The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 15 Sep 2026UN Commander Mark Clark is putting together five possible scenarios for hopefully solving the POW issue and getting an armistice, but who knows if the Communists will accept any of them? The war in the skies heats up, though it’s a quiet week on the ground, and we take a look at the pros and cons of the troops rotation system.
00:00 Intro
00:25 Recap
00:48 The Active War
01:23 The POW Issue
04:31 Five Plans
07:46 ROK Increases
08:58 Troop Rotation
11:05 Downsides
13:54 War in the Skies
15:06 Summary
15:13 Conclusion
16:01 Call to Action
September 16, 2026
The Korean War Week 117 – The Cost of Rotation – September 15, 1952
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September 3, 2026
QotD: Combined arms
Combined Arms is the use of different kinds of combat arms in concert; typically this is the combined use of some mix of infantry, artillery, armor (tanks and other armored fighting vehicles or AFVs) and airpower (when analyzing much older armies, we often talk about combined arms as mixing shock infantry, missile infantry and cavalry, so the “arms” being combined vary from era to era). This is important because effective use of these arms in modern warfare requires them to be used together: artillery and aircraft need infantry to help identify targets to strike (since both engage targets they typically cannot observe), while infantry needs them to provide supporting fires. AFVs of all kinds (but especially tanks) typically have poor situational awareness (there’s only so much you can see through even a good set of optics while buttoned up in a tank) and at close range are vulnerable to infantry-carried anti-tank weapons and so require infantry to screen them and be their eyes (while the superior firepower of AFVs enhance the infantry). Note that this can mean that good systems (e.g. an effective tank) can still be ineffective if not used appropriately with supporting arms (e.g. screening infantry with supporting fires). In the opening days of the invasion [of Ukraine in 2022], Russia struggled to use these arms in concert effectively, with the result that the Russian advantage in vehicles and fires, which was considerable, wasn’t realized. That in turn makes it difficult at this point to make clear assessments about the effectiveness of Russian equipment or the overall usefulness of certain kinds of equipment (e.g. tanks) when used properly in a combined arms framework.
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
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August 31, 2026
A Fighter to Make the European Skies Nazi – Nazi Rearmament 03 – Bf 109
World War Two
Published 30 Aug 2026The Messerschmitt Bf 109 was designed to solve one of the fundamental problems of modern warfare: how do you gain control of the air long enough for everything else to operate unhindered? Germany’s answer was a fast, heavily armed, highly advanced fighter that became the spearhead of the Luftwaffe‘s pursuit of air superiority.
In this German Rearmament special, we trace the Bf 109 from its origins in the clandestine development programs of the 1930s to its first combat missions over Spain and its emergence as one of the defining fighters of the Second World War. We examine its revolutionary design, its development and production, its role in the emerging doctrine of Bewegungskrieg, and its deployment from the opening campaigns in Poland and France to the Battle of Britain and the vast air war over the Eastern Front.
But the 109 also exposes the limits behind the image of an unstoppable German war machine. Its narrow-track landing gear made it notoriously unforgiving, its short range limited its effectiveness over Britain, and its ageing airframe became increasingly difficult to improve as the war progressed. By the later years of the war, Germany could still produce thousands of Bf 109s, but lacked the fuel, experienced pilots, industrial resources, and ultimately the air superiority needed to make those aircraft decisive.
The Bf 109 was an exceptionally advanced fighter for its time, and in the hands of an experienced pilot it remained lethal long after its first flight. But it also became a symbol of a deeper problem within the Nazi war economy: the growing inability to replace yesterday’s weapons with tomorrow’s.
This is the story of the fighter that made Blitzkrieg possible, and the machine that stayed in the sky long after Germany had lost control of it.
Never Forget.
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August 26, 2026
Who Destroyed the Japanese Economy in WW2?
Real Time History
Published 20 Mar 2026As the war in the Pacific develops, the United States takes the fight to Japan itself – by crippling its economy, destroying its industry, and crushing civilian morale. To do this, American submarines and heavy bombers wage campaigns beneath the sea and above the clouds. And even 80 years later, there’s a fierce debate about which of these campaigns did more to bring Japan to its knees – perhaps even more than the atomic bombs.
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August 5, 2026
The Korean War Week 111 – Will Stalin’s Nightmare Come True? – August 4, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 4 Aug 2026The UN conducts a massive bombing raid on the North Korean capital Pyongyang this week, and in the field, the bloody fight for Old Baldy continues. Behind the scenes, though, Presidential Candidate Dwight Eisenhower’s foreign policy guy John Foster Dulles is advocating for massive retaliation — in Korea and beyond — against all Communist states, to do more than simply “contain” them.
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June 24, 2026
The Korean War Week 105 – Destroy Suiho Dam! – June 23, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 23 Jun 2026Since the beginning of the war UN air power has studiously avoided hitting North Korea’s hydro-electric complex, since the power the dams provide is mainly for civilian use, but that changes this week! Meanwhile on the ground, the focus has turned to capturing Communist POWs for information, but that task has suddenly proved impossible now that the UN POW camps are firmly back in UN control, and it seems the Communists now prefer even death to capture.
00:00 Intro
00:29 Recap
00:59 Taking Prisoners
03:18 The Shropshires
05:54 Ammunition Shortage
08:41 Targeting Power Plants
14:55 Summary
15:10 Conclusion
15:58 Call to Action
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June 22, 2026
QotD: When the US switched to the All-Volunteer Force in 1973
This was a huge change. For such a major change, I find that it draws surprisingly little attention. The 50th anniversary of the AVF passed with relatively little fanfare in 2023. I’ve mentioned For the Common Defense (1984, 1994, 2012) as the dominant textbook for introductory American military history: the shift to the All-Volunteer Force is dealt with in a single page (page 568, for the curious). The textbook I’ve seen most recently used for US Naval history (and which I used), J.C. Bradford and J. F. Bradford, America, Sea Power and the World (2016, 2023), doesn’t even give it that much: the shift is discussed in a single paragraph on page 351 (308 in the 2016 edition).1
The likely impacts of the shift to an AVF were studied prior to implementation in the Gates Commission, a report that had a preordained conclusion – it was convened to provide Nixon the cover to do the thing (end the draft) he had promised to do already in his campaign – and which honestly I find disappointing in its approach, which is mostly “happy talk” designed to justify what Nixon had already decided to do. It is striking to me, for instance, that the Gates Commission did not include a single historian to perhaps discuss how the shift towards fully professional militaries had gone for republics in the past. Instead, the focus is on the economics of the shift, with fairly blithe assertions that the civil-military relationship would remain unchanged despite the fairly obvious implausibility of that given the shift from “everyone serves” to “only a small portion of society serves”.2
As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Romans also seem to have thought that they could professionalize their army without reducing its ability to scale up in an emergency or altering the civil-military relationship and for quite a few decades that more or less worked, while the old norms held. But as those old norms decayed, the institution increasingly became what you’d expect from its institutional structure: a permanent political faction, advocating for its own interests, often with violence, to the point that the emperor Septimius Severus’ advice to his sons as he lay dying in 211 was, “Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men”,3 a fairly open admission that the soldiery was not just a political constituency, but the most important one. It took time for those norms to shift, but when one is building or rebuilding institutions, the long-term is the term that matters.
I do not think necessarily that this is the direction the All-Volunteer Force must go. It has two and a half centuries of strong norms pushing it away from this direction. But careful maintenance of the civ-mil bargain is made all the more necessary when the military is effectively fully professional. For my own part, all cards on the table, while I greatly value the service of the United States’ military personnel (there’s that third part of the bargain!) and think they serve honorably, I am quite skeptical of the long-term implications of the All-Volunteer Force. Its creators assumed that fully professionalizing the military would not impact the civil-military relationship and that it would always be possible to shift back to a mass-conscript army in the event of a major war, but historical examples suggest it is not so easy.
But the All-Volunteer Force is not the direction from which I see now the principal threat to the civ-mil bargain.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The American Civil-Military Relationship”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-07-04.
- In that book’s defense, the Navy has a really big set of reforms associated broadly with CNO Elmo Zumwalt that happen at basically the same time and are connected and it opts to focus on those. I will note that the position of the paragraph has changed because the updated 2023 version of the book has opted to grapple more extensively and more successfully with this period as one of increasing diversity in the navy, with a chapter by Kristy N. Kamarck on that specific topic. It is a marked improvement over the first edition, though I think both FtCD and the Bradford and Bradford remain too hagiographic, too willing to sweep the military’s problems under the rug and only comment on military diversity when they can tell the story as a happy tale of progress.
- Especially as that small portion tends to be concentrated, a thing the Commission essentially refuses to consider as a first principle of their analysis; they assume cheerfully that the AVF will naturally continue to reflect a cross-section of the United States. In some ways that is true, but in other ways it is very much not – there certainly are “military families”, where service tends to “run in the family” in the United States now – and the emergence of those patterns would have been a pretty obvious thing to expect, given that the same trend is extremely visible in the Roman army of the early empire.
- Dio 77.16
June 16, 2026
The ever-declining (yet still effective) British military
Britain’s military needs have shifted a great deal since the United States took over the unofficial role of “world policeman” after the Second World War. As Imperial commitments overseas were reduced by former colonies achieving independence, the British armed forces have also diminished. In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak considers the current state of the British army, the Royal Air Force, and the Royal Navy in the wake of the sudden resignation of Defence Minister John Healey from Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet:
Britain’s armed forces have undergone a very long recessional. In 1945, the Army alone had some three million men under arms, with millions more in the navy, air force and various colonial forces. At the start of this year, by contrast, the “trained strength” total of the Royal Navy, RAF, Marines, and Army came to just 126,440, a figure that has actually fallen since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But it was not just that very low figure that explains John Healey’s dramatic resignation last week.
Until relatively recently, British defence secretaries were much envied by their European counterparts — because they were allowed to conserve as much real combat strength as possible by cutting everything else to conserve money for training and realistic exercises, as well as the continuous maintenance it requires. Typical in that regard was Healey’s namesake Denis, a fiery socialist and decorated beachmaster at Anzio, who served as Labour’s defence secretary from 1964-70. No relation to his 21st-century successor, this elder Healey worked closely with his cabinet colleagues to cut costs on buying warships, aircraft, bases and the like, to focus instead on what really matters: training, munitions and maintenance.
That may seem like mere common sense. But since the post-Cold War drawdown that was underway by 1991, almost every European defence ministry has wasted increasing proportions of their diminishing defence spending to keep increasingly empty bases open — often just to preserve civilian janitors and ground-keepers in a job, and retired NCOs in their attached housing. Also bloated are the officer corps of most European forces, increasingly disproportionate to their shrinking personnel totals. The Spanish army is perhaps the leading champion here. Despite shrinking from 280,000 men in 1990 to just 75,000 today, it has preserved every formation command, and every regional headquarters and geographic command, including one for the Canary Islands, headed by a three-star army general and flanked by navy and air force counterparts.
Altogether, these commands absorb a remarkable percentage of the total armed force personnel: all just to keep up appearances, and jobs for generals and admirals. Nor is the Spanish army unique in this self-sabotage; Madrid’s wasted defence spending, which may even reflect the policy preferences of its pacifist government, is merely an exaggerated version of knowingly wasteful policies across Europe. By a remarkable coincidence, for instance, every branch of the Italian armed forces — as well as the civilian police, the customs police, and the carabinieri military police present in every town — buy almost all of their pistols, rifles and machine guns from privately owned Beretta. The French are arguably even worse offenders: all their combat aircraft are slated to come from the privately-owned Dassault Aviation, and for all the lobbying of British firms they are not allowed to become monopolies.
The root cause of John Healey’s complaint is that to preserve those envied British defence practices, to retain a disciplined focus in using taxpayers’ money to buy actually usable combat capabilities, there are minimum funding levels which must be respected. All concerned know perfectly well that spending on “combat readiness” is like buying cut flowers: which must be bought anew each day, at the expense of furniture that can last for decades or even centuries. In other words, doing defence for real is, much more than anything else a government does, like running a restaurant open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is true even when compared with health care, in which the vast majority of patients do not require round-the-clock intensive care.
Luttwak pointedly differentiates the way the British armed services operate to most of the other NATO allies: “In sober strategic terms, there is nothing especially important about these examples. But think of the alternative: 3.5 million active NATO personnel, from Canada to Turkey, who eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in uniform every day — almost none of whom is ready to fight in earnest for any reason whatsoever.” The emphasis on the “soft” investment of skills and training has to be contrasted with the kinds of military organizations who boast vast numbers of tanks, artillery pieces, helicopters, fighter jets and bombers, but who lack the crews, maintenance technicians, and parts supply to keep them operational.
Update, 17 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
June 8, 2026
A Brief History of Nuclear Weapons in Canada
Polyus
Published 6 Jun 2026 #aviationlovers #canadianaerospace #PolyusStudiosCanadians themselves were largely opposed to nuclear weapons but their utility in a full out conflict was impossible to ignore. And so up until fairly recently the Canadian government’s position on the matter was deliberately ambiguous. Promoting peace while supplying the means of war. Now with the luxury of hindsight we can see the true extent to which these weapons played a central role in the defense of this country during the Cold War.
Like it or not, Canada was a threatening and potent nuclear-armed force during a 9 year period between 1963 and 1972. The posturing was offensive in Europe, and defensive on Canadian soil. The last defensive weapons were relinquished in 1984. Nuclear weapons were adopted as part of its network of alliances, when it became obvious that the Soviet missile threat could only be defeated by deterrence. Politically the nuclear question was a hot potato, John Diefenbaker tried to keep the weapons out, Lester Pearson let them in, and Pierre Trudeau kicked them back out again.
This video was made without the use of Artificial Intelligence (No AI). Long live people power!
0:00 Introduction
1:20 Uranium mining in the North
2:31 Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project
4:10 Post war fears of Soviet army and Canadian build up in Europe
6:04 Air threat from Soviet bombers
8:05 The case for nuclear weapons
9:28 Cancellation of the Arrow in favour of nuclear weapons
10:55 Defensive nukes
13:39 Offensive nukes
16:15 Nuclear capable platforms
16:59 Types and numbers of deployed weapons
18:30 Legacy and impact of these weapons
19:55 ConclusionSupport me on Patreon – / polyusstudios
Music:
Denmark – Portland Cello Project
Your Suggestions – Unicorn Heads
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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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April 22, 2026
Reflections on the life extension of the A-10 – “we ought to be seriously looking at building an A11”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR admits that there clearly still is a role for the “Warthog” in modern combat … under the right conditions:
Gotta admit I’ve changed my mind about this. I was in the camp that loved the Hog but was grudgingly prepared to concede that its time had passed — not survivable in a modern threat environment stiff with drones and MANPADs.
But damned if the A-10 didn’t turn out to be an effective tool against small-boat swarms in the Straits of Hormuz. And not so expensive to fly or ammo up that you end up with a nasty shot-exchange problem either — not something you can say for putting the F-35 on that job.
The Hog has demonstrated that there is still a tier of missions in between the envelope of an attack helicopter and a fast fighter for which the Hog is excellently fitted. Still. In 2026.
Of course you need to have done SEAD to lower the odds that it will be popped by competent air defense, but the US Air Force is very good at that mission. As it keeps demonstrating.
I was wrong. The Hog deserves its extension. And we ought to be seriously looking at building an A11. Maybe not a manned A11, but a functionally similar instrument with a big fucking gun and the ability to fly low and slow and loiter on a patrol area.
In conclusion: “Let me sing you the song of my people: BRRRRRRRRRT.”
March 14, 2026
Belgian Aces in Exile – Belgian Fighter Aces – WW2 Gallery 10
World War Two
Published 12 Mar 2026Belgium might have been quickly overrun by the Germans in 1940, but many Belgian airmen continued the fight by flying with Britain’s RAF, and quite a few of them were good enough to score five or more aerial victories and become Flying Aces. Here are a few of their stories.
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March 4, 2026
The Korean War Week 89: Is There Such Thing As Soviet Neutrality? – March 3, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 3 Mar 2026The UN is not just worried that the Communists have strong air power, they’re worried that because they can’t produce more jets quickly enough, the Communist advantage in the skies will soon become insurmountable, but they at least have plans to try and stave that off. They also have plans for rotating in fresh troops, but those plans have stumbling blocks of their own, as do the negotiations about who might be part of a post-armistice supervisory team, specifically the USSR, whom the US does not see as “neutral” with regard to this war.
00:00 Intro
00:54 Recap
02:05 Supervisory Team
03:29 45th and 40th Divisions
07:14 POW Repatriation
10:29 Communist Air Power
15:52 Notes
16:36 Summary
16:55 Conclusion
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February 27, 2026
The British Are Coming! – British Fighter Aces – WW2 Gallery 09
World War Two
Published 26 Feb 2026In this gallery special, we examine five of Britain’s leading fighter aces: Archie McKellar, James MacLachlan, Robert Stanford Tuck, John Braham, and James Edgar Johnson. From the Battle of Britain to night fighting, Intruder missions, and offensive sweeps over occupied Europe, their careers reflect the RAF’s transformation from desperate air defense to sustained air superiority.
These pilots did more than accumulate victory claims. Their experiences illuminate the evolution of air combat, showing how individual skill, technology, and strategy intersected in the broader history of the Second World War.
Which of these careers best captures the changing nature of air power in World War Two?
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February 23, 2026
QotD: Faith, Hope, and Charity defended Malta
France has collapsed, Hitler is eating Europe alive, and Mussolini doesn’t want to miss out. He wants birthday cake without bringing a present.
Poor show
So he looks at a map and asks the Italian Air Force:
“Who can we bomb that’s really close?”
Answer: Malta, 49 miles away.
The Italians begin their great wartime contribution by flying at 14,000 feet and dropping bombs with the accuracy of a man throwing darts after fourteen pints. Half land in the sea, a few hit fields.
But accuracy wasn’t the point. They just wanted to show Berlin they were “in the war”.
For the Maltese, who had never seen modern bombing, even bad Italian bombing was terrifying.
And unfortunately for them, this was only the warm-up act.
Maynard’s Defence: Faith, Hope and Charity
Air Commodore Foster Maynard is given the job of defending Malta with basically nothing.
He had been promised four fighter squadrons.
Zero have arrived. Typical early war British brilliance.
His only aircraft were some slow, ancient Fairey Swordfish.
Great for torpedoing ships, hopeless for intercepting bombers.
These were the famous “Stringbags”. We will hear from them later on.
Then like an archaeologist opening a cursed tomb the British discover 18 Gloster Gladiators in crates on the island. They were meant for HMS Glorious and HMS Eagle.
What followed was peak British wartime admin:
- Maynard asks the Navy to release some Gladiators.
- He gets permission.
- The ground crew assemble several.
- THEN the Navy says “No actually, stop, pack them back up.”
- THEN the decision gets reversed again.
- So they unpack them, reassemble them … again.
After all this faffing, three Gladiators emerge ready to fight.
Next problem: no fighter pilots.
Big problem I feel, anyway …
Maynard asks for volunteers. Eight bomber men step forward, either heroic or mildly insane.
Problem solved.
A journalist on the island, Harry Kirk, watching these three lonely biplanes scramble day after day, nicknames them Faith, Hope and Charity after his mother’s brooch.
The names stick. The legend begins.
On 21 June 1940 Pilot Officer George Burges shoots down a Savoia-Marchetti bomber over Valletta, the island’s first air victory.
The Maltese take it as a sign from God.
(It wasn’t, but let them have the moment.)
“MALTA: PART 1, Foreboding”, WWII Matters, 2025-11-17.
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