Tag Archives: GRFPM

Modern

A Simple Letter

Though the focus of the blog is US Military History, some times you run across little pieces of history that just need to be called out. In this case, the letter above is the actual resignation letter that President Richard Nixon sent to the Secretary of State, thus ending his tenure as President.

Even today the actions of President Nixon that lead to the resignation are polarizing. Many how lived during the time saw him as the face of government corruption, a man who used his station to try to cover up illegal acts committed by people on his staff. To others he was a man who tried his best to protect people in his employ that did something stupid.

In the days after Nixon resigned faith in the government stayed at an all time low, and no one really paid the price for that more the Gerald Ford, who didn’t help that general feeling much when he pardoned Nixon of the crimes he was accused of. Many believe that Ford paid the price in the 1976 election that he lost to Jimmy Carter.

As fascinating as it is, over forty years later, that trust in government has never really been rebuilt and for the most part we have had a number of men sit in the White House that have committed even worse offensives than what Nixon did. (At this point you can start rattling off offenses as you see fit, I am not getting into that.) As we look at the political divisions of the country today it seems you can draw a line from here all the way back to that letter above.

Modern, WWII

Hot Racking

Ah the US Navy. So many young people join up expecting to see the word, new and exotic places and people. However there may be something left out of most of the “travel brochures.” In the photo above you see racks, also known as bunks from a US Navy warship, in this an aircraft carrier.  Three beds in a fairly small space. See during you time stationed aboard the ships that tiny space is your home and your personal space. The beds lift for storage for your personal items and you have the little curtains, so maybe not so bad right?

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

See on some ships, smaller ones for sure, submarines for certain, that bed you see. Well, odds are good you share that with at least one, maybe two other people. Not at the same time of course.

It is called hot racking (or hot bunking) and it is the process where multiple people share a single berth. While one person is on watch (working) someone is sleeping in the bed. When when the shift is over the one returns to the rack that is probably still warm from the person that just got up to go and enjoy their day of work. Wash, rinse repeat, for six months. Yes, that also means that you could be sharing a bed with someone who you have never actually met. What would your mother say?

Don’t feel bad though. They do the same sort of things in prisons sometimes.

 

Interwar Years

The Five Power Treaty of 1922

 

In the aftermath of WWI, the world was tired of war. Millions had died for reasons that most people didn’t understand. Secret treaties and insane military build ups were seen as part of the problem, so in the wake of the war a massive demobilization was undertaken. A move was also made to limit the size of each nation’s military. Take away the toys, and no one would want to play. The Washington Treaty, also called the Five Power Treaty, of which the picture above present an actual copy, was designed to limit the size of the Navies of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan.

Signed in 1922 the treaty set a strict tonnage (displacement) limit for the navy of each power. That tonnage would be counted against their battleships, battle cruisers and aircraft carries based on certain ratios. While much time is spent discussing the actual ratios of the allowed tonnage, the important thing to note is that the US and Great Britain were allowed much more tonnage than Japan and far more than France and Italy.

For the US and Britain the allowance was 525,000 tons for capital ships (battleships and cruisers) and 135,000 tons for Aircraft carriers. With the average displacement of a capital ship at 35,000 tons that would limit each to about 15 capital ships. Aircraft carriers at 27,000 tons would allow for 5. A drastic reduction indeed.

Japan was allowed 315,000 and 8,100 tons (9 and 3).

France and Italy came in at 175,000 and 60,000 (5 and 2-ish).

Size and amount of guns on each ship we also limited as well as a ten-year moratorium being placed on new construction.

Like most treaties that came  out of the Great War, this one left everyone, let’s just say “grumpy”. With the world spinning towards the next great war, Japan realized that the treaty left them incredibly behind the other US and Britain in the Pacific and in 1934 the announced they were pulling out of the treaty. In 1936 the treaty was not renewed.

Japan always felt like the little brother to the West in modern times, they way their contributions in WWI were overlooked, and their subordinate position in this treaty simply brought them to the point where conflict would become inevitable.

Aren’t treaties wonderful things?

 

 

WWII

The Hero From Shangri-La

The Hero From Shangri-La

The Hero From Shangri-La

 

On December 7, 1941 the Japanese Imperial Navy undertook a surprise attack on the American Naval base at Pearl Harbor Hawaii. With that America launched head first into World War 2. Up to that point most average Americans saw the events transpiring in Europe as something that didn’t concern them, sure people had opinions but that was an ocean away. Now however we had been attacked. Americans died. Japan steamrolled across the pacific. The shaken people demanded President Roosevelt do something.

He put the call out to the military. We had to strike back. That is where Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle came in. His plan was to launch a bombing mission against the Japanese Home Islands using B-25 Medium bombers, launched from an aircraft carrier. Something never attempted before. Sixteen aircraft needed retrofitted to allow them to be launched from the carrier, and the crews would need to be trained.

The Raid

On April 18, 1942 the raid launched. All the planes reached their targets and dropped their payloads. They then headed for their landing sites in China. Unfortunately the planes did not have the fuel. The crews had no choice but to bail out. Most of the crews survived, assisted by the friendly Chinese and good dose of luck. The actual damage done to the Japanese was minimal. That was not the point, We had struck a blow in retaliation.  We proved we would fight.

Doolittle was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. His citation reads, “For conspicuous leadership above and beyond the call of duty, involving personal valor and intrepidity at an extreme hazard to life. With the apparent certainty of being forced to land in enemy territory or to perish at sea, Lt. Col. Doolittle personally led a squadron of Army bombers, manned by volunteer crews, in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland.”

What he did was brave beyond measure. It was also a little crazy, but in times of war we could use a little more crazy…

 

 

Vietnam

A Simple Shirt, A Complicated Story

The placard under this shirt tells the story as such:

Shirt worn by Joseph Mobley during his time as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. He was shot down in 1968 over North Vietnam and taken prisoner. Mobley spent 1,724 days in captivity. Once he returned in 1973, he began a steady rise in leadership within the U.S. Navy, ascending to Commander of the Naval Air Force of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet.

In the case of Joseph Mobley his incarceration in a POW camp had a happy story, but for many, many more that were forced to wear the same shirt, it did not turn out so well.

According to the Defense Prisoner of War * Missing Personnel Office there are still 1,639 unaccounted for soldiers from the Vietnam conflict. That is almost one missing soldier for every day the Joseph Mobley was held in captivity.

When you look at the other conflicts managed by the department you see some other shocking numbers.

From World War II there are over 73,000 soldiers unaccounted for.

From the Korean War, almost 8,000.

Look at the shirt above, then spend some time on the DPMO website, only then can you even start to get an idea of the losses these wars are still costing us.

For an even more incredibly picture, take a look at this chart maintained by the Mobile Riverine Force Association that numbers as closely as possible the missing and unaccounted for from all US conflicts up to Somalia. Yes, there are still unaccounted for troops from the conflict that was popularized by Black Hawk Down.

Never forget the soldiers that didn’t make it home, and cherish the ones that did.

 

Cold War, Modern

To the Moon…

A View from the Moon

To the Moon…

That is a picture of a picture that was made into a mural on the wall at the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While this may not fit directly into the Military History theme of the blog, it does fit around the edges.

The race to moon started as far back as the first time that someone looked up and say it hanging in the sky, and wondered “I wonder what’s up there?” Early Science Fiction writers came up with many different scenarios of what is there and how we can find out. It was not until the chaos of WWII that the idea finally looked like it would be a reality.

Above is a V2 from an earlier post. The first guided missile that the Germans used to effect against England. The German engineers that came up with that became one of the great prizes of WWII.  The Americans, British and Russians all looked to claim their brains. That race itself has had books written on them, so I won’t go into a lot of detail, to read more about it go here.

http://www.operationpaperclip.info/

The Great Race

And thus the ground work for the Space Race was laid. When the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 the marathon became a sprint. The desire to reach the moon became a national obsession. President Kennedy made his famous challenge at Rice University in 1962. In the speech he explained why we had to go to the moon.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

With those words a new gear was reached in the development of the technology that was needed to reach that goal. In 1969 with Apollo 11 we finally reached the moon and a new place in the human epoch.

 

Cold War

All That’s Old Is New Again

In the GR Ford Presidential Museum hangs this interesting piece from New York magazine. In it President Ford is shown storming the beaches alongside Henry Kissinger with US troops and oil rigs in the background. The headline reads, Would We Really Kill for Oil?

It would not be out of place to see something similar in most modern magazines or websites, regardless of who our leadership is and should serve as a reminder that what is old usually becomes new again.

In this case the illustration above is referencing our involvement with the Middle East, an area of the world that just happened to have very large oil deposits that are necessary to run the engines of the world economy. That oil has tied us (the world) to this region and has made it a focal point of our foreign policy for a very long time. National interest has dragged us into a number of wars, questionable alliances and quite frankly a continuation of the Crusades from which Western Civilization may very well not be able to survive.

Back under the Ford the question was, “Would We Kill For Oil?” Forty years later we know the answer to that question is still being debated. The irony is that in the last decade oil reserves that dwarf those in Iran and Iraq have been found much closer to home which should mean the answer is a resounding no.

Alas, we have embroiled ourselves so deep in that region that we may never be able to get untangled. Luckily though Ford and Kissinger never had to storm that beach as depicted in the magazine, which was good, but perhaps if they had we would be asking a different question now.

 

Interwar Years, WWII

CV-1 USS Langley First of Her Kind

USS Langley

CV-1 USS Langley First of Her Kind

The above is commemorative print of the USS Langley or as the picture shows, the U.S. Aeroplane Carrier. Yep, the Langley was our first official aircraft carrier.

In 1920 she was converted from the USS Jupiter, a collier and was one of several planned conversions. These took a different path as the Washington Naval Treaty (Hey! Didn’t we talk about that?) lead to several partial constructed battle cruisers becoming carriers instead, the Lexington and the Saratoga.

She had a carrier pigeon-house built on her stern. While this was not highly unusual as pigeons were used by seaplanes at the time. Of course things did not go as planned. If the pigeons were released one or two at a time, they would always come back as they were supposed to, but once the entire flock was released they went home to Norfolk and never came back to the ship. The coop was eventually turned into the Executive Officers quarters. (Please commence jokes now.)

Early on in WWII she ferried airplanes around the Southeast Asia theater and served as part of anti-submarine patrols.  She was not going to be able to avoid danger forever though. In February 27, 1942 the Japanese had their way with her, causing so much damage that she had to be scuttled. A twenty-two year career and she went out with a bang.

In a tragic foot note, after being scuttled most of her surviving crew was put aboard the USS Pecos for the trip back to Australia. Unfortunately the ship sunk on the journey back.