super bomb as anything done in Korea.
===
As every schoolboy knows the Sanctuary was a Christian rule giving safe haven in Cathedral or Church.
In WW2 the Allies and the Axis bombed and destroyed those sanctuaries as does the IDF and AQ
There are no religious sanctuaries any more.
Embassies used to be a sort of secular sanctuary-
-but the Iran revolution ended that when they attacked the American embassy in Tehran
White Horse Mountain, Korea.
The ROKA 9th Division was hastily created in late 1950 during the Korean War and operated in the mountainous terrain of Sorak and Odae in the northeast, not far from the 38th parallel. The North Korean II Corps cut it off in late 1950 and the division suffered heavy casualties. Down, but not out.
During October 1952, all three 9th Division regiments, the 28th, 29th and 30th (12,000 men) held Hill 395, northwest of Chorwon, North Korea, known as White Horse Mountain. The division prepared for a Chinese assault. A captured North Korean officer who knew of the impending attack and did not want to be in the fight betrayed his comrades and told the ROKs about it. Many support units helped the 9th ROK Division, but at the end of the day, it was the 9th ROK Division pitted squarely against the Chinese 387th Army. The 9th held under ferocious Chinese human wave attacks by three Chinese Divisions of 23,000 troops. We have seen reports that ownership of the hill changed some 24 times; other reports say the Chinese charged up the hill 24 times. The 2nd Infantry Division-Korean War Veterans Alliance has written this about the 9th:
“9th ROK Division won high praise from everyone. It was apparent that modern training and equipment had brought a great improvement in Korean units since the early part of the war.”
All together, the allied force inflicted 10,000 casualties on Chinese forces and swept those who survived out of the area. ROK casualties were high as well. This was the bloodiest battle of the Korean War. The 9th ROK Division was renamed after the battle, and forever after was, and is, known as the White Horse Division.
—
Fast forward 16 years from the shaky start of the Korean War. The division, officially named the 9th Division, but best known as the White Horse Division, went to the Ninh Hoa area of the RVN at the junction of Highways 1 and 21. You will recall Hwy 1 went north-south from Saigon along the coast all the way to Hanoi North Vietnam. Hwy 21 went east-west across the RVN from Ninh Hoa through Dar Lac Province, which was adjacent to Cambodia. Hwy 21 did not go into Cambodia, however.
The White Horses had a larger area of operations (AOR) than did the Tigers to the north. Their AOR also hosted several very important cities, ports and military bases at Tuy Hoa, Nha Trang, Cam Ranh, and Phan Rang.
Picture:
The Republic of Korea’s 9th (White Horse) Division conducts a firepower demonstration at the Tuy Hoa camp, June 14, 1968, where ROK troops were holding one-week training sessions for South Vietnamese Popular Forces soldiers (local militia) in infiltration, rifle firing and other combat tactics. Since the course began in April 1968, over 600 troops had taken part.
—
Camp Colbern
During The Cold War, sanctuaries also harbored the threat of a fight to the finish.
…nuclear tipped missiles.
rumored to be banned.
The link above shows pictures of Camp Colbern from 1976 and 2008,
the exit sign on the gate states
“Ready Always Ready”
…with nuke-tipped Sergeant missiles on mobile launchers that we would take out in the field.
(I was there ’66 – ’68)
2008 Photos show a 16 lane toll road to Seoul under construction.
In ’66 we used to drink beer and eat fried doggie and vegetable snacks on a patio overlooking the same valley which was silent, and mostly lightless.
—
…and don’t forget Little John!
Nuke tipped
Maximum range: 10 nautical miles
“The kid brother to the Honest John, this unguided artillery rocket was quickly developed to reach ranges comparable to tube artillery…“
What 7 Palestrina said.
Blert, I always love reading your posts and learn from each one.
Richard, you keep raising your own bar. Thank you.
This youth movement has women covered
The assumptions of her generation were off by 180 degrees:
The female graduating class of Cairo University in the Fifties looked little different from Vassar.
Half-a-century later, every woman is hijabed to the hilt. Mohammad Qayoumi, now the president of San Jose State University, recently published some photographs from the Afghanistan he grew up in:
The girls in high heels and pencil skirts in the Kabul record stores of the 1960s aren’t quite up to Carnaby Street cool, but they’d fit in in any HMV store in provincial England.
Half a century later, it was forbidden by law for women to feel sunlight on their face, or leave the home without male permission. Even more amazing to my female dining companions, today you see more covered women in London’s East End or the Rosengård district of Malmö, Sweden, than you do in Tunis or Amman.
…The assumptions of her generation were off by 180 degrees:
Half-a-century later, every woman is hijabed to the hilt.
Mohammad Qayoumi, now the president of San Jose State University, recently published some photographs from the Afghanistan he grew up in:
The girls in high heels and pencil skirts in the Kabul record stores of the 1960s aren’t quite up to Carnaby Street cool, but they’d fit in in any HMV store in provincial England.
Half a century later, it was forbidden by law for women to feel sunlight on their face, or leave the home without male permission. Even more amazing to my female dining companions, today you see more covered women in London’s East End or the Rosengård district of Malmö, Sweden, than you do in Tunis or Amman.
The mistake made by virtually the entire Western media during the Arab Spring was to assume that social progress is like technological progress – that, like the wheel or the internal combustion engine, women’s rights and gay rights cannot be disinvented.
They can, very easily.
In Egypt, the youth who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood are more fiercely Islamic than their grandparents who backed Nasser’s Revolution in 1952
. In Tunisia, the young are more proscriptive than the secular old-timers who turned a blind eye to the country’s bars and brothels. In the developed world, we’re told that Westernization is “inevitable.” “Just wait and see,” say the blithely complacent inevitablists. “They haven’t yet had time to Westernize.” But Westernization is every bit as resistible in Brussels and Toronto as it’s proved in Cairo and Jalalabad. In the first ever poll of Irish Muslims, 37 percent said they would like Ireland to be governed by Islamic law.
When the same question was put to young Irish Muslims, it was 57 percent. In other words, the hope’n'change generation are less Westernized than their parents. 36 percent of young British Muslims think the penalty for apostasy – i.e., leaving Islam – should be death. Had you asked the same question of British Muslims in 1970, I doubt the enthusiasts would have cracked double figures.
Unlike the dopes droning the halfwit slogans at the Obama rallies, these guys mean it.
The children are our future.
That’s the problem.
©MARK STEYN
Imagine AQ promising Christians in the U.S. that they can go fight terrorists overseas. The dupes get on a bus and are massacred right in their own country. AQ Public Radio reports: ’50 Muslims killed by Crusaders, details sketchy’.
Illusions like uniforms may keep spectators safe, but what if spectators furnished the uniforms? Are they still only spectators then? In the case of Major League sports, the fans insist “no” (reference Red Sox nationalism). Thus we are all Little Eichmanns to these nut cases, meaning fair targets.
It’s strange that the gladiators of Rome wouldn’t turn on the crowds. Surely even the tigers got loose sometimes and pounced on the sadists cheering them. The rules of the arena are too overwhelming apparently, despite being human agreements and not the rules of a deity.
26. Gordon
Mac was the greatest General America ever produced. He was obeying orders in the P.I., which is why the General who actually lined up US airplanes so the Nips could destroy them easier went on to Command the 9th Air Force in the ETO.
As far as Korea, all those claims of warnings were made AFTER the Chinese attacked. There is not one shred of evidence, not a single piece of paper or witnessed conversation to prove that Mac was warned. Read “American Caesar”. MacArthur was an arrogant SOB that not only made enemies by the bushel but didn’t care. After his death those enemies crawled out from wherever they were hiding to tell their lies.
Truman, on the other hand, is responsible for most of the negative results in American history since 1948. He was a moral coward who was afraid of Stalin. He lost his re-election bid BECAUSE he was afraid of Mao also. There should NEVER have been a cold war.
The time to fight the Soviet Union was in 1947;
http://americancombatplanes.com/nuclear_1.html
http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/Sciences/Chemistry/NuclearChemistry/NuclearWeapons/FirstChainReaction/FirstNuclWeapons/AdditionalBombs.htm
“the US arsenal after had only 9 actual Fat Man type bombs in July 1946, with initiators for only 7 of them. In July 1947 the arsenal had increased to 13 bombs. There was probably sufficient fissile material on hand for over 100 bombs though.”
So in Mid ’47, America had a dozen atomic bombs and the aircraft to deliver them. The Soviets had no defence against a B-29. Dropping an Atomic Bomb on the main Soviet Tank plant would have given Stalin something to think about. Then a polite request to withdraw from Eastern Europe and China might have worked. If it didn’t, nuke a city and ask again. Without Stalin’s support Mao would not have won. There would have been no Warsaw Pact.
America had the nukes, the delivery systems. What we didn’t have was a POTUS with the courage to use them. So Truman was replaced by Ike. Ike didn’t have the edge Truman had. By then the Soviets had stolen the nuclear secrets and built their own.
One wonders how the Korean war would have went if armed UAV’s had been available to use against the political officers and leadership of the PLA.
I wonder if Kimy boy ever thinks about Grifin landing on his limo?
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/small-drone-missile-soon/
Is Obama inadvertently killing off sanctuary?
Simpler Times:
Once Upon A Time In The West
Outstanding video, plus my favorite band.
@#25 Mr. X.,
“And how do the controlled Right talking points account for George Soros simultaneously funding all of those anti-Kremlin Colored Revolutions while funding the Left in the U.S.? Something does not compute with that essential contradiction away…”
So let’s pretend that Beijing is not also Red? Or that Brussels is not a deepening shade of Pink? o_O
The conflicts between Sauron and Saruman and between different orcish factions who worked for the same evil overlord do have their counterparts in real life y’know, and not merely among our jihadi friends. The West may count itself grateful that even the most dangerous of our foes have their own troubles as well. ^_^
I know little about this conflict, but it represents the enshrinement of “limited warfare.” There is a lot of evidence that this is a failed policy. I believe history only supports all out war. Minds are only changed when there is an owerwhelming fear of death.
Stoi @ 35: “America had the nukes, the delivery systems. What we didn’t have was a POTUS with the courage to use them.”
That’s as may be. There also was a lot of war-weariness among the general population. Truman may have faced a revolution at home if he had wanted to take the war to the Soviets.
From talks with old Brits who lived through WWII, at least part of the reason Churchill was thrown out of office as soon as the War was over was reportedly the fear that he was itching to attack the Soviet Union. From talks with an old US soldier who had already been loaded onto a ship in preparation for the invasion of Japan when Japan surrendered, there was little appetite for further combat in the US either.
Yes, there would have been a great opportunity to push back the Soviets at the end of WWII. It would have been a “just war” too. After all, the Soviets had started WWII with their invasion (jointly with Germany) of Poland. But the will to carry on fighting may simply not have been there.
40. Kinuachdrach
I’m not actually speaking to another conventional war. I’m talking about nuking a factory in the Urals, followed by another Major city every day until the Soviets did what we wanted, which would be withdrawing inside their borders.
The Army Air Corps had a plan. It involved 122 ‘Fat Man’ type devices being dropped on 70 Soviet targets. The Soviets would have had no defence for the B-29, atomic bomb combination.
The Nazi’s had no strategic bombers in production. The Luftwaffe was 100% tactical. So the Soviets had no fighters that could do combat above 25,000 feet. Even if they did, they had nothing that could match the performance of the US escort fighters.
The Theory of winning a war by air power alone was never really tested during WW2.
Speer said that after Hamburg if the Allies had hit a few more cities that bad, Germany would have surrendered. That wasn’t done because We didn’t have the aircraft. By mid ’44 we did. BY Spring of ’45 the USAAC was putting 1,000 heavy bombers over Berlin on a routine basis. It was done as a not so subtle warning to Uncle Joe. Stalin figured it was a bluff.
The USAAC had til late ’48 early ’49 (MiG-15) to bomb the Soviet Union without fear of interception.
israel and the US are the only existing examples of entire countries created around the concept of sanctuary. Both now face an enemy which knows no boundaries or unwritten rules. What Israelis might know on a more visceral level is that there are no sanctuaries, only defended positions.
The past few years have seen a string of foiled attempts by Iran and its proxies to hit soft Israeli targets abroad. They are specifically targeting tourist destinations. This month in Kenya and Cyprus. The background is that there are few places Israelis can go to escape the confines of their small fortress and relax on the beach like anyone else. Thailand, Kenya, Cyrprus, and Turkey have been popular destinations and these have been targeted in one way or another. The idea is to make Israelis feel trapped as prisoners inside their own walls. No escape from the sanctuary and no escape inside it.
Hezbolla and Iran know that Israel plays by certain moral rules and have used this as a defense. Southern Lebanon is one huge network of bunkers and installations hidden inside schools, villages, and mosques. The goal is that in a fight Israel will have to break its own rules and descend to same level which can break the bonds holding the whole Israel project together.
The jihadis have gotten their best recruits from the religious schools. Israel has given its own yeshiva students sanctuary and exempted them from military service. That is ending now in the harsh reality that sanctuary cannot exist in a struggle to the death.
The conduct of the Pakistanis brings to mind Sanctuary as envisioned by Faulkner.
27. Blast From the Past
No Absylum, Absylum! for them, then.
All good stuff.
Korean war question/story:
I had a co-worker who was one of the many Hungarians who came out in 1956. He initially went to Canada and later came to California, where I think he still lives. (We are no longer business associates, since I found him to be ethically challenged, although totally charming: a bad combination.)
He claimed that he was a MiG pilot in the early ‘Fifties flying with the Soviets in North Korea in support of the North Koreans. He also claimed that, when he revisited Hungary in the ‘Nineties, after things loosened up in Europe, that his plane was on exhibit somewhere in the vicinity of the airport in Budapest.
Good story, but I am skeptical on the grounds that I don’t think the Soviet’s ever trusted their Warsaw Pact comrades that much, although maybe North Korea would have been far enough away that they would have been sent there.
On a related subject, I recall that back in the late Sixties, I was told in a Tech Intel course that a number of the then modern Soviet aircraft we had obtained during the Cold War had been flown over by defecting non-Soviet allied pilots.
Anyone ever heard anything like this? / erc
Marvelous! One of your best pieces yet.
Impressive analysis regarding sanctuaries. Also insightful is your comment: “…saddling Beijing with the useless and parasitic North Korea regime.”
When I was retraining university professors in China who had been brought back from their exile (during the Cultural Revolution) in the hinterlands in the early 1980s, one of my elderly Chinese professor colleagues who had been an interrogator of U.S. troops in a POW camp in Korea during that war told me that the Chinese were very sorry that they had intervened in Korea. He said that the Chinese felt they had to prove themselves to be “good comrades” to the USSR because the Soviet Union had helped China. The Chinese suffered at the time from an inferiority complex as the “little brother” to the USSR in the communist world and fighting the Koreans was something that would raise the status of the Chinese in the communist world of the time. But it was all a mistake, said my Chinese colleague, and now they were saddled with having to support the North Korean regime.
I learned all this in 1981. If the U.S. State Department had any employees with the least bit of brains, they should have exploited this fact about the Chinese attitude towards North Korea. Obviously the State Department contains only idiots.
I remember hearing in the late 1980′s about some Mig 15′s and 17′s flown over by Soviet Client States in the early years of the Cold War, the 1950′s. But the commie leadership clamped down pretty hard. They made sure the high performance fighter pilots had families for hostages and a history of loyalty. The low performance fighter pilots often had to train with limited fuel so they wouldn’t have the range to defect and etc. I read somewhere that the present day N. Korean pilots have their ejection seats disabled in addition to having to train with limited fuel loads. I heard we kept quiet about it when the defecting pilots had any family at all left behind. We did get a publicized defection of a Russian pilot in a Mig 25. IIRC his wife had divorced him and she was connected so he left.
Doug @33 “In Egypt, the youth who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood are more fiercely Islamic than their grandparents who backed Nasser’s Revolution in 1952″
It’s not just a problem in Egypt and northern Africa. Mark Steyn and Theodore Dalrymple have observed the same thing right in Britain itself. The grandchildren of the Pakistanis who immigrated to Britain in the 60s and 70s are far less integrated than the original generation of immigrants. Those people put up with language difficulties and prejudice because they wanted entry into a society that worked. Their haughty descendants are dreaming of a Muslim paradise that never was and acting out their rage and resentment at not being princes lording it over their inferiors.
Doug # 31 Thanks for the info on the White Horse. I spent a year at Phan Rang in USAF Security Police Heavy Weapons.
We were the trip wire on the perimeter. M-113s, XM 706s, and 81mm mortars. Directly behind our position were the ROK arty batteries. We did a lot of trading with the ROKS. US for Korean C rats and lots of bags of concrete mix. The ROKs had a very strong concrete reinforced bunker and other prepared positions in case we were over run. To misquote a Hollywood character I pity the poor fool what try to overrun that ROK battery.
Thanks.
More from “Talking Proud:”
Tuy Hoa did not escape the Tet Offensive of 1968. During the early morning hours of late January, the 5th Bn, 95th NVA Regiment attacked the airfield, the provincial prison and American artillery positions. The 4-503 infantry of the 173rd Airborne responded to the attacks against an artillery position, reinforced by the 28th ROKs. They inflicted heavy casualties on the NVA. The 4-503rd battalion commander then decided to lead a charge against the NVA, who were surrounded at the time. The battalion suffered 19 KIA and 39 WIA, tough losses.
Photo:
1960′s — South Vietnam — An Air Force F-100 Super Sabre fires a salvo of rockets at a jungle target. May 1967. Photo presented by the US Air Force.
His brigade commander told him to withdraw, and USAF F-100 Super Sabres from the 188th Tactical Fighter Squadron (TFS), New Mexico Air National Guard, based at Tuy Hoa, were brought in. The 188th was known as “The Enchilada Air Force.” They destroyed the NVA unit. The ARVN then went in and cleaned up the VC who were supporting the NVA; the VC had withdrawn to avoid the Super Sabres, leaving their NVA brothers to pay the price.
As an aside, Pat Birmingham was a F-100 “Hun” pilot at Tuy Hoa. The pilots had been given the day off in honor of the Tet holiday. Several had been drinking, others resting when their operations officer made the rounds, told those who had been drinking to take an immediate nap, and told the rest to get to their squadrons to brief, fly and fight. Birmingham has written:
“A lot of us couldn’t believe that the NVA and VC were being so foolish. They didn’t have much support from the civilian community, and they surely got their butts kicked …
I wrote home that I thought we’d just won the war, only to learn later that we had been undermined at home and in Paris by losers calling themselves Americans. “
The trouble with sanctuaries, Wretchard, is that without the principle of reciprocity, they tend to give one side a tremendous advantage – with the corresponding temptation to escalate to total war, all other things being equal. In the case of the Korean conflict, there was a strategic decision not to escalate, to respect Chinese territory as a sanctuary for fear of escalating the war. Whether this policy as part of the Cold War was wise or foolish history will judge, though in fairness we do seem to have won that particular war.
In the case of Islamic terrorism, the policy of sanctuary is very much a one way street. Islamic terrorism is best described as low-intensity total war. Islamic terrorists, be they the Taliban, Al-Qaida, Iranians, Iraqis, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Pakistanis in India, all believe and act on the idea that there are and should be no sanctuaries for the indidels. Therefore, they do not hesitate to attack schools, places of worship, and other purely civilian targets. At the same time, Muslims believe and the West often encourages them in this belief, that Islamic countries Islamic schools and places of worship should always be sanctuaries and immune from attack, even when used for military purposes.
American troops ordered to fire on American citizens would shoot, all it takes is an Capt and Lt and Gunny to shoot a few mutinous soldier’s in the head or even more probable If the American soldiers see their buddies being killed and maimed by American citizens. I think back to the darker days of the Vietnam war, Ohio, spitting on the troops and Bubba for a soldier it wouldn’t take much to see who was on whose side and who wasn’t.
Don’t believe me? Check out how the American’s of the civil war south had no trouble shooting American’s of the North and vice versus, The Utah Mormon wars, the NYC draft riots.
People tend to shoot back after being shot at even more so if their buddies get shot. If I was ordered to while in service I would obey my orders or get shot by Gunny.
Wretchard, I would recommend Julian Corbett to you. Not only does he “translate” Clausewitz from the dialectic to something a little more accessible to Anglosphere minds, but he also provides a strategic basis for understanding sanctuary. I think you’ll find his work complementary to your current thinking. Read his book.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the associated activities by bin Laden and al Qaeda gave us the following jihadist rules of engagement:
1. There are no civilians;
2. There are no non-combatants;
3. There are no innocents;
4. There are no sanctuaries;
5. There are only infidel targets to be killed and destroyed.
The U.S. has never reciprocated in adopting the same rules of engagement in its waging of a limited war against the jihadis. I suspect that only if there is a nuclear bomb or bio-chemical disaster in the U.S. made by the islamists would such ROEs be finally considered as serious options. However, even then I am not sure the U.S. would wage such a total and ruthless war for absolute victory.
I think it is more likely that conflicts between Islam and other religions in Africa, India, southeast Asia, etc. may result in such rules of engagement in response sooner that the U.S. adopting them. Many of these places and conflicts are far beyond any meaningful U.S. influence. Such relatively low tech level total wars can be extremely deadly (e.g., Rwanda) and in the absence of any U.S. influence or strategic national interests, would the U.S. electorate really care if thousands of jihadis died or were expelled to Muslim countries in an African or Asian conflict? Will there ever be a reckoning of the ill effects that local islamists have on Western societies? So far, the answer has been ‘no’, but will such tolerance continue unchanged, particularly in western Europe?
54. The Olde Kat 1 – 5
…and, for us:
6. No open borders.
I have often thought that had Gore been elected (thereby perhaps not going completely looney tunes) the GOP might well have forced him to secure our borders.
For Real
…also think how many lives a shoot to stop policy would have saved since 9-11.
As they saying goes:
How much jaywalking would there be if it carried a death sentence?
Sanctuary in antiquity was a physical condition. It meant some place that was out of reach of military efforts. Charle’s Church sanctuary was dependent on the spirit of the moment.
It was violated a number of times. America developed a Strategic reach post WW2 the spans the globe. There is no place on this planet a B-2 and it’s F-22 escorts cannot attack.
So sanctuary is now a political condition.
“American troops ordered to fire on American citizens would shoot, all it takes is an Capt and Lt and Gunny to shoot a few mutinous soldier’s in the head or even more probable If the American soldiers see their buddies being killed and maimed by American citizens.”
Yes, and the Cpt., Lt., and senior NCO all understand that they will face criminal charges when it’s over. Besides, Fragging put the fear of enlisted men into the officers in Vietnam. Those mutinous troops are holding automatic weapons. I doubt that your troika would shoot more then one before they did a brief imitation of a colander. Remember your chain of command? That Captain commands a company. He gets orders from battalion, who gets orders from regiment who gets orders from either brigade or division. Division gets orders from either the Corp commander or theater commander.
So you need 4 or 5 superior commanders to decide to commit a war crime before the Captain gets his orders.
Yes, if fired on, US troops are trained to respond. That is well and good. Don’t fire at them and there is no problem. Since shooting at US troops is a form of suicide, most people will avoid it.
Besides, it might be my kid. I didn’t spend a couple of decades feeding, clothing and buying him video games to shoot him.
The current Democrat left doesn’t trust the military and from what I heard they don’t trust the Democrat leadership. Which is one reason the Obamites seem to be so intent in arming all the other executive branches. I mean Dept. of Ed. people ?? The down side of that is some of the chuck a lucks that are being armed seemed to think a few hours of paper punching means you are good to go. The military used to divide in sync. with the civilian population as far as political party support went. With ever Democrat administration since the late 1970′s it has been going farther to the conservative side of political view points.
I think I’m over posted again but I just had to share this;
http://freebeacon.com/honey-i-shrunk-obama/
Scroll down to the sign in front of the school.
Sylvester Stallone’s son died. The housekeeper was told not to knock on his door, because his room was like a sanctuary to him.
If you think about it- our bodies are safe areas that most people don’t want being invaded. Our brains, reproductive zones, and truly all of our insides. Earth is a sanctuary too from the harshness of space. Only it feels more like a zoo at times, as though we are being exhibited for other beings.
When people have too much sanctuary, they start misbehaving. Look at Sylvester Stallone’s son. Look at the internet hackers called Anonymous who cause bedlam for no reason. Our excessive sanctuary becomes like a prison; it drives people mad like Jack Torrance trying to maintain everything rather than welcome occasional guests.
Sanctuary is not only a military concept. Although for my entire life it has been the center around which American military policy has been based. It seems that the first thing that we do when we face an adversary is announce in some way that “here is the location where you are safe”.
But at the risk of repeating something I have used before:
Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln.
“War is merely a continuation of Politics by other means.”
Just as our foreign military enemies do not recognize any sanctuary for us, deeming the granting of such or of any quarter as being mere sentimentality and violations of [insert as appropriate to adversary -Islamic/Socialist/Peoples’/Racial] Morality; our domestic political enemies [be they truly domestic or overtly controlled by overseas interests] never grant such to us here at home.
Just as the French Revolutionary forces felt liberated from all such concepts when dealing with the ennemi du peuple, “enemies of the people”
every group of statists, elitists, and wanna-be dictators believes, and acts on the belief, that any act short of absolute annihilation of the enemy by any means fair or foul is weakness. Except that they do not believe that there are any “foul” means if they use them. Up until recently, our design margin, as Wretchard has aptly put it, has allowed us to survive and prevail in the end. That design margin has been deliberately destroyed. It cannot be depended upon.
I recently attended a talk on the French Revolutionary massacres in the region called the Vendée. 400,000 civilian men, women, and children were murdered at the express orders of the “Peoples’” government. One of the generals sent by the Committee of Public Safety, François Joseph Westerman, sent a somewhat premature report to his masters:
By the way, his orders included instructions to kill ALL inhabitants of the Vendée, regardless of whether they supported the Revolution or not. Just so as to be sure.
I do find it interesting that so many of the theorists and practitioners behind mass murders at government and political behest, up through modern times, studied and wrote in post-1789 Paris. It seems that the political culture there has allowed the strain to continue breeding true.
Conservatives and Institutional Republicans tend to view war and peace as two separate and opposite entities. In war, deadly force is the currency. In peace, politics is the medium of exchange. The Left, including those I have referred to in the past as TWANLOC, see it as a continuum from peace to war; with a goal of pushing as close to open war as they can without provoking retaliation.
And they have succeeded. Because the Institutionals, and so far the Conservatives, have given them Sanctuary analogous to the sanctuary that our foreign policy automatically grants to the enemies of this country. And the results are the same in both fields. We are getting our gluteal musculature well and truly kicked.
TWANLOC violate the Constitution while in power. The Institutionals look the other way.
TWANLOC violates the law. The Institutionals look the other way and there is no prosecution.
TWANLOC riots. There is no punishment, beyond possibly being held for a few hours.
TWANLOC destroy property. No one is arrested, and no one is punished.
TWANLOC assault Conservatives, and they are not punished.
TWANLOC lie [literally, not just a difference in viewpoint] about Conservatives, about Institutionals, about facts, and about our country. And the state-controlled media automatically give them absolute credence.
They have been given sanctuary by their own insistence, with the open acceptance by Institutional Republicans, and the increasingly grudging concurrence of Conservatives.
That concurrence has to come to an end if the political war is not to be lost. If they commit a crime, if it is not repaid in a way that makes it clear that it is personally counterproductive to commit such acts, then the crimes will continue. It is preferable that the law deals with criminals. If the law fails to do so, it has to be made clear that the failure is not society giving carte blanche for further crimes. And a letter to the editor will not suffice.
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”
Who said this? Originally, it was a line by Sean Connery in the 1987 movie “The Untouchables” “Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!”.
But in this specific case, it was Barack Hussein Obama, on June 14, 2008; at a campaign fundraiser in Philadelphia, PA. Also at the fundraiser were PA governor Ed Rendell, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter, and Sen. Bob Casey. And the 400 Democrats in the audience had paid between $1,000 and $2,300 to hear him say it. Not a slip of the tongue.
http://factcheck.org/2011/01/obama-guns-and-the-untouchables/
Even the Soros controlled FactCheck.org admits he said it.
If Obama wants the country governed like Chicago, who are we to gainsay him?
Subotai Bahadur
Years ago reading Dean Acheson’s book “Present at the Creation” gave me a generally favorable view of Truman and his decisions. At least he seemed decisive and took the task of his office seriously.
With the passing years I’ve come to regret the decision to limit the Korean “policing action” to returning the situation to the “status quo ante,” merely forcing North Korea to withdraw to the previously established borders.
Neville Chamberlain is widely despised for his betrayal of Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, thinking he could trust Hitler to abide by the constraints he’d seemingly accepted in exchange for those betrayals. Some excuse Britain and France for retreating from confrontation, considering the tens of millions of their young men who had melted into the battlefield mudflows only a generation earlier.
Truman and most of the politicians and statesmen of the day had a similar horror holding them back – the fear of a widening war, in which the belligerents would inevitably use their nuclear weapons, if a concentrated effort were not made to emphatically maintain the limited nature of the Korean effort.
How could Truman have believed that North Korea would continue to be a toxic cyst, leaking poisonous ooze throughout the world SIX DECADES LATER?
Hmmmm. Kinda like the Palestinians.
Who profits from the endless turmoil generated by those pests?
===============
p.s. Responding to Subotai’s comment above, So long as there is no consequence for continually repeating some outrageous behavior, the persons doing so have no particular reason to cease.
Suggests some corrective would be in order.
“When in the course…” and all that.
Blert said:
>FDR explicitly instructed MacArthur to take the first
> punch. His air staff assured him that Clarke was out of
>range from Taiwan — an unsinkable Japanese aircraft >carrier.
Do you have a document reference for that statement?
62. Trent Telenko
I second the motion. MacArthur was ordered to leave his B-17s all lined up so they could be an easy target?
And further: a reference showing he had no knowledge of the Chinese buildup north of the Yalu prior to the Chinese invasion?
The story is still unfinished and as is the way with such things, the ending is kept hidden until the very end. The ending of the story which begans with epic defense the White Horse was written at the Fall of the Berlin Wall, but the tale which begins with the attack on September 11 is still being played out. Unlike the first Cold War, we cannot say how it will end. Who will write the words, at first tentatively and then completely?
………….
The cold war had a strategic vision and theory. It was called the containment policy. The idea was that communism was unsustainable. That is, the politics and the economics of it were gibberish. That in time it would collapse of its own weight. Therefor, the only thing that was required of the west was to contain it. Just not let it expand. (Because expansion would like any empire give it more energy.) Without expansion the communist systems would collapse.
That policy worked.
What is not clearly enunciated in the global war on terror is …what is the overall theory and practice for achieving strategic victory.
The fact is the overall theory and practice for achieving strategic victory in the global war on terror is pretty easy to lay out. We have talked about it repeatedly in this blog. You shut down the madrasses in Pakistan and elsewhere by defunding the gulf arabs. How do you do that? But collapsing the cost of oil. How do you do that? By turning America into an oil exporter–of cheap oil…again. How do you do that. By drilling into the green river formation…on top of the other fracking operations around the country. For mor details go here.
All Russian patriots note. Medvenev is correct. The key to the future of Russia is diversification. Russia has some of the brightest lights on the planet. Shouldn’t be to tough to build a better mouse trap. But even that said recent reports are that Siberia has some of the biggest shale oil reserves in the world that are orders of magnitude bigger than Bakkan. They are likely in the same league as the oil shale in the Green River Basin. (So they can make up in volume what they lose in price–which would be the American plan spelled backwards.)
A conceptual question.
When does sanctuary become a besieged fortress? A prison? Carried to its fullest extreme, what would happen if ‘sanctions’ (Freudian, that) had teeth, and became blockade of, say, Iran?
Just thinking.
The US desire for the Japanese to “commit the first overt act” was explicitly NOT an order to receive the first punch. Furthermore the Far East Air Force (FEAF) was aware that the B-17 base at Clark Field was within Japanese attack range. All B-17s had been ordered to operate from the new field on the Del Monte Company property on Mindanao which was out of Japanese bomber range. Two squadrons of B-17s (16 planes) were still at Clark to leave room at primitive Del Monte for 16 B-17s due to leave California for the Philippines on Dec 6. The other B-17s at Clark were under repair or maintenance or getting camouflage paint applied.
In addition, V Interceptor Command had been trying to use RADAR directed GCI to intercept Japanese recon aircraft for several days prior to the attack but technical limitations in their ground radio doomed that effort.
When the attacks came the FEAF made every effort to protect their bases but a whole raft of problems mostly inexperience, lack of a war mind-set and materiel shortages made these efforts in vain. If you want to blame any one person (not fair IMO) it would be Col George of V Interceptor Command. When the main attack came, V Interceptor Command misjudged the targets and sent the fighters hither and yon causing their formations to fragment and wasting their fuel. They ended up engaging the Japanese in small groups, while low on fuel and with unreliable guns and non-broken in and thus unreliable engines.
Brief US Army Fighter Chronology in the Philippines
November 23rd 1940
20th Pursuit Squadron from Hamilton Field arrives in Manila. They join the 3rd Pursuit Squadron which had been in the Philippines since 1919.
December 5th 1940
17th Pursuit Squadron from Selfridge Field and 40 P-35A pursuits arrive in Manila. The P-35As are embargoed ex-Swedish aircraft still in Swedish markings and with Swedish documentation and instruments.
March 8th, 1941
An additional 17 P-35A pursuits from the embargoed Swedish order arrive in Manila.
May 7th
31 P-40B pursuits arrive in Manila. After assembly by the Philippine Air Depot, 24 are assigned to the 20th Pursuit Squadron.
September 29th
50 P-40E pursuits arrive in Manila. After assembly by the Philippine Air Depot, 25 are assigned to the 17th Pursuit Squadron and 25 are assigned to the 3rd Pursuit Squadron. Total fighter strength is 81 P-40B/E and 57 P-35A.
October 13th
Two P-40B and two P-35A are lost in separate mid-air collisions (LT J Weaver killed).
October 23rd
One P-40E from the 17th Pursuit is lost due to engine failure.
October 30th
One P-40E from the 17th Pursuit is lost due to engine failure.
November 11th
Two P-35As from the 24th Pursuit Group are lost in a mid-air collision.
November 12th
One P-35A from the 24th Pursuit Group lost in crash at Clark Field.
November 21st
One P-40E from the 17th Pursuit Squadron lost in a ground collision.
Tuesday November 25th
24 P-40E pursuits arrive in Manila. The fighter force reaches maximum prewar paper strength of 99 P-40B/E and 52 P-35A. However the P-35As are pretty used up and lack replacement engines. Only about half are usable. Also their .30-cal guns have been shot out by gunnery training. Many of the new P-40Es have not had their .50-cal guns test fired to conserve limited ammunition.
Thursday November 27th
One P-40E from the 17th pursuit Squadron is lost in a crash near Paobong, PI (LT G Manley killed).
Thursday December 4th
Philippines: Unidentified planes are detected off the coast of Luzon by the SCR-270B radar at Iba Field. In the early morning, an unidentified plane is sighted near Clark Field by a flight of six P-40s from the 20th Pursuit Squadron while they are on a night training mission. Later in the day, the 21st Pursuit Squadron receives their first ten P-40s from the Philippine Air Depot (PAD). The combat force of V Interceptor Command is now 70 P-40s and 18 P-35s.
Friday December 5th
Philippines: Around midnight, unidentified planes are again detected off the coast of Luzon by radar. A P-40 from the 3rd Pursuit Squadron makes an unsuccessful attempt to intercept. Later, an unidentified plane is sighted near Clark Field by a flight of six P-40s from the 3rd Pursuit Squadron. Vice Admiral Sir Thomas Phillips RN, Commander Far Eastern Fleet arrives in Manila to confer with Admiral Hart, Commander in Chief Asiatic Fleet.
Saturday December 6th
Philippines: Six P-40s from the 17th Pursuit Squadron make a predawn patrol over Clark Field but no intruders are detected. Six P-40s from the 3rd Pursuit Squadron at Iba Field are on overnight alert. The 21st Pursuit Squadron receives another ten newly assembled P-40s from PAD.
Malaya: A RAF Catalina locates the Japanese attack force but is shot down. Admiral Phillips rushes back to Singapore by air.
Sunday December 7th
Philippines: Six P-40s from the 17th Pursuit Squadron make a predawn patrol over Clark Field but no intruders are detected. Six P-40s from the 3rd Pursuit Squadron at Iba Field are again on overnight alert.
Monday December 8th
Philippines: At midnight, unidentified planes are detected off the coast of Luzon by the radar at Iba Field. The alert fighters from the 3rd Pursuit Squadron sortie but fail to intercept because the ground based radio lacks the range to guide the P-40s all the way to the intercept point.
0230 United States Asiatic Fleet receives word of the Pearl Harbor attack by U. S. Navy radio.
0330 USAFFE receives word of Pearl Harbor attack by commercial broadcast.
0600 Thirteen Navy Type 97 Carrier Attack Planes and nine Navy Type 96 Carrier Fighters from JN carrier Ryujo attack Davao. A second strike of two attack planes and three fighters also attack losing one fighter to ground fire. The two attacks destroyed two PBY patrol bombers from the tender William B Preston.
0800 V Interceptor Command radar detects a Japanese strike force heading south over Lingayen Gulf. All but three B-17 bombers at Clark sortie on dispersal flights. The 24th Pursuit Group attempts to intercept with thirty-six P-40s from the 17th Pursuit Squadron at Nichols Field and 20th Pursuit Squadron at Clark Field while eighteen P-35s from the 34th Pursuit Squadron at Del Carmen Field provides CAP over Clark Field.
0905 Japanese Army Air Forces attack. Eighteen Army Type 99 bombers from the 8th Sentai attack Camp John Hay at Baguio and twenty-five Army Type 97 light bombers from the 16th Sentai attack Tuguegarao airfield. The American fighters are positioned too far to the south to intercept as they were expecting this to be the main JNAF attack on Clark.
1100 General MacArthur authorizes V Bomber Command to strike Formosa. Far East Air Force plans an attack by sixteen B-17 bombers from 28th and 30th Bombardment Squadrons escorted by 17th and 20th Pursuit Squadrons. All FEAF aircraft are recalled to base for fueling and arming. 34th Pursuit Squadron returns to Del Carmen Field and 17th and 20th Pursuit Squadrons land at Clark Field.
1127 A Japanese strike force is detected by radar west of Luzon heading south. Their target is presumed to be Manila.
1140 Eighteen P-40 fighters from the 3d Pursuit Squadron (1Lt Thorne) at Iba Field takeoff to cover Iba. The formation becomes scattered by dust and haze during takeoff (Iba is a dust bowl) and only ten are able to follow orders to divert to Manila. One flight of six P-40s remain over Iba.
1145 A Japanese strike force is detected over Lingayen Gulf heading for Clark Field. Twelve P-40 fighters from the 21st Pursuit Squadron (1Lt Dyess) takeoff from Nichols Field to provide CAP for Clark Field but are diverted to Manila Bay. Four more P-40s, delayed by engine problems, fail to join the main formation and continue on to Clark. Two others returned to Nichols with engine problems. The 34th Pursuit Squadron (1LT Marett) were also ordered to cover Clark Field but the orders are not delivered.
1215 Eighteen P40 fighters from the 17th Pursuit Squadron (1LT Wagner) take off from Clark to intercept over Manila Bay. Thirty P-40s are now committed to intercept over Manila Bay and another twelve are providing CAP for Iba and Clark Fields or are en route.
1220 The 24th Pursuit Group (MAJ Grover) is ordered to intercept the second strike over Clark Field by V Interceptor Command (COL George). The 20th Pursuit Squadron (1LT Moore) is ordered to scramble and all airborne fighters are ordered by radio to Clark Field.
1230 Eight P-40 fighters from 3rd Pursuit Squadron arrive over Clark Field but six are force to return to Iba Field for fuel. The other two remain over Clark Field.
1235 The Japanese Naval Air Forces attack Clark Field. Fifty-three bombers attack with 636 60-kg bombs. Only three of 20th Pursuit Squadron P-40s get airborne and nine P-40s are destroyed or disabled during takeoff (2LT M Louk, 2LT J A Luker, 2LT L J Mulcahy and 2LT J T Drake KIA).
1240 The Japanese Naval Air Forces attack Iba Field. Fifty-three bombers drop 486 60-kg and 26 250-kg bombs. Six P-40s from the 3rd Pursuit Squadron are landing to refuel and two are destroyed by bombs (2LT Root KIA)
Thirty-four Japanese fighters attack Clark Field. Four P-40Es from 17th Pursuit Squadron and two from 3rd engaged and shoot down one Japanese fighter (LT Steele) before they are driven off. Five more 3rd Pursuit Squadron P-40s, arrive high over Clark Field but fail to contact the Japanese. Three head for Iba Field to fuel.
34th Pursuit with sixteen P-35As fighters sortie from Del Carmen Field after the smoke from Clark is seen. They engage six Japanese fighters and suffer damage to nearly all of the P-35s.
1245 Forty-two Japanese fighters attack Iba Field. By this time about seven remaining 3rd Pursuit Squadron P-40s are in the Iba area to land and refuel and they engage the Japanese downing one (1LT Roberts) and two (1LT Ellis) Zeros. One P-40 (2LT Ireland KIA) is shot down by Japanese fighters and one ditches in the ocean with battle damage (Roberts)
1305 Japanese fighters from Iba strafe Clark on the way home. Three 20th Pursuit Squadron P-40s engage nine Japanese fighters 30 miles west of Clark. Two Zeros are shot down (LT Keator) but the three P-40s are forced to disengage. One 3rd Pursuit Squadron P-40 (1LT Ellis) is shot down over Clark by Japanese fighters, a second is shot down by three Japanese fighters 28 miles northwest of Clark (2LT Ellstrom KIA). A third lands at Iba and two of the surviving P-40s at Iba take off after the Japanese attack.
1315 Surviving fighters from 24th Pursuit Group land all over Luzon.
The 3d Pursuit Squadron has lost eleven P-40Es. One P-40 lands on the beach at Lingayen, two land in a dry riverbed south of San Marcelino, two more land at Nichols Field, seven land at Rosales Field where one is written off from battle damage. Four have been shot down, four spare P-40s have been destroyed at Iba, two have been destroyed at Iba trying to land during the attack and one that landed during the battle is shot up beyond repair.
The sixteen P-35As from the 34th Pursuit Squadron land at Del Carmen Field where one is written off.
The eighteen P-40Es from 17th Pursuit Squadron land at Nichols Field.
The sixteen P-40s from the 21st Pursuit Squadron land back at Nichols Field where one is wrecked in a landing accident. Three others are out of commission with engine defects.
Two P-40s from the 20th Pursuit Squadron land at Clark Field. The other lands at Del Carmen Field. The remaining twenty including five spares have been destroyed on the ground at Clark Field.
The 24th Pursuit Group has also lost one of the Group HQ assigned P-40s on the ground at Clark.
The three attacks on Clark have destroyed seventeen of the twenty-one B-17s present. An additional B-17 that arrives over Clark during the attack is badly shot up by Japanese fighters but returns safely to Del Monte.
Lurker:
Thanks; very informative.
Couldn’t help but fixate on this one: ”34th Pursuit with sixteen P-35As fighters sortie from Del Carmen Field after the smoke from Clark is seen. They engage six Japanese fighters and suffer damage to nearly all of the P-35s.”
16 to six and they were almost all damaged?
You had to be good or lucky to take down Japanese fighters in the early part of the war. Someone did it in a P-26! Jesus Villamor:
P-26
Yes, imagine going up against a Zero in one those P-26s, with the open cockpit, two bladed prop, the scarf around your neck, the spatted landing gear. It’s like the Dawn Patrol.
Gordon
I noticed I omitted the arrival of the 21st and 34th Pursuit Squadrons. I don’t have notes handy but they had only been in the Philippines a couple of weeks. Their parent 35th Pursuit Group was still en route. They had been given the worn out P-35s until their P-40s arrived. If I remember correctly neither squadron had flown the P-40E before either. So the 21st goes into combat with a much heavier variant of the P-40 then they have flown before that they have only had their hands on for a couple of days and that have engine and ammo feeding shake out problems. The 34th with the P-35A, a plane they have never flown in any model, with worn out guns and worn out engines.
Lurker
Lurker—
Yes, an obvious case of inadequate readiness. I guess that’s why they’re called ”surprise” attacks.
I read more about the P-35 and can understand the losses. It was considered inadequate already by the time it went into production … against the Zeros, no less.
W: I note Villamor survived the war at least ’til 1954 when he was again decorated for his non-flying activities.
There is some doubt over whether Villamor actually shot down the Zeros or if the planes shot down were Zeros. However, Villamor himself did not claim the victories. It is suggested that command claimed them and attributed them to Villamor.
However that may be, going up in the P-26 Peashooter against what was then and would be for some time the best fighter in the theater with the flowing scarf and goggles, armed with the 2 x 30 caliber machine guns is a pretty cool image. And it must have taken a lot of guts.
Wretchard, Others,
The following is clipped from the H-NET Military History Discussion List:
From: Miller, Roger G Dr CIV USAF AF/HOH
Subject: General MacArthur’s Command During The Opening Stages Of The War In Philippines
Date: May 23, 2012 9:02:57 AM EDT
To: H-NET Military History Discussion List
Hi Gang
I’ve refrained from commenting on this thread because of the subject’s complexity, the dearth of primary documents, and a desire to avoid replying to endless questions, but I will make a bit of an effort here:
From 0330 until 1014, HQ USAFFE specifically denied Brereton permission to launch his bomber force at Clark (19 B-17s) against the Japanese facilities on Formosa and did not allow him to speak directly with MacArthur either in person or on the telephone. FEAF dispersed the bombers to holding positions in the air at about 0800 to avoid an attack expected that morning. Most of the bombers were in the air most of that morning. MacArthur gave Brereton permission to attack Formosa during a telephone call at 1014, and Brereton recalled the dispersed force which began landing about 1100. It took two to two and a half hours to refuel, load bombs, and prepare an attack, thus FEAF’s aircraft were on the ground at about 1220 when the Japanese air forces, delayed by fog on Formosa for roughly five hours, reached Clark.
USAFFE persistently denied Brereton’s efforts to conduct reconnaissance of Formosa prior to 8 December, but the 19th Bomb Group’s target files apparently contained enough information that, although dated, made an attack on Formosa more than just a thrust into the unknown.
Who ignored MacArthur’s chain of command and in what way?
I am still working on my biography of Lt. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton. Hopefully, it will get done.
Cheers,
Roger G. Miller, Ph.D., GS-14
Deputy Director
Air Force Historical Studies Office
HQ USAF/HOH
Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling
Washington, D.C. 20373-5899
This was one of my comments from the same discussion:
Some figures of merit for consideration in the MacArthur’s FEAF debacle.
First figure of merit:
To hit one 60 ft. x 100 ft. target in WWII required 1500 B-17 sorties carrying nine thousand 250 lb bombs because they had a circular error probability of 3300 feet. [1]
Circular error probability is defined as 50% within the CEP circle around the target and 50% landing somewhere else outside it.
That level of performance assumed,
1) Good daylight visibility and
2) Good target contrast from the background to achieve a good aim point.
A second figure of merit:
There were nineteen B-17′s available to the FEAF at Clark Air field with a maximum payload of 12 x 500 lb bombs for a total of 228 bombs in one 19 sortie mission.
Point in fact, the FEAF B-17′s only had 100 lb and 300 lb bombs to work with. [2] And this was 12-15 months before USAAF armorers got around to placing multiple lighter bombs on the B-17 500 lb. bomb stations.
A third figure of merit:
There was no effective way for FEAF B-17′s to deliver their loads of bombs through fog on Formosan airfields, to get in the first punch, even if MacArthur had said yes sooner.
It was years before the US Military deployed radio beam navigation for night/bad weather bombing (LORAN) and it was February 1944 before the H2X (AKA “Mickey set” or more properly the AN/APS-15) 3cm airborne radar arrived in USAAF service in UK based B-17′s to aim bombs through
clouds and murk. [3] This also leaves out considerations of upper level wind patterns over Formosa.
A fourth figure of merit is the following partial list of Japanese military airfields on Formosa. [4]
Okayama Airfield
Shenei, Shoka
Tainan Airfield
Japanese airfield
(Home of 84 A6M2 Zero/Zeke fighters & 100 bombers used 8 Dec 1941 at Clark Field)
Kaohsiung (Takao)
Harbor and airfield
Toko Airfield
Japanese airfield
Toshein Airfield
Japanese airfield
Toyohara Airfield
Japanese airfield, located in the central portion of the island
Koshun Airfield
Japanese emergency airfield
Matsuyama Airfield
Japanese airfield
Karenko Airfield
Japanese airfield
Shinchiku Airfield [5]
Japanese wartime airfield
Koryu Airfield
Japanese wartime airfield
Anyone who thinks nineteen pre-B-17E model Flying Fortresses in December 1941 could make a meaningful dent in the above Japanese airfield infrastructure on Formosa, given that B-17 force’s technical limitations, and the efforts in terms of sorties that the 5th Air Force put into suppressing Formosan airpower in the anti-Kamikaze
campaign of March thru June 1945, is trafficking in delusion. [6]
There was no way that the FEAF could survive in range of Japanese air power on Formosa in 1941, and it didn’t. Nothing MacArthur did, or didn’t do, would have changed that outcome.
The only thing that would be different, had MacArthur said “Yes” to a B-17 raid on Formosa hours sooner, was the place where those B-17′s died.
Notes:
1) “Effects-Based Operations” Col Gary Crowder, Chief, Strategy, Concepts and Doctrine Air Combat Command. See Document Link:
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dod/ebo_slides/030318-D-9085-024.pdf
2) See the “MacArthur’s Pearl Harbor” section at
http://www.homeofheroes.com/wings/part2/00_infamy.html
3) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LORAN and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2X_radar
4) See: http://www.pacificwrecks.com/provinces/formosa.html
5) The following link shows B-25 Mitchells using 5th Air Force low level airdrome attack techniques on the Shinchiku Airfield complex in April 1945 — http://shulinkou.tripod.com/dawg2e.html
6) See the 5th Air Force’s 1945 Formosa campaign history at http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/V/AAF-V-16.html
The Far Eastern Air Force (FEAF) took precautions to protect their B-17’s from a dawn Japanese strike on Dec 8, 1941, but as others have mentioned, they landed out of fuel just in time for the delayed by fog Japanese strike.
More modern evaluations — AKA less colored by immediate post-war reputation protection and organizational agendas — of the FEAF performance are more telling.
The best look at that I have seen on that debacle is in Chapter 10 of “Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat”, edited by Robin Higham, Stephen J. Harris, which evaluated the real readiness of the Far Eastern Air Force on Dec 8, 1941. That essay, titled “The United States in the Pacific” by Mark Parillo, addresses the FEAF Philippines performance starting at page 296.
The bottom line was that the B-17 force at Clark field did not have:
1) Intelligence — There were No pre-war over flights of Formosa, No human intelligence on the ground and thus No intelligence photos for inexperience photo interpreters to work from,
2) Accuracy — See B-17 anti-ship performance per pre-war doctrine at Midway,
3) Fighter Support — Supporting FEAF fighter units didn’t have the logistical chops (The FEAF P-40B & P-40E’s lacked Ethylene Glycol coolant for high altitude operations and were so short of .50 cal ammunition for its there was no test firing of guns until combat commenced) to conduct escorted strikes at the B-17′s normal operating altitudes anywhere within P-40 range,
5) Defensive Armament — The B-17 force at Clark Air field were pre B-17E models lacking tail guns and powered turret guns. Thus they were dead meat for Japanese A6M Zero/Zeke fighters with 20mm cannon on Formosa (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-17_Flying_Fortress_variants),
6) An effective early warning system at Clark Field — The Radar & Radio system in place didn’t work & the Japanese took out the operational Radar at the same time as the B-17′s.
The cheaper alternative system, the one applied in China by then retired for disability Captain Chennault, was the pre-war exercise tested as effective telephone radio & binocular equipped ground observer system. That approach was drummed out of the Army Air Service (along with Chennault) as a threat to the Heavy Bombardment clique’s pre-war B-17 budget.
The bottom line was that the B-17 force was thought of as a high value “force in being” to the American high command. This made the force’s commitment without a clear high value target — like the expected Japanese invasion convoy — a non-starter, given a lack of clear targets on Formosa.
The B-17, while an effective weapon, was so over sold pre-war by Gen. H.H. “Hap” Arnold that there was no way that it could meet the expectations placed upon it in the defense of the Philippines.
It was technically impossible for the B-17 force to get in a good lick on the Japanese because of the fog over Formosan airfields, and even without fog, B-17 combat accuracy using pre-war doctrine required an order of magnitude more bombers — 190 not 19 — to get the results that would set back the Japanese on Formosa.
This from an unimproved Clark Air Field, which at that time could not handle two groups of B-17, AKA half that number!
The hyperventilation about “MacArthur’s Pearl Harbor” since then has been an exercise in career and institutional public relations.
The pattern of Axis versus Allied airpower in WW2 was that the two major Axis powers had made the transition to 1st Generation WW2 closed cockpit, low wing, piston engine mono-plane fighters & bombers. It took a year of these more advanced aircraft being in service before they could be used to best advantage in terms of proper logistics.
Then it took further months of combat to get proper tactical doctrine for this new equipment.
German had the Czech crisis, Spain and Poland to iron these things out before the main event in the Battle of France.
Japan had the Sino-China War starting in 1937, plus major border incidents with Russia, before dropping down on the FEAF at Clark Field.
Clark Field was too close to a modern, combat tested Japanese Air Force to survive and nothing Gen MacArthur did, or did not, do would have changed that outcome.
Re: Tora Bora & fighting-back then apologizing for (claimed civilian) deaths.
What are the odds that the average farmer or tribal leader knows any of this? I suspect this is like our (accidental) bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia. Makes no difference what we say (to the few who can read – or what remains after the game of telephone conveying the “news”), our status rises in the eyes of those that respect only violence and force.
Re: Gen. MacArthur.
I thought the story was that his “breakdown” was an excuse to delay execution of Marshall’s direct order to immediately bomb Formosa (part of the Rainbow-5 war plan), because his friend Queson had asked him not to as the president had been given assurances (and threats) by the Japanese ambassador that the Philippines would be bypassed (as fellow Asians) if they stood by and let the IJA evict the colonial occupiers from the oil fields and rubber plantations.
MacArthur had retired from the U.S. Army in 1937 but remained Queson’s employee and advisor to the Philippine forces until recalled to active duty by the U.S. in July of 1941. Note that in Executive Order #1 of 1942 Queson put upwards of $10M dollars (in today’s currency) into his bank account – “…are hereby granted recompense and reward, however inadequate, for distinguished service rendered between November 15, 1935 and December 30, 1941.” Since Roosevelt was witting to all this and permitted it – perhaps it was justly due back pay – though there’s no indication that MacArthur or staff didn’t live the life of the 1% of the 1% while living in Manila. However it appears that after the payment previously unavailable space was found on the Swordfish for Queson’s evacuation.
Stories about the inadequacies of the Army Air Corps preparation, infrastructure, logistics etc., are weak excuses for not launching when existing intelligence gave them every reason to know that they would lose the use of their weapons in any case, which was the actual thinking in Washington and the reason to order Rainbow-5 and immediate bombing – there was no expectation that attacking Formosa would yield more than a trading of pawns, if that. Marshall was very aware of the weaknesses of his forces, irrespective of the dissembling of his direct reports that all was well. MacArthur should have been relieved of duty like the other naïfs of Pearl Harbor but he was the only one standing that was still “in the fight.” And Roosevelt hadn’t internalized Lincoln’s lesson – that you had to sacrifice the existing leadership, even those arguably able and not-at-fault, to motivate and focus the next generation of U.S. Grants.
He did not, and we’re still paying for it.
Look how quickly the FEAF melted away…
Tuesday December 9th
P-40 hit and destroyed parked B-17D 40-3100 in takeoff collision at Clark Field. Six P-40s total lost in takeoff collisions. The P-40 on the beach at Lingayen crashed on takeoff.
Wednesday December 10th
FEAF strikes Japanese invasion force at Vigan.
P-40 hit and destroyed parked B-17D 40-3063 in takeoff collision at Clark Field. B-17C 40-2045 (Capt Kelly) from the 14th Bombardment Squadron (Heavy) shot down over Luzon by JNAF fighters. B-17D 40-3091 damaged over Luzon by JNAF fighters. B-17D 40-3086 ditched off Mindanao Island on return to Del Monte. B-17D 40-3093 damaged over Luzon by JNAF fighters.
One P-40 shot down by JAAF bomber, one shot down by US Army AA, one crashed while landing.
One P-35A crashed in target area, one lost when JN Minesweeper No.10 blew up, 7 destroyed on the ground at Del Carmen by JNAF fighters
Snow flakes really…
Lurker