The National Interest

Ploy Pattanun Achakulwisut, Loretta Mickley, Susan Anenberg

Security, Americas

If the world stays on its current greenhouse gas emissions path, rising fine dust levels could increase premature deaths by 130 percent and triple hospitalizations due to fine dust exposure in this region.

The Dust Bowl in the 1930s was one of the worst environmental disasters of the 20th century. Intense dust storms relentlessly pounded the southern Great Plains of the United States, wreaking severe ecological damage, forcing 2.5 million people to leave the region and claiming unnumbered lives, mainly from “dust pneumonia.”

Research has shown that this disaster was fueled by a combination of severe droughts and over-cultivated lands. Today, climate change driven by human actions is enhancing the occurrence of droughts in multiple regions around the world.

As researchers working at the intersection of environmental health, air pollution and climate change, we wanted to know how increasing drought conditions and population growth in the U.S. Southwest could affect airborne dust levels and public health.

In a recently published study, we estimate that if the world stays on its current greenhouse gas emissions path, rising fine dust levels could increase premature deaths by 130 percent and triple hospitalizations due to fine dust exposure in this region.

Harmful effects of inhaling dust

If global greenhouse gas emissions are not sharply reduced, scientists project that the U.S. Southwest – already the nation’s hottest and driest region – will experience unprecedented multi-decade “mega-droughts” in the coming decades.

It is now well understood that short- and long-term exposures to airborne particles, including dust, pose major health risks. Effects range from increased hospital admissions to higher risk of premature death, primarily due to cardiovascular and respiratory disorders.

In our study, “dust” refers to soil-derived airborne particles generated by wind erosion or human activities, such as farming operations or travel on unpaved roads. Any soil particles smaller than 0.05 millimeters – roughly the width of a human hair – can be uplifted into the air. We focused on particles smaller than 0.0025 millimeters (2.5 microns), which are collectively known as “fine” particulate matter (PM). Particles this small stay in the air longer and cause the greatest harm to human health, since they can penetrate deep into the lungs.

Decades of epidemiological research have firmly established a link between exposure to fine PM and adverse health effects. Although more research is needed to differentiate between the potency and effects of various materials that make up fine PM, which also include emissions from fossil fuel combustion and other industrial sources, evidence suggests that dust is a significant contributor.

For example, silica, which makes up around 60 percent of windblown desert dust, is known to cause chronic lung inflammation, lung cancer and autoimmune diseases. Dust can also transport soil-borne pathogens and toxic contaminants over large areas. In the U.S. Southwest, dust episodes have been linked to outbreaks of valley fever and arsenic poisoning.

Dust and droughts in the U.S. Southwest

The southwestern United States, much of which consists of deserts and drylands, has the nation’s highest levels of airborne dust. The first question we investigated was how drought conditions occurring in different hydrologic systems, such as surface soils, river discharge areas and groundwater storage, have been influencing levels of airborne fine dust in recent years.

By analyzing data collected between 2000-2015 at 35 monitoring sites in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, we found that year-to-year changes in fine dust levels observed at each monitoring site tended to occur in sync. This pattern suggests that there is one or more common cause of large-scale changes in fine dust levels.

Indeed, we found that these changes were significantly correlated with soil moisture conditions across southwestern North America. Years with higher-than-normal fine dust levels were also marked by drier-than-normal soil moisture in areas spanning the Chihuahuan, Mojave and Sonoran deserts, the southern Great Plains and the Colorado Plateau.

Studies have shown that dust emissions within these regions primarily come from desert areas, dry lake beds, previously burned areas and lands disturbed by agricultural activities and fossil fuel development. Our findings are consistent with previous field studies showing that soil moisture can control dust emissions by modulating vegetation cover and soil stability.

Airborne dust and health risks under future climate change

In our next step, we quantified potential future changes in fine dust levels and associated public health impacts under two different climate change scenarios used in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The so-called “worst-case” scenario in the report is characterized by unabated, increasing greenhouse gas emissions over time. In the “best-case” scenario, dramatic cuts in emissions are required to hold global warming below two degrees Celsius.

First, we used projections of temperature and precipitation for the years 2076-2095 from an ensemble of 22 climate models in conjunction with our derived dust-soil moisture relationships to quantify future changes in dust due to changing drought conditions under the two climate scenarios. Since there is variation among climate model projections, using a large group of them allows us to gauge the robustness of the results.

We then estimated the resulting public health impacts by applying relationships drawn from studies that have quantified increases in risk of premature deaths and hospitalizations in representative U.S. populations due to exposure to fine PM. In these calculations, we also took into account projections of population growth for the Southwest and changing vulnerability to disease.

Under the worst-case scenario – the path we’re currently on – fine dust levels in the Southwest could increase by 30 percent by the end of this century compared to present-day values. This would result in a 130 percent increase in premature deaths and a 300 percent increase in hospital admissions attributable to fine dust exposure.

Even under the best-case climate mitigation scenario, we project that fine dust levels in the region could increase by 10 percent. This rise would increase premature deaths and hospital admissions due to fine dust exposure by 20 percent and 60 percent respectively, compared to present-day values.

It is worth noting here that we only looked at the isolated effect of future drought conditions. Changes in other factors, such as wind speed and human land use, may enhance or dampen our results.

Dust and droughts are a global threat

Other researchers have found results similar to our study in other parts of the world. For example, researchers have shown that the occurrence of dust storms in China and Saudi Arabia is modulated by rainfall or soil moisture in surrounding regions, which include remote deserts and drylands.

Today, drylands compose 41 percent of the world’s total land area and are home to around 2.1 billion people. On the world’s current greenhouse gas emissions trajectory, droughts will intensify and drylands will expand in parts of South America, Africa, Australia and the Mediterranean. Our findings highlight the potential for climate change to worsen air quality problems in many populated arid regions around the world – one of the many threats posed by climate change to human health and well-being.

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Ploy Pattanun Achakulwisut, Postdoctoral Scientist, George Washington University

Loretta Mickley, Senior Research Fellow in Chemistry-Climate Interactions, Harvard University

Susan Anenberg, Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health and Global Health, George Washington University

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

Image: Reuters.

 

Warfare History Network

History, Americas

An inspiring story.

General George S. Patton, Jr., was one of the most flamboyant and controversial figures of World War II. His career was also one of the most thoroughly documented of any of the war’s great commanders. Historians have had a treasury of material at their disposal as Patton was a prolific writer, kept personal diaries, and saved virtually every scrap of paper he ever handled. Additionally, his family and heirs have gone to great lengths to preserve the artifacts of his existence. Even with such voluminous, detailed, and often extremely personal material available on Patton, it was not until the 1980s that historians began to form a clear picture of the hidden elements that made up the man.

“A Genius of War”

Historians will inevitably examine the past through the lens of their own time; likewise, historical figures present themselves to their contemporaries according to the knowledge and prejudices of their epoch. Patton, who was always concerned about shaping his public image according to his own lights, did not care to call attention to his dyslexia; nor did those who wrote about his swashbuckling exploits as a tank commander in the aftermath of World War II care to investigate the subject, despite such red flags as the frequent symptomatic idiosyncrasies in his spelling and punctuation. Given the state of medical science in the 1940s and the postwar era, Patton could not have been aware that he may have also suffered from an affliction known today as attention deficit disorder (ADD), which afflicts many dyslexics; nor could historians have identified the condition until recently. Even the importance of Patton’s early family life, which led him to valorize war and model himself as the heir of his heroic Confederate ancestors, was neglected until recently.

Martin Blumenson brought the general’s dyslexia to attention in his 1985 biography Patton: The Man Behind the Legend. Historian Carlo D’Este enlarged upon Blumenson’s pathfinding work in his 1995 study Patton: A Genius for War, painting more clearly a picture of an oddly functioning Patton family that had shaped Patton’s entire life and ultimately enabled him to overcome, or a least deal with, his dyslexia and embark on a storied military career.

In trying to understand Patton’s career, we cannot afford to discount those aspects of his life that had long been hidden behind his martial bluster. Patton’s dyslexia and perhaps ADD, his immediate forebears, his unusual upbringing, and his early socialization developed the young Patton into what D’Este called “a genius for war.”

Evidence of Patton’s Conditions

The fact that Patton had dyslexia is supported by his family and documented by both Blumenson and D’Este. That Patton also had ADD will probably remain a matter of conjecture and speculation, although in his public life he exhibited many of the disorder’s behavioral symptoms: his flexibility and willingness to shift strategy, such as the quick deal he cut in Casablanca permitting the formerly Vichy forces to continue governing Morocco under Allied auspices in November 1942; his tirelessness when in pursuit of a tangible goal, as when he took command of the moribund II Corps in Tunisia in February 1943 and rapidly transformed it into a formidable fighting force; his boredom with mundane tasks, expressed in a 1916 letter during the garrisoning of the Mexican town of Dublan when he wrote his father, “We are all rapidly going crazy from lack of occupation and there is no help in sight”; and his startling ability to visualize and make ideas concrete.

Other ADD symptoms include poor impulse control, extreme mood swings in response to events, and short excessive tempers, all of which Patton displayed as a commanding officer, sometimes notoriously, as with his infamous slapping incidents during World War II in which he was accused of abusing enlisted men. The frustrations experienced by a person dealing with either dyslexia or ADD can be overwhelming and can often lead to serious self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, bouts of uncontrollable anger, and emotional hypersensitivity.

Dyslexia, which is often characterized by difficulty reading and by the transposition of letters or numbers, is considered to be a learning disorder. Having dyslexia, however, does not mean that a person lacks intelligence. Quite the contrary, many dyslexics are extremely intelligent and struggle mightily with the symptoms of the disorder. The dyslexic often has a different or unique mind-set, is often gifted and productive, but learns and perceives in a way different from others.

Both dyslexia and ADD have a genetic component. They are hereditary and run in families. In this light, perhaps George Patton’s genealogy is more important that even he imagined.

Growing up in Lake Vineyard

Patton was born on November 11, 1885, in San Gabriel, California, near Los Angeles, to doting parents from a financially comfortable background. His father spent several terms as district attorney of Los Angeles and ran unsuccessful campaigns for other public offices, including one as a Democratic candidate for Congress. In 1885, the year of George’s birth, he gave up the practice of law to take over the affairs of his deceased father-in-law’s business empire in an attempt to save it from the mismanagement of another relative. By 1899, the business was in foreclosure and new owner retianed the elder Patton as manager for many years. Despite all difficulties, no effort was spared by Patton’s father in providing a “proper” and, indeed, aristocratic upbringing for his children.

During George’s youth, the Patton family lived both in Los Angeles and at Lake Vineyard, the estate of his late grandfather, Benjamin “Don Benito” Wilson, an early American pioneer in California before the territory became part of the United States.

Blumenson credits Don Benito with some of the genetic makeup of the future general, including looks, driv, and tenacity. D’Este’s work reveals Don Benito as an extremely eccentric and physically rugged individualist. His exploits included lassoing and killing grizzly bears, surviving the poison-tipped arrow of an American Indian, and delivering the heads of rebellious Indians in a wicker basket to California’s governor. Patton would replicate that feat when he presented General Pershing with the bodies of three of Pancho Villa’s men during the Punitive Expedition of 1916. Like his ancestor, George Patton enjoyed and displayed a zest for combat, which contrasted sharply with his more low-key superior in World War II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Don Benito was a man of frightful temper who did not suffer fools and finally gave up carrying a gun lest he do something rash. There is more than just a suggestion that George S. Patton, Jr., owed a great deal genetically to Don Benito.

His environment shaped the young Patton as much as his heredity. The atmosphere of his childhood included the continual repetition of family lore that glorified participation in lost causes such as the Confederacy and the struggle for Scottish independence among his more distant forebears and emphasized the Pattons’ ties to the Southern planter aristocracy. There was also an ongoing exposure to the great military leaders of history and literature, of whom George learned while being read to by his family from Walter Scott, Rudyard Kipling, Homer, and other authors. In addition, a parade of famous martial figures visited his home as guests of his parents.

The building blocks of the general’s personality were laid out in Lake Vineyard, a place of open spaces, horses, and outdoor action.An expert horseman at an early age, George established himself as an accident-prone risk taker in his riding and childhood war games. He remained a magnet for accidents through his military career, from a tent fire that singed his face during the 1916 Mexican Expedition to auto accidents in the waning months of World War II. Patton’s military proclivity became evident at an early age. His father carved him a wooden sword, and the boy played continually with his sister and an abundance of cousins and friends who visited the Vineyard estate. Patton once said, “I must be the happiest boy in the world.”

Aunt Nannie

One of the more eccentric fixtures in the Patton household was George’s Aunt Nannie. When Ruth Wilson married the boy’s father, George Patton II, her sister, Annie, was devastated. Annie had fallen deeply in love with George II. Her sanity not quite intact and her love unrequited, Aunt Nannie, as she was known, nevertheless attached herself to the newly married couple and never left them. D’Este tells us that she shared everything in their marriage except the bed.

While his parents doted on George, Aunt Nannie was obsessed with him. She became a surrogate mother who shamelessly spoiled him. Nannie was the uncontested, often tyrannical ruler of the Patton household, often trying the Pattons’ patience with her refusal to allow George to be punished.

While George’s father amused him by reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, Aunt Nannie, having decided that George was “delicate,” began reading aloud to him classics such as Plutarch’s Lives and The March of Xenophon and stories about Alexander the Great and Napoleon. D’Este asserts that it was Nannie who deeply influenced his early education. George was a willing participant who listened attentively and absorbed deeply. The most influential work Nannie presented to George was the Bible, which she read him three or four hours a day. Jesus emerged from her exegesis as the quintessential example of human courage.

Nannie was never certain if her efforts were having any effect on her nephew and even came sadly to the conclusion that he was dim-witted. Until he started school at the age of 11, he was unable to read or write. Surprisingly, he could quote from memory not only lengthy Bible passages, but also entire volumes of poetry and long passages of history. Nannie’s unrelenting Bible readings caused the book to become the foundation on which George’s life was built. God dominated Patton’s speeches and his writings throughout his life and especially during the peaks and valleys of his career.

The Pattons’ Civil War Prestige

Where Aunt Nannie left off, Papa took over with vivid, lavish, and probably exaggerated tales of Confederate heroes of the Civil War. The dead colonels, George and Waller “Taz” Tazewell Patton, came back to life as Papa told and retold the stories of their heroic lives given willingly, tragically, in the cause of the South. The Pattons might now live in California, but emotionally they never left the Virginia plantations. It was Papa who taught George of his family heritage through the lives of Patton military men from the Revolution through the Civil War.

As assiduously as Aunt Nannie thumped the Bible and force-fed the classics, so with military history and family lore did Papa stoke George’s all-consuming fires. Papa was vicariously living his own truncated military career through his son. Sometimes he produced actual heroes for his son to emulate. Colonel John Singleton Mosby, the Confederate guerrilla who by the 1890s was a lawyer for the Southern Pacific Railroad, was a frequent visitor to the Patton home. He regaled the young boy with tales of the Civil War and the bravery of the Confederate Pattons.

Also among the living touchstones was George’s own beloved step-grandfather, Colonel George Hugh Smith, whose quiet counsel and tales of the Civil War instilled a profound sense of destiny in the boy. Blumenson and D’Este have noted that Smith may have been the greatest influence on Patton’s decision to become a soldier and continue the family’s martial legacy.

Papa was also willing to get down and play soldier with George. On occasion, the boy would wield his wooden sword against Papa, who would match his own father’s sword against his son’s. Papa also made sure that George learned to ride a horse sitting in the saddle from which Colonel George S. Patton had fallen fatally wounded during the Civil War. All told, the relationship between father and son was such that minor transgressions were willingly admitted and just as readily forgiven by the indulgent parent.

Learning with Dyslexia

George’s childhood prepared him to become a secure adult who knew what he owed the world and what he wanted from it. His place was securely at the top of respectable society, and although flawed and tormented, he never doubted his status. Blumenson writes that Patton’s position brought him a sense of superiority, a tinge of snobbery and racism. Patton was determined to realize his exalted, noble heritage. All his life, he honed his mannerisms—the profanity, arrogance, aristocratic bearing, the scowl, and the ruthlessness. And Blumenson says, “… the process killed his sensitivity and warmth and turned a sweet-tempered child into a seemingly hard-eyed and choleric adult.”

George’s early education was not unusual in his time, when children of privilege often were tutored at home until a relatively advanced age. Early on, however, his parents discovered their child had a learning disability that hampered his ability to read. Today that disability is recognized as dyslexia, a malady first identified in 1896, one year before the 11-year-old George entered the Classical School for Boys in Pasadena, unable to read or write. Dyslexia did not become widely recognized in the United States until the 1920s, well into Patton’s career as a military officer.

Dyslexia is not simply a matter of reversing letters or numbers but is a complicated disorder whose symptoms include hyperactivity, obsessiveness, mood swings, difficulty in concentrating, impulsiveness, and compulsiveness. Because of their effort to overcome difficulty in reading and writing, dyslexics can be driven by a compulsion to succeed. Yet, they often harbor feelings of inferiority. Virtually every common symptom of dyslexia can be found in the adult Patton. “I am either very lazy or very stupid or both for it is beastly hard for me to learn,” he told his future wife, Beatrice Banning Ayer, while still a cadet at West Point. This was despite his prodigious intellectual powers and ability to recall enormous bodies of text and information.

The Classical School for Boys, where Patton spent six years getting his first formal education, catered to children of the Southern California gentry. Patton was a diligent student who nevertheless struggled and faltered with algebra, geometry, and arithmetic because of his dyslexia. Drawing from his family-tutored knowledge, his marks in ancient and modern history were consistently high.

Patton at the Virginia Military Institute

His family was hardly surprised when George announced in 1902 that he would become an Army officer. Given so many years of indoctrination in the family heritage, his father surely would have been shocked if George had chosen any other profession. The family encouraged George to seek admission to West Point rather than Virginia Military Institute, the alma mater for three generations of Pattons. VMI remained an alternative, however, as entry into West Point was hardly guaranteed. Given the Patton presence at VMI since its founding, admission there was a certainty despite George’s mediocre school record.

Although his father attempted to pull every political string within reach, George was unable to secure a spot at West Point, and in September 1903 he started classes at VMI. This would give Papa another year to line up the political assistance he would need to crack the West Point barrier.

The trip to VMI was by train, and the strange and obsessed Aunt Nannie was part of the entourage, along with his parents. She set up housekeeping near VMI for the entire school year. The ritual of Aunt Nannie following her “son” from place to place was to become one of the more bizarre aspects of Patton’s family life.

VMI and George Patton suited each other well, partly because his father had prepared him impeccably, but also because George applied himself with a vengeance. His military work rose above that of his classmates, and his academic marks were good, even if he was struggling. Knowing that his dream of West Point could slip away, he redoubled his efforts, and his grades steadily improved. He was aided by the dyslexic’s need to strive hard to overcome all impediments.

Meanwhile, Papa worked tirelessly to win George’s appointment to West Point, and on March 4, 1904, he received a telegram informing him of success. Upon tendering his resignation from VMI, Patton learned that he would have been appointed first corporal at VMI had he returned. This signal honor was conferred on the outstanding plebe. By the time he entered West Point, Patton had taken a passable performance at the Classical School and forged it into an impressive one at VMI. The first real and significant challenge of Patton’s life had been conquered by dint of hard work and perseverance.

Pompous Patton

As at VMI, Aunt Nannie remained for the duration in close proximity to West Point and her beloved George. George believed that most of his fellow cadets at the academy were socially inferior to his classmates at VMI. He never lost his aversion to those of alleged inferior social status, a snobbish trait his grandson Robert ascribes to Patton’s father, who “considered himself to be of better stock, therefore of better character than most other men.” Patton himself wrote to his father that most “were nice fellows but very few indeed are born gentlemen…. The only ones of that type are Southerners.”

Patton’s caste consciousness was exceeded only by his bouts of mood swings, self-doubt, and self-aggrandizement. In numerous letters and conversations with his father, George alternately berated and then praised himself for one deed or another. All the while, Papa gave patient, judicious, and loving counsel to his son and provided support, advice, and reassurance whenever asked. Never judgmental, always analytical, he was the lens that allowed George to see his problems clearly. The only other people who could fulfill this need were Beatrice Ayer, the future Mrs. Patton, and the doting Aunt Nannie, whose odd presence George did not seem to mind at all. She provided a more immediate springboard for his emotions, doubts, and rages than the letters of Papa or Bea.

D’Este concluded that Patton was torn between an ability to see future greatness for himself and the possible effects of his dyslexia, which served unceasingly to implant the notion that he was both ordinary and stupid.

Patton’s classmates perceived him as pompous and overambitious. His penchant for self-promotion, honed razor sharp at West Point, lasted intact for a lifetime. His goal was glory, and any means to that end was fair. He aspired to become the first general from his class, an admirable goal but a tactless gaff when announced. His first command at West Point, as first corporal, was short lived. He was busted back to sixth corporal when he made himself foolish by putting more men on report than any other corporal. He could not understand why his over-the-top military style would be punished and vowed that he would never allow any slack under his command. Yet, in doing so he moderated his behavior so that the same fate would not befall him again. Throughout his career, he cultivated friendships and unabashedly called in markers, using his social status and whatever tools he could muster to promote himself.

Thriving with his Dyslexia

There were setbacks. Failing math, a typical hurdle for dyslexics, Patton was forced to repeat his plebe year, something he desperately wanted to avoid. This served two purposes: first to reinforce his feelings of inadequacy, and second to drive him to new heights of perseverance. It was at about this time that Patton began keeping a diary. He and his family had a habit of saving virtually every scrap of paper, every souvenir, and every trophy he ever acquired. The diary carried this a step further. When combined with volumes of his letters, pamphlets, poetry, and other communications, it has left historians with detailed indicators of the man. Even this was not without design on Patton’s part. The first diary carried a note from Patton that it would be important to a biographer some day. Prescience or arrogance? Perhaps both.

In his final year, Patton was named to West Point’s second highest rank, corporal adjutant. He was now in his element. In the class of 1909, Patton would graduate 46th out of 103 cadets. Upon graduation, he would marry Beatrice, the daughter of a Boston Brahmin and textile magnate, thereby validating his own aristocratic upbringing and instantly making him the wealthiest officer in the U.S. Army. Patton had survived into adulthood and, if he had not overcome his dyslexia, he had at least learned to thrive in his dyslexic world.

George Patton’s unique upbringing was the correct formula for bringing out the best in a dyslexic person. It provided the only way for him to become a historic figure of his stature. It would have been far more likely, given the extent of his disability, that Patton would become anonymous and marginal. Each person in George’s life played a vital role in his development, and the absence of any one of them could have left him unfavorably equipped for any meaningful career in a society that misunderstood his condition. Each of them, no matter how eccentric, outrageous, perfect, or flawed, provided a learning environment tailored for the combination of brilliance and disability that was George Patton.

This article by Glen Jeansonne, Frank C. Haney, and David Luhrssen first appeared in the Warfare History Network several years ago.

Image: Army Lt. George C. Patton jumping an obstacle during the equestrian segment of the Modern Pentathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden. Joint Base San Antonio.

John Perry

History, Americas

Prisoner Number One.

During the early hours of December 7, 1941, five midget submarinesof the Imperial Japanese Navy waited to enter Pearl Harbor, the anchorage of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Their mission was to complement the attack of naval aircraft in dealing a crippling blow to the American naval presence in the Pacific. This ambitious plan failed. Only one craft survived, HA-19, along with one member of its two-man crew, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, who became “Prisoner No. 1” of the United States in World War II.

The Midget Submarines

Sakamaki grew up in a tradition-bound Japanese culture that showed deep reverence for family, teachers, and Emperor Hirohito. He later explained, “We were taught, and we came to believe, that the most important thing for us was to die manfully on the battlefield—as the petals of the cherry blossoms fall to the ground—and that in war there is only victory and no retreat.” So, he applied for admission to the Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima and became one of 300 chosen from 6,000 applicants. After graduation, he spent a year at sea, then was promoted to ensign and ordered in April 1941 to report to the Chiyoda, a converted seaplane tender, at the Kure naval shipyard.

Sakamaki had been chosen to take part in the development of a secret weapon, the midget submarine, and would join an elite group called the Special Attack Naval Unit. Cadets received training on the island of Ohurazaki, along with a theoretical education at the Torpedo Experimental Division of the Kure Navy Yard. Classes were also held on the tug Kure Maru and seaplane tenders Chiyoda and Nisshin. This intense training program, which was observed and monitored, caused some cadets to drop out and others to commit suicide. Only the finest survived.

Sakamaki and his fellow crewman, Warrant Officer Kiyoshi Inagaki, learned the ins and outs of their special craft. Each sub held two crewmen because of cramped space. The only entrance was through a 16-inch hatch in the conning tower. The Imperial Japanese Navy called these minisubs Ko-Hyoteki, but those attached to units used the mother sub’s name, such as I-24’s midget. Paul J. Kemp says in Midget Submarines that these were “perhaps the most advanced midget submarines in service with any navy during the Second World War.”

Built in 1938, these cigar-shaped minisubs stretched nearly 80 feet with batteries arranged along each side. They could travel at a speed of 23 knots surfaced and 19 knots submerged, but battery charges lasted only 55 minutes. None of the craft carried generators, so they required recharging by a tender or mother submarine.  The torpedo room housed two 18-inch torpedoes, each with around 1,000 pounds of explosives in the warhead. The Japan Optical Manufacturing Company perfected a specialized 10-foot-long miniaturized periscope in secrecy.

In fact, great secrecy shrouded the entire project. The Japanese eventually produced over 400 vessels of four types in a special factory near Kure. Of these, around 60 Type A submarines, the type commanded by Sakamaki, were built. Only key commanders knew details. Dispatches called the craft Special Submarine Boats Koryu (dragon with scales) and other creative names to avoid revealing the true nature of the machines.

When the subs first arrived, one seaman recalled, “After we secured, a barge came alongside each submarine. The barges were carrying strange objects heavily screened by black cloth and guarded by armed sailors and police. The objects were hoisted onto the casing and secured in the cradles—still wreathed in their coverings. We, the ship’s company, were not informed what the objects were. It was only when we proceeded to sea for trials in the Sea of Aki that we learned what we were carrying.  The morale on the submarine was incredible.”

Piggy-Backing to Pearl Harbor

In mid-October 1941, maneuvers around islands in the Inland Sea shifted from mid-ocean strategies to invading narrow inlets at night. “When Captain Harada told us to pay particular attention to Pearl Harbor and Singapore,” Sakamaki recalled, “we thought that one group would probably be used against Pearl Harbor and another group against Singapore.” After crewmen graduated and received a 10-day leave, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet, spoke to them aboard the battleship Nagato and emphasized the importance of their secret mission against Pearl Harbor.

Five submarines, I-16, I-18, I-20, I-22, and I-24, were to carry midget submarines behind their coming towers. Each minisub would travel piggybacked to the large submarine’s pressure hull with steel belts and was to be released while the mother ship was submerged, enabling it to avoid exposure to the enemy. Some officers opposed the daring plan to use midget submarines to attack American ships in the narrow confines of Pearl Harbor. Captain Hanku Sasaki, commander of the First Submarine Division, wondered if the big submarines could handle so much weight. “There was too much hurry, hurry, hurry,” he criticized after the war.

Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the air attack against Pearl Harbor, scoffed at the entire plan. Others thought the midget submarines rolled and pitched too much. Their conning towers were exposed, and they depended on mother ships for equipment and maintenance. Besides, the element of surprise, which was essential to the success of the air attack, might be compromised if the midget submarines were discovered.

Sakamaki’s minisub was strapped to submarine I-24, which was a long-range reconnaissance type, 348 feet long with a 30-foot beam.  Nine thousand horsepower enabled them to reach a surface speed of 22 knots. A telephone line from HA-19’s conning tower connected the two craft, and an attached cylinder between the boats allowed crewmen to stock supplies and make periodic equipment checks en route. On November 18, 1941, Sakamaki wrote home, “I am now leaving. I owe you, my parents, a debt I shall never be able to repay. Whatever may happen to me, it is in the service of our country that I go. Words cannot express my gratitude for the privilege of fighting for the cause of peace and justice.”

The five I-class mother ships and their Special Attack Force minisubs left Kure and headed across the North Pacific to Pearl Harbor on a moonless night. They traveled slowly because of cargo and rough weather, running submerged during the day to avoid detection and surfaced during the evening, maintaining a distance of about 20 miles from each other. Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, skipper of I-24, remembered many troubles during the ocean trip to Hawaii, including clogged pumps, defective valves, and gear malfunctions.

Once I-24 nearly sank because of a stuck blow-valve, which was freed at the last moment. After surfacing, the crew found a crushed torpedo on Sakamaki’s midget sub and worked all night to replace it with a spare.  Hashimoto later said, “This operation may sound easy enough, but in fact, it was far from simple. The lack of space on the narrow upper deck made transporting something weighing over a ton to the after-end of the boat no mean task, say nothing of having to dispose of the damaged torpedo quietly over the side.”

“We were Members of a Suicide Squadron”

The five midget submarines were to be launched off the coast of Oahu where they were to quietly enter Pearl Harbor, navigate around Ford Island counterclockwise, and strike the U.S. battleships moored in the shallow water of the harbor. The minisubs were initially expected to attack between the first and second waves of the air attack. When the American battleships attempted to get underway and escape to the open sea, they might be crippled and clog the mouth of the harbor. “I was astonished and felt as if suddenly petrified,” Sakamaki remembered of the moment the details of the plan were revealed to him. “The effect was like a sudden magic blow.”

Although the plan called for the midget submariners to rendezvous with their mother subs to be recovered on December 8, 1941, about eight miles west of the island of Lanai, Sakamaki realized that the mission was suicidal. The midget submarines lacked battery power to travel such a distance after the assault.

Sakamaki said, “We were members of a suicide squadron. We did not know how we could ever come back.” Rear Admiral Hisashi Mito, who commanded a division of submarine tenders, also remarked after the war that all minisub crewmen “were prepared for death and not expected to return alive.” The name “Special Naval Attack Unit” was a euphemism for suicide attack in the Japanese language. These submariners predated later kamikaze attack units.

By the night of December 6, the mother ships neared Hawaii, and the flickering lights along Oahu’s Waikiki Beach were visible. Landing lights at Hickam Field on Ford Island blazed. Jazz music floated from radios and bars.  Everything appeared calm. The large subs fanned out within 10 nautical miles of Pearl Harbor’s mouth and waited for the moment to launch their midget submarines.

“On to Pearl Harbor!”

Shortly before the launch, Sakamaki wrote a farewell note to his father, made a will, and cut the traditional fingernail clippings and lock of hair for the family altar. Then, he put on his uniform, a cotton fundishi (breech-cloth), leather jacket, and a white hachimaki headband. He and Inagaki also sprayed themselves with perfume of cherry blossoms, and both were now ready to die honorably according to the Bushido code of conduct for Japanese warriors.

After loading their midget sub with everything from charts to tools and chocolate, Sakamaki scrawled in his log that the two sailors would go naked instead of wearing uniforms.  He also wrote, “Today, I will shoulder one important mission, and diving into Pearl Harbor, will sink the enemy’s warships. I was born a man in our country and the present daring enterprise is really the peak of joy. Disregarding the hardships and bitter dangers of the past year, I have trained and the time has come when I will test my ability here. These tubes [submarines] are the pick of our navy. Moreover, they are the result of the wisdom and skill of several tens of thousands of Japanese. In the present operation, the strength of the crew is even more prepared than the torpedoes and certainly we are all completely affected by a feeling of self-sacrifice.”

A final test before launching, however, uncovered a gyro failure on the minisub. Inagaki made a frantic attempt to repair it—without success. So Sakamaki decided to steer by memory, use a magnetic compass, and rely on periscope checks for location, all foolish but heroic choices. When asked if he wanted to back out, he replied, “On to Pearl Harbor!”

Around 3 am on December 6, Sakamaki and Inagaki squeezed into their black-hulled craft through the attached cylinder. Theirs was the last sub launched. Telephone lines were cut.  Heavy steel clamps released. The sailors moved toward Pearl under their own battery power, but trouble shadowed their midget sub from the start.

During the launch, HA-19 took a nose dive and nearly stood on its head. Sakamaki reversed the engines to slow down the descent, while Inagaki shifted ballast around and filled tanks with water to correct the trim. HA-19’s thin pressure hull would crack below 100 feet.  It took hours to fix things, which set the nerves of both men on edge. Afterward, they ate rice balls and drank grape wine before raising the ship to check its location through the periscope.  They had gone 90 degrees off course and were heading back out to sea.

“My hands were wet with cold sweat,” Sakamaki recalled. “I changed the direction three or four times, hoping against hope that somehow the ship would get going where I wanted to go.” But the tube would not head toward the harbor all night.

December 7th

The sun rose on Sunday, December 7, and HA-19 still remained outside the harbor’s entrance. Looking through the periscope, Sakamaki saw several U.S. destroyers moving back and forth across the entrance to Pearl. He decided to run the gauntlet, but the sonar aboard the destroyer USS Ward, which had sunk one of the midget subs earlier in the morning, picked up Sakamaki’s HA-19 and dropped depth charges that shook it violently. Sakamaki lost his balance, hit the side of the conning tower, and lost consciousness.

“I came to myself in a short while and saw white smoke in my submarine,” he later wrote in his memoir I Attacked Pearl Harbor. “I changed the speed to half gear and turned the ship around. I wanted to see if any damage had been done to the ship. My aide was all right.  The two torpedoes were all right. So I got ready to try again to break through the destroyers.”  HA-19 shot ahead. More depth charges came from the Ward. Sakamaki ordered another dive.

When Sakamaki later brought the minisub up to periscope depth, he saw columns of black smoke rising from inside the harbor. Ships were burning. The air attack had succeeded. This prompted him to head straight for the harbor, but the sub went aground on a coral reef, its bow lifting out of the water, propellers spinning in reverse. Most accounts say that the destroyer USS Helm fired shots at HA-19, which missed but knocked the sub loose, damaging one of its torpedoes. Sakamaki, however, said he was told later that a destroyer fired on the minisub, but he “didn’t hear any loud explosions at all at the time.”

The situation worsened. Gas leaks from the batteries made both Sakamaki and Inagaki sick and dizzy. They had to move 11-pound ballast pigs from front to rear on the slippery flooded floor, suffering electric shocks and becoming exhausted from the hot and foul atmosphere.  Temperatures reached around 135 degrees inside. They finally freed the minisub but found its torpedo-firing mechanism defective, which now left them weaponless.

Sakamaki wept at the thought of failure and decided to ram a battleship, turning HA-19 into a manned torpedo. “I had set out for Pearl Harbor with the purpose of sinking a battleship,” he later explained to a U.S. Navy intelligence officer. “Although we were able to reach the mouth of the harbor by creeping underneath your bombs falling like rain, our accident was fatal to the submarine. So we determined to proceed without hesitation on the surface of the water, dash into the harbor and climb the (USS Pennsylvania’s) gangway ladder. We hoped to leap onto the deck and die simultaneously with blowing up the enemy warship.”

But this fanciful plan also backfired. Depth charges had disabled the tube’s steering ability, and it spun around erratically. Interior air pressure rose to above 40 pounds. The sailors choked and gasped. Their eyes burned. Lurching made them dazed and weakened. Both seamen finally collapsed, and the craft drifted out to sea.

When Sakamaki finally awoke, he opened the hatch to get fresh air from the cool breeze and saw land. Initially, he thought he had reached the rendezvous point off Lanai. Instead, he was near Bellows Field on the eastern shoreline of Oahu. He tried to start the sub, but its batteries sputtered and went dead. HA-19 then ran aground. The two Japanese sailors decided to set off an explosive charge in the after battery room and swim for it. Sakamaki lit the detonator fuse, and both jumped overboard.

“The water was cold,” Sakamaki later wrote. “The waves were big. I could not move freely and I swallowed salt water. One minute. Two minutes. No explosion. I began to worry about the ship. The midget submarine had to be destroyed. I wanted to go back, but there was no strength left in me. Neither my aide nor I could shout to each other. Strength gradually went out of me. Then I saw my aide no more.  He was swallowed up by the giant waves. I lost consciousness.” U.S. soldiers later found Inagaki’s body.

Prisoner No. 1 of the Pacific War

Before dawn on December 8, Lieutenant P.C. Plybon and Corporal D.M. Akui, serving beach duty near Bellows Field about 15 miles east of Pearl Harbor, saw someone swimming toward shore.

“At first we thought it was a big turtle, and then we could see his arms moving as he swam,” said the lieutenant. Corporal Akui fired a rifle shot over the figure’s head. Then Plybon waded into the water and seized Sakamaki, who was wearing only an undershirt and a g-string with 15 cents in Japanese currency sewn into a prayer belt. He dragged the dazed, 127-pound Japanese sailor to shore with the help of Corporal Akui. The Americans shackled his hands and feet, rolled him in an army blanket, and tied him up. Taken to a detention station and interrogated, Sakamaki became “Prisoner No. 1” of the Pacific War.

The humiliated Sakamaki asked only to commit suicide. “My honor as a soldier has fallen to the ground,” he told American intelligence officers. “Due entirely to my inexpert navigation and strategy, I betrayed the expectations of our 100 million people and became a sad prisoner of war disloyal to my country.”

Around 8:45 am, lookouts spotted Sakamaki’s submarine from an observation tower.  It was beached on a reef about a mile from shore. A reconnaissance plane with two officers from the 86th Observation Squadron aboard flew out and made a sketch of the midget sub, which they gave to the squadron commander. Several Navy planes then dropped bombs around HA-19 in an attempt to dislodge it from the coral reef. The commanding officer at Bellows Field contacted the Navy submarine depot, requesting that salvage specialists investigate the situation.

Examining the Midget Sub

On the rainy morning of December 10, a crew from Pearl Harbor arrived to salvage the disabled minisub, eventually towing it to shore by attaching a cable to its conning tower. A young radioman named Charles L. Jackson was told by his chief to strip down, swim out the few yards, and take a look: “I didn’t argue,” he commented. “I quickly backed away, then swam to the side of the sub and pulled myself up near the conning tower. I looked back at the chief and he motioned to me to enter the boat. I opened the hatch and nearly fell off the side. The stench was so great, I took a few deep breaths, then climbed on top of the tower to let myself into the small opening of the hatch … As I looked around the darkened interior, I saw the communication gear on the starboard side, a navigation chart and instruments were on the port side.”

Several others joined Jackson on the midget sub. “As I worked on dismantling the radio, the officer crawled forward to examine the torpedoes while the chief went aft into the battery compartment to examine the batteries and propulsion gear,” he said.

During the search, Jackson found an official U.S. Navy chart of Pearl Harbor penciled in with positions of warships. This chart led a board of inquiry to believe that Sakamaki’s midget submarine had actually entered the harbor and traveled around Ford Island before the attack. The theory was later discarded because ideographs gave no sense of the time element, notations seemed too neat and organized, and such a route presented execution problems.

Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the time of the attack, also reasoned, “It didn’t make sense. They could see from the hills, so why risk a submarine going in there?… I would strongly discount anything except the most positive evidence that the Japanese were stupid enough to send a submarine in there merely for the purposes of observing.”

Although experts first hoped to examine HA-19 on land at Bellows Field, they decided to dismantle the vessel into three sections and examine it at Pearl Harbor. A year later, on November 30, 1942, a bronze plaque on a stone base was placed in front of the post headquarters at Bellows Field to honor those men who helped capture Sakamaki and the Japanese minisub.

“Remember Pearl Harbor”

The curious tale of midget sub HA-19 continued. Although it had suffered damage to the rudders, torpedoes, propellers, and bow net cutter, the vessel still remained in good condition and was outfitted as a traveling exhibit without periscope, motor, and most of its original equipment. Damaged parts were repaired with parts from a midget sub rammed in Pearl Harbor by the destroyer USS Monaghan. Electrical fixtures were installed, dummy batteries and motor added, and 22 small windows cut in the hull.

During the war, HA-19 toured 41 states on a trailer, draped in red, white, and blue bunting, promoting the slogan “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Millions bought war bonds and stamps to get a glimpse of the vessel and look inside.  Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt inspected it at Mare Island. The traveling HA-19 raised enough money to repair all the ships damaged at Pearl Harbor during the brutal attack.

After the war, HA-19 sat rusting at the Navy Pier in Chicago. It was later sent to a museum in Key West, Florida, and is now on display at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas.

The Japanese high command spread propaganda that one of the midget subs had sunk the battleship USS Arizona, which had actually been destroyed from the air. One book praised, “Dashing courageously into Pearl Harbor, they completed their task and then calmly awaited death. It came, and they faced it with smiles on their faces. When our thoughts dwell on their gallant deed and we recall their great act of sacrifice, how can we help but become overcome with the deepest feeling of emotion?”

Paintings and postcards romanticized the midget submarine sailors who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor, but Sakamaki is excluded from any mention. His image is not present in memorial artwork. The Japanese were aware that HA-19 and Sakamaki had both been captured. Having failed in his mission and lived, Sakamaki had become an outcast.

40 More Minisubs

Throughout the war in the Pacific, Japanese midget subs made meager contributions. The Pearl Harbor plan had apparently failed.  Around 40 more minisubs failed to achieve any notable success at Guadalcanal, the Aleutians, the Philippines, Saipan, Okinawa, or Sydney, Australia. One, however, nearly made history when its torpedo narrowly missed the cruiser USS Boise in the strait between Negros and Siquijor Islands. Aboard the ship at the time was General Douglas MacArthur, commander of Allied forces in the South Pacific.

After the war, Kazuo Sakamaki married, wrote his memoirs, and eventually rose to become Production Chief of Toyota’s Export Division in Nagoya. He later became president of Toyota in Brazil. He died on November 29, 1999, still remembered as “Prisoner No. 1” of the Pacific War.

This article by John Perry first appeared at the Warfare History Network.

Image: Midget Japanese submarine beached at Bellows Field, Hawaii, after the attack on  Pearl Harbor of Dec. 7, 1941. U.S. Navy.

Andrew Dix

Politics, Americas

He should watch these movies.

Strange to say, but Donald Trump might have been a filmmaker rather than real estate magnate. As he informs us in The Art of the Deal, his book of autobiographical recollection and business advice, he “flirted briefly with the idea of attending film school at the University of Southern California”.

Hotels, apartment blocks and casinos, rather than movie lots, ultimately became the favoured spaces for demonstration of Trumpian creativity. But he has remained a keen fan of cinema, and in 2012 identified his five favourite films for Movieline: Citizen Kane (1941), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Gone with the Wind (1939), GoodFellas (1990) and The Godfather (1972).

What do these films tell us about the Trump worldview? Each offers a spectacle of male potency, often in peril but persisting in the face of opposition, whether this is exerted by women or by forces of law and order. These movies can be understood as offering Trump support, in celluloid form, for a philosophy Oliver Jones calls social Darwinist: “He views the world as an irrational jungle where the most successful people are tough, masculine and neurotic.”

But what would a canon of anti-Trump cinema look like? Where might we find films that challenge his expressed values or the policies ? Here, countering his Movieline choices, are five movies that Trump might learn something from.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

While Trump’s campaign pitch presents the businessman in America as heroic visionary, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film unveils him instead as a sociopath. The pursuit of oil in California by Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) crushes bodies and destroys family bonds; at the end, guilty of murder, he hunches alone and defeated in his version of Trump Tower.

(This first appeared in 2016.)

The film offers subversive insights, also, into how an entrepreneur fashions a winning persona: the ruthless Plainview addresses those whose land he would possess in folksy and god-fearing rhetoric, practising public relations techniques that will be perfected in our advanced media age. Were Trump to appreciate satire (not his favourite genre, one suspects), he might learn something here.

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (2007)

In this harrowing Romanian film directed by Cristian Mungiu, a student, assisted by a female friend, desperately seeks an illegal abortion. Trump’s thinking on abortion has proved adjustable for different constituencies, shifting latterly from pro-choice to pro-life. But Mungiu graphically shows the effects of curtailing women’s rights in the exploited bodies and damaged psychologies of his two protagonists.

Here too, in the film’s emphasis on social constraints, is an antidote to Trumpian optimism. The power of positive thinking, imbibed by Trump as a young New Yorker from clergyman and self-help author Norman Vincent Peale, can achieve nothing in the world of this film.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

In his 2015 book Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, Trump reiterates his sense of the nation as citadel: “Nobody can build a wall like me. I will build a great wall on our southern border.” Tommy Lee Jones’s blackly comic neo-Western finds holes and crossings in the US/Mexico frontier, rather than sealing off each nation from the other. Illegal migration here is also southward rather than exclusively northbound, as an American border guard who begins in a state of Trumpian paranoia heads into Mexico looking for redemption.

The Age of Stupid (2009)

Included in this film’s montage of ecological casualties are the casinos of Las Vegas, now buried in sand. Not Trump’s own Vegas skyscraper, admittedly, but still worryingly close to home. (Or perhaps, to Trump, not so worryingly, given this political campaigner’s scepticism towards climate change – the short chapter on the subject in Crippled America is subtitled “A Lot of Hot Air”.) Mixing apocalyptic sci-fi imagery with testimonies by globally dispersed witnesses, Franny Armstrong’s film aims instead to produce environmentally activist viewers.

Bob Roberts (1992)

Bob Roberts is running here not for president, but for a senator’s seat in Pennsylvania. The similarities with Trump are nevertheless uncanny: each has been educated in military academy and business school, each is a highly successful entrepreneur, and each galvanises audiences by summoning up visions of US decline. While more scatter-gun than focused in its political satire, the film’s account of Roberts’s unlikely success displays a sense of panic familiar to American progressives in our present moment. Tellingly, its last word, after the credits, is “VOTE”.

There is, however, no guarantee that a Trumpian reading even of these five films would be progressive. Trump revealed a capacity for inventive movie interpretation – deflecting rather than absorbing challenges to his worldview – in remarks he made about Citizen Kane for the US film director Errol Morris in 2002. He chooses not to see the film as a disturbing portrait of the authoritarian personality or of the businessman as dangerous populist (the favoured view of critics). Instead, asked by Morris what advice he would give Charles Foster Kane, Trump dwells only on Kane’s two troubled marriages and replies: “Get yourself a different woman.”

Once again, then, the subject of Trump’s ideal cinema is revealed as the aspirational American male, ever mindful of threats to his potency.

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Andrew Dix, Lecturer in American Studies, Loughborough University

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

Image: Reuters.

Chris White

Politics, Americas

Is that possible?

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s struggle to defend some of his lofty proposals at Tuesday’s debate raises questions about some of his other ideas, namely those stemming from his version of the Green New Deal.

Sanders revealed his own GND in August 2019, promising everything from “virtually free” electricity and a “hunger-free” transition to green energy from fossil fuels. The democratic socialist’s nearly 14,000-page memo also lays out how he will deal with a variety of social justice issues.

“Generating revenue from the wholesale of energy produced by the regional Power Marketing Authorities. Revenues will be collected from 2023-2035, and after 2035 electricity will be virtually free,” according to the memo on the Sanders campaign website.

It contained one significant caveat.

The cost of electricity under Sanders’s plan is dependent on operation and maintenance costs, the memo notes, which could be substantial if past reports are any indication. Critics say Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would force American taxpayers to shell out trillions of dollars over the next decade to pay for the transition.

Republicans in the Senate torpedoed the Ocasio-Cortez’s legislation in March 2019 as Democrats called the vote a dog-and-pony show. The GOP defeated the proposal 57-0; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the bill a socialistic ploy designed to kill the economy.

The resolution called for “10-year national mobilizations” toward addressing climate change. A fact sheet published alongside the proposal said the plan would “mobilize every aspect of American society on a scale not seen since World War 2.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s GND would reportedly phase out fossil fuel usage within 12 years, but could cost tens of trillions of dollars, some reports show. Americans could be forced to pay up to $93 trillion to implement the proposal over a decade, the conservative-leaning American Action Forum (AAF) noted in a study in February 2019.

Sanders, for his part, is pegging his campaign to an ambitious plan — to nationalize U.S. electricity generation. He laid out a $16 trillion plan transitioning such forms of generation away from oil and other fossil fuels and toward green energy projects like wind and solar power.

Moderate Democrats have ripped Sanders’s plans.

“What the Sanders proposal would do is create an 800-pound federally owned power gorilla that would make it very hard for the existing generators to compete,” Josh Freed, head of energy and climate policy at Third Way, said in a Feb. 2 Politico report. Third Way opposes Sanders.

Freed added: “I think a plan like this could turn off voters in large parts of the country. It would have challenges in Pennsylvania, Michigan — a lot of the states that are competitive for the election.”

Sanders’s Democratic opponents ambushed the Vermont senator during Tuesday’s debate.

Sanders defended himself after former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg characterized his policies as radical and communistic.

“Is Medicare for all, universal health care, some kind of communist radical agenda?” Sanders asked in response at one pint in the debate. He also took great pains to explain how he would pay for his Medicare-for-all proposal.

Sanders’s campaign has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

This article by Chris White first appeared at the Daily Caller.

Image: Reuters.

David Uren

Economics, World

Just as the course of the virus is uncertain, so too is its likely economic impact.

The US and Australian share markets were touching record highs until 21 February, when they woke up to the possibility that the novel coronavirus—which had by that stage infected 78,000 people and killed nearly 2,400—would have a global economic impact.

The immediate trigger for the market taking fright was the report of outbreaks in South Korea, Japan, Italy and Iran, which led to concern that the virus wasn’t confined to China’s central province of Hubei but was becoming a global pandemic.

But just as the course of the virus is uncertain, so too is its likely economic impact; predictions vary wildly and it’s difficult to trace the effects of previous epidemics.

In its interim economic assessment released on 2 March, the OECD forecast that global economic growth will be just 2.4% this year, down from 2.9% in 2019. This represents lost output of around US$425 billion.

The OECD says the projected drop reflects the impact of the virus on confidence, financial markets, the travel industry and business supply chains.

Modelling by Australian National University economists Warwick McKibbin and Roshen Fernando comes up with much larger numbers, showing a pandemic would lead to a loss of global production of anywhere from US$2 trillion to US$9 trillion, depending on how many are infected and killed by the virus. Their modelling assumes a pandemic results in the death of at least 15,000 people and possibly as many as 68,000.

However, it’s been hard to identify the economic effects of past global health crises. A study conducted at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1990s found it was impossible to detect a statistically significant effect on per capita income in the African economies where it hit hardest.

Moreover, the study by one of the world’s leading experts in the economics of demography, Harvard’s David Bloom, along with Melbourne University’s health economist, Ajay Mahal, found that neither the bubonic plague in the 14th century nor the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was associated with any measurable fall in incomes or output.

In the case of AIDS, they suggest that the African countries most affected already had high unemployment, so labour shortages didn’t emerge, despite the high impact on working-age men.   Higher income and more productive workers were more likely to take preventive measures and avoid the disease, with the burden falling most heavily upon the poor. The greatest responsibility for healthcare was taken on by community-based organisations and family networks, which provided services more efficiently than the formal health system.

About 75 million people are estimated to have been infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic in the early 1980s, and 32 million have died.

In the case of the bubonic plague, which spread in several waves through Western Europe between 1348 and 1374 killing around a quarter of the population, the researchers were able to track the wages of unskilled British labourers working on the estates of the bishops of Winchester between 1310 and 1449, using a measure of inflation calculated with reference to the historical price of wheat. They could see the effect of the plague on population measurements, but there was no statistically significant effect on real wages.

The Spanish flu epidemic had its greatest impact in India, claiming an estimated 20 million lives or 6.2% of the country’s population. The study compared the acreage sown to crops in the provinces that were worst hit with those with lower mortality rates and found there was no measurable difference in output per person.

A more recent study done for the World Health Organization by two leading health economists,  Victoria Fan and Dean Jamison, along with former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers, says looking at potential loss in per capita income is the wrong way to measure the impact of an epidemic, because it puts no value at all on the lives that are lost.

‘If, in assessments of investments in pandemic preparedness and mitigation, we neglect this dimension of loss, we will underestimate the value of such investments, relative to alternative uses of public finances’, they say.

Their study used methods borrowed from the life insurance industry to estimate the expected loss from an influenza pandemic that resulted in 720,000 deaths, and came up with an economic impact of US$500 billion.

They noted that their study did not take account of the cost of non-fatal illness or the fear of pandemics, adding that intense media coverage may lead populations to overreact to mild pandemics.

Fear can have a big effect. A later report by Bloom for the International Monetary Fund notes that Liberia’s GDP growth collapsed by 8 percentage points in the wake of the Ebola outbreak in 2013–14, even though the country’s overall death rate fell in that period.

For the moment, it is the mixture of fear of the pandemic and official efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus that are having the biggest impact. Quarantines are making it difficult for workers in China to get to their workplaces, while travel restrictions are throttling the universities. A mix of travel restrictions and public fear has led to plunging tourism turnover.

Yesterday, the US Federal Reserve announced an unscheduled cut in interest rates by 0.5 of a percentage point. The Reserve Bank of Australia also lowered interest rates yesterday, by 0.25 basis points, and there are calls for the government to provide the sort of economic stimulus that helped Australia avoid the worst of the 2008 global financial crisis. However, the reality is that such policy measures have no effect on the supply bottlenecks that are squeezing businesses.

Then there’s the possibility of second-round effects. Economists have been warning for years about excessive Chinese corporate indebtedness, so there are concerns that the drop in turnover might result in a debt crisis. Just last week, news emerged that the Chinese aviation and property development conglomerate HNA Group is in crisis and seeking a government bailout over its US$75 billion debt while electric car maker Nio is trying to secure a US$1.4 billion bailout from a municipal government.

There are similar vulnerabilities in the US leveraged loan and junk bond markets, where debts can keep being rolled over only as long as underlying demand in the economy remains strong.

David Uren is an honorary associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

This article first appeared at the Australian Strategy Policy Institute.

Image: Reuters.

Michael E. Haskew

History, Europe

The least fearsome army of World War II...

After assuming dictatorial powers in Italy, Benito Mussolini remained a popular figure with the Italian people – for a time. The Fascist dictator enacted large public works programs, expanded the military, and created jobs. A popular expression noted that he “made the trains run on time.”

Always, however, Mussolini was pursuing a foreign policy that he believed would restore Italy to the glory days of the Roman Empire. In the process, Il Duce, or the leader, would be lionized as a modern day Caesar. Blinded by ambition and to divert attention from the economic hardship of the Great Depression, Mussolini embarked upon a series of military actions for which Italy’s armed forces were hardly well prepared.

Supporting Francisco Franco

The Italian Army invaded Ethiopia in 1935. During a brutal war, the Italians used aircraft, tanks, machine guns, and poison gas to subdue the Ethiopians, and Il Duce proclaimed the beginning of the 20th century Roman Empire. However, the victory in Ethiopia was more show than substance, and Mussolini’s future military adventures foundered.

In 1936, Mussolini threw military support to the Nationalists of Francisco Franco, who were fighting a civil war with the Republican government of Spain. Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany also supported Franco, and Italy received little tangible benefit for its military commitment. Although he had been wary of Hitler at first, Mussolini became enamored with the Nazi leader and obligated his country to the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936, the Tripartite Pact the following year, and the Pact of Steel in 1939. During a five-day campaign in April of that year, his army overran the tiny country of Albania across the Adriatic Sea. That military victory, such as it was, signaled the last Italian battlefield success of any consequence.

In June 1940, Mussolini declared war on Great Britain and France, affirming his devotion to Hitler and ultimately sealing his own fate. In October, Il Duce sent his army across the Albanian frontier into Greece. The Greeks, however, proved to be no pushover, and the German Army eventually intervened to subdue the Greece and its fighting allies of the British Commonwealth.

A Predictable Outcome

When Mussolini’s armies in North Africa took on the British, the result was predictable. By early 1941, the Italian Army had been humiliated in the desert. More than 140,000 Italian soldiers were taken prisoner in just two months from December 1940 to February 1941, during the British offensive codenamed Operation Compass. Once again, Hitler came to Mussolini’s rescue, sending General Erwin Rommel and the soon-to-be legendary Afrika Korps to stabilize the situation.

Events then spiraled completely out of Mussolini’s control. He had obviously become the junior partner in the Axis coalition, and while Hitler’s forces had marched from victory to victory his own ill-equipped and poorly led army was regularly drubbed. Rapidly, Il Duce’s popularity wavered and then collapsed. The Italian people grew tired of the news of endless defeats, lengthy casualty lists, and the hardship of rationing.

His dream of empire shattered, Mussolini effectively lost his war in 1942. By the summer of 1943, he was ousted from office and imprisoned. Only the good graces of Adolf Hitler, whose elite special forces troops rescued him from a mountaintop prison, staved off inevitable retribution. Shot dead by a Communist partisan in April 1945, Benito Mussolini died in shame, his body strung up by its heels in front of a garage in the city of Milan so that his once adoring public might jeer and batter his corpse.

This article by Michael Haskew first appeared at the Warfare History Network several years ago.

Image: Mussolini in Mailand, Germany. May 1930. Bundesarchiv.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

Better than an airship?

Key point: In the WWI era, these bombers represented a significant improvement. However, they weren't enough to win the war for Berlin.

On May 25, 1917, a fleet of 21 bombers lumbered in a line at 12,000 feet over the English coast. The biplanes, each carrying 13 bombs, had wingspans exceeding 70 feet, immense for World War I aircraft. German military leaders called the planes Gothas, hoping the name would add an element of terror to English citizens in their homes below.

Earlier that day the Gothas, a top-secret weapon carefully concealed at Belgian airfields, had taken off and headed toward England, about 175 miles away. The super-bombers were led by Ernst Brandenburg, personally selected to head Kagohl 3, the elite of Kaiser Wilhelm’s bombing squadrons organized for raids on England. The target was London. Because the British weren’t expecting these newly designed warplanes, they were not prepared to spot their arrival or to stop them.

Ironically, in the spring of 1917, British residents believed the battle for the skies over their country was already won. They had been able to sleep soundly in their beds for about eight consecutive months with no German Zeppelins daring the North Sea with their deadly bombs. The Gothas now heading toward London had a much greater potential for causing damage than the Zeppelins, which could muster only small bomb loads.

The German Gotha

Although no other bomber, German or Allied, cradled more than two 112-pound bombs, the Gotha was capable of carrying more than 10 times that amount and dropping them with remarkable accuracy by using a high-tech Goerz bombsight.

Twin engines gave these bombers a top speed of 88 miles per hour and a ceiling of 16,000 feet, well above the reach of most defensive fighters then based in England. Because the Gothas flew so high, tanks of liquid oxygen were available if needed by crewmembers. The aircraft’s many unique features convinced German leaders that the Gotha was a plane capable of winning the war.

The 34-year-old Brandenburg took off with 23 bombers from grass fields near Ghent and headed for the Nieuwunster Airfield 40 miles away to refuel. (A reserve fuel tank was later installed under the upper wing to avoid this delay on future raids.)

One Gotha experienced engine problems halfway to the coast and landed near Thielt. Another suffered fuel line problems over the North Sea and began falling behind. Unfortunately, Brandenburg had no radio (because of its prohibitive weight) to find out what was wrong with this Gotha, which was painted with undulating serpents from nose to tail. Finally, the pilot of the troubled plane fired several red flares to indicate he was turning back and dumped his bombs into the sea. Meanwhile, an observer on board scribbled a message about the bomber’s problems to be carried back to a German coastal station by one of two pigeons aboard.

“The Whole Street Seemed to Explode, With Smoke and Flames Everywhere”

Brandenburg had marched off to war in 1914 as an infantry officer, but after being severely wounded ended up an air observer flying over the front. From observer he had moved up to command the important Englandflieger, or England Squadrons, which he was now leading up the Thames Valley without opposition. Thick, towering clouds greeted the planes over the capital instead of the clear weather forecast in Belgium. Accurate bombing would be impossible, so the pilots reluctantly turned southeast and headed off to find another target.

They dropped a scattering of bombs along the way over Kent. These were aimed at Lympne Airfield and destroyed a few British airplanes about to take off. The Gothas then went in search of Folkestone, a major supply port for British armies in France.

The sky was clear at this seaside resort filled with unsuspecting crowds in a holiday mood for a Whitsun celebration. The Gothas droned high overhead. Although the raid lasted only 10 minutes, 60 bombs found their way to unsuspecting throngs in the Tortine Street shopping district. “The whole street seemed to explode, with smoke and flames everywhere,” one eyewitness reported. “Worst of all were the screams of the wounded.” The death toll was 95 along with 260 wounded, far higher than from any German Zeppelin airship raid.

The Gothas droned out over the North Sea again for the return flight to Belgium, ending their raid. The Germans had just introduced a new degree of aerial warfare, changing how wars from the sky would be fought during World War I and in future wars.

German efforts to create strategic bombing from the air with specially designed monster planes sprang from the hope of escaping the war’s hideous and interminable slaughter of ground troops. The bombers appealed to the German emperor and his High Command because they believed civilians had been softened by the Industrial Age and saw a chance to strike at the working class, considered Britain’s soft underbelly.

The Kaiser’s Secret Weapon

Brandenburg was personally selected to head Kagohl 3, the elite of the Kaiser’s bombing squadrons for the raids on England, by General Ernst von Hoeppner. Kagohl 3 was attached to the German Fourth Army in Flanders, but operated independently of fighting on that front. Its orders came directly from the German Army High Command (OHL).

A striking commander with dark, intelligent eyes, Brandenburg emphasized training his crews to handle the unwieldy bombers and to fly together like geese. In the middle of May when the Gothas were ready for their first raid on London, the revered Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was driven to a Flanders airfield in a large open car to give Kagohl 3 airmen a fitting sendoff. The lined-up planes were snow-white except for bold black crosses on their tails and fuselages and customized body painting to suit a crew’s own taste.

The Germans began air attacks in late 1914 by using their unique Zeppelins. While drawing considerable publicity, these airships caused only minor damage. When the OHL lost faith in the Zeppelins, it ordered increased Gotha bomber production. These planes were produced by the Gothaer Waggonfabrik AG Company, a prewar maker of railway carriages. The German High Command wanted 30 Gothas ready by late May.

Dubbed “the Kaiser’s secret weapon,” Gothas were a big improvement over early aerial combat efforts in small, rickety planes. Early emphasis had been on “dogfights” between opposing pilots, then some airmen began tossing small bombs from their open cockpits. Soon French pilots were dropping pencil-sized steel darts called flechettes on unsuspecting ground troops 1,500 feet below. Some were said to have fatally wounded a German general riding on horseback.

Bombing efforts gradually became more sophisticated until larger bombers like the Gothas were specially designed to pack a bigger wallop. Gothas were only 41 feet long, far shorter than their extensive wingspans. Two early Gotha models had 72-foot wingspans, with wings on more widely used G.IV models extending 77 feet. The bombers ranged from the G.I model with two 160-horsepower Benz motors, to the improved G.IVs equipped with more powerful 260-horsepower Mercedes motors. The fuselage and wings were made of plywood and fabric.

Brandenburg Pounces on London

In the front sat the navigator/bombardier, who was also the front gunner. Behind were the pilots. The tail had two guns reachable by a tunnel running through the rear fuselage. One was called the “sting in the tail” because it shot downward to cover the tail’s blind spot. The other rear gun was able to shoot above the plane if an attacker approached from that direction.

The machine guns were fitted with electrical dynamo-driven heating so they could be fired in the cold air of high altitudes. Because of chilling temperatures, the airmen dressed as warmly as possible. In addition, oxygen was taken along, but it wasn’t always used. “We rather preferred to restore our body warmth and energy with an occasional gulp of cognac,” claimed one pilot.

Brandenburg had to wait weeks for another try on London, but when good weather was predicted, he pounced. Brandenburg and 14 Gothas took off from Ghent at 10 am on June 13, hoping to return before forecast thunderstorms at 3 pm.

By midday the Gothas were droning up the Thames. The distant rumble was heard first by English suburb dwellers, who stepped outside to watch the planes—their wonder greater than their fear. They stared in awe at the distinctive formation three miles up. Because of their great height, a British volley from ground guns proved fruitless.

At 11:35 am, the Gothas dropped some bombs on London’s East End, with a cluster falling between the Royal Albert Docks and the borough of East Ham. Eight men were killed at the docks and bombs damaged some sheds, offices, and railway cars. Brandenburg, in the lead plane, fired a white flare signaling the Gothas to unleash their main bomb loads, Liverpool Street Station being the prime target. With terrible explosions, 72 bombs landed within a mile of the terminal—only three hit the station itself. Some victims were trapped in a wrecked dining car and two coaches were set afire.

Anxiety Sweeps the British Capital

Six Gothas then flew across the Thames near Tower Bridge to bomb the Southwark district railway station. Warehouses along the river suffered other blasts. Nearby, a Tottenham Court Road factory was burned out, and 34 casualties resulted when a bomb blasted a Royal Mint mechanic shop. Over the East End borough of Poplar, a bomber dropped a 110-pound bomb on the Upper North Street School; of the nearly 600 students, some 20 were killed and more than 30 injured.

The circling Gothas quickly closed up into formation and fled the capital. They faced only a few attacking planes over the suburbs, killing one British observer-gunner, but losing none of their own aircraft. The whole mission took about five hours. That night the Germans at the airbase threw a big party, with Captain Brandenburg proclaimed a hero. In all, his attack killed 132 people and injured 432—more than in any previous airplane or airship raid.

While the British admitted this first London raid was spectacular, they insisted it was far from crippling. Nevertheless, it caused a depressive anxiety to grip the capital. Because many workers feared the bombers could return, they stayed away from East End factory jobs. Meanwhile, citizens harangued local politicians over the safety of their homes and families. Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his War Cabinet felt something had to be done to soothe the aroused public and decided to call back two fighter squadrons from the war front, home-based planes not being up to the task.

Brandenburg was seriously injured in a plane crash while returning to his airfield from a report to OHL. The Germans named Captain Rudolf Kleine his successor and urged more raids. The new 30-year-old squadron leader with deep, brooding eyes never gained the affection of the crews that Brandenburg had enjoyed, though he commanded their respect.

London residents were surprised again on July 7 when 21 Gothas raided a second time. Most bombs fell on private homes, plus a few offices and warehouses in northern and eastern London. The Gothas also sank a Thames barge and damaged a pier. Although only 57 people were killed and 193 injured—less than half the first London raid’s toll—Kleine terrified much of the populace by bombing their rundown houses instead of military targets.

The Brits Struggle to Counterattack

The British sent 95 planes aloft on July 7, but most were old and no match for the Gothas. The defense also lacked overall direction and coordination. Prime Minister George felt a new voice was needed to solve this problem and picked Jan Smuts, the well-known South African statesman, to form a committee to study the situation. This eventually led to the creation of an effective air defense system, plus the formation of the Royal Air Force (RAF).

Soon improved countermeasures were coordinated by a high command of operations newly located in the Horse Guards Parade building. The British began to learn the preferred routes of the Gothas. To better counter nighttime raiders, English spotters designed a system of warning Londoners by changing the natural gas pressure. When the lights went up and down twice, Londoners had to draw all their window curtains, thus depriving Gotha crews of visual navigation and bombing aids. In addition, Gothas had to contend with more skillfully aimed antiaircraft barrages and fighter planes that knew their routes. At night, powerful searchlights probed the sky. Also helping was the ingenious British invention of barrage balloons. They trailed steel cables designed to cut through the wings of attacking planes if unsuspecting German pilots flew too low. Indeed, here was a “Battle of Britain” and “Blitz” 22 years before the Hitler’s air campaign of 1940.

The British eventually learned how to shoot down Gothas, but many more of the German behemoths were lost in landing accidents. The mammoth biplane was notoriously nose-heavy, especially when bomb loads were expended and fuel was low. When these Gothas returned in storms, the landings were described “controlled crashes,” with many of these crack-ups bringing heavy crew casualties.

Four-Engine Biplane Giants

Nevertheless, Gothas had a powerful effect, especially during a week near the end of September 1917. These were the “Harvest Moon Raids,” the pilots sighting by the light of the moon. Residents became so unnerved by the continual bombings that 300,000 or more people a night flocked to the London Underground. It got so bad that entire families started taking to the streets at night with pillows, blankets, and food baskets along with dogs, cats, and caged birds to head for the Underground before an air raid alarm even sounded. With many Londoners’ nerves shaken, Prime Minister George summoned newspaper editors and warned them to tone down their bombing accounts.

More was to come. The Germans unleashed on England even bigger bombers, four-engine biplanes nicknamed “Giants,” which had been developed on the Eastern Front. The Riesen or R-type had 150-horsepower Benz engines and a wingspan of nearly 92 feet. OHL ordered Squadron 501 from the Eastern Front to the West and to fly the largest R-39 Giants then being built by the Zeppelin-Werke at Staken, Germany. These were the largest German aircraft produced in any quantity during World War I. They had a 138-foot wing span, just three feet shorter than that of the World War II U.S. B-29 Superfortress.

A Giant’s basic crew included an aircraft commander, two pilots, a wireless operator, two flight mechanics, and a fuel attendant. Two gunners could be added as needed. Although essentially a monstrous biplane, the R-39’s fuselage was surprisingly modern. The forward section was built of plywood and completely enclosed. Two pilots sat up front with the throttle controls between them. A Bosch generator produced current for the lighting system and the crew’s electrically heated flying suits. Ground radio stations monitored each Giant’s flight path, making it possible, for the first time, for a bomber to fly blind in stormy weather. Moreover, Giants surpassed Gothas in bomb load capacity. They could carry nearly two tons of explosives, with projectiles sighted and released electrically from the bomber’s nose. Unfortunately for the crew, the planes were even more difficult to land than Gothas, and as it turned out, few Giants were available for raids over England.

Brandenburg’s Last Raid

Englandflieger members got a big surprise in January 1918 when Brandenburg, wearing an artificial leg, appeared on the Ghent airfield. After Kleine’s death, Brandenburg won his old command back, begging not to have to sit out the war as a decorated cripple, but he found a squadron demoralized and thinned from losses. Nevertheless, he would put on a show. OHL wanted a display of air strength as a prelude to the great Spring Offensive of 1918. Instead of going after military targets, the Germans candidly admitted trying to compel the British to maintain a large military zone in England that would hold back resources from the Continent.

The nights of the Giants began in late January, when Squadron 501 raided London for the first time without Gotha bombers. One Giant dropped the biggest bomb of the war: A monster by WW I standards, it was 13 feet long and weighed a metric ton. On February 16, 1918, the Giants’ commander, Captain Richard Von Bentivegni, aimed this bomb at Victoria Station. It was way off target and tumbled down more than a half mile away into the Royal Hospital grounds at Chelsea. Blown sky high was a hospital staff officer’s residence in the North Pavilion, killing five family members.

Meanwhile, Brandenburg was planning the largest raid of the war for May. He assembled 38 Gothas and two single-engine planes to fly in advance as weather observers and to drop a few bombs on Dover. Although still crushed by his recent plane losses, Bentivegni planned to lead his three remaining Giants. That meant a total of 43 airplanes, 16 more than had ever been sent before against England. They launched the raid on the evening of May 19, Whit-Sunday, a holiday. Bombers flew in the dead of night and dropped 11 tons of explosives. Over a thousand homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged. Forty-nine British were killed and 226 wounded. Casualties reportedly would have been much higher if not for pleasant weather and the holiday, leaving London partially deserted.

But the Englandflieger’s biggest raid attempt also was its worst defeat. Ten Gothas were forced back before even reaching the English coast. Seven were shot down and only 16 reached London. One crashed near its airfield on the way home.

Brandenburg wanted to launch other London attacks, but his squadron was committed to supporting the German Army. He couldn’t get approval for any more raids on England.

On their side of the Channel, the British had learned some lessons. They had fashioned the basics of a defensive system that would hold them in good stead during the renewed German effort of 1940. With radar, it proved unbeatable.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikipedia.

David Axe

History, Europe

Hitler's life had troubled beginnings. 

Key point: Hitler wasted no time leading his country into a genocidal war.

On April 1, 1924, 34-year-old Adolf Hitler — a socially awkward painter and former soldier from Austria — arrived at Landsberg prison in Bavaria to serve a five-year sentence for organizing a failed coup that got 18 men killed, including four policemen.

Hitler stepped into Landsberg as the occasionally self-doubting head of a tiny, impoverished and amateurish anti-semitic political movement — the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He would walk out nine months later a more self-assured figure steadily gaining prominence and power.

And arguably more importantly, Hitler left prison as the author of Mein Kampf, a two-volume memoir and political screed that, in the words of biographer Volker Ullrich, “connected [Hitler’s] biography and his political program.”

In doing so, Mein Kampf — published between July and December 1925 — did the initial work of creating a cult of personality around its author and subject. Hitler was the Nazi Party. And Landsberg was his, and Nazism’s, laboratory.

There is no shortage of books about Hitler. But Ullrich’s new biography Hitler: Ascent, 1889–1939, recently translated from German to English, stands out for its thorough research and aversion to myth-making. “The global entertainment industry has long since appropriated and transformed Hitler into a sensationalist, pop-cultural icon of horror,” Ullrich writes.

Equally troubling, studies of Hitler tend to skew toward one of two extremes — structuralism and intentionalism. That is, did larger political and cultural forces create Hitler the leader? Or did Hitler create himself?

Ullrich’s mission, he writes, is “bringing it all together and synthesizing it.” This balance is evident as Ullrich explores Hitler’s time in Landsberg. “Imprisonment only encouraged Hitler’s belief in himself and his historic mission.”

Helpfully for the budding dictator, Bavarian authorities had imprisoned Hitler and his fellow coup plotters — most notably, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s future deputy — together. Hitler’s “fellow inmates, first and foremost Hess, did everything they could to strengthen his conviction.”

The Austrian and his imprisoned compatriots met daily for lunch. “Hitler’s fellow inmates would wait, standing silently behind their chairs, for the cry, ‘Attention!’ The Fuehrer would then walk, accompanied by his inner circle, through the rows of his faithful followers and sit down at the top end of the table.”

Hitler gave a little speech. “Sieg heil!” his followers cried.

Landsberg was eminently comfortable for Hitler — more comfortable, in fact, than many of the shabby apartments and boarding houses young Hitler had lived in for most of his adult life.

This was no accident. Through Hitler’s arrest to his trial and sentencing, the Bavarian government had demonstrated that it was equally fearful of Hitler’s rising influence and sympathetic to his philosophy of racial bigotry. “I know you,” one of Hitler’s prison guards told him. “I’m a National Socialist, too.”

“Hitler enjoyed a wide variety of privileges,” according to Ullrich. “His ‘cell’ was a large, airy, comfortably furnished room with an expansive view. In addition to the hearty food cooked by the prison kitchen, Hitler constantly received care packages; his quarters reminded some visitors of a ‘delicatessen.’”

Hitler’s abortive putsch — and his commensurate prison sentence — demonstrated to the German populace that Hitler was “a man who not only talked, but acted in critical situations — and who was willing to take great personal risks.”

And for Hitler, being in prison eased the stress of daily living, allowed him plenty of time to visit with supporters — up to five per day — and afforded him the leisure and focus to write Mein Kampf, which he tapped out “hunt-and-peck” style on a typewriter that prison officials gave him.

And so Hitler relaxed, ate, honed his leadership and oratory skills, worked on his book — and behaved himself. In sharp contrast to the seditious behavior that had landed him in Landsberg, while in prison Hitler was a perfect angel. “Hitler scrupulously avoided any conflict with prison authorities.”

Behaving wasn’t just Hitler’s way of maintaining his prison privileges. Playing nice also represented a key philosophical turn for Hitler. Where before the aspiring strongman had aspired to overthrow the state, now Hitler wanted to gain control of the state … by way of the state’s own mechanisms.

“It was while imprisoned in Landsberg, Hitler recollected in February 1942, that he ‘became convinced that violence would not work since the state is too established and has all the weapons in its possession,’” Ullrich writes.

Hitler lived by that conviction. Released early from prison in December 1924, Hitler reorganized his National Socialist party, promoted his book and cultivated a mass audience that, amid economic stress and global political tensions, was becoming more and more sympathetic to anti-semitic rhetoric.

In 1932, Hitler ran for president and lost. But with Hitler’s leadership, the Nazis won the largest bloc of seats in parliament. Pres. Paul von Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Hitler as chancellor. A year later, Nazi legislators passed a law that paved the way for Hitler to eventually gain dictatorial powers.

Hitler wasted no time leading his country into a genocidal war. An entirely accommodating prison term had prepared him.

This first appeared in WarIsBoring here.

Image: Wikipedia.

(This article first appeared several years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.)

Daniel A. Cox

Politics, Americas

Rage isn't the answer.

Barring a seismic makeover, Donald Trump is poised to run for reelection disliked by most Americans. Even as his job approval ticks up in recent polls, the public’s view of Trump is largely settled. The RealClearPolitics average has Trump facing a double-digit deficit in personal popularity. Fifty-four percent of the public have an unfavorable opinion about him while 43 percent view him favorably.

What’s more, Trump inspires asymmetric passion among the public. The number of Americans who strongly dislike Trump consistently outnumbers those who view him very positively. The January American Perspectives Survey found that 42 percent of the public had a very unfavorable opinion of Trump while 24 percent expressed a very favorable view of him.

But if Democrats plan to coast by on public antipathy alone, they could be in for a rude awakening. First, Donald Trump was elected in 2016 despite historically low favorability ratings. One week before the 2016 election, a majority (57 percent) of Americans had an unfavorable view of Trump. True, his opponent was historically unpopular as well. But a polarized electorate likely means both candidates will be relatively unpopular this year as well.

Second, Americans who express strong affinity for Trump are far more politically engaged than those who express strongly negative feelings. Roughly two-thirds (66 percent) of Americans who have a very favorable view of Trump say they pay attention to politics most of the time compared to about half (51 percent) of those with very unfavorable views of the president.

Similarly, close to two-thirds (64 percent) of strong Trump supporters say they always vote in elections while fewer than half (48 percent) of those who view him very negatively say the same. And Americans who passionately support the president are more likely to be paying at least fairly close attention to the 2020 election than those who are critical of him (75 percent vs. 66 percent).

Conventional wisdom holds that elections are all about the incumbent’s performance in office and personal appeal. But public disaffection for Trump may not be the most relevant metric to assess his reelection prospects. Trump’s supporters look poised to turn out to support him in large numbers, while his critics’ supporters appear less politically motivated. Democrats will need to offer an appealing candidate and vision for the country if they are to be successful in November.

This article by Daniel A. Cox first appeared in 2020 on the AEI Ideas blog. 

Image: Reuters.

Paul Gardner

Security, Asia

Early action could have made a difference.

China’s political leaders will be hoping that when concerns about the coronavirus eventually start to recede, memories about the state’s failings early on in the outbreak will also fade. They will be particularly keen for people to forget the anger many felt after the death from Covid-19 of Dr Li Wenliang, the doctor censured for trying to warn colleagues about the outbreak. After Dr Li’s death, the phrase “We want freedom of speech” was even trending on Chinese social media for several hours before the posts were deleted.

Dr Li had told fellow medical professionals about the new virus in a chat group on 30 December. He was accused of “rumour-mongering” and officials either ignored or played down the risks well into January. “If officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier,” Dr Li told the New York Times, “I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency”.

I am currently researching the Chinese party-state’s efforts to increase legitimacy by controlling the information that reaches its citizens. The lack of openness and transparency in this crucial early phase of the outbreak was partly because officials were gathering for annual meetings of the local Communist Party-run legislatures, when propaganda departments instruct the media not to cover negative stories.

However, the censorship in this period also reflects increasingly tight control over information in China. As Chinese media expert Anne-Marie Brady notes, from the beginning of his presidency, Xi Jinping was clear the media should “focus on positive news stories that uphold unity and stability and are encouraging”.

Curtailing media freedoms

The deterioration in the media’s limited freedoms under Xi Jinping was underlined by a visit he made to media organisations in 2016, declaring that, “All Party media have the surname Party”, and demanding loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

There have been a series of good quality investigative reports, notably by the business publication Caixin, since the authorities fully acknowledged the virus. As political scientist Maria Repnikova argues, providing temporary space for the media to report more freely can help the party-state “project an image of managed transparency”. However, the clampdown has undoubtedly had a significant effect on the media’s ability to provide effective investigative reporting, particularly early on in the outbreak.

Online, there have been a succession of measures to limit speech the party deems a threat. These include laws that mean the threat of jail for anyone found guilty of spreading “rumours”. In an authoritarian regime, stopping rumours limits people’s ability to raise concerns and potentially discover the truth. A point made only too clearly by Dr Li’s case.

The party focuses its censorship on problems that might undermine its legitimacy. Part of my ongoing research into information control in China involves an analysis of leaked censorship instructions collected by the US-based China Digital Times. This shows that between 2013 and 2018, over 100 leaked instructions concerned problems about the environment, food safety, health, education, natural disasters and major accidents. The actual number is likely to far exceed this.

For example, after an explosion at a petrochemical factory, media organisations were told to censor “negative commentary related to petrochemical projects”. And after parents protested about tainted vaccines, the media were instructed that only information provided by official sources could be used on front pages.

State media play a key role in the CCP’s efforts to set the agenda online. My research shows that the number of stories featuring problems about the environment and disasters posted by People’s Daily newspaper on Sina Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) fell significantly between 2013 and 2018.

Around 4.5% of all People Daily’s Weibo posts between 2013 and 2015 were about the environment, but by 2018 had fallen to as low as 1%. Similarly, around 8%-10% of all posts by the newspaper were about disasters and major accidents between 2013 and 2015, but this figure fell to below 4% in the following three years.

The party wants people to focus instead on topics it thinks will enhance its legitimacy. The number of posts by People’s Daily focusing on nationalism had doubled to 12% of the total by 2018.

Citizen journalism fights back

As well as investigative reports on the outbreak in parts of the media, some Chinese individuals have also gone to great lengths to communicate information about the virus and conditions in Wuhan. However, the authorities have been steadily silencing significant critical voices and stepping up their efforts to censor other content they deem particularly unhelpful.

The censors do not stop everything, but as the China scholar Margaret E. Roberts suggests, “porous censorship” can still be very effective. She points out that the Chinese authorities’ efforts to make it more difficult for people to access critical content that does make it online, while flooding the internet with information the CCP wants them to see, can still be very effective.

When a problem cannot be avoided, my research shows that the propaganda authorities try to control the narrative by ensuring the media focus on the state’s efforts to tackle the problem. After a landslide at a mine in Tibet, the media were told to “cover disaster relief promptly and abundantly”. Coverage of such disasters by People’s Daily focuses on images of heroic rescue workers.

This same propaganda effort is in evidence now. As the China Media Project’s David Bandurski notes, media coverage in China is increasingly seeking to portray the Chinese Communist Party “as the enabler of miraculous human feats” battling the virus.

After Dr Li’s death, CCP leaders sought to blame local officials for admonishing him. However, the actions taken against Dr Li were fully consistent with the Party’s approach to controlling information under Xi Jinping.

It is impossible to know how many people have died, or might die in future, because people have decided to self-censor, rather than risk punishment for spreading rumours, or because the authorities have sought to avoid information reaching the public. The coronavirus outbreak highlights the risks of a system that puts social stability and ruling party legitimacy above the public interest.

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Paul Gardner, PhD Candidate in Chinese Studies and Political Communication, University of Glasgow

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

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Europe

The Scharnhorst proved far more than the Kriegsmarine’s other capital ships.

Key point: German battleships never engaged their British peers again in battle.

The Scharnhorst was far from the most heavily armed battleship deployed by the Kriegsmarine—but she arguably was its most successful. She and sistership Gneisenau were laid down in 1935 with nine 283-millimeter guns with a range of twenty-five miles—significantly smaller than those on British battleships so as not to spook London over German rearmament.

Nonetheless, Scharnhorst measured 234 meters, which is longer than two football fields, and displaced a massive forty-two thousand tons fully loaded with fuel, ammunition and a wartime-crew of nearly two thousand men. The ship’s three Swiss-built steam turbines allowed her to attain flank speeds of thirty-one knots or higher—fast enough to outrun most warships. Indeed, Scharnhorst was a battlecruiser designed to chase down and overmatch smaller vessels rather than duel enemy battleships.

The Scharnhorst’s guns were mounted in 750-ton triple-gun turrets named Anton and Bruno in the bow, and Caesar on the stern. Twelve quick-firing 150-millimeter guns provided additional firepower. The Scharnhorst’s two Seetakt radars, one forward and one rearward-facing, had a surface-search range of around ten miles and were primarily used for gun-laying. Three Arado 196 seaplanes served as the battlecruiser’s long-range “eyes.”

For air defense, the Scharnhorst additionally mounted seven twin 105-millimeter flak turrets that could spit air-bursting shells up to forty-thousand-feet high, and dozens of smaller thirty-seven-millimeter and twenty-millimeter auto-cannons for close defense. She was well-protected from long-range hits by up to fourteen inches of Krupp cemented steel girding her turrets, bridge and hull. However, her two-inch deck armor was vulnerable.

For all her speed, the Scharnhorst was not highly maneuverable and frequently returned to port damaged by rough seas. In sea trials after commissioning in January 1939, the Scharnhorst’s bow took on so much water she was promptly refitted with a flared “clipper-style” bow.

Despite these flaws, the Scharnhorst proved far more than the Kriegsmarine’s other capital ships. On her maiden war-cruise in November 1939, she sank the auxiliary cruiser HMS Rawalpindi. Then in June 1940, the battlecruiser ambushed the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, sinking her and two escorting destroyers, though Scharnhorst sustained a torpedo hit in battle.

Like an outlaw continually outwitting justice, the Scharnhorst was a notoriously “lucky” battleship, weathering numerous attacks by British bombers. In 1941, she managed to slip into the Atlantic and sink ten merchant ships, then evaded retribution under cover of sea squall to make port at Brest, France where she was outfitted with six torpedo tubes.

Heavily damaged in a July 1941 air-raid, Scharnhorst joined other German capital ships five months later in the notorious “Channel Dash” that was staged under the nose of Britain’s coastal defense, though she struck two mines in the process.

However, by 1943, German capital ships had fallen out of favor with Hitler after the Battle of the Barents Sea, a botched attack on an Arctic convoy carrying Allied aid for the Soviet Union. The Fuhrer had to be talked back from scrapping all his capital ships.

As the Wehrmacht’s woes in Russia mounted, in December 1943 Adm. Karl Donitz decided to again attempt a surface sortie targeting the Arctic convoys as they skirted past German-occupied Norway—and tapped Scharnhorst for the job.

However, not only were the British listening in to Donitz’s radio messages, but Home Fleet commander Adm. Bruce Fraser was already planning to lure the Scharnhorst into battle. Though the Royal Navy far outnumbered German surface combatants, it had to devote disproportionate resource to guard against possible sorties.

Fraser planned to use JW 55B as bait, reinforcing her ten escorting destroyers with three cruisers in “Force 1” under Vice Adm. Robert Burnett, which had just escorted a preceding convoy. Meanwhile, “Force 2” would sortie from the west, including the battleship Duke of York, the heavy cruiser Jamaica and four S-class destroyers.

The Brits made no effort to prevent German patrol planes from spotting the convoy on December 22. On Christmas Day, Fraser was pleased to learn that Scharnhorst and five destroyers had departed Altafjord at 7 p.m. under command of Adm. Erich Bay.

However, the German force failed to contact the nineteen-ship convoy. This far north, there was less than an hour of daylight, and gale-force winds were gusting heavy snowfall over the water. Bay fanned out his destroyers to extend his search—ultimately depriving his flagship of badly needed support.

At 9 a.m., the light cruiser Belfast of Force 1 picked up the Scharnhorst with her superior radar. The two sides finally spotted each other at a distance of about 7.5 miles and exchanged fire. While Scharnhorst missed, she was struck twice. One 8-inch shell fatefully smashed the battlecruiser’s forward-looking radar, crippling her situational awareness and the accuracy of her guns.

Scharnhorst disengaged, while the British escorts withdrew to screen the convoy as Force 2 raced to support them. But Bey circled Scharnhorst around and at noon bumped into Force 1 a second time. This time the battlecruiser’s guns twice struck the Norfolk, the huge 727-pound armored-piercing rounds passing clean through, knocking out a gun turret and radar.

Bey then decided to head south back to port with Force 1 in pursuit—though only the lighter Belfast could keep up.

However, the more numerous and powerful radars on Force 2’s Duke of York finally picked up the Scharnhorst twenty-five miles away after 4 p.m. Her sole forward radar knocked out, and nightfall and blizzard decreasing visibility, Scharnhorst was blind to the powerful British force barreling towards her from the west. Force 2 finally opened fire at six-miles range.

Norman Scarth, a sailor onboard the destroyer Matchless described the moment in a BBC interview:

All of us met up and all hell broke loose. Although it was pitch black the sky was lit up, bright as day, by star shells, which fired into the sky like fireworks, providing brilliant light illuminating the area as broad as day.

One huge fourteen-inch shell jammed the in Anton turret, silencing its triple-guns. Another strike triggered an ammunition fire in Bruno, forcing the gun crew to flood the turret to avoid an explosion. Now only Caesar could return fire—and fire she did, in turn knocking out a radar on the Duke of York.

However, the superior British fire-control radars gave British warships greater accuracy, while their flash-less charge left them difficult to spot with the naked eye.

Bey tried tacking back north away from Force 2, only to run afoul of the cruisers of Force 1. The battlecruiser finally began pulling away eastward at maximum speed. However, a long-range fourteen-foot abruptly penetrated Scharnhorst’s belt armor and blew apart one of her boiler rooms, reducing her speed to just twelve knots. Bey radioed his superiors “We will fight on until the last shell is fired.”

As the British barrage relentlessly crippled Scharnhorst’s main guns, smaller British destroyers swarmed in to attempt torpedo runs. Some of Scharnhorst’s smaller guns remained active, though, and one blasted a shell straight through the fire control tower of the Saumarez, killing eleven crew. Meanwhile, the Savage and Norwegian destroyer Stord dashed up to within a mile of the beleaguered battlecruiser and slammed three twenty-one-inch torpedoes into her port side approaching 7 p.m.

For nearly an hour more, the British ships relentlessly pounded the crippled Scharnhorst, with shells and torpedoes. The latter were known to occasionally sink capital ships with just a few lucky hits. The Scharnhorst, however, sustained nineteen torpedoes before she finally capsized.

As Scarth recounted:

She looked magnificent and beautiful . . . She was firing with all guns still available to her. Most of the big guns were put out. They were gradually disabled one by one. As we were steaming past at full speed a twenty-millimeter cannon was firing tracer bullets from the Scharnhorst.

A twenty-millimeter cannon was like a pea-shooter compared to the other guns and it could have no part in this battle . . . And that's one of the things that remains in my memory—a futile gesture but it was a gesture of defiance right to the very end.

Afterward, Matchless and Scorpion picked up just thirty-six survivors from the freezing Arctic waters before receiving the order to abandon the rest for fear of a counterattack.

German battleships never engaged their British peers again in battle. Fifty-seven years later, a Norwegian-led expedition located the Scharnhorst’s mangled wreckage 290-meters deep on the seafloor.

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 first appeared in December 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Asia

Who's sacred?

Key point: Beijing has long gone full steam ahead on modernization. That means building or buying all of the latest goodies from drones to stealth fighters.

On January 12, 2019, the Defense Intelligence Agency released an annual report highlighting the radical reorganization of China’s People’s Liberation Army to become faster-responding, more flexible and more lethal than ever before.

This first appeared in January 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

The PLA was formed in 1927 as a Communist revolutionary force to oppose the Nationalist Kuomintang government and (later) invading Japanese forces. Unlike Western militaries, the PLA remains loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, not a theoretical independent Chinese state. A cadre of political officers (commissars or zhengwei) still operate at every level of the command structure to ensure loyalty and manage personnel.

Even after securing the mainland in 1949 and sprouting Navy and Air Force branches, the PLA adhered to a defensive “People’s War Strategy” which assumed that technologically superior foreign invaders (the United States or Soviet Union) would need to be lured deep into Chinese territory to be worn down by guerilla warfare and superior numbers.

Serious PLA modernization efforts began in 1991 when the trouncing of Iraq’s huge mechanized army in the Gulf War caused Beijing to realize its dated, World War II-style military was similarly vulnerable. By 2004, a new doctrine focused on proactively defeating enemies beyond China’s borders, including through preemptive strike if necessary, as well as undertaking global governance missions befitting its superpower status.

Between 2000 and 2016, while the Chinese economy averaged official annual growth rates around 7-8 percent, the PLA’s budget grew even faster at 10 percent. Despite that, the PLA’s current roughly $200 billion dollar budget totals less than one-third of U.S. defense spending. However, China pays much lower costs for hardware and personnel because of China’s “latecomer advantage” as the DIA report explains:

“China has routinely adopted the best and most effective platforms found in foreign militaries through direct purchase, retrofits, or theft of intellectual property. By doing so, China has been able to focus on expediting its military modernization at a small fraction of the original cost.”

Prominent examples include China’s aircraft carriers and its J-11 jet fighters.

By 2017, Chinese defense spending growth declined to 5-7%percent and the PLA shed 300,000 personnel, bringing it down to 2 million-strong—still the largest armed force on the planet. This transition sought to remodel the PLA into a leaner, more flexible force suited for fast-paced modern warfare.

Indeed, that year Beijing fundamentally restructured how the PLA worked, consigning the traditionally dominant ground forces to their own branch on equal footing with the PLA Air Force, Navy, Rocket Force, and a brand-new Strategic Support Force. This last addition combines satellite-launch and satellite-killing capabilities, with elite hacker and electronic warfare units to collect vital intelligence while disrupting the adversary’s own recon capabilities.

Rather than being siloed in their respective branches, operational units now fall under five regional commands, each with its own Joint Operations Command Center to enable air-, land- and sea-warfare branches of the PLA to rapidly coordinate using robust and redundant communication networks and inter-service chains of command.

The theater commands fall under the ultimate control of a Central Military Committee. The Army’s large division-sized units have mostly been dissolved, with assets devolved to seventy-eight combined-arms brigades mixing together armor and infantry with organic artillery and anti-aircraft units. Special forces and helicopter units also doubled in number.

The new organization allows lower-ranking officers to act more flexibly without depending on higher headquarters for orders and support assets. However, the transition is proving culturally difficult for the traditionally hierarchy-obsessed PLA and complicates logistics and training for units now combining several types of equipment.

Nonetheless, transforming rigid command and control and logistical systems, and rooting out endemic corruption, is one of the chief aims of the reforms. So is implementing realistic combat training emphasizing joint operations, instead of reputation-burnishing scripted exercises.

Beijing’s Strategic Forces

The PLA’s huge Rocket Force has a diverse array of over a thousand ballistic and cruise missiles armed with both conventional and nuclear warheads, most of them short- or intermediate-range weapons to strike targets in Asia and the Pacific, as well as a smaller number of inter-continental ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. cities. New truck-launched DF-21D missiles may uniquely boast the precision-guidance capabilities to strike aircraft carriers hundreds of miles away from China.

China’s arsenal of around 300 nuclear warheads is primarily delivered by the Rocket Force, but the PLA Navy also operates nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, which may soon have the ability to strike U.S. targets without sortieing far from the Chinese coast. In 2017, the PLA reintroduced a nuclear role for the Air Force, likely to be fulfilled by the forthcoming H-20 stealth bomber.

However, Beijing has a no-first-use nuclear policy: it only plans to launch nukes if attacked with them first. A network of hardened underground facilities means the Rocket Force is likely to survive a first strike to inflict a retaliatory attack. China does not stockpile biological or chemical weapons.

The PLA’s New Mission

The PLA’s strategic objectives have expanded from territorial defense to achieving regional military dominance over East Asia and the western half of the Pacific, as well as expansion into the Indian Ocean. Beijing eventually aims to displace or render indefensible the Pentagon’s East Asian footholds, notably island bases in Guam and Okinawa and alliances with South Korea and Japan.

Regional hotspots include a border dispute with India, potential instability in North Korea, and maritime sovereignty disputes with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Beijing also requires the PLA to maintain a credible capability for invading Taiwan, including fighting off or deterring U.S. intervention on Taipei’s behalf. The PLA Navy operates Yuzhao-class Landing Platform Docks, and its Marine Corps recently tripled in size to around 35,000 personnel in seven brigades. The Army also maintains six combined arms brigades equipped with amphibious tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.

Operations other than war are also of increasing importance to the PLA, including suppressing protest and unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang—where reportedly hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs have been placed in forced labor camps—as well as providing disaster relief and evacuating nationals abroad in emergencies.

Though the PLA is focused on fighting regional, not global conflicts, it’s developing a limited capacity for global expeditionary operations—particularly evident in the opening of its first overseas base in Djibouti. Beijing is preparing the ground for additional overseas bases in Pakistan, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and various Pacific islands. The introduction of huge new Y-20 “Chubby Girl” transport planes will significantly improve China’s global logistical capabilities.

These technologies and reforms have only begun to address longstanding PLA deficiencies in command-and-control, logistics, unrealistic training and lack of recent combat experience. Furthermore, while the PLA does field cutting-edge systems like the Type 99 tank, J-20 stealth fighter and Type 055 destroyer, roughly 40 percent of its armor and fighter units still use outdated 1950s-era hardware like Type 59 tanks, Type 63 APCs and J-7 fighters. The rapidly growing PLA Navy still relies on many noisy diesel submarines, and its two new carriers are less capable than U.S. nuclear-powered carriers.

Despite these weaknesses, the radical reorganization of the PLA shows awareness at senior levels that overcoming the PLA’s shortcomings isn’t only a matter of procuring better technologies, but changing how the military uses them.

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 first appeared in January 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Sam McGowan

History, Americas

And it kept going in Korea and Vietnam.

Even though, technically at least, it was not a combat airplane, the performance of the Douglas C-47 transport led General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower to label it as one of the most important weapons of World War II.

It carried no armament and was not designed to drop bombs, but the C-47 and other variations of the Douglas DC-3 twin-engine airliner quickly proved their worth both on and off the battlefield as they became a familiar sight all over the world. Eisenhower was not exaggerating with his accolade. The C-47 became crucial to the conduct of the war in at least three theaters and proved beneficial to military operations around the world in roles that varied from limited to indispensable. By the end of the war, the Army had purchased more than 10,000 of the Douglas twin-engine transports in several variants.

From the DC-3 to the C-47

The C-47 is the most commonly known military designation for the airplane that revolutionized the civilian air transportation industry in the 1930s. Douglas Aircraft Company’s DC-3 was a follow-on to the DC-2, the first modern American-built transport aircraft. By the outbreak of war in 1939, the DC-3 had proven to be a safe, reliable transport capable of operating from short, relatively unimproved airstrips. Although it had not been designed with military needs in mind, the DC-3 was the natural choice to be the first widely produced Allied military transport aircraft.

The Army purchased a number of DC-2s, giving them the military designation of C-39; the bomber derivative was the B-18. When the DC-3 came out, the Army ordered several built to military specifications and designated them as C-47s. The bomber version was designated as the B-23, but it was not much of a bomber, so the Air Corps converted most of them for transport use, including for dropping paratroops, and called them C-67s.

When the Army began experimenting with airborne forces, it turned to the 50th Transport Wing, which had been established at Wright Field under the Air Corps Maintenance Command, for the use of its C-39s and C-47s to drop the fledgling airborne troops. Activated on January 14, 1941, as the parent unit for the Air Corps transport squadrons, the wing transported more cargo during the first half of 1941 than the entire U.S. civilian airline industry. The new airborne mission placed a heavy additional burden on the wing, so the Army placed orders for more transports and began training crews to fly them.

The original DC-3 was designed to carry 21 passengers, although increased engine performance on later models allowed 28. Other designations were given to production DC-3s that were taken over by the military but lacked the reinforced cargo floor and other amenities of the basic C-47. When the Army decided to develop the airborne mission, it contracted for a number of DC-3s specially configured to carry troops, with bucket seats and a door designed for paratrooper exit, and called it the C-53 Sky Trooper. Shackles were attached under the fuselage of the C-53s to carry parapacks, special bundles that could be filled with items too large to be carried by individual troops during a parachute assault.

In addition to dropping paratroopers, C-53s were also used for supply drops and as glider tugs. Although thousands of C-53s were produced, as the war continued the C-47 designation became generic. A later modification with larger engines and a redesigned tail was designated as the C-117. Various versions of the Douglas transport would see service with Army, Navy, and Marine transport squadrons as well as in the air forces of most of the Allied nations.

Building Allied Air Transport Wings

Several Douglas transports entered service in North Africa in 1941 when the U.S. Army Ferrying Command contracted with Pan American Airways to provide air transportation for British forces fighting Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The British had ordered their own Douglas transports, and the Royal Air Force (RAF) gave them a new name—Dakota. The Pan American DC-3s were sent to Africa to fill the gap until the RAF had received its own Dakotas and established air transport squadrons. The first British transports were DC-3s requisitioned from the airlines since the U.S. Army lacked the numbers to provide airplanes from its own stock.

The first Douglas transports to see operational duty were a trio of C-53s that arrived in Australia aboard ship in February. They joined an ad hoc group of transport aircraft and obsolete combat planes in the newly created Far East Air Forces Air Transport Command and went to work hauling cargo and personnel around Australia and northward to New Guinea—and even as far north as the southern Philippines, which were still in Allied hands. A reorganization of U.S. Army air transportation in June 1942 resulted in the redesignation of the air transport units as troop carriers, while a new Air Transport Command was created from the Army Ferry Command.

In early 1942, the Australia-based transports supported combat operations in the defense of Java. Until the American surrender of the Philippines, transports operated into airstrips on Mindanao, the southernmost of the Philippine islands, where American forces remained until their surrender in May 1942. A few weeks later, the transports proved their worth as the lifeline for Australian troops battling Japanese forces advancing southward toward Port Moresby over the rugged Kokoda Track in the Owen Stanley Range of Papua, New Guinea. The rough terrain ruled out resupply by truck, and the distances involved required hundreds of human porters. Air transportation allowed timely resupply as the transports landed on rude jungle strips when possible, and air-dropped ammunition and rations when no suitable landing strip lay close enough to the troops. A lack of suitable airdrop containers and parachutes led to the adaptation of cardboard ice cream containers packed with straw to deliver packets of ammunition and foodstuffs. The Australian infantrymen began referring to the transports of the 21st and 22nd Troop Carrier Squadrons as “Biscuit Bombers.”

The Troop Airlift Concept Takes Off

When Lieutenant General George C. Kenney arrived in Australia in mid-1942 to assume the role of chief of staff for air under General Douglas MacArthur, he brought many ideas with him, including the concept of using the airplane to move troops into battle and keep them supplied. An opportunity to prove his theories arose in September when MacArthur decided to move the U.S. 32nd Infantry Division northward to New Guinea. Kenney persuaded MacArthur to let him move a regiment by air; the event came off so well that he got permission to move a second regiment. The two regiments were in place in Port Moresby several days before the rest of the division arrived by ship.

Allied successes in New Guinea—thanks largely to the efforts of Kenney’s Fifth Air Force—raised the value of Kenney’s stock in Washington considerably. Part of the payoff for earlier successes was the assignment of an airborne regiment to the Southwest Pacific Area of Operations, and its arrival allowed Kenney to mount the attack on Nadzab he had been planning for several months. The 54th Troop Carrier Wing C-47s dropped the troops without a hitch, and the airfield was in Allied hands within a matter of minutes. MacArthur used the new installation to mount a two-pronged attack on Lae that led to the destruction of Japanese efforts in New Guinea.

The early successes of the C-47s and other transports in New Guinea led to the development of tactics built around the use of air transport to airlift troops into battle and also to move air units forward. Air evacuation of casualties made its debut in New Guinea during the battle for Buna. Young female flight nurses were assigned to troop carrier squadrons to care for wounded men who were brought from the forward airfields. Regularly scheduled air evacuation flights were established between Port Moresby and rear area hospitals in Australia. The success of air evacuation in the Southwest Pacific led to it becoming part of the troop carrier mission throughout the world. Thanks to the use of the airplane to move the seriously wounded, the combat death rate was drastically reduced.

The dependable C-47s and C-53s soldiered on, racking up hundreds, then thousands of hours in combat operations. One of the C-53s that had arrived in Australia in early 1942 had amassed more than 10,000 hours by 1944. The efforts of the troop carrier C-47 crews did not go unappreciated by the senior officers in their chain of command. General Kenney recognized the efforts of his troop carriers and said so in dispatches to the War Department in Washington, D.C. In one request for additional troop carrier pilots, Kenney told General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces, that the life expectancy of his C-47 crew members was less than that of the P-39 fighter pilots in his command.

The Hump Airlift

In the spring and summer of 1942, while the two troop carrier squadrons in New Guinea were making their mark, developing air transportation efforts in the China-Burma-India Theater began another chapter in the story of the Douglas transport. In early 1942, a small contingent of Pan American DC-3s was sent to India to airlift fuel and oil to Chinese bases in preparation for the arrival of the North American B-25 Mitchell bombers of the Doolittle mission against the Japanese home islands.

The civilian contingent was soon joined by a squadron of Army C-47s that arrived in India as part of Colonel Caleb Haynes’s AQUILA project that was intended to serve as the nucleus of a heavy bomber effort against Japan from Chinese bases. A Japanese offensive in China in retaliation for the Doolittle mission deprived the Allies of the planned bomber bases, and the Army and civilian C-47/DC-3 crews soon found themselves in the middle of the battle for Burma. When it became apparent that the Japanese had gained the upper hand, the transports were put to work evacuating Allied troops.

Although combat operations in defense of India were requiring most of Tenth Air Force’s efforts, it was imperative that supplies get to China, where the American Volunteer Group, popularly known as the Flying Tigers, was doing a good job of harassing the Japanese. Fortunately, there was another air transport organization in the theater. Before the war Pan American Airways had contracted with the Chinese government to operate a national airline. The China National Airways Corporation (CNAC) operated a fleet of DC-3s with civilian crews, mostly Americans.

Tenth Air Force contracted with CNAC to airlift supplies to China, beginning what came to be known as the Hump Airlift. Throughout 1942, DC-3s and C-47s operated the airlift, but the massive amounts of material requiring airlift dictated the use of larger airplanes with greater payloads. In late 1942 the airlift of supplies to China was taken over by the newly created Air Transport Command (ATC). ATC began the airlift with C-47s but switched to larger Curtiss C-46s and Consolidated C-87s, the cargo version of the B-24 Liberator bomber, as they became available.

Although the C-47 was replaced within the ATC airlift to China, the Douglas transports continued to play a major role. One of the conditions of the transfer of the China Air Ferry to the ATC was that Tenth Air Force would receive a troop carrier group equipped with C-47s. Additional Douglas transports came in the form of Royal Air Force Dakotas.

Many Roles in Many Theaters

Air transport would be a feature of new tactics worked out by the eccentric British Brigadier Orde Wingate, the commander of a special force made up of British and Commonwealth troops known as Chindits. In the spring of 1944, Wingate’s special force invaded Burma from the air. The entire Tenth Air Force effort was directed toward supporting the operation, which consisted of a glider assault onto landing zones in Burma that would be used as forward bases supported by troop carrier C-47s. The three C-47 squadrons of Tenth Air Force had been joined by a fourth squadron that came to India as part of Colonel Philip Cochran’s air commando group, and had been further augmented by the temporary assignment of the 64th Troop Carrier Group from the Mediterranean.

The air commando C-47s were assigned to glider towing duty while the troop carrier command transports airlifted men and equipment into the hastily prepared landing zones. One troop carrier squadron was assigned to support the American provisional force under Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill, who walked into Burma in the north. Once again the C-47 proved its worth as the twin-engine transports operated into airstrips that had been constructed with small bulldozers and graders that had been landed by glider.

The role of the C-47 in Europe was initially primarily logistical. In the summer of 1942, the 51st Troop Carrier Wing and its three groups moved to England as part of the Eighth Air Force. Throughout the summer the wing’s C-47s and C-53s supported the newly arrived bomber and fighter groups. Planning for the invasion of North Africa called for the wing to transfer to Africa. Several squadrons of C-47s left England carrying the paratroopers of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, the first American paratroop unit to see combat.

There were a handful of limited airborne operations in North Africa, but the transport mission became support of air and ground combat units, particularly after the battle moved away from the coast. Military planners had not taken the troop carrier transports into consideration, but their presence proved highly beneficial as they were used to airlift bombs and supplies for combat squadrons to airfields in the desert and to support motorized columns. Troop carriers in North Africa borrowed a page from the Southwest Pacific as they began evacuating casualties from forward areas to rear area hospitals.

In European Combat Operations

Plans for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, called for the use of paratroops and glider-borne forces. The airborne operations did not go well, thanks in part to high winds that blew the formations off course. Jittery antiaircraft gunners on ships offshore took the approaching C-47 formation under fire and shot down quite a few transports. Dozens of paratroopers fell into the sea and were drowned. Many gliders cut loose too early and failed to make the beaches, leaving their occupants to the same fate as the paratroopers who fell into the sea.

In spite of the numerous problems, the few paratroopers and glider troops who managed to arrive in one piece caused so much confusion among the German and Italian defenders that airborne operations were planned for future invasions. There was one paratroop drop in Italy when General Mark Clark decided to reinforce the beachhead at Salerno. Once Allied air units were established in Italy, the C-47s assumed a new mission, the resupply of partisans in Yugoslavia.

Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, included the massive use of American and British airborne forces. The D-Day airdrops have become famous and are perhaps the one World War II event most associated with C-47s. Unfortunately, the drops did not go well, while dozens of C-47s were shot down and hundreds were damaged by intense German fire. Once the beachhead had been established, landing strips were constructed for C-47s arriving on the continent from England.

The American breakout from the beaches in early August saw the C-47s in an important new role as they were called upon to support the rapidly moving armored columns of General George Patton’s Third Army. Patton came to depend on the C-47s and other transports to bring in fuel for his tanks and trucks, and when they were taken away his rapid advance ground to a halt.

The Troop Carrier Command was dedicated to the support of the First Allied Airborne Army when it was established in early August, and its squadrons were taken off combat operations to train for Operation Market-Garden, the upcoming airborne invasion of Holland. An additional 100 C-47s were taken off Air Transport Command domestic operations in the United States and sent to England to beef up the Service Command transport forces.

The drops in Holland saw the C-47 crews earn the respect of the paratroopers. While previous airborne operations had often been characterized by confusion, the drops in Holland were well organized and the crews were motivated to risk their own lives to ensure that the troops were dropped on target. Paratroopers returned from Holland to tell of courageous C-47 pilots were able to hold their course in burning airplanes so their troops could jump, and then went to fiery deaths as their stricken craft crashed. Troop Carrier Command C-47s, supplemented by B-24s detached from Eighth Air Force, kept the troops in Holland supplied until ground links were opened.

During the Battle of the Bulge paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division were sent to hold the town of Bastogne, where they soon found themselves surrounded by a determined enemy and cut off from all means of ground resupply. Terrible winter weather, with low clouds, fog, drizzle, and snow, prevented the C-47s from delivering supplies by air for several days. As their supplies dwindled, the Screaming Eagles held on. Finally, on December 23 the skies cleared and parachutes blossomed over Bastogne as C-47 crews braved German fire to deliver their loads of ammunition, rations, and medical supplies. By evening, 101st artillery crews were firing shells that had just been dropped in. The Bastogne relief was perhaps the C-47’s finest hour.

The Goony Bird Behind the Front

While the airborne operations in the European theater, the Hump Airlift, and the New Guinea missions were their most important, the Douglas transports were a familiar sight all over the world. Army C-47s supported combat operations in the Aleutians, while the Navy and Marine Corps established transport squadrons for duty in the islands of the Central Pacific with their own C-47s, which were given the naval designation of R4D. It was probably the Navy and Marine crews who gave the DC-3 its most famous name—Gooney Bird. Nature’s gooney birds are a species of albatross that are unique to Midway atoll, where sailors and Marines had been entertained by the ungainly creatures long before Midway became famous in mid-1942.

By 1943 the U.S. military was active all over the world as ferry and transport routes were developed over which young, inexperienced crews delivered bombers, fighters, and transports to combat squadrons overseas. Engine trouble, bad weather, and enemy action led to the loss of aircraft and crews who went down in the ocean or over hostile terrain. The Air Transport Command developed its own search and rescue units to look for downed airmen, and C-47s were equipped for the role. Some C-47s were equipped with skis to allow landings close to downed airmen in Arctic terrain. The C-47C was equipped with giant Edo floats to allow water landings. Tests were even conducted with a glider version of the C-47, when an early model was converted to become the XCG-17.

On May 5, 1945, the 10,000th DC-3 was delivered to the United States Army Air Forces; all but 500 were built after Pearl Harbor. By the end of 1944, all the DC-3s that had been procured from the airlines for military use had been returned. The airlines also benefited from the military production, as hundreds of C-47s and C-53s became surplus to the military’s needs and were released for civilian purchase.

Immediately after the war, the C-47s were instrumental in airlifting supplies to areas that had been devastated by the conflict and providing support for occupying forces. Unlike most other U.S. military aircraft of World War II, the C-47 remained in active military service during both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.

This article by Sam McGowan first appeared at the Warfare History Network in 2016.

Image: Douglas C-47 "Skytrains", 12th Air Force Troop Carrier Wing, loaded with paratroopers on their way for the invasion of southern France, 15 August 1944. (U.S. Air Force photo) 

Andrew Kerr

Politics, Americas

He could hold the key to stopping a subpoena.

Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said Thursday that people are tired of politically motivated investigations such as Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s probe into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company linked to Hunter Biden.

Romney is a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, whose chairman, Johnson, plans to hold a vote on March 11 to subpoena Andrii Telizhenko, a former consultant for a firm that Burisma hired to fight against corruption allegations.

Johnson’s effort to issue the subpoena could be halted if Romney votes against the measure, CNN reported. Republicans hold eight seats on the committee to the six seats held by Democrats.

“There’s no question that the appearance of looking into Burisma and Hunter Biden appears political,” Romney told reporters Thursday when asked about the upcoming subpoena vote. “I think people are tired of these kind of political investigations.”

“I would hope if there is something of significance that needs to be evaluated that would be done perhaps the FBI or some other agency that’s not as political as perhaps a committee of our body,” the Utah senator continued. “We also have a lot of work to do on matters that are not related to Burisma. We probably ought to focus on those things.”

Romney, who was the only Republican lawmaker to vote to convict President Donald Trump on the abuse of power impeachment charge in February, said he would be meeting with Johnson to discuss the merits of his investigation into Burisma.

When asked if he will support Johnson’s subpoena effort, Romney said: “I will make that decision after I’ve had the chance to meet the chairman and see what information he has.”

Romney’s office did not return a request for comment.

Johnson’s committee is investigating whether Hunter Biden leveraged his relationship with his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, to help Burisma combat allegations of corruption.

Johnson wrote in a letter to Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan on Monday that his committee has “received U.S. government records indicating that Blue Star sought to leverage Hunter Biden’s role as a board member of Burisma to gain access to, and potentially influence matters at, the State Department.”

Blue Star co-founder Karen Tramontano also reached out to State Department officials throughout 2016 to discuss Ukraine and Burisma, department records show.

Telizhenko, the former Blue Star consultant, has provided some Burisma-related documents to Johnson’s committee, but a non-disclosure agreement is preventing him from handing over any more without being compelled by a subpoena, Johnson told Peters in his letter.

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Image: U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) rides in a U.S. Capitol elevator to the U.S. Senate floor to cast a guilty vote during the final votes in the Senate impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., February 5, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy

Environment, Americas

American polarization has deep roots in racial, religious and ideological divisions and can be traced back to the reaction of conservatives to the cultural, social and political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s.

2019 will not be remembered as the year when the world finally united to save the planet. Despite massive worldwide demonstrations and increasing global awareness and anxiety, the December 2019 UN Climate Change Conference (a.k.a., COP25) in Madrid failed spectacularly.

The reason? A handful of countries blocked significant action, in particular the United States, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia, while China and India conveniently used the pretext of the historical responsibility of rich nations as an excuse for doing nothing.

A month before the COP25, President Trump formally confirmed the exit of the United States from the Paris climate agreement – just one policy change among more than 90 others aimed at rolling back environmental regulations. Because the United States is still the most powerful country in the world whose president has the most media coverage, this has created a toxic “Trump effect” that has weakened the credibility of international commitments and emboldened others, especially populists and nationalists, to shirk their responsibilities.

But how much do the aggressively anti-environmental actions of a minority president actually reflect American public opinion?

The US versus the rest of the world?

Even though Americans are less likely to be concerned about climate change than the rest of the world (by at least about 10 to 20 percentage points), a majority (59%) still see it as a serious threat – a 17-point increase in six years (Pew Research). But the devil is in the details. Only about 27% of Republicans say climate change is a major threat, compared with 83% of Democrats, a 56-percentage point difference!

Global concerns about climate change. Pew Research CenterGlobal Threats. Pew Research Center

Climate skepticism/denial exists in other Western democracies, mostly among right-wing populists, but even by comparison, the American Republicans are the least likely to see it as a major threat.

This in turn raises another question: why are American Republicans more skeptical about climate change than right-wing voters in other countries? The first reason has to do with polarization in politics and identity.

Polarization

American polarization has deep roots in racial, religious and ideological divisions and can be traced back to the reaction of conservatives to the cultural, social and political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. This polarization eventually made its way into politics in the 1980s and, even more so, in the 1990s when it became a ‘culture war.’ As global warming emerged on the US national agenda, it became one of those divisive hot-button issues in the culture war, along with abortion, gun control, health care, race, women and LGBTQ’s rights.

The fact that progressive Democrats took on the issue of global warming early on – former vice president Al Gore was a leading voice on the issue – and that the solutions they offered had to do with statist measure such as carbon taxes, a cap-and-trade system, or energy rationing resulted in further politicization of the issue.

In 2001, then-president George W. Bush withdrew from the Kyoto protocol asserting that it would be too costly for the US economy. And in 2010, the Tea Party movement solidified Republican hostility toward the climate-change issue, preventing Congress from passing a cap-and-trade bill. It came as no surprise then when Donald Trump’s comment that climate change was a “concept created by the Chinese” to make “US manufacturing non-competitive” did little to damage his 2016 presidential campaign.

Twitter.

Indeed, his criticism of the Paris accord as being “very, very expensive”, “unfair”, “job killing” and “income-killing” clearly resonated with his electorate.

As much as Donald Trump’s political strategy has been to intensify polarization and to appeal to his base, he is more the symptom than the deeper cause of this polarization. Undeniably, the measures needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions imply government intervention and internationally binding treaties that go against the conservatives’ ideals of individual freedom, limited government and free markets.

Trust and mistrust

More than most other issues, our acceptance of the human impact on climate change is contingent on our trust in science and environmental scientists. For most of us, It is a matter of trust and not intelligence since we cannot do the science ourselves. Americans of all stripes generally trust scientists (86%), except for environmental research where there is a 30-point gap between Republicans and Democrats, a gap – more surprisingly – that is persistent among those with high science knowledge.

Pew Research Center

Trust in government is also highly partisan, but Republicans have tended to be more specifically wary of international institutions. For instance, only 43% of Republicans have a favorable view of the United Nations compared to 80% of Democrats. There are fringe conservatives, like Alex Jones or members of the John Birch Society the alt-right who want to “get out of the UN.”

In many ways, Donald Trump’s “America first” nationalist slogan is a rejection of international institutions, internationalism and cosmopolitanism – something he made clear at the the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2018.

Anti-intellectualism and anti-science

Americans have always tended to distrust the government, the elite and expertise. This is nothing new. In his 1964 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter identified two sources of American anti-intellectual sentiment: business, which he depicted as unreflective, and religion, particularly evangelicalism. With its market-oriented, pro-business, and pro-religious agenda, the Republican party is naturally more distrustful of intellectuals and academics, including scientists.

This is fertile ground for right-wing think-tanks and lobbyists to sow doubt in the minds of conservatives who have a cognitive bias against climate change. And there has been no shortage of those, from the Global Climate Coalition, the Koch brothers to the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the fossil-fuel industry or the Heartland Institute. In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have shown how these groups use a strategy questioning scientific research similar to that used by the tobacco industry in the 1970s and 1980s.

For a long time, these pressure groups allies in the American press that more often portrayed climate science as “uncertain” than the press in other developed nations. More significantly, Fox News has been the true echo chamber of climate-change deniers. The result is that Fox News viewers are less likely to accept the science of global warming and climate change. And now, the social media have only made the situation worse. A recent study found that videos challenging the scientific consensus on climate change were outnumbered by those that supported it. Then there is Donald Trump who has, since becoming president, attacked the scientists in his own administration by censoring their findings, shutting down government studies and pressuring scientists (full report available here) to reflect his own thinking on the issue.

Confronted with the reality of natural disasters and rising temperatures, most Republicans no longer deny climate change, rather they deny that humans are responsible, and warn that it will affect the economy.

The Frontier myth of an endless economic bonanza

When confronted by journalists about climate change, President Trump diverts the questions by focusing on the immediate benefits are more concrete than potential, vague, long-term gains, as he did during his news conference with President Macron of France in Biarritz, in August 2019.

This idea that nature offers vast untapped reserves that will yield perpetual and painless growth is evocative of what historian Richard Slotkin called the Frontier’s “bonanza economics”. It is an old American story that back to the Puritans: that the wilderness had to be conquered and transformed, that the Anglo-Saxon race was defined by its ability to exploit it, which also justified the displacement of indigenous people who did not work the land.

In this story, the president becomes the Frontier hero who ventures into the wilderness (of nature and politics) to transform it. His professed love for “beautiful clean coal” not only pleases his voters in coal-mining states, it also taps into the belief that nature is first and foremost an infinite provider of wealth that will contribute to the prosperity of all Americans. From Alaska to Minnesota, the Trump administration is all about easing restrictions on drilling, logging and mining at the expense of the protection of the land.

Yet there is another quintessentially American approach to nature. One that sees the presence of the divine in nature and has acknowledged the exhaustability of land and resources. One that is reflected in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, in the paintings of the Hudson River School, and in the activism of John Muir. It is also ingrained in the politics of Theodore Roosevelt, who used the ethos of the Frontier for his conservationist policies. If values trump facts, maybe this is the American story that today’s conservatives should embrace.

Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, the Connecticut River near Northampton (1836).

Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, Assistant lecturer, Université Paris Nanterre – Université Paris Lumières

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

Image: Reuters

Victor Davis Hanson

Public Health, World

Keep calm and wash your hands.

The recent spread of the coronavirus is causing a global panic. Our shared terror arises not so much from the death toll of the new flu-like disease—more than 3,000 people have died worldwide—but from what we don’t know about it.

Experts at least agree that the virus originated in China. But Beijing’s authoritarian government hid information about its origins, spread, and severity for weeks.

Such duplicity only fanned the fears of a global plague—a hysteria not seen since the groundless fears of a Y2K global computer meltdown in the year 2000, or the political feeding frenzy during the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

Wild speculation followed that the coronavirus was a virulent or mutated superbug. Had it arisen naturally or escaped from a nearby military lab? Did it originate from a sick lab animal? A conspiracy theory arose that it was a manufactured virus that had escaped from scientists’ botched efforts to create either a vaccine or a biological weapon.

Is the outbreak an indication that China’s scientists are well behind their Western peers, at least in the areas of virology and bacteriology? Or is the problem that Chinese culture still features outdated traditions such as open-air “wet markets”? Unfounded rumors spread that the virus may have originated in one of these markets, where exotic mammals such as bats and pangolins are still sold for human consumption.

For all China’s gleaming high-speed rail lines and new airports, hundreds of millions of Chinese still live in places with suspect food safety and waste disposal—the historic incubators of epidemics.

The method of the contagion has been perplexing to experts. Why is the mortality rate for infected patients in Iran roughly double that of patients in countries such as South Korea, Italy, and Japan? Why have almost no children under 10 died from the infection?

Are governments unable (or unwilling) to count the infected, given the similarities in symptoms between the coronavirus and various colds and flus? Does such uncertainty suggest that we are undercounting the number of people sickened or killed by the coronavirus?

Or are we instead overestimating its dangers? Thousands of patients may have already recovered from mild cases—and perhaps never knew they were sick in the first place.

Evidence suggests that only about 2% of patients will die after infection. As in the case of other viral illness, the unfortunate victims are mostly elderly people with existing illnesses. Does that pattern suggest the coronavirus may be more like annual influenza outbreaks—deadly to thousands but hardly the stuff to shut down a global economy?

The common theme of history’s great plagues—Athens in 430 B.C., Constantinople in 541, and the Black Plague of 1347—was that preindustrial conditions of filth and ignorance helped spread what were usually bacterial diseases transmitted by lice, fleas, and rodents.

Real plagues can certainly change history. A stricken Athens afterward lacked the power to defeat Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The Byzantine emperor Justinian would never finish his half-completed dreams of a new reunited Rome. The Black Plague helped usher in the end of the Middle Ages.

Great literature—from Thucydides, Procopius, Boccaccio, and Camus—often chronicled the human suffering, and especially the hysteria, that follows from the breakdown of civilized norms.

History also reminds us that nature remains unforgiving. We may live in the age of the internet, smartphones, and jet travel, but viruses are indifferent to so-called human progress.

Modern life squeezes millions into cities as never before. Jet travel, with its crowded planes and airports, can spread diseases from continent to continent in hours.

Globalization is a two-edged sword. It may enrich billions of people, but the leveling effects of instant communication and travel can spread disease at a speed undreamed of in the past.

The dissemination of sophisticated Western science to non-Western societies that lack advanced research centers may be increasingly suicidal. Borders are now considered passe in the age of globalization. But their enforcement reminds us that not all nations are alike. All sovereign peoples should have the right to take measures for their own safety well beyond the purview of the transnational elites.

Finally, is it wise or safe to allow hundreds of thousands of homeless to live crowded among filth, vermin, and squalor on the sidewalks of America’s major cities?

The coronavirus threat and the unfounded hysteria that has accompanied it will pass.

But the specter of a pandemic offers a timely warning to remember that we are not necessarily any more immune from volatile nature—and humankind’s paranoid response to it—than were the ancients.

This article by Victor Davis Hanson originally appeared at The Daily Signal. This article first appeared in 2020.

Image: Reuters

James Clark

Security, Americas

A very useful weapon.

Key point: When you need a good explosion during a fire fight, grenade launchers will help in a pinch. This is why they are still kept in arsenals the world over.

Infantry platoons bristle with direct-fire weapons, but everyone loves a grenade. Grenades give ground troops the ability to send a big boom of fire and shrapnel over a wall or hedgerow, inside a window, or wherever else you can wing one. The catch, of course, is that a hand grenade’s range tops out at roughly 40 meters, depending on whether the grenade-hurler tried out for the minors before joining the military.

Enter the ubiquitous grenade launcher. Today, that simplest of standoff weapons is often mounted in the turrets of armored vehicles; lugged along by a dog-tired grunt in the form of a man-portable 15-plus pound system; or most of the time, just affixed to the underbarrel of an infantryman’s rifle.

But who cooked up the idea of a gun that burps explosive grenades — and how’d they end up on so many M4s and M16s in the first place?

Glad you asked. Turns out grenade launchers have a rich century’s worth of weird history, from the earliest steampunk-looking trench-warfare crossbows and bomb-apults of World War I.

“A New Type of Explosive Grenade That is Fired From a Rifle”

The earliest serious incarnations were rifle grenades, which were exactly what they sounded like: special charges meant to be mounted on the business end of your rifle barrel and shot off, at five times the range of their handheld counterparts. A rifle grenade could be fired in a plunging arc overhead, and unlike other indirect fire weapons like mortars or artillery, they could go wherever a rifleman went — anywhere — as this 1914 edition of Popular Mechanics notes.

Throughout World War I and World War II, American infantrymen relied on a wide variety of rifle grenades, according to U.S. Grenade Launchers, Gordon L. Rottman’s historical account of the weapon system published last September. The armaments were a mainstay of American combat troops for decades, but the weapons weren’t without shortcomings: The more distant the target, the less accurate the grenades became, and their range often maxed out around 200 meters — leaving a lot to be desired.

“40 Mike-Mike”​

In the early 1950s, weapons developers at the Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratories at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland were hard at work on a new type of grenade inspired by experimental German anti-tank munitions during World War II. The program was called Project Niblick — named after a 9-iron golf club, to highlight the similar arcing trajectories of a golf ball and a grenade in flight, according to Rottman.

By 1953, Project Niblick had its ace in the hole: the 40mm grenade. In the years that followed, that first “40 Mike-Mike” birthed a generation of aluminum-encased ordnance for a variety of launchers and payloads, from high explosives to buckshot to white phosphorous to parachute flares and non-lethal rounds.

The original “bloop gun”

By turns dubbed the “bloop tube” and “blooper,” owing to the sound made as a 40mm is launched from the barrel — or “thump-gun,” because of the noise it makes when said round lands — the M79 was created by Springfield Armory in Massachusetts in the 1950s. The idea was a weapon that could lob a high explosive munition up to 400 meters — though the effective range for most launchers comes in at around 350 meters, or less — and with no more recoil than a 12-gauge shotgun.

This article first appeared in 2017 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

The break-action shotgun-style launcher was officially approved by the military in 1961 and immediately began making its way into the hands of U.S. troops. Though it mostly saw service in Vietnam — and between 1961 and 1971, roughly 350,000 “bloopers” were manufactured — the M79 didn’t vanish after the war; the “thumper” even did a stint of field-testing in Iraq as an anti-IED system during the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom, where its range provided enough “standoff distance” to detonate suspected roadside bombs with a well-placed 40mm HE round.

Simple in design, with a wooden stock — typically black walnut or birch, though plastic eventually was an option, too — the M79 weighs about the same as an M16, and at two and a half feet in length, when not cut down, it’s man-portable. But it only fires one round at a time.

The military had also tested out the T148, a semi-automatic grenade launcher that could lob three rounds in the air before the first hit the ground. But its side-feeding magazine often snagged on a GI’s equipment, became tangled in heavy brush, or got gummed up with debris and muck, causing jams, according to Rottman. After minimal field testing, that prototype got scrapped in 1960.

The fabled “China Lake” SEAL “blooper”

The need for a standalone launcher that could get more grenades downrange ricky tick without jamming was met by the beastly 8-pound pump-action China Lake grenade launcher, which had a capacity of three 40mm grenades — though, according to Rottman, veteran grenadiers figured out a way to load an additional two rounds, one in the chamber, and a second onto the elevator plate, which carries the munitions from the feedway to the chamber. Created at Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, California in 1968, the weapon was fielded mainly by Navy SEAL detachments in Vietnam.

The China Lake was a one-trick pony, though: It was prone to jamming when any 40mm rounds other than high-explosive were used. Only a few of the weapons were made, likely between 16 and 50 — that’s as high as the serial numbers go — and just four are known to remain intact, safely stowed in museums, Rottman writes.

Getting the “bloop” and the “bang” in one boomstick

In May 1963, the U.S. military sought to field an under-the-barrel grenade launcher to complement the newly designed M16 assault rifle, War Is Boring notes. After a few missteps with the XM-148 — a finicky rifle attachment that was inaccurate, hard to clean, and prone to breaking — the military found the M203.

The first M203s reached U.S. troops in Vietnam in 1969, where they were well received: The launcher was rugged, reliable, and less likely to snag on heavy jungle growth than the XM-148. For the first time since the rifle grenades of World War II, infantry squads and fire teams had the firepower of a grenade launcher without sacrificing a rifleman — or burdening a grenadier with a heavy weapon and ammunition.

For the next half-century, the M203 performed its role admirably: taking out groups of enemies, providing a heavy base of fire for advancing or retreating troops, and depending on the grenade used — marking critical targets or locations.

The new kid in town​

But in the last decade, the M203 has given way to the M320. The advanced replacement first made its hands to the Army in 2009, and this year the Marines got their first batch following testing during Sea Dragon 2025, an 18-month initiative during which the Corps was trying out new weapon systems and tactics, Task & Purpose reported in June.

Both the M203 and the M320 can lob 5 to 7 rounds per minute and are effective against area targets up to 350 meters away. The most significant difference is the M320’s ability to function as a standalone weapon when broken away from a service rifle.

Though underslung grenade launchers have the niche of “squads artillery” pretty well covered, new advancements are continually being researched — like smart grenades that detonate inside of a doorway, and an M320-launched guided missile.

The six-shooter solution​

In 2005, the Marine Corps decided to procure the M32, a six-round rapid fire grenade launcher that looks like a giant’s revolver. The need arose during the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004, when Marines on the ground concluded that they needed a way to sling boatloads of HE into congested and enemy-occupied buildings, quickly, according to Rottman. The launcher, which was fielded in 2008 and weighs in at 18 pounds with a full payload, was seen less as a replacement to its underslung siblings, and more as a way to beef up an infantry squad’s firepower.

Given how far grenade launchers have come — from a medieval-type crossbow to a single shot 40mm bloop tube to a cornucopia of multishot hand cannons and underbarrel ’nade launchers —  it’s hard to know exactly where they’ll end up. One thing’s certain though: these “thump-guns” aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, having blooped into grunts’ hearts the world over.

This article by James Clark originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter. This article first appeared in 2017 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

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Image: Reuters

David Axe

History,

Lost opportunity?

Key point: The Air Force instead ordered what became the F-22. Although it could have been replaced by a faster plane, the F-22 has held its own.

The U.S. Air Force came very close to buying a rocket ship.

In 1991, the Air Force selected Lockheed’s YF-22 fighter over Northrop’s YF-23 as the basis for the service’s new air-superiority fighter.

That wasn’t the only major decision the Air Force made at the time. The service also selected Pratt & Whitney’s YF-119 as the engine that would power that YF-22, in the process rejecting General Electric’s YF-120.

It’s apparent 28 years later that the Air Force preferred the YF-119 because it seemed it would be cheaper and easier to develop and build. The YF-120 demonstrably was more powerful. But that power came at a cost that the flying branch decided was unacceptable.

History flows in one direction and fantastical conjecture about long-ago weapons programs can be toxic. But in 2019 as the Air Force begins considering how eventually to replace the F-22, it’s worth considering the implications of choosing cheaper and more reliable technology over riskier, pricier but potentially more powerful tech.

The Air Force in 1971 began studying requirements for a new fighter to succeed the F-15, which itself at the time was still in development, recalled Paul Metz, a former Northrop test pilot who flew the YF-23.

Metz and fellow YF-23 test pilot Jim Sandberg in 2015 spoke at length about the YF-23 in a lecture series at the Western Museum of Flight in California.

Studies continued for 10 years before the service finally approached the aerospace industry. The Air Force in 1981 asked nine companies to pitch new fighter designs. Seven responded. The Air Force in 1986 tapped Lockheed and Northrop each to build and test two prototypes. The deadline was in 1991.

Meanwhile, the Air Force tapped Pratt & Whitney and General Electric each to develop a new engine to power the two YF-22s and two YF-23s that Lockheed and Northrop were building. One of each type of demonstrator would fly with the Pratt & Whitney YF-119 while the other flew with General Electric’s YF-120.

In a sense, the Air Force planned to consider not two competing fighter designs, but four. That’s how different the two motors were. “This was a competition between two airplane designs but also two engine designs,” Sandberg said.

One key requirement was that the demonstrators be able to “supercruise” at supersonic speed without using their fuel-thirsty afterburners. In designing the YF-119, Pratt & Whitney stressed “a balance between performance, safety and reliability, maintainability and low life-cycle cost,” according to Globalsecurity.org.

General Electric, by contrast, “was focused on performance for the supercruise requirement,” David Aronstein, Michael Hirschberg and Albert Piccirillo wrote in their book Advanced Tactical Fighter to F-22 Raptor: Origins of the 21st Century Air Dominance Fighter.

During a brief but intensive flight-test program ending in early 1991, the YF-120 proved to be the more powerful of the two engines. The YF-22 and YF-23 both supercruised faster with the YF-120 than they did with the YF-119, Sandberg said.

The YF-120-powered YF-23 in particular was a veritable rocketship, supercruising faster than Mach 1.6.

But that power came at a cost. The YF-120 might be more difficult, and more expensive, to develop for mass production. When the Air Force tapped the YF-22 as the basis for its next fighter, it also selected the YF-119 as that fighter’s engine.

“The Air Force did not consider this demonstration to be a performance ‘fly-off’ but rather a demonstration of the technical and management capability needed to meet the program objectives during [development] with the least technical risk and the lowest cost," California think-tank RAND explained.

The service’s risk-aversion also helped to explain its preference for the YF-22, which many observers believed was an inferior performer compared to the YF-23. But Lockheed reportedly pitched what the Air Force considered to be a low-risk development and production process that the service hoped would minimize delays and cost overruns.

Sandberg for one called the Air Force’s preference for the lower-performing Pratt & Whitney engine “interesting.”

History seems to have validated the Air Force’s 1991 decisions. In 2019 the F-119-powered F-22 probably is the most capable fighter in the world.

If the flying branch applies the same criteria to a new fighter design to replace the F-22, it might opt for airframe and engine designs that are sophisticated … without being too sophisticated.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.

This first appeared in 2019.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Politics, Americas

An expensive mistake.

Key point: Washington is livid. The trillion-dollar F-35 stealth fighter has computer problems but no one wants to take the blame.

The U.S. military sees the Lockheed F-35 Lightning as representing a new paradigm of air warfare. The new tactical jet fighter controversially trades in some of the raw agility of preceding fourth-generation jet fighters in favor of capabilities emphasizing stealth, and reliance upon networked computers and powerful long-range sensors and missiles.

This first appeared in 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

But the F-35 Lightning also represents a new business paradigm—one in which the jets are offered more and more as a service than as a physical product, with manufacturer Lockheed Martin retaining exclusive rights to modify much of the aircraft’s critical mission and ground-based software.

Earlier, while attempting to persuade Turkey not to purchase Russian surface-to-air missiles, the United States even reportedly threatened that it could cut off software support for any F-35 delivered to Turkey, rendering them virtually unusable.

Of course, maintenance, training, and spare parts contracts have for decades meant that jet fighters amounted to lucrative long-term revenue streams for their manufacturers. But the F-35 advances this paradigm dramatically in that Lockheed retain exclusive rights to modify its operating software, a fact which has not sat well not only with foreign importers but even the U.S. military. 

Only Israel has received permission to install an overarching software shell “on top” of the jet’s computer in its customized F-35I fighters. Still, some will argue deeper privatization of jet fighter operations is unobjectionable if it delivers services more cheaply and efficiently than the military. But that may not be the case in this instance. The F-35’s ground-based ALIS logistical system, intended to streamline reporting and implement predictive maintenance, has for years remained buggy to the point of dysfunctionality—requiring constant manual inputs and workarounds when automated systems failed to do what they were supposed to do.

In a keynote address earlier this year, former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson described ALIS as “a proprietary system so frustrating to use, maintainers said they were wasting 10-15 hours a week fighting with it . . . and looking for ways to bypass it to try to make F-35s mission capable.”

Worse, government reports have repeatedly identified ALIS as being vulnerable to hacking—which could have disastrous consequences given how dependent the jet is on its computer systems.

Indeed, the Pentagon has reportedly become so exasperated with ALIS’s continuing dysfunction it by early 2019 it had its in-house Kessel Run software team develop an alternative computer cloud called Mad Hatter to do the same job.

Lockheed, however, insists that it’s spending $170 million of its own money to fix ALIS.

Nonetheless, in mid-November, defense undersecretary Ellen Lord told Congress that “understanding where all the intellectual property is and making sure the government has access to what it has paid for is a key part of rearchitecting ALIS.”

In other words, the Defense Department’s desire to directly implement fixes of bugs in the F-35 is running afoul of Lockheed’s sweeping proprietary ownership of those digital support systems and the data they’re recording.

According to a Defense News article by David Larter and Joe Gould, F-35 program chief General David Fick also criticized how at times intellectual property disputes “that bordered on the ridiculous” were preventing the program from advancing.

“Everything from something as simple as U.S. government documents that get uploaded into a system and come back with Lockheed Martin proprietary markings on it . . . What we’re working to do is to figure out where are the places at which intellectual property assertions actually prevent us from doing the kind of work that we intend to do.”

Furthermore, Lord also testified that the Defense Department hired an independent consulting group to find ways to lower the F-35’s operating costs from around $35,000 per hour to the target $25,000, which would make it only slightly more expensive than a single-engine F-16 jet. 

Reportedly the consultants discovered $3,000 in per-hour costs that they couldn’t account for. Lord said they were working with Lockheed to “understand” the “confusion.”

Not all the news is bad. The F-35 program’s formerly crippling shortage of spare parts has reportedly been alleviated with a buildup in inventory and presumably reforms to its inefficient depot logistic system. This has helped raise mission-capable rates from around 50 percent to roughly 70 percent—though still short of the target 80 percent. 

The flyaway cost of the land-based F-35A model has also decreased to around $85 million, meaning those jets individually cost little more than advanced fourth-generation fighters if you don’t count-in operating expenses. And the more expensive F-35B jump-jet model is inspiring a renaissance in small-carrier fixed-wing aviation in countries like Japan and South Korea, and even the amphibious carriers of the U.S. Navy.

As the F-35 is currently set to be the most extensively manufactured warplane of the twenty-first century with projected sales of two to three thousand units—making it the most expensive weapons program in human history to date— more of the jet’s persistent defect may be laboriously smoothed away as multi-million dollar software patches introduce new capabilities and fix old problems.

But for now, the Pentagon and Lockheed appear to be facing off in a showdown over to what extent the U.S. military actually owns the jets it’s paying for.

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 first appeared in 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters