End of an Era

Some eighty years ago the Battleship Era ended in a flurry of bombs and torpedoes that sank the two capital ships of the Royal Navy's Force Z.

Yes, aircraft had been involved in sinking the most capital of capital ships prior to December 10, 1941. But the circumstances allowed battleship fans to temporize. 

An aerial torpedo ensured the doom of Bismarck, but the actual sinking occurred during a surface gun action. Battleships were sunk by aircraft at Taranto and Pearl Harbor, but those were surprise attacks on unsuspecting moored warships.

There was no gray area on December 10. Aircraft found and sank two of the Royal Navy's heavy units, one, Prince of Wales, one of the newest and most powerful British battleships extant.

The "moral" I've always been told that this story taught was that in the 90 minutes it took the air attack to sink both Prince of Wales and Repulse the battleship era ended and any naval organization that pursued heavy gunpower rather than carrier airpower was foolishly incompetent. 

What's kind of intriguing about one "counterfactual" is that Force Z had come within five miles of an IJN task force consisting of "six cruisers" - I've been unable to discover which six these were, but at least one was Chōkai (鳥海), a Takao-class heavy cruiser.

Neither task force was using radar effectively. The Japanese because IJN radar technology was crippled throughout the Second World War, the British because Prince of Wales' radar had gone down earlier in the mission, supposedly through overheating in the tropical heat and humidity.

(Worth noting that in this the PoW lived up to her reputation as a "hard-luck ship"...)

Let's assume that at least three or four of the other "six cruisers" out that night were also heavies. The Japanese heavy cruisers were beasts, especially heavily armed with the big 24-inch torpedoes, and the IJN trained extensively in night gun and torpedo action as the encounters off Guadalcanal the following year proved.

 
Let's suppose that the two task forces had, instead, bumped into each other in the night.

The British weight of metal would probably have torn the Japanese cruisers apart, but the IJN night fighting and torpedo tactics might well have either sunk or badly damaged the British capital ships to the point where their sinking by aircraft the following morning could be written off the same way that the battleship aficionados wrote off Bismarck, Taranto, and Pearl Harbor.

The "end of the battleship era" might now be attributed to the naval and naval air actions off the Philippines in 1944.

No real point here other than to consider how things we take for received wisdom often turn on small, nearly insignificant events, like the failure of the British radar the night of December 9/10.

Thoughts?

Gumbo

Saudi Whistleblower:  MbS was supposed to visit Saudi troops at Najran on the border with Yemen.  But it appears he is cancelling that trip.  Meanwhile Saudi troops there are reported to be openly cursing him.  Time for a coup???

https://english.almasirah.net/details.php?es_id=9129&cat_id=2


Sanctions:  The Brit Exchequer sidestepped President Bone-Spurs sanctions on Iran.  They paid Iranian Bank Mellat $1.6 Billion in damages from a ten-year old squabble that was finally adjudicated by the Supreme Court.   Bank Mellat although mostly private is 17 per cent owned by the Iranian Government.  The US Treasury has Bank Mellat on their watchlist of Iranian banks trading in violation of UN Security Resolutions.   So it seems Boris just gave a big FU to Donny-Boy.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/uk-dodged-sanctions-to-settle-with-iranian-bank-mellat-5xwkclgdm


This Day in History:   "With all available men conscripted, 100,000 Moscow women, children & elderly are digging vast defensive trenches around city."  (Hat tip to RealTimeWWII twitter account)

VJ Day

Officially it was 2 September 1945 in a formal setting on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay with the famous photo of Dugout Doug MacArthur lording it over the ceremony.   It was about three weeks earlier on 10 August that the Swiss Embassy in Washington notified US Secretary of State James F Byrnes of Japan's intention to accept unconditional surrender.  There was just one small proviso, that Emperor Hirohito be permitted to remain in place.  Truman accepted.  Actual surrender was acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration just past noon of 15 August in Japan.  Because of time zone differences it was about 11 PM on 14 August in Washington DC.



The photo on the right was taken 19 August with MacArthur on the balcony of Manila City Hall.  Mac and the GIs and Filipinos below him are waiting for the Japanese delegation coming to accept the orders to surrender and return them to Tokyo.  City Hall, one of few buildings left standing, was still pockmarked by bullets from the Battle of Manila six months earlier which had resulted in the death of 1000 American GIs, 16,500+ Japanese, and 100,000 Filipinos. 


That Japanese delegation to Manila had flown from Tokyo to Sata Misaki on the southern tip of Kyushu and from there to Ie Shima , an island just off the western edge of Okinawa.

They flew in two twin-engined Mitsubishi G4M1 aircraft, AKA Bettys.  They had been stripped of all weapons and were painted white with green cross markings instead of the red meatball.   Partway to Ie Shima they were escorted by B-25 Mitchells and P-38 Lightnings, just in case some bushido fanatic tried to stop the peace talks (That was not paranoia on the part of the Americans on Ie Shima.  On 15/16 August on hearing of the surrender Japanese guards murdered over 100 American POWs.  Many Australian and British prisoners of war were murdered at Ranau and Sandakan in Borneo.  Plus at Batu Lintang in Borneo, death orders were proposed to murder some 2,000 POWs and civilian internees but the camp was liberated before they could be carried out.).   From Ie Shima they were put on a Douglas C54 Skymaster to proceed to Manila and meet Mac to accept the surrender orders.

Ie Shima or Ie Island, known as Iejima to the Japanese, is a very tiny island of about 23 square kilometers or less than nine square miles.  At that time it had one of the largest airfields in the Pacific.  Which is why it was selected for the changeover.  It is where Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle, was killed by machine gun fire when he was covering the 77th Division liberation of the island and airfield. Every April there is a memorial service there for him.

 It's a beautiful place today. Covered in gardens of vegetables and flowers.  Every April, in addition to the Ernie Pyle memorial, the island hosts the Iejima Island Lily Festival featuring acreage that looks like gigantic carpets of snow white lilys.

https://www.okinawanderer.com/2013/04/18th-iejima-island-lily-festival-set-for-two-week-run/


At MacArthur's dog and pony show on the 2nd (i.e. the formal surrender ceremony), the Japanese delegation was led by Mamoru Shigemitsu, Minister of Foreign Affairs and General Yoshijirō Umezu Chief of the IJA General Staff.  Mac's staff had specified all the details of the ceremony.  So was it a slap in the face to Admiral Nimitz that Admiral Soemu Toyoda, Chief of the IJN General Staff was not among them?  Some thought so at the time.  Both Shigemitsu and Umezu were later convicted at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.  Umezu certainly deserved it for his time in China as CG of the Japanese 1st Army and later CinC of the Kwantung Army.  Umezu died in prison four years after the surrender.  Shigemitsu, known as Shiggy to the American press, got a raw deal and never should have been convicted.  He had opposed militarism his entire career in the diplomatic corps, had opposed the war, and he had "argued that the success of the proposed Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere depended on the equal treatment of China and other Asian nations with Japan."  It was Stalin that wanted him on trial.  He had been ambassador in Moscow in 1938, so he must have stepped on some toes there during the Japanese/Soviet border conflicts.  Despite depositions from both American and British diplomats about Shigemitsu's opposition to the war, MacArthur caved to the Soviets.  Or maybe it was Truman?   But Shiggy was released from prison in 1950 he eventually went into politics becoming a member of the Diet in 1952 and Deputy Prime Minister in 1954.

Just for fun

Hmmm!   Something strange about redlegs.  Maybe they should have made him a lanyard puller, or a gun captain.

 

     

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojtek_(bear)

I've helped load a few truckfulls of 155 shells myself, which I'm sure is the source of my aching sacroiliac for the last 55 years.

Osttruppen @ Normandy

Oliver Bullough, the British author of "Moneyland"  (a good read) and several books on modern Russia, tweets the story of his uncle on D-Day landing on a beach defended by Ukrainians.  Who all immediately surrendered.

There were many others like them at beaches and ports in northern & southern France, and the Netherlands & Belgium.  Some were rear area security, some anti-partisan, some supervised forced-labor, some were in engineer units, some others were in Luftwaffe AAA units, and some were even incorporated into Heer infantry units.  They consisted of Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Cossacks, Turkestanis, Tartars, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Daghestanis, Chechens, ethnic Russians of Vlasov's Corps, and a few Japanese & Koreans.  And that doesn't count the many Europeans in SS units.

 Some capitulated forthwith like Bullough's Ukrainians.  Some others were hardcore and fought bitterly as they feared a death sentence if returned to Stalin.

Steemit blogger 'Alber159357'  put up a good post two years ago about Koreans at Normandy.   They had fought for the Kwantung Army at Khalkin Gol, then they had fought for the Red Army at Stalingrad &/or Kursk, and finally for the Wehrmacht at Normandy.

https://steemit.com/history/@alber159357/koreans-in-normandy

https://twitter.com/OliverBullough/status/1136696006022770691

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostlegionen

Forgiveness of the Dead

On this day, 64 years ago, Americans gathered at the cemetery at Nettuno, near what had been the terrible charnel-house beachhead of Anzio, to dedicate what would become the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and to "honor" those killed in the war that had just ended.

You know how I loathe all the flag-waving, pontificating, self-justifying “memorial” dog-and-pony shows that serve only to make the living feel better about themselves and their willingness – or, worse, eagerness – to cheer on others to die for their country if it wasn’t for those dang bone spurs.

The closest to fitting "memorial day" act I’ve ever read of was LTG Truscott’s address that day.

Truscott had commanded the VI Corps at Anzio, and a lot of the dead guys there were from his outfits. And he was a hard man, known to be kind of salty, and was probably more sick of hearing the pious patriotic platitudes than I am.

So when the opening caprioling was done he looked out over the rows of “dignitaries” and reporters and guests, turned, and faced the rows of silent markers behind the rostrum.

Nobody knows exactly what he said – probably because there was either no plan to record his words or because he couldn’t be heard – but based on Bill Mauldin's account the gist was that Truscott didn’t see how there was anything particularly good or heroic about getting killed in your teens or 20s or 30s, and that while generals and politicians would tell you that all your dying was noble and sacrificial that most generals, anyway, kinda suspected that was pretty much bullshit.

He agreed that lots of them had died because somebody, maybe he, had fucked up and if that had happened he was grievously sorry and apologized to them. That he knew that was a big ask, but that he owed it to them to ask their forgiveness anyway.

And that he promised that if, in the coming years, he ever ran into anyone tubthumping a line of guff about the glory of war and heroic death that he, Truscott, would tighten the joker's shot group damn quick smart.

So as far as I’m concerned it'd be great if every damn politician and talking head can stay the hell away and leave those haunted graves to the grass, and the sky, and the dead, and those who knew and loved and lost them.

They won't, because that's not how we do "Memorial Day". But I wish they would.

But I will be in that cemetery today, sharing a drink with my Army brothers. I hope you will, too.

And, as always today, this.

Pearl Harbor Survivor

We went to a memorial Saturday for a World War 2 Veteran who recently died at 92 years old. He was with the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks on Oahu on 7 December 1941.  He had always said it was not the worst place to be on Hawaii that day - as the 24th and 25th Divisions combined suffered just three killed and 26 wounded compared to the 2000 plus sailors killed and 1000 plus wounded.  The attack on Schofield happened just after 25 Val dive bombers from the Zuikaku and 14 Zeros from the Soryu and Hiryu attacked the adjacent Wheeler Field.  There they completely destroyed forty P-40 and six P-36 arrayed in a row like a carnival shooting gallery and not behind the revetments that were built for them.  Plus they damaged approximately 50 additional aircraft and inflicted 36 killed and 74 wounded on Army Air Corps soldiers.

After Wheeler the Japanese aircraft flew over Schofield Barracks at low altitude strafing the engineer, infantry, and artillery quadrangles, officer quarters, and the post hospital.  The redlegs at the artillery quad suffered the majority of the casualties.  A bomb hit a corner of the engineer quad and one hit the parade ground (or were they wayward Navy anti-aircraft shells?).  But neither caused casualties which were all due to strafing.  I have to wonder whether our vet had ever met James Jones, author of 'From Here to Eternity'.  I saw the movie version a few years after it came out in the 1950s.  But as a savvy teenager

even I knew that the scene with Burt Lancaster as 1st Sergeant Milt Warden on the roof cradling an M1919 Browning in his arms was complete BS.  His left palm would have cooked off like a well done steak – blackened Cajun style.  But apparently a Technical Sergeant William O. Gower, 27th Infantry Regiment was decorated by the Division Commander for a similar act.  Gower "took a machine gun and ammunition to the roof of the 27th Infantry quad and engaged strafing aircraft, at first cradling it in his left arm, then mounting it on a tripod. He remained on the roof throughout the

attack."   The 27th was also James Jones’ regiment, so he at the least probably attended the award ceremony for Gower if he did not know him personally.  During the attack two Japanese aircraft crashed into the nearby hills of Wahiawa.  It is believed that at least one and possibly both were brought down by small arms fire from Schofield.  Is that true?  Who knows, but those strafing runs were low, slow, and straight with no maneuvering, so perhaps?

The vet we memorialized Saturday was born in 1925 so was only 16 at the time.  A Washington State boy, he was brought up in Yakima and Wapato before enlisting.  When he finally returned stateside in 1944 on rotation furlough he was suffering from his sixth bout of malaria.  And he was wearing four battle stars aka campaign stars - one for Pearl Harbor, another for Guadalcanal, a third for Munda, and the fourth for Vella Lavella.  The 25th earned its nickname 'Tropic Lightning' and the lightning bolt in their unit patch at Guadalcanal.  It is also where their commander

'Lightning Joe' Collins earned his nickname.  Some claim it was Collins who first innovated with the TOT or 'Time-on-Target' technique at Galloping Horse hill on Guadalcanal with the initial rounds of six field artillery battalions landing simultaneously.  Maybe so for the US Army, but the Brits did it earlier in North Africa with all batteries syncing their time to BBC signals.  And I can't believe that concept or something like it was not experimented with 25 years earlier in France by Brits or Germans or French.  Besides, Collins was infantry branch so if he used the idea there it was probably from listening to a smart Division Artillery Officer (who probably got it from one of his even smarter junior officers or perhaps from an Aussie who had served earlier in the 8^th Army).

https://history.army.mil/brochures/72-8/72-8.htm


His recollection of Munda was hunger,  He and the men in his squad lived on a single can of C-rations a day for 19 days.

http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_munda.html


I do not recall him ever saying much about Vella Lavella other than 'spider holes'.  After capture, the SeaBees turned Vella Lavella into a key airfield for degradation of the important IJN base at Rabaul and allowed Rabaul to be bypassed.  But Vella Lavella itself was the first leap in the island hopping leapfrogging strategy.  By going to Vella Lavella they jumped over the 10,000 man Japanese garrison on Kolombangara Island and rendered them useless.  That strategy was developed 32 years earlier in 1911 by Admiral Raymond Perry Rogers at the Naval War College - that despite MacArthur's Trump-like claim that he had invented the theory.  The Japanese themselves had also used it in their earlier drive to Southeast Asia.  Probably the Athenians used it 2500 years ago in their Aegean domination?

http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_vella_lavella_invasion.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging_(strategy)

25 April

25 April is ANZAC Day.  Wear a sprig of rosemary in honor of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps: 
https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/customs/rosemary/    

TheANZACs suffered and endured the stupidity of Winston Churchill and Lord Kitchener at Gallipoli in the worst planned amphibious operation ever.

They fought in France at the Somme, at Passchendaele, at the 2nd Marne.




Their Camel Corps fought and outflanked the Turk in the Sinai, in Palestine, and in Jordan during Allenby's anabasis to Damascus and beyond.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07JGpardvLU&feature=youtu.be

In WW2, they again suffered and endured Churchill's overreaching in Crete and mainland Greece.

That same year they fought off Rommel's (at that time undefeated) Africa Corps for eight months at Tobruk until finally relieved by the Eighth Army.  Later they fought with distinction at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein.

But the Australian mainland had suffered the first of 97 separate air attacks by the IJN and IJAAF (that first attack was by 242 aircraft, most of them from the same aircraft carriers that had hit Pearl Harbor).  And at Singapore, Churchill's so-called Gibraltar of the East, Britain's disastrous defense lost the Australians 15,000 troops to Japanese POW camps.   Many of them died during the Sandakan Death March which matched (or was worse than) our experience at Bataan.  Or they died on the Burma Railway.  So the Aussie Prime Minister turned down further requests by Churchill and brought his troops home to the Pacific Theater.

Section C of the Allied Intelligence Bureau, also known as the Coastwatchers and mostly Australians, played a critical role in the Solomon Islands campaign.  https://www.amazon.com/Lonely-Vigil-Coastwatchers-Walter-Lord/dp/0670437654/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0670437654&pd_rd_r=3AYRCBXGDPC4GSXZK3RC&pd_rd_w=UCzTU&pd_rd_wg=d5HqE&psc=1&refRID=3AYRCBXGDPC4GSXZK3RC

http://kokoda.commemoration.gov.au/

Then in New Guinea, the ANZACs saved MacArthur's entire SW Pacific strategy by taking and holding the Kokoda Track; and doing outstanding work at Buna-Gona and Salamaua-Lae.   After that, Mac then gave them the dirty jobs of mopping up Bougainville, New Britain, etc.  And relegated them to the flank in Borneo while the US Sixth Army got the glory in the Philippines.  There was some strong resentment in Canberra for that treatment.  And rightly so IMHO.



No space to list all their contributions - I missed many other battles.  But on the 25th, my bride is promising to cook up some ANZAC biscuits (guaranteed not to crumble no matter how long they spend being bounced, banged and beaten in the bottom of a military mail sack): http://allrecipes.com/recipe/9816/anzac-biscuits-i    Might even need to wash them down with a tinny of Australia's favorite bevvie.

Yakla. Arabic for Dieppe, or Normandy, or neither, or what..?

It will surprise no one here that my general opinion of the not-even-a-month-old reign of His Fraudulency is a mixture of disgust and contempt; disgust for the greedy, mulcting brutality of the Grifter-in-Chief and contempt for an "adiminstration" that is barely capable of incompetence, let alone anything approaching a grasp of the actual complexity and difficulty of running an immense industrial nation.

But...since this is supposed to be a blog about military affairs and geopolitics...let me concentrate on one specific issue involving one single episode in this farcical miniseries and what is says, not just about the Barely Sentient Administration but about the whole business we've been doing in the Middle East since 2001; the raid on the village of Yakla in Yemen.

And the issue is this: "winning"

Specifically, the new President seems to be furiously irked that anyone questions that this particular operation was a "win" for the Forces of Goodness and Peace (i.e., the United States, by definition the Good Guys, amirite..?)

"...a winning mission..." is the exact phrase that the Tangerine Toddler Twitterblurted out (attributing it to his SecDef, mind you).

Now.

As I noted in the preceding post, first, I have no idea what the actual objective(s) of this raid was or were, and, second, I have no idea whether that objective or objectives was or were achieved. And, indeed, if it was in intel-gathering operation we will probably NEVER know, and rightly so. Whatever intelligence was obtained will be hidden and used to guide future operations, as it should be.

If the intelligence desired was obtained, then, in the strictest sense even a raid that seems to have fallen apart tactically, cost over 100 million dollars as well as dozens of lives - innocent, friendly and enemy - and has provided cause for at least one of the "governments" of Yemen to first revoke and then to request a "review" of U.S. ground operations in their portion of that wretched land can be called a "success".

But..."winning"?

The entire farrago about this mission "winning" or "failing" just point out to me two problems.

First, and specific to this administration, that Five-Deferment Donnie has no more idea of how actual military operations, campaigns, and wars work than a fucking Jersey cow knows about the proceedings of the Council of Trent. The "winning" nonsense is that's just how a simpleminded derp thinks war works, and the orange Amway salesman has never been closer to combat than the concession line where American Sniper was playing, so that's just how he thinks.

But people like Mattis should know better, and tell him so. I suspect that he did, and that the joker didn't listen, or understand.

Second, and worse, generic to our nation and our foreign policy, that we're even debating about whether some piddly-ass little airmobile raid was a "win" or a "failure" points out the degree that ALL of us; the press, the public, the military and civil authorities in the United States have no real fucking clue what the fuck we are doing in the Middle East.

Because, quite simply, this Yakla raid is part of a much larger, much more complex...something. A "(Sort of) War on (Certain Kinds of People Who Use Certain Kinds of) Terror". A "clash of civilizations". A Great Power cabinet war gone out of control. A...well, I have no fucking idea, actually, and what pisses me off is that I'll bet you and Joe and Molly and Steve Fucking Bannon have no fucking idea, either.

The Yemen raid was something of a tactical mess. But, more importantly, we don't know what our actual goals are in Yemen and whether (or how much) this raid got us closer to them, or not.

In August of 1942 the Brits attacked the French Channel port of Dieppe. The raid was a fiasco, thousands of Allied troops were killed or captured, and the Nazi hierarchy exulted in their success. But the Allies learned a ton from Dieppe, so the next time they came ashore in France it opened the road all the way to the Elbe.

Is this raid Dieppe, or Normandy, or what?

We have no context. We can't possibly know.

And that's a huge problem. If you have no idea what your end-state is (or, worse, if your end-state is something utterly impossible, such as "the utter defeat of radical Islamic terrorism") then how the hell do you know when you've reached it. How do you know whether Operation Yemen Derp, or whatever, has gotten you closer, or further away, or sideways, or where the hell you are?

Update 2/28: Per the usually-unnamed "Pentagon officials" it appears that this raid did not manage to acquire any particularly valuable information.

If that is indeed the case, then - given the loss of life and material - it seems fairly reasonable to write this operation off. Whether or not that loss has significantly affected the U.S. interests in Yemen, or whether the U.S. should be considered to even have interests in Yemen, is still nearly impossible to tell given the overall level of secrecy surrounding this war in the shadows.

Heros never die!

I think this coming spring I may just do a "battles" piece on the fight for Maeda ("Hacksaw") Ridge on Okinawa, April-May 1945, the subject of the new film glorifying Desmond Doss, the medical aidman who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during that period. Here's CPL Doss with his cute wife, Dotty, right after his award:

Not that Desmond really needs "glorifying"; dude had medicine-ball-sized brass spheres for testicles, given his actions in late April and May up on that horrific escarpment. There are seldom "bad" Medals of Honor but Doss' is SO good that it's kind of hard to imagine acting as he did. He was such a beast that Mel Gibson - and this is Mel Gibson, mind you, not a man with an obsessive attachment to facts - left out one of the most brutally heroic things Doss did on Maeda Ridge because Gibson flat-out didn't believe that other people would buy it as non-fiction.

Nope.

The reason I posted this was not so much as a "battles" trailer or a tribute to Desmond the Medic (yay, medics!) but as an awed tribute to Desmond the Man. Because after poor Dotty passed away in the early Nineties Desmond got remarried.

Now...keep in mind ol' Des only had one lung and was on 100% disability by that time.

And he was 74.

Goddamn it, now THAT's optimism. Desmond was my kinda medic; Hooah! Get some, doc!

Torpeckers and PigBoats

Fire Direction Chief has put up another of his excellent historical battle posts.  This one a sea battle.  The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot that took place while the world was looking to Normandy.  AKA the Battle of the Philippine Sea, this was the last of the five great carrier versus carrier battles of  WW2.  Although the submarine service had some fangs in this fight also.

Check it out.  It is well researched, well worth the read and great graphics:

http://firedirectioncenter.blogspot.com/2015/09/decisive-battles-philippine-sea-1944.html

The Other Malmedy

Standartenfuhrer Joachim Peiper's Kampfgruppe got all the media attention for the murder of 84 American POWs at Baugnez crossroads near Malmedy.

Lesser known was the other massacre at Malmedy itself  where 200+ Belgian civilians and about 30 American servicemen were killed by misguided bomb runs from elements of the 9th Army Air Force.

 Malmedy itself, had not fallen during the Battle of the Bulge.  On the northern shoulder of the bulge, the town was held initially by elements of the 291st Combat Engineer Battalion.  They put out roadblocks and blew bridges so Peiper's Kampfgruppe had to find a different route and never reached the Meuse and their goal of Antwerp.  Later the 291st was reinforced by the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate), aka the Viking Battalion, which was manned by Americans of Norwegian descent and Norwegian nationals who had fled German occupation and Vidkun Quisling's puppet government.  Eventually Malmedy was further reinforced by elements of the 120th Infantry Regiment of the  30th Infantry Division.

The first blue-on-blue bombing run was on 23 December.   With cloudy skies, six lost B-26s bombed Malmedy.  All the bombs detonated around and through the town center.  It turned out to be a navigation error, although there were many rumors that Malmedy was the target because the BBC had broadcast that Malmedy had been captured by the Germans.  The town center was devastated: fires, collapsed buildings, blocked roads and streets, and many civilians and soldiers buried alive under the rubble.  The 291st engineers were critical in putting out the fires and digging out survivors.  And their aid station, run by an Army dentist as they did not have an assigned doctor, treated about 150 wounded civilians and GIs.

1st Army HQ raised hell with the 9th Air Force and got back a pro forma letter indicating they would try to avoid such incidents in the future.  Unfortunately they did not.  The very next day, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 18 B-24 heavy bombers made the same mistake.  And in the words of a witness: "They made the previous days B-26 bombardment look like just an appetizer for a B-24 seven course feast". 

But it was not over, for dessert the flyboys got lost again on Christmas Day.  Four B-26s dropped sixty-four 250-pounders on Malmedy instead of their authorized target of German formations at Sainte Vith.

The 291st was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for their defense of Malmedy and stopping Kampfgruppe Peiper.  Later they went on to build the first bridge across the Rhine while under observed artillery fire, and luftwaffe strafing and bombing.  Many of those luftwaffe attacks were by ME-262 jet aircraft.   Their bridge site also sustained attacks by eleven V-2 rockets.  They ended up the war by bridging the Danube, thankfully while not under fire.

A TV documentary titled 'Those Damned Engineers' was made about the 291st.  The title reputedly came from when a bridge at Lienne creek was blown right in front of Peiper's eyes.  That bridge had been his last hope. The story, true or not, was that the frustrated Peiper banged his fist on his knee and swore 'Deise verdammten Pioniere'.  True or not I do not know, perhaps true or perhaps embellished over the many years since.

The documentary is at http://press.discovery.com/ekits/american-heroes/against-the-odds/those-damned-engineers.html.   It is a puff piece with lots of war propaganda, start it at minute 7.00 or minute 18.00 if you want to miss the background story of the Bulge and the agitprop.  And as you can see the footage is not real as those boys did not have signal corps cameramen following them around.  But the basic story is true.  Although the men themselves agree that it was not the 291st alone who stopped Kampfgruppe Peiper.  I am glad to see them get some credit.  With all due respect for the 101st at Bastogne, they were not alone in winning the Battle of the Bulge either.  And neither was Patton.  The biggest problem with the documentary that I saw is that it does not tell the story of the people in Malmedy who died due to 9th Air Force navigational incompetence - bad weather or not.  And it does not tell of the humanitarian mission of the 291st digging out survivors and giving them medical treatment and transporting them to military hospitals all while still fighting a war.

Over the shore

Seventy years ago today - as I'm sure you and everybody else within sight or hearing of some sort of broadcast implement knows - about 150,000 Allied troops landed on the north coast of the Normandy peninsula and reopened the Western Front of World War 2.

By dawn that morning my old unit, the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, had already had a hell of a shitty day. The unit was badly scattered - note the little black dots on the map to the left each representing a C-47-load of paratroops - and many of the troopers had landed in the swampy fringes of the River Merderet invisible in the dark fields below and had been drowned by their equipment without firing a shot.

Worse, the Third Battalion of the regiment had been dropped directly on the small town of St. Mere Eglise whose garrison were out of their fartsacks already, what with all those C-47s flying around overhead and all, and tore apart the guys as the descended. For the young men of the 505th, and a hell of a lot of other guys 6 JUN 1944 really was a long day full of suck.

But...they hung on, and by nightfall the Western Allies had a toehold on the European continent they never relinquished. Before another June would arrive those armies would be along the Elbe and the war in Europe would be over.

That said...it is a peculiarly American myopia to see D-Day as - in the words of LTC Bateman - "...on this day, this morning, 70 years ago...the world began to change."

That's not to say that D-Day wasn't a major event in World War 2, or a major historical event. That's not to say that the men - and women - who came ashore didn't play an important role in defeating the Axis.

But it was less than three weeks later that the Soviet Army opened up Oперация Багратион (Operatsiya Bagration). Operation Bagration destroyed an entire German Army Group and unhinged the Eastern Front. In that operation, lasting from June to July 1944 Armeegruppe Mitte...

"lost about a quarter of its Eastern Front manpower, similar to the percentage of loss at Stalingrad (about 17 full divisions)...included many experienced soldiers, NCOs and other officers, which at this stage of the war the Wehrmacht could not replace. An indication of the completeness of the Soviet victory is that 31 of the 47 German divisional or corps commanders involved were killed or captured. Exact German losses are unknown, but newer research indicates around 400,000 overall casualties. Soviet losses were also substantial, with 180,040 killed and missing, 590,848 wounded and sick, together with 2,957 tanks, 2,447 artillery pieces, and 822 aircraft also lost." (Wiki 2014)

I don't think we, that is, the people of the United States, have ever come to terms with the fact that the "Greatest Generation" of World War 2 was, very likely, the Soviet subjects born in the Teens and Twenties who fought, and died in millions to roll back the Nazi invasions. What destroyed the fighting strength of Germany was, largely, the Soviet Union. So when you read all the veneration of this day in the Western popular press, it's well to pause and consider that.

Still.

My father's generation, and the Western world they helped create, was shaped by days like this day seventy years ago. The importance of D-Day to them, and thus to us, is hard to elide...although we, at this remove, might do well to listen carefully past the speeches and paeans to the invasion beaches for the distant thunder of the guns in Ukraine and Belorussia. Those caught in the firestorm can't afford to spend time looking at the horizon; it is for those of us with space and time to be thoughtful and mindful that for all that what happens to us is the Most Important Thing in the World it is often our own viewpoint that distorts the size and shape of events, and that viewpoint is often skewed by hate, or fear, or lust, or simple ignorance.

As for my father and his cohort...this year is probably their last big anniversary; ten years from now I doubt more than a handful will remain. In twenty, the Longest Day and their war will be just a history story, different only in proximity from Verdun, or Shiloh, or Hohenlinden, or Cannae.