The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 19 May 2026Mark Clark is the new UN Commander and will run the war in Korea, replacing Matt Ridgway, who leaves for Europe to take over NATO Command. The Koje-Do POW camp situation is resolved, but is a black eye for the UN, as are the allegations that the US has been practicing germ warfare in Korea and Manchuria, backed up by “confessions” from captured American airmen.
00:00 Intro
01:13 Recap
01:29 Demand and Response
05:35 What Went Wrong at Koje-Do?
12:06 Germ Warfare?
13:55 Mark Clark
15:45 ROK and Ammunition
19:53 Philippine Raids
21:16 Summary
21:28 Conclusion
22:09 Call to Action
May 20, 2026
The Korean War Week 100: Mark Clark in Command – May 19, 1952
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LMG-25: The Swiss Toggle-Locked Light Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Dec 2025The LMG-25 was designed by Adolph Furrer at Waffenfabrik Bern in the 1920s. Furrer was a devoted fan of the toggle locking system, and also designed a toggle-locked submachine gun that Switzerland (unwisely) adopted in 1941. The LMG-25 was first produced in 1924, adopted in 1925, and remained in production until 1946 with a total of 23,045 standard models and 1,742 optics-equipped fortress models made.
It is chambered for the standard 7.5x55mm Swiss cartridge with a 30-round side-mounted magazine (interchangeable with the later Stgw 57 magazine, incidentally). It is an effective design, if expensive to produce, and served Switzerland well for several decades.
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May 19, 2026
The War People by Lucian Staiano-Daniels
At Dead Carl and You, Kiran Pfitzner reviews The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War and finds it has value in bringing to life some of the ordinary people involved in that bloody, interconnected series of wars that we group together as the Thirty Years’ War:
“Their word for themselves was People. Early seventeenth-century common soldiers were Die Leute, Das Volk, les gens, or la gente. They were Das Kriegsvolk, Die Kriegsleute, les gens de guerre, the War People.” So begins Lucian Staiano-Daniels’s aptly titled The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War. Using the technique of micro-history, Staiano-Daniels follows the Mansfeld regiment from its raising in 1625 to its unhappy dissolution in 1627. This unexceptional regiment is notable because of the primary source documentation that survives, specifically its original internal legal records — investigations, debts, trials, and last testaments. Through this unusually immediate resource, we gain glimpses of the reality of the 17th century common soldier and so a clearer view of the social conditions he lived within.
One way Staiano-Daniels situates this investigation is in terms of the relationship between military organization and state-building. Describing the existing historiography, he writes: “In this argument, early-modern states increased their control over their civilian populations in part to raise tax money for larger armies that were inhabited by soldiers who were themselves increasingly well-disciplined”. He instead finds, “neither an intensification of military discipline nor unadulterated thuggishness. The military community was made up of systems of relationships that were subtle, intricate, and disorganized.” (7). These findings are well evidenced, and significant, as earlier literature (drawing on more normative sources like manuals and regulations) asserted the intensification of discipline as part of the emergence of the modern state. Instead, we see states forced to engage in the paradoxically complexly and loosely organized world of the mercenary, unable in this time of crisis and state-emergence to fully subordinate the armed forces they employed.
The 17th century and the Thirty Years’ War serve as an important benchmark in understanding the development of war. In witnessing the lives of the kind of men with which wars of the 17th century were fought, we gain a greater understanding of the society that they moved in. In so doing, we can more easily conceptualize the forces that both constrained and enabled war in the 17th century, producing its particular form. This conception provides the opportunity to more easily understand war in other places and times and what conditions reduced or intensified its violence.
Reading this work as a Clausewitz scholar, I could also not help but see a connection between the culture of the war people and Clausewitz’s support for a national militia or Landwehr as a step towards more inclusive governance. There is, of course, a great distance between the unruly mercenaries of the Thirty Years’ War and the “nation in arms” envisioned by Clausewitz and the other Prussian reformers, but at its core we find a common phenomenon: the connection between military service and rights, personal and political.
This book demonstrates well the value of microhistory; in looking closely at the practices and prevalent attitudes of these soldiers of the 17th century, we gain a more concrete view of the prevailing social conditions. This is not just of interest for its own sake (as social history), but because social conditions greatly shape the practice of war, as Clausewitz tells us. This is so because social conditions both reflect and affect the political conditions that create war, as well as the political purpose that exercises a continuous influence upon it.
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May 18, 2026
Isoroku Yamamoto – the admiral and the postwar legend
Big Serge examines the popular memory of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Japan’s early naval war successes against the United States from 1941 onwards, contrasting the postwar image with the man himself:
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet.
Photo from the National Diet Library via Wikimedia Commons.
Japanese leadership in the Second World War enjoys noticeably lower name recognition than their German counterparts. Most people with a cursory knowledge of the war know the core German leadership group around Hitler — Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Speer, and perhaps Heydrich and Bormann — and the all-star lineup of German generals like Rommel, Manstein, and Guderian. In contrast, the only particularly notorious member of Japan’s nebulous leadership group is General Hideki Tojo, who served as Prime Minister for most of the war and became the centerpiece defendant in the postwar trial. As far as Japanese commanders go, the list of name-brand personnel has but a single entry: Isoroku Yamamoto.
Yamamoto’s life and career present a fascinating trajectory that shapes a particular, sympathetic view of the man. A veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, he spent much of his 30’s in the United States, studying at Harvard and serving as naval attache in Japan’s Washington embassy. He therefore had a first hand understanding of America’s industrial depth, and was famously pessimistic about Japan’s prospects in a a war against the United States. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas”, he argued, “knows that Japan lacks the power for a naval race with America”. In one of his more famous and widely recited (though often badly translated) remarks about a war with the United States, he told Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in September 1940:
If I was told that I had to do it, then you will certainly observe the Navy going all out for half a year to a year. However, I do not hold conviction about the outcome after 2-3 years.
This quote certainly seems remarkably prescient, in light of Japan’s initial wave of operational successes, which slowly faded away as American combat power ramped up. Far more famous still is his remark, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that Japan had “awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with terrible resolve”.
All of this shapes the perception of Yamamoto as a quasi-tragic figure who understood that Japan was unlikely to defeat the United States in the Pacific War, counseled against the conflict, and then dutifully tried to play a losing hand as well as he could once war had been thrust upon him against his own advice. Yamamoto was furthermore a critic of the Japanese Army’s war in China and a particularly vocal opponent of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Japan, lending credence to the idea that he was war-averse.
This is the Yamamoto of American popular memory, and indeed of a great deal of Japanese postwar writing: a sort of samurai Cassandra, too perceptive and cosmopolitan for the militarist regime he served, a man who fired the opening shot of the Pacific War with a heavy heart and no illusions.
It is certainly true that Yamamoto had an appropriately pessimistic assessment of Japan’s prospects in an extended conflict with the United States. What is less often appreciated is that Yamamoto did not, on the basis of this assessment, conclude that Japan ought not to fight. He concluded instead that, if Japan was going to fight, it had to fight differently — with greater boldness, more risk, and an aggressive search for a decisive stroke. He did not spend the eighteen months before Pearl Harbor advocating for peace. He spent them designing what was, on balance, the single most aggressive operational scheme that was possible — and then only barely — within Japan’s kinetic parameters.
This is the critical distinction between Yamamoto-the-man and the Yamamoto of postwar hagiography. He was not a pacifist, reluctant or otherwise. He was a Japanese naval officer of strong patriotic conviction, deeply committed to his service and his nation, who happened to understand the arithmetic of industrial war better than most of his colleagues. Notwithstanding his appreciation for America’s vast industrial base, he shared a broader Japanese disdain for American martial proclivities, dismissing American naval officers as a club of “golfers and bridge players”. His understanding of the United States did not produce pacifism. It produced, rather, a particular kind of operational philosophy — one which held that Japan’s best hope in a war with the United States was to front-load its risk-taking, to achieve a string of dramatic early victories that would either compel American negotiation or, failing that, push the eventual American counter-offensive as far into the future as possible. In either case, the operational prescription was the same: bold, high-risk operations aimed at decisive results.
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The American Civil War was “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”
Ben Duval looks at the implications of the quote above (attributed to Moltke the Elder) and shows that there were indeed lessons to be learned from that conflict:
Chief of the Prussian General Staff Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800-1891).
Photo by Carl Günther via Wikimedia Commons.
A famous, if apocryphal, quote attributed to Moltke dismissed the American Civil War as “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”. There were certainly lessons to be learned — it could hardly be otherwise in so long and intense a conflict. The war showcased many new technologies on a large scale, including rail and telegraph, while the growing accuracy of firearms showed the growing importance of field fortifications in pitched battle. It also gave witness to many expedients and innovations, including the first known employment of indirect fire (although that would take much longer to be appreciated).
Nevertheless, the readiness with which Moltke’s spurious quote was accepted is suggestive of fundamental differences between Europe’s large professional armies and the hastily-raised volunteers that fought for both North and South. The Civil War saw a mobilization of unprecedented scale, expanding from a pre-war regular army of 15,000 to a total of nearly 2 million at its peak.
At some critical battles, like Antietam, many regiments had mustered bare weeks before. At best, these soldiers could handle their weapons reasonably well; large-scale maneuvers in the heat of combat were out of the question. Even long-serving formations did not have much of a chance to redress these deficiencies, as demonstrated by the disjointed conduct of Pickett’s Charge. What immediate lessons could the Prussian and French, efficiently maneuvering under fire at Gravelotte or Mars-la-Tour, have learned from Civil War armies?
Prussian attack at Gravelotte on 18 August 1870.
Lessons at the Right Level
Perhaps not much at the tactical level, but there was plenty to be learned at the operational. Never before had railroads been employed at such scale to shift troops within and between theaters; nor the telegraph, which was used to coordinate such movements. Efficient logistical services allowed both sides to undertake bold maneuvers involving massive numbers of troops (it is noteworthy how many generals had previous experience working for railroad companies, and how many more went on to high management or board positions after the war).
Union supply wagons loading up at a railhead.
But the point also holds more broadly, beyond the particular technical specialties of 1860s America. Whenever tactics alone cannot suffice—either because both sides are extremely skilled, as in the First World War, or because organizational breakdowns rule out more complex maneuvers — decisive action can by default only occur at the operational level. This was an essential point in Saladin the Strategist. Muslim and Crusader armies, through long experience fighting each other, had developed unique fighting styles tailored to blunt each other’s edges: barring a fluke, decision could only be won through some higher-level maneuver.
In such cases, the fighting capabilities of an army matter less in any absolute sense than in their ability to effect a particular operational scheme. Tactical proficiency is but one variable among many, and not necessarily the most important. Whether a general is dealing with poorly-trained militia or long-serving professionals, it is above all their relative odds that factor into his calculations.
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Withdrawing the Black Jack Brigade from Europe
Depending on your point of view, President Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw a US Army brigade from Europe is either Trump having a temper tantrum yet again or part of an overall plan to reduce US deployment to allied nations who should be able to pay for their own defence. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort discusses the formation being relocated back to the continental United States:
1st Cavalry Division, 2nd Brigade – “The Black Jack Brigade”
There’s a lot of drama around Black Jack brigade being ordered back to the U.S. from Europe.
I was in that unit on that same mission from 2019-2020.
We deployed, did training there, went to a CTC. I’ll be honest, it was the most fun I’ve probably had in the Army.
But after the initial training and the CTC rotation, we didn’t do much.
Played a lot of softball. BBQs. PT. Some drinking. Mostly just working on keeping people out of trouble.
It was kind of like being back at Fort Hood, but in Germany.
I suppose one could argue that the simple act of us being there made all the difference. I don’t know. That was above my level.
But I couldn’t help but think then, as I do now, that there are better ways to keep one’s adversaries at bay.
To say nothing of the fact that I do believe we have been a crutch to Europe for too long. Everyone seems to forget that Europe as a whole, dwarfs the GDP of Russia. A country who is barely richer than Italy.
You accomplish nothing providing security for people who refuse to do it themselves.
What are we supposed to do? Defend them forever? Permanently?
What has it gotten us? Europe, by all accounts, has taken advantage of our security blanket and prioritized making a socialist hellscape.
A socialist hellscape that has become their chief export. So the very act of remaining there in force is enabling the destruction of the western world.
Our relationship with those people DEMANDS revisiting in my view. Because whatever good will we generated after the end of the Second World War has dried up.
The free flow of money from us to them has also dried up.
It’s very telling how others treat you when you stop doing things for them. This isn’t mutual respect. It’s been little more than bribery.
And I’m all for keeping our Armored brigades right here, building readiness.
And not running them into the ground for little gain.
There is an age old adage that says you must help yourself before you can help others. Prudence demands that for our country right now.
America first. America always.
May 17, 2026
Why the US Invaded Iraq
Real Time History
Published 21 Nov 2025The US invasion of Iraq was the culmination of several developments that started at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. In 2002, the Bush administration used the excuse of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and claimed links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to justify the invasion.
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QotD: Battlefield morale and cohesion in movies/games versus real history
I’ve focused on game morale systems here, but of course this blends over into film as well, where the “mooks” often charge the heroes seemingly utterly heedless of their losses – frequently despite the fact that the last identical group of mooks to do so just got taken apart before their very eyes. And invariably they do this until they are so beaten that they switch to the other binary state, simply running away.
Actual armies have far more than two states of morale and behaved in far more dynamic, unpredictable and interesting ways!
The first problem with this “binary model” of morale is that it assumes just a single factor (“leadership” or “morale”) but in practice we ought to be thinking about at least two different ingredients here: morale and cohesion.
Morale is the commitment the combatants have to their leadership and their cause. To simplify a bit, we might say that soldiers with good morale believe three things: that their cause is a worthy one, that they are on the road to success and that their leaders have a good (enough) plan to achieve final victory. Poor morale can result from a breakdown in any of those three elements: troops might for instance believe both in their goal and its eventual possibility but not in their leaders to produce it (this seems to have been the case, for instance, in the French Mutiny of 1917). On the other hand, regardless of the charisma of leaders, few people come to a war intending to die in it; if the cause appears impossible, morale will sink regardless. And armies that do not believe in the cause at all are extremely difficult to motivate by other means.
On the other hand cohesion is the force that holds a specific unit together through the power of the bonds holding the individual combatants to each other and/or to their (generally junior or non-commissioned) officers. There are a lot of ways to build that cohesion: people are generally unwilling to abandon neighbors, close friends and relatives, for one. They are also reluctant to expose themselves to shame at home for having done so; shame is one of the few things people fear as much, if not more than, death. For armies that can’t rely on that sort of organic cohesion, it can be built by reconstructing the soldier’s unit as his primary social group. Drill can do this: it creates an experience of shared suffering and achievement which bonds the soldiers together creating strong “artificial” cohesion.
These two ingredients have different roots, but they also function differently. The formulation that has always stuck with me is one from James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1998): morale (McPherson discusses it under the heading of “the Cause”) will get men into uniform, it will sustain them on large marches and cold nights and it will get them to the battle, but it will not get them through the battle. Instead, cohesion (the “comrades” of the title) gets men through the terror of actual combat, when fear has driven “the cause” far from mind. But of course cohesion isn’t enough on its own either, since it provides no reason to advance or attack or really to do anything at all except stick together.
Adding further complication to this, morale and cohesion are not, as they often exist in games, inherent properties of a unit, but rather emergent properties of the interactions of a whole bunch of individuals. In a strategy game, units exist primarily as extension of the player’s will; in film units typically exist as extensions of their commander’s or the main character’s will (note how common it is that right as the hero begins winning his duel with the villain, so too his army begins winning the battle). But of course actual armies are composed of lots of humans, each with their own individual will and agency.
Those humans are continually making calculations about risks, goals and survival. It’s not hard here to see why, by the by, morale won’t carry troops through high risk conditions: if your only goal is to survive to experience the end-state of the war, then it is always in your interest to let someone else do the dying; it doesn’t serve your end to stay in a high risk position. By contrast, if you are held there by the fear of shame if your close comrades see you run, that still applies. Thus these calculations get progressively more “primal” as the sense of danger rises (fear makes a mess of those higher brain functions), but they do not stop.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIC: Morale and Cohesion”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-01.
May 16, 2026
The failure of Operation Crossbow in 1943-45
Timing is everything in war — well, if not everything, it’s extremely important. An example was the development delays for the German V-1 and V-2 systems that kept them from being a potentially devastating weapon against the Anglo-American invasion forces on D-Day. Secretary of Defense Rock explains why allied air attacks to suppress the German launch sites were an almost unmitigated failure:
German A4 or V-2 replica at Peenemünde
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Two campaigns separated by 50 years — the Anglo-American CROSSBOW campaign against German V-weapons in 1943–1945 and the “Great Scud Chase” of Desert Storm in 1991 — suggest that what is happening over Iran today is not a deviation from the norm but simply a repeat of it. As Colonel Mark Kipphut argued in his 1996 study comparing the two campaigns, the failure to internalize CROSSBOW’s lessons was itself one of the reasons those same failures were repeated in 1991; the present campaign against Iran suggests we might still not have learned them.1
The first lesson of CROSSBOW is that fixed infrastructure is easy to destroy and that adversaries do not stay fixed for long. British intelligence had received “reliable and relatively full information” on German long-range weapons as early as November 1939 two months into the war.2 It wasn’t till four years later, in 1943, that Allied photo-reconnaissance first identified the German “ski-sites” in northwestern France, named for the curious shape of one of the buildings on each launcher complex.3 Within weeks, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey would later report, ninety-six sites had been cataloged, and a sustained bombing offensive against them had begun. Of these ninety-six sites, no more than two were ever used operationally.4 On its face, this was a complete victory. Allied airpower had, by direct attack, denied the Luftwaffe permanent launching infrastructure before the V-1 campaign could begin.5
The Germans drew the obvious conclusion. The Survey noted that during the period of the Allied counterattack, the Germans developed methods for launching V-1s and V-2s from small, inconspicuous sites that required minimal engineering work and freed firing operations from the elaborate sites originally planned.6 These were the “modified sites”, first photographed on April 26, 1944, which were well camouflaged, dependent largely on prefabricated buildings, of which more than sixty had been identified before the first V-1 was launched in England in mid-June.7 The “modified sites”, the Survey concluded plainly, were “heavily bombed without marked effect on the scale of effort”.8
Kipphut, working from the same primary documents, formalizes the consequence as a two-phase division of the campaign. CROSSBOW I, running from April 1943 to early June 1944, was a qualified success: it delayed the start of V-weapon attacks by an estimated three to six months and so allowed OVERLORD to proceed before the full weight of Hitler’s missile arsenal could be brought to bear.9 Eisenhower himself wrote that had the Germans perfected the weapons six months earlier, the invasion of Europe would have been “exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible”, and that a sustained V-weapons attack on the Portsmouth-Southampton embarkation area could have caused OVERLORD to be written off entirely.10 CROSSBOW II, however, the campaign to suppress launches once they had begun, was in Kipphut’s assessment a “dismal failure”; despite thousands of sorties against more than 250 targets in the critical summer of 1944, the Germans averaged just over 80 launches per day, and German sources contend they never failed to launch on account of either Allied air attack or weapons shortages.11
A World War II map shows the two areas where the Germans were setting up their secret “V” weapons to bombard England (right, center). These are the areas in which the Royal Air Force and 8th Air Force heavy bombers concentrated their bombs in order to knock out the weapons — part of the pre-invasion plan. This event was given the operational code name Crossbow during World War II. The grouping (left, center) is the site of the Invasion of Normandy.
The implications for Allied resource allocation were severe. Between the beginning of May 1943 and the end of March 1944, nearly 40% of Allied reconnaissance sorties over Europe were devoted to supporting CROSSBOW, with those planes taking more than 1.25 million photographs and service members preparing more than 4 million prints for study and analysis.12 Over the course of the campaign, U.S. and British air forces flew approximately 68,913 sorties against CROSSBOW targets and dropped roughly 136,789 tons of munitions.13 During the thirteen-month peak period from August 1943 to August 1944, the joint strategic-bomber effort absorbed 13.7% of its sorties and 15.5% of its tonnage on V-weapon targets.14 By the autumn of 1944 and into the winter, RAF Fighter Command devoted 79% of its offensive sorties to CROSSBOW.15 Eisenhower, faced with the apparent failure of CROSSBOW II to suppress the launches that began on D-Day plus seven, directed that V-weapon suppression take priority over all other Allied air operations, including direct support to the Normandy lodgment and the Combined Bomber Offensive.16
That bombing, which failed against the dispersed V-2 launch sites, was almost overdetermined. The Survey concluded bluntly that after the initial Allied success, the firing sites for V-2s were small, well camouflaged, and made poor targets for bombers.17 No comparable problem arises with a factory complex. The V-2 launcher, like the modified V-1 ramp, was small, mobile, and concealable, and the strategic-bomber instrument was designed and procured to flatten large, stationary targets. In the end, Kipphut notes, silencing the V-weapons required ground forces to overrun the launch sites.18
- Mark E. Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts: Lessons from History”, Counterproliferation Paper No. 15 (Maxwell AFB, AL: USAF Counterproliferation Center, February 2003), 1–3. Originally published in Airpower Journal, Winter 1996.
- Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 3, Europe: Argument to V-E Day: January 1944 to May 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 89.
- United States Strategic Bombing Survey, V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign, Military Analysis Division, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C., January 1947), 5–6.
- Ibid, 6.
- Craven and Cate, eds., have a full chapter on the operational history of CROSSBOW, 84-106.
- Ibid, 2.
- Ibid, 6.
- Ibid, 6.
- Kipphut, 7–8.
- Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 260, quoted in Kipphut, 5.
- Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts”, 8, citing Phillip Henshall, Hitler’s Rocket Sites (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 187.
- Craven and Cate, eds., 89.
- Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts”, 8
- USSBS, “V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign”, 28.
- USSBS, “V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign, 28”; Kipphut, 8–9.
- Kipphut, 5.
- USSBS, “V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign”, 7
- Kipphut, 10.
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Indonesian M95/51 Mannlicher Carbine & Short Rifle Converted to .303 British
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Dec 2025When Indonesia won its independence in 1949, its military had a real mess of different equipment. The SMLE was adopted as the first standard rifle, but these were in short supply and a lot of Arisakas and Dutch Mannlichers were also in the country’s possession. Looking for a weapon for rural police using the now-standard .303 British cartridge, the Indonesian government decided to revisit a program to convert 6.5mm M95 rifles and carbines to .303 — something initially done with Australian help in 1941.
With Australian advisors from Lithgow, the Indonesian PSM factory gear conversions in 1951, and continued them into early 1955. In total, 13,999 M95/51 conversions were made, 9,904 of them carbines and 4,905 short rifles. They were made by reboring the original 6.5mm barrels to .303 and reaming the chambers out (although this does result in a slight double shoulder to fired cases). The carbines (with 19″ barrels) were fitted with a variety of muzzle brakes, and made for an as-yet unidentified pattern of bayonet. The short rifles (with 26″ barrels) were given new 2-position rear notch sights, but left using standard Dutch M95 bayonets.
The guns were used in police and possibly military training roles until removed from service in 1961. A batch was sold as surplus in 1962 to InterArms, and another batch was found in the late 1970s and sold to Odin in the early 1980s. The InterArms guns tend to be in better condition, and have intact Indonesian markings, where the Odin guns are generally rougher and have the government property marks ground off.
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May 15, 2026
“One of the most iconic pictures of WWII” – the seen and the unseen, USN edition
CDR Salamander posts an iconic US Navy photo from late 1944, showing the unparalleled naval might of the American efforts against Japan. But, as with Bastiat’s famous economic essay, there are the obvious things we see and the important but unseen things that matter just as much:
Murderers’ Row. Ulithi anchorage, December 8th, 1944. Just three years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
One of the most iconic pictures of WWII.
The carriers are (from front to back): USS Wasp (CV-18), USS Yorktown (CV-10), USS Hornet (CV-12), USS Hancock (CV-19) and USS Ticonderoga (CV-14).
The oldest of those ships, Yorktown, was only 19 months old. The youngest, Hancock, was commissioned only a little under eight months earlier. All were laid down and took from a bit under three to a bit under four years to build.
Just a year prior, the US Navy was so short of aircraft carriers, it had to borrow a carrier from the Royal Navy.
At first glance, it appears to be a flex of American naval power at flood tide — the aircraft carrier’s unassailable invincibility manifest — and it is. However, when you dig deeper, it has a more important story. It gives a warning. It informs us today, if we are willing to listen.
It isn’t about the power of being the world’s greatest shipbuider, that we were. It isn’t about an unequalled ability to project national will across the Pacific like no nation ever has in human history, which it is.
No. That isn’t what it tells us that is most important.
As we have done more than once over the last two decades, we’re taking a holder of a front row seat on the Front Porch and CDR Salamander Plank Owner Sid’s comments, in this case from yesterday, and bringing it to a standalone post.
Most of this post is his. The insight certainly is.
The actual story this picture tells is much more sobering, right there in plain sight, but you can’t see it.
The reality is that on the day this picture was taken, the Fast Carrier Task Force (TF 38/58) was down an entire Task Group from where it started two months earlier.
USS Franklin (CV-13) was severely damaged on 27 OCT by kamikaze and had to return [to] CONUS for repairs.
USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24) was severely damaged in the same attack.
USS Princeton (CVL-23) was sunk on 24 OCT by a Judy dive bomber.
USS Essex (CV-9) had a devastating hit by a kamikaze on 24 NOV followed by a disabling machinery casualty requiring a trip back to CONUS for repairs.
USS Enterprise (CV-6) departed a few days earlier for repairs in Pearl Harbor.
All the carriers in this picture had been damaged to varying degrees. Damage that today would require a trip to the yard to fix, like the absent Enterprise and Essex.
For example Ticonderoga (fourth Essex in the line from the bottom) would take damage to her radar waveguides in January. That could not be repaired forward and she would have to return to Bremerton as well.
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Bloodier Than Verdun? Winter Battles on the Eastern Front 1915
The Great War
Published 16 Jan 2026The first four months of 1915 witnessed a titanic struggle on the Eastern Front, in East Prussia, the Carpathians, Bukovina, and at Przemysl. Both sides suffered staggering casualties that surpass those of the Somme or Verdun the following year. Ironically, the Austro-Hungarians lost far more men trying to save Przemysl than there were in the fortress.
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May 14, 2026
Why did the Romans defeat the Macedonians and Seleucids so easily?
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 19 Nov 2025Today I try to answer several questions about the confrontation between Rome and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Eastern Mediterranean — espcially the Macedonians and Seleucids. In contrast to the monumental struggle between Rome and Carthage, where Hannibal in particular inflicted very costly defeats on the Romans, the wars with the “sophisticated” military powers of the east seem much more one sided — brief and decided by a single pitched battle. How fair is the sense that these conflicts were “easier” for the Romans to win, and if they were — why was this?
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May 13, 2026
The Korean War Week 99: The War’s Most Humiliating Crisis – May 12, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 12 May 2026The world turns it’s eyes to the UN POW camp at Koje-Do island when the Communist POWs in one of the compounds kidnap the Camp Commandant, an American General no less, and issue demands that they say must be met before his release. Can this be settled diplomatically, or is the army going in in force?
00:00 Intro
00:54 General Dodd Kidnapped
04:09 Koje-Do Phase Two
07:04 Dodd on Trial
13:18 The POWs Demands
18:30 Summary
19:03 Conclusion
19:54 Call to Action
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May 11, 2026
The History of SPI: Part 1 / Simulations Publications Inc. / Wargaming History
Legendary Tactics
Published 18 Dec 2025Remember the golden age of wargaming? This is THE definitive history of SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.), one of the most influential publishers in tabletop gaming. From its groundbreaking magazine Strategy & Tactics to iconic titles like War in the East, StarForce, and Terrible Swift Sword, SPI reshaped what board wargames could be — and built a passionate community along the way.
This is Part 1, where we delve into the origins of SPI and Strategy & Tactics Magazine, and the people and games that were part of it.
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