The National Interest

Kyle Mizokami

Battleships, Asia

As the war in Vietnam reached its crescendo, the U.S. Navy prepared to recommission one of the most powerful ships ever to serve in the fleet.

Here's What You Need to Know: Over the course of her relatively short Vietnam patrol, New Jersey fired 5,688 16-inch gun rounds and 14,891 five-inch gun rounds, far more than she fired during World War II and the Korean War combined. She was never seriously attacked by North Vietnamese forces.

As the war in Vietnam reached its crescendo, the U.S. Navy prepared to recommission one of the most powerful ships ever to serve in the fleet. USS New Jersey, an Iowa-class battleship, was reactivated to provide naval gunfire support for American and allied forces fighting in South Vietnam. The battlewagon fired nearly twenty thousand shells during its tour of duty, bombarding enemy forces the way only a battleship can.

The USS New Jersey was the second Iowa-class battleship ever built, and the third from last U.S. Navy battleship ever built. New Jersey was part of the Navy’s prewar rearmament program, as the United States began to build up its forces in response to war in both Europe and the Pacific. Construction began at the Philadelphia Naval Yard on September 16, 1940, and the ship was launched exactly one year after Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1942. She was finally commissioned into the U.S. Navy on May 23, 1943.

New Jersey was built to the same specifications as her three sister ships: Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin. (Two additional ships, Illinois and Kentucky, were ordered but never completed.) Each battleship was 860 feet long, weighed 57,350 tons fully loaded with ammunition and fuel, and were powered by four General Electric steam turbines, giving them a top speed of 33 knots. The battleships were armed with nine sixteen-inch guns, twenty five-inch dual purpose guns, eighty 40-millimeter anti-aircraft guns, and forty nine 20-millimeter anti-aircraft guns.

The Ohio-class battleships were originally designed to duke it out with other battleships, including such Axis ships as the German Bismarck and the Japanese super-battleships Yamato and Musashi. The changing nature of warfare, however, relegated the battleships to providing naval gunfire support for Army and Marine landings across the Pacific and anti-air warfare escort for aircraft carriers. All four briefly saw action in the Korean War, with Iowa, New Jersey, and Wisconsin all reactivated to provide heavy gunfire support from the sea. The Korean War ended in 1953 and New Jersey was again decommissioned in 1957.

In 1968 New Jersey was brought out of mothballs yet again, for yet another war. New Jersey was recommissioned on April 6, 1968 at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard where she had been built a quarter century before. The battleship had only a modest set of modifications: her 40-millimeter guns were removed and a helicopter landing pad was added. The ship was also fitted with SHORTSTOP, a brand new combined jammer and chaff launcher meant to protect the ship from radar-guided anti-ship missiles.

The U.S. Navy, concerned by aircraft losses in the air campaign against North Vietnam, saw the battleship as a low-risk way of bombarding coastal targets without losing aircraft and pilots. North Vietnam, other than tactical aircraft and torpedo boats, had little that could damage a battleship parked off its coastline. A battleship could provide responsive fire support day or night, rain or shine, whenever friendly forces needed it.

USS New Jersey departed Philadelphia on May 16, 1968, traveling down the East Coast and passing through the Panama Canal before arriving at her new home port of Long Beach. The ship fired her guns, including the sixteen-inch guns off San Clemente Island in June 1968, then proceeded to Hawaii and then Subic Bay, the Philippines.

The battleship finally arrived off the coast of Southeast Asia on September 29th, 1968, and fired her guns in anger again for the first time in over fifteen years the next day. New Jersey was on the gun line in South Vietnam for 120 days. She participated in the U.S. Navy’s Operation Sea Dragon, an effort to disrupt North Vietnam’s seagoing supply effort, shell coastal batteries and radar sites. As originally intended, New Jersey was able to relieve U.S. tactical air forces from missions near the enemy coastline. The battleship also responded to calls for fire from the 1st and 3d Marine Divisions, 173rd Airborne Brigade, and 101st Airborne Division.

Over the course of her relatively short Vietnam patrol, New Jersey fired 5,688 16-inch gun rounds and 14,891 five-inch gun rounds, far more than she fired during World War II and the Korean War combined. She was never seriously attacked by North Vietnamese forces.

After her Vietnam tour, the ship returned to Long Beach. During the workup to her second tour her crew learned that the ship was scheduled to once again go into mothballs, the victim of cost cutting. Even a draftee military found it difficult to financially support a ship with 1,600 crew members and the demands of both Vietnam and the Cold War to satisfy.

New Jersey was inactivated in 1969. The old battlewagon would be reactivated just twelve years later as part of an effort to bring the U.S. Navy battle fleet up to 600 ships. USS New Jersey is now moored in Camden, New Jersey, where she serves as a floating museum. 

Kyle Mizokami is a writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and The Daily Beast. In 2009 he co-founded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch.

This article first appeared in 2019.

Image: Wikipedia.

Warfare History Network

U.S. Navy, Global

Only for training purposes though.

Here's What You Need to Know: The training carrier had certain limitations, such as having no elevators or a hangar deck, and the flight deck was smaller than those of the ocean-going fleet carriers. When barrier crashes or other mishaps used up the allotted spots on the flight deck for parking damaged aircraft, the day’s operations were canceled and the carrier headed back to its pier in Chicago.

In August 1942, the U.S. Navy acquired the 1913 USS Seeandbee (using the initials of its parent company, the Cleveland and Buffalo Transit Company), the world’s largest side-wheel passenger steamer, and began converting it into a training carrier. Her name was changed to USS Wolverine (IX-64), and she was designated an “unclassified miscellaneous auxiliary.” Conversion resulted in the ship being fitted with a 550-foot-long, 98-foot-wide flight deck capable of supporting takeoffand landing operations.

Another side-wheel excursion steamer, also built in 1913, and named the Greater Buffalo, was acquired by the Navy on May 8, 1943, rechristened USS Sable (IX-81), and converted to a training carrier to serve alongside the Wolverine. The Sable was slightly smaller than Wolverine, with a deck 518 feet long and only 58 feet wide. Both ships were the backbone of the Navy’s Carrier Qualification Training Unit (CQTU) at Glenview Naval Air Station near Chicago.

A Clear Purpose in Mind

Sable and Wolverine were a far cry from fleet aircraft carriers but were adequate for accomplishing the Navy’s purpose—that of qualifying naval aviators, fresh out of operational flight training, in carrier landings.

The two carriers had certain limitations such as having no elevators or a hangar deck, and their flight decks were smaller than those of the ocean-going fleet carriers. When barrier crashes or other mishaps used up the allotted spots on the flight deck for parking damaged aircraft, the day’s operations were cancelled and the carriers headed back to their pier in Chicago.

Accidents Common; Some Fatalities

Accidents were common. When the young, inexperienced pilots took off or approached either of the two carriers incorrectly, they frequently had nowhere to go but into the lake. The first fatal accident occurred on October 21, 1942, when Ensign F.M. Cooper and his F4F-3 Wildcat took off from Wolverine and crashed into the water; neither Cooper nor the F4F were recovered.

As time went on, more and more pilots suffered training accidents. There were over 200 accidents in which 128 planes (including 38 SBD Dauntlesses) were lost and eight pilots were killed. However, some 35,000 pilots—one of whom was future President George H.W. Bush—qualified for carrier duty between 1942 and 1945.

During the war, six of the planes that crashed into the water were recovered. Today, most of the restored SBDs on display in the country’s museums and airports came from Lake Michigan, and many unrecovered SBDs and other aircraft still rest on the bottom of the lake. The Underwater Archaeology Department of the Naval History and Heritage Command says, “The aircraft assemblage in Lake Michigan represents the largest and best-preserved group of U.S. Navy, sunken, historic, aircraft in the world. From a historical perspective, the assemblage provides a wealth of knowledge about the history of naval aviation. Individually they are physical pieces of our past linked to significant people and events.

Decommissioned After the War

“Vast amounts of information can be gleaned from and memorialized through these special objects. Artifacts lost in the cold, fresh waters of Lake Michigan usually exhibit excellent preservation characteristics. Many of the aircraft in this assemblage have been found in good condition, tires inflated, parachutes preserved, leather seats maintained, and engine crankcases full of oil. Often paint schemes are well preserved, allowing for easier identification.”

Once the war was over, the need for such training ships came to an end and, in November 1945, both the Wolverine and the Sable, which did much to prepare American naval aviators for war, were decommissioned and later sold for scrap.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Charlie Gao

Datalinks,

The OSNOD datalink is generally considered to be linked to the fifth generation Su-57/PAK FA fighter project.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Raduga and APD-518 were “first generation” datalinks mostly used for the MiG-31 interceptors, with the Raduga being larger and more powerful.

On the twenty-first century battlefield, datalinks are some of the most important features of any military vehicle. Ideally, datalinks are able to transfer and forward lots of data, are resistant to jamming, and are easily integrated into existing aircraft. As a result, as part of air force modernization, Russia is in the process of developing and fielding the next generation объединенная система навигации и обмена данными (OSNOD) datalink.

In Western media, the OSNOD datalink is generally considered to be linked to the fifth generation Su-57/PAK FA fighter project. But the project has been running for a long time, to replace the earlier Raduga (Rainbow), APD-518, and TKS-2 and TKS-2M datalinks. Raduga and APD-518 were “first generation” datalinks mostly used for the MiG-31 interceptors, with the Raduga being larger and more powerful. TKS-2 and TKS-2M datalinks were fitted standard to Su-27S and later Sukhoi fighters, though they were also retrofitted to MiG-31s in later variants to replace the APD-518 datalink.

OSNOD improves on previous generation datalinks in almost every aspect, doubling the amount of bits per message while also increasing jam resistance and probability of intercept. But it also promises to integrate with naval and land systems (hence the объединенная integrated in the name). This would make OSNOD into a close equivalent to Link-16 for NATO, which is widely integrated across most major naval and air services.

OSNOD is planned to be a standard, leading feature for the Su-57, and underwent testing in 2019. There are also plans to fit it to drones. OSNOD is also being retrofitted to earlier Sukhois, though the rate and extent to which this is happening is unclear. It is confirmed that OSNOD will be fitted to Su-30SMs, but whether it will be part of the fit of recently delivered Su-35s and MiG-35s, or put into Su-27SM3s is unclear. There are also standalone terminals for ground and sea usage, but information about the integration of OSNOD onto them is scarce.

If OSNOD reaches full capability similar to Link-16, it could significantly increase the potency of Russia’s military by granting it cooperative engagement capabilities (CECs). Many Russian systems are limited in range not by the power of the engines or boosters on the weapon itself, but rather by the ability for sensors to acquire and lock onto targets. Linking S-400s to AWACS or fighters could allow them to stretch their legs further, engaging targets near the full kinematic range of the missile, rather than being limited by what ground-based radars can acquire and track.

However, such capabilities are hard to develop. It took years for the US Navy to start mastering cooperative engagement, and the adoption and deployment of OSNOD is only the first step in developing a true cooperative engagement capability. But there are some Russian and Soviet systems, primarily based on ground control intercept that were limited implementation of a cooperative engagement capability. So true Russian CEC may be closer than some analysts think.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues.

Image: Flickr.

Robert Farley

World War II,

While the attacks definitely made an impression, they did not offer the Navy a long-term strategic role for its battlefleet.

Here's What You Need to Remember: In mid-1945 the U.S. Navy (USN) had an unusual, and unexpected, problem.

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In mid-1945 the U.S. Navy (USN) had an unusual, and unexpected, problem.

With the naval war well in hand, the USN had plenty of battleships and little use for them. Had the United States eventually invaded Japan, these battleships would have offered gunfire support to amphibious assaults and to coastal movements, as they had since the beginning of the island-hopping campaign. But with the remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy uninterested in a fight and the invasion still well in the future, they represented excess capability.

Noting the extent of the destruction caused by the U.S. Army Air Force’s B-29s, the USN decided that it could use the battleship in a similar fashion: to wreak destruction upon what was left of Japan’s industrial base. With luck, shore bombardment would draw out the last dregs of the IJN, or at least lure the kamikazes away from the valuable, vulnerable aircraft carriers. Accordingly, the U.S. Navy decided to use its battleships directly against Japanese cities, in a series of raids that were terrifying in their destruction.

Civilian:

As long as ships have carried artillery they have bombarded shore facilities, notwithstanding the dictum, attributed to Nelson by Jackie Fisher, that “no sailor could ever be such a born ass as to attack forts with ships.” But such attacks have generally sought tactical objectives. More general “strategic” attacks became a concern for countries as the size and power of shipborne artillery increased, but the risks associated with bombarding a city from a ship normally dissuaded admirals from committing their warships to such operations. Even so, the possibility of Royal Navy attacks against Italian cities in World War I helped make Italian entry on the side of the Entente a foregone conclusion, and worries about the effect of a naval bombardment on Istanbul drove the Turkish response to the Dardanelles campaign. 

Bombarding a city, even with a battleship, had obvious hazards. A battleship firing its heavy guns is distinctly non-stealthy, even by the low standards of the 1940s. This meant that enemy assets would have no difficulty locating the offending warship. Air attacks, small coastal submarines, torpedo boats, mines, and coastal artillery could all threaten to give a battleship a bad day; Norwegian land-based torpedoes had sunk a German cruiser during the 1940 invasion, and coastal weapons had damaged U.S. and other ships at various occasions. A presumably well-motivated Japanese military might still try to inflict serious damage on the largest ships in Allied service.

That said, numerous Japanese military and industrial facilities were located in coastal areas, with easy access to ports and to water. Although the combination of the B-29 bombing campaign, the USN submarine campaign, and the USAAF’s aerial mining campaign had inflicted dreadful damage on Japanese industry, some facilities remained only lightly affected. Consequently, the Navy saw an opportunity to inflict damage, as well as a chance to make the case that it could incur strategic effects on the same scale as the Air Force. Moreover, the Japanese were so weak that direct attacks with battleships seemed like an acceptable risk.

The Raids

The first raid targeted the Kamaishi ironworks in northern Honshu. Three fast battleships and two heavy cruisers inflicted heavy damage on the facilities, although the extent of the damage was not clear until after the end of the war. The battleships alone fired 802 shells, commencing from a range of 27 km and moving inward across the course of the bombardment. The next morning, another group of three fast battleships attacked steel factories and ironworks in Hokkaido. That group, including Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin, fired 860 shells, inflicting serious damage on the factories and on the surrounding towns. Beyond the range of B-29s, these areas had not yet been affected by U.S. strategic attacks.

The attacks incurred no Japanese response and seemed to have inflicted some damage, so Admiral William Halsey decided to continue them. On July 18 five U.S. battleships, accompanied by the British battleship King George V, hammered the city of Hitachi, just north of Tokyo. The B-29s of the USAAF followed up the attack with their own raid that night, producing utter devastation. On July 29, three American battleships and King George V hit Hamamatsu, causing significant industrial and infrastructure damage. Three U.S. battleships hit Kamaishi again on August 9, landing 803 16” shells on what was left of the ironworks.

Wrap

Further raids were planned, but the Japanese surrender suspended additional operations. Postwar assessments suggested that the raids had a serious effect on the industrial capacity of the facilities in question, but that the general economic collapse of Japan would have proceeded in any case. Surveys of the victims of the bombardment indicated that survivors found the battleships more terrifying than the B-29s. Some 1,700 Japanese civilians were killed during the raids.

While the attacks definitely made an impression, they did not offer the Navy a long-term strategic role for its battlefleet. The raids succeeded because Japan was almost completely prostrate in a military sense and because it was husbanding all of its remaining forces for the anticipated U.S. invasion. Against a better-resourced foe, even the battleships would have found themselves exceedingly vulnerable to air and submarine attack. Thus, the raids could not offer a plausible logic for retaining large numbers of battleships. Still, there is a certain irony in the fact that the Pacific War began with Japanese aircraft sinking five American battleships at Pearl Harbor and two British battleships off Malaya, and ended with Japan incapable of attacking battleships bombarding its own cities. 

Dr. Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, teaches at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of the Battleship Book and can be found at @drfarls. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government

This article first appeared last year.

Image: Flickr.

Kyle Mizokami

U.S. Navy,

The Nimitz-class carriers have participated in nearly every crisis and conflict the United States has been involved in over the past forty-two years.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Nimitz-class carriers are a monumental achievement—an enormous, highly complex and yet highly successful ship design. The ships will carry on the Nimitz name through the 2050s, with the entire class serving a whopping eighty consecutive years. That sort of performance—and longevity—is only possible with a highly professional, competent Navy and shipbuilding team.

The most successful U.S. Navy carriers of the postwar era all belong to a class named in honor of World War II’s most successful admiral, Chester W. Nimitz. The class’s lead ship, commissioned in 1975, bears the fleet admiral’s name. The Nimitz-class aircraft carriers were, at the time, the largest warships ever constructed. Although superseded by the new Ford class, the ten Nimitz carriers will continue to form the bulk of the Navy’s carrier force for the next twenty to thirty years. Many project a half a century or more.

The story of the Nimitz carriers goes back to the mid-1960s. The U.S. Navy was in the process of spreading nuclear propulsion across the fleet, from submarines to cruisers, and had just commissioned the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, Enterprise, in 1961. As older carriers were retired, the Navy had to decide whether to switch over to nuclear power for future ships. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was ultimately convinced to proceed with nuclear power on the grounds that nuclear carriers had lower operating costs over their service lifetimes. He ordered the construction of three nuclear-powered carriers.

The result was the Nimitz class. Its first ship was laid down on June 22, 1968. The ship built on the Navy’s prior experience with both conventionally powered supercarriers and the Enterprise. The Nimitz retained the layout of previous carriers, with an angled flight deck, island superstructure and four steam-powered catapults that could launch four planes a minute. At 1,092 feet she was just twenty-four feet longer than the older Kitty Hawk, but nearly nineteen thousand tons heavier. More than five thousand personnel are assigned to Nimitz carriers at sea, with three thousand manning the ship and another two thousand in the air wing and other positions.

Lower operating costs were not the only benefits of nuclear power. Although nuclear-powered carriers have a maximum official speed of thirty-plus knots, their true speed is suspected to be considerably faster. Nimitz and her sister ships can accelerate and decelerate more quickly than a conventional ship, and can cruise indefinitely. Like Enterprise, it is nuclear powered, but it also streamlined the number of reactors from eight to two. Its two Westinghouse A4W reactors can collectively generate 190 megawatts of power, enough to power 47,500 American homes. Finally, nuclear propulsion reduces a carrier battle group’s need for fuel.

Of course, the real strength of a carrier is in its air wing. The Carrier Air Wings of the Cold War were larger than today’s. During the 1980s, a typical carrier air wing consisted of two squadrons of twelve F-14 Tomcat air-superiority fighters, two squadrons of twelve F/A-18 Hornet multi-role fighters, one squadron of ten A-6 Intruder attack bombers, one squadron of 4-6 E-2 Hawkeye airborne early-warning and control planes, ten S-3A Viking antisubmarine planes, one squadron of four EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes and a squadron of six SH-3 antisubmarine helicopters. With slight variations per carrier and per cruise, the average Nimitz-class carrier of the Cold War carried between eighty-five and ninety aircraft.

Today the carrier air wing looks quite different. The venerable F-14 Tomcat aged out and was replaced by the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. The A-6 Intruder was retired without a replacement when the A-12 Avenger carrier stealth bomber was canceled in 1991. The S-3A Viking was retired in the 2000s, and the EA-6B Prowler was replaced by the EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft. This resulted in a smaller carrier air wing of approximately sixty planes without dedicated fleet air defense, long range strike and antisubmarine warfare platforms.

The Nimitz-class carriers have participated in nearly every crisis and conflict the United States has been involved in over the past forty-two years. Nimitz was involved in the failed attempt to rescue U.S. embassy personnel from Tehran in 1980, and a year later, two F-14s from Nimitz shot down two Su-22 Fitters of the Libyan Air Force during the Gulf of Sidra incident in 1981. During the Cold War, Nimitz-class carriers conducted numerous exercises with regional allies, such as NATO and Japan, designed to counter the Soviet Union in wartime.

During Operation Desert Storm, the Nimitz-class carrier Theodore Roosevelt participated in air operations against Iraq. In 1999, Theodore Roosevelt again participated in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. After 9/11, Carl Vinson and Theodore Roosevelt participated in the first air strikes against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Since then, virtually all Nimitz-class carriers supported air operations over Afghanistan and both the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

Over a thirty-year period ten Nimitz carriers were built. The last, George H. W. Bush, incorporated the latest technology, including a bulbous bow to improve hull efficiency, a new, smaller, modernized island design, upgraded aircraft launch and recovery equipment, and improved aviation fuel storage and handling.

The Nimitz-class carriers are a monumental achievement—an enormous, highly complex and yet highly successful ship design. The ships will carry on the Nimitz name through the 2050s, with the entire class serving a whopping eighty consecutive years. That sort of performance—and longevity—is only possible with a highly professional, competent Navy and shipbuilding team.

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

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Kyle Mizokami

Russian Army, Europe

Russian infantry has some advantages over their American counterparts.

Here's What You Need To Remember: American and Russian infantry would never fight alone. Both would fight as part of an integrated team with armor, mortars, heavy artillery, air support, and electronic warfare all contributing to win the battle. Still, in a matchup between American and Russian infantry forces American forces have a decisive advantage in firepower. Let’s hope the two sides never do meet.

The United States and Russia field two of the most powerful armies in the world. Heavily mechanized and salted with combat veterans, the U.S. Army and Russian Ground Forces have spent the better part of the last fifteen years not only chasing guerrillas from Afghanistan to Syria, but also fighting conventional-style wars in Iraq and Georgia. Now, as tensions between the NATO and Russia place U.S. and Russian ground pounders in the same country (Syria) or just across the border from one another (the Baltics), the question is: in a head to head matchup, which side would prevail?

The backbone of U.S. Army infantry is the infantry squad. In light infantry—including air assault, airborne and mountain units—a squad consists of nine soldiers that further divide into a squad leader and two fire teams. Each fire team of four soldiers consists of a fire team leader, rifleman, grenadier, and an automatic rifleman equipped with two M4 carbines, an M4 carbine equipped with the M320 underbarrel grenade launcher and the M249 squad automatic weapon. Individual soldiers will carry single-shot AT-4 light antitank weapons as issued.

In mechanized infantry units, the nine-man squad consists of the two- or three-man Stryker interim combat vehicle or M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle crew, plus six soldiers that dismount to fight on foot. A mechanized infantry squad can put fewer soldiers on the ground, but it also has the benefit of vastly increased mobility and firepower in the form of the Bradley’s 25mm M242 Bushmaster autocannon, TOW antitank missiles, and 7.62mm coaxial machine gun. Strykers are currently armed with M2 .50 caliber machine guns but Europe-based units are receiving a new turret upgrade that includes a 30mm cannon or Javelin antitank missile. The mechanized dismount team also has its own M4 carbines, a M320 grenade launcher, one M249 squad automatic weapon and a Javelin shoulder-fired medium range antitank missile, capable of defeating the heaviest Russian armor at ranges of up to 2,187 yards.

Mechanized infantry platoons consist of three mechanized squads without additional firepower, although a Stryker platoon will have a weapons squad with two M240B machine guns. Each platoon has four M2s or four Strykers. Light infantry platoons consist of three infantry squads and add additional firepower via a weapons squad. The weapons squad is made up by a squad leader and nine soldiers armed with two M240B machine guns and two Javelin antitank missiles, and allows the platoon commander, typically a lieutenant, to parcel out this firepower to the squads that will likely need it the most. A new addition to the weapons squad is the 84mm M3 “Carl Gustav” recoilless rifle, versatile antipersonnel, antifortification, and antiarmor weapons system first introduced in 1946. The result: an infantry platoon with two antipersonnel and two antiarmor weapons, and a fifth weapon that can function as both.

The Russian fields motor rifle (mechanized) squads and light infantry equivalent squads in the airborne forces. A typical Russian motor rifle squad will consist of a BMP-2/3 infantry fighting vehicle or BTR-82A wheeled armored personnel carrier, a three man crew, and a seven man dismount team armed with AK-74M assault rifles, two PKM machine guns and a RPG-16 short range antitank weapon. The GP-30 grenade launcher, the Russian equivalent of the M320, is fitted to some AK-74Ms. The PKP “Pecheneg” will eventually replace the PKM but for now the Russian army has plenty of the older weapons.

The Russian motor rifle squad is nearly identical to the U.S. Army mechanized infantry squad except it does not have a medium range antitank guided missile launcher in the same category as the Javelin. Just like in American squads, single shot, disposable RPG-18 light antitank weapons are issued as needed.

Russian airborne infantry squads are similar to motor rifle squads, built around a BMD-3, BMD-4, BTR-D airborne armored vehicles. Airborne squads are smaller owing to the smaller personnel carrying capacity of BMD and BTR-D vehicles. Despite having fewer troops, Russian airborne forces are much more mobile than their American counterparts. The BMD-3, which has a 30mm autocannon and BMD-4, which has a 30mm autocannon and 100mm cannon, are both armed with the Konkurs antitank missile system.

At the platoon level, Russian motor rifle forces add no additional firepower except for a single designated marksman armed with a SVD rifle, nor does it add additional vehicles. A motor rifle or airborne platoon of three squads consists of three vehicles plus dismounts.

Russian infantry have some advantages over their American counterparts. Three vehicle platoons means the Russian Ground Forces, man for man and vehicle for vehicle, can field twenty five percent more platoons than the U.S. Army. Theoretically this gives a commander more tactical options on the battlefield. Russian airborne forces, owing to their mechanization, have much greater tactical mobility than foot-mobile American paratroopers. Moscow’s parachutists can also airdrop farther from their objectives, making their way to them in their vehicles, helping keep vulnerable air transports loaded with soldiers at a distance from lethal enemy air defenses.

Still, U.S. Army infantry have a decisive edge over their Russian counterparts. One reason is organizational resiliency: if a Russian platoon loses a vehicle, it loses one third of its combat power. If an American platoon loses a vehicle, it only loses a quarter of its firepower. A Russian platoon that loses two vehicles is reduced to a single vehicle.

U.S. mechanized vehicles are also superior to their Russian counterparts. While both the Bradley and the BMP can carry seven soldiers, mount a 25 to 30mm autocannon and are armed with antitank missiles, the Bradley is better armored, has a digital battle management system, and carries twice as many antitank missiles ready to fire. The BMP is inferior in all respects. The American Stryker and Russian BTR-82A wheeled armored vehicles, on the other hand are roughly the same. Both are set to receive updates, the Stryker with a 30mm autocannon or Javelin turret and the BTR-82A a turret with a 57mm gun.

Dismounted firepower is where U.S. forces truly shine. Against armored threats, an American platoon can bring three Javelin missiles, a M3 recoilless rifle, and numerous AT4 short-range antitank rockets to bear against enemy armor, engaging enemies at ranges of up to 2,000 yards. Their Russian comrades-in-arms could bring only unguided RPG-16 and RPG-18 rockets against enemies at a maximum effective range of about 300 yards. Against infantry, American forces bring six light and two medium machine guns and a M3 recoilless rifle to bear, versus three medium machine guns and a SVD designated marksman rifle for the Russians.

American and Russian infantry would never fight alone. Both would fight as part of an integrated team with armor, mortars, heavy artillery, air support, and electronic warfare all contributing to win the battle. Still, in a matchup between American and Russian infantry forces American forces have a decisive advantage in firepower. Let’s hope the two sides never do meet.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009, he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami. This article first appeared in December 2017. 

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Trevor Filseth

Stimulus Check,

More than four months since the first checks were mailed out, the IRS has continued sending out payments from the third stimulus bill.

More than four months since the first checks were mailed out, the IRS has continued sending out payments from the third stimulus bill. This week, more than two million additional payments were made, including a large number of “plus-up” payments to previous stimulus recipients – bringing the total number of stimulus payments up to around 170 million.

The tax collection agency announced on Wednesday that it had sent an additional 900,000 payments to Americans who had already received a stimulus check, but for which the amount was inaccurate. Because the first stimulus checks were sent in March, and 2020 taxes were not filed until May, many Americans have reported changed circumstances which allowed them to qualify for more stimulus money, necessitating the “plus-up” checks.

For this reason, Americans who filed their taxes in mid-May or later could expect to receive additional payments, depending on their circumstances. For instance, Americans who lost income during the pandemic, putting them below the $75,000 per year cutoff for individuals, can expect to receive a check. Americans who had a child during the pandemic – reported on a family’s 2020 taxes, but not its 2019 ones – can expect to receive an additional $1,400 payment, the amount set aside for dependents.

The remaining 1.3 million new payments are destined for Americans whose information was not in the IRS database before they filed their 2020 tax returns – and therefore never received a stimulus check in March in the first place.

The IRS has been uniquely well-suited to administer the stimulus program. Because it is already accustomed to sending out tax refunds, the process of making payments is routine, and it already receives information on Americans’ incomes during the normal course of its work.

One drawback of using the tax collection agency to make payments, however, has been that the poorest Americans, who do not usually pay any taxes, are often difficult to reach. This is unfortunate because the poorest Americans have the most to gain from stimulus payments, and the payments often do the most good in their hands. This problem is shared between the third round of stimulus checks and the newly-distributed advance Child Tax Credit payments, which are also being administered by the IRS.

The extra workload has also burdened the IRS, which as of early July still needed to process an estimated 35 million tax returns from the most recent filing deadline.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for The National Interest.

Trevor Filseth

Stimulus Check,

While the stimulus checks nationwide are coming to an end, one state, California, has recently begun to send out its own payments to all qualifying state residents.

Over the past two weeks, substantial media attention has been paid to the Biden administration’s newest quasi-stimulus program: a series of six payments to low- and middle-income American families, running from July until December,

Most (although not all) of the March 2021 stimulus checks have now been sent out and spent. The IRS announced on Wednesday that an additional 2.2 million payments, including so-called “plus-ups”, had been sent out over the previous weeks. It has been estimated that 90 percent of qualifying Americans have received their stimulus payments by now, and roughly $400 billion of the $450 billion set aside for the payments has been sent out.

However, while the stimulus checks nationwide are coming to an end, one state, California, has recently begun to send out its own payments to all qualifying state residents. The state budget is closely tied to gains and losses in the stock market, and the stock market’s success during the pandemic left the state with a multibillion-dollar surplus. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has estimated the surplus at $75 billion; other groups have lowered the estimate to $40 billion, depending on how it is measured. 

Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom agreed to a budget deal with the state legislature. The most consequential part of the deal for many Californians is the section concerning the stimulus payment; all Californians making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, regardless of immigration status, will receive an extra $600 payment. Parents of dependents under the age of 18 will receive an additional $500 per child.

The checks are slated to be sent out in September, according to the Sacramento Bee. An earlier round of equivalent checks targeted Californians making $30,000 per year or less; they will not receive a second payment.

Newsom has trumpeted the projected benefits of the stimulus measure, citing early estimates of its positive impact. The governor has not mentioned publicly that the stimulus payment is legally required by a quirk in California state law, which states that a budget surplus above a certain limit must be returned to the state’s residents.

In addition to the stimulus payment, California’s new budget includes funding to a number of other discretionary issues. The state government in Sacramento has also created a $5.2 billion fund to assist struggling low-income renters and landlords; the fund is intended to cover back rent accrued during the pandemic, as well as future rent. An additional $2 billion has been provided for similar relief for unpaid utility bills. $4 billion has been set aside for small business grants.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for The National Interest. He lives in California.

Charlie Gao

F-14 Tomcat, Middle East

The F-14A is a true interceptor with the speed, power and long-range missiles to strike at range then fly away before the enemy has a chance to lock on.

Here's What You Need to Know: The Iranian upgrades, if anything, have produced an equivalent to the AIM-54C, the American update to the AIM-54 which featured digital electronics, improved low altitude capability, and improved jamming rejection.

Iran’s F-14A Tomcats are an anomaly in the region. While most other air forces in the region field multirole or air superiority fighter, the F-14A is a true interceptor with the speed, power and long-range missiles to strike at range then fly away before the enemy has a chance to lock on. This is, of course, enabled by the AIM-54A Phoenix long-range air-to-air missiles it carries. But Iran’s stockpile of these missiles is rapidly dwindling. Air-to-air missiles often have a short shelf life, missiles that have “expired” can fail to guide on targets or fail to produce enough thrust to reach them.

Iran has tried to remedy this in the past in a variety of ways, including strapping surface to air missiles onto their F-14s. But in 2018 they began production of their own version of the Phoenix, called the Fakour-90. The missile appears to be practically dimensionally identical to the AIM-54, but Iran claims improvement over the original models in several aspects.

However, missile technology has advanced significantly since the Phoenix. While the Phoenix was retired from service without a true replacement in the 2000s, the AIM-120D AMRAAM which entered service in the 2010s reaches out to nearly the same range.

But in a head to head confrontation, which missile would come out on top? Do the Iranian upgrades make the Phoenix relevant in modern air-to-air warfare?

The answer is no. The Iranian upgrades, if anything, have produced an equivalent to the AIM-54C, the American update to the AIM-54 which featured digital electronics, improved low altitude capability, and improved jamming rejection. But even then, the AIM-54C was a bulky heavy missile that wouldn’t perform well against an aware target with energy to maneuver.

The launch platform matters as well. Even though the missile’s seeker might be upgraded, for the majority of the flight the missile is still being guided by the radar of the F-14. While Iran is said to have upgraded the radars of its F-14 with indigenous variants, it’s unlikely that the performance of these radars matches the latest generation of American radars.

Comparatively, Iranian fighters would likely be facing either F-15s or F/A-18E/Fs of the U.S. Navy or US Air Force, most of which have been upgraded with cutting edge AESA radars with tracking and guidance capabilities far beyond what older generation radars could offer. The AIM-120D is also designed with cooperative, networked warfare in mind, as it can receive midcourse guidance from other aircraft, not just the host fighter. It also features an INS/GPS navigation system onboard compared to the INS only AIM-54.

The seeker is also similarly improved, featuring a wider scanning area and better jamming rejection. While the AIM-120D doesn’t have an AESA radar, the technology in its seeker is likely far better than that of the Fakour-90.

Contemporary warfare has often been described as a battle for information. The AIM-120D is built for the new mode of networked warfare, and the Fakour-90 isn’t. While it’s unsure whether networked warfare will work in practice as electronic warfare may significantly degrade or disrupt networking capability, the AIM-120D also is built to perform better in that environment. Iran’s upgrade is a great missile for the last war it fought. It’s not a good missile for the next war it may fight.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national-security issues.

This article first appeared in September 2019.

Image: Flickr.

Warfare History Network

World War I, Europe

These ships helped hunt down surfaced subs. This is how they did it.

Here's What You Need to Remember: A prodigious ship-building program was hastily implemented at the start of World War I, but because of heavy demands on the country’s steel industry for destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, the only material left available for submarine chasers was wood. Small, privately owned shipyards soon received contracts to build wooden submarine chasers. The design approved by the Navy Department called for a sturdy vessel with an overall length of 110 feet, a displacement of 85 tons, and a maximum speed of 18 knots.

When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the nation’s Navy was shockingly short of combat ships—particularly the submarine chasers that would be vital to combating the German U-boat menace. A prodigious ship-building program was hastily implemented, but because of heavy demands on the country’s steel industry for destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, the only material left available for submarine chasers was wood. Small, privately owned shipyards soon received contracts to build wooden submarine chasers. The design approved by the Navy Department called for a sturdy vessel with an overall length of 110 feet, a displacement of 85 tons, and a maximum speed of 18 knots.

The new subchasers, nicknamed 110s in honor of their length, were originally armed with two 3-inch cannons and a couple of machine guns. The objective was to provide heavy firepower against enemy submarines running on the surface. In practice, however, the original design proved faulty. Whenever a U-boat was sighted, it would immediately submerge, leaving the chasers vulnerable to an underwater attack. Subsequently, a Y-shaped depth charge thrower was substituted for one of the ship’s 3-inch guns. Prior to the development of the Y-gun, depth charges were simply dropped off the stern of a subchaser. The ship then would race away at top speed, putting as much distance as possible between it and the underwater blast. Occasionally, the depth charge would explode prematurely, shaking up the subchaser much more than the submarine. The Y-gun was a marked improvement over the drop-and-run method of fighting U-boats. It permitted two depth charges to be shot from a ship at the same time. Both canisters would plunge into the sea at a safe distance from the attacking vessel, thereby lessening the danger to surface ships.

The Wooden Warships Soon Prove Their Worth

As the Navy’s new submarine chasers began to come onto line, they were formed into units of three ships each. The small wooden vessels were looked upon with disdain by sailors on steel warships, who dubbed the new chaser force the “splinter fleet.” It would not take long, however, for the sub chasers to prove their worth—to enemies as well as friends.

In late May 1918, four units of Submarine Chaser Detachment Two, equipped with hydrophones, radios, and Y-guns, sailed for Europe. Crossing the ocean in the small ships was a battle in itself. Atlantic gales and high seas often caused the vessels’ wooden seams to open and flooded their engine rooms. Clothing and bed sheets were used to plug the leaks, and disabled chasers had to be towed. Upon arrival in Queenstown, Ireland, the submarine chasers were immediately put to work escorting convoys and dashing after sighted U-boats. In his memoirs, Cary Johnston, a radio operator aboard SC-129, recalled a few of the problems encountered while serving with the splinter fleet. “After a few weeks of the same rations—bully beef and hardtack—the very thought of the next meal turned one’s stomach,” he recalled. “Then there was the continuous heaving and rolling of the ship. Even a light breeze tossed us about. But, as if that was not enough, the windblown ocean salt spray—combined with the engine exhaust gasses—kept the crew in a constant state of nausea.”

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Conditions "Ideal for Hunting U-Boats"

In the mid June of 1918, Submarine Chaser Detachment Two, under the command of Captain Charles P. Nelson, sailed from the British Isles toward the Adriatic Sea. Throughout the war, the Adriatic had been a hornet’s nest of activity for German and Austrian submarine forces. U-boat sorties were routinely dispatched from Cattaro, Pola, and Durrazo through the Otranto Strait to prey on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean Sea. In early 1916, an attempt was made to stop such attacks. A so-called barrage, or net barrier, was stretched across the 40-mile strait. The barrage was maintained by 120 net trawlers and 30 motor launches, each armed with depth charges to be dropped on any U-boat that became trapped in the nets. Stopping the submarines as they attempted to run through the barrage, however, was like trying to stamp out an ant colony one ant at a time, and in the spring of 1917 an Austrian sortie managed to sink 14 of the trawlers and drive off the rest. Subsequently, the barrage was left untended at night, leaving the strait unguarded. Allied shipping losses soon increased alarmingly.

As Nelson’s fleet approached Gibraltar, a British aircraft reported sighting two German submarines lying in wait for the Allied convoy. The warplane managed to chase off one of the U-boats, and SC-129 pursued the other for several miles before losing contact. Despite the scare, the submarine chasers safely entered the Adriatic Sea and anchored in the harbor at Corfu Island. Charles Scott, a civilian engineer for the General Electric Company who made the journey aboard SC-129, described the situation when the chasers arrived on the scene. “Conditions in the Adriatic were ideal for hunting U-boats,” he said. “The sea was very deep, with depths ranging from 2,500 to 3,600 feet. Commercial traffic was light, and the sound man had only a small amount of extra noise to contend with.”

Occasional Breaks in the Monotony

German U-boats usually waited for bad weather to attempt to sneak through the mine barrier into the Mediterranean. But even under the worst atmospheric conditions, the submarines were often detected. Cary Johnston remembered: “While on barrage duty, we were continually in sound contact with U-boats—especially when they attempted to traverse the Otranto Strait at night. Upon leaving their base, the enemy subs would run on the surface at top speed, and could be heard for more than an hour before they reached the nets. The difference between the sound of a U-boat’s engine and its batteries, was so distinctive that it was comparatively easy to tell when a submarine submerged and switched to its battery motors. But the Germans knew approximately where our ships were located, and invariably dived before they reached the barrage.”

Searching the Adriatic for enemy U-boats was a monotonous job, but there were occasional breaks in the dreary routine. One morning at the Mediterranean entrance to the Adriatic, an enemy submarine was reported caught in the nets. A nearby trawler dropped depth charges, then backed away to check the results. Suddenly the ship’s hydrophone operator heard a heavy object brush against the sound detector. Moments later, a dripping-wet German sailor climbed over the side of the trawler. The man had evidently been blown clear of the U-boat by the force of the exploding depth charge, and had saved himself by grapping the hydrophone cable and pulling himself to the surface.

On another morning, SC-129 was patrolling the barrage when she picked up the sound of a submerged U-boat at a distance of 200 yards. The American vessel laid out a pattern of depth charges to cover all possible escape routes by the sub, then cut her own engine and listened. After a 20-minute wait, the Americans picked up a squeaking sound—the sub’s propellers had been bent. More depth charges were dropped, and subsequent sounds indicated that the Germans were attempting to repair their craft. Then there was dead silence, followed by a series of 25 pistol shots. The U-boat crew, realizing that they could not escape, had decided to take their own lives.

Preparing for the Land Attack Against Bulgaria

In the late summer of 1918, the Allies planned a land attack against Bulgaria. It was considered essential to the campaign that the port of Durazzo be destroyed. On September 28, Captain Kelly prepared his subchasers to screen and protect an Allied task force during its bombardment of Durazzo. The mission’s objective was to destroy enemy shipping, warehouses, and dock facilities. Beside’s Nelson’s flotilla, the Allied fleet consisted of the Italian armored cruisers San Giorgio, Pisa, and San Marco, British cruisers Lowestoft, Dartmouth, and Weymouth, and several destroyers and torpedo boats. According to intelligence reports, two enemy destroyers, a torpedo boat, and a few submarines were sheltered in Durazzo Harbor.

Just before dawn on October 1, Submarine Chaser Detachment Two hurriedly sailed from Corfu Island to Brindisi. The rest of the day was spent stacking ammunition, cleaning guns, and writing letters home. The next day before dawn, 11 of the detachment’s subchasers steamed out of Brindisi, passed through the barrage, and entered the Adriatic. The bombardment fleet followed some distance behind.

At 10 am, as the enemy coastline and harbor came into few, Nelson ordered all ships to general quarters. Mattresses were quickly rigged as splinter mats around the bridge and charthouse to protect against flying wooden fragments, and sand was scattered across the decks to prevent the gun crews from slipping on blood. Johnston recalled the Allied approach: “We headed into the bay—then made a high-speed circle in an effort to lure enemy warships out from the harbor. Meanwhile, Austrian coastal batteries were busy shooting at us. It seemed as if we were being used for target practice. Although their shells were high and off the mark, the missiles flew overhead with a wicked shriek and a menacing ricochet when they hit the water. I was so frightened that I had difficulty remembering the radio code.”

The SC-129 Takes Damage

Columns of black smoke soon appeared on the horizon, as the Allied cruiser force approached the enemy coast. At 8,000 yards, the warships turned parallel to Durazzo and began shelling the harbor’s docks and warehouses. Several salvos from San Giorgio crashed into a large transport and quickly sent it to the bottom. Meanwhile, Nelson ordered his subchasers to take their assigned positions to screen the cruisers’ flanks and block the southern and northen ends of the bay. At the same time, Allied aircraft began dropping bombs on enemy buildings and military facilities in the harbor.

Determined not to be left out of the action, four Italian torpedo boats raced headlong across the habor, sending torpedoes crashing into a floating drydock and flooding a German submarine that was under repair. Johnston caught sight of another enemy submarine porpoising—alternately surfacing and diving—as it headed for the cruisers. Before SC-129 had time to react, the U-boat launched a torpedo that crashed into Weymouth’s stern, exploding the cruiser’s depth charges and blowing off completely the aft section of the ship.

“The submarine immediately submerged, and we raced to attack,” Johnston remembered. “Our depth charges were set at 50 feet. The Y-guns fired three salvos at ten-second intervals. Over the noise of the exploding cans, I heard an excited yell from Ensign Jacoby, ‘We got him!’ A large field of black oil rapidly surrounded our ship and volumes of air began bubbling to the surface. We had sunk the U-boat, but our chaser also sustained damage. The depth charge explosions had severely shaken the ship, and the gasoline feed to one engine was ruptured. I had been standing in the radio room during the action, and the first blasts slammed me against the transmitter. The wireless telephone went dead, and everything not nailed down littered the deck.”

The Allied Fleet vs. Austrian Coastal Guns

The other ships in the unit had also been busy. SC-128 and SC-215 sighted the periscope of another enemy submarine and opened fire. One shot struck home and a column of water shot six feet into the air. Depth charges finished the job, and a large amount of oil and debris bubbled to the surface. SC-130 exploded one enemy mine with gunfire and successfully warned away the cruisers from other mines.

For several hours the Austrian coastal guns dueled with the Allied fleet. As SC-128 patrolled the northern approaches of Durazzo, her lookouts spotted a Red Cross hospital ship, Baron Call, attempting to leave the harbor. The chaser was about to let the ship pass undisturbed when a sailor spotted the wake of a German U-boat following close behind the Red Cross vessel. SC-128 sank the submarine with depth charges, and Baron Call proceeded safely along the coast toward Pola.

As the battle drew to a close, Johnston described the crew’s overall mood: “By late afternoon, the fun was over and we headed back to Corfu,” he wrote. “Our crew was happy as a gang of kids on a picnic. And, after all, most of us were only in our early twenties.”

A Strategic Success

In his subsequent report of the battle, Captain Nelson stated: “The operation was a strategic success. The combined attack of our ships and aircraft silenced the Austrian shore batteries, destroyed ammunition dumps, docks, and warehouses, and crippled the enemy’s use of Durazzo as a military base for some time to come. All ships moored in the harbor were either sunk or badly damaged. There were no casualties to our personnel or chasers involved in the action.…I feel that the performance of the submarine chasers shows that they can be of immeasurable value with the main fleet in any contemplated actions—especially those that necessitate operations in shoal water.”

Ironically, the day before the attack on Durazzo, Bulgaria surrendered to the Allies, and two weeks later Austria capitulated. German submarines were left stranded in the Adriatic without a friendly port. Their only choice was to surrender or try to make it back to Germany. Half a dozen U-boats managed to slip through the Otranto Barrage and into the Mediterranean. American subchasers met them at Gibraltar and sank two of the subs. It was the closing action in the subchasers’ short but brilliant career.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by A. B. Feuer originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Warfare History Network

U.S. Military,

Vulnerability to enemy attacks killed the idea.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Dirigibles kept getting “shot down” during fleet exercises. If the Macon was close enough to spot an enemy ship, she was also vulnerable to attack.

It is sometimes difficult to understand just how immature aviation was in the 1920s and 1930s. Everything about flying was new. Planes sported two sets of canvas-covered wings, had limited navigational ability, and had significantly less ocean-going range than a traditional destroyer. After their debut in World War I, planes held promise as instruments of war, but air tactics were still being refined and the planes themselves were unreliable, evolving, and still unproven. They may have been safe enough to carry mail, but not paying passengers—to say nothing of soldiers. The Air Force did not even have its own branch of the service until 1947.

Nevertheless, after World War I there was a strong feeling among certain members of the United States military that rigid-framed airships, or dirigibles, had a great deal of potential as instruments of war. Anything seemed possible during the quickly changing period of aviation. Between 1923 and 1933, the U.S. Navy’s Lighter Than Air (LTA) program produced four such dirigibles. At the time, they were the largest, most expensive aircraft ever built and were spectacular to behold. And though the dirigible seems in retrospect like something of a white elephant, for its time the LTA program was daring, imaginative, and highly innovative.

The Dirigible Craze

Dirigibles seemed poised to surpass trains and ocean liners as a better, faster form of transportation, especially across the Atlantic Ocean. The American military had seen the tactical success the Germans achieved using blimps during the Great War, and it acquired what would become the Los Angeles (ZR-3) as war reparations from Germany for study and experimentation. The public was also intrigued by the behemoths. They were especially captivated by the German Graf Zeppelin, which carried passengers from Europe to the United States, Brazil, and Japan long before commercial aviation was a going enterprise. Indeed, the 1930s saw a craze in America for all things dirigible. Airship designs became an integral part of Art Deco style and could be found on plates, pins, postmarks, and neckties. Newspapers lavished detailed coverage on each transcontinental crossing as if it were an Apollo program moon shot, and miniature Graf Zeppelin children’s toys, fashioned out of tin, were wildly popular.

The Navy’s dirigible program produced the USS Shenandoah in 1923, the USS Los Angeles in 1924, the USS Akron in 1930, and the USS Macon in 1933. The Macon, at 785 feet long, was literally the queen of the skies. To put her size into perspective, the Macon was three times longer than a Boeing 747, 971/2 feet shorter than the Titanic, more than 15 stories tall, and four times the length of modern-day Goodyear blimps. She even edged out Germany’s Graf Zeppelin in terms of size. Like the Saturn V rocket, Navy dirigibles were the high-tech aircraft of their day. The Macon, the last of the Navy’s dirigibles, was built at a cost of $2.5 million by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Company of Akron, Ohio, a joint venture between the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and the Zeppelin Company of Germany.

The Macon: a New Class of Airship

The Macon pushed the envelope in every conceivable way. She weighed more than 200 tons, carried a complement of 83 officers and crew over a range of 7,000 miles, and could stay aloft for more than three days. Fully outfitted with a galley, three dining messes, sick bay, smoking room, and separate sleeping quarters for officers and enlisted men, the Macon was a self-contained world in the sky. She was kept aloft by nonflammable but very expensive helium gas. Her 12 helium cells were made from gelatin latex and were suspended from a complex internal skeletal structure made of a German-invented alloy called Duralumin 17-SRT. Composed of aluminum, copper, magnesium, and manganese, Duralumin was designed to be both durable and lightweight, the carbon fiber of its time.

Because of her clean lines and overpowering size, the Macon was one of the most beautiful airships ever designed. She was powered by eight German-made Maybach VL-II, 12 cylinder engines, each of which generated 560 horsepower at 1,600 rpm. The Maybachs drove an external, triple-bladed propeller that enabled the ship to reach speeds up to 75.6 knots (about 80 miles per hour), a bit faster than her sister ship, the USS Akron, which could only do 69 knots, and her props could swivel up and down as well as in reverse. At top speed, she could cross the entire United States in 37 hours.

Being a lighter-than air-ship, weight was everything for the Macon. She was actually 8,000 pounds lighter than Akron, but keeping her trim while airborne involved a complicated ballet involving fuel, water ballast, helium gas, outside temperature, and altitude, not to mention barometric and wind conditions. To compensate for the decrease in weight that naturally came from fuel consumption, the Macon recycled her engine exhaust through condenser units designed to capture water vapor necessary to maintain the ship’s trim.

The Macon had two control cars, one near the bow where the officers managed the rudder and elevator controls; monitored the altimeter, air speed, and rise-and-fall indicator; and issued commands to the eight engine rooms. A second control car located in the lower stabilizing fin at the ship’s tail was a backup in case anything happened to the primary command car. The Macon also sported a spy car or “angel basket,” which was lowered from the ship’s bottom on 3,000 feet of cable to spy on the enemy below while the dirigible stayed hidden in the clouds. The spy car sported a tail fin and rudder pedals to provide a margin of control, and could be used as a raft to retrieve downed pilots. The spy car was the bane of whoever rode in it. It was difficult to control, open to the elements, and virtually guaranteed even its most hardened occupant a severe case of airsickness. The Macon carried her own defensive armament in the form of machine-gun installations in the airship’s bow, aft, and topside that could be used to defend the airship from attacking aircraft in any direction.

“Parasite Fighters”

One of the Macon’s most appealing features was her ability to launch and retrieve airplanes in mid-flight. She carried five Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk fighter planes in a hangar inside her belly. The Sparrowhawks, which were known as “parasitic fighters,” hung from a rail system inside the airship and were guided from their hangar’s four respective corners to a T-shaped opening in the Macon’s belly located slightly aft of the control car. A fifth Sparrowhawk could be accommodated in the center of the hangar, but was rarely carried. When ready to be deployed, the Sparrowhawks were transferred to a crane with a harness-like trapeze attachment that lowered the aircraft through the opening without their wheels ever touching the ship. With the aircraft hanging outside but still attached to the airship via a trapeze, an electric-ignition line would be lowered to the pilot, who would connect it to his aircraft and start the engine.

Sparrowhawk pilots turned over their engines outside the airship as a safety precaution to avoid a catastrophic explosion from occurring inside the dirigible. Once the engine was running, the pilot pulled a lever outside the cockpit near the top left wing and released the plane from the trapeze to fly off under its own power.

The Macon was not just a catch-and release-program, however; she also retrieved her aircraft in mid-flight. The Macon’s Sparrowhawk pilots would fly behind and underneath the airship, guided by two signal men visible from the T-shaped opening who helped them close the gap in the sometimes turbulent slipstream. Carefully maneuvering his throttle at near stall speed, a Sparrowhawk pilot inched his way upward beneath the giant dirigible until the skyhook latched into place on the trapeze catch mechanism. Then the pilot would cut the engine and the plane would be winched back on board. Another trapeze was located near the tail of the Macon, where a Sparrowhawk could “perch” while waiting its turn to come aboard. No wonder the pilots of this elite group were called “the men on the flying trapeze.” They even adopted a special insignia that depicted two trapeze artists poised to catch one another in mid-air (a fat one signifying the dirigible and a skinny one signifying a Sparrowhawk).

Because every pound on a dirigible counted, the protocol was to wait until the mother ship was airborne and then fly the aircraft on board. Neither the Akron nor the Macon took off with her full complement of fighters on board. In this way, the ship was spared lifting an additional 14,000 pounds that could make a real difference if there was no wind.

Questionable Utility in Modern War

 

Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and Captain Garland Fulton were the Navy’s two most influential LTA evangelists. Both believed passionately in the strategic value of the rigid-frame airship and its ability to serve as the eyes of the fleet. The Macon and the other dirigibles were used as scouting ships to reconnoiter a larger area of ocean in search of the enemy and provide useful intelligence. They could do this faster and more cheaply than a typical destroyer, and great promise was seen in the Macon’s ability to warn the Navy of an approaching enemy in the days before radar existed. Meanwhile, the Macon’s complement of Sparrowhawks provided protection for the dirigible against enemy ships and aircraft. Although they provided some supplemental scouting, the Sparrowhawks were not the primary scouting vehicles—that was the dirigibles’ role.

The main problem with this approach was that the dirigibles kept getting “shot down” during fleet exercises. If the Macon was close enough to spot an enemy ship, she was also vulnerable to attack. Nevertheless, during 1934 fleet exercises in the Caribbean, the Macon’s performance was judged successful enough that she was ordered west to participate in Pacific Fleet war games, although some Navy higher-ups, including Admiral William H. Standley, chief of Naval Operations, still strongly questioned her usefulness.

Wiley’s Proof of Concept

Over time, it became obvious that airships were vulnerable to carrier-based planes as well anti-aircraft fire from surface ships. As a result, by 1934 the Macon was struggling to find an effective role while an increasingly heated debate raged inside the Navy and the federal government over the long-term effectiveness of rigid-frame airships. To the LTA program’s credit, a good deal of flexibility, innovation, and learning was applied toward maximizing the Macon’s strategic effectiveness. As a result, Macon’s commanding officer, Lt. Cmdr. Herbert V. Wiley, came to believe that the Macon had to evolve from a long-range scouting vehicle to a floating platform, or aircraft carrier, with the Sparrowhawks taking over as the principal scouts. Wiley felt that the Sparrowhawks could significantly extend the dirigible’s range and more quickly cover a broader area while the dirigible remained safely hidden in the clouds.

By July 1934, Wiley was ready to prove his point and decided on an audacious move to secretly find and rendezvous at sea with the USS Houston, which was carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his secretary of the Navy, Claude A. Swanson, from Central America to Hawaii. Wiley successfully located his “prey” despite the ship’s position being top secret and sent out two Sparrowhawks to drop packages for the president containing mail and newspapers onto the ship’s deck. The pilots missed their target—probably just as well, considering that FDR was situated somewhere directly below—and the packages had to be fished out of the ocean. But the president was suitably impressed to be located 1,500 miles out to sea, and it seemed for a time that the Macon’s stock was rising. Wiley’s superiors were less impressed, accusing him of “misapplied initiative” and threatening him with court martial for his reckless actions.

The LTA Program Crashes

The LTA program faced greater problems than one eager commander’s desire to prove the strategic effectiveness of his command. The first dirigible, the USS Shenandoah, broke up spectacularly over the Ohio Valley in 1925, killing 14 crew members. Eight years later, on April 4, 1933, the USS Akron ran into severe weather off the New Jersey coast and sank tail-first into the Atlantic Ocean. Wiley, who was an officer on board at the time, was one of only three crewmen to survive the crash; 73 others died, including Admiral Moffett, the father of naval aviation, and two other crewmen from a Navy J-3 blimp which had joined the search for survivors.

The Macon remained a familiar sight inside her massive hangar at Moffett Air Field in Sunnyvale, California, a few miles from the Stanford University campus. On February 11, 1935, she left the air field to reconnoiter with the Pacific Fleet in southern California. Eager to get under way, Macon’s engineers had not yet completed reinforcing her vertical tail fin and supporting structure, which had been damaged on a previous mission over Texas.

The next afternoon, off the coast of Big Sur, the ship ran into a powerful gust of wind, which triggered a structural failure causing the top stabilizing fin to sheer free, sending metal shards into her three rear gas cells and dropping the Macon tail-first into the Pacific. It was a virtual reprise of the Akron’s fate. Once again, Wiley’s luck held out. Only two of his 83 crewmen died in the slow-motion crash—Radioman 1st Class Ernest Dailey, who jumped out of the ship 100 feet above the ocean, and Filipino mess steward Florentino Edquiba, who refused to abandon ship because he could not swim. Survivors were picked up by the USS Richmond and USS Concord within an hour.

The third spectacular crash in 10 years marked an end to the LTA program of building rigid airships. President Roosevelt appointed a private commission to look into the mishaps, and although the commission, chaired by Stanford engineering professor William F. Durand, recommended that the program be continued, neither the Navy nor the government had the stomach to construct any more rigid-body airships. The Navy continued building blimps and semi-rigids until 1962, but the giant dirigibles were doomed because of uncertain strategic benefits, a mixed track record of effectiveness, and radically changing technology—not to mention a Congress that was hard-pressed to justify spending more money on accident-prone aircraft during the Depression. By May 1935, the dirigibles—beautiful as they had been to look at—were an obsolete branch of America’s aviation tree.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Warfare History Network

Security,

The MG 42, possibly the best machine gun ever created, originated as a replacement for the German Army’s standard machine gun, the MG 34, which first came into service in 1936.

Key Point: The MG 42 fired a 7.92mm round. With a muzzle velocity of 2,480 feet per second the MG 42’s effective range was nearly 1,100 yards.

In 1943, the U.S. Army attemped to copy the MG 42. The design, called the T24 machine gun, was hampered by the introduction of provisions for it to fire the U.S. .30-06 cartridge. The gun’s performance was disappointing, and the project was abandoned.

The MG 42, possibly the best machine gun ever created, originated as a replacement for the German Army’s standard machine gun, the MG 34, which first came into service in 1936. Designed by Louis Stange of the Rheinmetall-Borsig AG (referred to simply as Rheinmetall) located at Sommerda, the MG 34, at the start of World War II, was the Third Reich’s preferred general purpose machine gun (GPMG) and was intended to replace the heterogeneous collection of automatic infantry weapons then in service as befitted the new German “one-gun-fits-all” philosophy.

The MG 34, using a 7.92mm round, turned out to be a fine GPMG, meeting all the specifications laid down over the previous decade. Crewed by two or three soldiers, the gun weighed 24.3 pounds; its tripod weighed an additional 52 pounds. Air cooled and recoil operated, it had a cyclic rate of fire of 800 rounds per minute, mandating that the barrel be changed after every 250 rounds. By changing its mounting and fire mechanism, the operator could radically transform its function. With its standard bipod it was a light machine gun, ideal for infantry assaults; mounted on its tripod it served as a sustained fire medium machine gun spewing bullets to a range of 3,829 yards. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany manufactured over 354,000 of this proven and effective weapon.

For all its qualities as a first-rate GPMC and popularity with its users, the MG 34 did have its problems. In their enthusiasm to make the weapon the finest machine gun possible, the designers had gone over the top by producing a gun that demanded a high-quality finish, the use of scarce raw materials, and higher precision manufacturing than was really needed. Consequently, the manufacturing process was quite time consuming and expensive, so much so that demand due to combat losses and the expansion of the German armed forces could never keep pace with the demands for new production during the war, even after several new manufacturing centers including the main one run by Mauser AG-Werke were established. A simpler, easier to produce GPMG appeared to be the only solution.

The MG 42’s Design Improvements

The MG 42 fired a 7.92mm round. With a muzzle velocity of 2,480 feet per second the MG 42’s effective range was nearly 1,100 yards. The gun used a 50-round flexible metal belt feed, or, alternatively, a 75-round snail drum magazine. A full 50-round belt of ammo would be depleted in a 21/2-second burst; the 75 round drum in 31/2 seconds. To permit longer fire bursts, MG 42 crews normally linked together several 50 round belts. Ammunition boxes (weighing 22 pounds each) held five separate belts totaling 250 rounds per box. A good crew could shoot 250 rounds in 12½ seconds of continuous fire, or 20-30 seconds by firing quick bursts.

As good as the MG 42 was, there were still complaints about its performance. First, unlike the MG 34, it could not fire single shots. Another complaint that arose due to the high rate of fire was that during prolonged firing the gun tended to veer away from the target due to the vibration and even push its operator backward. Once the gun was set on its tripod these problems vanished, and the MG 42 became the perfect sustained fire support weapon.

What’s more, the tremendous rate of fire coming from the MG 42 was considered by some to be a waste of ammunition. To counter that argument, others said that since a soldier, in the Germans’ experience, only fired at an enemy he could see and time (only seconds) was fleeting, the more bullets directed at the enemy the greater chance for a kill.

During the war a number of companies produced the MG 42, although never in the numbers needed to keep up with the ever increasing demand. These included Gustloff-Werke in Suhl, Mauser AG-Werke in Borsigwald, Steyr in Vienna, Grossfuss in Dobeln, and Maget in Among them, 129 MG 42s were made each day from 1942 through 1945. More than 400,000 units were produced (17,915 in 1942,116,725 in 1943, 211,806 in 1944, and 61,877 in 1945).

Machine Gun Doctrine

Of course, even the best weapon has to be used appropriately for its battlefield capabilities to be fully realized. Fortunately for the Germans, and unfortunately for their opponents during World War II, the German Army formulated an effective machine gun doctrine and tactics.

Unlike their American, British, Commonwealth, and Soviet adversaries, the Germans in World War II employed machine guns as their major infantry support weapons. The Allies used automatic weapons to support rifle-armed infantry. The German Army reversed the process, using infantry to support machine guns in combat. As a result, the standard German Army infantry company of 150 men in 1944 contained 15 MG 42s needing only 30 to 50 men to crew the lot. By contrast, only two light machine guns were assigned to each American foot company.

Generally, German machine gun doctrine, both for defense and attack, stressed five basic points: surprise, fire and movement, coordination of firepower,  conservation of ammunition, and alternate positions. In defense, the MG 42 was usually employed with its tripod to act as a heavy machine gun. When German troops were surprised by an enemy attack, the weapon was often removed from the tripod and used as a light machine gun to counterattack the enemy assault.

Acting as a heavy automatic weapon, the MG 42 was usually sited in concealed ground and manned by two gunners under the direction of a section leader. Reverse slopes were the preferred covered positions. The guns were only placed in their final fire position at the last moment before combat began. In attack and defense, MG 42s were set up in areas where they could lay down enfilade and crossfire against any advancing enemy.

During offensive operations, MG 42s acting as heavy machine guns covered the deployment of friendly infantry from echeloned positions sited on commanding terrain. In preparing for the attack of friendly forces, the MG 42, firing from behind the friendly troops, aimed to smother enemy centers of resistance and deliver fire against opposing counterattacks. As advancing German soldiers moved forward, the supporting machine guns, acting as heavy weapons, followed from position to position in their wake.

Attack and Defense

In either attack or defense, the German rifleman’s prime responsibility was to support the squad-operated machine gun. When the MG 42 crew moved, the riflemen covered them with fire. When the MG 42 set up, the riflemen dug foxholes for the machine gun crew while watching for the approach of enemy forces. When the MG 42 opened fire, several riflemen were detailed to carry ammunition to the gun. Since the MG 42 was light enough to be operated and carried by one man, the bearer could keep pace with advancing comrades. Its ability to be set up and in action in a matter of seconds made the MG 42 invaluable in the attack.

On the defensive, MG 42s were shifted back and forth between different positions to confuse the enemy. The Germans called this tactic Stelungswechsel (change of position) and was a vital part of their overall machine gun doctrine. Three firing pits for the gun were usually dug at various places along the front line: one to cover the expected avenue of an enemy advance; another on the left or right flank to support a neighboring squad; and yet another—called the Schweige MG (ambush position)—about 50 yards behind the main German line. These tactics made the Germans, as one American officer during the early stages of the Normandy Campaign stated, “masters at making one man appear to be a whole squad by moving rapidly from one concealed position to another.”

The MG42’s Lasting Legacy

In 1943, the U.S. Army attemped to copy the MG 42. The design, called the T24 machine gun, was hampered by the introduction of provisions for it to fire the U.S. .30-06 cartridge. The gun’s performance was disappointing, and the project was abandoned.

Whether called the “linoleum ripper” by Soviet soldiers, the “Spandau” by the British, “Hitler’s zipper” by the Americans, or Hitlersage (“Hitler’s saw”) or “Bonesaw” by its German users, the MG 42 machine gun proved its combat worth on every European battlefield. Its ominous and terrifying “ripping cloth report” announced to all the presence of the best machine gun available.

Originally Published April 22, 2014

This article by Arnold Blumberg originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

The Me-262 was well ahead of its time.

Key Point: The Germans knew the bombers were coming, and they prepared even as the U.S. 457th Bomber Group first assembled in the early morning sunlight over faraway London. That March 18, 1945, raid on Berlin included more than 1,220 Allied bombers and scores of North American P-51 Mustang fighters contending with heavy German flak and tangling with fast-flying German Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighters employing air-to-air rockets operationally for the first time.

A Twelve-Thousand-Foot Jump

It was the last great air battle of the European war, one that would be a final, deadly encounter for many American flyers and nearly so for Oberleutnant Gunther Wegmann, commander of Jagdgeschwader 7’s 9th Squadron of Me-262 jets. Wegmann led his squadron in a loose formation toward the incoming bombers. He and his two wingmen fired their R4M rockets into one tight formation of some 60 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers from a distance of 3,000 feet. The scores of rockets created devastation, with bits of aircraft, smoke, and flame erupting from the formation of bombers.

The squadron then scattered for the homeward flight. That was when Wegmann spotted another formation of enemy bombers and swung around to take a pass at them with his MK 108 “machine cannons.” He swooped in from astern and came within 600 yards of one bomber before opening up with a staccato of fire that ripped away the cowling from one of the target’s engines.

Wegmann was jubilant and started to transmit his victory to home base when a stream of enemy fire struck his jet, splattering his canopy, tossing instruments from their panels, and studding his plane with bullet holes. Worse yet, his right leg was numb. Reaching down, he discovered a large hole just below his knee. But he felt no pain at that point as his plane streaked along at 18,000 feet above war-torn Germany.

He desperately pushed his shot-up jet downward, and at 12,000 feet he saw flames leaping from his starboard engine. That quickly ruled out a crash landing that would turn his plane into a giant fireball. He decided to push the control stick forward, disconnected his seat straps, removed the retaining bolt from the plane’s canopy, and was sucked from the cockpit at 250 miles per hour. Wegmann bounced off the plane’s tail and fell free. He counted five long seconds before pulling the release cord of his parachute and drifted downward toward the town of Wittenberge 60 miles northwest of Berlin. He brushed the tops of pine trees and managed, just barely, to land in a small meadow.

“German pilot!” he shouted loudly as an elderly woman made her way to him. Wegmann’s luck held. The woman was a nurse who quickly bound his thigh above his right knee and applied a tourniquet. Within four hours he had been rushed to a hospital where his leg was amputated.

Others were not so fortunate that day, including five American fighter pilots who failed to return home. Sixteen Allied bombers were hit by flak and either crashed on their approaches to Berlin or managed to make emergency landings behind the advancing Soviet lines east of the German capital. Another 25 Allied bombers were destroyed with the loss of only two German jets. The pilots acquitted themselves well that day against overwhelming odds, yet the effort of the German jet fighters was to prove too little too late in the face of relentless Allied assault from the air, land, and sea with their overwhelming war matériel and seemingly endless supply of manpower.

“It was Like Being a God”

The Me-262 did have a significant influence on the later stages of the war. It was the world’s first operational turbojet fighter, and it simply outclassed any plane flying at the time. It reportedly could reach speeds of 540 miles per hour with a cruising speed of 460 miles per hour and a range of some 650 miles. The Me 262 had a ceiling of 38,000 feet, and it could climb at 3,940 feet per minute with its two Junkers Jumo engines, which produced 1,980 pounds of thrust apiece. In its standard configuration, the single-seat jet was armed with four 30mm MK-108 cannons and the plane could be modified to carry 1,000 pounds of bombs.

It was the development of the feared R4M rockets that sealed the fate of many Allied flyers over Germany when facing the Me-262. “The rockets gave us extra punch,” said Me-262 pilot Leutnant Klaus Neumann. “Fire the rockets, do the damage, weaken the tight formation integrity of the bombers, and then pick off the crippled stragglers,” he said.

“It was like being a god in a way,” added Neumann, who had seen combat in piston-driven Messerschmitt Me-109s and Focke Wulf FW-190s over Russia. The jet was “fast, had great firepower,” and gave one a lot of confidence when pitted against a well-armed enemy aircraft, he said. The 55mm R4M rockets contained a high explosive shell filled with Hexogen and were mounted under the wings on specially designed wooden racks with 24 rockets typically attached to each jet.

Initially, there were problems because the rockets often failed to fire. Reports of the problem reached Generalleutnant Adolf Galland, head of the Luftwaffe’s jet arm. An electrician was promptly called in. The electrician quickly identified a problem with the copper electrical triggering connectors. From that point forward, the connectors were reinforced with silver or nickel, and the difficulty was resolved.

Each of the Me-262’s four MK-108 30mm cannons could pump out more than 650 rounds per minute. The specially produced MK cannon was considered a masterpiece of weapons engineering because of its stopping power, compact size, and ease of manufacture. German engineers noted that it could knock down enemy bombers with a minimum expenditure of ammunition while staying beyond the range of enemy counterfire.

The newly developed Jumo 004 engines presented challenges, occasionally pulling in debris after an enemy plane had burst apart, damaging the compressor, and causing a flame out. Flying on one engine, the Me-262 could not easily take evasive action or even outrun an Allied P-51 Mustang, Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, or the De Havilland DH.98 Mosquito. In that situation, the Me-262 pilot had to reach a friendly base as quickly as possible. Galland was particularly disgruntled with the jet power plants. Germany’s war economy lacked many of the needed specialty metals for the jet engines that, on average, lasted less than 12.5 hours before needing to be changed out. That problem became far worse toward the end of the war as nickel and chromium supplies petered out. Many of the newly unpacked engines at that point did not even make it through the onboard testing process before failing and needing to be replaced.

The Nazi engineers knew that the engine’s compressor had to be brought up to speed before the ignition of the turbojet. They resorted to a small two-stroke gasoline engine located behind the engine nozzle, while many postwar jets came to rely on a high-torque electric motor or airflow from a small starter turbine engine.

The Me-262’s starter engine relied on an electric start, with a pull-cord starter with a handle serving as backup. One can only image the frustration of a Luftwaffle mechanic needing, on occasion, to tug on a lawnmower-type pull cord to get the state-of-the-art jet engine fired up. The jet came with armored front glass and an armored seat back but lacked an ejection seat. The pilot was to pop the canopy, gently roll the plane over, and slide out or remain horizontal and let the plane’s speed suck him out as Wegmann elected to do late in the war.

First Flight of the Jet Fighter

The Me-262 first took flight on March 25, 1942, when test pilot Fritz Wendel achieved a test flight speed of 541 miles per hour, almost 100 miles per hour above the speed of the Mosquito or anything the Americans could field. The smooth, shark-shaped plane was surrounded by controversy almost from the start, with Hitler insisting that it be used as a fast bomber. Designer Willi Messerschmitt, Galland, and others gave some lip service to Hitler’s request, largely moving forward with their initial plans for a fighter while planning to have the Arado 232 fill the role of a future jet bomber. Hitler’s constant meddling, though, pulled precious time and resources from fighter development to produce a modified Me-262 bomber. Some 232s were also developed as reconnaissance planes and others as night fighters.

Galland remained critical of using the 262 as a bomber, a role it was not designed to play. He remained firmly convinced that the fighter jet could have been put into combat “at least a year and a half earlier” without Hitler’s interference, “and built in large enough numbers so that it could have changed the air war.”

That time estimate is perhaps exaggerated, and Galland did not say it could have changed the outcome, but rather more likely the course of the war, perhaps causing the Allies to reconsider daytime bombing over Germany.

The two-seat night fighter variants proved surprisingly successful, again despite Hitler’s initial misgivings. With a radar operator in the back, the pilot could zero in on the bombers. Oberleutnant Kurt Welter, who had two years’ experience as a night fighter in FW-190s and Me-109s, proved to be the best of the night fighter aces. Using recent analysis, Welter appears to have made 20 confirmed kills, including a large number of Mosquitos, with his Me-262, making him the highest scoring German jet fighter pilot.

The Me-262 in Combat

The first Me-262 fighters were delivered to Luftwaffe field units in April 1944, with the first encounter recorded on July 26 when one of the German jets fired at a British Mosquito, which disappeared trailing smoke but managed to land safely in Italy. On August 8, a unit scored a confirmed kill over a Mosquito. Interestingly, the Allies had received reports of the Me-262 from both the resistance and via the Office of Strategic Services. “The rumors of a super fast German plane were being taken seriously,” wrote Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle, who had led the daring early war bomber raid on Tokyo and later joined the U.S. Eighth Air Force in Europe. “There were just too many corroborating reports from different sources not to take notice, but many of the pilots almost refused to believe [them],” he wrote.

Doolittle recalls one bomber pilot who was stunned at the quickness and severity of an Me-262 attack. One explosive shell, most likely from a MK-108 cannon, entered through the bomber’s bomb bay, killing one and injuring four other airmen. Fortunately, the plane was returning from its bombing run, otherwise the shell could have struck the bombs on board and the resulting explosion could have destroyed several additional aircraft flying in the tight box formation. The young American pilot was in complete shock, recalled Doolittle. “I knew he was never going to be an effective leader again,” he wrote. The Americans realized something had to be done to prevent a severe morale problem.

Countering the German Jet

Additional reconnaissance flights were immediately ordered, and soon the jet airfields were being bombed. This became an ongoing process; one that forced the use of bases ever-closer to the heart of Germany in the face of Allied advances. Eventually, the Germans even resorted to using parts of the autobahn for landing strips and nearby wooded areas to conceal the parked jets from marauding and opportunistic American P-51 Mustang pilots.

The Allies knew the fast-moving jets were exceptionally vulnerable during landing and takeoff, so the patrolling of the jet airfields paid handsome dividends. The Germans used the airfields as improvised “flak traps,” attempting to lure Allied fighters in where the deadly 88mm and other flak guns—along with covering piston-driven FW-190s and Me-109s—could take a substantial combined toll on unwary Allied pilots who ventured too close.

Galland admitted after the war that the bombing of the factories did not prove overly effective, but the bombing of the petroleum facilities and railways did have a significant effect. “What harmed us the most was the killing of our pilots in combat,” wrote Galland. “Planes can be rebuilt, but men cannot be made.”

The development of drop tanks and the eventual positioning of P-51s on the European mainland gave the fighters more air time over Germany. It was the unleashing of the Mustangs from escort duty with the Allied bombers that made a significant difference. In 1944, the fighter pilots were often given the green light to go in before the bombers and destroy anything that moved, especially the jets rising to meet the slow-moving bombers.

“We had the numbers, we had the best pilots, best aircraft and we were in a sort of blood lust to whack those guys the best and hardest way we could,” said 2nd Lieutenant Francis S. Gabreski, the leading American fighter ace in Europe.

The Allies had a few other tricks up their sleeves, too. One of these was nitrous oxide injection, similar to the Germans’ own GM-1 fuel injection system, which gave them a quick burst of speed to close and fire on the jets. They also found that a tight box formation of four P-51s could reportedly prevent a jet from evading them, especially when the American fighters had the advantage of altitude and position. In that situation, a “jet-propelled plane can be destroyed on every encounter,” according to a report filed in late 1944 by Colonel Irwin Dregne, commander of the 357th Fighter Group.

Operation Bodenplatte: Striking Back at the Allies

While this method of winning through attrition proved effective for the Allies, the Germans had a few surprises, too. Operation Bodenplatte, for example, called for a first strike against all the Allied fighter fields on the continent that the jets and other Luftwaffe planes could reach. Generalmajor Dietrich Pelz believed that if the German planes could destroy half the Allied fighters on the ground and destroy the airfields in the process, then the jets would be able to handle the remainder of the Allied fighters.

Pelz noted the plan was never fully put to the test because of the lack of Nazi planes at that point in the war. The daring operation, however, that took place on January 1, 1945, did result in the destruction of more than 285 Allied planes, including some 145 fighters, with another 180 aircraft damaged and 185 personnel killed, according to recent research.

How Many Me-262s Saw Combat?

More than 1,400 Me-262s were built, but only 50 were approved for combat, according to Galland. Of those 50, there were never more than 25 operational at any given time, he said. It is no secret that continuing engine problems, shortages of fuel, and Allied bombing and strafing of airfields and manufacturing facilities took a toll on the number of available jets.

Some reports indicate that there had been more than 180 Me-262s, including those modified as bombers, but reliable German documentation was problematic at best in the final months of the war. The same thing also holds true for proper documentation on the number of victories achieved by the jet pilots, which may have totaled more than 500 before the war’s end.

The Me-262 was well ahead of its time. If the Nazis had had greater access to refined metals for the jet engines, more fuel reserves, and more time, then things might have played out somewhat differently toward the end of the war. The fact remains that the ground-breaking jet truly set the course for the future of aviation history.

This article by Phil Zimmer originally appeared on Warfare History Network.

Image: Flickr.

Eric Chu

Coronavirus, Asia

Given the opportunity, Taiwan has the power to help the United States. Together we shall overcome this pandemic by supporting a new global effort to manufacture and distribute vaccines.

Amidst a global pandemic, the parallel universe in which Taiwan enjoyed a reprieve underwent a reality check in May 2021, when the spread of the coronavirus spiraled out of control for the first time at the local level. As a reaction to the bad news, Taiwan’s major stock index experienced two of the largest plunges in history later that same month, trading at record volumes. Similarly, according to Bloomberg’s COVID resilience ranking, Taiwan plunges into the bottom half of the ranking to the forty-fourth, accentuated by a lagging vaccination drive and a resurgent outbreak.

Since then, the coronavirus-induced death rate in Taiwan has surged past 4 percent, well above the global rate at approximately 2.2 percent. As a former role model in coronavirus prevention, Taiwan’s fall off the pedestal was largely due to the current administration’s complacency and myopia, which it contracted during Taiwan’s coronavirus-free experience for most of the duration since the global outbreak.

The evidence had been clear from the beginning that the cornerstone to returning to normalcy is a vaccinated population. Yet not only was the government behind in procuring vaccines for 23.5 million citizens, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), Taiwan’s center for disease control, even rejected an offer by AstraZeneca to manufacture vaccines in Taiwan. In comparison to another fellow Asian country, Singapore has so far vaccinated 41.1 percent of its population to Taiwan’s single digital to date.

More notably, South Korea announced a vaccine partnership with the United States in May and has since emerged as a global vaccine production base with its fourth coronavirus vaccine contract manufacturing deal struck as of late June.

The United States also has a similar vaccine arrangement for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue partnership between the United States, India, Japan, and Australia. Under this dialogue, the Quad will finance, manufacture, and distribute at least 1 billion doses of safe and effective coronavirus vaccines by the end of 2022.

India, the world’s vaccine leader, produces 60 percent of the world’s overall vaccine needs. The United States and Japan finance the initiative, India makes the vaccines, and Australia helps with the logistics and delivery. 

All is not lost for Taiwan. A statement released by the White House on June 3 unveiled Washington’s strategy for global vaccine sharing. This was followed by a concrete reiteration by Jonathan Fritz in mid-June, where the deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian & Pacific Affairs commented on plans for the United States to partner with Taiwan to manufacture and distribute vaccines.

This U.S. gesture of goodwill already delivered 2.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine to Taiwan in June but should also encourage Taiwan to proactively seek a vaccine manufacturing agreement following South Korea’s precedent with the Biden administration, perhaps alongside the island’s semiconductor partnership. On May 21, 2021, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Joe Biden announced a U.S.-South Korea vaccine partnership to expand vaccine manufacturing and scale-up global vaccine supplies.

Taiwan needs to seize this opportunity to end the vaccine drought for its population, and at the same time reinforce its Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the goal of building resilience.

President Biden said that it is “an ambitious new joint partnership that is going to boost vaccine manufacturing for global benefits and strengthen vaccinations to benefit the entire Indo-Pacific.” 

Taiwan and the United States’ partners can join together to launch an ambitious new partnership to boost vaccine manufacturing for the world’s benefit and to strengthen vaccinations to benefit the entire Indo-Pacific. Taiwan has much to offer these like-minded countries in achieving progress on health security while also standing to gain from this partnership—primarily by assuring Taiwanese that the island will not be short of vaccines in the years to come.

This is an opportunity for a global response to expand safe, affordable, and effective vaccine production and equitable access, to speed economic recovery and benefit global health.

As the former commander of The Central Epidemic Command Center during Taiwan’s response to H1N1 influenza during 2009, I know Taiwan offers a pharmaceutical capacity for vaccine rollout that could serve as a model for other places. Taiwan is a country with a universal health care system that ensures a digitized distribution network and stores patient data in a centralized manner. Domestically, such production facilities can also create jobs in management, quality control, and production that can benefit Taiwan’s economy.

Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, the world meets a single disease and finds a single fate. We are at a turning point in the search for good health and vaccination. So it was during the Spanish flu. So it was during H1N1. While people are now divided into the vaccinated and the not, we still stand united together. Because there is no Taiwanese problem. There is no American problem. There is only a world’s problem facing the pandemic. Taiwan is eager to be a solution to that problem. Given the opportunity, Taiwan has the power to help the United States. Together we shall overcome this pandemic by supporting a new global effort to manufacture and distribute vaccines.

Eric Chu is a former Chairman of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang.

Image: Reuters.

Michael Lind

War, Americas

For generations, Americans opposed to foreign wars have warned that they might result in the conversion of American society into a garrison state. But there are other ways in which foreign policy can undermine the economic, political, and social foundations of a democratic republic like the United States, to the point at which it becomes a different kind of regime.

THE FEAR that a country’s foreign policy can warp its internal social order is a perennial anxiety, in the United States and elsewhere. Usually, it takes the form of the claim that warfare or imperialism will trigger the militarization and regimentation of society at home, transforming the homeland into what the political scientist Harold Lasswell, in an influential 1941 article, called “The Garrison State.”

The perception that domestic social order can be shaped by a country’s interactions with the rest of the world is correct and profoundly important. Curiously, however, this subject has been neglected in traditional Western political philosophy. Typically, Western political philosophers have promoted an ideal political regime, usually a slightly idealized version of their own—the polis for Aristotle, the bureaucratic monarchy for Hegel, liberal democracy for John Rawls. Questions of war, diplomacy, and trade have been afterthoughts.

But there is a minority tradition, exemplified by thinkers like Machiavelli, with his distinction between republics for expansion and preservations, and the German historian Otto von Hintze, that emphasizes the interaction between world politics and internal political structures. This approach is found as well in Alexander Hamilton’s argument from Realpolitik for the need for union among the American states which had separated from Britain. In Federalist Number 8, in the course of arguing that rival post-colonial confederacies in North America would become militarized because of mutual fear, Hamilton explains the different internal constitutions of liberal Britain and autocratic continental powers in terms of their respective geopolitical environments:

The kingdom of Great Britain falls within the first description. An insular situation, and a powerful marine, guarding it in a great measure against the possibility of foreign invasion, supersede the necessity of a numerous army within the kingdom. … This peculiar felicity of situation has, in a great degree, contributed to preserve the liberty which that country to this day enjoys, in spite of the prevalent venality and corruption. If, on the contrary, Britain had been situated on the continent, and had been compelled, as she would have been, by that situation, to make her military establishments at home coextensive with those of the other great powers of Europe, she, like them, would in all probability be, at this day, a victim to the absolute power of a single man.

For generations, Americans opposed to foreign wars have warned that they might result in the conversion of American society into a garrison state. But there are other ways in which foreign policy can undermine the economic, political, and social foundations of a democratic republic like the United States, to the point at which it becomes a different kind of regime. There are two other categories of American nightmares that can be discerned in addition to the garrison state. One is what I call the tributary state; the other, the castle society.

The garrison state is a regime that sacrifices domestic liberty to preserve national independence. The tributary state pursues the opposite strategy; it sacrifices national independence to preserve domestic liberty. In contrast to both of these, the castle society does not choose between national independence and domestic liberty; it fails to achieve either. Indeed, state institutions are so weak or corrupt in a castle society that describing it as a “society” rather than a modern, institutionalized, bureaucratic state is appropriate. Government institutions are too feeble to protect individuals even from rampant crime or terrorism on the country’s own soil, forcing individuals and associations who can afford to do so to withdraw into their own secured enclaves or to hire private security forces. In such a quasi-anarchic society, like that of the Wild West or Al Capone’s Chicago in the United States, there may be no formal restrictions on individual liberty, but in the absence of effective policing and non-corrupt judiciaries, personal and commercial freedom are hardly possible. The category of the castle society includes many countries that are colloquially described as “failed states.”

The four regimes—the democratic republic, the garrison state, the tributary state, and the castle society—can be envisioned with the help of a diagram, with one axis standing for national independence and the other axis standing for civil liberty:

 

NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE

CIVIL LIBERTY

 

High

Low

High

Democratic Republic

Tributary State

Low

Garrison State

Castle Society

 

IN THE twentieth century, opponents of U.S. intervention in great power struggles in Europe and Asia frequently argued that U.S. participation would inevitably turn America into a garrison state. In response, proponents of U.S. intervention in the world wars and of U.S. participation in international alliances flipped this argument on its head, claiming that failure to intervene to prevent the German conquest of Europe would force the United States to defend itself by becoming permanently militarized and mobilized.

Following World War I, President Woodrow Wilson argued that the United States must take part in the League of Nations, an international collective security system, in order to create a concert of power that could avert future great power conflicts. The alternative would be an endless cycle of world wars, in which the United States, whether it took part or remained on the sidelines, would have to be permanently armed and mobilized. In that case, Wilson told an audience in St. Louis in 1919:

We must be physically ready for anything to come. We must have a great standing army. We must see to it that every man in America is trained to arms. We must see to it that there are munitions and guns enough for an army that means a mobilized nation … And you know what the effect of military government is upon social questions. You know how impossible it is to effect social reform if everybody must be under orders from the government. You know how impossible it is, in short, to have a free nation if it is a military nation and under military orders.

The Roosevelt administration and its allies made a similar argument that the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies in the short term would avert the necessity of permanently converting the United States into a “Fortress America” besieged in the Western Hemisphere by German and Japanese empires. Douglas Miller, a U.S. diplomat, warned that in a world dominated by the Axis empires: “We should have to be a whole nation of ‘Minutemen,’ ready to rush to arms at the first sight of invasion.” Lewis L. Douglas, Roosevelt’s former budget director, argued: “To retreat to the cyclone cellar here means, ultimately, to establish a totalitarian state at home.”

The same theme informs NSC-68, the 1950 Truman administration state paper that laid out what became the containment strategy toward the Soviet Union, rejecting the alternative strategies of the tributary state and the garrison state, without using those terms.

As the Soviet Union mobilized the military resources of Eurasia, increased its relative military capabilities, and heightened its threat to our security, some would be tempted to accept “peace” on its terms, while many would seek to defend the United States by creating a regimented system which would permit the assignment of a tremendous part of our resources to national defense. Under such a state of affairs our national morale would be corrupted and the integrity of and vitality of our system subverted.

The goal of the Cold War containment policy was to prevent the Soviet bloc from ever obtaining so much relative power that Americans would be forced to choose between their national autonomy and their domestic liberty. According to NSC-68: “In essence, the fundamental purpose [of American strategy] is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.” 

Truman’s successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, made the same point in his famous warning about the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the American people on January 17, 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex … We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or our democratic processes.”

Eisenhower’s speech is often misconstrued by those who claim that “war profiteers” control the government and are inventing fictitious threats to enrich and empower themselves. But that is not what Eisenhower argued. In the preceding paragraphs, he argues that the military-industrial complex, as dangerous as it is, is a necessary response to genuine foreign threats like the Soviet Union:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction … But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisations of national defense, we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

Generations of isolationists on the libertarian Right and anti-interventionists on the radical Left have caricatured Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and their successors as militarists. But these policymakers themselves argued for limited, defensive militarization and U.S. participation in the world wars and Cold War as a strategy that was less threatening to civil liberty and political pluralism than never-ending, defensive mobilization in a United States besieged in North America by triumphant Eurasian empires. From their perspective, the two wars against Germany and the Cold War against the Soviet Union were temporary preventive wars. Their aim was to prevent Imperial and Nazi Germany and the USSR from establishing direct control or obtaining informal domination over the major industrial nations of Europe and East Asia. They conceded that a few years of world war and a few decades of Cold War would warp civil liberty and democracy in the United States, but to a much lesser degree than would occur in an isolated, permanent Fortress America. 

Ironically, the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh, one of the leaders of the anti-interventionist “America First” movement in the run-up to U.S. entry into World War II following the Pearl Harbor attack, agreed that the alternative to destroying the German and Japanese empires before they could be consolidated was creating an American garrison state. He thought it was a nifty idea. Lindbergh declared: “The men of this country must be willing to give a year of their lives to military training—more if necessary.” And Lindbergh called on the United States to invade its neighbors, to create a secure North American empire from which the Germans, Japanese, and others could be kept out. He demanded U.S. bases throughout North America “wherever they are needed for our safety, regardless of who owns the territory involved.”

None of this should give intellectual aid and comfort to today’s neoconservative advocates of “global democratic revolution” or “humanitarian hawks” who favor invasions of countries that do not threaten the United States to defend “human rights” or “the liberal world order.” On the contrary, both of these belligerent approaches to U.S. foreign policy are antithetical to the approach of mainstream U.S. policymakers during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson agonized over the effects that war might have on American society. Franklin Roosevelt told the American people, “I have seen war … I hate war.” In contrast, according to her memoirs, Madeleine Albright, favoring intervention in the war of the Yugoslav succession, a conflict of only remote and indirect interest to the United States, asked General Colin Powell: “What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”

Both interventionists and anti-interventionists in the United States, then, have maintained that their preferred policies would minimize the long-term threat that the American republic would be replaced by a militarized, Spartan garrison state. Advocates of intervention to prevent German or Soviet hegemony in Eurasia conceded that the temporary sacrifice of a degree of liberty and democracy during a war or cold war could be harmful, but would be less harmful to the way of life of a civilian, democratic, and liberal republic than the alternative—permanent defensive militarization of American society in an environment of regional empires and recurrent world wars. The anti-interventionists disputed this argument, claiming that U.S. participation in world war or cold war would turn America into a garrison state immediately and permanently.

Which side was right? One result of the global conflicts of the twentieth century has indeed been the emergence of a large, permanent military and defense industrial base, along with a permanent and powerful intelligence community. The world wars and the Cold War diminished the authority of Congress in foreign affairs, while giving the president vastly enhanced discretion in military affairs. Even worse, the “War on Terror” that followed the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, led a panicked Congress to delegate to the president the construction of a surveillance state which genuinely threatens the civil liberties of American citizens, who, for example, may be put on secret “no-fly lists” by government agencies without being told.

But even when these deformations of the American constitutional order are acknowledged, it is clear that the United States overall is not a garrison state. America is not an autocracy. There is no president for life; following Roosevelt’s four terms in the White House, the constitution was amended to limit a president to two terms. Indeed, two of the last four presidents have been impeached by Congress.

Conscription? Even at the height of the early Cold War in the Truman administration, proposals for universal military training were so unpopular with the public that the United States instead adopted the more limited selective service lottery system, which itself came to an end in 1973 following popular discontent with the costs of the Vietnam war.

Mobilization of industry? From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, successive presidents, singing the praises of “globalization,” complacently ignored the deindustrialization of the United States thanks to the offshoring of industry by U.S.-based multinationals, to China in particular. They also ignored the damage done to American industry by the mercantilist policies of U.S. allies like Japan, South Korea, and Germany. When Barack Obama left office in 2017, the U.S. military had to purchase rocket engines from Russia, U.S. astronauts had to hitch rides to the international space station on Russian rockets, and America had nearly lost its capacity to make many critical tech components including silicon chips. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed that the United States was almost completely dependent on Chinese factories for many crucial medical supplies, from masks to the chemical precursors used in common drugs. What kind of garrison state makes itself dependent for industrial supplies on a hostile strategic rival like China?

Overgrown military? In 1944, U.S. defense spending engrossed a third of GDP. Then, between 1945 and 1950, it plummeted to less than 5 percent. As a share of GDP, U.S. defense spending rose to 11.3 percent at the height of the Korean War in 1953 and 8.6 percent at the height of the Vietnam War—hardly Spartan levels of military consumption. Following the end of the Cold War, defense spending dropped to around 3 percent of GDP, a number to which it has returned after a brief uptick to 4.5 percent at the apex of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010. One may believe, as I do, that most of the small wars the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere are unnecessary, but a country that spends 3 percent of GDP on the military is not one in which military expenditure threatens to choke off the civilian economy.

As for the “standing army,” that nightmare of generations of Americans, the U.S. military has been radically downsized since the Cold War ended. The number of active-duty military personnel shrank from around two million in 1990 to a little more than a million today. Even when private contractors are considered, this has hardly the swollen military of a totalitarian state.

The American republic is not in danger of becoming a garrison state—not now, nor in the foreseeable future. But that is not to say the American republic is not in danger. The excessive militarization of society in a regimented state is not the only way that our republican social order can give way to a different kind of social order, with its own kind of foreign policy. America’s democratic republic could be warped to the point at which it ceases to be a democratic republic in all but name and morphs into a tributary state or a castle society.

THE BEST-KNOWN example of a tributary state, in the sense in which I am using the term, was Finland during the Cold War. The term “Finlandization” was coined by West German political scientists to describe the process by which Finland accommodated the Soviet Union in foreign policy, in order to maintain its nominal sovereignty and domestic autonomy. The term is unfair to Finland, because it is commonplace for small and weak states to pursue foreign policies that avoid provoking the wrath of powerful neighbors. This is certainly true in America’s neighborhood, where the United States in the last few generations has invaded the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, and Haiti while engaging in proxy war and covert action to install client governments in the region.

The lack of attention to tributary states by theorists of international relations is puzzling, because the category includes the vast majority of regimes in recorded history. Premodern empires and kingdoms were not centralized, bureaucratic states, but loose conglomerations of semi-autonomous lesser kingdoms, satrapies, provinces, city-states, duchies, bishoprics, and other entities. Typically, in return for fealty and tribute, the imperial government allowed a high degree of internal independence in subordinate units. Sovereignty in the modern sense did not exist in such systems; there were only degrees of suzerainty.

The ubiquity of premodern tributary states, including dominions and colonies of the European empires that enjoyed various degrees of self-government before post-1945 decolonization, suggests that the assumption of academic neorealist theory that most states seek to maximize their relative power is too simple. The mistake of crude realism is to confuse states with elites. If the state is not an autonomous agent but merely the instrument of a social elite—an assumption shared by Marxists, populists, and others—then it may be in the self-interest of a dominant elite to maintain or increase its own status within its local society by sacrificing the state’s external sovereignty and making it a protectorate of another regime, particularly if the foreign protector can guarantee the security of the local ruling class against challenges from below. To secure its status, the social elite may even give up national independence altogether in favor of annexation. This is what the Scottish elite did with the Act of Union of 1707 and what the short-lived Republic of Texas decided when it joined the United States as a state in 1846.

The Confederate States of America (CSA), had it survived the Civil War, would have been a de facto tributary state of the British empire—formally independent, but in practice an economic colony of industrial Britain. Apologists for the Confederacy who claim that the secession of the Southern states was motivated by fear of tariffs rather than the defense of slavery have always been unpersuasive. Nevertheless, it is true that the Confederate planter class planned for their agrarian economy to complement, rather than compete with, industrializing countries—including the United States as well as Britain, France, and Germany. In his First Inaugural Address, Confederate President Jefferson Davis made it explicit that the CSA would specialize in exporting cotton to the factories of Britain and the shrunken remnant of the United States, rather than seek to compete with them in manufacturing:

An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country, our true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our necessities will permit. It is alike our interest, and that of all those to whom we would sell and from whom we would buy, that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon the interchange of commodities. There can be but little rivalry between ours and any manufacturing or navigating community, such as the Northeastern States of the American Union.

The South’s lack of the military-industrial capacity of the Northern state meant that an ignominious defeat was all but inevitable in the absence of British intervention. By the end of the Civil War, the Confederate elite was confronted with a stark choice: it could maintain its independence by centralizing power in the new national government, engaging in a crash program of state-sponsored industrialization from above, and perhaps freeing and arming Southern slaves—in other words, by revolutionizing the very social order that secession was supposed to preserve. In any event, following Reconstruction, the Southern oligarchy, through anti-Black terrorism and the repression of white populists, managed to restore and maintain a privileged position that was only undermined generations later by the mechanization of agriculture, the industrialization of the Sun Belt, and federal civil rights enforcement in the second half of the twentieth century.

Like the Southern planter class, many oligarchies in Latin America have preferred to be the dominant elites in de facto resource colonies that export commodities to the industrial nations rather than risk the loss of their own social positions that might result from the enrichment of the majorities in their countries by state-sponsored programs of national industrial modernization. And as Roberto Unger has pointed out, the refusal of Latin American countries to participate in the world wars, except at the margins, forestalled the danger that armed and mobilized masses would demand more political power and a greater share of the wealth in return for wartime sacrifice. A similar pattern can be seen in post-colonial regimes in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, in which reliance on exporting commodities like oil and gas allows local oligarchies to avoid empowering their subjects. In the case of the petrostates of the Persian Gulf, despotic monarchies like that of Saudi Arabia and Qatar do not even have to arm and enfranchise their own people to defend their countries; they can depend on the U.S. military to protect them.

THE FACT that socio-economic elites, not states, are the actual actors in world politics explains two puzzling historical episodes: the failure of Britain in the 1900s to respond to the rising industrial power of Germany and the United States, and the latter’s massive offshoring of its own manufacturing capability to Communist China from the 1990s to the 2010s. In each case, a powerful bloc of economic interests chose to sacrifice the national military power and independence of their own country to maximize their short-term personal profits.

Between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, Britain became the first industrial nation in the world by pursuing a sophisticated program of national development, based on protectionism, bans on the export of technology, skilled immigration, and laws requiring its North American and Indian colonies to buy British manufactured goods rather than manufacturing for themselves. In the 1840s and 1850s, no longer needing to protect its domestic industries and seeking to open up export markets, the British abruptly abandoned protectionism and began to preach global free trade. Free trade, they hoped, would help to lock in Britain’s lead in manufacturing by encouraging Britain’s trading partners to forego manufacturing for themselves, while competing with each other to provide British factories with cheap inputs like cotton and other raw materials and British factory workers with cheap food.

Most Latin American countries, along with the short-lived Confederate States of America, accepted the offer to function as resource colonies for industrial Britain. But the British offer was rejected by the United States during and after the Civil War and by Imperial Germany after it was consolidated in 1871. Abraham Lincoln’s America and Otto von Bismarck’s Germany used protectionism and other policies to build up their own industries to compete with those of the United Kingdom. 

By the late nineteenth century, British manufacturers were being driven out of their home market as well as global markets by floods of American and German imports. Members of the British “national efficiency school”—a diverse coalition of liberal nationalists like Joseph Chamberlain, hawkish conservative imperialists and technocratic collectivists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw—called upon Britain to defend its industrial might by consolidating the entire British empire, or perhaps only the home islands and “white dominions” like Canada and Australia, into a single protected market.

Instead, Britain clung to the unilateral free trade policy which it had adopted in the mid-nineteenth century, and which had made sense only when Britain had no major industrial rivals. The warnings of the national efficiency school were vindicated when Britain was subjected to attack by technologically-advanced Germany in the two world wars, while losing even industries it helped to invent like the jet airliner and television and computer industries to the United States. Today, post-imperial Britain is, in effect, a tributary state of the United States.

Why did Britain spurn the protectionist industrial policies that might have preserved more of its manufacturing leadership and military power a century ago? The reason is simple—the British elites which benefited from free trade, chiefly the financial interests of the City of London, had more influence over British policy than British manufacturers. British investors were not threatened by the American imports that wiped out factories in the British midlands. Indeed, while high tariffs kept out American manufactured goods, American industry welcomed British investment. British rentiers were enriched by their overseas investments even as British industry declined.

The pattern has been recapitulated in the United States, from the end of the Cold War to the present. In one industry after another, American corporations have offshored production to China since the 1990s, rendering the U.S. dependent on Chinese factories for many critical supply chains and manufactured goods, from iPhones to drugs and personal protective equipment that were essential in the Covid-19 pandemic. The toleration by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations of this massive transfer of industrial power from the United States to the Chinese dictatorship, a regime seeking to eliminate U.S. hegemony in Asia and the world, is an even more remarkable case of national military-industrial suicide than that of Britain a century earlier. It is as though the British parliament in the 1900s had encouraged the offshoring of British industry to Imperial Germany, even while engaging in the Anglo-German arms race.

As in Britain in the 1900s, in the United States in the 2000s capitalist elites with no interest in the health of the national industrial base—the managers and shareholders of Silicon Valley companies like Apple that were offered cheap labor and subsidies by the Chinese dictatorship, Wall Street firms salivating at the prospect of access to Chinese financial markets, and agribusiness corporations that are content to export foodstuffs to China in return for manufactured imports—defeated the U.S. military elites and America’s national manufacturers who viewed China as a threat. The struggle between these domestic coalitions explains the paradox of American policy toward China. America’s financial and commercial elites for the most part welcome the role of the United States as a deindustrialized resource colony of industrial China, as long as they can make money accessing China’s vast domestic market and pool of cheap, unfree labor, while American military hawks and populists and the remnant of private organized labor seek to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies and rebuild American manufacturing. Paradoxically, given the ostentatious social liberalism of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, America’s tech elites and financial elites have adopted something like the voluntary tributary state strategy of Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders, with twenty-first-century industrial China replacing nineteenth-century industrial Britain as a source of manufactured imports, and a post-industrial United States which exports farm products, raw materials, and tourist and professional services to industrial Asia and Europe playing the role of the cotton-exporting Confederacy.

WHILE THE garrison state saves national independence by sacrificing civil liberty, and the tributary state sacrifices national independence to preserve civil liberty (at least for local elites), the castle society sacrifices the state and loses both national independence and civil liberty.

If Cold War-era Finland symbolizes the tributary state, Somalia or post-Gaddafi Libya might symbolize the castle society today. The erosion or collapse of state institutions and central authority produces anarchy, in which individuals and communities are forced to defend themselves or seek protection from stateless mafias or insurgent groups.

Elements of the castle society have always existed in the United States. The movement of settlers into Western frontier areas in advance of adequate law enforcement produced the anarchic conditions of “the Wild West,” with bloody clashes among native Americans and settlers and widespread crime. Criminal gangs, often specializing in the sale of prohibited alcohol and drugs, have dominated urban neighborhoods in many American cities over the generations, sometimes in collusion with corrupt police and politicians. For its part, between Reconstruction and the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the American South was a de facto state-within-a-state, with the paramilitary Ku Klux Klan often allied with the local social and political elites who controlled the one-party Democratic regime. In the post-World War II era in which U.S. troops occupied Japan and parts of Germany, the federal government was still struggling to assert its authority in the states of the former Confederacy.

A democratic republic is defined in part by the limitation of the objects of government. But within its legitimate realm, a democratic republican government must be able to protect its citizens from invasion, crime, economic immiseration, and disease—at least in part through public agencies staffed by civil servants and soldiers who are paid out of taxes.

The high-water mark of democratic republicanism in the United States was reached in the decades after World War II. Without becoming a tyranny, the government was strong enough to protect the borders, dismantle racial segregation, regulate the economy, eliminate diseases like polio, and wage cold war against the Communist bloc. At the same time, informal checks and balances operated in the social sphere, with powerful trade unions, political parties, and churches exercising what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “countervailing power” against concentrated industrial capital.

In contrast, the last half-century has seen the replacement of nation-building by nation-dismantling in the United States, at the hands of an increasingly homogeneous, rich, and powerful national oligarchy. The American managerial elite has crushed organized labor, to the point that fewer private-sector workers—around 6 percent—enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining than was the case under President Herbert Hoover. The political parties, once federations of autonomous state and local organizations, have become mere labels captured by billionaires who, like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg, view the national political parties as brands to be captured.

America’s managerial elite, based now more in Silicon Valley and Wall Street than in the old industrial sectors of oil and gas and manufacturing, have employed tax avoidance to starve the federal government of revenue, by means of offshore tax havens. In 2015, for example, U.S.-based multinationals reported 43 percent of their foreign earnings as coming from five notorious tax havens—Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—even though only 4 percent of the workforce of the same companies resided in these jurisdictions. Like many American corporations, many of America’s rich are scofflaws, using tax shelters to avoid paying taxes. And those who do pay taxes frequently benefit by paying a lower tax on capital gains than cashiers and janitors and truckers pay on their labor income.

Using libertarian ideology as an excuse for slashing the government’s capacity to provide basic public order, the bipartisan American elite in the last half-century has “deinstitutionalized” many of the mentally ill—with the result that every large American city has a homeless population of individuals suffering from untreated psychiatric disorders or drug addiction. Meanwhile, under Democrats and Republicans alike, the U.S. government has tolerated the migration of millions of illegal immigrants to the United States to provide American employers with a pliant, low-wage workforce which is unprotected by labor laws and civil rights. 

“Authoritarianism” has been redefined in American public discourse to stigmatize what were formerly considered ordinary functions of government. For example, attempts to crack down on cross-border labor trafficking are often met with cries of “fascism!” In the summer of 2020, following the death in police custody of George Floyd, left-wing calls to “defund the police” contributed to the greatest wave of vandalism and murder in American cities since the urban riots of the 1960s.

As the public realm has been taken over in much of the country by mentally ill and sometimes dangerous vagrants, drug addicts, criminal gangs, and left-wing Antifa protestors, many Americans have retreated to fortified homes in suburban or rural areas and bought guns to defend themselves. Following the example of the Latin American upper classes, America’s managerial oligarchs tend to live in secure apartment towers or gated communities with their own private security forces. Many of the same progressive elites who denounce the idea of a wall on the American border pay top dollar for the walls that protect them and their families from anarchy and squalor inside American borders.

Not content to allow public authority to wither, America’s new ruling class has begun to govern the American people informally but directly, through the “private” institutions it controls—social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and retail platforms like Amazon as well as by older infrastructures like the banking system. Twitter purged a president of the United States. YouTube and Amazon “disappear” content at variance with the left-wing social norms of the American plutocracy and its professional-class courtiers. The United States is drifting ever closer to adopting a Chinese-style “social credit” system that freezes citizens guilty of wrongthink out of bank loans, savings accounts, and air and bus and rail travel—albeit a social credit system run by nominally private corporations and financial institutions.

IN THE middle of the twentieth century, a case could be made that prolonged mobilization for war threatened to turn the United States into a garrison state. Today, despite numerous small peripheral wars and the overhang of presidential emergency powers from earlier crises, the United States is in less danger of becoming a garrison state than ever. The greatest threat to America’s future comes not from a totalitarian state bureaucracy in Washington, DC, but from unchecked private power at home and authoritarian state capitalism abroad.

Saving the United States from geopolitical weakness and domestic chaos requires a reassertion of the democratic republican state, at the expense of oligarchs at home and hostile great powers and labor- and drug-trafficking gangs abroad. Such a limited rebuilding of national state capacity will not turn America into a garrison state. But it may save the American republic from degenerating into a combination of a tributary state and a castle society.

Michael Lind is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a columnist for Tablet, and a fellow at New America. He is the author of The New Class War (2020) and The American Way of Strategy (2006).

Image: Flickr / The U.S. Army

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

Most fighter pilots developed a grudging respect, even admiration, for pilots of the opposite uniform. Shooting each other down was nothing personal. It was not about killing a man; it was about killing a machine.

Key Point: The first large-scale American bombing raid deep into the Reich with fighter protection all the way took place on January 11, 1944.

Unlike bomber crews that went home if they survived a designated number of missions, World War II fighter pilots like Lieutenant Jim Carl, 354th Fighter Group, United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), flew until the war ended, they got shot down over enemy territory and were captured, or they died.

“If you get through five missions,” Major “Pinky” O’Connor, one of three squadron leaders of the 354th, bluntly told replacements, “you will probably get smart enough to survive.”

America’s premier aircraft when the United States entered World War II were the heavily armed Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, nicknamed “The Jug” because of its bulk, and the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. Due to their limited range, however, neither was able to provide long-distance cover for bombers on missions into Nazi territory over occupied Europe, which left the bombers unprotected and vulnerable. The appearance of the North American P-51 Mustang, considered the best all-around fighter plane of World War II, changed the character of the Allied air war.

Its development was due not to the Americans, but instead to the British. A U.S. airplane manufacturer built it to British specifications in 1941, prior to the United States entering the fight. The early model lacked power at higher altitudes, but the 1942 version fitted with a Rolls Royce Merlin engine attained a top speed of 440 miles per hour, an altitude capacity ceiling of 30,000 feet, and an extended range that enabled it to provide fighter protection all the way from England to Poland and back, a round trip of 1,700 miles. It could outrun, outclimb, and outdive any fighter fielded by the enemy.

“When I saw Mustangs over Berlin,” Reichmarschall Herman Göring, commander of the German Luftwaffe, is said to have commented, “I knew the jig was up.”

The 354th Fighter Group, flying P-51 Mustangs and composed of three squadrons—354th, 355th, and 356th—deployed to Kent, England, in 1943 to fly escort for Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and Consolidated B-24 Liberators on long-run bombings into Nazi territory. During its short tenure in Kent, the 354th shot down 68 enemy planes and lost 23 of its own.

“Your job,” the commanding general of the USAAF told the new unit, “is to achieve air superiority.”

Allied tactical air forces pounded the Luftwaffe relentlessly in the air and on the ground during the months prior to the Normandy D-Day invasion in order to achieve that superiority. Massive wide-ranging air assaults knocked out roads and rail lines, bridges, enemy convoys, troop movements, artillery emplacements, armor, and other targets of opportunity.

The first large-scale American bombing raid deep into the Reich with fighter protection all the way took place on January 11, 1944. Targets for the strike force of 663 B-17s and B-24s were Luftwaffe airplane and parts factories in Oschersleben, Halberstadt, and Brunswick. Fighter support consisted of 11 groups of P-47s, two groups of P-38s, and a single group of 49 P-51 Mustangs. The short-range American fighters had to turn back, but the Mustangs proved more than a match for the Luftwaffe interceptors, destroying a number of enemy fighters while suffering no losses of their own.

Two weeks after D-Day in June 1944, the 354th Group moved into France to support the Allied advance and take on Göring’s Luftwaffe. Lieutenant Jim Carl, a lanky native of Quapaw, Oklahoma, and fresh out of flight training on the P-51, linked up with the group a month later and was assigned to the 356th “Red Ass Squadron.” Squadron leader Major “Pinky” O’Connor had unintentionally coined the nickname after a long flight when he climbed out of his Mustang rubbing his butt and groaning, “Aiieee! Is my ass ever red!”

The squadron’s official emblem became a cartoonish red donkey wearing a broad grin.

Like most new pilots thrown into the mix, Carl had to learn his craft quickly. He began to count off the missions until he reached the magic number of five.

His first mission turned out to be anticlimactic. At the controls of Quapaw Squaw, named after his hometown, he flew wingman to “Pop” Young on a bomber escort. At 24, Pop was one of the older flyers. Carl was 21.

En route, the raiders flew over lines of grooves marking the World War I trenches that scarred the French countryside. Lieutenant Carl stared in disbelief, his thoughts briefly on all the men who had died in those trenches—and now the Americans were back again.

Over the target, an enemy airfield, the clear sky exploded with flak and antiaircraft fire. It seemed a miracle that a single airplane might make it through unscathed. Carl was reckoning himself a goner—and on his first mission at that—when Pop Young reported engine trouble. As his wingman, Carl turned back with Pop to escort him to base.

Four missions to go.

Lieutenant Carl’s second mission involved an air-to-ground attack on a freight train loaded with fresh troops and supplies steaming across a wide plain toward the German front. Armed with quad .50-caliber machine guns and two 250- or 500-pound bombs mounted on wing racks, the P-51 excelled in ground attack and support as well as in air combat.

In a long line, the Mustangs made runs on the train at more than 400 miles per hour while German troops in green and gray uniforms on flatcars unlimbered their cannons and machine guns on the attacking fighters.

Carl rolled Quapaw Squawdirectly at the approaching locomotive and strafed the train all the way to its caboose. Tracers from German machine guns flashed through the formation like meteors. A train wheel blasted into the air and whizzed past Carl’s cockpit.

He flew so low that he caught expressions on the faces of flatbed antiaircraft crews before they and their cars were reduced to kindling, blood, and bone chips. On his climb out, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the train derailed, cars overturned and smoldering, surviving troops running for the hills.

Three to go.

He acquitted himself well in air-to-air encounters and acquired a reputation for being cool and deadly under fire. During one dogfight, the 354th Group with 38 Mustangs engaged a superior force of 51 German Messerschmitt Me-109s and Me-110s. Buzzing like giant bees at 20,000 feet, planes of both teams mixed it up in a furious maelstrom of violence, ducking and darting and sweeping, muzzles flashing and flaming. A gnat against a distant cloud one moment quickly became a flying dragon spitting fire the next. There was no time for thinking at such speeds, only action.

Outflown and outgunned, the Germans broke off contact and fled with their figurative tails between their figurative legs. Quapaw Squawsurvived with only a few holes in her fuselage. Lieutenant Carl was still in the fight.

A few days later, about 40 planes from the 354th flew at 10,000 feet approaching an enemy ground installation when someone radioed an alarm: “Bogeys!” German Messerschmitts swarmed out of the clouds like frenzied hornets.

“Break left! Now!” Group leader Major Carl Depner ordered.

The formation broke in a single unit, jettisoning its bombs to lighten the planes for aerial combat. Mustangs climbed in waves and burst through the bogeys with guns blazing. Lieutenant  Carl swept onto an enemy aircraft’s backside and laid on his trigger, anticipating a kill.

His guns malfunctioned. He found himself defenseless and surrounded by vampires. His only recourse was to fly like hell in the middle of swarming airplanes all shooting at each other. Fighters, both enemy and friendly, exploded in bright balls of fire or streaked toward earth trailing smoke and flame.

Major Depner’s wingman, Boze, was shot down and killed. Moments later, Depner got hit. He pulled out of the fight and headed for home. Fire in the cockpit forced him to parachute out. That was the last anyone heard of him.

Those were the only American planes lost in the dustup, while the Germans lost nearly two dozen blasted out of the sky. And Carl had not fired a single shot.

This was Quapaw Squaw’s magic mission of five. Carl was beginning to think he might make it after all.

The Red Asses’ squadron leader, Major O’Connor, ballsy and cavalier, took care of his men and thereby commanded a great deal of respect. During a raid on a heavily defended German airfield, Carl sprayed a .50-caliber swath of destruction into enemy fighters caught by surprise on the ground. He pulled out of his run and circled at 1,000 feet. Several shattered Messerschmitts spewed flame and smoke into the air. A fire truck at the end of the asphalt runway near some concrete revetments had overturned and burst into flames. Tracers zipped up from hardened antiaircraft sites.

Major O’Connor was on the radio calling off the attack when Carl noticed an undamaged Me-109 partly concealed underneath a tree off to one end of the landing strip.

“Hallum Two,” he radioed Pinky. “I’m making another run on the bogey hiding underneath the tree.”

“Roger, Squaw Man.”

Carl dipped a wing into a belly-wrenching dive almost straight down at the parked aircraft. He felt the smooth stutter of his .50-caliber machine guns throughout his body as he gnawed up turf, the tree, and the Me-109. He zoomed through the black and red ball of gasoline flame he had ignited and pulled up in a wild, weaving flight through streams of tracers attempting to bring him down.

Typically, Major O’Conner never left one of his fighters alone in a fight. While Carl was taking care of the hidden Me-109, O’Connor was raising hell at the opposite end of the airfield, creating a diversion. When the squadron returned to base near Cherbourg, Pinky had almost as many holes in his Mustang as Carl had drilled through the parked Me-109.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Carl scold­ed him. “You didn’t have to make another run.”

“I did it to give you a chance,” the major replied with a shrug.

Shortly after that, Major O’Connor was shot down during a long escort of B-17s. He parachuted out directly on top of an SS gun crew.

Other pilots got shot down more than once and lived to tell about it. Captain James Edwards, a big, tall boy and winner of two Distinguished Flying Crosses, was busted out of the air twice and wrecked two other airplanes while trying to bring them home riddled by gunfire.

“You keep losing planes,” Carl admonished him, “and they’ll make you start paying for them.”

Even Quapaw Squawwas shot down on what was to be a routine sortie. Since that particular mission expected little or no contact, Carl allowed a rookie named Homberg to fly the Squaw.A battery of German 88s on the ground brought her down like a meteor. That was Homberg’s first and last mission.

Carl named his replacement Mustang Quapaw Squaw II.

Most fighter pilots developed a grudging respect, even admiration, for pilots of the opposite uniform. Shooting each other down was nothing personal. It was not about killing a man; it was about killing a machine.

In supporting the Allied advance after D-Day, the 354th basically followed General George Patton’s Third Army across France, into Belgium and the Battle of the Bulge, then across the Siegfried Line into Germany. Lieutenant Carl was up to 60 or so missions in his logbook, and the Red Asses were sweeping out ahead of Patton when he encountered an Me-109 jock in a one-on-one dogfight that could end only one way—with the destruction of one or the other.

Although the savage-looking Me-109s were not quite on par with the mosquito-like P-51s, they could be quite formidable when flown by a top-line pilot who knew his way around the sky. As a dozen or so Me-109s bounced the Mustangs out of the sun, Carl tacked onto an enemy plane that began twisting into maneuvers Carl would not have thought possible before now. The dogfight degenerated into a deadly game of tic-tac-toe played at speeds in excess of 400 miles per hour.

Carl seized the first advantage by grabbing onto the guy’s exhaust and zig-zagging with him through the air, sending tracers slashing after him. The Me-109 seemed to dive every time just before the bullets reached him.

The German suddenly switched positions with Carl in a maneuver so skillfully executed that it left Carl breathless with astonishment. The Me-109 was now on the American’s ass.

Carl feinted, bobbed, and weaved across the sky, trying to shake the Me-109 before tracers flashing past his cockpit caught him. The guy might fly like a superhero, but, fortunately, he could not shoot for crap. That was the only thing that saved the American.

The two fighter planes dueled it out for what must have seemed an eternity to the combatants. First one took the advantage, then the other, each unable to administer a fatal blow.

They broke apart and circled warily at a distance, each striving to fight out of the sun while forcing the other to fight into it.

They charged like gladiators, weapons blazing. Lead spanged into Quapaw II’s fuselage. The fighters passed wing tip to wing tip at a combined speed of more than 800 miles per hour. Carl glimpsed his rival’s face—young and encased in a brown aviator’s cap, ear pieces loose, intense and concentrated—nothing like the gross caricatures on the “Know Your Enemy” propaganda posters.

Carl pulled into a turn so sharp he thought his wings were ripping off. That put him back on the hotshot’s tail. The German dived with Carl in pursuit, his aircraft vibrating at speeds beyond its red line. The earth below rushed at him.

The first one to “chicken out” would find himself at a crucial disadvantage, as it would permit the other a tail position in good machine-gun shape at a relatively slow recovery speed. The German bobbed and weaseled, making himself a difficult target and apparently determined to bury them both in the ground rather than pull out of his dive.

Carl glimpsed trees and fences coming at him. A farmhouse. Some geese flying.

At the last instant, just when it appeared both planes would crash, the German “chickened out” and leveled off just above the tree line. Evasion lay in his climbing to a more favorable level for maneuvering, which meant giving up precious speed and making himself vulnerable to his pursuer.

Tree branches quaked and bowed from the combined speed of the two fighters’ slipstreams. Carl anticipated his foe’s next move and caught the Me-109 in his sights as it pulled up and out. He squirted it with his quad-50s, tumbling it through the low air like a pheasant shotgunner in flight. It burst into bright flames as it struck the ground. Burning parts of it exploded in all directions. No pilot could have lived through such a conflagration.

Momentary sadness and guilt overcame Lieutenant Carl as he pulled back on Squaw II’s throttle and circled the field, wagging his wings in tribute. He thought he might have liked to have congratulated the German over a cup of coffee on a duel well fought.

P-51 Mustangs flew 213,873 sorties during the war, losing 2,520 planes to all causes, including enemy action. In turn, Mustangs shot down 4,950 enemy aircraft, a feat second only to the carrier-borne Grumman F-6F Hellcat used in the Pacific War.

The three squadrons of the 354th Fighter Group in Europe destroyed more enemy aircraft in aerial combat, 701, than any other while losing only 63 of their own pilots.

Jim Carl flew 86 combat missions with the Red Ass Squadron, won two Distinguished Flying Crosses, and left the USAAF as a lieutenant colonel. He lost a lot of friends during the final year of the war.

Charles Sasser is the author of the classic book of sniper warfare titled One Shot-One Kill. He has written dozens of other books and articles and appeared on numerous television networks including ABC, Fox, the History Channel, and CNN. He is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army Special Forces. He resides in Chouteau, Oklahoma.

Originally Published November 22, 2019.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

The Soviet's successful defense greatly disrupted Hitler's plans and marked a turning point in the conflict. 

Key Point: Dug in on the battlefield were the forward elements of a fresh division from the Soviet Union’s Far East Military District that had been rushed to Moscow to thwart the German drive on the Soviet capital.

The troops of Germany’s Army Group Center were more than a week into a fresh offensive to capture Moscow on July 14 when they approached the historic battlefield of Borodino where the Russians delayed Napoleon’s advance on Moscow in 1812. Dug in on the battlefield were the forward elements of a fresh division from the Soviet Union’s Far East Military District that had been rushed to Moscow to thwart the German drive on the Soviet capital.

The burly men, outfitted in fur caps, great coats, and fur boots, belonged to Colonel Viktor Polosukhin’s 32nd Siberian Rifle Division, which had arrived from Vladivostok by rail and reached the old battlefield several days earlier. As soon as they arrived, they entrenched and constructed emplacements for their artillery. Stalin had reinforced the division’s three rifle regiments—the 17th, 113th, and 322nd —with two armored brigades equipped with T-34 and KV-1 tanks.

Approaching their position were elements of General Erich Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4. Hoepner had tasked Lt. Gen. Friedrich Kirchner, commander of the 10th Panzer Division, with the destruction of the troops in and around Borodino. Kirchner assigned some of his best units for the hard fighting that lay ahead.

The tactical plan called for Colonel Bruno Witter von Hauenschild to lead his infantry brigade and the SS Reich Motorized Infantry Division in a frontal assault while the 7th Panzer Regiment moved to outflank the Siberians. The attacking armor and infantry were supported by Stuka dive bombers, 88mm flak guns, and Nebelwerfer rocket launchers.

As the battle unfolded, T-34 medium tanks counterattacked in mass formations. The Germans put their powerful 88mm flak guns to work as tank busters. Soviet artillery units and mortar batteries blasted the German grenadiers as they fought their way forward through minefields and barbed wire.

The slugfest at Borodino lasted for nearly a week before threats from the flanks forced the Soviets to retreat. The 32nd Rifle Division was mauled by the Germans, although it inflicted grievous losses on the attacking German units; for example, the Third Infantry Regiment of the SS Reich Motorized Infantry Division suffered such heavy losses that it had to be disbanded and its survivors distributed to other regiments in the division. Nevertheless, the Germans pushed on to the next Soviet line of defense, the Mozhaisk Line. Stalin believed that the 17th Rifle Regiment in particular had fought with great valor, and he therefore awarded it the Order of the Red Banner.

On June 22, 1941, the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack involving 3.6 million German and other Axis troops organized into 153 divisions. Hitler and his generals had organized the attacking troops into three army groups for the invasion, which was codenamed Operation Barbarossa. Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North was ordered to push toward Leningrad, Field Marshal Fedor Von Bock’s Army Group Center was tasked with capturing Moscow, and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South was sent into the Ukraine to secure the Donets Basin. The Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the German Army High Command, believed that the Red Army could be defeated west of the Dvina-Dnieper line, but it had not developed contingency plans if that did not occur as expected.

Despite suffering devastating losses early in the campaign, the Red Army did not collapse. It was able to hold itself together through the grim determination and draconian measures instituted by the ruling Communist party. The German timetable for a lightning-fast campaign to occupy all of the European Soviet Union within four months slowly began to unravel. Although German panzer formations continued their push eastward, infantry divisions fell far behind, not only because they lacked mechanized transport, but also because they had to methodically eliminate large pockets of Red Army troops.

Army Group Center became embroiled in a two-month-long slugfest known as the Battle of Smolensk in July. The battle raged over a swath of territory that was 400 miles long and 150 miles deep. It began on July 10 when General Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 and General Herman Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 advanced from Vitebsk toward Dukhovschina and Orsha toward Yelnya. Their objective was to encircle the Soviet 16th, 19th, and 20th Armies. During the titanic clash, the Germans were startled by the effectiveness the Soviet of T-34 medium tank and KV-1 heavy tank, Katyusha rocket launcher, and IL2 Sturmovik ground attack aircraft. These weapons platforms awed the Germans and they had no choice but to acknowledge that the Soviets had made impressive strides in military technology. 

The T-34 medium tank was superior to any tanks the Germans had in action at the time. The T-34 outclassed the German Army’s Panzer IV in many respects, including speed, armament, and armor. Its 76mm long gun was more effective than the Panzer IVs short-barreled 75mm gun. The two Soviet tanks had sloping hull and turret armor that enabled them to withstand all but the heaviest German antitank guns. Last but not least, both the T-34 and KV-1 had wide treads that gave them better traction on mud and snow than the German tanks.

Hitler and the generals of his personal staff in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) clashed sharply with the OKH generals in regard to how Barbarossa should proceed. The two highest ranking generals of the OKH were Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the Army, and General Franz Halder, chief of OKH general staff. They led a faction that believed that the capture of Moscow would destroy the Red Army’s morale and quickly win the war. They were supported in this belief by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, and his hard-charging panzer generals Guderian and Hoth. As for Hitler, he had long favored the destruction of the Soviet field armies over capture of key objectives such as Moscow. Thus, Barbarossa had been a compromise of sorts between the opposing viewpoints.

But after nearly two months of hard fighting in which Army Group North and Army Group South had encountered difficulties, Hitler for all intents and purposes postponed the drive on Moscow by Army Group Center to reinforce the other two army groups. He ordered Hoth’s panzers to reinforce Army Group North and Guderian’s panzers to reinforce Army Group South. Valuable time was lost while Guderian assisted in the destruction of the General Mikhail Kirponos’ Southwestern Front in the month-long Battle of Kiev that began in late August.

In early September, while the Battle of Kiev was still raging, Hitler believed that success on the northern and southern flanks had made a concerted push in the center imperative to bring about the total collapse of the Soviet resistance. Furthermore, he wanted to secure the economic resources of the Ukraine and shore up the flanks of Army Group Center.

Führer Directive 35, which was issued September 6, set forth that the successes on Barbarossa’s flanks had made it possible to resume the advance in the center against Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s Western Front. Timoshenko’s front “must be destroyed decisively before the onset of winter,” the directive stated. With this in mind, von Bock and his staff developed a plan for the final push on Moscow, codenamed Operation Typhoon. In the initial stage of the operation, Panzer Groups 2, 3, and 4 were to surround and destroy the bulk of the Red Army forces facing Army Group Center in and around Vyazma and Bryansk. Next, the panzer groups would swing north and south of Moscow and link up at Noginsk, 20 miles east of the Soviet capital. The northern pincer, composed of the Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 and General Erich Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4, would strike at Moscow from the northwest through the city of Kalinin, while the southern pincer, Panzer Group 2, was to advance on Moscow from the southwest through Tula. Meanwhile, General Gunther von Kluge’s 4th Field Army would advance directly toward Moscow from the west.

German forces for Operation Typhoon numbered approximately two million men, 1,700 tanks and assault guns, 14,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and 780 aircraft. Despite seemingly large numbers overall, German units began showing signs of fatigue. Attrition of men and matériel exceeded expectations and replacements did not keep pace with casualties. This situation was especially serious in motorized formations, where loss of tanks and tracked and wheeled transport seriously affected the combat efficiency of the panzer divisions.

Despite the attrition, morale was high and German troops were confident of victory. “The last decisive battle of this year will deliver a destructive blow to the enemy,” exhorted Hitler. “We will remove the threat to the German Reich and all of Europe, which has existed since the time of the Huns and the Mongols, of an invasion of the continent.”

Deployed east of Smolensk, Army Group Center was opposed by Lt. Gen. Ivan Konev’s Western Front, Marshal Semyon Budyonny’s Reserve Front, and Lt. Gen. Andrey Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front. The armies that made up the three Soviet fronts were exhausted from the sustained heavy fighting. Their effective strength at the time was 1,250 men, 1,000 tanks, and 7,600 artillery guns.

The Russians used rivers as defensive positions, especially the Desna River in the area of operation of the Bryansk Front; however, Soviet defenses lacked deployment in depth, continuous defensive lines, and sufficient antitank artillery. Soviet formations, especially those of the Western and Bryansk Fronts, were brittle after tremendous losses sustained during the summer fighting. To assist the hard-pressed fronts facing Army Group Center, Stavka concentrated reserves and equipment on the most threatened directions, particularly along the two highways leading to Moscow from the west. 

Having the farthest distance to travel, Guderian’s Panzer Group 2, which was deployed on Army Group Center’s southern flank, was given a lead of three days over the other panzer groups. Guderian had some of the best units in the German Army. He had at his disposal five panzer divisions, four motorized infantry divisions, and the Grossdeutschland Motorized Infantry Regiment. Despite attrition, he still had 300 tanks.

Guderian’s panzer units began their advance on September 30 against Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front. They caught Maj. Gen. Arkady Erm-akov’s Operational Group by surprise. When he reported the German attack to Yeremenko, he was instructed to counterattack. He sent his 30 light tanks against Kampfgruppe Eberbach of the 4th Panzer Division on October 1 only to see them turned into flaming hulks. Once through the porous Soviet defenses in this sector, the XXIV Panzer Corps reached Orel on October 3, while the XLVII Panzer Corps captured Bryansk on October 6.

The rest of Army Group Center attacked on October 2. On Guderian’s left, despite strong artillery and air support, the 2nd Field Army stalled in front of forward Soviet defenses along the Desna River in the face of determined Red Army opposition. Despite this, the 4th Field Army and Panzer Group 4 conducted a successful crossing of the Desna River and penetrated Soviet defensive positions up to 20 miles in several locations. In a similar manner, the 9th Field Army and Panzer Group 3, which were positioned on the left flank of Army Group Center, achieved substantial success and reached the Dnieper River on October 3.

Stavka’s orders to the Bryansk Front to form a new defensive line came too late to save it from destruction. The capture of Bryansk by the XLVII Panzer Corps trapped three armies of the Bryansk Front in two pockets. The 50th Army became trapped in the Bryansk pocket north of the city, and the 3rd and 13th Armies were surrounded in the Trubchevsk pocket south of the city.

Soviet fighters guard the skies above Moscow. German air strikes against the city began on July 22 and continued for four months.

Similarly, the 2nd and 10th Panzer Divisions from Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 closed the pincers east of Vyazma on October 10, thus trapping four armies of the Western and Reserve Fronts (19th, 20th, 24th, and 32nd) in a giant cauldron west of the city.

The outer encirclement rings initially were composed of German mobile formations that lacked the manpower to seal off all avenues of escape. The Soviet troops trapped in the pocket made repeated attempts to break out to the east. But as German infantry divisions moved up, the noose tightened around the Red Army troops and Luftwaffe aircraft unmercifully pounded their positions.

Some of the Red Army troops, their units astonishingly cohesive despite the constant shelling and bombing they endured, were able to escape their respective pockets during the following two weeks. They were reorganized and put in new defensive lines farther east. By the middle of October, the units still inside the Bryansk and Vyazma pockets began surrendering en masse. Although 85,000 soldiers escaped encirclement, the German Army captured 680,000 Soviet soldiers.

Even as the fighting continued in the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets, the first snow fell on October 7. The resulting snowmelt turned the Russian roads, most of which were unpaved, into a quagmire of mud. As a result, the German supply system slowed to a crawl. Heavy rains began a week later, heralding the arrival of the Rasputitsa (literally meaning time without roads) season in which travel on roads was extremely difficult because of muddy conditions. Rasputitsa, which occurs throughout Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine in the spring and fall, results from poor drainage of underlying clay-laden soils.

The Rasputitsa robbed the Germans of their mobility, which was one of their key advantages over Soviet forces. Vehicles broke down repeatedly or sunk to their axles in the sticky mud. Teams of men were commonly required to push and pull trucks and horse-drawn wagons out of the mud. Although Soviet forces also fell victim to the mud season, they had shorter supply lines than the Germans.

With the collapse of Soviet forward defenses, Stavka issued orders on October 9 for the creation of a new defensive line centered on the city of Mozhaisk, just 80 miles from Moscow. As survivors of Western, Reserve, and Bryansk Fronts trickled back, they reformed along the new defensive line. Western and Reserve Front units that had been mauled in combat were combined into the Western Front under the command of General Georgy Zhukov.

The Mozhaisk defensive line stretched for 180 miles in a shallow curve from the Ivankovo Reservoir on the Volga River north of Moscow to the city of Kaluga in the south. Zhukov, who was acutely aware that the 90,000 men under his command were woefully inadequate to create continuous defenses, concentrated his forces to defend main arterial roads leading to Moscow.

Even before pockets at Bryansk and Vyazma were eliminated, the Germans resumed the offensive toward Moscow. As they advanced, they exploited gaps in the Soviet defenses. The exhausted Red Army units gave way, and the Mozhaisk defensive line collapsed within a week. On the northern flank, Major Josef Eckinger’s advanced detachment of the Lt. Gen. Friedrich Kirchner’s 1st Panzer Division captured Kalinin on October 14, in the process cutting the Leningrad-Moscow railway and capturing an intact bridge over the upper Volga. This put the Germans in that area just 93 miles from Moscow.

To defend Moscow from the north, three right-flank divisions of the Western Front were reorganized into a new Kalinin Front under Lt. Gen. Ivan Konev. In the center, the Russian cities of Maloyaroslavets, Mozhaisk, Naro-Fominsk, and Volokolamsk all fell in quick succession to the Germans. By the end of October, German forces stood within 50 miles of Moscow.

As the Germans pressed ever closer, the Soviet State Defense Committee issued orders on October 15 for the evacuation of governmental, cultural, and industrial institutions, as well as foreign embassies, from Moscow. The next day, wholesale departure from the capital began to the east. The evacuation and resulting panic became known as Bol’shoi Drap (Big Bug-Out). For three days beginning on October 16 all semblance of order in Moscow collapsed. Factories, stores, and civil administration stopped working. Buses and street cars did not run. Officials at all levels attempted to use their positions to secure transport for themselves and their families out of the city. At some factories, management attempted to pay the workers before shutting down, while at others, officials fled with the money. Some food stores attempted to distribute the food on hand, while others were stormed and looted by the panicked populace. The Russians looted the warehouses, and criminals robbed and committed various atrocities with impunity.

Civil order broke down entirely as Moscow residents assaulted public officials who they believed had forsaken them. Train stations were thrown into chaos as crowds stormed the trains to secure a seat. Roads to the east became clogged with streams of trucks, cars, buses, and horse-drawn wagons surrounded by people fleeing on foot. In just a few days, the population of Moscow had been reduced almost by half.

When governmental institutions were evacuated, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and a handful of advisers assisted by skeleton staffs remained at their posts. The Soviet government on October 19 began reasserting order by draconian measures. Police and military patrols appeared on the streets in force. Captured looters and bandits were shot on the spot and within three days order was restored in the Soviet capital.

While lawlessness in Moscow was brought under control, the situation at the front became critical. On October 20 the State Defense Committee declared that Moscow was under siege. Three concentric defensive positions with extensive earthworks were established around the city. Stavka put Zhukov in charge of the outer perimeter and placed Lt. Gen. Pavel Artemyev, commander of Moscow’s garrison, in charge of the city defenses.

The first defensive ring was an outer perimeter, the second defensive ring ran along Moscow’s suburbs, and the third defensive ring was in the heart of downtown Moscow. Approximately 100,000 civilians from Moscow and its vicinity, three-quarters of whom were women, furiously labored mainly with picks and shovels to erect antitank obstacles and dig antitank ditches. Inside the city, the garrison and the workers’ militia were tapped to defend an array of defenses that included barricades, antitank ditches, and gun emplacements. Unbeknown to the civilians, the majority of strategic objectives in Moscow were mined for demolition. Steps were taken to deal with every possible contingency; for example, resistance cells were organized to continue the struggle should the city fall to the Germans.

The Soviets created a formidable air defense system for Moscow consisting of one aviation and one air-defense corps. The 6th Fighter Corps numbered 600 aircraft, almost half of which were fighters. The 1st Air Defense Corps was armed with 1,000 antiaircraft guns and 300 quad machine guns. The defenders placed antiaircraft guns and machine guns on the roofs of Moscow’s buildings. To pinpoint the German aircraft they used hundreds of searchlights, and to thwart flights over the city they launched barrage balloons. German aviators, many of whom were veterans of the London Blitz, said that they had never encountered as dense a curtain of antiaircraft fire as they did over Moscow.

The Germans had made their first major aerial bombardment of Moscow on July 22, 1941. In that bombing mission, 220 Luftwaffe aircraft had attacked in four waves over a period of five hours. Although Soviet air defenses took a heavy toll on German aircraft, air raids on Moscow steadily escalated, peaking in November of that year. The bombing continued steadily until June 1943. In total, the Germans destroyed 6,000 buildings and killed an estimated 2,000 civilians.

On October 26, delayed by bad weather and fuel shortages, leading elements of the 2nd Panzer Army arrived before the city of Tula, the traditional center of the Soviet Union’s armaments industry. Survivors of Soviet 50th Army, after breaking out of the Bryansk pocket, conducted a fighting retreat to Tula, where the army was reorganized and reinforced.

A large militia regiment formed from the city’s workers took an active part in the city’s defense. Shifting the majority of the available fuel and ammunition to his leading XXIV Panzer Corps, Guderian launched repeated attacks against the city. Although the Germans reached the outskirts of Tula, they got no farther. While the fighting raged, Tula’s factories worked around the clock producing ammunition and repairing vehicles. Unable to capture Tula, Guderian was forced to swing east in an attempt to reach Moscow on a parallel route through Kashira. By this time, the German advance had ground to a halt as a result of exhaustion and heavy attrition. Indeed, many of the German divisions were down to one-third of their men and equipment. OKH ordered a halt to offensive operations on October 31.

Stalin’s determination and willingness to defend Moscow at all costs had paid off. A month earlier, on the same day that Guderian kicked-off Operation Typhoon, a conference took place in Moscow between Soviet, American, and British representatives. The United States had been providing economic assistance to the United Kingdom in its struggle against Hitler since January 1941. Stalin requested similar American and British assistance. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt agreed on October 30 to extend to the $1 billion in interest-free loans to the Soviet Union for purchases of armaments and raw materials. The Russians already were receiving equipment, such as Matilda and Valentine tanks and Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft, from the British government. It’s worth noting, though, that the British and Americans did not give the Russians their best equipment.

To stiffen the resolve of the Red Army and the Soviet people, Stalin ordered the traditional military parade held on November 7 in Red Square in Moscow. Several of his advisers recommended canceling the parade, but Stalin insisted. Many commanders expressed concern that the German bombers would stage a massive attack to disrupt the parade and kill the Soviet leadership. To guard against this threat, the Soviet Air Force began preemptive strikes against German forward airfields two days before the scheduled parade. The weather also cooperated, for low clouds and heavy snow were forecast for the event, thus reducing the concern of military officials.

The Moscow garrison, as well as units moving through the city to the battlefront, marched past Stalin and other senior leaders of the Soviet Union where they stood atop Lenin’s mausoleum on November 7. The show of determination was a great success. It demonstrated to the world the strengths of the Soviet people and their intentions to continue the fight against the invaders.

During the first week of December, frost formed on the roads in the Moscow region. The frozen ground enabled German units to move not only on the roads, but also through the countryside.

Up to that point, sporadic fighting had occurred on the Moscow front as both sides reinforced their positions. Compared to the situation in October, the Red Army’s condition improved significantly. Defensive positions of the three Soviet fronts stretched for 700 miles. Lt. Gen. Ivan Konev’s Kalinin Front held the right flank, Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s Western Front held the center, and Timoshenko’s Southwestern Front held the left. Stavka had dissolved the Bryansk Front and distributed its units between the Western and Southwestern Fronts.

As for Moscow, it was protected by artillery and engineer units positioned astride strategic roads into the city. Soldiers and civilians alike stoically braced for the German attack. Not content with static defense, Stalin constantly demanded that the Red Army units attack. Zhukov attempted to convince Stalin that the forces under his command were barely adequate for defense let alone attack; however, there was no persuading Stalin.

Zhukov, therefore, reluctantly ordered Lt. Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 16th Army to attack on October 16. Rokossovsky’s three depleted divisions were reinforced by the fresh 316th Rifle Division under Maj. Gen. Ivan Panfilov and the 1st Guards Tank Brigade under Colonel Mikhail Katukov. A task force consisting of Rokossovsky’s two rifle divisions, Katukov’s tank brigade, and two cavalry divisions under Maj. Gen. Lev Dovator were to retake the town of Volokolamsk on the Moscow highway.

While Rokossovsky was preparing his forces, Army Group Center renewed its offensive on November 15. Its objective was Klin, which was situated northwest of Moscow. The spearhead of Panzer Group 4 was General Rudolf Veiel’s 2nd Panzer Division, a relatively fresh unit. The division was outfitted with Panzer IIs, Panzer 38ts, and Panzer IIIs. It also had a small number of Panzer IVs.

 The main thrust of the German offensive fell on Panfilov’s 316th Rifle Division, which was the strongest division in Rokossovsky’s command. Arriving from Siberia in August, the division spent most of the time in the reserve and was involved in active fighting only since October. Panfilov’s division was bled dry after five days of fighting, having lost four-fifths of its personnel. Although they had inflicted heavy losses on the Russians, the Germans were able to make only minor inroads into the Soviet defenses. In many instances, they advanced less than two miles a day. The 2nd Panzer Division was not able to achieve its objective of capturing Klin by October 20. Nevertheless, the 7th Panzer Division of Panzer Group 3 captured the town three days later.

The situation was so dire that Stalin called Zhukov and demanded an honest answer as to whether Moscow could be saved. Zhukov replied that it could, but reserves needed to be deployed immediately. Stalin transferred three armies from the reserves, the 1st Shock Army under Lt. Gen. Vasili Kuznetsov, 10th Army under Maj. Gen. Mikhail Yefremov, and 20th Army under Maj. Gen. Andrei Vlasov to Zhukov’s Western Front. Two armies, the 24th and 60th, were deployed to defend the city.

On November 27 Major Hans Freiherr von Funck’s 7th Panzer Division seized a bridgehead on the Moscow-Volga Canal, the last natural terrain obstacle on the way to Moscow. Its leading elements stood within 20 miles Moscow’s downtown, but the German offensive power was spent. A determined counterattack by the reserve 1st Shock and 20th Armies drove the Germans back.

Soviet combat engineers blew up six dams north of Moscow to hamper German progress. The resulting flooding inundated the surrounding low-lying terrain. A wall of water up to eight feet high and 30 miles wide flooded some villages, drowning residents who had not been warned because of the desire not to jeopardize security.

In the south Guderian renewed the offensive on November 18 by attempting to bypass Tula toward Kashira; however, the exhausted Germans were making slow progress, at times barely five miles a day, in the face of constant Soviet counterattacks. By November 27 Guderian’s offensive petered out and the threat to Moscow from the south was permanently eliminated. “The troops were no longer strong enough to capture Moscow and I therefore decided with a heavy heart, on the evening of December 5, to break off our fruitless attack and withdraw to a previously selected and relatively short line which I hope I shall be able to hold with what is left of my forces,” Guderian wrote about the situation.

Having encountered strong resistance north and south of Moscow, Army Group Center launched a frontal attack on Moscow with the 4th Field Army on December 1. The Germans fought their way east along the Smolensk-Moscow highway. The German attack, supported by a small number of tanks, ran into well-prepared positions of the Soviet 1st Guards Motor Rifle Divisions. Counterattacked in the flanks and unable to break through frontally, the German offensive stalled. On December 2 the 1st Shock and 20th Armies began steadily pushing back the Germans. The 20th Army in particular achieved such success at the village of Krasnaya Polyana, its commander, Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov, became known as the Savior of Moscow among the Russian troops.

At the tip of the German advance was the 638th Infantry Regiment, a unit composed of French volunteers and Russian emigrants. Unlike the Frenchmen led by Napoleon during his invasion in 1812, the men of the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism did not reach Moscow, coming only within 20 miles of the Kremlin.

Lacking proper winter clothing, German troops suffered severely as the temperatures plummeted. Since German war planners had intended to defeat the Soviet Union by wintertime, the Wehrmacht had only manufactured enough winter clothing to supply those divisions that were to remain in Russia on occupation duty.

In some German units the losses from sickness and frostbite exceeded those from combat. To further exacerbate the plight of German frontline soldiers, the delivery of warm clothing was pilfered by the rear-echelon troops and only a small amount reached the front lines. To make up the shortfall, German soldiers turned to looting warm clothing from the Russian population. Freezing German soldiers near the front lines expelled Russian civilians from their homes.

Taking advantage of the German vulnerability, the Soviets parachuted saboteurs and commandos behind enemy lines with orders to burn homes and barns that the Germans used for shelter from the freezing temperatures. Their efforts frequently doomed their own citizens to a cold death as well. There were instances when local residents, in an effort to protect their homes, would capture the arsonists and turn them over to the Germans.

The Soviet high command ordered a massive counteroffensive in early December in an effort to relieve pressure on Moscow. Although German intelligence knew of the Red Army reserves staging to the east of Moscow, the strength of the Soviet attack shocked the Germans.

As early as September, Stavka had been steadily shifting the bulk of its divisions from the Far East Military District to the Moscow theater. Red Army divisions from Siberia, fully mobilized and held in readiness since June, formed the majority of Soviet strategic reserves. The front-ine forces of the Kalinin, Western, and Southwestern Fronts, combined with 58 divisions of the strategic reserves, numbered 1.1 million men, slightly more than the Germans facing them.

The units of the Kalinin Front switched to the offensive on December 5. They were followed the next day by units of the Western and Southwestern Fronts. At the start of the counterattack, the majority of fresh reserve divisions were distributed among the armies of the Western Front. This meant that the Kalinin and Southwestern Fronts had to carry on understrength and exhausted during the December fighting.

After several days of heavy positional fighting, Soviet forces began to penetrate German positions up to 10 miles in some places. Quickly committing reserves to exploit even the minor breakthroughs, the Red Army maintained pressure against both the flanks and rear of those German units still defending their positions. Two cavalry corps and one mounted mechanized group were sent to exploit the gaps and conduct raids behind German lines. Faced with a slowly crumbling front line, the Germans slowly began to fall back to avoid encirclement.

Faced with alarming reports, on December 8 Hitler reluctantly signed Directive No. 39, ordering the Wehrmacht to go on the defensive along the whole front. In some places German commanders pulled back to eliminate bulges in the front line. The shortening of lines occasionally resulted in the creation of reserves. On December 14 Halder and Gunther von Kluge, the commander of the 4th Field Army, gave permission for a limited withdrawal west of the Oka River without first seeking Hitler’s approval. When Hitler learned of this he was irate. He rescinded the order six days later, reminding his generals that they were to defend every inch of hard-won ground.

Enraged with the failure of Operation Typhoon, Hitler needed scapegoats and began a wholesale dismissal of senior commanders. On December 19, Hitler dismissed von Brauchitsch for health reasons and assumed the supreme command himself. Brauchitsch, whose health actually was declining since he had suffered a heart attack in November, was removed to the officer reserve where he remained inactive for the duration of the war.

By the end of December, dozens of generals were relieved of duty. One of these officers was Guderian, who languished in the officer reserve until 1943. For retreating without orders, General Erich Hoepner, commander of Panzer Group 4, was cashiered in January 1942.

The retreating Germans fought fiercely and the Red Army had to fight its way through the German defenses. Despite its battlefield losses, Army Group Center remained a potent and dangerous battle force. Indeed, Soviet casualties mounted to the point when the Moscow counteroffensive ground to a halt in the first week of January 1942.

Historians still debate the losses sustained by the opposing sides during Operation Typhoon and the Soviet counteroffensive. The start of the Battle of Moscow is commonly considered to be September 30, 1941. But there are still debates about the date of the end of the giant battle. Western sources typically consider the first week of January 1942 as the end of the Battle of Moscow; in contrast, many Russian sources include the Rzhev operation that followed, which began on January 8, 1942, and ended on March 3, 1942, as part of the battle. Soviet casualties numbered 658,279 for the defensive phase and an additional 370,955 until the end of the counteroffensive on January 7, 1942. In addition, the Soviets lost 4,000 tanks and 1,000 aircraft. During the same period, German casualties amounted to 460,000 men as well as 600 tanks and 800 aircraft.

By the end of the Soviet counteroffensive, the Red Army had advanced up to 150 miles in some places. The whole of the Moscow and Tula regions, as well as large parts of Kalinin and the Smolensk regions, were cleared of Germans and the threat to the capital was permanently eliminated. But the Red Army was not able to defeat Army Group Center. If it had been able to do so, the war on the Eastern Front might have ended in 1942. Believing they had captured the strategic initiative, the Soviet leadership launched several ill-prepared offensives in the first half of 1942. Although suffering tremendous losses that year, the Soviet Union was by that time fully engaged in the war of attrition, a contest that Germany could not possibly win.

Originally Published November 22, 2019.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia.

Warfare History Network

Security, Asia

“You did a damn fine job there,” he said. “No matter what other people tell you, your decision was correct.”

Key Point: Ozawa had the majority of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s fighting fleet under his command at the time, but his force of approximately 90 ships and submarines was still considerably smaller than the U.S. Navy’s 129 ships and submarines. He also commanded 450 carrier-based aircraft that would coordinate with 300 ground-based aircraft in the Marianas.

The Philippine Sea encompasses two million square miles of the western part of the Pacific Ocean. It is bounded by the Philippine Islands on the west, the Mariana Islands on the east, the Caroline Islands to the south, and the Japanese Islands to the north. In the summer of 1944 it was the battleground of two great carrier strike forces. One of these belonged to Japanese Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa. The other belonged to U.S. Admiral Raymond Spruance, and its carriers were under the tactical command of Marc Mitscher. Ozawa had explicit orders to halt the steady advance of the U.S. 5th Fleet, to which Mitscher’s carriers belonged, across the vast Pacific Ocean toward Japan.

Ozawa had the majority of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s fighting fleet under his command at the time, but his force of approximately 90 ships and submarines was still considerably smaller than the U.S. Navy’s 129 ships and submarines. He also commanded 450 carrier-based aircraft that would coordinate with 300 ground-based aircraft in the Marianas.

Ozawa’s strike force steamed east in two groups. The vanguard, comprising three small carriers, four battleships, and other vessels, plowed through the Philippine Sea 100 miles ahead of the main group, which was composed of six large carriers, a battleship, and a wide array of supporting vessels.

Ozawa’s strategy was simple. His vanguard would serve as a decoy to lure the U.S. carrier aircraft while the aircraft from the main group, reinforced with land-based aircraft in the Marianas, inflicted heavy damage in multiple attacks.

Ozawa had no intention of letting Mitscher land the first blow. Japanese carrier aircraft had greater range than U.S. carrier aircraft, and Ozawa planned to make the most of his advantage. In addition, Ozawa would be able to launch his aircraft into the wind. The U.S. carriers would have to turn around and sail away from the Japanese fleet to launch their aircraft into the wind.

The Trap Flops for Ozawa

What Ozawa did not know was that even before he launched his aircraft on June 19, Mitscher had derailed his plan by knocking out the Japanese ground-based aircraft in the Marianas more than a week earlier. Beginning on June 11, Mitscher had sent his aircraft against Japanese air bases on the islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian in the Marianas. Sweeps in the days afterward pummeled the targets repeatedly to ensure aircraft were destroyed and airstrips too damaged to use. When the battle did start, Mitscher would enjoy a two to one advantage in aircraft. Rather than Mitscher sailing into a trap, it was Ozawa who was sailing into one.

Following the American defeat at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. Navy had moved decisively toward establishing the world’s first carrier-centered navy, a force that would play a deciding part in the Allied victory at Midway in June 1942.

In revenge for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, U.S. carrier aircraft struck back in the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. The Japanese failure to win a decisive victory in the Coral Sea, coupled with their loss at Midway, only strengthened the Japanese dependence on the strategy of a defensive decisive victory.

Uncertainty Grows for the Japanese High Command

Meanwhile at Midway, Spruance, who had no earlier experience with carrier-launched aircraft battles, commanded Task Force 16, including the carriers Enterprise and Mitscher’s Hornet. Despite his inexperience, he was able to oversee an American victory, which included the sinking of four Japanese carriers.

The Americans leapfrogged their way steadily north through the South Pacific, and the Japanese worked to build up their navy, waiting and watching for an opportunity for kantai kessen, the battle they believed would lead to the destruction of American naval power and decide the rest of the war. That opportunity, they would finally decide, had come in June 1944 in the Philippine Sea.

By 1944, however, the Japanese high command feared its ability to fight and win such a kantai kessen battle was slipping away. Imperial Navy aircrews had suffered serious losses, especially of skilled pilots at Coral Sea, Midway, and during the Solomon Islands campaigns. These were losses they could not easily replace, while the United States could easily replace its losses.

By the summer of 1944, the Americans had worked their way north sufficiently that they were preparing to invade the Mariana Islands. The Marianas, situated 700 miles south of the Japanese home islands, controlled the sea lanes to Japan. The capture of the islands would give the United States control of these sea lanes and would also put the U.S. Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers within striking distance of the Japanese home islands. Japan had to prevent the loss of the Marianas and stop the American advance north.

Mitscher’s Task Force 58

Still looking for the decisive victory that might end the war in the Pacific, the Japanese began eyeing Mitscher’s Task Force 58. The task force comprised five attack groups, each composed of three or four carriers and supporting ships. The ships of each attack group sailed in a circle formation with the carriers in the center and the supporting ships sailing close to the carriers so they could add their antiaircraft fire to that of the carriers and help ward off any attacking aircraft. When under attack by torpedo aircraft, the task group would turn toward the oncoming aircraft to limit attack angles. In addition, the carriers would not take evasive action when under attack, which allowed more stable platforms for the antiaircraft fire of all the ships in the task group. Mitscher had introduced many of these tactics.

In June 1944, Task Force 58 was part of Spruance’s 5th Fleet. The ships at sea were designated Task Force 58 under Spruance and Task Force 38 under Admiral William Halsey. The six-month name changes and apparent shifting of personnel in this two-platoon system had some benefit in confusing the Japanese, who at times were unsure as to the actual size of the American force.

Admiral Mineichi Koga, commander of the Combined Japanese Fleet, had been killed in March 1944 when his plane crashed in a typhoon. He was replaced with Admiral Soemu Toyoda, a torpedo and naval artillery expert who had been opposed to war with the United States, a war he had considered unwinnable. Despite this belief, Toyoda continued to develop the attack plans that Koga had been working on, plans aimed at a decisive victory.

The Japanese Fleet Rendezvous in the Philippine Sea

On June 11, Mitscher’s carriers launched their first air strikes on the Marianas, and Toyoda became aware that the showdown in the Central Pacific was at hand. Japan had to save Saipan, and the only possible defense, he believed, was to sink the U.S. 5th Fleet that was covering the landing.

The Japanese fleet Ozawa commanded consisted of three large carriers (Taiho, Shokaku, and Zuikaku), two converted carriers (Junyo and Hiyo), and four light carriers (Ryuho, Chitose, Chiyoda, and Zuiho). Ozawa’s fleet also included five battleships (Yamato, Musashi, Kongo, Haruna, and Nagato), 13 heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, 27 destroyers, six oilers, and 24 submarines. Ozawa commanded from aboard the Taiho, which was the first Japanese carrier to have been built with an armor-plated flight deck, which was designed to withstand bomb hits.

The commanders in the U.S. 5th Fleet had 956 carrier-based planes available to them. In addition, Ozawa’a pilots only had about 25 percent of the training and experience the American pilots had, and he was working with inferior equipment. His ships had antiaircraft guns, for example, but lacked the new proximity fuses, which provided a more sophisticated triggering mechanism than the common contact fuses or timed fuses did, as well as good radar.

The Japanese fleet rendezvoused June 16 in the western part of the Philippine Sea. Japanese aircraft did have a superior range at that time, though, which allowed them to engage the American carriers beyond the range of American aircraft. They could attack at 300 miles and could search a radius of 560 miles, while the American Hellcat fighters were limited to an attack range of 200 miles and a search range of 325 miles. Additionally, with their island bases in the area, the Japanese believed their aircraft could attack the U.S. fleet and then land on the island airfields. They could thus shuttle between the islands and the attack, and the U.S. fleet would be receiving punishment with only a limited ability to respond.

A Major Battle on the Horizon…

The American air raids on the Marianas continued through June 15, and U.S. ships began an additional bombardment of the islands. On June 15, three divisions of American troops, two Marine divisions and one Army division, went ashore on Saipan, and Toyoda committed nearly the entire Japanese Navy to a counterattack. Toyoda wired Ozawa that he was to attack the Americans and annihilate their fleet. “The rise and fall of Imperial Japan depends on this one battle,” Toyoda wrote.

The U.S. submarines Flying Fish and Seahorse sighted the Japanese fleet near the Philippines on June 15. The Japanese ships did not finish refueling until two days later. Based on those sightings, Spruance quickly decided a major battle was at hand. He ordered Mitscher’s Task Force 58, which had sent two of its carrier task groups north to intercept aircraft reinforcements from Japan, to reform and move west of Saipan into the Philippine Sea. Mitscher was aboard his flagship, the carrier Lexington, which Tokyo Rose would erroneously report on at least two occasions to have been sunk. Spruance was aboard the heavy cruiser Indianapolis.

Task Force 58 comprised five attack groups. Deployed in front of the carriers to act as an antiaircraft screen was the battle group of Vice Admiral Willis Lee (Task Group 58.7), which contained seven battleships (Lee’s flagship the Washington, as well as the North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Alabama), and eight heavy cruisers (Baltimore, Boston, Canberra, Wichita, Minneapolis, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Spruance’s Indianapolis). Just north of them was the weakest of the carrier groups, Rear Admiral William K. Harrill’s Task Group 58.4. This group was composed of only one fleet carrier (Essex) and two light carriers (Langley and Cowpens).

“Let’s Do It Properly Tomorrow”

To the east, in a line running north to south, were three additional attack groups, each containing two fleet carriers and two light carriers. This was Rear Admiral Joseph Clark’s Task Group 58.1, which consisted of the Hornet, Yorktown, Belleau Wood, and Bataan, Rear Admiral Alfred Montgomery’s Task Group 58.2 (Bunker Hill, Wasp, Cabot, and Monterey), and Rear Admiral John W. Reeves’s Task Group 58.3 (Enterprise, Lexington, San Jacinto, and Princeton). These ships were supported by 13 light cruisers, 58 destroyers, and 28 submarines. The attack groups were deployed 12 to 15 miles apart.

Eight older battleships along with smaller escort carriers under the command of Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf remained near Saipan to protect the invasion fleet and provide air support for the landings.

On the afternoon of June 18, search planes sent out from the Japanese fleet located the American task force, and Rear Admiral Sueo Obayashi, commander of three of the Japanese carriers, immediately launched fighters. He quickly received a message from Ozawa, however, recalling the fighters. “Let’s do it properly tomorrow,” Ozawa wrote.

Later that night, the Americans also detected the Japanese ships moving toward them. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, alerted Spruance that a Japanese vessel had broken radio silence and a message apparently sent by Ozawa to his land-based air forces on Guam had been intercepted. A fix obtained on that message placed the Japanese some 355 miles west-southwest of Task Force 58. Mitscher requested permission from Spruance to move Task Force 58 west during the night, which would by dawn put it in position to attack the approaching Japanese fleet. “We knew we were going to have hell slugged out of us in the morning [and] we knew we couldn’t reach them,” Captain Arleigh Burke, a member of Mitscher’s staff, said later when discussing that request.

But after considerable consideration, Spruance denied Mitscher permission to make the move. “If we were doing something so important that we were attracting the enemy to us, we could afford to let him come and take care of him when he arrived,” Spruance said.

Carrier Commanders Spruance & Mitscher

This decision was far different from decisions Spruance had made at Midway. There he had advocated immediately attacking the enemy even before his own strike force was fully assembled with the intent of neutralizing the Japanese carriers before they could launch their planes, an action that he then considered the key to the survival of his carriers. He would also take considerable criticism for missing what some were to consider a chance to destroy the Japanese fleet.

Spruance’s decision to deny Mitscher’s request was influenced by orders from Nimitz, who had made it clear that the protection of the Marianas invasion was the primary mission of Task Force 58.

Spruance was concerned that the Japanese move could be an attempt to draw his ships away from the Marianas so a Japanese attack force could then slip behind it, overwhelm Oldendorf’s force, and destroy the landing fleet. Locating and destroying the Japanese fleet was not his primary objective, and he was unwilling to allow the main strike force of the Pacific Fleet to be drawn westward, away from the amphibious forces.

Spruance also may have been influenced by Japanese documents that had been captured in March and described just such a proposed plan: drawing American ships that were supporting an invasion away from an island and then sweeping in behind the fleet to destroy the invading force.

Spruance and Mitscher were different commanders. Though now commanding carriers, Spruance was still at heart a battleship man and, like most of the Imperial Japanese Navy establishment, he dreamed of a ship-to-ship confrontation. As the Battle of the Philippine Sea loomed, Spruance early on considered sending his fast battleships out to confront Ozawa in a night action and had only dropped the idea when his battleship commander, Admiral Lee, deferred. Lee had seen enough of night actions at Guadalcanal and the Solomons.

As for Mitscher, he was a carrier man. He sat on the bridge of his flagship watching the flight deck as planes were launched and could be seen using body language to help them off. He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1910 and had taken an early interest in aviation, requesting a transfer to aeronautics in his last year as a midshipman. The request was denied, and he served on the destroyers Whipple and Stewart before being stationed on the armored cruiser North Carolina, which was being used as an experimental launching platform for aircraft. Mitscher trained as a pilot and became one of the first U.S. naval aviators on June 2, 1916.

As information about the Japanese buildup came in and the upcoming battle loomed, Mitscher said that what was coming “might be a hell of a battle for a while,” but added that he believed the task force could win it.

Search Planes At Dawn on June 19

At dawn on June 18, Task Force 58 launched search aircraft, combat air patrols, and antisubmarine patrols and then turned the fleet west to gain maneuvering room away from the islands. The Japanese also launched search patrols early in the day. Those planes pinpointed the American position, and one of the Japanese planes, after locating the task force, attacked one of its destroyers. The attacking Japanese plane was shot down.

At dawn on June 19, Ozawa again launched search planes and located the American ships southwest of Saipan. He then launched 71 aircraft from his carriers, which were followed a short time later by another 128 planes.

Among the U.S. fighters that would be sent up to confront them were a large number of F6F Hellcats, a Grumman aircraft that had been put into service in early 1942, eventually replacing the F4F Wildcat. The Hellcat had been engineered specifically to confront Japanese fighters when the Americans recovered an intact Zero during the fighting in the Aleutian Islands in 1942 and were able to engineer a fighter to succeed against it in combat. The Hellcat could outclimb and outdrive the Japanese Zero and was heavily armed. In addition, its pilot was protected by heavy armor plating, self-sealing fuel tanks, and a bulletproof windshield, which made it popular with the Navy pilots.

The American pilots who would meet the Japanese also had at least two years of training and 300 hours of flying experience as opposed to the Japanese pilots, who had at most six months of training and a few flying hours. They were faint copies of the pilots who had flown against the American base at Pearl Harbor and the American fleet at Midway.

A Great Fight In The Sky and In The Water

At 10 am, radar aboard the American ships picked up the first wave of Japanese attackers. American fighters that had been sent to raid Guam were called back to the fleet, and at 10:23 am Mitscher ordered Task Force 58 to turn into the wind. All available fighters were sent up to await the Japanese. He then put his bomber aircraft aloft to orbit open waters to the east to avoid the danger of a Japanese bomb strike into a hangar deck full of aircraft.

The approaching Japanese planes were first spotted by a group of 12 Hellcats from the Belleau Wood about 72 miles out from the American fleet where they had paused to regroup. The Belleau Wood planes tore into the Japanese planes there and were soon joined by other American fighter groups. Twenty-five of the Japanese planes were quickly knocked out of the sky, and then 16 more.

As the Japanese and American fighters dove at each other, machine guns blazing, 70 miles west of the American fleet, a few of the Japanese planes were able to break away and work their way through to the American ships. They attacked the picket destroyers Yarnall and Stockham, causing only a small amount of damage. But one Japanese bomber was able to get through the American defenses and scored a direct hit on the main deck of the battleship South Dakota. More than 50 of her crew were killed or injured, but the ship remained operational.

Only one Hellcat was lost in the fighting. At 11:07 am, radar detected a second wave of 107 Japanese aircraft approaching. American fighters met this attacking group while it was still 60 miles out, and 70 of the attackers were shot down before they reached the task force. Of those that did get through, six attacked the American fleet, nearly hitting two of the carriers and causing some casualties before four of that six were brought down. A small group of torpedo planes also attacked the carrier Enterprise and the light carrier Princeton, but all were shot down. Altogether, 97 of those 107 attacking Japanese aircraft were destroyed.

“Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”

A third attack consisting of 47 Japanese aircraft came at the American ships at about 1 pm. Forty U.S. fighters intercepted the attack group 50 miles out and shot down seven of the Japanese planes. A few again broke through defenses to attack the American ships but caused little or no damage. The 40 remaining Japanese aircraft fled the scene.

The Japanese fleet had also launched an additional attack, but somehow those planes had been given incorrect coordinates for the location of the American fleet and were originally unable to find the ships. Eighteen of those aircraft did finally stumble on some of the American ships as they were heading back to Guam and attacked. U.S. fighters shot down half of them while the remaining planes were able to attack the Wasp and Bunker Hill but failed to score any hits. Eight of these Japanese planes were also shot down. Meanwhile, the remains of this aborted attack force were intercepted by 27 American Hellcats as they were landing on Guam and 30 more were shot down. Nineteen others were damaged beyond repair.

“Hell, this is like an old-time turkey shoot,” said Lexington Commander Paul Buie,

creating the nickname, “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” which would later be pinned on the battle by the men who were fighting it.

The Japanese had lost 346 aircraft during the day’s fighting, while the Americans had lost 15 and, aside from the casualties on the South Dakota, had suffered only minor damage to their ships.

Submarines In The Water

The pilot with the highest score of the day was Captain David McCampbell of the Essex, who would go on to become the U.S. Navy ’s all-time leading ace with 34 confirmed kills during the war and would win the Medal of Honor for his actions in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. On June 19, he had downed five Japanese D4Y “Judy” carrier-based dive bombers. He would also notch two Zero fighters later in the day during an afternoon strike on Guam.

Lieutenant Alex Vraciu of the Lexington, the top-ranked Navy ace at the time with 12 victories, downed six Judys of the second wave in about eight minutes, and Ensign Wilbur “Spider” Webb, a recent transfer to fighters from bombers, attacked a flight of Aichi dive bombers over Guam, also downing six. Webb returned safely to the carrier Hornet, but the gunners aboard the Japanese bombers had shot his plane so full of holes that it was judged a total loss.

The destruction wrought in the air was not the only damage done to the Japanese that day. While the air battle was taking place, another battle was being fought above and below the surface of the sea.

At 8 am that day the submarine Albacore sighted a Japanese carrier group and began maneuvering to attack. The submarine’s commander, Lt. Cmdr. James W. Blanchard, selected the closest carrier to his position as his target. That carrier happened to be Admiral Ozawa’s flagship, the Taiho, the newest carrier in the Japanese fleet. As Blanchard gained position and prepared to fire, however, the Albacore’s fire-control computer failed, and he was forced to fire manually. Blanchard fired all six torpedoes in a single spread. Four veered off target. One of the remaining two was spotted heading for the Taiho by Japanese Warrant Officer Akio Komatsu, who had just taken off from the carrier. Without hesitation, Komatsu jammed his stick and intentionally dove his plane in front of the torpedo, detonating it and saving the carrier. But the remaining torpedo of the six struck the Taiho on its starboard side, rupturing two aviation fuel tanks. The Albacore was able to escape the ensuing depth charge attack with only minor damage.

Initially, the Taiho seemed to have suffered only slight damage, but gasoline vapors from the damaged fuel tanks soon began to leak into the hangar decks, creating a serious situation on the ship.

Meanwhile, a second American submarine, the Cavalla, attacked the carrier Shokaku, which was a veteran of the fighting at Pearl Harbor and the Coral Sea. At about noon, the Cavalla fired on the Japanese ship, hitting her with three torpedoes and badly damaging her. One torpedo had hit the forward aviation fuel tanks, and aircraft that had just landed and were being refueled exploded into flames. Ammunition, exploding bombs, and burning fuel added to the chaos. The order to abandon Shokaku had just been given when an explosion on her hangar deck initiated a series of secondary explosions that blew the ship apart. She rolled on her side and sank taking 887 officers and sailors and 376 members of the 601st Naval Air Group to the bottom with her. There were 570 survivors, including the carrier’s commanding officer, Captain Hiroshi Matsubara.

Ozawa Retires Northwest to Refuel

The destroyer Urakaze made several attempts to destroy the submarine, but the Cavalla escaped with relatively minor damage. However, she did get a scare. Cavalla’s main induction line, which brought air into the engines when she was on the surface, had become flooded during the initial depth charge attack, which made the submarine very heavy. When diving to avoid the attack of the Urakaze, the additional weight took Cavalla nearly 100 feet below her maximum test depth. “We hoped the safety factor would keep the hull from imploding,” said a crewmember. It did.

Three destroyers continued to hunt the Cavalla, dropping 106 depth charges, but she was able to slip away. Meanwhile, aboard the Taiho an inexperienced damage control officer ordered that the ship’s ventilation system be operated at full blast to clear the growing fumes. Instead of clearing the air, however, the action allowed the gasoline vapors to spread throughout the ship. At about 2:30 am, those fumes were ignited by an electric generator on the hangar deck, and a series of large explosions followed. Taiho had become a floating bomb. Ozawa and his staff quickly transferred to the nearby Zuikaku, and shortly afterward the Taiho sank, taking down 1,650 of her 2,150 officers and sailors.

As darkness fell, Ozawa retired to the northwest to refuel, intending to attack again in the morning. He had received several erroneous reports of heavy damage done to the American ships and was also under the impression that many of his missing aircraft had landed in the Marianas. During the night Task Force 58 began to move west in order to be closer to the Japanese when dawn came.

For the Americans, the Worst Was Yet to Come…

As the sun finally edged over the horizon, American search planes were sent out but were unable to locate the enemy. A later search also failed to make contact. But, finally, at 3:40 pm an American search plane located the Japanese fleet 275 miles away from the task force, near the limit of the American fighters’ range. That range was advertised at 250 miles, one aviation commander said, “But with planning and luck we could get to 300.” In addition, because of the time of day that the Japanese ships had been finally spotted, any planes that took off from the American carriers would have to strike in the fading light of dusk and find their way back to the American carriers and land in the dark, something that was new to most of the American pilots. Mitscher, prodded by Nimitz in Hawaii, nonetheless opted to launch an all-out attack.

When he became aware of the American attack, Ozawa began pulling his ships back, hoping to get them out of the American planes’ range before they could close the gap. Aboard the American ships, a another message, perhaps a result of Ozawa’s retreat, arrived indicating the Japanese fleet was actually 60 miles farther out than previously believed. That put the Japanese at 335 miles, beyond even the Americans’ lucky range of 300 miles. Based on that information, further launches were cancelled, but the planes already launched were allowed to continue. Of these 240 planes, 14 returned to their carriers for various reasons. Of the remaining 226 planes, 95 were Hellcat fighters, 54 were Avenger torpedo bombers (only a few carrying torpedoes, the rest four 500-pound bombs), and 76 were Curtiss Helldivers and Douglas Dauntless dive bombers.

As the American planes approached the Japanese fleet, Ozawa was able to put up only 75 planes to protect his ships, and the American planes quickly overwhelmed these fighters. They swept through the Japanese defenses and attacked the fleet, quickly causing serious damage to several oilers and then hitting the carrier Hiyo, which was soon ablaze after leaking aviation fuel exploded. An abandon ship order was sounded, and she went down. Two hundred-fifty of the Hiyo crew were killed; Japanese destroyers in the area rescued the remaining 1,000 survivors.

Some of the American planes also bombed the large carrier Zuikaku and the light carrier Chiyoda, both of which were set ablaze, and heavily damaged the battleship Haruna and the heavy cruiser Maya. The converted carrier Junyo was also hit. Sixty-five Japanese planes were downed in the fighting as were 20 of the American aircraft. But for the Americans the worst was yet to come.

After the strike, which ended at about 6:45 pm, many of the American planes were already running low on fuel, and some had suffered enough battle damage that they were forced to ditch on their way back to their carriers. Darkness was falling. Despite the danger of submarine attacks on his ships, Mitscher fully illuminated his carriers and had his destroyers’ fire star shells to aid the pilots in landing.

“The effect on the pilots left behind was magnetic,” said Lt. Cmdr. Robert Winston. “They stood open-mouthed at the sheer audacity of asking the Japs to come and get us. Our pilots were not expendable.”

Sixty of the returning aircraft were still lost, many of them crashing into the sea as they ran out of fuel, but the majority of the flyers, 38 of the downed men, were eventually rescued.

Meanwhile, Admiral Ozawa received orders from Toyoda to cease fighting and withdraw from the area. U.S. forces briefly gave chase, but by June 21 the Japanese planes were out of range. The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot was over.

A Resounding American Victory

The Battle of the Philippine Sea had been a resounding American victory. The Japanese lost three carriers and two oilers sunk and had almost all of their aircraft destroyed. Six other ships had been damaged and an estimated 2,987 Japanese combatants killed. The Americans had one battleship damaged and 123 aircraft destroyed. The task force lost 29 airmen and another 31 men on the ships.

The Japanese losses were irreplaceable. They had spent the better part of a year building up their carrier strike force, and the United States had destroyed 90 percent of it in the fighting. The Japanese only had enough pilots left to form the air group for one of their light carriers, and during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 they used their carriers only as decoys.

The battle also added to the growing reputation of the American F6F Hellcat. With its powerful engine, greater speed, and firepower it had proved itself deadly, greatly outclassing the A6M Zero.

Spruance’s conservative battle plan, while not destroying all of the Japanese aircraft carriers, had resulted in an overwhelming American victory. It had severely weakened Japanese naval aviation forces by killing most of the remaining trained enemy pilots and destroying their last reserves of naval aircraft. Despite the lopsided American victory, though, many officers, particularly aviators, criticized Spruance for his decision to fight the battle cautiously rather than exploit his superior forces and intelligence more aggressively.

Spruance’s critics argued that he had squandered an opportunity to destroy the entire Japanese fleet. Admiral John Towers, a naval aviation pioneer and deputy commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, demanded that Spruance be relieved. The request was denied by Nimitz. Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commander of the amphibious force during the Pacific campaign, and the Navy’s most senior commander, Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, joined Nimitz in supporting Spruance. Despite what some called the chance of the century, Spruance had done what Nimitz had ordered him to do: he had remained and protected the invasion of Saipan.

A month after the Battle of the Philippine Sea, King and Nimitz visited Spruance at Saipan. During that meeting, King made a point of telling Spruance of his support. “You did a damn fine job there,” he said. “No matter what other people tell you, your decision was correct.”

The Battle of the Philippine Sea was the last great contest between carrier strike forces ever fought. It was a victory that, among other things, brought the American B-29 within striking distance of the Japanese home islands, and in so doing shortened the war.

Originally Published October 9, 2018.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Warfare History Network

Security,

Bombers, especially, were crucially important aircraft. 

Key Point: The Japanese air raid consisted of a few medium bombers making several passes at night.

Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber crews of the U.S. 11th Bombardment Group spent the first three months of 1943 organizing on Hawaiian airfields and flying practice and patrol missions around the islands. By mid-April, with no strike missions and no contact with the enemy, the bomber crews were restless. But the morning of April 17 had a different feel—electric.

The group’s officers were still in a closed-door briefing while rumors buzzed about a bombing mission, their first. All that remained for pilots to tell their crews was when and where. When pilot Lieutenant Joe Deasy met with his crew and gave them the particulars, it was the first time they had heard of Funafuti. Twenty-three Liberators would fly to Canton Island, a pork-chop shaped atoll 1,900 miles southwest of Oahu, refuel, and continue 740 miles farther to Funafuti in the Ellice Islands group, more than 2,600 miles from Hawaii.

“We didn’t know where Funafuti was,” B-24 gunner Sergeant Ed Hess recalled. “When we saw the map, we griped about it being halfway to Australia.”

Airfield at Funafuti

Six months before, on October 2, 1942, 11 ships of the United States Navy entered Funafuti’s lagoon and landed a Navy construction battalion. The Seabees immediately began construction of an airfield and support facilities while Marines prepared defenses and set up antiaircraft guns. To build the runway, the Seabees bulldozed thousands of coconut trees and covered arable land with hard-packed coral. The airfield was completed before the end of the year.

On the long flight to Canton, the men ate sandwiches delivered to the flight line from Kahuku’s mess hall. They used their flak jackets for pillows and stole naps in the back of the airplane. A relief tube, or “piss pipe” as crewmen called it, was built into the side of the plane just aft of the left waist window; another one was installed behind the flight deck. There was a portable toilet that most men avoided, better to wait than use the “honey bucket” and have to wash it out after landing because “if you used it, it was yours to clean,” radio operator Sergeant Herman Scearce remembered. Even the piss pipe could be a nasty problem at higher altitudes where its flow could freeze and cause a messy backup.

The Navy garrison on Canton treated its overnight guests well. The Air Corps men ate a hot meal in the Navy mess hall and slept in clean barracks with fresh bed linens. Early the next morning, 23 refueled B-24 Liberators took flight for the final leg of the trip to Funafuti, and on the afternoon of April 18 the wisps of land of the Ellice Islands came into view.

The planes approached Funafuti’s coral airstrip from the southwest. The island, shaped like a long, narrow boomerang, curved from the southwest to its thickest part in the middle, then bent back toward the northwest. Long and graceful, Funafuti was about 50 yards wide at each end, about 700 yards wide in the middle, and seven and a half miles long. Waves broke along the eastern side, the dark blue water of the Pacific just beyond and to the right as the aircraft approached.

To the left of the island, in the middle of the boomerang, was a lagoon, its calm water a beautiful shade of light blue fading to green close to shore. Coconut trees covered the island from its lower tip, nearest the approaching planes, and ended at the airfield. The white coral runway cut straight across the leading edge of the boomerang, beginning just a few feet from the ocean, and it seemed to end in the ocean on the other side.

After landing, the aircraft were parked along the runway side by side. There were no taxiways and very few revetments or bomb proofs on Funafuti to shelter parked aircraft, though there were plans to add them later. If a plane was hit during a Japanese air raid, the planes on either side were also at risk. But the airmen on Funafuti were not worried about a Japanese attack because Funafuti was just a staging base; they were not going to keep the planes there long. Besides, the briefing officer back at Kahuku made it clear that the Japanese would not know they were there.

Dogpatch Express

Early on Monday, April 19, 1943, an officer stepped front and center on Funafuti’s outdoor stage before the assembled air crews. The men sat on felled palm logs arranged in rows like seats in a theater. Behind the officer was a map, and on the bottom right of the map was Funafuti. There was another island near the upper left corner, and beside the map was a separate, large, scale drawing of the second island, Nauru.

The officer tapped his pointer on targets and visual references on the map of Nauru. He described antiaircraft gun positions and what kind of fighter interception the men would face. When he was finished, a weather officer took the stage, describing the conditions expected through each part of the flight. Next, the operations officer gave the crews critical mission details, including engine start time and order of take off. Each man mentally calculated when he needed to be at the plane in order to preflight his equipment and be ready for engine start.

After the briefing, aircrews prepared their planes for the next day’s mission. Ground crews fueled each B-24 with 2,700 gallons of gas from tank trailers towed behind Cletracs, tracked vehicles similar to bulldozers. Flight Engineer Jack Yankus and Assistant Engineer Bob Lipe confirmed the fuel level and checked engine oil levels of their B-24, Dogpatch Express. Yankus, Lipe, radioman Herman Scearce, and gunners Hess, Elmer Johnson, and Al Marston cleaned and oiled the barrels of their machine guns and loaded them with ammunition, belts of .50-caliber rounds in a repeating sequence of two armor piercing, two incendiary, and one tracer. Scearce confirmed the radios were working properly and ready to go.

Bombardier Lieutenant Shorty Schroeder oversaw the bomb loading of Dogpatch Express. Eight 500-pound general purpose bombs were loaded in the plane’s bomb bay racks from bomb trailers pulled by a truck. Most of the bombs were fused to explode on impact; some were equipped with delay fuses. Once the plane was loaded, Yankus checked the landing gear for four inches of travel in their shock-absorbing struts because less could cause the gear to fail.

Taking Off Toward Nauru

After a fitful few hours of sleep, the crew of Dogpatch Express walked to their plane. Yankus made certain the ignition switches were off, then he and Lipe pulled the propellers through, counting six propellers at each engine, two full revolutions of the Liberator’s three-bladed prop. While Scearce rechecked his radio equipment, Yankus climbed aboard and fitted the pilot and copilot parachutes into the recesses of their seats, then reported to Lieutenant Joe Deasy that the plane was ready.

On the flight deck of Dogpatch Express, Deasy and copilot Lieutenant Sam Catanzarite completed their preflight checklist as pilots and copilots aboard 22 more Liberators on Funafuti’s moonlit runway completed their own. At engine start, four 14-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-1830-43 radial engines, 1,200-horsepower each, joined the motors of the other aircraft to produce a mighty harmony unlike anything Funafuti had ever heard before.

Before his takeoff roll, Deasy opened the throttles and held the brakes until engine manifold pressures reached 25 inches of mercury. When Deasy released the brakes, Catanzarite held the throttles to the stops so they would not creep back. Yankus called out speed as Dogpatch Express accelerated, slowly at first with its full bomb load. Deasy began to apply gentle pressure, pulling the yoke back, and the heavy bomber lifted off Funafuti’s dusty coral runway.

In the predawn darkness of April 20, the B-24s took off, each loaded with 4,000 pounds of bombs. One plane developed an engine problem and turned back to Funafuti, but the remaining bombers droned on toward a midday strike against Japanese positions on Nauru.

Nauru lies 26 miles below the equator, 1,000 miles northwest of Funafuti. Oval shaped with about eight square miles of territory, it is ringed by trees and a sandy beach on its perimeter. The interior of the island is almost solid high-grade rock phosphate, essential in metal alloys and used in bomb production. Phosphate mining, refining, and shipping facilities operated by the British on Nauru before the war were shelled by a German auxiliary cruiser in 1940 and seized by the Japanese in 1942. Far flung Nauru, with the unusual distinction of being occupied by the British and attacked by both German and Japanese forces already during the war, was about to be bombed by Americans.

“Man Your Guns”

The Liberators drew closer to Nauru and more than 220 air crew and observers were wholly and irrevocably committed. There was no way to avoid whatever was to come, no place to hide. Nauru lay just beyond the horizon, the distance closing at more than three miles per minute. The American bombers would reach their target at noon, each man keenly aware that the bright, beautiful day meant Nauru’s Japanese defenders would see the bombers approach with plenty of time to prepare their reception.

Scearce recalls sitting at his radio operator’s table behind copilot Catanzarite when navigator Lieutenant Art Boone leaned toward their pilot and said, “Joe, we’re one hour out.” Scearce glanced at his pilot, and from the right and behind him, he saw Lieutenant Joe Deasy swallow and take a breath before speaking to the crew through the interphone. “We’re 60 minutes from the target, boys. Man your guns.”

Scearce and Yankus unplugged their interphone headsets and moved toward the rear as they had practiced a hundred times before. They stepped into the bomb bay, Dogpatch Express’s four massive radial engines howling in unison, much louder than they had seemed from the flight deck. Moving along the narrow catwalk and indifferent to the thousands of pounds of high explosives just inches to their right and left, waist gunners Scearce and Yankus gripped the framework of the bomb racks as they went. The vibrating metal felt cool.

After Scearce and Yankus passed, Bob Lipe took his position in the top turret, just behind the flight deck, and rotated the turret clockwise, then back, out of habit. Ed Hess settled into the nose turret. Elmer Johnson, already in the aircraft’s rear section with Al Marston, stepped back from the piss pipe and stretched himself before jacking up the belly turret with the hand pump, just enough to release its safety hooks. Johnson opened a hydraulic valve and allowed the turret to slide into the wind stream beneath the plane. He glanced back at Scearce and Yankus, smiled, and made a diving motion, hands together as if he was on the high board at the YMCA, and then opened the turret’s hatch door, stepped into the turret, and folded himself into position.

Marston moved up the sloping floor toward the twin .50s in the bomber’s tail. There was an interphone jack box at every position, and each gunner plugged in, pulled on his interphone headset, and checked the jack box to make sure the switch was set to “INTER.”

Throat microphones around their necks, Yankus and Scearce glanced down and pushed their flak jackets flat with shuffling feet, standing on them for protection against gunfire from below. They pushed their wind deflectors out, swung open their windows and latched them overhead. Already Lipe, Hess, and Johnson had reported ready. Yankus and Scearce swung their machine guns into the air stream and charged their guns with an expert pull on the handle.

“Right waist gun ready,” Scearce said. “Left waist ready,” Yankus reported, then Marston called in from the rear. Joe Deasy recalled telling his crew, “Keep your eyes open, keep the chatter down, and call ‘em when you see ‘em. Hold your fire ‘til they’re in range.”

Zeros Attack

Hess swept the nose turret side to side. Lipe kept the top turret forward, mostly, rotating through 360 degrees, first right, then to the left, as often as his stomach could handle it. Al Marston shifted his eyes up and then straight behind the plane, scanning the sky from just below the twin rudders of his bomber, wind whistling to either side. Elmer Johnson rode below the plane, almost in his own world, the expanse of the ocean thousands of feet below. Scearce searched the sky, and behind him Yankus gripped his machine gun. Back to back they shared almost identical views, a beautiful bright sky, sun directly overhead, other B-24s nearby.

Deasy’s voice broke the interphone silence, clear and steady, “Eleven o’clock, got two coming in 11 o’clock high!” Scearce heard Lipe and Hess open fire from the top and front of Dogpatch Express. He and Yankus leaned forward, trying to see, fists gripping their guns, instinctively pointed where the men were looking.

“Two o’clock high, coming down fast, be ready, top.” Lieutenant Deasy’s voice was matter-of-fact, Yankus remembered, almost calming, though the words came quickly. The top turret opened up again. The first two Japanese planes, attacking head-on, had broken off to one side of Dogpatch Express. The Liberators had been modified by the Hickam Air Depot with tail turrets mounted in the nose, surprising the Japanese fighter pilots who expected to attack the weak, glass nose of unmodified D model Liberators. After their initial head-on pass, the Mitsubishi Zero fighters attacked from other angles.

Scearce’s heart pounded like a jackhammer. He could not see the Zeros yet. The nearest B-24’s top turret and left waist gunner blazed away, their tracers leading Scearce’s eyes above Dogpatch Express’s right wing, when a blur of gray flashed beneath the wing. Scearce reacted instantly, pushing his gun barrel low, squeezing the trigger. A two-second burst and the Zero was gone before Scearce heard its 14-cylinder Nakajima Sakae 12 engine scream past. Elmer Johnson in the belly turret then saw the Zero and squeezed off a burst.

Up top, Lipe spoke clearly, a nervous edge in his voice. “One, two more at two o’clock high  … out of the sun again!”

“Eight o’clock low, coming up! Another one at five o’clock,” Yankus and then Johnson called. Each man was part of a whole, a working team, and part of their machine. Dogpatch Express was now fully engaged, every gun hammering at the attacking fighters in turn. The .50-caliber machine guns pounded like angry fists beating hard and fast on a steel door. Hot, spent brass and gun belt links falling to the floor clinked like glass breaking around the waist gunner’s feet.

“We were all scared,” Scearce recalls. “We all prayed selfish prayers…God, just get me back on the ground again.”

“This is a Long Way From Gunnery School”

Scearce joined Johnson and Lipe, five .50-caliber machine guns blazing at a single Zero fighter, tracers spitting toward the Japanese plane in burning white lines. Lipe, in the top turret, sent a stream of gunfire into the belly of the Zero as it streaked overhead. From the left waist window, Jack Yankus saw Lipe’s tracers drill the unprotected bottom of the enemy plane. He watched it pitch forward, nose down, and lost sight of it as it plummeted straight down. A few seconds of strained quiet followed  while the men scanned the sky.

Scearce suddenly spotted a Zero “four o’clock high” and called out the position. Lipe swung around in his electrically powered turret. Scearce bent low, aiming high, waiting for the range to be right when Lipe opened up. Johnson swung left and strained to see the Zero. Scearce saw muzzle flashes through the Zero’s propeller; its twin guns seemed to be shooting straight at him. Squeezing the trigger, Scearce swung his gun down as the Zero passed. He saw tracers run through the Zero’s cowling and remembered that a .50-caliber bullet could knock a cylinder head off a Zero’s engine.

Nose gunner Ed Hess gave a quick burst from up front, swinging through 10, then nine o’clock as the fighter passed, and then it was quiet again. Scearce kicked some brass away from his feet, took a deep breath, and thought, “This is a long way from gunnery school.”

As the Zeros moved off, the crew was sure the other bombers were catching hell behind them. The twin 7.7mm machine guns of the Zero fighters were supplemented by menacing 20mm cannon mounted in each wing. The explosive round from the 20mm gun weighed more than a quarter of a pound, and hits by the Zero’s cannon could be devastating.

However, the Zero’s impressive armament belied the nimble fighter’s weaknesses. The Japanese plane sacrificed the added weight of self-sealing fuel tanks and armor protection in favor of speed and agility, qualities that could serve the Zero well in combat with other fighters. As an interceptor of B-24 Liberators, however, with their armor protection, self-sealing fuel tanks, and 10 .50-caliber guns, the Zero was vulnerable, even fragile. Zero pilots pressing home an attack against a Liberator needed nerves of steel.

Dogpatch Express Bombing Run

Aboard Dogpatch Express, bombardier Lieutenant Shorty Schroeder was ready to take control of the plane for the bomb run, his bomb sight connected to the flight controls. The bombardier aimed his entire aircraft through the bomb sight.

The Japanese fighter pilots changed tactics as the bombers readied for their bomb runs, and the flak batteries on the ground below began sending their shells skyward. Nine Zeros circled at a distance, chasing one another’s tails in an oval, a racetrack pattern that advanced as the bombers sped forward. The Zeros fired their guns each time the circuit brought them to face the American bombers, but with his own plane’s right wing and engines between him and the enemy fighters Scearce could only watch, a white flash each time, a blink, and hope the streams of Japanese bullets missed.

Antiaircraft gunners now took their turn. Flak bursts filled the sky ahead, inky dark puffs drifting closer as the bombers approached. In the distance, a single Japanese plane idled along, out of range of the Liberators’ guns, holding the same altitude as the American planes, reporting it to the ground batteries below. The B-24s rushed unalterably, purposefully ahead.

There was no dodging the flak. Dogpatch Express held 7,500 feet altitude during the bomb run, level, steady, with no deviation from course. This was a bomber at its most vulnerable during a strike mission, 45 seconds that lasted forever, 45 seconds, it seemed, before the crew could breathe again. Flak bursts, like sinister potholes in the sky, caused the plane to shake and bounce as they exploded. Scearce was amazed anything flew through it. Spent flak pelted the plane like hail on a tin roof.

“We wanted to be small, very small,” Deasy remembered. They wanted the bomb run to end, the bombs to be away, but they also wanted the bombs to be on target. They did not want their trip to be wasted, did not want to have to do it again. Scearce noticed his knuckles, ghost white on the grips, and he forced himself to flex his hands as he watched the sky.

“Bombs Away!”

Behind the flight deck of Dogpatch Express there suddenly was a loud thump and a metallic clang, followed immediately by an evil hissing sound behind copilot Sam Catanzarite. Scearce heard navigator Art Boone say, “We’re hit!”

“Bombs away!” Schroeder reported, as the last 500-pound bomb fell from its rack. The plane seemed to leap in the air, free of its heavy burden. Deasy pushed the control yoke forward, nosing Dogpatch Express over, and put the throttles to the stops, getting the hell out of there fast.

The hissing slowed as Yankus traced the damage. Sunlight streamed through a hole just below the leading edge of the right wing. A piece of flak, a jagged shard of twisted metal three inches across, had come through the ship just behind Bob Lipe’s legs as he sat in the top turret. After cutting a compressed oxygen line, the bomb fragment had stabbed through the pilot’s seat. The Zeros harassed the trailing B-24s for half an hour more and finally turned away.

“How’d we do?” Deasy asked. There was a pause, a moment’s hesitation, before Yankus spoke. “Everything hit the water, sir.” Scearce had seen the splashes, too.

Scearce and Yankus swung their guns inside, locked the windows closed, and pulled the wind deflectors in tight to the sides of the plane. Bob Lipe stepped down from his turret, wiped his face on his sleeve, and looked up at the ugly hole in his plane’s skin. He hadn’t heard the impact. A few feet aft, and the flak might have hit the top turret. Ed Hess unfolded himself from the nose. Yankus steadied Johnson as he pulled himself from the belly turret and helped him jack it up and secure the turret inside the plane. Johnson stood and stretched, as he had before settling into the turret almost two hours before.

From the rear, they heard Marston say, “Fellas, I’m going to sit here a minute, watch our ass a little while.”

A Lonesome Return

Out of danger, the aircraft returned to a higher cruising altitude and continued toward Funafuti. Their targets, phosphate plants, gun positions, maintenance and barracks buildings, and runways on tiny Nauru, were so small that each plane had to make its bomb run alone. As a result, their return to Funafuti was staggered.

Since each plane had to find its own way, each crew needed a skilled navigator. There was nothing below but ocean, no point of reference except the sun. Navigators relied on dead reckoning, calculating position based on the previous position, taking into account time, heading, and drift. Errors in dead reckoning were cumulative, so each calculation increased the difference between the aircraft’s plotted position and its actual location. Because the aircraft were returning to a pinpoint island base hours away and burning limited fuel supplies, mistakes in dead reckoning could be deadly.

The “Navigator’s Information File” of the Army Air Forces advised: “In the Central Pacific celestial navigation is used in conjunction with dead reckoning on all missions. Many of the islands and atolls are plotted in error from 2 to 10 miles, usually eastward or westward. Interpretation of sun lines and fixes is important. Radio facilities are not always available in this area and you cannot always depend upon them because of local disturbances. Be careful when you use clouds for pilotage. Cumulus often builds up around islands, but shadows of clouds also look like land….”

Twelve hours after taking off, Dogpatch Express settled gently onto Funafuti’s dusty coral strip and Deasy taxied the bomber to a stop, guided by a ground crewman’s hand signals. On the ground again, the men of Dogpatch Express walked around their aircraft, checking it for damage. Some elevator fabric was torn away. There was the jagged flak hole behind and above the copilot’s seat, big enough for Yankus to put his fist through. Joe Deasy found the razor-sharp metal in his parachute pack where, its energy finally spent, it stopped less than an inch from the pilot’s spine.

“Brooks Didn’t Make it”

A ground crew corporal skidded up in a weapons carrier, wooden planks along its sides for seats, to take the crew of Dogpatch Express to the mess hall. There an intelligence officer debriefed them. He gathered information about enemy fighters, how many and what tactics they used, how aggressive they were. He made notes about the antiaircraft reception, bomb hits, fires started, what color the smoke was, and how far out the smoke could still be seen.

After their debriefing and after a few bites to eat, the men walked back to the flight line.  They counted 22 B-24s, all but one. Word got around about Lieutenant Russell Phillips’s crew. A burst from a Zero’s 20mm cannon had raked the side of Super Man, practically rolling the plane out of control.

Phillips struggled mightily to get back to Funafuti. There were hundreds of holes in his plane, plus the right rudder was half gone. Six men of Phillips’s crew were hurt, including Scearce’s good friend, Harold Brooks.  Brooks had been rushed from Super Man to the field hospital on Funafuti, rushed the short distance from the plane to the hospital, but only after the agonizingly slow flight of nearly six hours from Nauru.

Scearce returned to the tent that housed the enlisted men on his crew. He sat on his cot, untied his boots, and pulled them off. He lay down and stared straight up at the sloping canvas ceiling, turning his head when Jack Yankus stepped in. Yankus had lingered at the flight line with Dogpatch Express where he surveyed the severed oxygen line, checked for other damage, and got the latest news. Yankus said, “Brooks, uh … Brooks didn’t make it, Herman.”

A man injured on a bombing mission in the Pacific had hours to go, perhaps longer than any soldier in any theater of the war, before getting to a field hospital and a surgeon. There was little his crewmates could do beyond basic first aid, try to stop the bleeding, try to position the man correctly, give him morphine, maybe stop the pain. He would wait for hours, riding in his bomber back to a waiting ambulance and a field hospital.

Scearce responded weakly to Yankus, “That’s bad.” He sat up without looking back toward his friend, pulled his boots on again, and walked back to Dogpatch Express. At the plane, Scearce climbed through the open bomb bay and went to his gun position. He inspected his gun and decided against changing the barrel. Some gunners changed their barrels religiously, to be sure the gun would be straight and true for the next mission. A long burst from the .50s could generate enough heat to damage the barrel, but Scearce believed that a proper inspection of the gun was more sensible than frequent barrel changes. He would install a new barrel if and when the gun needed one.

 

The radioman got down on his knees on the floor of Dogpatch Express under the right waist window. In the silent, parked bomber he knelt for a moment on his flak jacket, still flattened on the metal floor. Kneeling there he scooped up spent .50-caliber machine-gun shell casings with both hands. He wondered whether Brooks had used his weapon, whether, just maybe, Brooks had gotten a burst into a Zero, possibly even the one that killed him.

Scearce dropped the spent brass into a galvanized metal bucket. After picking up the last few casings from the bottom of the airplane, he turned to check the left side and saw that Yankus had already cleaned up his area.  Scearce carried the bucket forward, dropped out of the plane through the bomb bay, and set the bucket of shell casings on the ground beside a tool cart. Maybe tomorrow the crew chief would empty the casings into the island’s waste dump.

After-Action Report: “Damage to Installations and Material was Heavy”

Intelligence information gathered from each air crew just returned from the Nauru mission was compiled and compared, and photos developed and analyzed, until an accurate accounting of the bombing results was completed. Maj. Gen. Willis Hale endorsed the final report, which was then sent to CincPac, the office of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Command.

The report described a highly successful mission: “All bombs dropped hit target except eight…. Damage to installations and material was heavy. Personnel casualties were extremely heavy. Large fires were observed in all bombed areas … a group of approximately twelve buildings in the center of the runway were destroyed…. Phosphate Plant #3 was completely demolished by at least two direct hits … at least three direct hits were made on Phosphate Plant #2 … this plant was completely destroyed. Six bombs destroyed at least three large warehouses, thirteen buildings, eleven small railroad cars, stock storage pile, two water tanks supplying plant … Diesel power plant, main plant elevator building, one water tank, five cisterns, seven buildings and water distillation plant badly damaged. A train of six 500-lb bombs burst in residential area. Large fires were started which were increasing in scope when last oblique photo was taken … most buildings in immediate area were destroyed. At least ten fragmentation bombs put out of action three machine gun positions and one heavy antiaircraft. At least fifteen motor vehicles were destroyed. Four two-engine bombers were completely destroyed, two of which burned … at least three one-engine fighter planes were destroyed.”

The report also described damage to American bombers, crediting all of it to attacking Japanese fighter aircraft, and noted that 12 airmen were wounded and one killed. The missing B-24, low on fuel, had landed at Nanumea, where it gassed up and made the hop back to Funafuti.

General Hale concluded his report, stating, “It is believed that this operation was the first successful attack against a valuable Japanese industrial installation since the raid on Tokyo. It was probably the longest offensive air operation of the war to date—the target was in excess of 3,200 miles by air from the home base of the attacking unit.”

After the attack, Nauru’s Japanese defenders rounded up their prisoners. These prisoners, 191 employees of the British Phosphate Commission, had been left behind when their colleagues evacuated ahead of the Japanese landing eight months before. Because they feared that the aerial bombardment was a precursor to an American invasion, an invasion that would never come, and because they would not risk the prisoners’ cooperation with the enemy, the Japanese executed them all.

The 11th Group crews on Funafuti prepared for another strike mission, but Dogpatch Express would not be in the lineup. Ground and flight crews spent the evening fueling and “bombing-up” undamaged airplanes for a raid against Tarawa atoll while repairs to planes damaged in the Nauru raid continued.

Repair and maintenance work on Funafuti was slow and improvised. As an advanced staging base, Funafuti was lightly equipped. The “72 hour kits” carried to the island in the bomb bays of the aircraft were adequate for three days’ maintenance, but repair to some of the damaged aircraft was beyond the capabilities of the base. The sheet metal work to Dogpatch Express was completed on Funafuti, but the severed oxygen line would wait until the plane returned to Oahu.

Life on Funafuti

A crew from Life magazine was on Funafuti, having accompanied the group on the flight from Hawaii via Canton. It seemed strange to the crewmen having the magazine people there because the airmen were not used to being newsworthy. But the Nauru raid was the first strike by American heavy bombers against a Japanese industrial target, and it seemed that the Air Corps wanted publicity for it. Besides chatting with officers, the Life crew toured the island in little groups, taking pictures and writing in notebooks while their officer escort pointed out Funafuti’s features.

The largest building on the island was the Missionary Church, a concrete structure with a wood-framed roof thatched with pandanus, the same plant natives used to weave mats. The church was built by the London Missionary Society on the west side of the island near the lagoon, almost even with the northeast end of the runway. It provided an easily recognizable visual reference for pilots. Native huts, about 60 of them in all, were on the lagoon side protected by the crescent curve of the island. The huts were rectangular, with corner posts of strong coconut trunks. Roofs were similar to the church, timber framed and thatched with pandanus. The sides of the huts were also thatched and made so they could be rolled up and tied open during the day. Gentle waves in the lagoon lapped at the beach, but on the eastern side, the ocean’s waves met the shore with noisy crashes and salty spray.

Funafuti was short on amenities, but the island did have the advantage of a friendly, cooperative native population, and the American servicemen at Funafuti were amused by the pretty, dark-skinned, and topless girls among the island’s several hundred natives. But the men were supposed to keep their distance from native women and “the novelty wore off soon enough,” Yankus recalled.

Many of the natives spoke English, learned from the London Missionary delegation. They were friendly. In fact, they had worked themselves to near exhaustion months before, helping men of the 5th Marine Defense Battalion, two companies of the 3rd Marines, elements of Navy Scouting Squadron 65, and a group of Seabees unload gear and equipment from their landing vessels.

A quirk of time and location had turned this place, an island paradise, into a wartime bomber base. As beautiful as it looked, like a Robinson Crusoe shipwreck setting, it was a sorry place for a military operation.

Each morning, the relentless equatorial sun heated aircraft and tools so quickly that it was difficult to work. Ground crews who serviced the several Marine Vought F4-U Corsair fighter planes and the Navy’s Kingfisher scout planes on Funafuti knew how critical it was to keep tools and equipment covered or put away because salt and sand were everywhere. In the afternoon, it rained, cooling things a bit, but the sun quickly cooked off the rain so that humidity joined forces with the heat to make working conditions miserable.

The coral runway built by the Seabees should have been as solid as concrete, but rain prevented the live coral used to build it from curing properly. The coral packed like gravel, rutted and dusty. When aircraft took off or landed, dust from the runway created storms of minute abrasive particles. The northeast to southwest orientation of the single airstrip offered no alternative if the predominantly easterly winds shifted to the southeast. In those conditions, pilots met a 90-degree crosswind, challenging enough with a heavy load on takeoff, but nerve-racking with low fuel, an engine out, or battle damage on the return.

Freshwater was provided by distillation units. The Marines and Navy men supplemented the water supply by catching rain runoff in barrels placed under the drape of their tents. In the middle of the island was a pond, really more of a swampy bog, that the Seabees had to partially fill when they built the runway, but the bog was of little practical use except to the island’s mosquito and rat populations.

The enlisted men of each bomber crew shared a tent. The canvas tents lacked floors and electricity and were equipped with cots. Officers were housed in a separate area, also in tents but with electricity from gas-powered generators.

Equipment for servicing bombers was barely adequate. Ground crewmen had two Cletracs, slow, tracked vehicles, more tractor than truck, for servicing aircraft. Cletracs were excellent for towing and parking aircraft but dreadfully slow for pulling gas trailers to refuel airplanes. A mess hall and barracks were planned, but for now the men made do with field kitchens and tents.

Eddie Rickenbacker on Funafuti

There was a one-room hospital on Funafuti, completed in November 1942. It had 40 field beds and was staffed by two doctors, a dentist, and 22 Navy corpsmen. They boasted that the famed World War I fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker was among their first patients. Rickenbacker was one of seven survivors of an October 1942 B-17 crash in the ocean. Survivors drifted for weeks in their rafts before being rescued by a Kingfisher aircraft.

Rickenbacker and his men were taxied half an hour across water, lashed to the aircraft’s wing because the rescue made the plane overloaded for flight. The Kingfisher finally met a PT boat that took Rickenbacker the rest of the way to Funafuti.

There were a few bunkers for personnel, built by the Marines, but not enough for every man’s protection. There were shallow slit trenches and some holes where palm trees had been bulldozed down, but most of the island was too low for much digging. There were a few revetments for aircraft, but not enough to protect them all. The group’s best defense on Funafuti was secrecy, but there were only so many places from which B-24s could have attacked Nauru.

The Japanese may have sent a plane to follow the Americans as they returned, or they may have reconnoitered Funafuti undetected. The briefing officer on Kahuku who told the bomber crews bound for Funafuti that the Japanese would not know they were there had made no promise that the secret would last.

In fact, sometime during the night of April 20, just hours after the last B-24 returned, three twin-engined Mitsubishi aircraft took off from a Japanese air base on the island of Betio in the Tarawa atoll with full bomb loads. The Japanese planes turned south-southeast, headed for Funafuti.

“Air Raid! Air Raid!”

Scearce made his way to his crew’s tent before curfew. An ordnance truck, a bomb loader with a small crane attached to the rear, was parked nearby. Scearce assumed that whoever used it last must have parked it near his own tent. Parking it in the shade of coconut trees in the crew quarters area would keep the vehicle and its steering wheel a little cooler than parking it beside the runway.

Inside the tent, the enlisted men of Dogpatch Express chatted quietly. They talked about Nauru and the coming strike against Tarawa. They speculated about their next mission and whether Lieutenant Schroeder would get his bombs on target next time. Conversation faded quickly because the men were exhausted; they had not slept much the night before.

Shortly after midnight, the air raid signal sounded. A shrill, piercing siren, 10-second blasts at five-second intervals, caused the men to stir. Marines ran from tent to tent, yelling “Air raid! Air raid!”

Scearce and his heavy-eyed crewmates halfheartedly swung their legs to the ground, assuming this was someone’s idea of a joke or maybe a drill. Then a Marine Corps antiaircraft battery opened fire, boom … boom  … boom … and the men knew immediately it was no drill. They scrambled in the dark to pull on flight suits and ran out of their tents. Now aircraft could be heard, but the direction was indistinct, there was just the sound of unsynchronized aircraft engines overhead. A familiar voice shouted, “Get in the hole!”

There was a shallow hole near the crew’s tent, and Scearce piled in on top of his crewmates. Falling bombs made menacing whistling sounds while explosions threw orange flashes about treetops and tents, casting silhouettes of men running. The smell was pungent, like sulfur or a spent shotgun shell.

Forty terrified villagers huddled inside the Missionary Church, praying that its concrete walls would save them. Marine Corps Corporal Fonnie Black Ladd ran into the church, calling for the people to get out, imploring them to get away from the church, to take cover elsewhere because the church was an obvious target for the Japanese.

A salvo of bombs stepped toward the hole containing the men of Dogpatch Express, its pattern of explosions growing louder and closer. Scearce held the sides of his helmet with both fists clenched, trying desperately to fit under it. Knees to his chest, teeth gritted, and eyes squeezed tight, Scearce knew the next one whistling toward them would be very close.

With a terrific whang the bomb hit the ordnance truck parked just a few feet away. Dirt and metal rained down. In the next second, a hissing cylinder landed in the crew’s tiny hole, right on top of Elmer Johnson. For a moment, the men of Dogpatch Express could hear nothing, then the sensation of sound returned with a shrill ringing, and the powerful stench of explosives filled their nostrils. Scearce’s mind raced: “This is it,” he thought. The metal cylinder continued to hiss, and the men did not move, afraid they could cause it to explode.

Assessing the Damage

The hissing weakened, and the whistling of falling bombs and their terrific explosions finally stopped. Voices were audible now, agonized screams, cries for help, shouts, men giving orders. The enemy aircraft could be heard again, leaving the island toward the north, toward Tarawa. There were crackling and popping and strange metallic groans; an aircraft was burning. In the dim light of early morning, with gray-black smoke stinging their eyes, the enlisted men of Dogpatch Express accounted for each other.

“It’s a damn fire extinguisher,” Johnson said. The cylinder that landed on him, the hissing object that the crew feared was a bomb, was instead the damaged pressure tank of a brass fire extinguisher blasted from the ordnance truck when the truck took a direct hit.

Men had jumped under the truck for cover. Scearce thought there were four. Parts of bodies were strewn about, and one man still lay under the demolished truck. Scearce could tell the man was a staff sergeant by his stripes, but could not recognize him because his face and the top of his head were gone.

Corpsmen rushed to help the injured while others fought fires. Casualties were lined up by the airstrip in the shade of planes’ wings. As bulldozers cleared debris, the worst of the injured were placed aboard a plane to be sent back to the U.S. mainland. Others went to a hospital on Fiji, 670 miles south. Some injured men refused to be evacuated, insisting on staying with their crews.

One Liberator was burned completely. Smoking radial engines lay on the coral runway, propellers bent and folded under as if they were made of rubber. The twin vertical tail planes seemed intact, though the rudder fabric was scorched away. The tail section stood on the coral, pitched forward, as if the plane were in a steep dive.

Other aircraft were holed by shrapnel, tires blown out, and plexiglass shattered. Some of the planes could be repaired, and some would be scrapped and used for parts to keep others flying. Bomb-loading equipment, radio gear, the mess area and tents were damaged, burned, or blown down by the concussion of bombs. The walls of the Missionary Church stood, but its roof was gone and its interior was gutted. A bomb had crashed through the thatched roof and exploded, bringing roof timbers and flaming, dried pandanus down into the building vacated by the villagers a moment before.

A young native man named Esau Sepetaina lay on his back as if resting, arms at his side, his chin, mouth, and left ear visible, but the rest of his head was smashed like a melon. He was the only native killed in the raid, and he died beside one of the few true personnel bunkers in Funafuti’s shallow earth, his feet just inches from the edge.

On to the Next Mission

On the morning after the air raid, Scearce, Lipe, Yankus, and Johnson stood with a handful of other men near the broken remains of the ordnance truck, watching helplessly as medical corpsmen lifted one of the dead men from the wreckage. They felt hollow, sick, and at the same time relieved it was not them. Beside the wrecked truck lay its splattered and torn seat and the vehicle’s battery, and beyond them a Life magazine photographer captured the scene on film.

On April 21, Dogpatch Express took off past the still smoldering remains of a sister aircraft. The bombers in the lineup for the next mission stayed behind, scheduled to hit Tarawa the next night. The long flight back to Hawaii, with its overnight stop at Canton, lacked the sense of purpose and anticipation of success that sustained the men on the way out. The return flight felt like retreat. The men felt beaten.

The Japanese air raid consisted of a few medium bombers making several passes at night. The enemy planes had traversed the island, back and forth, as if without concern about the three Marine Corps antiaircraft batteries. The Japanese took their time, working thoroughly and deliberately, taking advantage of a full moon’s light on Funafuti’s white coral runway. Their show of skill was sobering to the American bomber crewmen, particularly the men of Dogpatch Express, who had seen their bombs explode in the water just off the sandy beach of Nauru.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by Phil Scearce originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Warfare History Network

Security, Asia

The Mongols began besieging the more than one million residents of Beijing.

Key Point: The Mongols attacked the Xi Xia in 1209, first taking the border settlements north of the Yellow River.

In ad 1205, Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, having completed the unification of his Gobi Desert empire, began looking south toward China for further conquest. The ever-truculent Mongols had been a thorn in China’s side for more than 2,000 years. Their many raids were the main reason the Chinese had constructed a 1,500-mile-long Great Wall from the eastern coast on the Pacific Ocean to the very edge of the Gobi. Not without reason did the Chinese consider the Mongols barbarians—their very name meant “earth shakers.” At the head of a united army of fearsome nomads, Genghis Khan would soon make the earth shake again.

War With Xi Xia

Genghis’s first target was the western Chinese kingdom of Xi Xia. The Xi, known to the Mongols as the Tanguts, had emigrated east from the mountains of Tibet to the hilly grasslands centered on the Yellow River in the 7th century ad. The Mongols and the Xi, as wary neighbors, shared some of the same relatives; one of Genghis’s own stepdaughters was the wife of a Tangut chieftain. Family ties meant little to Genghis Khan. His father, Yesugei, had been poisoned by grudge-bearing members of a Tatar clan when Genghis, then called Temujin, was eight. Five years later, Temujin killed his own half brother Begter in cold blood after the two quarreled over some birds and minnows that Temujin had caught. “Apart from our shadows we have no friends,” he had been taught from the cradle. It was lesson he never forgot. After he had consolidated his power, Genghis Khan killed every male member of the Tatar clan that had killed his father—any boy taller than a wagon wheel was struck down.

The Mongols attacked the Xi Xia in 1209, first taking the border settlements north of the Yellow River. The 75,000 Mongol invaders faced an army of 150,000 Xi Xia troops near their capital at Zhongxing. The Xi Xia had stationed 100,000 armored pikemen and crossbowmen in large phalanxes in the center of the battle line, with 25,000 Tangut cavalry on each wing. The Mongols were not accustomed to being outnumbered. As nomadic warriors they traveled fast, in huge columns of superbly skilled cavalry, often separated by many miles but knit together by an intricate system of signal fires, smoke signals, and flags, and a gigantic camel-mounted kettledrum to sound the charge. They were used to coordinating their forces on small settlements or camps whose residents could not move with anything like the same speed or decisiveness. The Mongols were interested not in a fair fight, but a victorious one.

In the Xi Xia, however, they ran into an opponent who fought much the same way they did. The Mongols had taken extensive casualties in an earlier battle with the Xi Xia pikemen by charging their pike wall; they were determined to not repeat the mistake. The Mongol light cavalry rode parallel to the Chinese pikemen and crossbowmen, firing thousands of arrows into them while other Mongol forces fought with Tangut cavalry on the flanks. The Mongol and Tangut cavalry also rode parallel to each other, firing thousands of arrows and inflicting innumerable casualties on each side. Each side’s cavalry feigned retreat, but the other side wouldn’t fall for the ruse. Finally, the Mongols attacked the Tangut cavalry with their heavy cavalry. The Tangut cavalry broke and ran, leaving the huge phalanxes of the Xi Xia pikemen vulnerable to attack. The Chinese pikemen had formed a giant rectangle that faced in all directions, and they took repeated volleys of arrows that inflicted great damage while the Mongols themselves stayed mostly out of range of the Chinese crossbows. After the Xi Xia pikemen lost unit cohesion, the Mongol heavy cavalry attacked the remaining demoralized and exhausted Chinese from all sides to finish them off.

Besieging Zhongxing

The Xi Xia capital of Zhongxing presented a new problem for the Mongols, who had little experience in siege warfare. In an earlier siege of the walled city of Volohai, the Mongols had attempted a series of suicidal assaults with scaling ladders that failed, and they suffered heavy casualties in the fighting. Genghis offered to lift the siege of the city provided the residents gave the Mongols 1,000 cats and 10,000 swallows in cages. The puzzled citizens of Volohai quickly granted the request—and just as quickly lived to regret it when the animals fled back into the city with tufts of flaming wool tied to each of them by the Mongols. Soon, the whole city was ablaze. While the defenders were occupied with putting out the fire, the Mongols scaled the now undefended walls and massacred the inhabitants.

Genghis did not want to face a similar costly assault of the walls of Zhongxing. Instead, he decided to break the dikes on the Huang River and flood the city below. The plan backfired, however, when the Mongol camp itself was flooded and hundreds of troops were swept away by the raging waters. To make matters worse, the move left two feet of standing water for miles around the city, in effect creating a ready-made moat. The Mongols retreated into the surrounding hills but returned in force in 1210. Xi Xia Emperor Li Anquan, not wishing to face another siege, agreed to give his daughter Chaka to Genghis Khan as a wife and to pay tribute to the Mongols as a vassal state. Genghis demanded and received another 1,000 young men and women, 3,000 horses, and vast quantities of gold, jewelry, and silk. The Xi Xia later rebelled in 1218 and 1223 because they tired of providing the Mongols with so many men to fight in their wars of conquest, but these rebellions were brutally put down.

Routing the Jin

In 1210, an emissary of the newly installed Jin emperor, Prince Wei, appeared before Genghis and demanded his submission and a tribute paid to the Jin. An infuriated Genghis answered that it was the Jin who needed to pay tribute to him; he spat on the ground as a gesture of defiance. With his flank secured by the conquest of Xi Xia, Genghis was ready to attack the mighty Jin Dynasty. In 1211, 30,000 Mongol troops under Genghis’s greatest general, Subedei, assaulted the Great Wall. The Mongols brought up groups of archers who cleared an area of wall while other Mongols scaled the wall with ladders and took possession of sections of it. The Jin rushed in reinforcements and recaptured the lost sections of the Great Wall. Thousands died on both sides as the fighting continued back and forth for several days.

The Jin brought most of their army to back up the forces defending the Great Wall. What the Jin didn’t know was that Subedei’s attack was merely a diversion. Some 200 miles to the west, Genghis and a force of 90,000 Mongols were crossing the Great Wall at its end in the Gobi Desert. The Onguts, a tribe similar to the Mongols, were supposed to be guarding the western end of the Great Wall for the Chin, but they defected to Genghis and allowed the Mongols to cross into China unmolested. After Genghis’s cavalry poured into China, Subedei’s force broke off its attack and crossed over into China from the end of the Great Wall as well.

The Jin forces were now out of position and moved to cut off the Mongols from Beijing. Genghis’s cavalry caught close to 200,000 Jin troops on open ground near Badger Pass, where the Jin hoped to block the Mongols from advancing any farther. The Jin formed for battle with the pike phalanxes and crossbowmen in the middle and armored heavy cavalry on the flanks. The outnumbered Mongol heavy cavalry engaged in a hotly contested battle on the flanks with the Jin cavalry as the densely packed Jin phalanxes and their crossbowmen held off the Mongol horse archers. Suddenly, Subedei’s remaining 27,000 Mongols (3,000 had died at the Great Wall) showed up on the battlefield on the flanks and rear of the Jin army. The rout was on.

After the Jin cavalry was defeated, the Jin pikemen, half of whom were militia conscripts, broke and ran. They were cut down by the Mongol cavalry or trampled by their own terrified horsemen. Bodies stacked “like rotten logs” littered the ground for more than 30 miles. Genghis then separated his army into three forces that burned, pillaged, raped, and murdered the populations of 90 cities over the next six months. Despite the awful destruction, the Jin would not surrender. Genghis became frustrated by the enormous size and scope of a nation-state like the Jin. He entered into negotiations with the emperor and agreed not to attack any more cities. The Mongols had already captured well over 100,000 Chinese prisoners; to make a negotiating point, Genghis had them executed.

The Capture of Beijing

The next year the Jin moved their capital farther south, from Beijing to Kaifeng, and began rebuilding their armies. Genghis was angered by the move, which he considered a betrayal of trust, and looked for an opportunity to attack the Jin again. In the spring of 1213, the Jin attacked the Mongol-allied Khitan tribe in Manchuria. Genghis came to the aid of his Khitan allies and attacked the Jin armies in Manchuria, which fell back to their fortifications at Nankuo Pass. The Mongols were blocked from attacking Beijing by the well-fortified Jin positions at the pass and by the eastern sections of the Great Wall. The Mongols headed into the pass and then retreated. It was all a ruse. The Jin forces hurried to trap the fleeing Mongols, recklessly leaving their fortified positions to pursue them. The Mongols led the Jin forces into their own trap and destroyed most of the Jin army. Those Jin troops that had not pursued the Mongols fled their fortified positions and retreated to the Great Wall, with the Mongols in hot pursuit. The Mongols caught and destroyed the remaining Jin troops as they tried frantically to retreat through the Great Wall. The Mongols then passed through the open gates of the Great Wall.

The Mongols began besieging the more than one million residents of Beijing. Beijing was a tough nut to crack, with walls and moats that extended more than nine miles around the city, and was watched over by 900 towers. The city’s defenders had double and triple crossbow ballistae and trebuchet catapults that fired clay pots filled with naphtha-like incendiaries that exploded and set on fire whatever they hit. The Jin also introduced one of the first poison gas weapons in history, firing projectiles bound in wax and paper of 70 pounds of dried human waste, ground-up poisonous herbs, roots, and beetles packed in gunpowder. The projectiles were lit with a fuse and fired from a trebuchet, creating a deadly cloud of toxic fumes that killed or disabled anyone unfortunate enough to breathe in the poisonous dust.

The Jin also had clay-pot firebombs filled with incendiaries to throw from the walls and hot oil to pour down on attackers. The Mongols launched attacks against the walls with ladders, but lost dozens of men to the incendiaries and the hot oil. The Mongols then forced Jin prisoners to build and push forward siege engines and serve as human shields for the attackers. Jin soldiers would recognize family and friends among the captives and hold their fire. Many Jin prisoners were killed from missed crossbow fire aimed at the Mongols and from the bombs used to burn down the siege engines before they could get into the city.

The Mongols and their Chinese human shields dug trenches covered by cowhide up to the walls to undermine them, but the Jin dropped firebombs from chains onto the trenches that exploded with such force that they left only smoldering craters and no intact human remains. The siege dragged on for a year as starvation and disease began killing people on both sides of the walls, but the defenders, with more than a million people to feed, had the worst of it. Two Jin relief columns loaded down with food were intercepted by the Mongols, and some defenders in Beijing turned to cannibalism to survive.

In June 1215, the Jin commander escaped to Kaifeng, where he was executed by the emperor for leaving his post. The desperate people of Beijing then opened the gates of the city to the Mongols, who ransacked the city and massacred thousands in revenge for their ordeal. The city was set on fire. Thousands of girls ran to the city’s steepest walls and threw themselves to their deaths to escape the flames and the unwanted amorous attention of the Mongols. A year later, the ambassador of Khwarezm described seeing mountains of bones inside and outside of what had been the greatest city in the world.

The Death of Genghis, the Ascension of Ogedei

Despite the overwhelming victories, the Mongols were trapped in a long war of attrition in China. Rather than finish the conquest of the Jin, Genghis became sidetracked in 1217 in the destruction of Khwarezm (Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), an Islamic holocaust in which more than a million people were massacred by the Mongols. During the campaign to conquer Khwarezm, the Mongols brought in thousands of Chinese engineers, siege engines, and crews to help reduce Islamic fortifications.

In 1223, Genghis turned his attention back on the Jin. He sent a trusted general, Mukhulai, with 100,000 troops to attack Chang’an, which was defended by 200,000 Jin troops. Mukhulai became ill and died. As soon as this happened, the Xi Xia troops abandoned the Mongol army, which in turn caused the siege to be abandoned. Genghis then hunted down and killed the Xi Xia troops who had deserted his army.

Genghis himself died in 1227, probably from typhus, while planning yet another massive invasion of Jin. His son, Ogedei, ascended the throne and sent envoys to the Jin, who promptly had them executed. Meanwhile, Subedei was to conduct one last effort to conquer the Jin in 1231. The Jin armies all faced north to prevent Subedei’s 120,000 Mongols from crossing the Yellow River. Subudei sent a general named Tuli with 30,000 Mongols on an arduous journey across the western Chinese mountains of Sichuan and through Song territory into southern Jin territory.

The Jin panicked, thinking the Mongol force was much bigger than it was. The Jin repositioned the majority of their troops to the south and began pursuing the Mongols with a massive force of over 300,000 men. The Mongols retreated as planned into the Sichuan Mountains as the huge Jin army followed them. The Mongols fought a tenacious rearguard action with their archers in the rough mountain terrain, killing thousands of pursuing Jin. The Mongols led the Jin higher and deeper into the snow-covered mountains, where additional thousands froze to death or fell off the icy trails. The Mongols circled back through the mountain passes and destroyed the Jin baggage trains, adding starvation to the woes the Jin troops were already enduring.

Once Subedei had the main Jin army trapped in the mountains of Sichuan, he moved his 120,000 Mongols across the Yellow River against the much smaller Jin forces. The Jin belatedly realized their mistake and began desperately trying to get their main army out of the mountains to defend the capital. The Jin retreat turned into a rout as Tuli’s and Subedei’s forces massacred the entire Jin army without mercy on the open ground within sight of Kaifeng.

The Siege of Kaifeng

The Mongols had learned well from their Chinese prisoners how to conduct sieges. They built a 54-mile-long wooden wall of contravallation to hem in Kaifeng’s one million frightened inhabitants. In addition to the almost 150,000 Mongols conducting the siege, the Song sent 300,000 troops to help finish off their Jin enemies. For six days, the Mongol and Song armies assaulted Kaifeng’s wall but took thousands of casualties from a dreaded weapon called a ho pao, a long bamboo tube filled with incendiaries that could be lit with a fuse or thrown into siege engines from holes in the walls to explode with such force that it left craters in the ground and burned everyone in the immediate vicinity. Thousands of Mongol and Song Chinese troops died in assaults against Kaifeng’s stout walls.

It was clear to Subedei that a long siege was needed to reduce the Jin capital. Plague soon broke out in Kaifeng, and Subedei withdrew his forces to let the disease destroy his enemies while the Mongol and Song armies remained plague-free. Within a month, the Jin emperor committed suicide and the Mongol and Song armies broke into Kaifeng and began massacring the population. Ogedei ordered the massacre to be stopped and aid brought to the suffering people. Subedei wanted to massacre the entire Jin population and turn the farmland into grazing fields for Mongol horses, but Ogedei overruled him. Ogedei’s Chinese advisers had convinced him that the Jin population would provide lucrative taxes, craftsmen, and soldiers for future Mongol conquests. The Jin held out until 1234 before being overwhelmed by the combined Mongol and Song forces, ending the Jin dynasty forever.

In 1235, the Song sent their armies to occupy the Jin cities they understood would be given to them by the Mongols for their part in the war. Instead, the Song armies were repulsed by Mongol forces using many of the same weapons and methods to defend the cities that they had learned from the Jin. This started a 43-year-long war between the Mongols and the Song that would claim many more thousands of lives. In 1236, the Mongols captured the city of Xiangyang in Sichuan Province. The Mongols and the Song fought for control of Sichuan around the city of Chengdu until 1248, when the Mongols gained solid possession of the area. By 1248, the Mongols had killed hundreds of thousands of Song and reduced many Sichuan cities to rubble.

The Yuan Dynasty

In 1251, Mongke was elected Great Khan and decided to intensify the war with the Song Dynasty. In 1253, some 100,000 Mongols and their Chinese allies captured Dali and Yunnan and crossed through Laos to attack the Song Empire’s southern flank. The next year, the Mongols clashed with more than 100,000 Song troops and 1,000 war elephants near the Laotian border. The Mongol horses would not charge the elephants, so the Mongols dismounted and fired flaming arrows to kill or enrage the great animals, which became uncontrollable and randomly killed men on both sides. The battle degenerated into a chaotic hand-to-hand battle. Both armies virtually annihilated each other, and the Mongols withdrew into Laos with only 20,000 men. In 1257, Mongke made the mistake of invading Da Viet (North Vietnam) and lost most of the rest of his men and horses to disease in the intense tropical conditions.

In 1258, Mongke pulled together 300,000 Mongol and Chinese soldiers to face a massive army of over 400,000 Song Chinese troops under General Wang Jian in Sichuan. In 1259, the two sides met at the Battle of Diaoyucheng. During the battle, Mongke collapsed and died from cholera and dysentery. The battle ended in stalemate, with more than 100,000 dead on both sides, including Wang Jian. The new commanding Song general, Jia Sidao, collaborated with Genghis Khan’s grandson, Prince Kublai, and worked out a deal whereby the Song army would occupy Sichuan under Mongol authority. After the Mongol forces left Sichuan, Jia Sidao reneged on his agreement and reoccupied Xiangyang, returning Sichuan to Song control. In 1260, Jia Sidao took his army back into Song territory and established himself as prime minister with a new young emperor named Zhao Qi, who would serve as puppet ruler. Meanwhile, Kublai left Sichuan and took his army back to Mongolia to stake his claim as the new khan of the Mongol Empire. Later that same year, Kublai became khan of the Mongols and established the Yuan Dynasty in China, with himself as emperor.

A Five-Year Siege

In 1265, a Chinese allied naval force destroyed 100 Song ships in a river battle, and Mongol troops defeated the isolated Song army to regain control of part of Sichuan. The key to conquering the Song was capturing the twin fortress cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng. Both cities had thick walls with wide moats protecting the convergence of the Han and Yellow Rivers. In 1268, the Mongols built fortifications downriver from Xiangyang on the Han River to cut off resupply of the city by ship. Most Song ships were able to run by the Mongol forts and resupply Xiangyang and Fancheng. Chinese ships allied with the Mongols were brought in to block the passage between the Mongol forts. More than 20 miles of siege lines were built around Xiangyang and Fancheng on both sides of the Han River.

The Mongols and their Chinese engineers set up trebuchets and began firing incendiary clay bombs and exploding biochemical projectiles they had learned from the Jin at the siege of Beijing in 1215. The Song fired incendiary bombs and biochemical projectiles at the Mongols as well, causing great destruction and loss of life on both sides. The Mongols had to pull back after their wooden siege walls and trebuchets caught fire from the bombardments, leaving the Mongols with no cover, while the Song defenders took shelter behind the twin cities’ stout rock and masonry walls.

In 1269, Kublai Khan sent another 20,000 troops to replace those in the previous year’s fighting. More than 3,000 Song ships attacked the Mongol forts on the Han River in an effort to break the blockade, but 500 ships were sunk by Kublai Khan’s brilliant admiral Liu Cheng, who had defected to the Mongols. Mongol and Chinese troops clambered aboard the Song vessels and beheaded hundreds of Song soldiers and sailors.

The besieged Song tried several unsuccessful attempts to break out but were defeated each time with thousands of casualties. In 1271, 100 Song ships successfully broke through a boom across the Han River to bring 3,000 soldiers and much-needed supplies to reinforce Xiangyang. The siege dragged on with no real advantage for either side until Kublai Khan decided to send a Muslim engineer captured during the siege of Baghdad to China to build a giant 40-ton trebuchet that could hurl 220-pound projectiles more than 600 feet to breach the cities’ walls. After a few days, a breach was opened and Mongol troops stormed through to meet the Chinese defenders. For days, men fought and died in the vicious battle at the breach.

The Song were able to throw more soldiers into Fancheng to defend the breach from a pontoon bridge that connected Xiangyang across the Han River. The Mongols called off the assault on the breach and used their giant trebuchet to widen the breach and destroy the pontoon bridge. Incendiary bombs fired from the trebuchet struck the bridge and consumed it. With Fancheng cut off from reinforcements, the Mongols assaulted the widened breach. The disheartened defenders held on for several hours before resistance broke and the Mongols poured into the city and began massacring the inhabitants. The Mongols took the last 3,000 Song soldiers and 7,000 inhabitants to the walls facing Xiangyang and in full view slit the prisoners’ throats and threw them off the wall.

The Mongols then dismantled their giant trebuchet and repositioned it across the river facing Xiangyang. The first shot from the trebuchet forced a tower to collapse in a great crash as the Song inhabitants screamed in terror. Kublai Khan offered to spare the inhabitants and to reward the Song commander if he would surrender the city. Xiangyang was surrendered and the Song heartland was open to the Mongols. The siege had lasted from 1268 to 1273.

74 Years of Conquest

In 1274, the Mongols headed down the Han River, bypassing Song fortresses and emerging onto the flood plains of the Yangtze River. The Mongols now faced the impregnable fortress of Yang-lo. The Mongols sacrificed several thousand Chinese troops on a frontal attack on Yang-lo while most of the Mongol army, carrying a number of ships, bypassed the fort and crossed the river upstream. Then the Mongol and Chinese fleet came down the Yangtze and attacked the Song fleet from both front and behind. The Song boats were packed so close together on the river that incendiary bombs fired from Mongol catapults set much of the Song fleet on fire. Thousands perished in the flames. Fortress Yang-lo and the 100,000 cut-off Song troops surrendered the next day.

In 1275, Jia Sidao set out from the capital of Hangzhou at the head of 100,000 Song troops and another fleet of 2,500 ships in a last-ditch effort to stop the Mongol juggernaut. A massive cavalry and infantry battle took place on both sides of the river. The Mongols and their Chinese allies pushed back the Song army and boarded their ships from both ends of the river, beheading thousands of Song troops and capturing 2,000 ships. It was another overwhelming victory for the Mongols. Jia Sidao was later assassinated by a Song officer.

The city of Hangzhou refused an offer to surrender peacefully and was burned. As usual, the Mongols massacred the city’s inhabitants. On February 21, 1276, the boy emperor Zhao Xian came out of Hangzhou, bowed toward the north in obeisance to Kublai Khan, and turned over the capital and the rest of the Song Empire to the Mongols. The Mongol conquest of China had taken 74 years and claimed the lives of as many as 25 million Chinese from war, plague, and famine.

The ramifications of the Mongol conquest of China were felt for some time. The Ming, who overthrew the Mongols in 1368, became obsessed with improving and lengthening the Great Wall to close to 5,000 miles (including walls that backed up walls) to prevent another Mongol invasion of China. The Great Wall as it existed from the time of the Ming Dynasty was an expensive reaction to the Mongol conquest of China. In the end, the improved Great Wall did not save China. In 1644, a Mongol-like nation, the Manchu, conquered China and ruled the unhappy nation until 1911.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by Steven M. Johnson originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Flickr.