Civil War

The Hardtack Life….

The Hardtack life...

The Hardtack Life….

See that piece of hardtack in that frame there? I bet you could still eat it today. Which is one of the reasons that hardtack and its variations have been since ancient Egypt. A little water, a little flour, some salt if you were lucky and bam! Hardtack.

For this discussion we will talk about its widespread popularity(?) during the Civil War. Both sides produced it as it was quick and easy and the three by three square that came in was packed full of stomach filler. Heck, mix in a little bacon grease and you really had something.

Two things really stand out about the hardtack that you see above.

At the beginning of the war, when people thought it would only last a few weeks, there was not a massive amount of ready to eat provisions ready for either army. So they looked in the military warehouses and found plenty of hardtack from the previous war, ready made provisions on the go. Just one little problem. The previous conflict was the Mexican-American War which ended in 1848, the Civil War started in 1861, so these biscuits were over thirteen years old. Think about that when you see milk a day past the sell by.

The other thing is that bugs really liked it So much so they would live in it. In the card that goes with the picture you can see that it was not unusual for the men to dunk the hardtack in their morning coffee to soften it. Then scoop the bugs out of their coffee. Sometimes though they would just eat the infected squares that were writhing with worms and larvae. Protein wasn’t cheap!

Want to give it a try? The recipe is really easy and can be found here.

Of course they leave the bugs out, but you can add them to your hearts content.

Civil War, Word and Phrases

Wednesday Words & Phrases: Copperhead

Image result for copperhead civil war
Cartoon about the Copperheads, published in Harper’s Weekly, February 1863. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-132749)

On Wednesdays we are going to branch out a bit from word origins and talk about some of the unique words that have entered our language. Still with a history and military bent mind you.

Copperhead (American Civil War)

Politics in America has always been divisive, it is the nature of our beast. Never though was it more divisive then leading up to the Civil War. in 1860 Abraham Lincoln won the presidency as a Republican. The Republican Party was fairly young at this point ans was made up of the remnants of several other parties that had come and gone. Free Soilers, Whigs, Know Nothings, etc. The Democratic Party was older and more established at the time of the Civil War, but it was going through some issues. Slavery being one of them.

Southern Democrats, of course believed that slavery was a right and it fought for it. Northern Democrats were a little shaky on the subject and in the lead up to the 1860 election a rift formed in the party. This lead to two conventions and two Democrat nominees for the presidency. (And then some.) The Democrats lost the election and had the party stayed together, that may not have happened.

As the Southern States seceded the great majority of the Democrat Party went with them, but not all of them. Many Northern Democrats supported the cause of the South and became very vocal against the war. These anti-war democrats became known as Copperheads which are known as sneaks and having the ability to strike without warning.

For most of the war they proved a thorn in the side of President Lincoln. One of the leaders of the movement Clement Vallandigham, a member of the House from Ohio, became so outspoken that Lincoln deported him to the Confederacy.

The Copperhead movement lost steam after the 1864 fall of Atlanta. This event pretty much signaled that the war was moving into its final stages.  Though their overall effectiveness was marginal. However they did take a stand against the regimes crack down on civil liberties.  Other than that their main focus was the same as all political parties, winning elections and beating their rivals.

American Revolution

The British Army In The Colonies

The British Army in the Colonies

The British Army In The Colonies

 

The plaque above is part of small monument outside the visitor’s center at the Cowpens National Battlefield. Look back through the site and you will see some articles about Cowpens itself and some of the actors, but this plaque is a reminder that there are always two sides that  fight in a war. For the British Army serving in America during the revolution, it was not all fun and games.

At the opening of the war the British Army numbered around 45,000 men  scattered across the globe. The army at the time was not supplied or staffed and in the decade since end of the French & Indian war was arguably in decline. It should also be noted that a number of the troops were stationed in Ireland that was pretty much always in an active state of rebellion. (Thanks guys!)

This was the force that would be needed to face off against approximately 3 million unruly colonists three thousand miles away from their home base. It was simply not enough.  While efforts to recruit more men were put into overdrive, they needed backup. This backup would come from the German states. German mercenaries, numbering about 30,000 would be used  both in the colonies. They would also be used  as garrison troops in other British possessions to free up regular troops. These two forces were joined by close to 20,000 American Loyalists.

By the end of the war approximately 4,000 British and 2,000 German soldiers were killed. By comparison the American battle casualties number about 7,000.

It is easy to pick sides during a war, especially when the war is from our past. It must never be forgotten that the other side was fighting for its own reasons. Seeing that plaque is just a reminder of that.

Cold War

Fishbed and Badger, NATO Designation Unmaksed

MiG-21PF Fishbed by the NATO Designation

NATO Designation Unmaksed

 

The airplane in the photo above is the Mig-21PF a Soviet workhorse of a fighter plane that goes by the NATO Designation “Fishbed”. Walking through any aircraft museum, or reading and studying about military aircraft, some of the names for the Soviet planes seem a little weird. Fishbed, Badger, Bear, Blackjack, Fulcrum. We seem them all the time and I for one always was a little curious as how those names were picked. If you know, don’t say anything yet. This is the fun part.

The familiar names for the “enemy” aircraft come through NATO, and are deigned to give each aircraft a clear and easy to understand name, generally based around words that don’t come up in conversation so that there can be no confusion.

Who decides the names? This next bit is lifted straight from Wikipeida:

The assignment of the names for the Russian and Chinese aircraft was once managed by the five-nation Air Standardization Coordinating Committee (ASCC) (now called the Air and Space Interoperability Council, or ASIC, which includes representatives of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States), but that is no longer the case.

The Breakdown

 

Here is where it gets fun.

Single syllable NATO Designations denote fixed wing, prop driven aircraft.

Multiple syllable names indicate a jet aircraft.

The first letter of the NATO designation tells you what kind of aircraft it is.

F for fighter.

B for bomber.

C for cargo. (Also commercial aircraft and airliners.)

H is for helicopter.

M is for (get this) miscellaneous.

So the Soviet aircraft known as the Bear, propeller based bomber. The Badger? Bomber jet. The fabulous MiG-29 Fulcrum? Fighter Jet. The Red Dawn worthy MI-24 Hind, H is for helicopter. And just for fun, The La-11 Fang? Starts with f so fighter plane, but only one syllable so it must be a propeller type.

I wish I had known this during all those years reading Tom Clancy books! (The good ones, before Jack became President.) One last thing. The Soviets do not use the NATO designation for their aircraft, why would they? Well, except for one. They like the name Fulcrum for the MiG-29 as it represents the integral nature of the aircraft in the defense plans.  I don’t know, I think Fishbed sounds kind of cool also…

WWII

The Buzz on the V-1 (Not VH1 Totally Different!)

The Buzz on the V-1

The Buzz on the V-1

You now how it is when you read about something and then when you see it in reality you are sort of taken aback? That was the feeling when I came across this V-1 rocket. During WW2 the Germans rained these down on Britain. In all almost 10,000 were produced and fired. Even with only about 25% hitting anything close to a target they were an effective and cheap method of warfare that allowed Germany to harass British soil after the Blitz had been turned back.

Power by a pulse jet engine it made a very distinctive sound and became known as the buzz bomb. The guidance system was sate of the art for the time, weights pendulums and gyroscopes, flight control given by compressed air this “autopilot” system meant all you had to do was point in the general direction and watch it fly. If you were lucky the almost 2000lb payload would hit something important. If not, then just hearing them in the air was enough to rattle the civilians.

An Effective Distraction?

Where the V-1 was most effective was in sapping resources from the allied war effort. Not only did Britain have to concentrate on the methods and tactics of intercepting and defeating them, but almost a quarter of all the strategic bombing missions that the Allies carried out on the mainland centered around the underground bunkers that housed the launch and building facilities in Northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands. On March 29th, 1945 the last V-1 struck British soil and brought the buzz bomb era to an end.

 There were lessons learned from these instruments of terror. In a way we still use these weapons today. Everything from the Tomahawk Cruise Missiles to the drones that current are being used to great effect.
Uncategorized

The First Post of 2018

 

I hope you all had a great holiday season. It was a great break and I feel that 2018 is going to be a breakthrough year.

We are still kind of working on the plans for the blog in the coming year. We may be making some format changes but nothing drastic. I mean after all we have been going for almost three and half years and doing so fairly strong.

One thing that some of you may have noticed towards the end of the year is that we started re-posting some of the stories from our early years. This was done for two reasons.

First reason was the schedule around the office got a little cramped and rather than skip posts, we felt that revisiting some of the classic posts would be a good way to keep the content going. This mean some revisions, some rewriting and just general polishing.

The second reason, and that sort of feeds into the revising has to do with SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Basically how we get found out on the Internet. In the early days our concern was posting content and we figured that the eyes would just naturally find us out in the wild. Hey, quit laughing, it made sense at the time.

With such a philosophy we published a lot of posts that had zero SEO, and as such, we never really took off that much with direct traffic. A few months ago we decided to focus more on that. As such all posts with new content are in fairly good SEO shape, but the old ones not so much. So as we launched revised posts we also updated the SEO on them

The results have been astounding. We are growing on the Internet like never before. It is that kind of growth that we are going to take into 2018.

Thank you all for you support and kind words.

Regular posts will start back up on Wednesday of this week.

 

Vietnam

Lifeline

A lifeline for the troops

Lifeline

 

During the Vietnam War, that was the most beautiful thing you can see. Helicopters were the lifeline for the troops out in the bush. They brought you reinforcements, food, water, ammunition, clean socks and eventually they would take you somewhere at least marginally safer than where you were.

The helicopter above is a CH-47 Chinook, a very big brother to the classic Huey that was the face of the war. The CH-47 entered service in 1962 and amazingly are still being produced and are in service today. Sixteen countries have these in their arsenal. Including Iran who purchased a large number from us in the 70’s and still have many in service today.

It can reach a top speed of 196 mph, has a range of 450 miles and can lift approximately 28,000 pounds of cargo, if arranged properly.

Originally used in some of the roles mentioned above supply and troop transport. Eventually it became an invaluable tool for the artillery section.  Its enormous lifting capability meant that it could take big guns and there crews up into the mountains faster, easier and safer than transporting them overland. Once established the Chinook could keep the fire bases supplied with massive amounts of ammunition. This allowed them to function for extended periods of time. Having these artillery emplacements in strategic locations were vital to war effort. They could provide support to forces in the field at a much greater capacity.

During the war, nearly 750 of these big birds were in service with almost 200 lost to combat or accidents. Pretty high percentage. I can guarantee you that if you were out in the field and saw one of these flying overhead, your heart skipped a beat.

Civil War, Word and Phrases

Wednesday Words and Phrases: Sideburns

Image result for sideburns
General Burnside, bad a war INCREDIBLE at facial hair.

How many of you knew that the term sideburns, those wonderful tufts of hair that cuddle the side of a dapper mans face,  was born from a military origin? Well, kind of at least. See they were named for the guy above.

Union Civil War General Ambrose  Burnside. A man of unquestionable talented facial hair. The problem was that he did have what one would call military talent. He was not a great general and a lot of soldiers died because of that. Prior to the 1864 Battle of the Crater outside of Peteresburg Virginia his style of facial hair was already known as having “burnsides”, a popular style at the time of the war. After the battle though, just one in a long series of catastrophes by his hand, they started calling the whiskers sideburns in honor of the general, who always got things “the wrong way around”.

WWI

The Sopwith Camel

The Sopwith Camel

The Sopwith Camel

 

Of all the aircraft of WWI, the Sopwith Camel has got to be one of the most recognized. Heck, if nothing else it is the “plane” that Snoopy’s dog house was supposed to be during his battles with the Red Baron. Above is an authentic Sopwith Camel that is being restored at the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo Michigan.  Yes, I know the bicycle wheels on the plane scare me also.

The Sopwith Camel came into the service with the British Royal Flying Corps in June of 1917 and served though January 1920.. During that time the Camel saw several different variants. The versatile design also saw service with the American Expeditionary Force.  Also the Australians, Belgians, Canadians, and the Russians.

With a maximum speed of 115 MPH and a range of about 300 miles it could reach an altitude of 21,000 feet with its 130 hp engine. Best known for its agility in the hands of a skilled pilot it was an amazing machine. One of the different variants had a shorted wingspan so that it could be based on ships. Another was a night fighter version that had the twin machine guns mounted above the top wings. This was to prevent the muzzle flash from causing night blindness.

One pilot, Major William Barker, took his Camel into the air for 404 operational hours from September 1917 to September 1918. During that time he shot down 46 enemy aircraft and balloons. To this day he is still the most successful pilot in the history of the RAF. Not bad for a plane who’s most famous pilot was a cartoon beagle.

American Revolution, Pre-Revolution

Relics of the Frontier

Relics fo the Frontier

Relics of the Frontier

In 1691 on the banks of the St. Joseph river in what would someday be South Western Michigan, the French built a fort that would become a mission that would have an incredible history.  The fort was finally abandoned in 1795 and during the 100 years it traded hands between the French, The English, The Spanish, the English again, and eventually to the United States. That does not actually count any of the Indian incursions against the fort itself, but you get the idea.

Life on the frontier was not easy, and it took a certain breed of people to pull it off. Life in a frontier military post was not easy either. No one looked forward to being posted out in the boondocks. Long winters, lack of supplies, being at the end of the chain of fortifications meant you may not see reinforcements for a very long time. All said, not a happy place, but life goes on.

In 1998 the fort was “rediscovered” and since then it has become a fantastic archaeology site that has provided valuable insights into the life on the frontier, especially under four different flags. In the picture above are just a small sample of the relics that have been found. If only we knew the stories that came along with them.

Pictured above you have several firing mechanisms from a flint-lock rifles. Lead shot of various sizes, a very cool looking hammer/pry bar which could still be useful today. And a number of nails or fastening devices.

People, Places and Things from US Military History

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