… it is far easier to protect against chemical munitions than against an equivalent amount of high explosives, a point made by Matthew Meselson. Let’s unpack that, because I think folks generally have an unrealistic assessment of the power of a chemical weapon attack, imagining tiny amounts to be capable of producing mass casualties. Now chemical munition agents have a wide range of lethalities and concentrations, but let’s use Sarin – one of the more lethal common agents, as an example. Sarin gas is an extremely lethal agent, evaporating rapidly into the air from a liquid form. It has an LD50 (the dose at which half of humans in contact will be killed) of less than 40mg per cubic meter (over 2 minutes of exposure) for a human. Dangerous stuff – as a nerve agent, one of the more lethal chemical munitions; for comparison it is something like 30 times more lethal than mustard gas.
But let’s put that in a real-world context. Five Japanese doomsday cultists used about five liters of sarin in a terror attack on a Tokyo Subway in 1995, deployed, in this case, in a contained area, packed full to the brim with people – a potential worst-case (from our point of view; “best” case from the attackers point of view) situation. But the attack killed only 12 people and injured about a thousand. Those are tragic, horrible numbers to be sure – but statistically insignificant in a battlefield situation. And no army could count on ever being given the kind of high-vulnerability environment like a subway station in an actual war.
In order to produce mass casualties in battlefield conditions, a chemical attacker has to deploy tons – and I mean that word literally – of this stuff. Chemical weapons barrages in the First World War involved thousands and tens of thousands of shells – and still didn’t produce a high fatality rate (though the deaths that did occur were terrible). But once you are talking about producing tens of thousands of tons of this stuff and distributing it to front-line combat units in the event of a war, you have introduced all sorts of other problems. One of the biggest is shelf-life: most nerve gasses (which tend to have very high lethality) are not only very expensive to produce in quantity, they have very short shelf-lives. The other option is mustard gas – cheaper, with a long shelf-life, but required in vast quantities (during WWII, when just about every power stockpiled the stuff, the stockpiles were typically in the many tens of thousands of tons range, to give a sense of how much it was thought would be required – and then think about delivering those munitions).
[…]
But that’s not the only problem – the other problem is doctrine. Remember that the modern system is all about fast movement. I don’t want to get too deep into maneuver-warfare doctrine (one of these days!) but in most of its modern forms (e.g. AirLand Battle, Deep Battle, etc) it aims to avoid the stalemate of static warfare by accelerating the tempo of the battle beyond the defender’s ability to cope with, eventually (it is hoped) leading the front to decompose as command and control breaks down.
And chemical weapons are just not great for this. Active use of chemical weapons – even by your own side – poses all sorts of issues to an army that is trying to move fast and break things. This problem actually emerged back in WWI: even if your chemical attack breaks the enemy front lines, the residue of the attack is now an obstruction for you. […] A modern system army, even if it is on the defensive operationally, is going to want to make a lot of tactical offensives (counterattacks, spoiling attacks). Turning the battle into a slow-moving mush of long-lasting chemical munitions (like mustard gas!) is counterproductive.
But that leaves the fast-dispersing nerve agents, like sarin. Which are very expensive, hard to store, hard to provision in quantity and – oh yes – still less effective than high explosives when facing another expensive, modern system army, which is likely to be very well protected against such munitions (for instance, most modern armored vehicles are designed to be functionally immune to chemical munitions assuming they are buttoned up).
This impression is borne out by the history of chemical weapons; for top-tier armies, just over a century of being a solution in search of a problem. The stalemate of WWI produced a frantic search for solutions – far from being stupidly complacent (as is often the pop-history version of WWI), many commanders were desperately searching for something, anything to break the bloody stalemate and restore mobility. We tend to remember the successful innovations – armor, infiltration tactics, airpower – because they shape subsequent warfare. But at the time, there were a host of efforts: highly planned bite-and-hold assaults, drawn out brutal et continu efforts, dirigibles, mining and sapping, ultra-massive artillery barrages (trying a wide variety of shell-types and weights). And, of course, gas. Gas sits in the second category: one more innovation which failed to break the trench stalemate. In the end, even in WWI, it wasn’t any more effective than an equivalent amount of high explosives (as the relative casualty figures attest). Tanks and infiltration tactics – that is to say, the modern system – succeeded where gas failed, in breaking the trench stalemate, with its superiority at the role demonstrated vividly in WWII.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-20.
April 2, 2023
QotD: The (in-)effectiveness of chemical weapons against “Modern System” armies
March 29, 2023
The obscure Polish banker who foresaw the carnage and deadlock of the First World War
Jon Miltimore on one of the few people to realize the increased deadliness and growing size of modern armies foreclosed any possibility of a quick, glorious war that would have the troops “home for Christmas”:
Jan Bloch, author of The War of the Future in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations (1898).
One man who did portend the carnage was Jan Bloch, a Polish banker and railroad baron who moonlighted as a military theorist. In 1898, Bloch published a little-noticed six-volume work titled The War of the Future in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations. The following year, the work was re-published in a single volume under a new title: Is War Now Impossible?
In the work, Bloch, who had closely studied Britain’s campaign in Africa during the Boer War, explained that modern weaponry had become so deadly that it had fundamentally changed warfare. Bayonet charges and cavalry flanking maneuvers were obsolete in an era defined by sophisticated earthworks and precision projectiles, he suggested.
Everybody will be entrenched in the next war. It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle. The first thing every man will have to do, if he cares for his life at all, will be to dig a hole in the ground. War, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army is able to get at the other, threatening each other, but never being able to deliver a final and decisive attack.
War would be “impossible” in the sense that it would be suicidal. Neither side would be able to gain a decisive advantage, battles along massive contiguous fronts would continue indefinitely.
Was Bloch suggesting that modern man had vanquished war by making it so deadly and terrible? Hardly. He argued that humans would be slow to realize the changes, and the results would be catastrophic.
At first there will be increased slaughter — increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue. They will try to, thinking that they are fighting under the old conditions, and they will learn such a lesson that they will abandon the attempt forever. Then, instead of war fought out to the bitter end in a series of decisive battles, we shall have as a substitute a long period of continually increasing strain upon the resources of the combatants. The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest, in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being willing to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening the other, but never being able to deliver a final and decisive attack …
That is the future of war — not fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men, but the bankruptcy of nations and the breakup of the whole social organization …
First World War generals don’t get much credit for their varied efforts to break the trench warfare deadlock, and later historians certainly piled on for the leaders’ collective failure to resolve the problem, but as Bret Devereaux pointed out, there was no easy solution. Artillery wasn’t the answer, nor were the famed German Stoßtruppen, nor the technical innovation of tanks, nor air power (either tactical or strategic). The technology of the day provide no one answer, but the leaders tried everything they could and the bleeding went on.
March 27, 2023
Frommer Pistolen-MG Model 1917: A Crazy Villar Perosa Copy
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Nov 2022After encountering Italian Villar Perosa machine pistols in the field, Austro-Hungarian troops requested a similar weapon. The project was given to FÉG to work on, and the result was the Pistolen-MG Model 1917: a pair of Frommer Stop pistols with long barrels and 25-round magazines, redesigned to fire from the open bolt, mounted to an adorably tiny tripod and spade grips.
Only a few dozen of these were made for testing, and they were not accepted for military service. Many thanks to Joschi Schuy for giving me access to film that fantastic surviving example for you!
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March 24, 2023
From “railway spine” to “shell shock” to PTSD
At Founding Questions, Severian discusses how our understanding of what we now label “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” evolved from how doctors visualized bodily ailments over a century ago:
A shell-shocked and physically wounded soldier in the First World War.
I mentioned “shell shock” yesterday, so let’s start there. Medicine in 1914 was still devoted to the “Paris School,” which assumed nothing but organic etiology for all syndromes. Sort of a reverse Descartes — as Descartes (implicitly) “solved” the mind-body problem by disregarding the body, so the “Paris School” of medicine solved it by disregarding the mind. So when soldiers started coming back from the front with these bizarre illnesses, naturally doctors began searching for an organic cause. (That’s hardly unique to the Paris School, of course; I’m giving you the context to be fair to the 1914 medical establishment, whose resistance to psychological explanations otherwise seems so mulish to us).
They’d noticed something similar in the late 19th century, with industrial accidents and especially train crashes. When a train crashed, the people in the first few cars were killed outright, those in the next few wounded, but the ones in the back were often physically fine. But within a few hours to weeks, they started exhibiting all kinds of odd symptoms. Hopefully you’ve never been in a train crash, but if you’ve ever been in a fender-bender you’ve no doubt experienced a minor league version of this.I hit a deer on the highway once. Fortunately I was at highway speed, and hit it more or less dead on (it jumped out as if it were committing suicide), so it got thrown away from the car instead of coming through the windshield. The car’s front end was wrecked, naturally, but I was totally fine. I don’t think the seatbelt lock even engaged, much less the airbag, since I didn’t even have time to hit the brakes.
The next few hours to days were interesting, physiologically. It felt like my body was playing catch up. I had an “oh shit, I’m gonna crash!!!” reaction about 45 minutes after I’d pulled off to the side of the road, duct-taped the bumper back on as best I could, and continued to my destination. All the stuff I would have felt had I seen the deer coming came flooding in. Had I not already been where I was going, I would’ve needed to pull over, because that out of the blue adrenaline hit had my hands shaking, and my vision fuzzed out briefly.
The next morning I was sore. I had all kinds of weird aches, as if I’d just played a game of basketball or something. I assume part of it actually was the impact — it didn’t feel like much in the moment, but if it’s enough to crumple your car’s front end (and it was trashed), it’s enough to give you a pretty good jolt. That would explain soreness in the arms, elbows, and shoulders — a stiff-armed, white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, followed by a big boom. But I was also just kinda sore all over, plus this generalized malaise. I felt not-quite-right for the next few days. Nothing big, no one symptom I can really put my finger on, but definitely off somehow — a little twitchy, a little jumpy, and really tired.
Having done my WWI reading, I knew what it was, and that’s when I really understood the doctors’ thought processes. I really did take some physical damage, because I really did receive a pretty good full-body whack. It just wasn’t obvious to the naked eye. And since everyone has experienced odd physical symptoms from being rattled around, or even sleeping on a couch or sprung mattress, it makes sense — the impact obviously jiggled my spine, which probably accounts for a great many of the physical symptoms. Hence, “railway spine”. And from there, “shell shock” — nothing rattles your back like standing in a trench or crouching in a dugout as thousands of pounds of high explosive go off around you. It must be like going through my car crash all day, every day.
Skip forward a few decades, and we now have a much better physiological understanding of what we now call (and I will henceforth call) Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). There’s a hypothesis that I personally believe, that “shell shock” is also a whole bunch of micro-concussions as well as “classic” PTSD, but let’s leave that aside for now. The modern understanding of PTSD is largely about chemistry. Cortisol and other stress chemicals really fuck you up. They have systemic physical and mental effects. If those chemicals don’t get a chance to flush out of your system — if you’re in a trench for weeks on end, let’s say — the effects are cumulative, indeed exponential.
Returning to my car crash: I was “off” for a few days because my body got a huge jolt of stress chemicals. That odd not-quite-right thing I felt was those chemicals flushing through. Had I gone to a shrink at that moment, he probably would’ve diagnosed me with PTSD. But I didn’t have PTSD. I had a perfectly normal physiological reaction to a big shot of stress chemicals. If I’d gotten into car crash after car crash, though, day in and day out, that would’ve been PTSD. I’d be having nightmares about that deer every night, instead of just the once. And all that would have cumulative, indeed exponential, effects.
He then goes on to cover similar physical reactions to stimuli in modern life, so I do recommend you RTWT.
March 22, 2023
What happened to Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne after Rorke’s Drift?
The History Chap
Published 20 Jul 2022Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne was the senior NCO at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift during the Zulu War of 1879. Superbly played by actor Nigel Green in the 1964 film Zulu, many have wondered why he was never awarded a Victoria Cross when 11 others were. This is the story of what happened to Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne after Rorke’s Drift.
He was actually awarded Britain’s second highest military medal (at the time), the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and ultimately rose from the ranks to become an officer. His military career continued all the way to the First World War, where he was promoted to the rank of Lt. Colonel. Frank Bourne, the last surviving defender of Rorke’s Drift, died in 1945, one day after the Germans surrendered.
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March 12, 2023
The young British officer’s attitude toward his men
Dr. Robert Lyman has been working on pulling together various newspaper and magazine articles written by Field Marshal William Slim before the Second World War, to be published later this year. I believe this will include everything he included (in shorter form in some cases) in his 1959 book Unofficial History plus many others. In this excerpt from “Private Richard Chuck, aka The Incorrigible Rogue”, Slim recounts taking command of a company of recent conscripts while recuperating from wounds received earlier in WW1:
“Light duty of a clerical nature,” announced the President of the Medical Board. Not too bad, I thought, as I struggled back into my shirt. “Light duty of a clerical nature” had a nice leisurely sound about it. I remembered a visit I had paid to a friend in one of the new government departments that were springing up all over London at the end of 1915. He had sat at a large desk dictating letters to an attractive young lady. When she got tired of taking down letters, she poured out tea for us. She did it very charmingly. Decidedly, light duty of a clerical nature might prove an agreeable change after a hectic year as a platoon commander and a rather grim six months in hospital. Alas, after a month in charge of the officers’ mess accounts of a reserve battalion, with no more assistant than an adenoidal “C” Class clerk, I had revised my opinion. My one idea was to escape from “light duty of a clerical nature” into something more active. Reserve battalions were like those reservoirs that haunted the arithmetic of our youth — the sort that were filled by two streams and emptied by one. Flowing in came the recovered men from hospitals and convalescent homes and the new enlistments; out went the drafts to battalions overseas. When the stream of voluntary recruits was reduced to a trickle the only way to restore the intake was by conscription, and this was my chance.
It had been decided to segregate the conscripts into a separate company as they arrived. I happened to be the senior subaltern at the moment and I applied for command of the new company. Rather to my surprise, for I was still nominally on light duty, I got it. The conscripts, about a hundred and twenty of them, duly arrived. They looked very much like any other civilians suddenly pushed into uniform, awkward, bewildered, and slightly sheepish, and I regarded them with some misgiving. After all, they were conscripts; I wondered if I should like them.
The young British officer commanding native troops is often asked if he likes his men. An absurd question, for there is only one answer. They are his men. Whether they are jet-black, brown, yellow, or café-au-lait, the young officer will tell you that his particular fellows possess a combination of military virtues denied to any other race. Good soldiers! He is prepared to back them against the Brigade of Guards itself! And not only does the young officer say this, but he most firmly believes it, and that is why, on a thousand battlefields, his men have justified his faith.
In a week I felt like that about my conscripts. I was a certain rise to any remark about one volunteer being worth three pressed men. Slackers? Not a bit of it! They all had good reasons for not joining up. How did I know? I would ask them. And I did. I had them, one by one, into the company office, without even an N.C.O. to see whether military etiquette was observed. They were quite frank. Most of them did have reasons — dependants who would suffer when they went, one-man businesses that would have to shut down. Underlying all the reasons of those who were husbands and fathers was the feeling that the young single men who had escaped into well-paid munitions jobs might have been combed out first.
[…]
We had now advanced far enough in our training to introduce the company to the mysteries of the Mills bomb. There is something about a bomb which is foreign to an Englishman’s nature. Some nations throw bombs as naturally as we kick footballs, but put a bomb into an unschooled Englishman’s hands and all his fingers become thumbs, an ague affects his limbs, and his wits desert him. If he does not fumble the beastly thing and drop it smoking at his — and your — feet, he will probably be so anxious to get rid of it that he will hurl it wildly into the shelter trench where his uneasy comrades cower for safety. It is therefore essential that the recruit should be led gently up to the nerve-racking ordeal of throwing his first live bomb; but as I demonstrated to squad after squad the bomb’s simple mechanism, I grew more and more tired with each until I could no longer resist the temptation to stage a little excitement. I fitted a dummy bomb, containing, of course, neither detonator nor explosive, with a live cap and fuse. Then for the twentieth time I began!
When you pull out the safety-pin you must keep your hand on the lever or it will fly off. If it does it will release the striker, which will hit the cap, which will set the fuse burning. Then in five seconds off goes your bomb. So when you pull out the pin don’t hold the bomb like this!’
I lifted my dummy, jerked out the pin, and let the lever fly off. There was a hiss, and a thin trail of smoke quavered upwards. For a second, until they realized its meaning, the squad blankly watched that tell-tale smoke. Then in a wild sauve qui peut they scattered, some into a nearby trench, others, too panic-stricken to remember this refuge, madly across country, I looked round, childishly pleased at my little joke, to find one figure still stolidly planted before me. Private Chuck alone held his ground, placidly regarding me, the smoking bomb, and his fleeing companions with equal nonchalance. This Casablanca act was, I felt, the final proof of mental deficiency — and yet the small eyes that for a moment met mine were perfectly sane and not a little amused.
“Well,” I said, rather piqued, “hy don’t you run with the others?” A slow grin passed over Chuck’s broad face.
“I reckon if it ‘ud been a real bomb you’d ‘ave got rid of it fast enough,” he said. Light dawned on me.
“After this, Chuck,” I answered, “you can give up pretending to be a fool; you won’t get your discharge that way!”
He looked at me rather startled, and then began to laugh. He laughed quietly, but his great shoulders shook, and when the squad came creeping back they found us both laughing. They found, too, although they may not have realized it at first, a new Chuck; not by any means the sergeant-major’s dream of a soldier, but one who accepted philosophically the irksome restrictions of army life and who even did a little more than the legal minimum.
March 7, 2023
“The First Soldier” – Albert Séverin Roche – Sabaton History 118
Sabaton History
Published 6 Mar 2023This song is the story of Albert Roche, who is very much forgotten today, but after the First World War was THE hero of France. He was hotheaded and tempestuous, but above all he was GOOD. His service — and his legend from that war — is just remarkable, and today we share the war stories of the First Soldier of France.
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March 1, 2023
Mauser WW1 Flyer’s Rifle: the Flieger Selbstlader Karabiner 1916
Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Nov 2022Paul Mauser dedicated much of his life to the development of a practical semiauto military rifle, and did manage to have a design that was used in combat by Germany in World War One. It began with the model 06/08, a short-recoil, flap-locked design made in both rifle and pistol form. The short recoil idea was disliked by the military for a shoulder rifle, and so Mauser redesigned it to be inertially locked with a fixed barrel. This was sold in small numbers as a sporting rifle, and tested by the military a few years before the war. Once war began, Mauser once again submitted the design for use in an infantry configuration, but the system was too delicate for infantry combat. A second pattern was made for use by fliers, and this was accepted and used in service for that brief period between the introduction of military aviation and the adoption of aerial machine guns.
Designated the FSK-16 (FliegerSelbstladeKarabiner 1916), it was used primarily by balloon and Zeppelin crews. With a large magazine and self-loading action, it was much better for use in aircraft than the typical bolt action infantry rifles — and there was no mud to get into the action while airborne.
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February 27, 2023
QotD: Sigmund Freud’s insights
That’s what happened with Anna O., history’s most famous psychiatric patient. She had a very turbulent love/hate relationship with her father, as tightly wound girls do. When he became deathly ill on a family vacation, the unresolvable tension caused a whole host of physical symptoms, including hysterical paralysis. Pioneering psychologist Josef Breuer “talked her through” it, finally resolving the emotional conflict and “curing” the patient.
All this would’ve been interesting, but largely irrelevant, were it not for World War I. The world at large didn’t care about the problems of overprivileged Jewish girls, but they did care about their soldiers suddenly going crazy in the trenches. Once military doctors finally ruled out a physical cause, they were left with Freudian explanations: A soldier can’t stop fighting, because he’s an honorable, dutiful soldier. Yet that soldier must stop fighting. The only honorable way out is a wound. If the enemy doesn’t wound him, then, his subconscious will. Hence the bizarre “conversion disorders” — hysterical blindness, paralysis, mutism, etc. — characteristic of “shell shock.”
But a funny thing happened. While everyone now acknowledged the real power of the subconscious mind, we sort of … forgot … about it. Psychology, particularly psychotherapy, went back to being a ghetto Jewish preoccupation. Bored, over-privileged housewives might go to a shrink to talk through their “issues”, but as for the rest of us, well, if we weren’t going into combat anytime soon, why bother? Outside of a few crusty old reactionaries (like yours truly) making fun of SJWs, when was the last time you heard the word “neurotic”?
But that’s the thing: either the subconscious is real, or it isn’t. When we say “neurotic” (the few of us who still do), we usually mean people like Anna O. — rich, cosseted, politically active human toothaches who try to force the entire world into the all-encompassing drama of their Daddy Issues (see also: Virginia Woolf). But that’s not how Freud meant it. According to him, we’re all neurotic to some degree or another, because that’s just how anxiety works.
We all have strong emotional impulses that run counter our self-image. Hence the entire panoply of pop-Freudianism: The preacher who constantly rails against homosexuality from the pulpit is secretly gay (“projection”). The strict, controlling, everything-in-its-place type is a sadist (“anal-retentive”). The player who can’t settle down with any woman is actually trying to find a Mommy figure (“Oedipus complex”). And, of course, the — ahem — daddy of them all, the crippling Daddy Issues that make feminists such fun.
But that’s just the thing: Either anxiety works that way or it doesn’t. Just because we don’t see a specific syndrome in ourselves doesn’t mean we don’t have a whole bunch of anxiety we need to discharge. Just because it’s subclinical, in other words, doesn’t mean it’s not real, or unimportant. See for example the legions of keyboard commandos who show up in the comments of any blog with more than fourteen readers. Yeah, sure, it’s possible that those guys all got kicked out of SEAL Team 6 for being too badass … but it’s probably classic identification. They’re deeply uneasy about the world and their place in it, so they construct themselves an identity as the Rambo of Evergreen Terrace.
Severian, “High Anxiety”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-16.
February 17, 2023
Spy ballooning has a remarkably long history (that’s clearly still ongoing)
In The Line, Scott Van Wynsberghe outlines the history of balloons in wartime and (as many are now aware from recent events) in peacetime:
China’s balloon spying is shocking on so many levels that you can take your pick. There is the ultra-flagrant violation of foreign sovereignty, the stunningly surreal air of denial exhibited by Beijing, and the fearful sense that something in the world order just lurched. There is also puzzlement: what, balloon spying is still a thing? Indeed it is, and its centuries-long history is instructive as to what China is now doing. It also makes clear that the U.S. is no innocent victim here but rather a past offender with a cleaned-up act.
Among the first major studies of aerial reconnaissance was a book brought out by military author Glenn B. Infield way back in 1970. In a way, Infield was charting unknown territory. When he addressed balloons in particular, he traced their use in spying to the many wars associated with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. In 1794, he related, the French military officer Jean-Marie-Joseph Countelle made an ascent at the city of Maubeuge in order to monitor enemy forces in the area. In the process, Countelle became the first balloon spy.
As technology improved, other firsts followed. By the 1850s, cameras were mounted on French military balloons. In the 1860s, during the American Civil War, Union forces battling the Confederacy used balloons trailing telegraphic wires, which transmitted immediate updates from the balloonists. Yet technology cut both ways. By the early 1900s, balloons had a nemesis in sight, in the form of winged and powered aircraft.
The inevitable showdown occurred in the First World War, and it was ugly. Large numbers of observation balloons were used by all sides in the conflict, and WWI historian Denis Winter claims the Germans alone deployed 170 of them in France by 1917. Typically, such balloons were tethered in place near the frontline, floating at several thousand feet, with telephone wires dangling to the ground. Although they seemed vulnerable, they were actually protected from below by anti-aircraft units, which blasted at any enemy plane that got too close. However, the reverse was also true, with balloons themselves being fired at from the ground. By 1915, says aviation writer Ralph Barker, the British were losing at least a dozen balloons a month from all forms of enemy action. Those balloonists who were not shot to pieces often had to bail out, putting their faith in parachutes that did not always work. (Horrified onlookers called them “balloonatics.”) The fighter pilots responsible for much of this mayhem — which they called “balloon-busting” — may not have had an easy time, but some of them scored heavily, with one Frenchman named Coiffard tallying 28 balloons. Although observation balloons managed to make it to the end of the war, it was a near-run thing. According to author Linda Hervieux, nobody after the war was talking about repeating that experience in any future fighting.
[…]
Once the Second World War was underway, some propaganda leafleting did occur, but secret balloon activity seemed to be at a low level. That was very misleading, because one of the tensest moments in ballooning history was playing out in the background, but it occurred amid so much security that the entire tale took years to emerge. In 1944, Japan launched the first of over 9,000 bomb-rigged balloons across the Pacific. Robert C. Mikesh, in a comprehensive 1973 monograph issued by the Smithsonian Institution, noted that almost a thousand of the balloons may have reached North America, but the true number is unknowable, because so many came down in remote wilderness. (One was found by forestry workers in British Columbia as late as 2014.) Mikesh tabulated 285 known incidents, ranging from Alaska all the way south to Baja California and as far inland as Manitoba. Both the U.S. and Canada clamped down hard on any news about the balloons, for fear of providing Tokyo valuable feedback about the results of the campaign. (In other words, balloon counterintelligence became a priority.) In general, the balloons did not cause a lot of harm, but one of them slaughtered six people in Oregon in 1945. By a strange fluke, one of the few groups in the U.S. that knew the full story of the balloons was an element of the Black community. The all-Black 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion was sent to the U.S. West to handle emergencies caused by the balloons.
The remains of a Japanese balloon bomb found in the Monashee Mountains near Lumby, BC in 2014. It was detonated on-site by the bomb disposal unit of Maritime Forces Pacific of the Royal Canadian Navy.
There is a strong temptation to blame the Japanese balloon bombs for what happened next, because the U.S. unaccountably entered the Cold War as the most pugnacious exponent of clandestine ballooning up to that time. Whatever the explanation, the epic struggle between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics plunged U.S. ballooning into a tangle of psychological warfare, shadowy science, under-the-table finances, and clandestine belligerence indistinguishable from military attacks. Plus, UFOs and breakfast foods were involved (seriously).
February 3, 2023
“Lady of The Dark” – Milunka Savić – Sabaton History 117
Sabaton History
Published 2 Feb 2023One of the most badass and decorated soldiers of the Great War was a woman. Serving first in the Balkan Wars, this Serbian war heroin became a celebrity when she won the Karađorđe’s Star — the highest Serbian decoration — in 1914 and 1916. Those weren’t her only decorations either — watch to find out more.
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January 29, 2023
France’s Ultimate WW1 Selfloading Rifle: The RSC-1918
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Sept 2017The French RSC-1917 semiauto rifle was a major step forward in arms technology during World War One, offering a reliable and effective self-loading rifle for issue to squad leaders, expert marksmen, and other particularly experienced and effective troops. No other military was able to field a semiauto combat shoulder rifle during this was in anything but very limited numbers. However, the RSC-1917 definitely had some shortcomings:
– It was just too long, at the same size as the Lebel
– The specialized clip was a logistical problem
– The gas system was fragile and difficult to clean or disassemble
– The magazine cover was easily damagedThese issues were all addressed in the Model 1918 upgrade of the rifle, although it was too late to see active service in the Great War. The new pattern was substantially shorter (both the stock and barrel), it used the standard Berthier 5-round clip, it had a substantially strengthened magazine cover, and a much improved gas system.
Today, we will compare the various features of the 1917 and 1918 rifles, and disassemble the 1918 gas system to show how it worked.
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January 22, 2023
Where The British Army Figured Out Tanks: Cambrai 1917
The Great War
Published 20 Jan 2023The Battle of Cambrai in 1917 didn’t have a clear winner, but the conclusions that Germany and Britain drew from it, particularly about the use of the tank (in combination with other arms), would have far reaching consequences in 1918.
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January 18, 2023
Ask Ian: Why No German WW2 50-Cal Machine Guns? (feat. Nick Moran)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Sep 2022From Nathaniel on Patreon:
“Why didn’t Germany or Axis powers have a machine gun similar to the American M2?”Basically, because everyone faced the choice of a .50 caliber machine gun or 20mm (or larger) cannons for anti-aircraft use, and most people chose the cannons — including Germany. There were some .50 caliber machine guns adopted by Axis powers, most notably the Hotchkiss 1930, a magazine-fed 13.2mm gun that was used by both Italy and Japan (among others). However, the use of the .50 caliber M2 by the US was really a logistical holdover form the interwar period. The M2 remained in production because it was adopted by US Coastal Artillery as a water-cooled anti-aircraft gun, and commercial sales by Colt were slim but sufficient to keep the gun in development through the 20s and 30s. It was used as a main armament in early American armor, but obsolete in this role when the war broke out.
However, with the gun in production and no obvious domestic 20mm design, the US chose to simply make an astounding number of M2s and just dump them everywhere, from Jeeps to trucks to halftracks to tanks to self-propelled guns. And that’s not considering the 75% of production that went to coaxial and aircraft versions …
Anyway, back to the question. The German choice for antiaircraft use was the 20mm and 37mm Flak systems, and not a .50 MG on every tank turret. And so, there was really no motive to develop such a gun. The Soviets did choose to go the US route, though, and developed the DShK-38 for the same role as the US M2 — although it was made in only a tiny fraction of the quantity of the M2.
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January 4, 2023
“Sarajevo” – Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – Sabaton History 116
Sabaton History
Published 3 Jan 2023Where did the war to end all wars begin? The assassination in Sarajevo may have only killed two, but the repercussions killed millions, destroyed empires, and changed the course of history.
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