Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Dec 2022After (formally) joining World War Two in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the United States endured a series of defeats at the hands of the Japanese. The Philippines garrison fell, Wake Island fell, Guam fell. British possessions in Southeast Asia teetered and fell as well — the campaign was not going well for the Allies.
The first American offensive of the war would come on August 7th, 1942 with the landing of the 1st and 5th Marines at Red Beach on Guadalcanal. Part of a multi-prong assault (the nearby Japanese bases on Tulagi and Gavutu/Tanambogo were also captured at the same time), the attack on Guadalcanal was made to secure the airstrip under Japanese construction there. If the island became an operational Japanese air base, Allied supply shipping to Australia would come under threat, and this could imperil the whole area of operations.
Fortunately for the Marines, US intelligence massively overestimated the Japanese force on Guadalcanal. It was in fact only a few hundred infantry, leading a work force of about 3,000 laborers (mostly Koreans). They thought the US landings were just a small raid, and dispersed into the jungle to wait for the US departure. Instead, the Marines were there to take the airfield and hold it. They were not, however, very well prepared. The Navy suffered a massive defeat in the waters off Guadalcanal the very next night, and would pull out of the area August 9th, leaving the Marines with dangerously low supplies of food, ammunition, and other essentials.
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April 18, 2023
Guadalcanal’s Red Beach Landing: America’s First Offensive in WW2
April 17, 2023
Tank Chats Reloaded | Panzer IV | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 30 Dec 2022Let’s go inside Panzer IV with another episode of Tank Chats Reloaded. Chris Copson takes a detailed look inside the tank which was considered the backbone of the Wehrmacht‘s Panzer force, uncovering the reality of what it might’ve been like to serve as a Panzer crew member in WW2.
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April 16, 2023
4,000 German teens trapped in Tarnopol – WW2 – Week 242 – April 15, 1944
World War Two
Published 15 Apr 2023Thousands of German soldiers, mostly new teenage recruits, are obeying Hitler’s “Fortress Directive” and are surrounded in Tarnopol; it does not go well for them. German forces in Ukraine manage to all pull back across the Dniester, but they are under serious pressure in the Crimea. Meanwhile, in India, the Japanese siege of Kohima continues, and in China they are poised to launch a gigantic offensive.
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April 15, 2023
Do the Germans Know About Operation Overlord?
World War Two
Published 14 Apr 2023We are getting closer and closer to D-Day and the potential liberation of Nazi Europe. But how much do the Germans know about this? Is the leak inside the British Embassy in Ankara enough to thwart the efforts of Operation Bodyguard, Operation Fortitude, and everything else the Allies are doing to deceive Adolf Hitler? Let’s find out. This is the story of Cicero.
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Type 68 North Korean Tokarev/High Power Hybrid
Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 May 2020The Type 68 is a North Korean hybrid of the Tokarev and the High Power, used as a military service pistol until replaced by the Beak-Du-San copy of the CZ75. The general outline of the gun is a copy of the Tokarev, with a modular removable fire control group, lack of manual safety, and tall thin sights. It is chambered for 7.62x25mm, and uses a magazine identical to the standard Tokarev except for not having a magazine catch cut, as the Type 68 has a heel magazine release.
Internally, the High Power elements include a detent-retained barrel pin, use of a solid barrel cam instead of a 1911/Tokarev swinging link, and a fixed barrel bushing. Two patterns of markings exist, one with a date and North Korean marking, and one (like this example) with only a serial number.
North Korean guns of all types are very rare in the United States. A very small number of Type 68s have come into the US, generally through Central America (probably via Cuba) and South Africa (via Rhodesia/Zimbabwe).
Update: It appears that the original design work for these was done by an independent engineering firm in Yugoslavia. The design (a TT33 with High Power type locking and angled slide serrations) was not completed in time for the trials that would lead to adoption of the Yugoslav M57, and the drawings were transferred to “another country” — probably North Korea.
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April 14, 2023
QotD: The three great strategic sins
The first sin is the sin of of not having a strategy in the first place, what we might call “emotive” strategy. As Clausewitz notes, policy (again, note above how what we’re calling strategy is closest to policy in Clausewitz’ sense) is “subject to reason alone” whereas the “primordial violence, hatred and enmity” is provided for in another part of the trinity (“will” or “passion”). To replace policy with passion is to invert their proper relationship and court destruction.
The second sin is the elevation of operational concerns over strategic ones, the usurpation of strategy with operations, which we have discussed before. This is, by the by, also an error in managing the relationship of the trinity, allowing the general’s role in managing friction to usurp the state’s role in managing politics.
Perhaps the greatest example of this is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; an operational consideration (the destruction of the US Pacific Fleet) and even the tactics necessary to achieve that operational objective, were elevated above the strategic consideration of “should Japan, in the midst of an endless, probably unwinnable war against a third-rate power (the Republic of China) also go to war with a first-rate power (the United States) in order to free up oil-supplies for the first war”. Hara Tadaichi’s pithy summary is always worth quoting, “We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war.”
How does this error happen? It tends to come from two main sources. First, it usually occurs most dramatically in military systems where the military leadership – which has been trained for operations and tactics, not strategy, which you will recall is the province of kings, ministers and presidents – usurps the leadership of the state. Second, it tends to occur when those military leaders – influenced by their operational training – take the operational conditions of their planning as assumed constants. “What do we do if we go to war with the United States” becomes “What do we do when we go to war with the United States” which elides out the strategic question “should we go to war with the United States?” entirely – and catastrophically, as for Imperial Japan, the answer to that unasked question of should we do this was clearly Oh my, NO.
(Bibliography note: It would hardly be fitting for me to declare these errors common and not provide examples. Two of the best case-studies I have read in this kind of strategic-thinking-failure-as-organizational-culture-failure are I. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (2005) and Parshall and Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (2005). Also worth checking out, Daddis, “Chasing the Austerlitz Ideal: The Enduring Quest for Decisive Battle” in Armed Forces Journal (2006): 38-41. The same themes naturally come up in Daddis, Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (2017)).
The third and final sin is easy to understand: a failure to update the strategy as conditions change. Quite often this happens in conjunction with the second sin, as once those operational concerns take over the place of strategy, it becomes difficult for leaders to consider new strategy as opposed to simply new operations in the pursuit of strategic goals which are often already lost beyond all retrieval. But this can happen without a subordination failure, due to sunk-costs and the different incentives faced by the state and its leaders. The classic example being functionally every major power in the First World War: by 1915 or 1916, it ought to have been obvious that no gains made as a result of the war could possibly be worth its continuance. Yet it was continued, both because having lost so much it seemed wrong to give up without “victory” and also because, for the politicians who had initially supported the war, to admit it was a useless waste was political suicide.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VIII: The Mind of Saruman”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-19.
April 10, 2023
It’s totally normal for a country to send troops overseas and neglect paying to feed them, right?
This week’s Dispatch post from The Line includes some commentary on the story I linked to last week from the Ottawa Citizen, reporting that Canadian soldiers sent to Poland to train Ukrainian troops are being stiffed by the Department of National Defence on their food bills:
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery
Here’s a totally normal story from a well-functioning country that isn’t at all broken: it turns out that processing per diems for a hundred or so folks is now beyond the capability of the federal government.
This story came to us courtesy the Ottawa Citizen, where David Pugliese reported that the company sized unit of Canadian military personnel operating in Poland has seen months worth of expense filings go unpaid. In some situations, a military unit sent abroad would include its own logistical support team, including cooks. In other situations, a relatively small unit sent to a place with functioning civilian infrastructure is told to feed themselves and keep the receipts for reimbursement. For our troops in Poland, there to provide logistical and training support to Ukrainian forces since October, the government went the latter route.
And that’s fine. Really. Frankly, we’re sure the troops are happier eating out at local places and enjoying delicious Polish food — really, it’s amazing — than getting three servings of military slop a day. The problem, though, as these poor troops discovered, is that the military and national defence bureaucracy no longer has the ability to process the expense payments. So these balances are just sitting on their personal credit cards. For months.
[…]
The mission began in October.
It seems almost pointless to add much actual insight and analysis here. This kind of dysfunction speaks for itself. We’ll limit ourselves to two comments: operational deployments are incredible stressful on military personnel and their families on the homefront. That’s uncontroversial, and unavoidable. That’s why military service is recognized as a sacrifice even during peacetime deployments. The basic bargain we make with our servicemembers is while they are serving their country abroad, their country will take care of their families at home. Leaving these families with high-interest credit-card balances they can’t pay off because the Canadian government is too broken to reimburse soldiers for expenses they were told to incur is an on-the-nose failure of Canada to honour its debt to the the military parents, spouses and children who have been, in effect, ordered to advance the Canadian government money to subsidize military deployments.
The second comment we’ll make, is that this isn’t just further evidence in support of the Canada-is-broken thesis — it’s a very specific kind of break. We’ve all known that Canadian governments, at all levels, have struggled to turn new policies into new programs. That’s not new. But even granting that failure, we’ve generally been able to keep doing the things we already do. There seemed to be enough residual muscle memory in our governments. Can we do new things? No, not really. But we’ll keep doing the stuff we already do.
This military fiasco is alarming because it’s a sign that our state-capacity issues are now extending into areas that previously worked. Not only are we struggling to do new things, we’re forgetting how to do things we used to be able to do. This goes beyond what our typical gripes about state capacity. This is something else. This is state atrophy, or rot.
Now that the public is paying attention, we suspect we’ll see some reasonably rapid progress. The government will throw bureaucrats and maybe consultants at the problem until it goes away. This is how they have reacted to similar issues: we hurled ground staff at airport delays until they cleared, and bureaucrats at passport offices until the backlogs eased.
But we have to ask why we now require exceptional redeployments of staff to maintain typical levels of service. And we don’t like the answers we can come up with. Ottawa has added tens of thousands of civil servants, at an annual cost of tens of billions, in recent years. During that time Ottawa has also sharply ramped up spending on consultants; the annual cost now surpasses $20 billion.
And yet.
What the hell is going on?
I’ve been saying for literally years now, the more the government tries to do the less well it does everything, and this fiasco is a perfect example of that sclerosis spreading further.
The Crimean Naval War at Sea – Battleships, Bombardments and the Black Sea
Drachinifel
Published 5 Apr 2023Today we take a look at most of the naval theaters of the Crimean War on conjunction with the fine people @realtimehistory find their video here: Last Crusade or F…
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US Army and Marine Corps deployments other than with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF)
Another excerpt from John Sayen’s Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry currently being serialized on Bruce Gudmundsson’s Tactical Notebook shows where US infantry units (US Army and USMC) were deployed aside from those assigned to Pershing’s AEF on the Western Front in France:
Apart from the war in Europe, the principal military concern of the Wilson administration during 1917-18 was the protection of resources and installations considered vital to the war effort. The threat of German sabotage in the United States was taken very seriously. In addition, Mexico was still unstable politically and sporadic border clashes continued to occur into 1919. Mexican oil was also regarded as an essential resource and the troops stationed on the Mexican border were prepared to invade in order to keep it flowing. However, all the National Guard, National Army, and even the Regular Army regiments raised for wartime only were reserved for duty with the AEF. (The National Army 332nd and 339th Regiments did deploy to Italy and North Russia, respectively, but both remained under AEF command.) This left non-AEF assignments in the hands of the pre-war Regular Army regiments.
Out of 38 Regular infantry regiments available in 1917, 25 were on guard duty within the Continental United States or on the Mexican border and 13 garrisoned U.S. possessions overseas. Local defense forces raised in Hawaii and the Philippines eventually freed the pre-war regiments stationed in those places for duty elsewhere. By the end of the war the 15th Infantry in China, the 33rd and 65th (Puerto Rican) Infantry in the Canal Zone, and the 27th and 31st Infantry (both under the AEF tables) in Siberia were the only non-AEF regiments still overseas. Inside the United States state militia (non-National Guard) units and 48 newly raised battalions of “United States Guards” (recruited from men physically disqualified for overseas service) had freed 20 regiments from stateside guard duties, but not in time for any of them to fight in France.
Only twelve pre-war regiments actually saw combat in the AEF. Nine of them served with the early-arriving 1st, 2nd, and 3rd AEF Divisions. The other three were with the late arriving 5th and 7th Divisions. One more reached France with the 8th Division, but only days ahead of the Armistice. By this time, the Regular Army regiments had long ago been stripped of most of their pre-war men to provide cadre for new units. They were refilled with so many draftees that their makeup scarcely differed from those of the National Army.*
The situation with the Marines was similar to that of the Regular Army. Most Marine regiments had to perform security and colonial policing duties that kept them away from the “real” war in France. Also like the Army, the Marines made Herculean efforts to accommodate a flood of recruits, acquiring training bases at Quantico Virginia and Parris Island South Carolina, as their existing facilities became too crowded. The Second Regiment (First Provisional Brigade) continued to police Haiti while the Third and Fourth Regiments (Second Provisional Brigade) did the same for the Dominican Republic. The First Regiment remained at Philadelphia as the core of the Advance Base Force (ABF) but its role soon became little more than that of a caretaker of ABF equipment.
Although there was little danger from the German High Seas Fleet ABF units might still be needed in the Caribbean to help secure the Panama Canal and a few other critical points against potential attacks by German surface raiders or heavily armed “U-cruisers.” Political unrest was endangering both the Cuban sugar crop and Mexican oil. To address such concerns, the Marines raised the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Regiments as infantry units in August, October, and November 1917, respectively. The Seventh, with eight companies went to Guantanamo, Cuba, to protect American sugar interests. The Ninth Regiment (nine companies) and the headquarters of the Third Provisional Brigade followed. The Eighth Regiment with 10 companies, meanwhile, went to Fort Crockett near Galveston, Texas to be available to seize the Mexican oil fields with an amphibious landing, should the situation in Mexico get out of hand.
Three other rifle companies (possibly the ones missing from the Seventh and Ninth Regiments) occupied the Virgin Islands against possible raids by German submarines. In August 1918, the Seventh and Ninth Regiments expanded to 10 companies each. The situation in Cuba having subsided, the Marine garrison there was reduced to just the Seventh Regiment. The Ninth Regiment and the Third Brigade headquarters joined the Eighth at Fort Crockett.**
* Order of Battle of the United States Land Forces in the World War op cit pp. 310-314 and 1372-1379. A battalion of United States Guards was allowed 31 officers and 600 men. These units were recruited mainly from draftees physically disqualified for overseas service. The 27th and 31st Infantry when sent to Siberia were configured as AEF regiments, though they were never part of the AEF. Large numbers of men had to be drafted out of the 8th Division to build these two regiments up to AEF strength. This seriously disrupted the 8th Division’s organization.
** Order of Battle of the United States Land Forces in the World War op cit pp. 1372-78; Truman R. Strobridge, A Brief History of the Ninth Marines (Washington DC, Historical Division HQ US Marine Corps; revised version 1967) pp. 1-2; James S. Santelli, A Brief History of the Eighth Marines (Washington DC, Historical Division HQ US Marine Corps; 1976) pp. 1-3; and James S. Santelli, A Brief History of the Seventh Marines (Washington DC, Historical Division HQ US Marine Corps; 1980) pp. 1-5.
April 9, 2023
New Offensive in the Crimea – WW2 – Week 241 – April 8, 1944
World War Two
Published 8 Apr 2023The Soviets are finally going to try and push the Axis out of Sevastopol and the Crimea. They also continue to drive the Axis back in Transnistria. Over in Burma and Northeastern India, the Japanese have the Allies under siege at not one, but two towns, and are also attacking Imphal from several points, but the Japanese have way bigger future plans up their sleeves in China.
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USMC units in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France
Another interesting excerpt from John Sayen’s Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry currently being serialized on Bruce Gudmundsson’s Tactical Notebook discusses the role of the US Marine Corps on the Western Front as part of Pershing’s AEF:
“How Twenty Marines Took Bouresches” by Frank E. Schoonover.
Originally published in the Ladies’ Home Journal Vol. 24 No. 1, via Wikimedia Commons
The Fifth Regiment arrived in France in July 1917. Being the fifth regiment of a four-regiment division, it soon found itself relegated to the sidelines and stuck with all the odd jobs such as providing military police details, couriers, and guards. Correctly reasoning that a larger unit would not be so easily pigeonholed, General Barnett [the Marine Corps Commandant] in October 1917 augmented the Fifth Regiment with the newly formed Sixth Regiment and Sixth Machinegun Battalion. The whole force constituted the AEF Fourth Brigade, or half the infantry of the AEF 2nd Division.*
Although the organization of the Fourth Brigade’s infantry regiments was supposed to be the same as that of all the other AEF infantry regiments, it did in fact differ in some details (see Appendix 2.6). Every Marine rifle and machinegun company had two additional sergeants to serve as gas NCOs and the Marines added gas officers to each battalion headquarters. Whether this helped reduce the number of gas casualties is unclear.
Marine enlisted men also tended to be given higher ranks than their Army counterparts. In a Marine regiment a platoon sergeant was not just the senior sergeant in a platoon, he was a gunnery sergeant, ranking as an Army sergeant first class (a rank that the Army awarded only to specialists) and well above a sergeant. Sergeants commanded all four sections in a Marine rifle platoon and this allowed an additional sergeant per half-platoon. The rifle section included two men trained equipped as snipers (enough for one sniper per half-platoon). Two more snipers were in company headquarters. Since 1887 when test results had exposed their poor marksmanship, the Marines had made rifle shooting into even more of a fetish than it had been in the Army. In contrast to the many soldiers sent into battle without even having fired their rifles, no Marine was even allowed overseas if he had not qualified as an expert rifleman or sharpshooter.
To give extra promotion, pay, and recognition (but not leadership responsibility) to the best shots the Marines introduced the rank of corporal (technical). The rank was also given to mechanics, horseshoers, saddlers, teamsters, and five senior operators in the telephone section of the regimental signal platoon to reward technical proficiency. However, despite their important but difficult and thankless duties, Marine cooks only ranked as privates.
[…]
The Marine AEF regiments differed from their Army counterparts in more than just structural details. They had a huge advantage in manpower quality. Except for about 7,100 draftees accepted during the war’s last weeks, the nearly 79,000 Marines who served in the war were all volunteers. About one sixth of these men had joined prior to the war. This was several times the Army’s percentage of pre-war men, even if those who had only National Guard service are included. Many Marine wartime volunteers were college men and included a lot of athletes.
The large number of officer-quality enlisted men persuaded General Barnett to direct on 4 June 1917 that, in future, all officers be appointed from the ranks. This move had the strong backing of Secretary Daniels who favored the practice of commissioning enlisted men. Such a system would be more in line with what the Germans and French were doing. Even the college men would have to have several months’ enlisted service before they could hope for a commission. By then their leadership potential could be properly evaluated. In addition, many pre-war enlisted men of greater age and experience but less education and growth potential could also become officers. Better still, the Marines were mostly infantry. Unlike the Army, they had few service or technical positions into which their best and brightest could be drained. Instead of getting the dregs, Marine infantry regiments got all the best officers and men. They were always kept at full strength with fully trained replacements, despite heavy casualties.**
The high quality men that the Marines were able to contribute to the AEF provoked a good deal of jealousy within the Army in general and from General Pershing in particular. The latter praised the Marines in private but refused to do so in public. Although Pershing had accepted the Fourth Marine Brigade into the AEF, he rebuffed every offer to send Marine artillery to France. The presence of both Marine infantry and artillery in France would have paved the way for the formation of a Marine AEF division. That would have given the Marines much more publicity at Army expense.
Late in the war Pershing relented enough to accept another Marine infantry brigade, the Fifth, which reached France in September 1918. However, although nearly all these Marines had qualified as expert marksmen, he employed them in menial jobs in the rear areas. At the same time, Pershing was rushing thousands of untrained Army recruits into front line combat where they were routinely and needlessly slaughtered.***
* Major David N. Buckner USMC, A Brief History of the Tenth Marines (Washington DC, Historical Div. HQMC; 1981) pp. 16-17.
** Heinl pp. 191-228; and J. Robert Moskin, The Story of the U.S. Marine Corps (New York, Paddington Press Ltd. 1979) pp. 138-139; LtGen William K. Jones USMC(Ret) A Brief History of the 6th Marines (Washington DC, History and Museum Div. HQMC 1987) p 1.
*** Heinl pp. 194-195 and 208-210; Allan R. Millett, Bullard op cit p. 321.
Uncancelled History | EP. 01 Robert E. Lee
Nebulous Media
Published 21 Nov 2022Jonathan Horn joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss Robert E. Lee’s infamous legacy. The two dissect his childhood, military career and life after the war. Should Robert E. Lee stay cancelled?
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April 8, 2023
Russia’s Last Crusade – The Crimean War 1853-1856
Real Time History
Published 7 Apr 2023The Crimean War between the Ottoman Empire and Russia (and later the UK and France) has been called the last crusade and the first modern war at the same time.
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Błyskawica: The Polish Home Army’s Clandestine SMG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Dec 2022The Błyskawica (“Lightning”) is an SMG developed in occupied Poland to be issued out to Home Army units during Operation Tempest: the liberation uprisings planned for the advance of the Red Army into Poland.
The gun was developed starting in September 1942 by two engineers, Wacław Zawrotny and Seweryn Wielanier. Both were smart and talented, but neither had previous experience in arms design. The design they created is both innovative in some areas and inferior in others as a result, with major inspiration coming from the Sten and the MP40. Production was undertaken in the harshest conditions of occupied Warsaw, where just possession of cutting tools required German military permission.* It is a credit to the skill and dedication of the Home Army team that some 750 Błyskawica guns were made; the largest mass production of any underground weapon that I am aware of.
Ultimately, Operation Tempest did not come to full fruition, as the NKVD’s treatment of Polish fighters as collaborators destroyed Home Army interest in cooperation. The Błyskawica guns were never issued as planned, with only the few dozen last made being used in the Warsaw Uprising. The remaining 700-odd examples have never been found — perhaps they remain in long-forgotten caches still to this day?
For the full story of the Błyskawica, see Leszek Erenfeicht’s excellent article:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/subm…Many thanks to the Polish Army Museum for giving me access to film this exceptionally rare item for you! Check them out at: http://www.muzeumwp.pl/?language=EN
* This created some interesting situations in which a shop might take a contract to make material for the Wehrmacht as a way to get access to the tools needed for Błyskawica component production. To those who did not know the whole story, such a shop was collaborationist.
April 7, 2023
Stormtroopers – The German Elite of WW1 – Sabaton History 119
Sabaton History
Published 6 Apr 2023By the middle of the Great War, several nations had begun to experiment with shock troops, and Germany was one of them. The Sturmtruppen were a revolution on the battlefield, for sure, but what did they actually do? What equipment did they carry and use? What were the men actually like? Today we’ll look at all that.
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