Diplomacy & Crisis News

Jonti Horner

Astronomy, World

Even if Earth is in the crosshairs, though, there’s nothing to worry about.

Social media around the world lit up over the weekend, discussing the possibility that an asteroid (known as 2018 VP₁) could crash into Earth on November 2.

It seemed only fitting. What better way to round off a year that has seen catastrophic floods, explosions, fires, and storms – and, of course, a global pandemic?

But you can rest easy. The asteroid does not pose a threat to life on Earth. Most likely, it will sail harmlessly past our planet. At worst, it will burn up harmlessly in our atmosphere and create a firework show for some lucky Earthlings.

So, What’s the Story?

Our story begins a couple of years ago, on November 3, 2018. That night, the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in Southern California discovered a faint new “near-Earth asteroid” – an object whose orbit can approach, or cross, that of our planet.

At the time of its discovery, 2018 VP₁ was roughly 450,000 kilometres from Earth – a little farther than the average distance between Earth and the Moon (around 384,000km).

The asteroid was very faint, and hard to spot against the background stars. Astronomers were only able to watch it for 13 days, before it was too far from Earth to see.

Based on that short series of observations, it became clear the asteroid is a kind of near-Earth object called an “Apollo asteroid”.

Apollo asteroids spend most of their time beyond Earth’s orbit, but swing inward across our planet’s orbit at the innermost part of their journey around the Sun. 2018 VP₁ takes two years to go around the Sun, swinging just inside Earth’s orbit every time it reaches “perihelion” (its closest approach to our star).

Because 2018 VP₁’s orbit takes almost exactly two years, in 2020 (two years after discovery), it will once again pass close to Earth.

But how close will it come? Well, that’s the million-dollar question.

Anything from a Collision to a Very Distant Miss …

To work out an object’s exact path through the Solar system, and to predict where it will be in the future (or where it was in the past), astronomers need to gather observations.

We need at least three data points to estimate an object’s orbit – but that will only give us a very rough guess. The more observations we can get, and the longer the time period they span, the better we can tie down the orbit.

And that’s why the future of 2018 VP₁ is uncertain. It was observed 21 times over 13 days, which allows its orbit to be calculated fairly precisely. We know it takes 2 years (plus or minus 0.001314 years) to go around the Sun. In other words, our uncertainty in the asteroid’s orbital period is about 12 hours either way.

That’s actually pretty good, given how few observations were made – but it means we can’t be certain exactly where the asteroid will be on November 2 this year.

However, we can work out the volume of space within which we can be confident that the asteroid will lie at a given time. Imagine a huge bubble in space, perhaps 4 million km across at its largest. We can be very confident the asteroid will be somewhere in the bubble – but that’s about it.

What does that mean for Earth? Well, it turns out the closest approach between the two this year will be somewhere between a direct hit and an enormous miss – with the asteroid coming no closer than 3.7 million km!

We can also work out the likelihood the asteroid will hit Earth during this close approach. The odds are 0.41%, or roughly 1 in 240. In other words, by far the most likely outcome on November 2 is the asteroid will sail straight past us.

But What If It Did Hit Us?

As the great Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten”. But have you ever heard someone say “It’s a 240-to-1 chance, but it might just work?”

So should we be worried?

Well, the answer here goes back to how hard it was to spot 2018 VP₁ in the first place. Based on how faint it was, astronomers estimate it’s only about 2 metres across. Objects that size hit Earth all the time.

Bigger asteroids do more damage, as we were spectacularly reminded back in February 2013, when an asteroid around 20 metres across exploded in the atmosphere above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

The Chelyabinsk airburst was spectacular, and the shockwave damaged buildings and injured more than 1,500 people. But that was an object ten times the diameter of 2018 VP₁ – which means it was probably at least 1,000 times heavier, and could penetrate far further into the atmosphere before meeting its fiery end.

2018 VP₁ is so small it poses no threat. It would almost certainly burn up harmlessly in our atmosphere before it reached the ground. Most likely, it would detonate in an “airburst”, tens of kilometres above the ground – leaving only tiny fragments to drift down to the surface.

If 2018 VP₁ is particularly robust (a chunk of a metal asteroid, rather than a stony or icy one), it could make it to the ground – but even then, it is way too small to cause significant damage.

Having said that, the fireball as the asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere would be spectacular. If we were really lucky, it might be captured on camera by the Global Fireball network (led by Curtin University).

With images of the fireball from several cameras, researchers could work out where any debris might fall and head out to recover it. A freshly fallen meteorite is a pristine fragment from which we can learn a great deal about the Solar system’s history.

The Bottom Line

It’s no wonder in a year like this that 2018 VP₁ has generated some excitement and media buzz.

But, most likely, November 3 will come around and nothing will have happened. 2018 VP₁ will have passed by, likely unseen, back to the depths of space.

Even if Earth is in the crosshairs, though, there’s nothing to worry about. At worst, someone, somewhere on the globe, will see a spectacular fireball – and people in the US might just get to see some spectacular pre-election fireworks.

Or to put it another way: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine”.

Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

Security,

What makes a battleship "great?"

Here's What You Need To Remember: A battleship's name becomes legend if it helps win a grand victory, loses in dramatic fashion, or perhaps accomplishes some landmark diplomatic feat. A vessel favored (or damned) by fortune, furthermore, becomes a strategic compass rose. It becomes part of the intellectual fund on which future generations draw when making maritime strategy.

Ranking the greatest battleships of all time is a tad easier than ranking naval battles. Both involve comparing apples with oranges. But at least taking the measure of individual men-of-war involves comparing one apple with one orange. That's a compact endeavor relative to sorting through history to discern how seesaw interactions shaped the destinies of peoples and civilizations.

Still, we need some standard for distinguishing between battlewagons. What makes a ship great? It makes sense, first of all, to exclude any ship before the reign of Henry VIII. There was no line-of-battle ship in the modern sense before England's "great sea-king" founded the sail-driven Royal Navy in the 16th century. Galley warfare was quite a different affair from lining up capital ships and pounding away with naval gunnery.

One inescapable chore is to compare ships' technical characteristics. A recent piece over at War Is Boring revisits an old debate among battleship and World War II enthusiasts. Namely, who would've prevailed in a tilt between a U.S. Navy Iowa-class dreadnought and the Imperial Japanese Navy's Yamato? Author Michael Peck restates the common wisdom from when I served in mighty Wisconsin, last of the battleships: it depends on who landed the first blow. Iowas commanded edges in speed and fire control, while Yamato and her sister Musashi outranged us and boasted heavier weight of shot. We would've made out fine had we closed the range before the enemy scored a lucky hit from afar. If not, things may have turned ugly.

Though not in so many words, Peck walks through the basic design features that help qualify a battleship for history's elite -- namely guns, armor, and speed. Makes sense, doesn't it? Offensive punch, defensive resiliency, and speed remain the hallmarks of any surface combatant even in this missile age. Note, however, that asymmetries among combat vessels result in large part from the tradeoffs naval architects must make among desirable attributes.

Only sci-fi lets shipwrights escape such choices. A Death Star of the sea would sport irresistible weaponry, impenetrable armor, and engines able to drive the vessel at breakneck speed. But again, you can't have everything in the real world. Weight is a huge challenge. A battleship loaded down with the biggest guns and thickest armor would waddle from place to place. It would make itself an easy target for nimbler opponents or let them run away. On the other hand, assigning guns and speed top priority works against rugged sides. A ship that's fleet of foot but lightly armored exposes its innards and crew to enemy gunfire. And so forth. Different navies have different philosophies about tradeoffs. Hence the mismatches between Yamato and Iowa along certain parameters. Thus has it always been when fighting ships square off.

But a battleship is more than a machine. Machines neither rule the waves nor lose out in contests for mastery. People do. People ply the seas, and ideas about shiphandling and tactics guide their combat endeavors. Great Britain's Royal Navy triumphed repeatedly during the age of sail. Its success owed less to superior materiel -- adversaries such as France and the United States sometimes fielded better ships -- than to prolonged voyages that raised seamanship and gunnery to a high art. Indeed, a friend likes to joke that the 18th century's finest warship was a French 74-gun ship captured -- and crewed -- by Royal Navy mariners. The best hardware meets the best software.

That's why in the end, debating Jane's Fighting Ships entries -- lists of statistics -- for Iowa, Yamato, and their brethren from other times and places fails to satisfy. What looks like the best ship on paper may not win. A ship need not outmatch its opponents by every technical measure. It needs to be good enough. That is, it must match up well enough to give an entrepreneurial crew, mindful of the tactical surroundings, a reasonable chance to win. The greatest battleship thus numbers among the foremost vessels of its age by material measures, and is handled by masterful seamen.

But adding the human factor to the mix still isn't enough. There's an element of opportunity, of sheer chance. True greatness comes when ship and crew find themselves in the right place at the right time to make history. A battleship's name becomes legend if it helps win a grand victory, loses in dramatic fashion, or perhaps accomplishes some landmark diplomatic feat. A vessel favored (or damned) by fortune, furthermore, becomes a strategic compass rose. It becomes part of the intellectual fund on which future generations draw when making maritime strategy. It's an artifact of history that helps make history.

So we arrive at one guy's gauge for a vessel's worth: strong ship, iron men, historical consequence. In effect, then, I define greatest as most iconic. Herewith, my list of history's five most iconic battleships, in ascending order:

Bismarck:

The German Navy's Bismarck lived a short life that supplies the stuff of literature to this day. Widely considered the most capable battleship in the Atlantic during World War II, Bismarck sank the battlecruiser HMS Hood, pride of the Royal Navy, with a single round from her main battery. On the other hand, the leadership's martial spirit proved brittle when the going got tough. In fact, it shattered at the first sharp rap. As commanders' resolve went, so went the crew's.

Notes Bernard Brodie, the dreadnought underwent an "extreme oscillation" in mood. Exaltation stoked by the encounter with Hood gave way to despair following a minor torpedo strike from a British warplane. Admiral Günther Lütjens, the senior officer on board, gathered Bismarck crewmen after the air attack and "implored them to meet death in a fashion becoming to good Nazis." A great coach Lütjens was not. The result? An "abysmally poor showing" in the final showdown with HMS Rodney, King George V, and their entourage. One turret crew fled their guns. Turret officers reportedly kept another on station only at gunpoint. Marksmanship and the guns' rate of fire -- key determinants of victory in gunnery duels -- suffered badly.

In short, Bismarck turned out to be a bologna flask (hat tip: Clausewitz), an outwardly tough vessel that shatters at the slightest tap from within. In 1939 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder lamented that the German surface fleet, flung into battle long before it matured, could do little more than "die with honor." Raeder was righter than he knew. Bismarck's death furnishes a parable that captivates navalists decades hence. How would things have turned out had the battlewagon's human factor proved less fragile? We'll never know. Doubtless her measure of honor would be bigger.

Yamato:

As noted at the outset, Yamato was an imposing craft by any standard. She displaced more than any battleship in history, as much as an early supercarrier, and bore the heaviest armament. Her mammoth 18-inch guns could sling 3,200-lb. projectiles some 25 nautical miles. Armor was over two feet thick in places. Among the three attributes of warship design, then, Yamato's designers clearly prized offensive and defensive strength over speed. The dreadnought could steam at 27 knots, not bad for a vessel of her proportions. But that was markedly slower than the 33 knots attainable by U.S. fast battleships.

Like Bismarck, Yamato is remembered mainly for falling short of her promise. She provides another cautionary tale about human fallibility. At Leyte Gulf in October 1944, a task force centered on Yamato bore down on the transports that had ferried General Douglas MacArthur's landing force ashore on Leyte, and on the sparse force of light aircraft carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts guarding the transports from seaward assault.

Next ensued the immortal charge of the tin-can sailors. The outclassed American ships charged Yamato and her retinue. Like Lütjens, Admiral Takeo Kurita, the task-force commander, appeared to wilt under less-than-dire circumstances. Historians still argue about whether he mistook Taffy 3, the U.S. Navy contingent, for a far stronger force; lost his nerve; or simply saw little point in sacrificing his ships and men. Whatever the case, Kurita ordered his fleet to turn back -- leaving MacArthur's expeditionary force mostly unmolested from the sea.

Yamato met a quixotic fate, though less ignominious than Bismarck's. In April 1945 the superbattleship was ordered to steam toward Okinawain company with remnants of the surface fleet, there to contest the Allied landings. The vessel would deliberately beach itself offshore, becoming an unsinkable gun emplacement until it was destroyed or its ammunition was exhausted. U.S. naval intelligence got wind of the scheme, however, and aerial bombardment dispatched Yamato before she could reach her destination. A lackluster end for history's most fearsome battlewagon.

Missouri:

Iowa and New Jersey were the first of the Iowa class and compiled the most enviable fighting records in the class, mostly in the Pacific War. Missouri was no slouch as a warrior, but -- alone on this list -- she's celebrated mainly for diplomatic achievements rather than feats of arms. General MacArthur accepted Japan's surrender on her weatherdecks in Tokyo Bay, leaving behind some of the most enduring images from 20th-century warfare. Missouri has been a metaphor for how to terminate big, open-ended conflicts ever since. For instance, President Bush the Elder invoked the surrender in his memoir. Missouri supplied a measuring stick for how Desert Storm might unfold. (And as it happens, a modernized Missouri was in Desert Storm.)

 

Missouri remained a diplomatic emissary after World War II. The battlewagon cruised to Turkey in the early months after the war, as the Iron Curtain descended across Europe and communist insurgencies menaced Greece and Turkey. Observers interpreted the voyage as a token of President Harry Truman's, and America's, commitment to keeping the Soviet bloc from subverting friendly countries. Message: the United States was in Europe to stay. Missouri thus played a part in the development of containment strategy while easing anxieties about American abandonment. Naval diplomacy doesn't get much better than that.

Mikasa:

Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō's flagship is an emblem for maritime command. The British-built Mikasa was arguably the finest battleship afloat during the fin de siècle years, striking the best balance among speed, protection, and armament. The human factor was strong as well. Imperial Japanese Navy seamen were known for their proficiency and élan, while Tōgō was renowned for combining shrewdness with derring-do. Mikasa was central to fleet actions in the Yellow Sea in 1904 and the Tsushima Strait in 1905 -- battles that left the wreckage of two Russian fleets strewn across the seafloor. The likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan considered Tsushima a near-perfect fleet encounter.

Like the other battleships listed here, Mikasa molded how subsequent generations thought about diplomacy and warfare. IJN commanders of the interwar years planned to replicate Tsushima Strait should Japan fall out with the United States. More broadly, Mikasa and the rest of the IJN electrified peoples throughout Asia and beyond. Japan, that is, proved that Western imperial powers could be beaten in battle and ultimately expelled from lands they had subjugated. Figures ranging from Sun Yat-sen to Mohandas Gandhi to W. E. B. Du Bois paid homage to Tsushima, crediting Japan with firing their enthusiasm for overthrowing colonial rule.

Mikasa, then, was more than the victor in a sea fight of modest scope. And her reputation outlived her strange fate. The vessel returned home in triumph following the Russo-Japanese War, only to suffer a magazine explosion and sink. For the Japanese people, the disaster confirmed that they had gotten a raw deal at the Portsmouth Peace Conference. Nevertheless, it did little to dim foreign observers' enthusiasm for Japan's accomplishments.Mikasa remained a talisman.

Victory:

Topping this list is the only battleship from the age of sail. HMS Victory was a formidable first-rate man-of-war, cannon bristling from its three gun decks. But her fame comes mainly from her association with Lord Horatio Nelson, whom Mahan styles "the embodiment of the sea power of Great Britain." In 1805 Nelson led his outnumbered fleet into combat against a combined Franco-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar, near Gibraltar. Nelson and right-hand man Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood led columns of ships that punctured the enemy line of battle. The Royal Navy crushed its opponent in the ensuing melee, putting paid to Napoleon's dreams of invading the British Isles.

Felled on board his flagship that day, Nelson remains a synonym for decisive battle. Indeed, replicating Trafalgar became a Holy Grail for naval strategists across the globe. Permanently drydocked at Portsmouth, Victory is a shrine to Nelson and his exploits -- and the standard of excellence for seafarers everywhere. That entitles her to the laurels of history's greatest battleship.

Surveying this list of icons, two battleships made the cut because of defeats stemming from slipshod leadership, two for triumphs owing to good leadership, and one for becoming a diplomatic paragon. That's not a bad reminder that human virtues and frailties -- not wood, or metal, or shot -- are what make the difference in nautical enterprises.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming this October). The views voiced here are his alone.

This was posted on December 2013 and is being reposted due to reader interest. 

Image: Wikipedia.

Ben Bramble

Health, World

To answer that question, ethicists must consider an equation involving risk, knowledge and need.

The world urgently needs a vaccine for COVID-19. Only when a vaccine is approved and people are safe can countries fully end their lockdowns and resume normal life. The trouble is that such vaccines usually take years to develop and test for efficacy and safety.

Recently, some bioethicists have proposed a way of speeding up this testing process by several months. Researchers would put volunteers in quarantine with access to the best medical care, give these volunteers one of the trial vaccines and then directly expose them to the coronavirus. This type of intentional exposure is called a challenge trial, and since researchers would not have to wait for subjects to encounter the virus in the normal course of their daily lives, it could result in a vaccine much faster than a normal trial. Researchers need to know if the vaccine they are testing actually produces some sort of immunity, so people have to come in contact with the coronavirus. The question is whether to produce that contact intentionally, or let random chance do it.

I am a philosopher and bioethicist who has been researching and writing a book on the ethics of the pandemic. Challenge trials are not a new idea, and have always faced a major ethical question: Do they exploit test subjects even if the subjects volunteer?

To answer that question, ethicists must consider an equation involving risk, knowledge and need. Given the current state of the pandemic, there is only one rare situation in which I believe a challenge trial would be ethical. In most cases, it would unfairly exploit those who volunteer.

Risk Minimization

The first question is risk. Some proponents of challenge trials say that they might be ethical if you only select volunteers who already have a high risk of catching the virus – for example, people who live in high transmission areas, or who are essential workers like doctors, nurses, bus drivers, cleaners, food workers and so on. People who support this argue that since these people are already at great risk, being purposefully exposed to the virus isn’t that much riskier for them than normal life.

But I see a big problem with this idea. These people are at such high risk of catching COVID-19 in large part due to failures of governments to properly lock down, test and contact-trace. In asking these people to volunteer, I see governments as saying to them: “Due to our repeated blunders, you’re still at a very high risk of something really, really terrible. Sorry about that. But now, seeing as you are already so very imperiled, would you mind terribly if we increased your risk even further, to help us all get out of this giant pickle?” I believe that there is something deeply wrong with asking people this.

Full Information

OK, risk is bad, but what if volunteers fully understand the risks they face? Would that make challenge trials ethical?

Unfortunately, it is unclear whether this is possible. The medical community’s knowledge of the full health impacts of COVID-19 is simply too incomplete right now. For example, recent studies suggest the virus might cause long-term heart damage in patients who do not even require hospitalization during their initial infection.

Moreover, in order to reduce the risks of volunteers becoming severely ill or dying, they would likely have to be young and healthy people. But such people have, by definition, never experienced severe illness before. Even if they have a good theoretical grasp of the health risks, that is a far cry from firsthand experience of severe, long-term illness. This is a substantial problem.

Analogies with Other Professions

The final point that people make is that there are many other contexts in which it is ethical to allow people to take on big health risks for the sake of the community – firefighters, police officers, soldiers and many other people who work dangerous jobs do this daily. And of course, millions of essential workers are still going to work in the morning despite the risks involved.

The difference between firefighting and a challenge trial has to do with need. While there is robust debate going on over just how essential many of these jobs are, if every essential worker stopped going to work, society would grind to a halt. The country needs grocery store workers and firefighters to do their jobs.

By contrast, if the U.S. prevents people from volunteering for challenge trials, society will not collapse. It is true that the country needs a vaccine, but challenge trials are not the only way to get one. Researchers can simply run vaccine trials in the normal way.

When Challenge Trials are Ethical

If a normal vaccine trial can be run, I don’t believe challenge trials can be justified.

But imagine some point in the future before a vaccine is approved. Efforts to contain the virus have proven so effective that there is no longer enough of the virus still circulating in communities for a normal vaccine testing process to produce a result, but there is enough virus around to pose a significant risk of outbreaks if lockdowns were relaxed. In this specific scenario, countries could face a choice between staying in various states of lockdown indefinitely or conducting human challenge trials.

Here, it would be not only morally permissible, but arguably morally required to let people volunteer for challenge trials. The alternative to doing so would be a permanent and substantial diminishment of society and quality of life. Trial volunteers would then become truly analogous to essential workers, needed to prevent a kind of societal collapse.

If countries immediately commit to the effective interventions – mask wearing, locking down, testing and contact-tracing – and then actually do them, the virus could be contained. In that case, challenge trials could be justified.

Whether a country ends up facing the decision between indefinite lockdowns and a challenge trial remains to be seen, as there are a lot of unknowns with this virus. Until that decision is upon us, the equation involving risk, knowledge and need does not add up to a sufficient justification for challenge trials.

Ben Bramble, Visiting Fellow, Princeton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Robert Beckhusen

Security, Europe

Slovakia has some of the world's best.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The reason this machine is appearing now has to do with Slovakia’s goal of equipping a modern mechanized brigade with an artillery battalion that can respond rapidly to crises — whether affecting Slovakia itself or the NATO alliance, which is all the more salient given Slovakia’s proximity to Ukraine. The Slovak armored corps is still largely comprised of Warsaw Pact-era T-72s and BMP-1 and -2 armored fighting vehicles, although Slovakia is acquiring dozens of Finnish Patria armored vehicles to replace the BMPs.

When the DANA began rolling off Czechoslovakian assembly lines in the late 1970s, there wasn’t much else like it. The enormous, 152-millimeter self-propelled howitzer had eight road wheels instead of tracks. Most mobile artillery pieces at that time were tracked, like tanks, and the DANA was the first gun its of its size to roll on wheels — while carrying an innovative auto-reloading mechanism for the cannon.

The Czechoslovak People’s Army wanted the DANA so it wouldn’t have to rely as much on the Soviet industry for its needs — and the wheels made for a speedy and rapidly-deployable artillery piece, the most significant downside being less off-road maneuverability.

It worked well enough. The self-propelled gun is now battle-tested, with more than 670 built in total and exports to Poland, Libya and the Soviet Union — which were handed down to the successor states of Georgia and Azerbaijan, which still have them in service.

Most recently, the Czech military used them in Afghanistan.

The DANA is more precisely a Slovak weapon. In the 1990s, the recently-independent Slovakia — with its DANA-producing factories — produced the Zuzana, a successor to the Dana which is similar except for its 155-millimeter cannon designed to accommodate standard NATO ammunition. The only other country to ever adopt Zuzana is the Republic of Cyprus.

Now the Slovak company Konstrukta has a very interesting successor to the DANA and Zuzana known as the Zuzana 2. On May 23, 2018, the Slovak army announced it would be the first to acquire 25 Zuzana 2s, which have been in testing since 2014.

The machine is enormous at more than 46 feet long — and rather unique looking.

It looks like construction equipment, and it is quite heavy at 37.5 tons, which is 10 tons heavier than the U.S. Army’s self-propelled, tracked M-109 Paladin howitzer. Befitting the wheeled configuration and using the M-109 as a comparison, the Zuzana 2 can travel 15 miles faster — at 50 miles per hour — and has 156 more miles of unserviced range at 372 miles in total.

Like the first Zuzuana, the Zuzana 2 has a 155-millimeter howitzer servicing NATO ammunition. The crew has been reduced to three, from the Zuzana 1’s four, due to increased automation.

The reason this machine is appearing now has to do with Slovakia’s goal of equipping a modern mechanized brigade with an artillery battalion that can respond rapidly to crises — whether affecting Slovakia itself or the NATO alliance, which is all the more salient given Slovakia’s proximity to Ukraine. The Slovak armored corps is still largely comprised of Warsaw Pact-era T-72s and BMP-1 and -2 armored fighting vehicles, although Slovakia is acquiring dozens of Finnish Patria armored vehicles to replace the BMPs.

The most important upgrade to the Zuzana 2 is its “MRSI” capability — or multiple-round simultaneous impact — where the fire-control computer crunches the numbers for multiple rounds to fire at different trajectories in short succession, causing each high-explosive shell to land in the same place at the same time.

This makes the Zuzana 2 one of the most advanced artillery systems in the world.

Image: Reuters.

Jody Ralph, Dana Menard, Kendall Soucie, Laurie A. Freeman

Public Health, Americas

As a community, we need solutions that go beyond a pat on the back and “hero” label, and instead address unsafe working conditions and offer practical effective support.

The Year of the Nurse brought increased attention to the “heroes of health care”: nurses working on the front lines of COVID-19. However, despite public displays of thanks, it’s becoming clear that many nurses are not getting the support they need to feel safe on the job and to maintain their own health and well-being.

As researchers in psychology and nursing at the University of Windsor, we sought an in-depth understanding of how nurses in a border city felt about working during the pandemic.

Evidence from SARS in 2003 indicated that nurses may experience significant, long-term mental health effects from working during the pandemic. Early research from China and Italy found that nurses working during the surge of COVID-19 cases in those countries reported high rates of depression, anxiety and sleep disturbances.

Commuting in a Border City

As a border city, Windsor, Ont., is home to nurses who reside and work locally, but also a significant number who commute daily to hospitals in Detroit, Mich. Early in the pandemic, Detroit emerged as a “hot spot” partly due to significant racial inequalities and health disparities in the city’s population.

Detroit hospitals depend on their Canadian nurse employees. In 2016, 20 per cent of the nurses working at Henry Ford Hospital were Canadian, and a total of 1,600 Windsor residents reported working in health-care settings in Detroit. The continued ability of these hospitals to operate during and after the pandemic depends on the retention of Canadian personnel.

In May and June 2020, our team interviewed 32 female and five male nurses living in Windsor and working in health-care settings in Windsor (20 nurses) or Detroit (17 nurses). They worked on intensive care units, COVID-specific units, labour and delivery units, in emergency departments and field hospitals, with experience in nursing ranging from 1.5 to 36 years.

Concerns About Family and Mental Health

Nurses consistently reported increased mental health concerns, difficulties coping and substantial dissatisfaction with the level of support provided by their hospitals.

The support that nurses felt from their organization and managers varied from workplace to workplace and unit to unit. A few felt well supported, but many reported they were not valued, citing organizations that furloughed them, stopped employer contributions to retirement funds or did not provide adequate PPE. One participant noted:

“I didn’t sign up for not having myself protected, you know, I think I deserve as a nurse to at least have that.”

Despite increasing levels of depression and anxiety, there was a strong sense that referrals to employee assistance plans (EAPs) were not sufficient. Overall, we found that nurses were surprisingly resistant to the idea of formal mental health supports. They felt more comfortable seeking support from their coworkers or “work family” than non-nurse family/friends or organizational supports. Many expressed fears that seeking help from hospital administration would be perceived as a sign of weakness. One participant stated:

“Heaven forbid, you say mental health or stress … because then they’ll take you from your unit, and say, put you at the front door as a greeter.”

Nurses also expressed concerns about their own health and the health of family members. They described difficulties balancing quality patient care with “cluster care,” which limited their time in patient rooms, and the emotional toll of “death over Facetime” as one participant called it: holding electronic tablets as dying patients said their goodbyes to family.

They experienced difficulties navigating rapidly changing hospital policies (sometimes during a single shift), discrepancies between governmental and hospital recommendations, do not resuscitate orders that were either avoided or forced, and inadequate access to PPE.

Many reported sleep issues, nightmares, fatigue, increased irritability, increased alcohol consumption, unhealthy eating habits and use of sleep aids and cannabis. Many self-isolated from their families and missed out on the day-to-day moments and key developmental milestones of their children. One participant recounted:

“I missed my kid’s entire crawling stage.”

Many nurses spoke of inequity and moral injury. They expressed frustration about doctors and men with facial hair receiving better PPE, temporary employees (that is, travel nurses) getting better pay and/or hours, being reassigned to multiple units and doing non-nursing tasks like cleaning COVID-19 positive rooms. Nurses felt better prepared to be reassigned if they volunteered, but not if it was forced (and some were).

Some nurses were encouraged to purchase their own PPE to use at work, for example, face shields from Amazon or even dollar store raincoats. Almost everyone we interviewed expressed concern about second and third waves and whether the hospitals would be prepared.

Heroes … But Stigmatized

Nurses expressed appreciation regarding the community responses (for example, clapping, food donations, skipping lines at businesses) but also felt a lot of stigma as potential “disease carriers.” One participant shared:

“[The public] keep saying: ‘Oh, nurses are heroes. Doctors are heroes. They’re doing so much for us.’ You’re out in scrubs and they’re like, ‘They’re contaminated, get them away, they’re infectious.’”

There were some differences in responses between nurses employed in Detroit and those working in Windsor. Overall, nurses working on the Michigan side of the border reported greater patient mortality, PPE shortages, community stigma and dissatisfaction with hospital administration. However, these findings are complicated by the much more rapid onset and greater intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic in Detroit compared to Windsor, and therefore can’t be interpreted with confidence.

Most nurses said that they were not planning on leaving nursing, but several are considering changing units or looking to a career change if the pandemic continues for many months or even years. Nurses also highlighted issues that the public may not be aware of: a moratorium on organ donation, decreased quality of care or risk of family-patient online meetings getting hacked.

Rapid intervention and availability of supports are needed to quickly address symptoms of mental health issues and reduce loss in the nursing workforce that has been observed after previous outbreaks, such as SARS, which could exacerbate a pre-pandemic shortage of nurses in Canada.

Nursing is a profession with a reputation for trustworthiness and dedication to quality care. As a community, we need solutions that go beyond a pat on the back and “hero” label, and instead address unsafe working conditions and offer practical effective support.

Jody Ralph, Associate Professor, Nursing, University of Windsor; Dana Ménard, Assistant professor of clinical psychology, University of Windsor; Kendall Soucie, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Windsor, and Laurie A. Freeman, Associate Professor, Nursing, University of Windsor

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Arturo Bris

economy, World

The dollar may be soft, but not for long.

Stock markets have been very strange this year. We witnessed the fastest sell-off in history between February and March, with the S&P 500 falling more than 30%, only to enjoy the best recovery ever, reaching an all-time high on August 21.

Institutional investors and especially pension funds have gone from panicking to completely reconsidering their long-term asset allocations. What we thought would be the biggest stock market crash in history has led to a fundamental reconsideration of the key risks around financial investments.

For international investors in general, currency risk – above all the weakening of the US dollar – has become the most important financial risk of the year. In spite of the pandemic, it has even overshadowed their considerations about specific firms and sectors.

For a European investor, for example, US markets have yielded about 5% in US dollar terms) in the first eight months of 2020. Translated back into euros, however, that return is 0.5% because of the depreciation of the US dollar over the past two months.

Some commentators have even been wondering whether the US dollar might be in danger of losing its privileged place as world reserve currency. Thanks to this status, the dollar is used in most international financial transactions. This gives the US certain economic advantages, such as being able to borrow cheaply and having more leeway with its national balance sheet.

Why So Soft?

For the dollar, 2020 has been the perfect storm. The pandemic has taken a particularly heavy toll on America. The sudden stop of the economy resulted in a massive drop in consumption and production, disrupting global supply chains and affecting commodity prices worldwide.

The Baltic Dry Index, often used as a measure of global trade and economic activity, fell 6% between January and May. This meant that the prices of many commodities have fallen as well, as can be seen in the CRB Commodities Index below.

For example, the World Bank expects oil demand to have fallen by an unprecedented 9.3 million barrels a day in 2020 from the 2019 level of 100 million barrels per day. Because oil and many other commodities are priced in dollars, weaker demand has meant a drop in demand for dollars too.

On top of this, the health crisis caused by COVID-19 was not confronted properly by the US authorities, so the country recorded the fifth highest death rate after Peru, Spain, Chile and Brazil. This has eroded consumer confidence and extended the prospect of a severe recession, with recovery delayed until 2022. The OECD estimates that, at best, the US economy will contract by 7.3% (and 8.5% if there is a second wave of pandemic).

Finally, the US dollar has been penalised by the presidential election. Financial markets like stability, so the prospects of a change in the presidency make the recovery more uncertain. Historically, volatility in the stock market rises in the months leading up to an election (albeit less so in recent years), and this weakens investors’ demand for dollars. Investors also fear that Donald Trump is not coping with the COVID-19 crisis, especially on the health front.

A cheaper currency has made imports more expensive for the US and has therefore further worsened the domestic economy. Yet it has also affected many other variables of the world economy. As other currencies have appreciated, exporting economies such as Brazil and India have suffered a lot. Consequently international investors have re-oriented their portfolios towards other developed economies, particularly European ones.

On the other hand, all countries with their currencies pegged to the dollar (especially those in the Middle East) have become more competitive. This has offset the damage from both the pandemic and declining oil prices.

The Longer View

On the whole, we shouldn’t worry too much about the weaker dollar. It is still relatively strong, having appreciated 17% against the euro between 2010 and 2020 even allowing for its current weakness. On the whole, the concerns about the future of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency are probably unfounded.

The dollar will probably rise as the political uncertainties are resolved, and this will happen sooner rather than later. I think we have seen the worst already. The greenback has already risen slightly in the past couple of days, although there could always be further slight depreciation to come.

For the next year, the financial markets now expect only mild adjustment: the US$ to euro 12-month forward rate – what the euro will be worth in US$ a year from now – is 1.19553 as of August 21, only 0.7% lower than the current trading rate. And 24 months from now, the dollar is expected to be 1.5% higher against the euro than at present.

Gold prices are another signal of comfort. When the dollar falls, gold rises. As of mid-August, gold prices had risen by around 30% since January 1. In five years, gold has appreciated by almost 80%, equivalent to 12% on an annualised basis.

By comparison, in the same period the S&P 500 has returned 10% on an annualised basis, and only 5% since the beginning of the year. However, gold forward prices – what the market thinks gold will be worth in future – are coming down now: they peaked in early August, and are now back to the levels of one month ago.

In conclusion, we should not expect a completely new financial order where, perhaps, a basket of global currencies or the Chinese yuan or Swiss franc take over from the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Most global trade transactions will still be denominated in the US currency; oil and other commodity prices will be in dollars; US stock markets will for a long time be the largest and prices of securities will be mostly dollar-denominated. The dollar may be soft, but not for long.

Arturo Bris, Professor of Finance, International Institute for Management Development (IMD)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Mark Episkopos

Security,

One of the world's most popular rifles.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Russia’s military may no longer be using it, but the AK-74 serves a curious purpose elsewhere in contemporary Russian society: schools. It was mandatory for many Soviet schoolchildren to fieldstrip and assemble AK-74’s within a certain timespan.

Born into a poor peasant family amid the Bolshevik seizure of power, young Mikhail Kalashnikov aspired to become a poet. Instead, he fought as a tank commander in the Second World War and went on to design one of the most iconic firearms of the modern world: the AK-47. The first Kalashnikov rifle left a gargantuan legacy that is still unfolding to this day, but its many successors and variants are not without a footprint of their own.

The 1970s AK-74 is particularly noteworthy as the first major Kalashnikov revision, as well as the Red Army’s standard-issue rifle during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Almost five decades after its inception, here are five little-known facts about the AK-74.

1. The AK-74 continues to be circulated in staggering numbers.

The Kremlin is currently phasing out the AK-74 and its AK-74M variant in favor of the modernized AK-12 and AK-15 rifles, but a staggering eighteen million AK-74’s remain in circulation across the world. A chunk of that comes from official production licenses purchased by Soviet-aligned countries like Bulgaria and former Soviet nations like Azerbaijan.

Many more are unauthorized, less reliable reproductions that remain popular across Central Africa and in parts of Latin America. Yet others, like North Korea’s Type 88 rifle, are thinly rebranded copies made without a license.

2. Russian schoolchildren are taught to assemble AK-74’s.

Russia’s military may no longer be using it, but the AK-74 serves a curious purpose elsewhere in contemporary Russian society: schools. It was mandatory for many Soviet schoolchildren to fieldstrip and assemble AK-74’s within a certain timespan. In homage to this tradition, schools across Russia continue to hold that exercise in the form of competitions.

3. The AK-74 was the first Kalashnikov variant to experiment with a smaller round.

Whereas the original AK and its AKM variant use the 7.62x39mm cartridge, the AK-74 was the first of several subsequent Kalashnikov models to be chambered in a smaller, lighter 5.45x39mm cartridge. The change enabled lighter equipment loads, considerably reduced recoil and greater accuracy.

The Soviets realized that the move to a lower-caliber round will come at the cost of some penetrating power, but believed that the AK-74’s bullets will yaw earlier once inside the human body and thus inflict even more catastrophic damage against soft-tissue areas.

4. The AK-74 was even cheaper than the original, dirt-cheap Kalashnikov.

Despite boasting across-the-board improvements in handling and accuracy, the AK-74 was even cheaper to mass-manufacture than its predecessor due to slight tweaks in the 74’s production process. It also featured lower maintenance costs, saving additional money over the long term. Nonetheless, the AK-47 was so widely disseminated in export markets by the late 1970s that the AK-74 simply arrived too late to replicate the breakaway success of its predecessor.

5. Four countries bear the Kalashnikov on their flag or coat of arms.

This point is related to both the AK-74 and its predecessor, but warrants inclusion on this list for how well it illustrates the global reach of the Kalashnikov brand: Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and East Timor all depict the Kalashnikov rifle on their flag or coat of arms.

Interestingly, all four countries adopted this symbology at around the same time in the mid 1980s; by this time, the AK-47 had well established itself as the staple choice of guerillas and insurgents across the third world, and the AK-74 was first making waves as an export product.

Mark Episkopos is a frequent contributor to The National Interest and serves as a research assistant at the Center for the National Interest. Mark is also a Ph.D. student in History at American University.

This first appeared last year and is being republished due to reader interest. 

Image: Reuters

Emma Long

Politics, Americas

Evangelicals who feel that “America is becoming a more difficult place for them to live,” believe Trump hears their fears, takes them seriously, and responds.

“He’s following the radical left agenda, take away your guns, destroy your second amendment, no religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God … He’s against God,” President Donald Trump told supporters during a recent trip to Ohio.

Trump was speaking about Joe Biden, the Democrat challenger for the White House. Never mind that Biden, a Catholic, has spoken openly and often about how his faith helped him cope with family tragedy, and wears rosary beads that belonged to his late son, Beau.

Trump’s statement echoed a strategy that paid dividends in the 2016 election and he is clearly hoping will do so again: appeal to the nation’s evangelicals using a political agenda wrapped in the language of faith.

Although a highly complex term which doesn’t lend itself to an easy definition, evangelicals generally believe in the literal truth of the Bible. They believe that the only way to salvation is through belief in Jesus Christ, and that salvation can only come through individual acceptance of God – often through a conversion or “born again” experience.

Studies suggest around a quarter of Americans consider themselves to be evangelical, although estimates vary. Eight out of ten white evangelicals supported Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

From Hands-Off to Front and Centre

Those who sought to revive the common 19th-century name evangelical during the second world war were just as politically active as their more contemporary descendants. They testified before congressional committees, organised letter writing campaigns, and published editorials and articles in religious publications to support or criticise policies of the day.

But while their politics often leaned to the right, these founders of the modern evangelical movement largely eschewed party politics – as my own ongoing research is exploring. “We are rejoicing,” Clyde Taylor, secretary of public affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), one of the major evangelical organisations in the mid-20th century, told members in early 1953, that the organisation, “has never allowed itself to become entangled with the political influences and parties of Washington.”

All that changed in the 1980s when close connections between the evangelical-influenced religious right and the administration of Ronald Reagan were developed consciously by conservative activists, both secular and religious, who saw advantages to creating greater ties between faith and politics.

Since the late 1980s religious conservatives have built networks of political, legal and social activism which have aggressively, and successfully, pushed their agenda into mainstream American politics.

Anti-Trump Evangelicals

A recent Pew Research Center poll indicated that although Trump’s approval ratings among white evangelicals have slipped slightly to 72%, eight out of ten still say they would vote for him again in November.

Yet given the focus on evangelical Trump supporters, it’s easy to overlook the 19% of white evangelicals, and those evangelicals of colour, who did not support Trump in 2016. Among the most prolific and high profile are John Fea, Messiah College professor of history, and Randall Balmer, professor of religion at Dartmouth College.

But there are others, such as the Red Letter Christians, a group who seek to “live out Jesus’ counter-cultural teachings” and whose focus on social justice tends to see them allied more often with the political left. In December 2019, even the leading evangelical publication Christianity Today published a widely reported editorial supporting Trump’s impeachment.

Although these divisions run deep within the evangelical community, they have scarcely caused a ripple in American culture more generally. So why has the political impact of these anti-Trump evangelicals been relatively small?

First, the “evangelical left” has always struggled to achieve political impact, often attracting enthusiastic support but not huge numbers. Second, the anti-Trump category is so large and diverse, and based on so many different issues, that it’s easy for any one group to be submerged into the larger howl of protest.

And third, evangelicals are a diverse group who disagree on many issues. Significant as it is within the evangelical community, the evangelical left is probably neither big enough nor sufficiently cohesive to have much of an electoral impact in November.

Ramping up the Rhetoric

When commentators say Trump is speaking evangelicals’ language, what they mean is not the language of theology and faith, but the language of politicised religion that has come to form a large part of what’s now frequently referred to as the “culture wars” in America.

Trump began employing this language during the 2016 campaign and has continued throughout his term in office. He has consistently claimed that people of faith are “under siege,” language which pointedly echoes a common refrain from evangelical leaders.

He also promised to “totally destroy” the Johnson amendment which bars non-profit organisations such as churches from endorsing or opposing particular candidates – although he hasn’t done so. And he became the first sitting president to address the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in 2020.

In this light, Trump’s claim that Biden poses a threat to the American faithful is part of a much longer history of the politicisation of conservative Christianity. It’s increasingly associated with issues such as free market capitalism, support for the state of Israel, abortion, gun ownership and religious liberty rights. The rhetoric, promises and symbolism has far outstripped the reality of policy change, but that does not appear to matter a great deal.

Evangelicals who feel that “America is becoming a more difficult place for them to live,” believe Trump hears their fears, takes them seriously, and responds. And such symbolism is working: in March, 81% of white evangelicals said the Trump administration had helped their constituency.

As the November election nears with Trump behind in the polls, expect him to turn more and more to those within his constituency, both secular and religious, on whom he has relied for affirmation and support. It’s likely there will be more claims of religious liberty under threat and more merging of religion with issues such as gun control, abortion and economic policy.

But evangelicals might heed a warning issued in 1950 by then NAE president, Stephen Paine, that evangelicals should be wary of increasing engagement with the government. They risked the state filling “the place which the Lord should be,” and officials telling them what they wanted to hear while failing to provide real answers. Neither state nor faith benefited from their mingling, he argued. It’s a warning that clearly echoes in the 2020 campaign.

Emma Long, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, University of East Anglia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

Ankara had offered to release a German political prisoner in exchange for Germany upgrading the Turkish Army’s older-model Leopard 2A4 tank, which had proven embarrassingly vulnerable in combat.

Here's What You Need To Remember: This was shockingly illustrated in December 2016 when evidence emerged that numerous Leopard 2s had been destroyed in intense fighting over ISIS-held Al-Bab—a fight that Turkish military leaders described as a “trauma,” according to Der Spiegel. A document published online listed ISIS as apparently having destroyed ten of the supposedly invincible Leopard 2s; five reportedly by antitank missiles, two by mines or IEDs, one to rocket or mortar fire, and the others to more ambiguous causes.

Germany’s Leopard 2 main battle tank has a reputation as one of the finest in the world, competing for that distinction with proven designs such as the American M1 Abrams and the British Challenger 2. However, that reputation for nigh-invincibility has faced setbacks on Syrian battlefields, and placed Berlin in a uniquely awkward national-level dispute with Turkey, its fellow NATO member.

Ankara had offered to release a German political prisoner in exchange for Germany upgrading the Turkish Army’s older-model Leopard 2A4 tank, which had proven embarrassingly vulnerable in combat. However, on January 24, public outrage over reports that Turkey was using its Leopard 2s to kill Kurdish fighters in the Syrian enclaves of Afrin and Manbij forced Berlin to freeze the hostage-for-tanks deal.

The Leopard 2 is often compared to its near contemporary, the M1 Abrams: in truth the two designs share broadly similar characteristics, including a scale-tipping weight of well over sixty tons of advanced composite armor, 1,500 horsepower engines allowing speeds over forty miles per hour and, for certain models, the same forty-four-caliber 120-millimeter main gun produced by Rheinmetall.

Both types can easily destroy most Russian-built tanks at medium and long ranges, at which they are unlikely to be penetrated by return fire from standard 125-millimeter guns. Furthermore, they have better sights with superior thermal imagers and magnification, that make them more likely to detect and hit the enemy first—historically, an even greater determinant of the victor in armored warfare than sheer firepower. A Greek trial found that moving Leopard 2s and Abramses hit a 2.3-meter target nineteen and twenty times out of twenty, respectively, while a Soviet T-80 scored only eleven hits.

The modest differences between the two Western tanks reveal different national philosophies. The Abrams has a noisy 1,500-horsepower gas-guzzling turbine, which starts up more rapidly, while the Leopard 2’s diesel motor grants it greater range before refueling. The Abrams has achieved some of its extraordinary offensive and defensive capabilities through use of depleted uranium ammunition and armor packages—technologies politically unacceptable to the Germans. Therefore, later models of the Leopard 2A6 now mount a higher-velocity fifty-five-caliber gun to make up the difference in penetrating power, while the 2A5 Leopard introduced an extra wedge of spaced armor on the turret to better absorb enemy fire.

German scruples also extend to arms exports, with Berlin imposing more extensive restrictions on which countries it is willing to sell weapons to—at least in comparison to France, the United States or Russia. While the Leopard 2 is in service with eighteen countries, including many NATO members, a lucrative Saudi bid for between four hundred and eight hundred Leopard 2s was rejected by Berlin because of the Middle Eastern country’s human-rights records, and its bloody war in Yemen in particular. The Saudis instead ordered additional Abramses to their fleet of around four hundred.

This bring us to Turkey, a NATO country with which Berlin has important historical and economic ties, but which also has had bouts of military government and waged a controversial counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists for decades. In the early 2000s, under a more favorable political climate, Berlin sold 354 of its retired Leopard 2A4 tanks to Ankara. These represented a major upgrade over the less well protected M60 Patton tanks that make up the bulk of Turkey’s armored forces.

However, the rumor has long persisted that Berlin agreed to the sale under the condition that the German tanks not be used in Turkey’s counterinsurgency operations against the Kurds. Whether such an understanding ever existed is hotly contested, but the fact remains that the Leopard 2 was kept well away from the Kurdish conflict and instead deployed in northern Turkey, opposite Russia.

However, in the fall of 2016, Turkish Leopard 2s of the Second Armored Brigade finally deployed to the Syrian border to support Operation Euphrates Shield, Turkey’s intervention against ISIS. Prior to the Leopard’s arrival, around a dozen Turkish Patton tanks were destroyed by both ISIS and Kurdish missiles. Turkish defense commentators expressed the hope that the tougher Leopard would fare better.

The 2A4 model was the last of the Cold War–era Leopard 2s, which were designed to fight in relatively concentrated units in a fast-paced defensive war against Soviet tank columns, not to survive IEDs and missiles fired by ambushing insurgents in long-term counterinsurgency campaigns where every single loss was a political issue. The 2A4 retains an older boxy turret configurations which affords less protection from modern antitank missiles, especially to the generally more vulnerable rear and side armor, which is a bigger problem in a counterinsurgency environment, where an attack may come from any direction.

This was shockingly illustrated in December 2016 when evidence emerged that numerous Leopard 2s had been destroyed in intense fighting over ISIS-held Al-Bab—a fight that Turkish military leaders described as a “trauma,” according to Der Spiegel. A document published online listed ISIS as apparently having destroyed ten of the supposedly invincible Leopard 2s; five reportedly by antitank missiles, two by mines or IEDs, one to rocket or mortar fire, and the others to more ambiguous causes.

These photos confirm the destruction of at least eight. One shows a Leopard 2 apparently knocked out by a suicide VBIED—an armored kamikaze truck packed with explosives. Another had its turret blown clean off. Three Leopard wrecks can be seen around the same hospital near Al-Bab, along with several other Turkish armored vehicles. It appears the vehicles were mostly struck the more lightly protected belly and side armor by IEDs and AT-7 Metis and AT-5 Konkurs antitank missiles.

Undoubtedly, the manner in which the Turkish Army employed the German tanks likely contributed to the losses. Rather than using them in a combined arms force alongside mutually supporting infantry, they were deployed to the rear as long-range fire-support weapons while Turkish-allied Syrian militias stiffened with Turkish special forces led the assaults. Isolated on exposed firing positions without adequate nearby infantry to form a good defensive perimeter, the Turkish Leopards were vulnerable to ambushes. The same poor tactics have led to the loss of numerous Saudi Abrams tanks in Yemen, as you can see in this video.

By contrast, more modern Leopard 2s have seen quite a bit of action in Afghanistan combating Taliban insurgents in the service of the Canadian 2A6Ms (with enhanced protection against mines and even floating “safety seats”) and Danish 2A5s. Though a few were damaged by mines, all were put back into service, though a Danish Leopard 2 crew member was mortally injured by an IED attack in 2008. In return, the tanks were praised by field commanders for their mobility and providing accurate and timely fire support during major combat operations in southern Afghanistan.

In 2017, Germany began rebuilding its tank fleet, building an even beefier Leopard 2A7V model more likely to survive in a counterinsurgency environment. Now Ankara is pressing Berlin to upgrade the defense on its Leopard 2 tanks, especially as the domestically produced Altay tank has been repeatedly delayed.

The Turkish military not only wants additional belly armor to protect against IEDs, but the addition of an Active Protection System (APS) that can detect incoming missiles and their point of origin, and jam or even shoot them down. The U.S. Army recently authorized the installation of Israeli Trophy APS on a brigade of M1 Abrams tanks, a type that has proven effective in combat. Meanwhile, Leopard 2 manufacturer Rheinmetall has unveiled its own ADATS APS, which supposedly poses a lesser risk of harming friendly troops with its defensive countermeasure missiles.

However, German-Turkish relations deteriorated sharply, especially after Erdogan initiated a prolonged crackdown on thousands of supposed conspirators after a failed military coup attempt in August 2016. In February 2017, German-Turkish dual-citizen Deniz Yücel, a correspondent for periodical Die Welt, was arrested by Turkish authorities, ostensibly for being a pro-Kurdish spy. His detention caused outrage in Germany.

Ankara pointedly let it be known that if a Leopard 2 upgrade were allowed to proceed, Yücel would be released back to Germany. Though Berlin publicly insisted it would never agree to such a quid pro quo, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel quietly began moving towards authorizing the upgrade in a bid to improve relations in the face of what looks suspiciously like tank-based blackmail. Gabriel presented the deal as a measure to protect Turkish soldiers’ lives from ISIS.

However, in mid-January 2018, Turkey launched an offensive against the Kurdish enclaves of Afrin and Manbij in northwestern Syria. The attack was precipitated generally by Turkish fears that effective Kurdish control of the Syrian border would lead to a de facto state that would expand into Turkish territory, and proximately by an announcement by the Pentagon that it was recruiting the Kurds to form a “border security force” to continue the fight against ISIS.

However, photos on social media soon emerged showing that Leopard 2 tanks were being employed to blast Kurdish positions in Afrin, where there have several dozen civilian casualties have been reported. Furthermore, on January 21, the Kurdish YPG published a YouTube video depicting a Turkish Leopard 2 being struck by a Konkurs antitank missiles. However, it is not possible to tell if the tank was knocked out; the missile may have struck the Leopard 2’s front armor, which is rated as equivalent to 590 to 690 millimeters of rolled homogenous armor on the 2A4, while the two types of Konkurs missiles can penetrate six or eight hundred millimeters of RHA.

In any event, parliamentarians both from German left-wing parties and Merkel’s right-wing Christian Democratic Union reacted with outrage, with a member of the latter describing the Turkish offensive as a violation of international law. On January 25, the Merkel administration was forced to announce that an upgrade to the Leopard 2 was off the table, at least for now. Ankara views the deal as merely postponed, and cagey rhetoric from Berlin suggests it may return to the deal at a more politically opportune time.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

Robert Beckhusen

History, Europe

But failed all the same.

Here's What You Need To Remember: This is where Mark’s narrative begins to break down. It’s not his fault — it’s simply harder to keep track of what happened given the chaos. The shock of the Soviet attack was so severe, Panzer-Abteiling 129 broke down as a cohesive fighting unit. The battalion’s surviving tanks, disorganized and disrupted, merged with other German formation as they fell farther back into the pocket.

The Panzer-Abteilung 129, a tank battalion serving with the German 6th Army, fought its way into the Soviet city of Stalingrad in late 1942 only to find itself pinned down during winter. A a million-man Red Army counter offensive, attacking in two giant pincers, surrounded the Germans that November.

Trapped, the battalion’s soldiers sheltered wherever they could in a village to find warmth — and whatever meager protection the homes provided from regular Soviet air attacks.

The last days of the battalion were brutal and unimaginably miserable, as recounted in the first volume of historian Jason Mark’s highly-regarded series Panzerkrieg: German Armored Operations at Stalingrad — which traces the day-by-day history of 6th Army tank battalions using extensive primary sources from those who witnessed the battle.

“Gradually, the losses become sensitive,” German war correspondent Parzival Kemmerich wrote in December 1942. “Every night, and sometimes even by day, there are dead and wounded in the village. Added to this is the lack of panzer crews. Last but not least, the psychological stress resulting from the inactivity imposed on us becomes apparent.”

“Waiting, coupled with idleness, is probably the worst thing for the German soldier. He then begins to brood, and the sun shines darker.”

Shortly after Kemmerich wrote that account, the battalion prepared to head west to resist Soviet forces which had flanked the 6th Army from behind. But some of the biggest problems for the ordinary German soldier was sheer exhaustion combined with malnutrition — and the weather. The horrible, frigid weather.

Despite the Russian winter being the second one experienced by the German army in the war, Panzer-Abteilung 129 lacked winter clothing. That was due in part to Soviet forces overrunning several supply depots.

“Usually, only the commander of a combat vehicle has cold protection suit and a pair of felt boots, which are absolutely necessary, as he drives with the cupola open and stands in the midst of an icy draft which, furthermore, is also swept past him by the cooling of the engine,” Kemmerich reported.

“Without special clothing, he would soon be frozen.”

On New Year’s Eve, the German soldiers played cards, drank cognac, dodged aerial bombs and ate dogs. Two days later, the battalion began moving westward across the winter terrain — what one soldier described as an “endless white surface of death” that reminded him of stories of polar explorers he read as a child.

The Panzer-Abteilung 129 eventually — facing to the northwest — dug itself in near the village of Dmitriyevka, which the Soviets needed to take before reaching Karpovka to the south, which housed a railway station and a vital airfield the Germans needed to bring in supplies. To the battalion’s northeast were the German 29th, 44th and 76th Infantry Divisions; to the southwest, the 3rd Infantry Division.

“It was an orderly battle formation with enough strength to put up stout resistance — on paper,” Mark writes. “In reality, however, many favors were stacked against the Germans.”

His descriptions of the landscape, collected from first-hand accounts, are apocalyptic. There were plenty of corpses lying around — horse and human — which contributed to further demoralization within the German ranks already beaten down by hunger and cold.

Worse, the Panzer-Abteilung 129 was short on everything, particularly ammunition. What was left had to bear the brunt of the final Soviet offensive toward Stalingrad, named Operation Koltso. In the Panzer-Abteiling 129‘s sector, the battalion faced the Soviet 21st Army as it approached from the northwest.

When the offensive finally arrived on Jan. 10, 1943, the Soviets opened up with 8,000 artillery pieces — the largest bombardment of the war at that point — and attacked with three armies along the front.

This is where Mark’s narrative begins to break down. It’s not his fault — it’s simply harder to keep track of what happened given the chaos. The shock of the Soviet attack was so severe, Panzer-Abteiling 129 broke down as a cohesive fighting unit. The battalion’s surviving tanks, disorganized and disrupted, merged with other German formation as they fell farther back into the pocket.

However, scattered battalion reports note several bold, nighttime counter-attacks that caught the Soviets by surprise. These thrusts, Mark notes from Russian archives, inflicted heavier losses on Soviet tank forces taking part in Operation Koltso — numbering dozens of tanks destroyed — than traditionally believed by post-war historians.

On Jan. 14, three or four surviving German tanks sped through a village toward a nearby rise named “Hill 2.0,” which had been occupied by Soviet tanks. The charge so shocked a “horde” of starving, German rear-area troops hiding in the village that they ran outside and followed the tanks into battle — believing this to be their chance to escape the pocket.

The attack shocked the Soviets, too, who retreated from the hill. But that was as far as the panzers were either willing or able go, and so the tank crews set up a defensive position. “Disappointed, [the accompanying German soldiers] simply drifted back to their hidey-holes,” Mark writes.

The Soviets returned the next day and smashed the German position. At that point, Mark notes, Panzer-Abteiling 129 had effectively ceased to exist as survivors fled into the city of Stalingrad proper. None of the battalion’s officers would return to Germany alive.

Image: Wikipedia.

Warfare History Network

History, Asia

Thirty-six days of hell.

Key Point: Iwo Jima was one of the worst blood-lettings of World War II.

“You know,” said Marine Maj. Gen. Clifton B. Cates to a war correspondent on the eve of Operation Detachment, the invasion of Iwo Jima, “if I knew the name of the man on the extreme right of the right-hand squad of the right-hand company of the right-hand battalion, I’d recommend him for a medal before we go in.”

And for good reason. General Cates’s 4th Marine Division was tasked with conducting its fourth opposed amphibious landing on a heavily defended island. The 4th was the right flank division of General Harry Schmidt’s V Amphibious Corps and, together with Maj. Gen. Keller E. Rockey’s 5th Marine Division on the left, was about to begin one of the bloodiest battles in American history. Also taking part would be Maj. Gen. Graves B. Erskine’s 3rd Marine Division.

General Cates understood what his men were about to face. Born August 31, 1893, in Tiptonville, Tennessee, he was commissioned into the United States Marine Corps after receiving his law degree from the University of Tennessee. He fought in the Great War with the Marine Brigade of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Division at Verdun, Belleau Wood, Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne.

After inter-war duty in China and several military schools, Cates commanded the 1st Marine Regiment on Guadalcanal. Then, after commanding the Marine Corps Schools, he was sent back to the Pacific to command the 4th Marine Division, which had just completed the seizure of Saipan in July 1944. His many well-deserved decorations included the Navy Cross, two Distinguished Service Crosses, two Distinguished Service Medals, two Silver Stars, a Legion of Merit, and two Purple Hearts.

Whoever the unknown Marine on the far right flank was, he was a member of the 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division. Most of the men in the division had already made three or more opposed landings in the Marshall Islands, at Saipan, and most recently at Tinian, both in the Mariana Islands. Like General Cates, who had taken command of the division from General Schmidt after Saipan, they knew all too well what they were about to encounter.

They had learned fast. For a unit that had not existed when General Cates and the 1st Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal in 1942, the 4th Marine Division had been organized, trained, and took part in four amphibious assault landings in less than 13 months. And Iwo Jima, scheduled to be attacked on February 19, 1945, would be the worst.

The Strategic Importance of Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima was also important. Lying midway along the direct path from Saipan to Tokyo, Iwo Jima had two airfields with a third under construction. From here Japanese fighters were able to attack B-29 Superfortresses on bombing raids to Tokyo or returning home to Saipan, picking off bombers that had been damaged by antiaircraft fire. As a result, the B-29s had to fly higher, along circuitous routes, with a reduced payload. At the same time, enemy bombers based on Iwo often raided B-29 bases in the Marianas. Iwo’s radar station also gave the Japanese defense authorities two hours advance notice of coming B-29 strikes.

Because of the distance between mainland Japan and American bases in the Mariana Islands, Iwo Jima, if captured, would provide an emergency airfield for damaged B-29s returning from bombing runs. The seizure of Iwo would also allow for sea and air blockades, plus strengthen America’s ability to conduct intensive air bombardment and degrade Japan’s air and naval capabilities.

Iwo was, and is, an isolated, sulfurous, seven-square-mile island that is part of the Bonin Group located 750 miles south of Tokyo. The Japanese, who considered the island part of the Tokyo Prefecture, had occupied it for decades and had spent all of 1944 creating a spider web of stinking, stifling hot underground tunnels, warehouses, command posts, fortifications, and fighting positions. Two airfields were spread across the island’s surface, and 14,000 soldiers and 7,000 Japanese marines manned the defenses. The island garrison’s commander, Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, was confident that his position was as impregnable as anyone could make it.

The 4th Marine Division consisted of the standard three Marine infantry regiments (the 23rd, 24th and 25th) and one artillery regiment (the 14th). It included tank, engineer, and medical battalions as well as other supporting units. The 4th’s assignment at Iwo was to secure a beachhead, seize the first enemy airfield, and then pivot to the north and east, clearing out enemy opposition as it went. Critical to success was the reduction of the enemy’s ability to deliver flanking fire on the landing beaches from an area known as “the Quarry,” which overlooked them from the north.

The various Marine divisions and regiments had specific sectors of the two-mile-long beach assigned to them. In the first wave, Colonel John R. Lanigan’s Regimental Combat Team 25 would come ashore on Blue Beach on the right flank, Colonel Walter W. Wensinger’s RCT 23 was assigned the Yellow landing beaches (to the left of the 25th) and to assault the first enemy airfield. The 27th Marines would land on Red Beach to the left of center, while the 28th would hit Green Beach on the far left, closest to Mount Suribachi. The 24th was in reserve and would come ashore at about 5 pm on L-Day (landing day).

Softening up enemy defenses was deemed critical. After sustaining a terrific naval and aerial bombardment that lasted for days (but not as long as American commanders wanted), the Japanese, although a bit shaken and deafened, looked through their telescopes and field glasses to see the 450-ship American armada parked off the island’s southern coast.

“Land the Landing Force!”

At 6:45 am on February 19, 1945, Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner signaled, “Land the landing force!” It took hours to obey that order, but shortly after 9 am Marines of the 4th and 5th Divisions began hitting Green, Red, Yellow, and Blue Beaches abreast, initially finding little enemy resistance. Kuribayashi had ordered his men to hold their fire until the beaches were crowded with invaders; most would obey. There would be no suicidal banzai charges, either.

After wading ashore, the 4th Marine Division’s 25th RCT’s mission was to push forward to take the Quarry, a Japanese strongpoint, while the 5th Marine Division’s 28th Marines had the task of attacking Mount Suribachi, which loomed 556 feet above the invasion beaches. The 3rd Marine Division would be kept in reserve and land on L+5 to capture Airfield Number 2. More than 80,000 Marines would eventually take part in Operation Detachment.

The Japanese watched and waited as the Marines in their camouflage-speckled uniforms came ashore, followed by their great, lumbering Sherman tanks. Supplies began to pile onto the black sand. The Marines were obviously relieved that, thus far, everything was proceeding without a hitch. Few shots had been fired at them. Maybe the preliminary barrages had wiped out all of the enemy.

And then, at about 10 am, the calm morning was shattered as General Kuribayashi gave the signal and hundreds of guns, firing from hidden emplacements, opened up on the Marines.

Colonel Wensinger’s RCT 23 discovered that trying to run across the soft, yielding volcanic sand was like running through molasses. Struggling inland under increasingly severe enemy fire, they pushed forward until they reached the edge of Motoyama Airfield Number 1 in early afternoon. But enemy opposition had depleted the ranks of the leading battalion, and despite support from Lt. Col. Richard K. Schmidt’s 4th Tank Battalion, the attack stalled at the edge of the airfield. Even the tanks had difficulty reaching the airfield, several being lost to enemy mines buried in the soft sand and others temporarily stranded on the beach in that same black volcanic sand.

Wensinger’s 23rd Marines ran into a series of blockhouses and pillboxes manned by the 10th Independent Anti-Tank Battalion and the 309th Infantry Battalion. It was here that Sergeant Darren S. Cole, USMCR, a 24-year-old from Flat River, Missouri, serving with Company B, 1st Battalion, 23rd Marines, became the first Marine on Iwo Jima to earn the Medal of Honor. When his squad was halted by devastating small-arms, mortar, and artillery fire, Sergeant Cole led them up the slope to Airfield Number 1 and alone destroyed two enemy positions with grenades. He then identified three enemy pillboxes threatening his men.

Putting his machine gun into action, he managed to silence the closest pillbox. Suddenly, his weapon jammed and the enemy opened up a renewed fusillade, including knee mortars. Sergeant Cole, armed only with a pistol and one hand grenade, charged alone at the enemy, tossed his grenade, and then returned for more. He repeated this action twice more, each time knocking out an enemy position. As he destroyed the final enemy post, he returned to his squad only to be killed by an enemy hand grenade. His self-sacrifice had enabled Company B to continue its advance against Airfield Number 1.

Colonel Wensinger ordered his reserve battalion, Major James S. Scales’s 3rd, into the fight. As Major Scales’s men came forward, the tanks were forced to withdraw under an intense Japanese antitank barrage. Nearby, Major Robert H. Davidson’s 2nd Battalion couldn’t even get tank support, so intense was the enemy fire. Nevertheless, by mid-afternoon the Marines of the 23rd Regiment, through sheer guts, had reached and secured the edges of the airfield.

“One of the Worst Blood-Lettings of the War”

Colonel Lanigan’s RCT 25 was on the extreme right of V Amphibious Corps. Their assignment was twofold. After landing over the Blue Beaches, they were to attack in two directions; Lt. Col. Hollis Mustain’s 1st Battalion was to strike directly inland, protecting the right flank of the 23rd Marines attacking Airfield Number 1, while Lt. Col. Justice M. Chambers’s 3rd Battalion was assigned to take the Quarry. Because of concerns that fire from the Quarry and East Boat Basin would be severe against the landing beaches, Blue Beach 2 was not used, and Chambers’s battalion landed behind Mustain’s battalion over Blue Beach 1.

Because the two battalions followed each other across Blue Beach 1 under heavy enemy fire, some confusion and mixing of units resulted. The 3rd Battalion in particular was hard hit, with Company K losing eight officers by mid-afternoon; Company I lost six others and Company L another five. The supporting tanks of Company A, 4th Tank Battalion only drew more enemy fire. A bulldozer cutting a road off Blue Beach 1 was destroyed when it hit a large enemy mine hidden in the sand, and the tanks of Company A were halted barely 100 yards off the beach by a large enemy minefield.

Using their main 75mm guns, Company A’s tankers provided what support they could to the Marines attacking the enemy positions in the cliffs and pillboxes to the north. Engineers from the 4th Engineer Battalion worked under enemy fire to clear the blocking minefield.

Landing 15 minutes after H-hour, Lt. Col. Chambers’s 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, took the heaviest beating of the day on the extreme right while trying to scale the cliffs leading to the Quarry. “Crossing that second terrace,” Chambers recalled, “the fire from automatic weapons was coming from all over. You could’ve held up a cigarette and lit it on the stuff going by. I knew immediately we were in for one hell of a time.”

The enemy bombardment was unlike anything the Marines had ever experienced. There was hardly any cover. Japanese artillery and mortar rounds blanketed every corner of the 3,000-yard-wide beach. Large-caliber coast defense guns and dual-purpose antiaircraft guns firing horizontally caught the Marines in a deadly crossfire from both flanks.

Marines searched for cover in vain as the Japanese artillery and machine-gun fire cut them to shreds. One Marine combat veteran observing this expressed a grudging respect for the Japanese gunners. “It was one of the worst blood-lettings of the war,” said Major Frederick Karch of the 14th Marine Artillery Regiment. “They rolled those artillery barrages up and down the beach—I just didn’t see how anybody could live through such heavy fire barrages.”

At sea, Lt. Col. Donald M. Weller, the naval gunfire officer with Task Force 51, tried desperately to hit the Japanese gun positions that were blasting 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, from the Quarry. It would take longer to coordinate this fire: the first Japanese barrages had wiped out the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines’ entire shore fire control party.

Medal of Honor in the Quarry Battle

As the two battalions of the 25th Marines attacked in different directions against strong enemy resistance, they soon lost contact with each other. This had been foreseen, and Colonel Lanigan called forward Lt. Col. Lewis C. Hudson’s 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines, from Blue Beach 1 to fill the gap.

With all his battalions now on line, Colonel Lanigan ordered a coordinated attack to clear the beaches and move on the airfield and the Quarry. This attack began well, but soon both the 1st and 2nd Battalions were forced to ground by enemy fire. The 3rd Battalion managed to clear about 200 yards before halting.

The 3rd Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Justice M. Chambers, USMCR, of Huntington, West Virginia, was already a legend in the Marine Corps before he ever set foot on Iwo Jima. Having served as a Marine Raider in the Solomon Islands campaign before joining the 4th Marine Division, he had earned a reputation as a daring leader in addition to several medals for bravery.

He was also a caring leader and trained his battalion hard. Chambers preached “mental conditioning” to his men and kept them for weeks on the rifle range to ensure accurate marksmanship. Not much for close-order drill, he kept his men out in the field, training at every opportunity. Some men groused and even considered revolt but gradually came to respect their battalion commander when they began to realize they were among the best trained battalions in the division. Now, after three campaigns, they would follow Chambers’s lead anywhere.

On L-Day at Iwo Jima, he led them against the Quarry. It was a bitter, brutal fight and cost the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines dearly.

By late afternoon, Chambers reported to Colonel Lanigan that of the 900 Marines he had landed with that morning only 150 were still on their feet as the first day ended. Lanigan immediately rushed up elements of the 1st Battalion, 24th Marines, to the Quarry battle.

As night fell, Chambers’s battalion, or what was left of it, was relieved by Major Paul S. Treitel’s 1st Battalion, 24th Marines. For his personally courageous leadership of 3rd Assault Battalion Landing Team, 25th Marines, from February 19 to February 22, when he was seriously wounded, Lt. Col. Chambers was awarded a Medal of Honor.

Eight Percent Casualties

Not far behind the thin line of Marine infantrymen, Colonel Louis G. DeHaven’s 14th Marine Artillery Regiment landed over the now secured beaches. Because of the heavy and accurate Japanese fire, only the 1st and 2nd Battalions came ashore on L-Day, the 3rd and 4th Battalions landing the following day.

The artillerymen had problems of their own. The beachhead was too small and did not include areas that had been preselected for the artillery to emplace their guns. There were no roads inland, and the soft sand hindered movement of heavy equipment. Casualties, including a battalion commander, further hindered the artillery. Even Lt. Col. Carl A. Youngdale’s 4th Battalion, which had spent the day aboard ships awaiting orders to land, suffered six casualties from enemy shells falling among the transports.

Japanese tactics so far in the Pacific War had been to launch a major counterattack on the first night of any invasion of their islands. This “defense at the water’s edge” doctrine had broken the back of Japanese resistance in many island battles. But not at Iwo Jima. Although enemy artillery and mortars pounded the Marines all night long, no serious ground attack was launched against the V Amphibious Corps’ beachhead. Iwo Jima was already showing signs of being a different type of battle than those the Marines had fought earlier in the Pacific.

The constant Japanese barrage took a toll, however. Both Lt. Col. Ralph Haas, the commander of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Marines, and his operations officer were killed during the night, and the supply dump of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, on Blue Beach was destroyed by enemy rockets. Preliminary casualty counts showed that about eight percent of the 30,000 men who landed on L-Day had become casualties. Of these 2,420 casualties, about 20 percent, or 548 men, had been killed.

February 20 dawned clear and with good visibility. The 4th Marine Division attacked toward Airfield Number 1 with the 23rd and 25th Marines abreast; battalions of the 24th Marines reinforced both regiments. With the support of Company C, 4th Tank Battalion, the 23rd Marines secured the airfield, breaching an important section of the Japanese defensive line. Minefields, rough terrain, and fierce enemy opposition slowed the advance. Heavy rocket, artillery, and mortar barrages constantly struck the advancing Marines.

Late in the afternoon, the 23rd Marines made contact with the 27th Marines of the 5th Marine Division, forming a connected line of advance across the middle of the island. The 25th Marines advanced with two battalions, while the attached 1st Battalion, 24th Marines, held in place at the Quarry until the rest of the corps came alongside.

Again, the cost of the advance was high. A mortar shell knocked out the command staff of the 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines, and killed the commander of Company B, 4th Tank Battalion. Lt. Col. James Taul, the executive officer of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, then in reserve, took command of the 2nd Battalion.

Knocking Out Bunkers on Iwo Jima

Meanwhile, the fight raged on. Lieutenant Arthur W. Zimmerman, seeing that tank support was desperately needed, constantly exposed himself to direct tank fire against a blockhouse that had his platoon pinned down. A tank commander, Sergeant James R. Haddix, volunteered to remain in an exposed position protecting several Marines who were pinned down in a shell hole, eliminating every enemy threat that came against them.

One of the participants, who wrote a brief history of the battle, stated, “There was no cover from enemy fire. Japs deep in reinforced concrete pillboxes laid down interlocking bands of fire that cut whole companies to ribbons. Camouflage hid all the enemy installations. The high ground on every side was honeycombed with layer after layer of Jap emplacements, blockhouses, dugouts, and observation posts. Their observation was perfect; whenever the Marines made a move, the Japs watched every step, and when the moment came, their mortars, rockets, machine guns, and artillery––long ago zeroed-in––would smother the area in a murderous blanket of fire.

“The counterbattery fire and preparatory barrages of Marine artillery and naval gunfire were often ineffective, for the Japs would merely retire to a lower level or inner cave and wait until the storm had passed. Then they would emerge and blast the advancing Marines.”

Fighting remained personal on Iwo Jima. A 24-year-old from Marvel Valley, Alabama, Sergeant Ross Franklin Gray, USMCR, was a platoon sergeant with Company A, 25th Marines, when his unit was held up by a grenade barrage near Airfield Number 1 on February 21. He pulled his platoon out of grenade range and then went forward alone to reconnoiter the enemy defenses. He discovered a large minefield and a strong network of emplacements and covered trenches.

Although under heavy enemy fire, Sergeant Gray cleared a path through the minefield and then returned to his platoon. He volunteered to lead an attack under the covering fire of three fellow Marines. Unarmed except for a huge demolition charge, he crawled to the first enemy position and blew it closed with the explosives.

Immediately taken under fire by another of the enemy positions, Gray crawled back to get another demolition charge. He then returned and destroyed the second enemy post. He did this again and again, destroying a total of six enemy pillboxes and killing 25 enemy soldiers. Not finished, he returned to the minefield and disarmed the remaining mines. He survived to wear his Medal of Honor.

As the battle slowly moved north, the 24th Marines came up against six pillboxes that were stalling the leading company. Two tanks came forward and tried to knock them out, but both tanks were themselves disabled by mines. The battalion commander asked a Marine “regular,” 43-year-old Marine Ira “Gunner” Davidson, from Chavies, Kentucky, if he could knock out the pillboxes. Davidson rounded up a gun crew of six Marines and a 37mm gun. While running across 200 yards of open ground under enemy fire, one was killed, two were wounded, and one knocked senseless before they could get the gun into position.

Davidson then set his sights on each bunker in turn, aiming for the firing slits in each pillbox and blasting away. Now protected by some riflemen, the Marines moved up to find that in each pillbox were from two to four dead Japanese. Davidson’s exacting aim had knocked out all six pillboxes by exploding his rounds inside each without destroying the emplacement itself. Davidson repeated this exploit a few days later and was awarded a Silver Star for his skills and courage.

The time had come to take Airfield Number 2 in the island’s center. During the advance of the 24th Marines on February 21, a company commander in the 2nd Battalion, Captain Joseph Jeremiah McCarthy, USMCR, a 34-year-old Chicagoan, refused to admit his men were stymied by the Japanese defenses around the airfield.

Despite heavy enemy machine-gun, rifle, and 47mm fire directed at his company, he organized a demolition and flamethrower team, covered by a rifle squad, and led them across 75 yards of fire-swept ground into a heavily fortified zone of enemy defenses. He personally threw hand grenades into the successive pillboxes as his team came up to destroy each in turn.

Seeing enemy troops attempting to escape from a destroyed position, McCarthy stood erect in the face of enemy fire and destroyed the fleeing enemy. Entering the ruins of one pillbox, he killed an enemy soldier who was aiming at one of his Marines, then went back to his company and led them in an attack that neutralized all enemy resistance within his area. Throughout this battle, he had consistently exposed himself to personally lead and encourage his Marines. He received the Medal of Honor.

Raising the Flag on Mount Suribachi

The situation was no less dangerous at the supply and aid stations in the rear along the waterline. Enemy gunners seemed to target supply dumps and aid stations, and many Marines suffered second and third wounds while lying helplessly in an aid station. Vehicles bringing supplies to the forward areas were also targeted.

On the beaches, a sudden storm made unloading difficult and delayed removal of the wounded to hospital ships offshore. During the landing of the 4th Battalion, 14th Marine Artillery Regiment, on February 20, over half the battalion’s 105mm howitzers were lost to the sea and two more were lost on the beach due to high surf conditions. The surviving guns were set up on Yellow Beach and provided support for the infantry.

Advancing painfully, the 4th Marine Division had lost too many men to cover the assigned front. To assist with this, General Schmidt gave General Cates the 21st Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, then offshore in reserve. Although he originally intended for the new arrivals to relieve the battered 25th Marines, General Cates was advised by his assistant division commander, Brig. Gen. Franklin A. Hart, that beach conditions and inland routes favored replacing the 23rd Marines instead, and it was so ordered.

Iwo Jima became a bloody battle between Marines above ground and Japanese deep underground, well camouflaged, and well supported by artillery, rockets, and mortars. Nights were full of enemy infiltration attempts and the occasional small counterattack. Single-plane enemy air raids dropped bombs at random, rarely hitting anything of importance, although one attack did hit the rear areas of the 25th Marines on Blue Beach on L+3. A cold, drizzling rain did little to cheer the exhausted Marines.

On February 23, L+4, a platoon of Marines reached the summit of the island’s most imposing feature: Mount Suribachi. Five men from the 28th Marines raised a small flag atop the volcanic mountain. Navy Corpsman John Bradley said, “It was so small that it couldn’t be seen from down below, so our battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chandler W. Johnson, sent a four-man patrol up with this larger flag….” Another group of men from the 28th Marines, including Bradley, raised the second, larger, flag––an event that was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal and reproduced thousands of times. Although it was a photo that symbolized victory, final victory on Iwo Jima was still a long way off.

“It takes courage to stay at the front on Iwo Jima,” wrote Lieutenant Jim G. Lucas, a Marine Corps combat correspondent. “It takes something which we can’t tag or classify to push out ahead of those lines, against an unseen enemy who has survived two months of shell and shock, who lives beneath the rocks of the island, an enemy capable of suddenly appearing on your flanks or even at your rear, and of disappearing back into his hole. It takes courage for officers to send their men ahead, when many they’ve known since the [4th Marine] Division came into existence have already gone. It takes courage to crawl ahead, 100 yards a day, and get up the next morning, count losses, and do it again. But that’s the only way it can be done.”

The “Meat Grinder”

Having secured the Quarry and the high ground above the East Boat Basin, the 4th Marine Division was now faced with a major enemy defensive enclave. This was a mutually supporting group of defensive positions known as the “Amphitheater.” The main defenses of this area in the central and northern sections of the island––Hill 382, Turkey Knob, Charlie-Dog Ridge, and Minami Village––would soon be collectively known as the “Meat Grinder.”

The enemy had done everything possible to build these defenses. Hill 382, also known as “Radar Hill,” had the remains of a radar station atop it, but the hill itself had been hollowed out by Japanese engineers and filled with antitank guns and artillery pieces. Each resided safely in a concrete emplacement. The hill gave the enemy excellent observation over all approaches.

The remainder of Hill 382 was a honeycomb of caves, ridges, and crevices containing light and medium tanks, 57mm and 47mm guns, and infantry armed with rifles, mortars, and machine guns. Turkey Knob, some 600 yards south, was a major communications center for the Japanese and housed reinforced concrete emplacements.

In the Amphitheater, a southeastern extension of Hill 382, the Japanese had taken the bowl-shaped terrain and filled it with three tiers of heavy concrete emplacements. Here, too, were extensive communications facilities along with electric lighting for the vast underground defenses. Antitank guns and machine guns covered all approaches to Turkey Knob.

Between each of these was a jumble of rocky ground, caves, crevices, and open ground offering little, if any, protection for attacking forces. Torn trees blocked approaches, as did blasted rocks, depressions, and a host of irregular ground obstacles. This was the eastern bulge of Iwo Jima––the core of the Japanese defense in the northeastern half of the island––and the 4th Marine Division’s objective.

Two Days of Fighting For Hill 382

On February 24, the 24th Marines began to move across those approaches.

After several hundred yards the Marines were stopped cold. From Charlie-Dog Ridge came heavy machine-gun, rifle, antitank, and mortar fire at point-blank range. From behind came antiaircraft fire using airbursts, antitank fire, and artillery. The Marines called for supporting fire of their own, but because they were so close to the enemy this was refused.

Only the 14th Marine Artillery’s 105mm guns were accurate enough, along with the infantry’s own 60mm and 81mm mortars; Marines of the Weapons Company dragged a 37mm gun forward and helped. Four machine guns were also pushed forward to help in suppressing enemy fire.

Then it began again. Advancing by rushes, individual squads of Marines attacked each enemy position in turn, working from one position to the next. Shooting, burning, and blasting, they fought their way to the top. By late afternoon, Companies G and I had made it and were mopping up the last of the defenders.

The 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines, was not so fortunate. They hit the Amphitheater itself, suffered heavy casualties, and had to use white phosphorous smoke shells to screen the evacuation of their wounded. Among these was the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Alexander A. Vandegrift, Jr., son of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, who was seriously wounded.

By this time, L+6, two-thirds of the 3rd Marine Division was ashore on Iwo Jima and had taken over the center of V Amphibious Corps’ front line. The 4th Marine Division continued on the right flank, facing the Amphitheater; one-third of the island lay in their sector. It was the most rugged terrain on the island and defended by determined enemy soldiers and sailors.

The 23rd and 24th Marines, the latter reinforced with the 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines, and Company A, 2nd Armored Amphibian Battalion, opened the attack with a fierce barrage from supporting weapons. Because enemy defenses blocked the use of tanks on the division’s front, permission had been given to move the 4th Tank Battalion’s tanks through the adjoining 3rd Marine Division’s sector. These were particularly helpful to the 23rd Marines’ advance, knocking out enemy pillboxes, machine guns, and antitank guns.

The 24th Marines and their reinforcements took on the Amphitheater and Minami Village. From offshore, the amphibian tractors tried to support the attack, but rough seas reduced their effectiveness and they were recalled.

Incredibly heavy resistance greeted the 24th Marines. Even the arrival of five tanks did little to aid the attack due to the rough ground and fierce enemy resistance. Once again, key leaders were among the first to fall to enemy fire. After gaining a few hundred yards, the attack halted for the night. General Cates alerted the 25th Marines to replace the 24th Marines in the morning. All three of its battalions, including the 2nd, which was already at the front, would resume the attack.

Using a rolling barrage, with the 14th Marine Artillery Regiment providing an artillery bombardment that advanced toward the enemy 100 yards at a time every five minutes, for 20 minutes, the 25th Marines advanced for the first 100 yards successfully. They then ran into a wall of enemy fire from the Amphitheater and Turkey Knob.

Tanks from Company A, 4th Tank Battalion, came up to assist, but they soon became targets of the enemy artillery. Attempts at counterbattery fire were frustrated by poor observation, even though two observation planes flew over the area attempting to locate the enemy guns. To the left, the 23rd Marines had doggedly moved on Hill 382 using flamethrowers, rockets, and demolitions to gain about 200 yards.

For the next two days the battle continued without pause. Time after time the Marines would gain the top of Hill 382 only to be forced back to cover by enemy artillery, mortar, and small-arms fire. Fighting became hand-to-hand around the ruins of the Japanese radar station.

As one Marine later remarked, “The easiest way to describe the battle … is to say that we took the hill [Hill 382] almost every time we attacked––and that the Japs took it back.”

Marine engineers and bulldozers finally cleared a path for tanks to move to the front, and Company B, 4th Tank Battalion, came up to support the 23rd Marines. But once again, the Marines were forced to withdraw for the night. That night Japanese planes were observed parachuting supplies to their troops; Marine artillery took the drop zone under fire.

Navy Corpsman Cecil Bryan

No description of Marines in combat is complete without an acknowledgement of the brave Navy corpsman assigned to them. One such was Pharmacist’s Mate 2/c Cecil A. Bryan. During one battle on Iwo Jima, he saw First Sergeant Fred W. Lunch of the 24th Marines fall seriously wounded.

Despite heavy enemy fire, Bryan raced to the sergeant’s side and saw that his windpipe had been severed by a shell fragment. Unless something was done immediately, he would be dead within moments. Bryan knew he had to give Sergeant Lunch an alternate windpipe––but how? Thinking quickly, he reached into his medical bag and grabbed a piece of rubber tubing normally used for plasma transfusions. He cut off six inches and thrust it into Lunch’s throat. Then he carried his patient, barely alive and bleeding profusely, to an evacuation station. Lunch survived the war with no ill effects.

Combat Effectiveness Down to 50 Percent

At the Amphitheater and Turkey Knob, the 25th Marines, with the 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines attached, continued their frontal attacks. There was no way to surround either terrain feature since they were mutually supporting. On February 27, the 1st Battalion attempted to flank the Amphitheater by moving through the zone of the 23rd Marines, but the latter had not advanced far enough.

Finally, late in the day an opening was cleared, and Company A, supported by tanks, moved forward. The advance soon turned into a disaster. Three tanks were quickly knocked out by enemy antitank fire, and enemy small arms, mortars, rockets, and artillery saturated Company A. Fire from Turkey Knob also ravaged the advancing Marines, and a withdrawal was soon ordered. The only significant success was the securing of the East Boat Basin by the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines.

The constant attacks day after day not only wore down the Americans, but the Japanese as well. By March 1, Hill 382 was surrounded, many of the heavier enemy guns silenced, and many of the Japanese defenders dead.

For several more days the battle continued. Company E of the 24th Marines repeatedly attacked, and it seemed as if every attack cost the company a commander killed or wounded. Second Lieutenant Richard Reich, who had been with the company since L-Day, remarked, “They [the new commanding officers] came so fast,” he said, “I didn’t even get their names.”

With such fierce fighting it was little wonder that the division’s combat effectiveness was down to 50 percent. Casualties as of March 3 were preliminarily reported as 6,591 Marines killed, wounded, or missing. While this number was about 37 percent of the total division strength, it represented 62 percent of its authorized infantry strength and, as usual, the infantry carried the burden of the battle.

In other words, two of every three infantrymen who came ashore on L-Day were casualties by March 3, 1945, or L+13, after two weeks on Iwo Jima. As just one example, Captain William T. Ketcham’s Company I, 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines, landed with 133 Marines in the three rifle platoons. Only nine of these men remained when the battle ended.

Although some replacements had arrived and joined the depleted regiments, they were not nearly enough to bring them up to authorized strength.

The First B-29 Lands on Iwo Jima

Although fighting still raged across, below, and above Iwo Jima, a signal moment came on March 4 when the first emergency landing was made by a B-29 bomber on one of the captured airfields. The aircraft was repaired, refueled, and took off to complete its mission. By war’s end, 2,400 B-29 bombers would make unscheduled landings on the island.

Meanwhile, the strong enemy defenses caused the Marine commanders to try new techniques. When two tanks fired directly into an enemy communications blockhouse atop Turkey Knob without result, the 14th Marine Artillery was asked to send up a 75mm pack howitzer. A gun was duly brought forward with its crew and fired 40 rounds directly at the blockhouse and, while it did not destroy it, the fire neutralized the garrison sufficiently for Company F to move forward some 75 yards to a position from which it destroyed the emplacement the next day. A demolitions crew and a flamethrowing tank completed the job.

By March 9, the Marines had outflanked Hill 382 and Turkey Knob, as well as the Amphitheater; the way to Iwo’s east coast lay ahead. Division intelligence reported that the main enemy core of resistance in the 4th Marine Division’s zone had been broken.

Signs that the Japanese were suffering were becoming clear. The one and only major counterattack against the 4th Marine Division came on the morning of March 9, when enemy troops were discovered infiltrating the lines of the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marines and 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines.

This infiltration quickly turned into a major counterattack but was by no means a wild banzai charge for which the Japanese were known. The enemy troops worked their way as close as possible to the American lines before revealing themselves. Several managed to advance to the battalion command post of the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marines, before being killed. Others carried stretchers and shouted, “Corpsman!” in English to disguise themselves while penetrating the Marine lines. Most of the fighting fell to Company E, 23rd Marines, and Company L, 24th Marines.

Daylight found some 850 enemy dead in and around the friendly lines; many more were thought to have been carried back to Japanese lines.

General Erskine’s 3rd Marine Division also encountered extremely stubborn defenses during its frontal assault to take Airfield Number 2, but take it they did. By nightfall on March 9, the 3rd had reached Iwo’s northeastern beach, cutting the enemy defenses in two.

Hard fighting was by no means over, however. When the 1st Battalion, 25th Marines, moved into rough terrain north of Turkey Knob, the unit went quietly, with no pre-assault bombardment. For a few minutes all seemed well, but then a barrage of rocket and mortar fire hit the battalion; close fire from enemy machine guns soon joined in the battle.

Friendly tanks and artillery answered. A thousand gallons of flamethrower fuel (jellied gasoline) and thousands of rounds of 75mm fire were hurled against the concrete communications blockhouse, which was again active. The battalion was nevertheless forced to withdraw; it spent the night absorbing replacements for the many casualties it had suffered.

Indeed, so short of men was the division that a “4th Provisional Battalion” was organized from supporting troops and placed under the command of Lt. Col. Melvin L. Krulewitch, who had been the 4th Division support group commander.

It had become common practice for companies to be shifted from one battalion to another simply to bring the assault battalion for that day up to near normal strength. The 24th Marines were forced to disband one rifle company in both the 1st and 2nd Battalions, using those men to strengthen the remaining companies.

The 4th Marine Division’s Last Major Attack

The 4th Marine Division continued to clear its zone on Iwo Jima. Patrols sent out by the 23rd Marines on March 10 reported that they had reached the coast. The 25th Marines continued to advance on the right against strong but not determined resistance; the 3rd and 5th Marine Divisions would join them there. Clearly Japanese resistance had been broken.

A two-regiment attack on March 11 pushed forward against moderate resistance. Combat engineers followed and destroyed any enemy positions found. The 23rd Marines settled down for the night about 400 yards from the coast, the best position from which to cover their front.

The 25th Marines, facing more opposition, including rocket, mortar, and small-arms fire, continued forward. A prisoner captured during the day reported that about 300 enemy troops remained hidden in caves and tunnels in the small area left under Japanese control. He also reported that a Japanese major general commanded the group.

The remaining Japanese had good terrain from which to continue their resistance. Once again crevices, caves, and ridges covered the area. To avoid more casualties, a surrender appeal was broadcast to these defenders and the enemy general, thought to be Maj. Gen. Sadasue Senda, commanding the 2nd Mixed Brigade.

When the appeal failed, the attack began. Three battalions––2nd and 3rd, 25th Marines, and 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines––launched the 4th Marine Division’s last major attack on Iwo Jima. For the next four days the battle raged, too close for air support or artillery. It became a battle of small arms, mortars, and flamethrowers against Japanese hidden deep in caves and crevices. Tanks could only operate with caution, so close were the fighters.

Finally, Marines with flamethrowers, bazookas, rifles, grenades, and satchel charges decided the issue. Despite numerous attempts to convince the Japanese to surrender, they fought to the end. Some 1,500 Japanese dead were later counted in this area. Maj. Gen. Senda’s body was never identified, nor was Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi’s body ever found.

On March 14, 1945, the 4th Marine Division, or what was left of it, began departing Iwo Jima for Maui, Territory of Hawaii, and some well-deserved R&R. Fighting still raged on the island, but the division had accomplished its mission. Plans for the invasion of the Japanese home islands were already in progress, and the 4th Marine Division was included. Behind them, 9,098 of the 4th’s members were killed or wounded.

Indeed, for the 4th Marine Division the war was over. The division had spent a total of 63 days in combat during four major amphibious operations. The 4th’s casualties totaled 16,323, or 260 casualties per combat day. Only the 1st Marine Division suffered more casualties during the war, but it spent far more time in combat. Only the 1st and 4th Marine Divisions made four opposed amphibious landings during the war. The 4th Marine Division also suffered more combat fatalities than any other Marine division except the 1st.

It had been a short but a very difficult war for the 4th Division, a unit that did not even exist until after Guadalcanal. But they had performed magnificently.

Twenty-Seven Medals of Honor on Iwo Jima

Total casualties for all three Marine divisions and the Navy offshore during the 36-day battle were over 26,000 with 6,821 killed; the Japanese lost 20,000 men killed. Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded to Marines and sailors, many posthumously, the most ever awarded for a single operation during the war, and one third of the 80 Medals of Honor awarded to Marines during World War II.

After the battle, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas, wrote, “The battle of Iwo Island has been won. The United States Marines by their individual and collective courage have conquered a base which is as necessary to us in our continuing forward movement toward final victory as it was vital to the enemy in staving off ultimate defeat.

“By their victory, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and other units of the Fifth Amphibious Corps have made an accounting to their country which only history will be able to value fully. Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

This article by Nathan N. Prefer originally appeared on Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

The German leader became fixed on the need to protect the Hungarian oilfields from Red Army tank and rifle units that had encircled Budapest in late December 1944.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Hitler would have done well to heed Guderian’s advice to commit the Sixth Panzer Army to the defense of the Oder line to slow the Russian advance on Berlin. Georg Maier, deputy chief of staff for operations for the Sixth Panzer Army, offered a fitting summation of the failed offensive. “Time, pressure, poor weather, extremely difficult terrain conditions, [and] Hitler’s impatience joined forces with the well-prepared enemy defense to form a combined front,” he wrote.

Even in the dark days of March 1945, when the Third Reich was on the brink of collapse, its troops managed to exhibit that grim humor that enables frontline soldiers to endure the horrors of battle. As the panzer crews of mighty Tiger II tanks rumbled forward in the last German offensive of World War II in eastern Hungary, they joked about the difficulties they were having coming to grips with the enemy. A few of the 68-ton King Tigers sank up to their turrets in the mud produced by an early spring thaw. Making light of the situation, tank commanders quipped that they were steering tanks, not U-boats.

The Soviet forces gathering on the Oder River in early 1945 seemed not to bother Adolf Hitler. The German leader became fixed on the need to protect the Hungarian oilfields from Red Army tank and rifle units that had encircled Budapest in late December 1944. Hitler had sent the IV SS Panzer Corps against the forces threatening Budapest in three consecutive counterattacks in January 1945 that were known collectively as the Konrad Offensives. But the tenacious Soviet forces had repulsed each assault. On February 13, the city fell to the soldiers of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front.

The Hungarian oilfields at Nagykaniscza constituted the last major petroleum resources available to Germany. By early 1945, the Austrian and Hungarian oilfields furnished 80 percent of the oil for the German armed forces. Despite the setbacks of January, Hitler devised a new offensive called Operation Fruhlingserwachen (Spring Awakening) that had both economic and military objectives. Hitler wanted to stem the Soviet tide in Hungary. He envisioned a larger offensive that would roll back the gains of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front in Hungary. If all went according to plan, the Germans would inflict severe distress on the Russian marshal and his forces in the upcoming campaign. Hitler hoped that his panzer forces would be able to establish bridgeheads over the Danube River and perhaps even retake Budapest. In so doing, the Germans would secure the oil resources needed to feed their war machine.

Although Operation Spring Awakening officially began on March 6, 1945, the planning began as early as January. The Supreme High Command of the German Army issued orders on January 16 to SS-Oberfruppenfuhrer Sepp Dietrich to bring his Sixth Panzer Army back to Germany from the Ardennes region to rest and refit for a new operation. Although Dietrich’s command is commonly referred to as the Sixth SS Panzer Army, it was not officially known as such until it was transferred to the Waffen SS on April 2, 1945.

Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army comprised Generalleutnant Hermann Preiss’s I SS Panzer Corps and Generalleutnant Willi Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps. Preiss’s corps was composed of the 1st SS and 12th SS Panzer Divisions, and Bittrich’s corps was composed of the 2nd SS and 9th SS Panzer Divisions. To bring these battered units up to standard strength for an SS panzer division, the commanders filled the depleted ranks with raw recruits and support personnel from the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Unfortunately, time and fuel were in short supply, so the replacement personnel received no combat training. Nevertheless, the four panzer divisions did receive nearly all of the arms and vehicle production they needed to build up their tank, assault gun, and tank destroyer requirements. In the end, the Germans amassed 240,000 troops, 500 tanks, 173 assault guns, and 900 combat aircraft for the offensive.

Hitler and his advisers planned to make the main attack for Operation Spring Awakening with General Otto Wohler’s Army Group South. Wohler would have plenty of hitting power. His command would consist of General Hermann Balck’s Sixth Army, Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army, and the Hungarian 8th Corps. Wohler had a total of 10 panzer and five infantry divisions to hurl against the 3rd Ukrainian Front.

While Army Group South advanced south toward the Soviet forces between Lake Balaton and Lake Velencze to the east, other German armies would strike east against Tolbukhin’s left flank. Wohler’s attack would be supported by a secondary attack by Generaloberst Alexander Loehr’s Army Group E in Yugoslavia, as well as another minor attack by General Maximilian de Angelis’s Second Panzer Army.

By the start of Operation Spring Awakening, nearly 40 percent of the German Army’s heavy combat fighting vehicles in use on the Eastern Front were in Hungary. Under the strictest security measures, additional units made their way there. Col. Gen. Heinz Guderian, the German Army’s Inspector General of Armored Troops, disapproved of Hitler’s decision to send the Sixth Panzer Army into Hungary. Guderian believed its strength would be better employed behind the Oder River to slow the Red Army’s drive on Berlin. Hitler overruled Guderian, and the Hungarian offensive went forward as planned.

Hitler approved the final plan for Operation Spring Awakening on February 23. As part of the final preparations, he reinforced Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army with the I Cavalry Corps, comprising the 3rd and 4th Cavalry Divisions, and Generalleutnant Joseph von Radowitz’s 23rd Panzer Division. Radowitz’s troops would serve as a ready reserve to be committed at the most opportune time.

Dietrich assigned Preiss’s I SS Panzer Corps the center position, which stretched from Lake Balaton to a point west of Seregelyes. Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps took up a position on its left, and the I Cavalry Corps deployed on its right. Flank protection would be provided by the 44th Grenadier and 25th Hungarian Infantry Divisions. Dietrich’s first objective was to secure a crossing over the Sio Canal and capture the city of Dunafoldvar.

General Hermann Breith’s III Panzer Corps of Balck’s Sixth Army was to attack north of the Sixth Panzer Army from Seregelyes to Lake Valence. Its objective was to capture the area between Lake Valence and the Danube River. Two heavy tank battalions with King Tigers provided extra firepower for the III Panzer Corps and the Sixth Panzer Army. Generalleutnant Rudolf Freiherr von Waldenfels’ 6th Panzer Division would follow behind.

Guarding the left flank of the III Panzer Corps were the 3rd and 5th SS Panzer Divisions of SS- Obergruppenführer Herbert Otto Gille’s IV SS Panzer Corps. The IV SS Panzer Corps was badly depleted from the Konrad Offensives, but it would be sent into action anyway.

To the south, the Second Panzer Army held the front line south of Lake Balafon. By the time of the offensive, though, it could hardly be described as a panzer army. It consisted of four divisions equipped not with tanks, but with assault guns. Its best division was the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division. The Second Panzer Army’s objective was to capture Kaposvar. Army Group E was deployed south of the Second Panzer Army along the Drava River. Its objective was to establish a large bridgehead across the Drava near Donati Miholjac with its three divisions.

Although the Germans had employed strict security measures to disguise the transfer to Hungary, the Red Army knew a German offensive was brewing. As early as February 12, the Western Allies passed along intercepted communications regarding troop movements. Any doubt the Red Army commanders might have had was eliminated near the end of February when the last successful Waffen SS operation, known as Operation Southwind, went forward against the Soviet forces in Slovakia. In that offensive, the I SS Panzer Corps eliminated a Red Army bridgehead over the Gran River.

Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front would receive the brunt of the German attack. Created in October 1943, the units that constituted the front had participated in various Soviet offensives that had liberated Ukraine and Moldova from German occupation by August 1944. In the following months, the 3rd Ukrainian Front had invaded Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Tolbukhin’s Red Army troops liberated Belgrade in October. Afterward, Stavka, the Soviet high command, shifted the front north to Hungary where it assisted Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front in besieging Budapest and helped repulse German attempts to relieve the city.

While the Germans were clearing the Gran bridgehead, Stavka issued directives to Tolbukhin and Malinovsky to prepare for fresh offensives to capture Vienna and Bratislava, respectively. Soviet Premier Josef Stalin set March 15 as the start date for these offensives. Thus, Tolbukhin not only had to prepare for the upcoming offensive, but also establish a defensive plan for the forthcoming German attack.

Tolbukhin created a multilayered defense that stressed antitank obstacles and killing zones. Each layer had multiple fortified belts. The first two layers typically had two or more lines of trenches. Altogether, Tolbukhin had a defense in depth that stretched for 30 kilometers. But since the defenses were created in a short time, the soldiers only strung barbed wire in a few places and had not had time to construct concrete pillboxes.

The 3rd Ukrainian Front had approximately 406,000 soldiers and 407 tanks, assault guns, and tank destroyers. In addition, the Soviet 17th Air Army had 965 aircraft available to support the ground troops.

The 4th Guards Army held the 3rd Ukrainian Front’s right flank. The army comprised three rifle corps, each of which had three rifle divisions. The 4th Guards’ main task was to defend Szekesfehvar. Deployed on its right flank was the XXIII Tank Corps, which functioned as a mobile reserve.

To the left of the 4th Guards was Lt. Gen. Nikolai Gagan’s 26th Army, deployed directly in the path of the advancing Sixth Panzer Army. Gagan’s army was responsible for the area from Seregelyes to Lake Balaton. Because of the likelihood that it would be hit hard, the XXX Rifle Corps had half of the 3rd Ukrainian Front’s artillery and ample anti-tank guns.

The XVIII Tank Corps, another of Tolbuknin’s mobile reserves, was stationed in the Sarosd area where it could either assist the 4th Guards or the 26th Army as the situation developed. The I Guards Mechanized Corps also was deployed directly behind the 26th Army.

The 57th Army was deployed to the south of Gagan’s 26th Army. Comprising two rifle corps, its task was to guard a section of the front that stretched from the shores of Lake Balaton south to the Drava River. Although it had only six infantry divisions, each division had slightly more men than those in the other Soviet armies. It was deployed in the path of the Second Panzer Army. The V Guards Cavalry Corps was situated in the northeast area of the 57th Army in such a way that it might assist either the 57th Army or the 26th Army.

Stationed along the northern banks of the Drava River south of the 57th Army were the six infantry divisions that constituted the First Bulgarian Army. Although the Bulgarian divisions had a strength that was twice that of a Soviet division in numbers, its men had less combat experience. Stavka believed that a major enemy advance in the sector held by the Bulgarians was unlikely because of the difficulty the Germans would have striking across the Drava. Still, Tolbukhin was prepared to send elements of the 57th Army south to assist the Bulgarians if the need should arise. To the Bulgarians’ left was the XII Army Corps from the Third Yugoslavian Army, which was not part of Tolbuknin’s front.

Tolbukhin entrusted the 27th Army with his second line of defense. The 27th Army consisted of three Guards infantry corps, yet all of its divisions were significantly weaker in men and equipment than the 26th Army. The 27th Army held a section of the front from Lake Valence to the Danube River.

While it seemed as if the Red Army had an extraordinarily large number of troops in this sector, a typical Soviet unit was small in comparison to its German counterpart; for example, a Red Army tank corps in terms of men and equipment was equivalent to a German panzer division.

Tolbukhin also had other units in his sector which, under orders from Stavka, he was forbidden to use. One of these units was the 9th Guards Army, which was slated for the drive on Vienna. Even if the 3rd Ukrainian Front’s situation grew critical, Tolbukhin knew from past experience that his request to use such units was likely to be rejected.

Overall, German intelligence had accurately estimated the number of Soviet armies, corps, and divisions against which the German forces would be attacking. But it failed to detect the guards mechanized and guards cavalry corps positioned in the assault route of the Sixth Panzer Army, failed to determine the location of two corps of the 27th Army, and failed to accurately assess the strength and disposition of the Soviets units.

Although the German intelligence omissions were important, they were nothing in comparison to other factors that would influence the Germans before and during the offensive. The security measures that the Germans employed in an effort to deceive the enemy, which in the end were futile, prevented orders from reaching anyone below corps level. This had a detrimental effect on final preparations for the offensive. In addition, some assembly positions were up to 20 kilometers from the actual starting points. To make matters worse, commanders were not allowed to conduct their own reconnaissance of enemy positions to their immediate front.

Dietrich and the staff of the Sixth Panzer Army had considerable concerns about the location chosen for the attack. In addition to being vulnerable to a Soviet thrust north of Szekesfehervar, several waterways and canals crossed the lanes of attack and threatened to slow the German advance. Moreover, only two of the roads were paved, and the dirt roads shown on the maps the Germans would be using were in reality no more than narrow paths.

Last but not least, the weather at that time of year was apt to hinder the movement of the tracked vehicles of the German panzer divisions. An early thaw in the spring of 1945 had turned the entire area into a morass. The region’s canals and drainage ditches had been unable to contain the runoff. During the first days of the offensive, the SS panzer divisions lost vehicles due to the saturated condition of the terrain. German tanks often sank in mud up to their turrets. The situation was particularly problematic for the King Tigers. Commanders of some units participating in the offensive requested a postponement of offensive operations until either the temperatures dropped low enough to freeze the mud or climbed high enough to dry the ground. Hitler and his advisers refused all such requests.

The effects of the bad weather delayed the II SS Panzer Corps to the extent that by March 5 some of its units still had not reached their starting points. Hitler was adamant that the attack begin on time, even if all participating units were not in place. The headquarters of Army Group South had experience with these conditions but still did little to assist with the requests. Rather than help those under his command, Balck echoed the orders coming from Berlin. Throughout the war he had always been overly optimistic about an operation’s potential outcome, and this operation proved no different than before. But Balck also had a tendency to blame others for shortcomings that ultimately were his responsibility. The situation was exacerbated by Balck’s disdain for SS officers due to previous experiences in the war. Specifically, Balck harbored a grudge against Bittrich for the failed relief of the Ukrainian city of Tarnopol in April 1944.

German corps commanders participating in Operation Spring Awakening distributed orders to their division commanders on the evening of March 5. With herculean efforts, most units had by that time slogged their way through the mud to their respective starting points. Hungarian liaison officers had warned the Germans not to underestimate the mud season in their homeland, but their advice fell on deaf ears.

The II SS Panzer Corps, though, had not managed to reach its staging area. Bittrich made multiple pleas to have the offensive delayed until his divisions reached their starting points, but his superiors flatly rejected his repeated requests.

At 1 AM on March 6, Army Group E’s three divisions surged across the Drava in five places. Throughout the course of the day, the Germans consolidated their five small bridgeheads into two larger bridgeheads near Valpovo and Donati Miholjac. Not surprisingly, the Bulgarians were unable to repulse the Germans. Three hours later, the Second Panzer Army’s four divisions attacked eastward in a drive to encircle Nagybajom. Thirty minutes after that the 1st SS Panzer Division began a preplanned artillery barrage at 4:30 AM.

Other German units opened fire shortly afterward. Although the indirect fire did not have the results hoped for by the German commanders, German tanks and assault guns employed direct fire with good effect against the Soviet forces in the area. The I Cavalry Corps gained ground at the outset but was pushed back by the Russians.

Like the divisions of I Cavalry Corps, the 12th SS Panzer Division stalled after marginal advances, but it managed to hold onto its gains. The 1st SS Panzer Division made noteworthy progress when it exploited some weak spots in the Soviet defense; however, its gains were only two to four kilometers deep. As for the II SS Panzer Corps, its advance elements did not attack until evening and made negligible progress.

In concert with the Second Panzer Army, the Sixth Army established a bridgehead across the Hadas Ditch, which empties into Lake Valence. On either side of Seregelyes, the 1st Panzer Division and the 356th Infantry Division managed to advance only to the north end of the village by nightfall. The 3rd Panzer Division was unable to bring its full weight to bear as some of its units had not yet reached their jump-off positions.

By day’s end the attackers had advanced only three to four kilometers on a 3.5-kilometer front. It was fortunate for Tolbukhin that the damage was not more severe because III Panzer Corps had struck the seam between the 4th Guards and the 26th Armies. German air support was restricted on the first day due to inclement weather.

Tolbukhin and his staff had correctly predicted the German avenues of attack. The 3rd Ukrainian Front commander instituted measures designed to further strengthen the defense in the direct path of the German assault. He regrouped his artillery and shifted elements from the XVIII Tank Corps into the second defensive belt. In addition, the 27th Army’s XXXIII Rifle Corps was repositioned to block the I SS Panzer Corps, which had made significant progress on the first day of the operation given the weather conditions.

Rain mixed with light snow greeted the combatants at daybreak on March 7. The Germans renewed their attack across the entire front. Along the Drava River, Army Group E was unable to significantly enlarge its bridgeheads due to the mud. For the rest of the offensive, its divisions stayed on the defensive. Farther north around Nagybajom, the Second Panzer Army benefitted from captured enemy plans that detailed Soviet defenses. Based on the intelligence gleaned from the plans, the Second Panzer Army shifted the focus of its attack to its right wing.

A stubborn Soviet defense permitted little gain, and a stalemate ensued for the next few days. Between Lake Balaton and Lake Valence, the main attack pressed on as worsening terrain conditions trapped more German tracked vehicles, putting a strain on the already weakened infantry. Against the layered defense, the I Cavalry Corps made few gains. To its left the SS panzer divisions enjoyed some success. For example, the 1st SS Panzer captured Kaloz, and the 12th SS Panzer drove six kilometers into the Soviets lines. The II SS Panzer Corps, which was able to attack in force, also made significant headway, advancing six kilometers.

But the adjacent III Panzer Corps did not make any attempt to attack. Dietrich severely criticized its commanders for their lackluster performance. The IV SS Panzer Corps, though, did capture ground near Stuhlweissenburg that strengthened its defensive position.

An early morning frost on the third day of the offensive saw some road improvement. This was lost as temperatures rose, exacerbating the muddy conditions. The offensive finally looked like it might have a chance when the I SS Panzer Corps made the first real gains across a wide front when the 1st SS Panzer Division breached the enemy’s second defense line. Exploiting this momentum, the I Cavalry Corps also gained significant ground. The II SS Panzer Corps failed to follow up the gains of the previous day and became bogged down in heavy fighting near Sarosd. Orders were given for the 23rd Panzer Division to assemble behind the 44th Grenadier Division to be ready for a possible breakthrough. The 3rd Panzer Division was brought forward to attack Adony on the Danube River while the III Panzer Corps captured Seregelyes and an additional couple of kilometers.

These advances continued to be contested by the Soviets. Tolbukhin brought forward more of his reserves beginning on March 8, especially artillery and Katyusha rocket batteries. With the exception of XVIII Tank Corps, most of the Soviet mechanized forces had been held back. The following day major developments occurred between Lake Balaton and the Sarviz Canal.

The I Cavalry Corps made a surprisingly deep penetration with its 3rd Cavalry Division overcoming several defensive lines. These gains were assisted by the success of a night attack by the 1st SS Panzer Division. By the end of March 9, Dietrich had two corps through the Soviets’ primary defensive line. But the localized success had a drawback. The III Panzer Corps also enjoyed considerable success as its units advanced along the southern shore of Lake Valence before being stopped by Soviet forces at Gardony.

With his infantry suffering heavy attrition, Bittrich became deeply concerned over the losses suffered by his troops from combat and exposure to the elements. The 9th Panzer Division had lost more than a third of its strength by that point in the offensive.

Tolbukhin also became increasingly worried about the losses his units were incurring. The tempo of battle on March 9 compelled him to commit all of his reserves, except for a few small units. He informed Stavka that the situation was critical, and he asked if they would release to him the 9th Guards Army. His superiors flatly refused the request. They instructed him to make do with the forces at hand. As a result, Tolbukhin began to alter areas of responsibility along the front. He reduced the length of front for which the 26th Army was responsible. The result was that the 27th Army had to take up the slack. Its commander was startled to find that he was suddenly responsible for a critical portion of the front line. Tolbukhin also shifted units from the 4th Guards Army in the second echelon and placed them directly in the path of Dietrich’s advancing Sixth Panzer Army in an effort to slow the enemy’s momentum.

Frontline troops on both sides shivered in their positions on March 10 as the skies opened up and snow and freezing rain fell in western Hungary. This exacerbated the already poor road conditions. Nevertheless, the Second Panzer Army south of Lake Balaton experienced considerable success when the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division exploited the seam between the Soviet 57th Army and the First Bulgarian Army. The panzergrenadiers advanced five kilometers, reaching the village of Kisbajom.

Meanwhile, the 25th Hungarian Infantry Division entered battle in the I Cavalry Corps’ sector. After a full day of savage house-to-house fighting, the understrength Hungarians captured the high ground around Enying. The 3rd Cavalry Division and the 1st SS Panzer Division reached the Sio Canal and secured sections of its bank in preparation for a crossing.

Elsewhere, the 12th SS Panzer, 2nd SS Panzer, and 44th Grenadier Divisions all made gains. In the Sixth Army’s sector, the 3rd Panzer Division surprised a pair of Soviet divisions by attacking amid a heavy falling snow. The panzer troops fought their way into the enemy’s second echelon of defense near Seregelyes. Its fellow division, the 1st Panzer, captured several villages. The pressure of battle compelled some of the German commanders to point fingers of blame at each other. Balck was accused of having misinformed Guderian about the status of the IV SS Panzer Corps. Balck reported that the corps had enough reserves to deal with a Russian counterattack when it no longer had such capability. As for Tolbukhin, he shifted units from relatively secure areas to critical ones to limit the enemy’s gains.

The weather improved on March 11, which enabled both Luftwaffe and Red Army ground attack aircraft to fly multiple sorties. With the support of their aircraft, Soviet troops were able to push back elements of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division around Kisbajom. The Second Panzer Army requested a change in the direction of its attack, but this was rejected by Wohler.

Instead, Wohler ordered the Second Panzer Army to renew its attack within the next 48 hours to keep Tolbukhin off balance and take the pressure off the Sixth Panzer Army. The Hungarians continued to advance along Lake Balaton, but they ground to a halt at Siofork. The German divisions that reached the Sio Canal spent the day securing its north bank and continued to search for crossing locations. While forward elements of the 12th SS Panzer Division were able to locate an intact bridge over the Sio, they were unable to exploit their discovery because it was blocked by burning vehicles.

The 23rd Panzer Division attacked Sar Egres, but it could not control the village. Despite the good weather of March 11, Dietrich sent a direct request to Hitler asking him to temporarily halt the offensive due to the rain and mud. Not surprisingly, Hitler rejected the request. Elements of the II SS Panzer Corps and the III Panzer Corps nevertheless managed to drive four kilometers into the Soviet 27th Army in some places.

The German armies involved in the offensive faced a determined, veteran commander. As Dietrich’s and Balck’s panzer divisions sought desperately to punch through the Soviet defenses, Tolbukhin masterfully shifted his resources in ways that prevented a decisive breakthrough. The Soviets’ defenses forced the Germans to make tactical adjustments. To catch the Red Army units by surprise, the Germans refrained from conducting preliminary artillery barrages before making an assault.

On the seventh day of the offensive, Army Group E ran out of steam. From that point forward its units did nothing more than hold their ground and fix the enemy units arrayed against them so that they could not be shifted to other sectors.

Tolbukhin, who already was deeply concerned over the condition of the 26th Army, watched in dismay as the German 4th Cavalry Division and 1st SS Panzer Division established bridgeheads across the Sio. These bridgeheads were approximately three kilometers deep and three kilometers wide. In addition, elements of the 1st SS Panzer Division entered Simontornya. On the opposite bank of the Sarviz Canal, most of the units of the II SS Panzer Corps could make no progress, although the redoubtable soldiers of the 44th Grenadier Division cleared the village of Aba. To the north, the three panzer divisions of the III Panzer Corps advanced two kilometers mainly because they benefited from the support of a heavy panzer battalion that used its King Tigers to blast Soviet positions. Despite the impressive gains made by the German forces that secured the Sio Canal bridgeheads, the soldiers of the 3rd Ukrainian Front had succeeded in preventing a breakthrough.

March 13 marked a week since the Germans launched what was to be their final offensive. The weather improved, and the roads began to dry out. Despite this, the Germans were unable to make any significant progress. There were two noteworthy exceptions. First, the 23rd Panzer Division captured Sar Egres. Second, the 1st SS Panzer Division occupied Simontornya. A change occurred in the nature of the fighting when the Soviet forces, which up to that point in the German offensive had only used self-propelled guns, introduced tanks to the battle.

The Soviets continued to hold their defensive lines, though Tolbukhin withdrew one division that had the potential to be encircled. The IV SS Panzer Corps reported increased enemy troop movement. If the enemy counterattacked, Dietrich believed his veterans would have sufficient time to establish strong defensive positions. German intelligence at the army and army group levels misinterpreted this activity in the 2nd Ukrainian Front as local reinforcement movement and not as preparation for a major offensive.

Stavka transferred Maj. Gen. A.G. Kravchenko’s crack 6th Guards Tank Army, which had approximately 500 tanks, and the 9th Guards Army from their positions near Budapest to the rear of the 4th Guards Army. The Germans did not detect the arrival of Kravchenko’s armored units.

On March 14, the German panzer forces were able to maneuver better than in previous days due to the arrival of better weather. But by that time, the panzer force divisions participating in the offensive had shrunk to 50 percent strength.

With the sun peeking out from behind the clouds, the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division received orders to spearhead an attack that day, which only made limited progress in the face of heavy artillery fire from the Soviet 57th Army. Dietrich watched helplessly as his cavalry divisions lost all offensive capability. Although his panzer divisions were still able to make small gains against the enemy, it became increasingly apparent that there would be no armored break- through. Bittich’s II SS Panzer Corps held its ground in bitter fighting near Sarkeresztur. At that point Dietrich was greatly concerned about his flanks, which were vulnerable to enemy counterattack. Reports flooded into his headquarters about increased Soviet vehicle activity, particularly in the passes of the Vertes Mountains northwest of Lake Velencze.

Balck responded by frantically organizing every possible reserve unit to bolster the German and Hungarian forces in his sector of the battlefront. He reluctantly committed his last reserve, the 6th Panzer Division, to the battle. After making some initial headway, its attack was easily contained by the reinforced Soviet XVIII Tank Corps. Even the most optimistic of the German commanders realized by that time that the offensive had ground to a halt. Although they also were exhausted, the Russians sensed that they had won the battle. At that point, the armies of the 3rd Ukrainian Front began making preparations to resume offensive operations. Tolbukhin’s subordinate commanders ordered their units to move into the staging areas for the drive on Vienna.

The good weather held on March 15. The Second Panzer Army resumed its advance. To the north the Sixth Panzer Army and the III Panzer Corps of the Sixth Army tried to gain new ground on their respective fronts, but they had nothing appreciable to show for the blood spilled that day. The II SS Panzer Corps remained on the defensive. The only positive developments for the Germans were that the 1st SS Panzer Division slightly expanded its bridgehead and the 44th Grenadier Division erected a pair of pontoon bridges capable of handling tanks. Hitler and his advisers debated the merits of reorganizing their forces for a new direction of attack.

Unwilling to abandon his objectives, Hitler allowed the reorganization to proceed after an entire day was squandered in the debate. The upshot was that the lengthy delay put some of the units of the I SS Panzer Corps in greater danger from the looming Soviet assault than they would have been if they had received permission to adjust their positions.

March 16 dawned much like the previous 10 days. Heavy fighting occurred the length of the battlefront. Taking advantage of the good weather, the Soviet Air Force stepped up its operations flying numerous sorties against the Sixth Panzer Army and Sixth Army. On the southern end of the battlefront, the Russians attacked Army Group E’s bridgeheads. As for the Second Panzer Army, it only made negligible gains. Elsewhere, the I Cavalry Corps and II SS Panzer Corps remained on the defensive. The momentum had shifted by that point, and even the best plans for reorganization were nullified by the Red Army’s resumption of offensive operations. Both Ukrainian Fronts attacked in force on March 16. The 4th Guards Army and the 9th Guards Army, with the 6th Guards Tank Army and 46th Army following in reserve, struck the left flank of Balck’s Sixth Army northwest of Lake Velencze.

The Soviets targeted the Hungarian divisions, which were the weakest of the enemy’s units. In heavy fighting on the second day of the offensive, the Soviet 46th Army overran the 1st Hungarian Cavalry Division. Wohler responded by cancelling all offensive operations. The Germans had completely abandoned the Drava bridgeheads by March 20. The panzer troops fought tenaciously against the advancing Russians to protect a narrow escape corridor and avoid being surrounded and cut off. The fighting grew in intensity in the following days, and during that time the German retreat corridor narrowed to no more than two miles in width. Speed was of the essence, and the retreating German units abandoned their equipment and supplies as necessary to ensure their escape.

Some of the SS panzer divisions fell back without orders. Hitler threw a tantrum. He immediately dispatched a representative to Hungary to summarily strip the SS troops of their armbands, which had been bestowed upon them to signify that they were elite troops of the Third Reich.

As the Germans withdrew, low-flying Russian Ilyushin Il-2 Sturmovik ground attack planes pounded their columns from above and Russian tanks and tank destroyers pursued them on the ground. Dietrich’s and Balck’s panzer divisions fell back as quickly as possible given the conditions. Elements of Dietrich’s 6th SS Panzer Army fought for a short time on the outskirts of Vienna, but the weight of the Russian attack forced them to retreat to avoid being encircled. On April 2, the Soviet 57th Army and 1st Bulgarian Army captured the Nagykaniscza oilfields.

The Germans suffered 14,800 casualties compared to 33,000 Russian casualties. Malinovsky captured Bratislava on April 4, and Tolbukhin secured Vienna on April 13 after an 11-day battle.

In the final analysis, Hitler would have done well to heed Guderian’s advice to commit the Sixth Panzer Army to the defense of the Oder line to slow the Russian advance on Berlin. Georg Maier, deputy chief of staff for operations for the Sixth Panzer Army, offered a fitting summation of the failed offensive. “Time, pressure, poor weather, extremely difficult terrain conditions, [and] Hitler’s impatience joined forces with the well-prepared enemy defense to form a combined front,” he wrote.

This article by John E. Spindler originally appeared on Warfare History Network. This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kyle Mizokami

Security, Asia

More than twenty years ago, a military confrontation in East Asia pushed the United States and China uncomfortably close to conflict.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Third Taiwan Crisis was a brutal lesson for a China that had long prepared to fight wars inside of its own borders. Still, the PLA Navy deserves credit for learning from the incident and now, twenty-two years later, it is quite possible that China could seriously damage or even sink an American carrier.

More than twenty years ago, a military confrontation in East Asia pushed the United States and China uncomfortably close to conflict. Largely unknown in America, the event made a lasting impression on China, especially Chinese military planners. The Third Taiwan Crisis, as historians call it, was China’s introduction to the power and flexibility of the aircraft carrier, something it obsesses about to this day.

The crisis began in 1995. Taiwan’s first-ever democratic elections for president were set for 1996, a major event that Beijing naturally opposed. The sitting president, Lee Teng-hui of the Kuomintang party, was invited to the United States to speak at his alma mater, Cornell University. Lee was already disliked by Beijing for his emphasis on “Taiwanization,” which favored home rule and established a separate Taiwanese identity away from mainland China. Now he was being asked to speak at Cornell on Taiwan’s democratization, and Beijing was furious.

The Clinton administration was reluctant to grant Lee a visa—he had been denied one for a similar talk at Cornell the year before—but near-unanimous support from Congress forced the White House’s hand. Lee was granted a visa and visited Cornell in June. The Xinhua state news agency warned, “The issue of Taiwan is as explosive as a barrel of gunpowder. It is extremely dangerous to warm it up, no matter whether the warming is done by the United States or by Lee Teng-hui. This wanton wound inflicted upon China will help the Chinese people more clearly realize what kind of a country the United States is.”

In August 1995, China announced a series of missiles exercises in the East China Sea. Although the exercises weren’t unusual, their announcement was, and there was speculation that this was the beginning of an intimidation campaign by China, both as retaliation against the Cornell visit and intimidation of Taiwan’s electorate ahead of the next year’s elections. The exercises involved the People’s Liberation Army’s Second Artillery Corps (now the PLA Rocket Forces) and the redeployment of Chinese F-7 fighters (China’s version of the MiG-21 Fishbed fighter) 250 miles from Taiwan. Also, in a move that would sound very familiar in 2017, up to one hundred Chinese civilian fishing boats entered territorial waters around the Taiwanese island of Matsu, just off the coast of the mainland.

According to Globalsecurity.org, redeployments of Chinese long-range missile forces continued into 1996, and the Chinese military actually prepared for military action. China drew up contingency plans for thirty days of missile strikes against Taiwan, one strike a day, shortly after the March 1996 presidential elections. These strikes were not carried out, but preparations were likely detected by U.S. intelligence.

In March 1996, China announced its fourth major military exercises since the Cornell visit. The country’s military announced a series of missile test zones off the Chinese coastline, which also put the missiles in the approximate direction of Taiwan. In reality, China fired three missiles, two of which splashed down just thirty miles from the Taiwanese capital of Taipei and one of which splashed down thirty-five miles from Kaohsiung. Together, the two cities handled most of the country’s commercial shipping traffic. For an export-driven country like Taiwan, the missile launches seemed like an ominous shot across the country’s economic bow.

American forces were already operating in the area. The USS Bunker Hill, a Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruiser, was stationed off southern Taiwan to monitor Chinese missile tests with its SPY-1 radar system. The Japan-based USS Independence, along with the destroyers Hewitt and O’Brien and frigate McClusky, took up position on the eastern side of the island.

After the missile tests, the carrier USS Nimitz left the Persian Gulf region and raced back to the western Pacific. This was an even more powerful carrier battle group, consisting of the Aegis cruiser Port Royal, guided missile destroyers Oldendorf and Callaghan (which would later be transferred to the Taiwanese Navy), guided missile frigate USS Ford, and nuclear attack submarine USS Portsmouth. Nimitz and its escorts took up station in the Philippine Sea, ready to assist Independence. Contrary to popular belief, neither carrier actually entered the Taiwan Strait.

The People’s Liberation Army, unable to do anything about the American aircraft carriers, was utterly humiliated. China, which was just beginning to show the consequences of rapid economic expansion, still did not have a military capable of posing a credible threat to American ships just a short distance from of its coastline.

While we might never know the discussions that later took place, we know what has happened since. Just two years later a Chinese businessman purchased the hulk of the unfinished Russian aircraft carrier Riga, with the stated intention of turning it into a resort and casino. We know this ship today as China’s first aircraft carrier, Liaoning, after it was transferred to the PLA Navy and underwent a fifteen-year refurbishment. At least one other carrier is under construction, and the ultimate goal may be as many as five Chinese carriers.

At the same time, the Second Artillery Corps leveraged its expertise in long-range rockets to create the DF-21D antiship ballistic missile. The DF-21 has obvious applications against large capital ships, such as aircraft carriers, and in a future crisis could force the U.S. Navy to operate eight to nine hundred miles off Taiwan and the rest of the so-called “First Island Chain.”

The Third Taiwan Crisis was a brutal lesson for a China that had long prepared to fight wars inside of its own borders. Still, the PLA Navy deserves credit for learning from the incident and now, twenty-two years later, it is quite possible that China could seriously damage or even sink an American carrier. Also unlike the United States, China is in the unique position of both seeing the value of carriers and building its own fleet while at the same time devoting a lot of time and resources to the subject of sinking them. The United States may soon find itself in the same position.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009, he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami. This article first appeared in 2018. 

Image: Wikipedia.

Peter Suciu

Security,

One issue with any remote control vehicle is ensuring that distant operators are provided with “situational awareness” but in this case, the T-14 may have that covered.

Does the Russian military have a personnel shortage? Is it an issue of trust, or does Russia simply desire to keep its soldiers out of harm’s way in a future conflict? Perhaps Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin doesn’t believe there is any danger from autonomous weapons, because this week there is news that the Russian military is exploring remote-controlled operations for its Su-57 fifth-generation multi-role fighter jet, but now comes news that an unmanned version of the Armata T-14 Main Battle Tank is also in the works.

“The appearance of heavy unmanned combat vehicles is a matter of the near future,” the T-14’s manufacturer UralVagonZavod announced this week during the ongoing Army-2020 forum outside of Moscow as reported by DefenseWorld. “Within the framework of R&D commissioned by the Ministry of Defense, the company’s specialists are working to create robotic combat vehicles of the front edge. During the work, the T-14 Armata tank was also tested in unmanned mode," the company announced during the ongoing Army-2020 forum in Moscow.”

This isn’t a new development for the tank, however. Among the T-14’s innovative characteristics is its unmanned turret, which includes a remotely controlled 125-millimeter 2A82-1M smoothbore main gun with fully automated loading. The driver, gunner and tank commander are housed in a crew compartment that is located in an armored capsule at the front portion of the hull, isolated from the automatic loader as well as the ammunition storage in the center of the tank.

UralVagonZavod’s Deputy General Director Vyacheslav Khalitov has previously said that the company had carried out theoretical and experimental work to create a robotic tank on the Armata-heavy military tracked vehicle platform. 

The forty-eight-ton modern T-14 tank is widely reported to be able to reach speeds of ninety-kilometers per hour, which makes it potentially more mobile than the American-built M1 Abrams. 

The Russian fifth-generation MBT is based on the Armata Universal Combat Platform (UCP), and according to Russian state-media is also the first tank in the world to incorporate so-called “network-centric warfare” technologies. In normal speak this means that the T-14 can be conduct reconnaissance missions, operate as a target designation and fire adjustment vehicle for self-propelled guns, surface-to-air missile systems and even T-90 tanks.  

One issue with any remote control vehicle is ensuring that distant operators are provided with “situational awareness” but in this case, the T-14 may have that covered. It features wide-angle cameras fitted around the exterior. These provide a 360-degree all-round vision and situational awareness for the crew, with the commander’s sight, mounted on the top of the turret, also offering an entire field of view while the gunner’s sight is fitted with a direct-vision periscope and laser designator. The cameras can be zoomed as necessary, while heat sensing and infrared viewing capabilities are available under all weather conditions, day or night. 

If it is true that an unmanned version is in fact in the works, then it is possible it is an attempt to help entice foreign customers. Last month, the head of Russia’s Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation, Dmitry Shugayev, told the Serbian Glas javnosti newspaper that Russia has started promoting the latest T-14 tanks for export. An unmanned version would be a far better selling point than Russia having to admit that one of the advanced Armata tanks was destroyed in Syria earlier this year!  

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

Image: Reuters

Edward Chang

Security,

The 1982 mission was the largest ever American naval deployment to the Mediterranean.

Key Point: It may be the Middle East, not Europe or the Asia-Pacific, where America and its allies will be faced with its most complex military challenge.

As tensions escalated in the Middle East over the civil war in Syria, in April 2018 the United States deployed one of the largest naval forces to the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The carrier strike group, centered on Nimitz-class nuclear-powered supercarrier USS Harry S. Truman, seven surface combatants and two submarines departed stateside for the region on April 11. They were scheduled to join a guided-missile cruiser, three guided-missile destroyers and a nuclear-powered attack submarine already in the Mediterranean to form a 15-ship-strong naval task force.

In addition, the USS Essex expeditionary strike group was slated to deploy to the area. Along with its escorts, the Essex would embark a squadron of Lockheed F-35B Lightning IIs, representing the long-awaited operational debut of the Joint Strike Fighter.

While it may be the largest U.S. naval deployment to the region since the start of the Iraq war, much of the sea power involved in that conflict deployed to the Persian Gulf. Even in the 1991 Gulf War, which involved a larger force, the carriers operated from the Gulf and the Red Sea. In actuality, the largest American naval deployment to the Mediterranean occurred 36 years ago during a war that didn’t directly involve the United States.

On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in response to an increasing number of provocations by the Palestinians. In some of the fiercest fighting of the modern era, the Israelis made quick of its adversaries, one of which was the military of Syria under the rule of Hafez Al Assad, father of current Syrian leader Bashar Al Assad. By June 14, Israel was laying siege to Beirut.

As Tel Aviv continued to place maximum pressure on the Lebanese capital, concerns arose in Washington and around the world of the possibility of the eruption of a larger regional war, mainly one drawing a deeper Syrian involvement. In response, the Reagan administration bolstered its presence in the region.

The nuclear-powered Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and her battle group, which was on-station in the Mediterranean when the war began, in early June had been joined by USS John F. Kennedy, which had entered the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal from the Indian Ocean. On June 24, Eisenhower assisted in the evacuation of American citizens in Lebanon caught up in the conflict.

The next day, two more carrier battle groups, centered on USS Forrestaland USS Independence joined Kennedy and Eisenhower from the United States. The result was a 50-ship task force, with four carriers and their air wings at the core, along with a plethora of other surface combatants. This powerful juggernaut was to conduct a NATO exercise codenamed “Daily Double,” but were also ordered to prepare for additional evacuations and, possibly, rescue attempts of other Americans still in Lebanon.

Though the siege of Beirut would last until August, the situation had stabilized to Washington’s satisfaction within several days. Exercise Daily Double concluded, and Forrestal and Independence relieved Kennedyand Eisenhower of duty, sending the latter two home.

This “dream team” lasted for only days, but it represented one of the greatest assemblies of air and naval power in the post-Vietnam War era. It was certainly the most powerful concentration of carrier-based air power ever in the Mediterranean. By comparison, two carrier battle groups were deployed to the Mediterranean for the Iraq invasion in 2003.

By 1982, the carrier and its embarked air wing had improved by leaps and bounds from just a decade earlier. Apart from Forrestal, which still carried the McDonnell Douglas F-4S Phantom II, all three carriers were equipped with the Grumman F-14A Tomcat as its primary fleet-defense fighter.

By then in its second decade of service, the Tomcat had already proven to be one of the world’s deadliest dogfighters. Armed with one of the most powerful radars of its time and the long-range AIM-54 Phoenix missile, alongside shorter-range missiles and a gun, the Tomcat would prove time and again in the Middle East it was one of the region’s “top guns.” Just a year prior, two F-14s had downed two Libyan fighters over the Gulf of Sidra, an area not too far from the shores of Lebanon.

Though the air wing of the early ‘80s lacked the more sophisticated precision-strike capabilities of today, they did not lack in range or bomb-toting capability. The primary attack platform of the day was the Grumman A-6E Intruder, which had been recently upgraded with the Target Recognition Attack Multi-Sensor system, which afforded it all-weather, day-and-night attack capability.

The Intruder had a combat radius of nearly 1,000 nautical miles and could carry up to 18,000 pounds of guided and unguided ordnance. By comparison, the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet can carry 17,750 pounds of ordnance, it has a combat radius of just 390 nautical miles.

The early-‘80s air wing also had a light attack option in the Ling-Temco-Vought A-7E Corsair II, which could carry unguided and limited amounts of guided munitions. It would be gradually replaced by the new McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet during the decade, but while lacking the sophistication of the newer platform, the Corsair still had superior range, to say nothing of the Intruder.

This lack of range in both the legacy Hornet and the newer Super Hornet has been cited by analysts as problematic for the contemporary carrier air wing as it faces increasingly more capable great-power opposition in the militaries of countries such as China and Russia.

The “big three” of the ‘80s air wing were supported by the E-2C Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning plane, the EA-6B Prowler for electronic warfare, the S-3A Viking for anti-submarine warfare and the SH-3H Sea King helicopter for ASW and search-and-rescue.

Tactics, however, had yet to catch up with technology. Well into the 1980s, the U.S. Navy still employed approaches to strike warfare rooted in those used in Vietnam. Some lessons are learned only during a shooting war. The debacle the following year over Lebanon in which two Navy A-6Es were lost, one pilot killed, and another captured during an attack on Syrian targets precipitated improvements in tactics and training.

These lessons were incorporated into a new training syllabus at Strike Warfare Center, located at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada, where air wings train extensively to prepare for deployments.

The deployment of four carrier battle groups to the region was strategically significant in 1982, as the Middle East had yet to become the focal point of U.S. foreign policy and military activity it is today. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union ratcheted up one last time during the Cold War, America’s focus was on defeating the Warsaw Pact in Central Europe and deterring the Soviets in the Pacific. Simultaneously, change was in the winds.

Regional conflicts, such as the Yom Kippur War of 1973, showed the United States and the USSR could come to blows in regions other than Europe or Northeast Asia. Furthermore, conflicts in key regions of the world, such as the Middle East, could still have global implications, for example, by threatening the world’s oil supply. Even today, the Syrian Civil War has created a refugee crisis that Europe has experienced great difficulty addressing.

Exercise Daily Double reflected this new reality. The maneuvers were part of a larger Reagan administration strategy to convince NATO of the importance of the Persian Gulf region to the defense of Europe against Moscow.

Finally, the Mediterranean, in many ways the cradle of Western civilization, has experienced armed conflict on a near-daily basis for centuries. From the 1970s to the end of the Cold War, the United States slowly but surely placed greater emphasis on preparing for these smaller, yet globally consequential conflicts that are far more likely to occur than any full-blown confrontation between the great powers. As a result, the United States began preparing to fight adversaries other than the Soviet Union, preparations that paid off in subsequent clashes with Libya, Iran, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan and, now, Syria.

As the United States mulls the possibility of greater intervention in a Syrian war directly involving the great power of Russia, the regional power of Iran, and an endless list of other state and non-state actors, a scenario is developing where it will have to figure out a means of waging war against all types of adversaries at once. It may be the Middle East, not Europe or the Asia-Pacific, where America and its allies will be faced with its most complex military challenge.

This first appeared in WarIsBoring here.

Image: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Michael R. Gendron / Flickr

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Europe

There is nothing one over-sized and over-gunned tank can do that several, much cheaper armored vehicles can’t do better. 

Key Point: The T-35 amounted to an impressive icon of Soviet might—just not a successful war machine.

Recently, a Russian military museum in Sverdlovsk unveiled a moving replica T-35 tank, recreating one of the largest tanks ever to see combat, though only very briefly. Indeed, a few dozen T-35s charged straight into the largest tank battle in history—and none came back. Overtaxed transmission and faulty clutches proved a greater nemesis than armor-piercing shells.

Soviet Land Ironclad

In his 1903 short story, science fiction writer H.G. Wells imagined that the wars of the future would be won by towering ‘Land Ironclads’—a term referencing nineteenth-century armored warships. Just thirteen years, the United Kingdom deployed the first Mark I tanks to battle, each bristling with multiple cannons and machineguns operated by a crew of eight.

By the end of World War I, however, it grew apparent that lighter, faster single-turret tanks with small crews were more practical. Still, armies continued to conceive of hulking multi-turret ‘land battleships’ such as the French Char 2C and German Neubaufahrzheug.

In 1930, the Red Army sketched plans for heavy ‘breakthrough tanks’ intended to penetrate fortified defensive lines, using their multiple gun turrets to blast foes from all sides. However, the Soviet Union lacked necessary design expertise, so it brought in German scientist Edward Grotte to brings its engineers up to speed. It is possible Soviet engineers were also inspired by the Vickers A1E1 Independent, a hulking British tank prototype with five turrets.

Though Grotte’s TG-5 tank design proved unworkable, two T-35 prototypes were eventually built in 1932, the second simplified to make it more affordable. The first T-35A finally entered production at the Kharkov Locomotive Factory in Ukraine on August 1933.

In a fascinating interview shortly before his death, T-35 driver Smolyakov Ivan Erastovich, (“the best tractor driver in his village”) recalled his first encounter with the vehicle:

Five turrets, barrels sticking out in different directions. You needed a special ladder to climb up it. And it was, well, so huge that word cannot express it. Scary even. And the crew—a whole soccer team of ten!

The behemoth’s nearly ten-meter long hull mounted three cannon and two machinegun turrets, stacked two stories high. The main turret peaked 3.4 meters high and mounted a 76mm KT-28 low-velocity gun with ninety-six rounds of ammunition, as well as a DT machinegun in a ball mount and a ‘clothes-line’ style radio antenna. A machinegunner, a tank commander/gunner, and radio operator/loader were crammed inside. Later T-35s sometimes mounted one or two more machineguns on the turret: one on an anti-aircraft mount, the other facing the rear.

The two secondary cannon turrets mounted 45mm high-velocity cannons with better armor penetration (and over 220 shells each), and another DT machine gun each. These two-man turrets were situated diagonally from each other, one facing to the front and right of the vehicle, the other situated behind the main turret covering the arc to the rear and left.

Finally, there were two one-man machinegun turrets covering front-left and rear-right arcs. A driver was also seated in the main hull in a position that afforded him very little visibility.

The crew of ten (or twelve, if you counted dismounted engineering personnel) communicated through six intercoms—but practically speaking the tank commander had limited visibility and little ability to coordinate such a large crew. Remember, he also had to aim and fire the main gun! Worse, the turrets were physically isolated from each other, though there were corridors connecting the secondary gun turrets on each side. Several of the exit hatches were located adjacent to gun turrets, meaning certain crew had no way of getting out if that turret was stuck in the wrong position.

One expects a ‘heavy tank’ to be heavily armored—but the T-35s long hull made it prohibitively weighty to install thick armor plates. Thus, the T-35 had only mediocre armor protection of 30mm in the front, and 20mm of riveted and welded steel armor on the side, rear and turrets.

On May Day, 1934 the Red Army proudly paraded the land battleships through Moscow and the tank rapidly became a star of Soviet propaganda—appearing on posters even two years after the type had left service. But the Soviets quickly realized the T-35 had big problems.

Erastovich recalled:

Honestly, the T-35 was not a sweetheart. A very heavy tank, and complicated… It was difficult to control. It was necessary to be physically strong to drive it. There was a rule—after every 50 kilometer’s march, it was necessary to inspect it. Often something had broken. The transmission was disaster. We did not do any long road marches, we tried to preserve them.

Between 1934 and 1939, only fifty-nine production T-35s were built. The Red Army did not aim for larger scale production, as at 525,000 rubles each, a single T-35 could have paid to produce nine BT-5 light tanks. Instead, the Soviets combat tested two more multi-turret prototypes, the SMK and T-100, in Finland, before settling on the single-turret KV-1 heavy tank.

Still, virtually every aspect of the T-35’s design—from radios, to guns, to armor—was tweaked with each new factory batch. The Soviets learned from combat experience with lighter tanks in Spain and Mongolia that even light anti-tank guns would be able to pierce the T-35’s armor, so later models had the narrower frontal armor beefed up to 50–70mm. 10mm armored side skirts were also added to the lower hull. Around 1938, a final production run featured a new conical turret with 30mm of sloped armor.

However, heavier armor increased the weight from forty-nine to fifty-four tons—worsening the vehicle’s true Achilles’ heel: mobility. The T-35’s 500-horsepower M-17M petrol engine could theoretically boost the tank to eighteen miles-per-hour on road—but that dropped to only eight or fewer miles while going cross-country, and most of the Soviet Union still relied on dirt roads. The vehicle’s transmission, clutch and gearbox could barely tolerate the strain, and T-35s regularly broke down attempting to travel short distances.

The Soviets also designed two prototype self-propelled guns from the T-35 chassis. The Su-14-1 mounted a 152mm BR-2 gun above the hull, while the Su-14-2 had an even larger 203mm howitzer. Unlike most Soviet self-propelled guns of the era, these were designed to shoot at distant targets indirectly (ie, beyond visual range). The Soviets considered converting its T-35s to Su-14s in 1940, but instead elected to dispatch them to frontline units in Ukraine. The two Su-14s may have fired shells at advancing German troops during the defense of Moscow, but did not see further development.

The Land Battleships Roll to their Doom

Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941—and inflicted staggering losses on disorganized Soviet ground and air forces. However, Gen. Mikhail Kirponos deployed over 3,400 tanks in six Soviet mechanized corps during a counterattack aimed at the towns of Brody and Dubno. The resulting Battle of Brody was likely the largest tank battle in history.

At the time, forty-eight T-35 tanks were assigned to 67th and 68th Heavy Tank Regiments, part of the 34th Tank Division of the 8th Mechanized Corps in the area around Kharkov. (The remainder were awaiting repairs in workshops or deployed to military schools.) The T-35s began a chaotic week-long road march starting towards the frontline, while German warplanes subjected them to near constant bombardment.

Driver Erastovich’s account is typical of what befell the T-35s:

We were still 50 kilometers from Brody on the evening of June 27 when we received a new order - to turn to the south, to Zlochev, and from there to Tarnopol ... We had no idea what was going on, and we were not the only ones. Some many people were going this way in that on the road, everything was a mess.

Not far from Tarnopol, our friction clutch burned out. There was nothing to do, and we abandoned the tank. The machine guns were removed, as expected, as were the optics. So our giant did not reach the Germans.

Of the forty-eight T-35s, records show twenty-six suffered mechanical breakdowns on the road and were abandoned. Broken fan belts, friction clutches, malfunctioning reduction gears and gearbox failures were common culprits. At least eight more were ditched because routine repairs could not be performed. The T-35’s excessive weight contributed to four more losses: two literally fell through bridges, one taking its entire crew with it. Another two T-35As got bogged down in a swamp and had to be abandoned.

Not only did the Red Army lack adequate tank tractors, but the T-35 usually required two; in the chaotic circumstances of unfolding military catastrophe, the super-expensive tanks simply had to be left behind.

Around June 30, German and Soviet records confirm a handful of functioning T-35s finally encountered German force. Four T-35s joined by five other tanks drove elements of the 16th Panzer Division out of the town of Verba, Ukraine, knocking out two Panzer IIIG tanks. But as they continued their advance, two T-35s appear to have been destroyed by air attacks, and the remaining two by numerous shell penetrations.

Turret gunner Vasiliy Sazanov provided a first-hand account of the Verba engagement:

Our last fight was stupid. First we fired across the river from the main turret on a hamlet called Sitna and then attacked with the remaining infantry. Participating were fifty infantry, three others T-35s and four BTs and T-26s [and a KV-1]. The infantry, of course, fell behind as the German bullets zipped overhead…

We advanced on the farm, when to our left German guns opened fire. I rotated the turret there -but couldn’t see anything! Suddenly the turret went BOOM! Bullets spattered against our armor like peas. Peering through my periscope, I could not see anything... And again: "Boom! Boom !! German shells struck us every five seconds, both the hull and turret. I saw a flash, and fired ten shells…

We never reached the hamlet, as our tracks were knocked out. Should we abandon the tank? It seemed useless. We began shooting in all directions at everything we could see—which was almost nothing. I tried to aim for the muzzles flashes, while our infantry retreated…The engine broke down, the gun jammed, the main turret couldn’t turn.

Then German soldiers closed in on us. I realized that it was time to beat it. I climbed out of the turret and jumped down the ground. Fortunately, they didn’t open fire. I dragged my loader to the road junction. The driver followed us. We began to crawl away, then our tank erupted in flames…

Three to five more T-35s were apparently destroyed by enemy fire in other scattered engagements. German troops smugly delivered a captured T-35 to their tank museum at Kummersdorf, while others were used for anti-tank practice shooting. The fate of each individual T-35 has been meticulously photo-documented in the book Fallen Giants by Frances Pulham, who also offers interesting commentary in this podcast.

After Brody, only a small number of T-35s remained in Soviet service, largely in a training capacity (one remains today in the Kubinka tank museum.) There are reports of a T-35 knocked out defending Kharkov, and there are disputed claims that two fought in defense of Moscow as well.

However, the land battleship’s last major engagement may have occurred under stranger circumstances. As Soviet troops closed on Berlin in April 1945, the Wehrmacht formed the adhoc Kampfgruppe Ritter to defend the capital’s suburbs. They raided the tank museum at Kummersdorf for everything they could use.

According to a German unit history, one Lt. Teriete of Panzerjaeger Battalion 653, attached to KG Ritter, recalled that “we never had any Jagdtigers. We only a received a 5-turret tank. The crew abandoned the vehicle during the final battle for the Zossen training area near Berlin.” This T-35 was later recaptured by Soviet forces on April 22. Thus the iconic land battleship was present for both the first and very last act of the terrible war on the Eastern Front.

The multi-turret land battleship proved to be a blind alley in tank development—there was nothing one oversized and over-gunned tank could do that several, much cheaper armored vehicles couldn’t do better. Still, the T-35 amounted to an impressive icon of Soviet might—just not a successful war machine.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

This article first appeared in 2018 and is reprinted here due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Steve Weintz

History, Europe

The Bomb represents the ultimate expression of might.

Here's What You Need To Remember: If the Tsar Bomba explosion was a stunt, the other biggest Soviet tests weren't. 1962 was the last year of atmospheric nuclear tests for the Soviet Union and the United States, and both sides rushed to prove weapon designs.

The Bomb represents the ultimate expression of might, so the biggest bombs express that power to its extremes. The United States and the Soviet Union built bigger and bigger bombs to deter each other. Eventually, Washington stopped testing such large weapons due to improved accuracy of their delivery methods. Only 3 percent of the superpowers' stockpiles consisted of nuclear weapons with yields greater than four megatons, but those weapons more than any others symbolize the terror of nuclear war.

The Soviet Union's swift strides towards nuclear arms alarmed American officials in the 1950’s. "First Lightning" (called "Joe-1" in the West)—the first Soviet nuclear test—announced Moscow's new military power less than three months after lifting the Berlin Blockade in May 1949. The twenty-two-kiloton shot copied the U.S. Trinity test as closely as possible to achieve early success; the rushed development actually stalled the Soviet program for over a year, with the second test occurring in September 1951.

This phase of the Cold War went hot on the Korean Peninsula and President Truman gave the go-ahead for the "Super," as it was called. Edward Teller—a brilliant, vain and pugnacious physicist who fled Hungary for the United States to join the Manhattan Project—was smitten by the idea of thermonuclear fusion and argued forcefully for U.S. research into bigger bombs. Pursuit of the "Super" alarmed Soviet leaders and scientists. As they explored the possibility, however, the Soviets had an advantage over the Americans: lithium.

The first-ever hydrogen bomb blast, Ivy Mike, required American weaponeers to create an vast new industrial capacity for manufacturing liquid hydrogen in its "heavy" form of liquid deuterium. The Ivy Mike device was liquid-fueled and a handful of emergency-capability (EC) liquid-fuel bombs were later built; several B-36 bombers were modified to top off the liquid hydrogen in flight en route to their targets.

But the Soviets dispensed with liquid fuel for dry powdered lithium deuteride, a chemical compound of lithium metal and hydrogen gas. Lithium comes in two "flavors" or isotopes: Lithium-6 and Lithium-7. Lithium-7 was thought by both sides to be inert and unsuitable as bomb fuel. The Soviet Union had plentiful sources of Lithium-7, but the United States did not. As a result, Soviet weaponeers worked on dry-fuel bombs from the start. The fourth Soviet nuclear test in 1953 registered an impressive 400 kilotons from the "Sloika" design.

America’s disastrous Castle Bravo H-bomb test in 1954 revealed Lithium-6's fusion potential and provided the Soviet Union with needed information; a mere eighteen months elapsed between the Castle Bravo test and the Soviet test of November 1955: an air drop of a fully weaponized hydrogen bomb. At 1.6 megatons, the yield of RDS-37 was impressive—but it would be dwarfed by the monsters to come.

In 1958 the Soviet Union matched the America’s voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing; in September 1961, after raising the Berlin Wall, Nikita Khrushchev ordered testing resumed. On October 23, a 12.5-megaton airdrop pounded the high Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. The resulting blast was nearly as large as Castle Yankee—America's second biggest test—but only the Soviet Union’s fifth-biggest.

The biggest bomb ever built or tested—the RDS-220 ("Big Ivan" or "Tsar Bomba")—rattled the planet one week later on October 30, 1961. The result of a crash program directed by Andrei Sahkarov, the Tsar Bomba was a conservative design accomplished with astonishing speed: in only four months. The 100-megaton (possibly 150-megaton) design was an impractical weapon—only a single modified Bear bomber could carry it, slowly—but a billy-hell of a propaganda show.

Even though Sakharov had the third-stage fission tampers replaced with inert lead due to concerns about fallout, the Tsar Bomba still yielded fifty-six megatons, enough to blow a hole in the atmosphere and cause damage hundreds of miles away. Had the third stage tampers been uranium this one bomb would have raised global fallout levels by 25 percent. Every person born before October 1961 has bits of the Tsar Bomba (and other bombs) in their bodies to this day.

If the Tsar Bomba explosion was a stunt, the other biggest Soviet tests weren't. 1962 was the last year of atmospheric nuclear tests for the Soviet Union and the United States, and both sides rushed to prove weapon designs. The fourth, third and second largest Soviet nuclear tests all seem related to ICBM-warhead development: Test 147 on August 5, 1962 yielded over twenty-one megatons; Test 173 nineteen megatons; and Test 219 a whopping 24.2 megatons—nearly half the Tsar Bomba's yield.

This city-busting warhead wound up on R-36 ICBMs (NATO designation SS-18 "Satan"), huge missiles capable of obliterating deeply buried targets or entire metro areas. Although photos and data from Test 219 are not publicly available, Alex Wellerstein's NUKEMAP drives home the power of such a bomb. Dropped on downtown Los Angeles, the air blast would level the Coliseum (four miles away) and burn down all of Beverly Hills (nine miles away).

Steve Weintz, a frequent contributor to many publications such as WarIsBoring, is a writer, filmmaker, artist and animator. This first appeared two years ago.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kyle Mizokami

Security, Asia

Should the South be worried?

Key Point: North Korean special forces have evolved from a nuisance force designed to stage attacks in the enemy’s rear into something far more dangerous.

One of the most vital parts of North Korea’s war machine is one that relies the most on so-called “soldier power” skills. North Korea has likely the largest special-forces organization in the world, numbering two hundred thousand men—and women—trained in unconventional warfare. Pyongyang’s commandos are trained to operate throughout the Korean Peninsula, and possibly beyond, to present an asymmetric threat to its enemies.

For decades North Korea maintained an impressive all-arms force of everything from tanks to mechanized infantry, artillery, airborne forces and special forces. The country’s conventional forces, facing a long slide after the end of the Cold War, have faced equipment obsolescence and supply shortages—for example, North Korea has very few tanks based on the 1970s Soviet T-72, and most are still derivatives of the 1960s-era T-62. The rest of Pyongyang’s armored corps are in a similar predicament, making them decidedly inferior to U.S. and South Korean forces.

In response, North Korea has upped the importance of its special forces. The country maintains twenty-five special-forces and special-purpose brigades, and five special-forces battalions, designed to undertake missions from frontline DMZ assault to parachute and assassination missions. The Light Infantry Training Guidance Bureau, part of the Korean People’s Army, functions as a kind of analog to U.S. Special Operations Command, coordinating the special forces of the Army, Army Air Force and Korean People’s Navy.

Of North Korea’s two hundred thousand “commandos,” approximately 150,000 belong to light infantry units. Foot mobile, their frontline mission is to infiltrate or flank enemy lines to envelop or mount rear attacks on enemy forces. North Korea’s hilly terrain lends itself to such tactics, as does the network of tunnels that the country has dug that cross the DMZ in a number of places. Eleven of North Korea’s special forces brigades are light-infantry brigades, and there are smaller light-infantry units embedded within individual NK combat divisions.

A further three brigades are special purpose airborne infantry. The Thirty-Eighth, Forty-Eighth and Fifty-Eighth Airborne Brigades operate much like the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, conducting strategic operations including airborne drops to seize critical terrain and infrastructure. NKPA airborne forces would likely target enemy airfields, South Korean government buildings, and key roads and highways to prevent their sabotage. Each brigade is organized into six airborne infantry battalions with a total strength of 3,500. Unlike the Eighty-Second, however, NKPA airborne brigades are unlikely to operate at the battalion level or higher, and due to a lack of long-range transport cannot operate beyond the Korean Peninsula.

In addition, North Korea has an estimated eight “sniper brigades,” three for the People’s Army (Seventeenth, Sixtieth and Sixty-First Brigades), three for the Army Air Force (Eleventh, Sixteenth and Twenty-First Brigades), and two for the People’s Navy (Twenty-Ninth, 291st). Each consists of approximately 3,500 men, organized into seven to ten sniper “battalions.”  These units fulfill a broad variety of roles and are roughly analogous to U.S. Army Rangers, U.S. Special Forces and Navy SEALs. Unlike their American counterparts, it appears some these units are capable of fighting as conventional airborne, air assault, or naval infantry.

Sniper brigades are trained in strategic reconnaissance and so-called “direct action” missions including assassination missions, raids against high-level targets military and economic targets, sabotage, disruption of South Korea’s reserve system, covert delivery of weapons of mass disruption (including possibly radiological weapons), and organizing antigovernment guerrilla campaigns in South Korea. They will frequently be dressed in civilian, South Korean military, or U.S. military uniforms. One platoon of thirty to forty troops per Army sniper brigade consists solely of women, trained to conduct combat operations dressed as civilians.

Finally, the Reconnaissance Bureau maintains four separate reconnaissance battalions. Highly trained and organized, these five-hundred-man battalions are trained to lead an an army corps through the hazardous DMZ. They likely have intimate—and highly classified—knowledge of both friendly and enemy defenses in the demilitarized zone. A fifth battalion is reportedly organized for out-of-country operations.

Special forces are generally meant to operate behind enemy lines, and North Korea employs considerable, though often obsolete, means of getting them there. For ground forces, one obvious means of infiltrating South Korea is through the 160-mile-long and 2.5-mile-wide DMZ. Undiscovered cross-border tunnels are another means. By sea, Pyongyang has the ability to deliver an estimated five thousand troops in a single lift, using everything from commercial vessels to Nampo-class landing craft, its fleet of 130 Kongbang-class hovercraft and Sang-O coastal submarines and Yeono midget submarines.

By air, North Korea has a notional fleet of two hundred elderly An-2 Colt short-takeoff and -landing transports. Capable of flying low and slow to avoid radar, each An-2 can carry up to twelve commandos, landing on unimproved surfaces or parachuting them on their targets. The regime also has a fleet of about 250 transport helicopters, mostly Soviet-bloc in origin (and age) but also including illicitly acquired Hughes 500MD series helicopters similar to those flown by the Republic of Korea. Pyongyang also appears bent to acquire modern, long-distance transports such as this aircraft, manufactured in New Zealand. Aircraft such as the P-750 XSTOL would allow North Korean special forces to reach as far as Japan and Okinawa, both of which would serve as forward bases for U.S. forces in wartime.

In the event of war, North Korea would likely launch dozens of separate attacks throughout South Korea, from the DMZ to the southern port of Busan. Whether or not these forces can make their way through Seoul’s considerable air and sea defenses is another question. Valleys, passes and waterways that could be used by low-flying aircraft and watercraft are already covered with everything from air-defense guns to antitank guided missiles. Given proper warning, South Korean defenders would inflict heavy losses on North Korean commandos on the way to their objectives.

North Korean special forces have evolved from a nuisance force designed to stage attacks in the enemy’s rear into something far more dangerous. Their ability to distribute nuclear, chemical, biological, or radiological weapons could, if successful, kill thousands of civilians. They have even trained to attack and destroy a replica of the Blue House, the official resident of the South Korean president. Although many would undoubtedly die en route to their destination, once on the ground their training, toughness and political indoctrination make them formidable adversaries.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009, he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami.

This article first appeared in 2017 and is reprinted here due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters. 

Warfare History Network

History, Asia

(Hint: It's not Tom Cruise)

Key Point: More than seven decades after Butch O’Hare’s exploits, many people—even those from Chicago—don’t know much, if anything, about the man for whom Chicago's airport is named.

Edward Henry “Butch” O’Hare rocketed to fame in February 1942 by singlehandedly taking on eight Japanese torpedo bombers bent on destroying the aircraft carrier USS Lexington and shooting down several of them. For this deed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decorated him with the Medal of Honor. Just 21 months later, he was dead, killed off the Gilbert Islands in the Central Pacific while engaged in night-fighting combat.

To honor his sacrifice, one of the world’s busiest airports, Chicago’s O’Hare International, was named after him. It’s a constant reminder of who Butch O’Hare was and the sacrifice he made.

Butch, however, was not the first in his family to create headlines. His father, Edward “E.J.” O’Hare, first the owner of a trucking company and later an attorney, was gunned down in 1939 on orders from infamous Chicago mobster Al Capone.

As president of Sportsman’s Park, a now vanished Cicero racetrack just outside Chicago’s western limits, E.J. was privy to many of Capone’s illegal activities because Capone and his associates were also entwined in the operation of the racetrack. From 1930 to the time of his death, E.J. was an active undercover participant in the Treasury Department’s investigation and conviction of Capone on charges of tax evasion. Capone eventually learned of E.J’s role, which cost him his life.

Although E.J. lived in Chicagoland for many years, St. Louis was home for Butch while growing up. With him were two sisters, Patsy and Marilyn, and mother Selma.

When he was 13, Butch was whisked across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois, and Western Military Academy, a private military school about 25 miles from St. Louis. Interestingly, among his best friends there was Paul Tibbets, who later became the U.S. Army Air Forces colonel who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Holidays and summers Butch spent back home in Missouri, where he continued practicing hunting and shooting—skills that would one day serve him well. By the age of 15 he had had his first experience with flying, as E.J. arranged to get him into a plane and even spend some time handling the controls.

The five years he spent at Western Military Academy were, by all accounts, good ones. His grades were solid, he played some football, and he was an excellent swimmer. He also began to shed some of the shyness and lack of self-confidence that had worried his parents when they first chose to send him to the academy.

In September 1932, E.J. and Butch’s mother Selma divorced. By that time E.J. had become part of the horse racing business in Chicago. Much of his time had to be spent there, and Selma wasn’t well suited to that life.

Speculation has centered on exactly what caused E.J. to put his life at risk to help the Treasury Department go after Capone. E.J.’s connection to the Feds was through Frank Wilson, a Treasury Department official loaned in 1928 to the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS for the purpose of investigating Capone. By 1930, E.J. was providing Wilson with information that led to Capone’s conviction. In fact, once Capone died in prison in 1947, Wilson stated openly, “On the inside of the gang I had one of the best undercover men I have ever known: Eddie O’Hare.”

Some have also speculated that E.J. worked with the government to avoid having his own less than squeaky clean income tax situation investigated. Another theory is that by helping put Capone in jail, E.J. would be removing from his own racetrack business a man known not only for illegal activities but also behavior as heinously violent as Chicago’s 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

One other thing about E.J. should be stressed. He did not want his son to follow in his footsteps in the gaming business. Noting that by the time Butch was graduating from the Western Military Academy the boy had begun to show a keen interest in flying, E.J. did everything to leverage this passion in any way he could.

E.J. was no doubt pleased when, in 1932, Butch applied to the U.S. Naval Academy and passed his entrance tests on his second try. On June 3, 1937, he graduated, ranking 255th out of 323. Few knew that World War II was around the corner, and who could have guessed that 41 members of the Class of 1937 would lose their lives in that conflict?

In Butch’s first assignment, he spent two years aboard the battleship USS New Mexico (BB-40) before heading off for preliminary flight training. He was stunned when he was informed that his father had been shot to death while driving his car in Chicago on November 8, 1939, most likely by Capone’s gunmen.

By 1940, when he was assigned to the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida, to train in Naval Aircraft Factory N3N-1 “Yellow Peril” planes and Stearman NS-1 biplane trainers, one thing was becoming abundantly clear: Butch O’Hare excelled at aerial gunnery.

When he was assigned to the fighting squadron VF-3, his commander was Lt. Cmdr. John (Jimmy) Thach, one of the Navy’s top airmen. Thach had come up with something called the “Bitching Team,” which consisted of a group of VF-3’s most highly skilled and experienced pilots.

One of these aces would take a newcomer into the air for a mock dogfight. Thach’s experience had taught him that the best approach was to gain altitude and then swoop down on an opponent’s tail, where he could home in for the kill. Few rookies mastered this skill quickly, but when Butch was so tested, by Thach himself no less, the rookie won the day. Thach was so impressed that he made Butch part of the Bitching Team.

Under Thach’s tutelage, Butch’s skills grew rapidly. Thach was greatly impressed by what Butch was able to get a plane to do. “He didn’t try to horse it around,” said Thach many years later in an oral history recording. “He learned a thing that a lot of youngsters don’t learn[:] that when you’re in a dogfight with somebody, it isn’t how hard you pull back on the stick to make a tight turn to get inside of him, it’s how smoothly you fly the plane.”

Thach attributed it to Butch’s acute and innate sense of timing and relative motion. Thach also admired Butch’s eagerness to read anything he could lay his hands on that might help him in aerial gunnery and his quick understanding of what he read. As Thach put it, “Butch just picked it up faster than anyone else I’ve seen.”

Apparently that wasn’t the only thing he did with remarkable celerity. On July 21, 1941,while at the hospital to visit a friend whose wife had just given birth, Butch met Rita Wooster, a nurse attending the new mother. When Rita’s shift ended, Butch drove her home. Upon arrival, he asked her to marry him. She pointed out that they’d only met that day, that she was several years younger, and that he wasn’t a Catholic as she was. None of it mattered, he replied, adding that he’d take instructions to convert. Six weeks later, they were married.

Three months after the nuptials, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On the morning of December 8, 1941, Butch and the rest of VF-3 were on their way to Hawaii to learn how and where they’d be deployed now that war had begun.

By mid-December they were onboard the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga (CV-3) headed west for Wake Island as part of Task Force 14. VF-3’s first loss occurred on December 22, when a plane piloted by Lieutenant Victor M. Gadrow had engine trouble that led to his crashing and sinking in rough seas.

A few days later, TF-14 was recalled to Pearl, so Butch and company saw no action at Wake Island. By December 31, the Saratoga was back at sea and heading west. That trip was cut short the evening of Sunday, January 11, 1942, when a Japanese torpedo struck the Saratoga. She was able to limp back to Pearl, but she was no longer part of the Butch O’Hare story. VF-3, with a full complement of 18 Grumman F4F Wildcats, was now attached to the “Lady Lex”—the aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-2).

On January 31, 1942, the Lexington was sent south as part of Task Force 11 under Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, Jr. VF-3 suffered its second fatality onboard the Lexington on February 8. Edward Frank Ambrose was crushed due to a malfunction in a block-and-tackle arrangement used to start the fighter planes’ engines.

February 13 saw the Lexington in the Solomon Islands in the Southwest Pacific, and Butch expected to be on combat air patrol shortly. But while some members of VF-3 were indeed sent airborne, including Thach, Butch’s orders were to stay in reserve. Thach downed a Japanese reconnaissance plane, as did Burt Stanley, another member of VF-3. Back onboard the Lexington, they described to their squadron comrades what VF-3’s first two kills had been like. According to Thach, Butch, having been kept in reserve so far, was pretty much fit to be tied.

O’Hare got his chance on February 20  when 17 medium bombers of Japan’s Fourth Air Group were sent in two groups (Chutai) to attack Task Force 11. These land-based torpedo bombers from the base at Rabaul, Papua New Guinea—nine in Chutai Two and eight in Chutai One—were Mitsubishi G4M1 attack planes, one of Japan’s most modern aircraft at the time. Characterized by a relatively fat fuselage and wide wings that came to an abrupt point, this was the plane that the U.S. Navy called a “Betty.”

At 3:42 pm on the day that Butch O’Hare made history, the radar systems of Task Force 11 detected the approaching Japanese Bettys. The nine-plane Chutai Two attacked first, and between 4:39 and 4:43 pm Wildcat pilots launched from the Lexington had eliminated five of the nine Bettys.

The pilot of one of the crippled torpedo bombers tried to crash his plane onto the flight deck of the Lexington, but 1.1-inch cannons and .50-caliber machine guns on the carrier helped make sure that didn’t happen.

Vice Admiral Brown said the concentrated fire nearly tore pilot and plane to pieces. “And as the plane swung by,” wrote Brown in his unpublished memoir, “only a few yards from where we stood, we saw that the pilot was dead, slumped at the controls, as he plunged into the sea.”

It was 4:46 when Butch was launched during the enemy’s aerial assault, and he couldn’t help but wonder if his carrier would still be afloat when he returned. Once aloft, he swiveled his head all around, amazed at the number of American planes dashing around him. He worried that the fight would be over before he could get a shot off.

So, along with another VF-3 Wildcat piloted by Duff Dufilho, he climbed to an altitude high above the ships and assumed combat air control position. At 4:49, right about the time the wounded Betty from Chutai Two tried but failed to crash onto the Lexington’s flight deck, the carrier’s radar detected Chutai One about 30 miles north-northeast and sent up a radio message warning of the threat.

Unfortunately, because all the other fighters had flown southwest to pursue what remained of Chutai Two, Butch and Dufilho were the only two fighters available to take on this new threat. So the two pilots positioned their F4F Wildcats between the Lexington and the incoming Bettys.

Butch test fired his four .50-caliber Browning machine guns, and all was fine, but Duff’s were jammed. O’Hare gestured to Dufilho to return to the carrier, but Duff refused, even though he knew he would only be a decoy in the upcoming fight.

With the eight Bettys less than 12 miles away from the Lexington and closing fast, Butch and Dufilho had an altitude advantage of about 1,000 feet. They also had with them the element of surprise, as the Japanese didn’t know they were there. But still, one armed fighter against eight enemy bombers?

Keep in mind, too, that in addition to carrying torpedoes, the Bettys—like American B-17s and B-24s—were bristling with firepower. There were a dozen 7.7mm Type 92 machine guns in each bomber, plus a 20mm Type 99 cannon in the tail.

It mattered not to Butch. “There wasn’t time to sit and wait for help,” he’s quoted as saying in Queen of the Flattops, a 1942 book by Chicago Tribune correspondent Stanley Johnston. “Those babies were coming on fast and had to be stopped.”

And stopped they were, thanks largely to four remarkable passes made by Butch. In each pass—termed by combat aviators a “high-side run”—he descended from above, fired bursts as short as possible to conserve ammunition, and then climbed back above the V formation of enemy bombers to begin another pass.

As crucial as piloting skills and sheer bravery were in this dogfight, being able to shoot accurately and efficiently trumped everything. Butch’s four guns each held about 450 rounds, which meant he had enough ammunition to fire for a grand total of about 34 seconds.

In his first pass he aimed for the trailing bomber on the right side of the V formation, firing into the right engine. Both the fuselage and a fuel tank were struck, and the surprised pilot fell out of formation to the right, streaming smoke. Next Butch aimed at the adjacent bomber on the right side of the V, this time igniting the plane and causing it, too, to fall out of formation to the right.

Pleasantly surprised that his first aerial combat had gone so well, he looked around for Duff but didn’t see him. It turns out that Dufilho had followed Butch into the battle in the hope of drawing some of the fire away from Butch. Like Butch, he survived the battle. He died the following August in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons.

Though these two Bettys were forced out of the attack formation, it turned out that they were not out of the fight. Both managed to recover sufficiently to later drop their bombs. This hardly mattered to Butch at the time, as he explained in a March 30, 1942, radio broadcast: “When one would start burning, I’d haul out and wait for it to get out of the way. Then I’d go in and get another one. I didn’t have time to watch [them fall]. When they drop out of formation, you don’t bother with ‘em anymore. You go after the next.”

Now it was time for Butch’s second pass, and this time he targeted the far left Betty in the attack formation. Again he aimed for the right engine, and again his aim was true. The third Betty dropped out of the formation and dumped its bombs harmlessly.

Still in his second pass, Butch now maneuvered into point-blank range and fired into the cockpit of one of the Bettys in the center of the V formation. This time his victim splashed into the sea. By now Butch and his airborne adversaries were so close to the Lexington that a whole new challenge presented itself: the 5-inch antiaircraft guns of Task Force 11.

Unfazed, Butch climbed above the Japanese bombers to make his third pass. Again he managed to splash one of the bombers, leaving exposed the lead bomber of the formation. Targeting its left wing, Butch fired so accurately that he shot the engine right out of the plane. Fatally damaged, it spun out of the formation and into the ocean.

Still not finished, Butch gained altitude again to make his fourth and final pass. But after firing 10 rounds he was done, all 1,800 bullets fired. So he climbed above the bursting antiaircraft fire and away from the fray. At this point there were still five of Chutai One’s original eight Bettys in the air.

By the time the battle was over, a total of six 250kg torpedoes were aimed at the Lexington. Not one hit its mark. In fact, of the 17 Japanese bombers that had left their base that day in Rabaul, only two made it back. Japan’s Combined Fleet headquarters was appalled at these losses, which wound up having hugely negative strategic implications for future combat.

As for Butch O’Hare, it was time to return to the Lexington. As he prepared to land, a nervous and obviously confused Lexington gunner opened fire on Butch’s Wildcat with a .50-caliber machine gun. Fortunately, he missed.

According to Thach’s oral recording, Butch later encountered the embarrassed young gunner and said, “Son, if you don’t stop shooting at me when I’ve got my wheels down, I’m going to have to report you to the gunnery officer.” Later, said Thach, Butch added, “I don’t mind him shooting at me when I don’t have my wheels down, but it might make me have to take a wave-off, and I don’t like to take wave-offs.”

Examination of Butch’s plane after it landed revealed that it had received minor damage from antiaircraft shell fragments, but only one enemy bullet had reached him, striking his right wing.

What he accomplished in just under four minutes above the Lexington would have been remarkable for even the most experienced and battle-hardened veteran. But this was O’Hare’s first combat experience!

And what did he make of it all? A reporter for the Washington Times-Herald captured this quote from Butch for a June 9, 1942, story: “It was just careful timing. You don’t have time to consider the odds against you. You are too busy weighing all the factors, time, speed, holding your fire till the right moment, shooting sparingly. You don’t feel you are throwing bullets to keep alive. You just want to keep shooting. You’ve got to keep moving. When you’re sitting (and you do have to sit to fire) you’ve got to get your shots off and then move again. The longer you sit, the better chance you’ve got to get hit.”

Butch participated in just one more combat mission, the March 10, 1942, raid on Lae-Salamaua in Papua New Guinea, before Task Force 11 and the Lexington headed back for Pearl Harbor. Butch would not return to combat for another 18 months, as the Washington brass decided that his recent heroics made him more valuable in PR and pilot training roles than in the role of a fighter pilot.

On April 15, 1942, amid rumors of a Medal of Honor being headed his way, Butch boarded a plane from Pearl Harbor to San Francisco, where he’d soon be reunited with wife Rita, mother Selma, and all the rest of the family. On the same day, many of his VF-3 comrades sailed aboard the Lexington on what proved to be her final cruise. Three weeks later, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, she became the first U.S. carrier lost in World War II.

Official confirmation for Butch’s Medal of Honor came on April 16. Three days later, Butch and Rita arrived in Washington to face the media ahead of the April 21 meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt during which the medal would be bestowed.

In Fateful Rendezvous: The Life of Butch O’Hare, Steve Ewing and John B. Lundstrom’s outstanding 1997 biography of O’Hare, the authors wrote, “As he was shuttled from one group of VIPs to another, Washington’s ‘take’ on Butch was that he was modest, somewhat embarrassed by all the flap, handsome, and very nice, and although not overly articulate, he nonetheless conveyed humor. His favorite comment was that he hoped his next aerial combat would not take place in front of an audience, such as the one on the Lexington, so that he would not again become ‘cannon fodder for the press.’”

On the morning of Tuesday, April 21, Butch and Rita were presented to President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, assorted admirals and politicians, and members of the press. First Roosevelt informed Butch that he had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant commander.

Roosevelt then moved on to what he described as the more important part of the ceremony. Using all the rhetorical flourish for which he was famous, the president proceeded to read the Medal of Honor citation:

“For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in aerial combat, at grave risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty, as Section Leader and Pilot of Fighting Squadron Three, on 20 February 1942. Having lost the assistance of his teammates, Lieutenant O’Hare interposed his plane between his ship and an advancing enemy formation of nine attacking twin-engined heavy bombers.

“Without hesitation, alone and unaided, he repeatedly attacked this enemy formation at close range in the face of intense combined machine-gun and cannon fire. Despite this concentrated opposition, Lieutenant O’Hare, by his gallant and courageous action, his extremely skillful marksmanship in making the most of every shot of his limited ammunition, shot down five enemy bombers and severely damaged a sixth before they reached the bomb release point.

“As a result of his gallant action—one of the most daring, if not the most daring single action in the history of combat aviation—he undoubtedly saved his carrier from serious damage.”

In fact, Butch had faced not nine heavy bombers but eight; some fog-of-war type details were still being sorted out when the citation copy was composed. It is also unlikely that Butch actually “shot down five enemy bombers.” After all relevant records are examined, it appears he actually splashed three bombers during the dogfight and heavily damaged three others. The fact that he single-handedly saved the Lexington from serious damage is beyond dispute.

After Butch and Roosevelt shook hands, the president, sitting in his chair, took the Medal of Honor from its case and asked Rita to put it around her husband’s neck. He then asked the new lieutenant commander what sort of improvements he thought should be made to the Navy’s fighters. Without hesitation, O’Hare said that he would like to see a plane that could climb faster than the Japanese Zero. O’Hare would get his wish; the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Company of Bethpage, New York, was already hard at work on one: the F6F Hellcat that would first see combat in August 1943. A more powerful 2,000 horsepower engine was also later introduced into the Hellcat. It would be in an F6F Hellcat that Butch would fight his last battle.

A rousing reception in St. Louis came on Saturday, April 25, 1942, when a huge crowd turned out to cheer for its native son. Proud mom Selma and sisters Patsy and Marilyn were naturally part of the parade. By now they were beginning to realize just what Butch had accomplished. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch proclaimed in a banner headline, “60,000 GIVE O’HARE HERO’S WELCOME HERE.” He was, indeed, a national hero.

In the ensuing months, appearances before aviation cadets at Norfolk, Miami, Corpus Christi, and Jacksonville followed. It was usually a matter of making a patriotic speech and pushing war bonds. Still pretty much shy and retiring, “the uncomfortable hero” as Ewing and Lundstrom put it, Butch hated every minute of it, referring to it as “the dancing bear circuit.” But apparently he saw it as his duty and soldiered on. Besides, Washington wasn’t about to have it any other way. Few things had gone right for America in the war up to this point, so now that a genuine hero and a positive story had emerged it was an opportunity to be seized, and seized aggressively.

Finally, by June 1942, Butch was headed back to Pearl Harbor, where he would take command of VF-3. Training now became his primary responsibility, and though he worried that his relative lack of seasoning and experience might be a liability, he devoted himself to the task at hand. By all accounts he excelled at it, not only by succeeding in getting his young fliers ready for the important battles that lay ahead in the South and Central Pacific, but also by earning the respect, loyalty, and friendship of just about everyone he encountered.

On July 15, 1943, VF-3 was reconstituted as VF-6. Soon the pilots and their 36 F6F Hellcats found themselves attached to the light aircraft carrier USS Independence (CVL-22), from which they participated in attacks on Marcus and Wake Islands in August of that year.

On September 17, 1943, Butch was named commander of Carrier Air Group Six (CAG-6). He now oversaw the training and operational deployment of 100 pilots. But he never let his rise in rank go to his head. One of the fighter pilots under his command around this time described him as “a quiet, easy-going person with a delightful personality—aside from being a topnotch flyer.”

Andy Skon, a fighter pilot whose Hellcat would be along for the ride when Butch met his death, described Butch as “very much a flying CAG” who liked nothing better than to be aloft at the head of his air group.

As CAG-6, Butch now reported to the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6), the “Big E” and flagship of Rear Admiral Arthur W. Radford’s Task Group 50.2 during the American assault on the Central Pacific’s Gilbert Islands.

For Butch and the other fighter pilots launched from the Enterprise, strikes were focused on Makin Island, and everything seemed to go well. But as the dust settled, Admiral Radford was coming to the conclusion that the Japanese were now realizing how outmatched they were in trying to attack the American naval forces by day. He was convinced that Japanese air commanders would order night torpedo strikes, and he was determined to create an effective deterrent.

The strategy they came up with, and Butch played a central role in devising it, was something of a three-legged stool: ship’s radar, radar on board a Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, and firepower from two F6F Hellcats. It all hinged on ship-mounted radar first detecting bogeys at considerable distances and then launching a TBF Avenger and guiding it to the bogeys by way of ship-to-plane radio communication.

The TBF Avenger also had radar, but it was far less powerful and was only useful to a distance of about six miles. So the idea was for the Avenger to piggyback on the robustness of the ship’s radar so that the Avenger could be positioned within striking distance of the bogeys. Two Hellcats would also be launched, and they would use radio communication to rendezvous with the TBF Avenger. Once the Avenger’s radar determined that the bogeys were within striking distance of the Hellcats, the Avenger would peel off, and the six .50-caliber machine guns of the Hellcats would neutralize the bogeys. It sounded simple, but was actually extremely dangerous.

By November 24, Radford ordered two three-plane night-fighting units—dubbed “Black Panthers” by Butch—into action at 3 am about 75 miles east of Makin. Needless to say, Butch was in one of the F6F Hellcats. While no encounter with the enemy ensued, it marked the first time in history that a night-fighter mission had been flown from an aircraft carrier.

Two nights later, on November 26, as reports came in to Radford that a night torpedo strike was imminent, he pondered if it was time to launch the Black Panthers for a second mission. From Radford’s memoirs: “On the bridge, as I decided what to do, Lieutenant Commander O’Hare approached me and requested that I send one of the Black Panther groups out.” Radford agreed.

At 5:45 pm, the “Pilots, man your planes” order rang out from the ship’s squawk box. A story in the Honolulu Advertiser said, “Stocky Butch was pulling on his helmet over his close-cropped black hair. He had widened a bit in girth in recent months, but the extra poundage had not lessened his ability to fly a Hellcat. One of the pilots shouted, ‘Go gettem, Butch.’ O’Hare’s reply was a grin. Then he dashed up a ladder to the flight deck.”

The idea was to intercept the Japanese night-strike group and then land either back on the Enterprise or at Tarawa atoll. Only one of the three-plane night-fighting units was to be launched. Butch and Andy Skon each piloted an F6F Hellcat. At the controls of the TBF Avenger was Lt. Cmdr. Phil Phillips, and joining him were gunner Alvin Kernan and Lieutenant Hazen Rand on radar.

O’Hare knew the mission was dicey and told Phillips that it was likely they wouldn’t make it back to the carrier, but would try for Tarawa instead. He told Phil, “We’ll be lucky if we even find the damned place.”

And so it was that at 6 pm on November 26, 1943, Butch’s Black Panther unit was airborne. The original plan to have all three planes united before attacking any Japanese aircraft was altered when the Command Information Center (CIC) sent Butch and Skon chasing after Japanese surveillance planes spotted on the Enterprise’s radar screen. Within an hour or so, having had no success in locating these planes, the two Hellcats went in search of the Avenger piloted by Phillips.

The rendezvous of the three planes was guided by radio communication from the Enterprise’s CIC, and by 7:25 the Avenger and the two Hellcats were finally united in the formation that had been originally planned: Avenger in the lead and Hellcats trailing left (Skon) and right (Butch). After the war, Kernan published his memoir titled Crossing the Line, in which he describes this final glimpse of Butch: “Canopy back, goggles up, yellow Mae West, khaki shirt, and helmet, Butch O’Hare sat aggressively forward, looking like the tough Navy ace he was, his face sharply illuminated by his canopy light for one last brief instant.”

To successfully complete the rendezvous of the Black Panthers, both Butch and Phillips had to turn on some combination of their planes’ running lights or recognition lights. Unfortunately, the lights didn’t go unnoticed by a Japanese Betty trailing the three American planes. It pounced.

“The long black cigar shape came in on the starboard side of the group across the rear of O’Hare … and began firing,” wrote Kernan, who had as good a view as anyone because he was facing backward in the turret of the lead plane. ‘Butch, this is Phil. There’s a Jap on your tail. Kernan, open fire.’

“I began shooting at the Betty. The air was filled with streams of fire, and a long burst nearly emptied my ammunition can. The Betty, as the tracers arced toward him, continued firing and then abruptly disappeared into the dark to port. I thought I saw O’Hare reappear for a moment, and then he was gone. Something whitish gray appeared in the distance, his parachute or the splash of the plane going in. Skon slid away. I thought that the Jap had shot O’Hare and then disappeared, but I also realized with a sinking feeling that there was a chance I might have hit O’Hare as well in the exchange of fire.”

At 7:34 pm, the Enterprise officially recorded that Butch was in the water. A desperate search that night by Phillips and Skon proved fruitless, as did a search the next morning by flying boats launched from Tarawa.

Deeply saddened at losing the skilled and universally popular Medal of Honor winner, Radford summed up the Black Panthers’ first night combat: “Believe our night fighters really saved the day. They mixed with the largest group, shot down two, and apparently caused great consternation. Had this [Japanese] group been able to coordinate their attacks with other groups, it would have been practically impossible to avoid all of them.”

No one will ever know for sure what happened to Butch that night, but Ewing and Lundstrom are convinced that he was not a victim of friendly fire. He was hit by machine-gun fire from the Betty, they believe. The authors also provide the following statistics to put Butch’s fate in context: “He was the first of seven carrier-based night-fighter pilots lost in combat, during which time the carrier night fighters flew 164 sorties, engaged the enemy on 95 occasions, and scored 103 victories.”

Among the tributes paid to Butch was the naming of the destroyer USS O’Hare (DD-889), launched in June 1945. But the biggest honor came in September 1949, when the Chicago-area Orchard Depot Airport was renamed O’Hare International Airport.

More than seven decades after Butch O’Hare’s exploits, many people—even those from Chicago—don’t know much, if anything, about the man for whom the airport is named. To help bridge this gap, in Terminal Two there is a display about the young pilot complete with photos, text, and an actual F4F Wildcat similar to the one flown by Butch. Used for training purposes over nearby Lake Michigan, it was restored after being recovered from the lake. Anyone passing through the airport who has an interest in history will want to stop at the display for a few moments and pay his or her respects to Edward Henry “Butch” O’Hare—an extraordinary man, pilot, and patriot.

This article by Patrick Reynolds originally appeared on Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

TNI Staff

Security,

Situational awareness.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Israelis’ massive situational awareness advantage given the capability of the Iron Vision system will give Tel Aviv’s seasoned tank crews a decisive advantage over the T-14 or any other Russian tank until Moscow develops an equivalent capability. In armored warfare, the crew that sees the enemy first almost always wins.

With its ongoing campaign in Syria proving to be a useful live-fire operational test and evaluation process for its latest weapons, it is perhaps not inconceivable that the Kremlin might eventually deploy the T-14 Armata main battle tank to that war-torn country.

The Russians are currently building 20 prototypes of the new tank and could build as many as 100 of the new vehicles for the Kremlin’s elite Taman Division. If the Kremlin did deploy some number of T-14s to Syria for operational evaluations under genuine combat conditions, there is a possibility the machines could face off against Israeli Merkava tanks if Tel Aviv chose to make a ground incursion into Syria.

The latest Israeli Merkava IVm Windbreaker is an excellent tank that is equipped with the Trophy active protection system (APS), Tzayad battlefield management system and advanced survivability features such as modular armor. Moreover, the Merkava IV will likely continue to improve—perhaps incorporating a revolutionary feature in the form of the Elbit Iron Vision helmet-mounted display system, which would allow crew members to “see” the world outside the tank via a series of external cameras without opening the vehicles’ hatches. The system, which provides unprecedented situational awareness, was tested in 2017 but it is not clear when it will be fielded—but it will be soon. Israel is the first to develop such technology, but Russia could eventually field similar hardware.

“The discussion among experts now revolves mainly around the question of whether the commander lacks the necessary overview when sitting in the tank or whether TV cameras and electro-optical aiming devices can actually provide the same information as the optical aiming devices and observation equipment on the current generation of battle tanks,” Captain Stefan Bühler, graduate engineer at the University of Applied Sciences, Explosive Ordnance Disposal Officer at the NBC-KAMIR Competence Center for the Swiss Armed Forces and Commander of Tank Squadron 12/1,wrote. “A look into the sky provides the (technical) answer: the pilot of an F-35 can look through the aircraft with his head-up display – a computer generates a virtual 3D world from the video signals from the cameras mounted all around, which is then faded into his optics depending on the pilot’s direction of vision. With such technology, as offered by the Israeli company ELBIT Systems under the name ‘Iron Vision’ for use on armored vehicles, the commander of a T-14 could see even more than the commander of a battle tank with a manned turret.”

The T-14, by comparison to the Israeli machine, also features advanced protection systems—possibly more advanced in some regards than that of the Merkava—but also features an unmanned turret. The Russian vehicle also offers excellent mobility—and its faster and far more agile than the comparative huge Israeli machine, which weighs 65 tons and has 1500hp engine.

“The T-14 has the same power output as the Leopard 2 or the M1 Abrams, however, with a combat weight of 48 tons, it is 20% lighter, resulting in a specific output of 31.3 hp/T (22.9 kW/T). In comparison its western counterparts with 24 hp/T (17.6 kW/T), this new vehicle is extremely agile,” Bühler wrote. “The T-14’s tracks are narrower in the current version compared to the Leopard 2 or the M1 Abrams, however, due to the significantly lower combat weight, wide tracks are also not absolutely necessary: the specific ground pressure will be about the same compared to the western counterparts.”

Further, given its combination of active protection systems, reactive armor and passive laminated armor, the T-14 could possibly offer better protection for its crew than a comparable tank such as the Merkava, which is a more survivable machine than either the Leopard 2 or Abrams. Bühler argues that the Armata’s unmanned turret offers some survivability advantages over manned turret designs. “Based on all these considerations, it must be assumed that the T-14 Armata offers the crew a higher overall level of protection than its western counterparts, despite its significantly lower combat weight,” Bühler wrote.

In terms of sensors and situational awareness, the Israelis almost certainly retain a massive advantage over the Russian T-14. However, Bühler notes that sensors are a problem for all tanks. “Compared to older optical systems, video cameras and electro-optical scopes are neither more nor less vulnerable to enemy fire or splintering. Optics are, and will remain, the Achilles’ heel of a battle tank, including the T-14,” Bühler wrote.

The disadvantage of the Armata’s unmanned turret is situational awareness. The commander cannot pop his head out of the vehicle to maximize to see. That problem could be solved by technology such as Iron Vision, but it is not clear that the Russians have that technology. It is certain that Moscow does not have such technology installed on the current versions of the T-14, but it could eventually as Bühler notes. The Israelis’ massive situational awareness advantage given the capability of the Iron Vision system will give Tel Aviv’s seasoned tank crews a decisive advantage over the T-14 or any other Russian tank until Moscow develops an equivalent capability. In armored warfare, the crew that sees the enemy first almost always wins.

This article first appeared in 2018 and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.