The National Interest

Warfare History Network, Michael D. Hull

Security, Africa

The Commandos learned their bitter lessons and went on to serve in many World War II campaigns as a peerless special force—mentoring the U.S. Rangers and setting an example for other elite assault units in the years to come.

Key Point: His mission on this particular night was a hazardous one—to locate the headquarters of the commander of the German forces in North Africa, the legendary General Erwin Rommel.

One night in mid-October 1941, a British Army intelligence officer disguised as a Senussi Arab was dropped by parachute behind the German lines in the Italian colony of Libya.

He was Captain John E. “Jock” Haselden of the famed Long-Range Desert Group (LRDG), a specialized British force led by Lt. Col. David Stirling that conducted reconnaissance patrols and hit-and-run raids against enemy installations in North Africa. Bearded and weather beaten, Haselden wore tattered Arab robes and carried a staff while venturing out alone on his intelligence-gathering forays. Born and raised in Egypt and a former Cairo cotton broker, he was fluent in Arabic.

His mission on this particular night was a hazardous one—to locate the headquarters of the commander of the German forces in North Africa, the legendary General Erwin Rommel. Haselden was to lay the groundwork for a bold attempt—tied to a major offensive by the British Eighth Army—to either capture or kill Rommel and his cantankerous Italian field commander, General Ettore Bastico. For several months, Rommel had proved to be a skillful and formidable foe by outwitting and outmaneuvering the British during the seesawing Western Desert campaigns.

Based on radio intercepts of German message traffic, “Sigint” (Signals Intelligence) at the British Middle Eastern Command headquarters in Cairo had come to the conclusion that a remote village named Beda Littoria in the northern Libyan hump was the probable site of Rommel’s headquarters.

After burying his parachute in the sand, Captain Haselden trudged to the outskirts of the dusty village a dozen miles south of the Mediterranean coast, west of Derna and not far from the site of the ancient city of Cyrene, the birthplace of Hannibal, to verify the Sigint information. Stealthily, he trained his field glasses on stuccoed Italian colonial buildings clustered in olive and cypress groves and groups of German troops.

Off to one side, Haselden could see a villa and an official building that the Italians called the Prefettura. Parked around it were about 20 Afrika Korps communications trucks, while a steady stream of vehicles disgorged and retrieved officers and dispatch riders. The British officer gasped when he spotted General Rommel striding out of the Prefettura and driving off in a command car. Haselden had hit the jackpot; apparently Beda Littoria was indeed the headquarters of the “Desert Fox.”

Haselden hastily stole away into the desert and linked up with a LRDG patrol two days later. He was whisked back to Cairo with his information, and plans and preparations were drawn up. By mounting a raid on Rommel’s headquarters, the British hoped to wreak chaos in the command system of the Afrika Korps and its Italian allies. The operation was likely to prove one of the most daring special force missions of World War II.

The British Commandos assigned to carry out the mission had come to the Mediterranean theater as part of the “Layforce” contingent led by Lt. Col. Robert E. “Lucky” Laycock, commander of Commando operations and the elite Special Boat Section there. One of his units was the 11th (Scottish) Commando, which had practiced night landings from submarines using rubber dinghies and lightweight canvas canoes called folbots.

The idea for the raid on Rommel’s headquarters 250 miles behind enemy lines had been formulated in the autumn of 1941 by temporary Lt. Col. Geoffrey Charles Tasker Keyes of the 11th Commando, the 24-year-old son of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes. A decorated hero of the Boxer Rebellion and the Zeebrugge and Dover naval actions in World War I, Sir Roger had been chosen by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to direct all Commando operations from Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations headquarters.

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A brave, competent officer and the youngest lieutenant colonel in the British Army, Keyes led the planning for the upcoming raid—code named Operation Flipper—and insisted on leading it personally. Simultaneous actions to support the November 16-17 British offensive codenamed Operation Crusader were to be undertaken by the LRDG and the Special Air Service. The initial objectives of the Laycock-Keyes force were to attack the Italian forces’ headquarters at Cyrene and destroy telephone and telegraph services; hit the Italian intelligence center at Appollonia; cut communication lines around El Faida, and assault the Afrika Korps headquarters at Beda Littoria and Rommel’s villa west of the village.

Colonel Laycock, himself a gallant veteran of special operations in Libya, Rhodes, and Crete who would later win the Distinguished Service Order and lead Commandos and U.S. Rangers in the invasion of Salerno, voiced reservations about the planned mission. A London-born former subaltern in the Royal Horse Guards, he reported, “I gave it my considered opinion that the chances of being evacuated after the operation were very slender, and that the attack on General Rommel’s house in particular appeared to be desperate in the extreme. This attack, even if initially successful, meant almost certain death for those who took part in it. I made these comments in the presence of Colonel Keyes, who begged me not to repeat them lest the operation be canceled.”

Laycock tried several times to persuade Keyes to detail a more junior officer to lead the raid, but he refused. “On each occasion,” said Laycock, “he flatly declined to consider these suggestions, saying that, as commander of his detachment, it was his privilege to lead his men into any danger that might be encountered—an answer which I consider [was] inspired by the highest traditions of the British Army…. Colonel Keyes’s outstanding bravery was not that of the unimaginative bravado who may be capable of spectacular action in moments of excitement, but that far more admirable calculated daring of one who knew only too well the odds against him.” Despite his misgivings, Laycock agreed to accompany the raiding force as an observer.

On the night of Thursday-Friday, November 13-14, 1941, after a three-day voyage from Alexandria, two 1,575-ton Royal Navy submarines, HMS Torbay and HMS Talisman, carrying 60 Commandos, stood off the coast of Djebel Akhdar, 20 miles west of Appollonia, Libya. Periscope observations were made of the planned landing area. From a small cove on the shore, Captain Haselden, who had been designated to guide the raiders to Rommel’s headquarters, sent a prearranged signal out to the submarines. As soon as his blinking lights were spotted, the vessels flashed back a recognition signal.

But things began to go wrong from the start. The Commandos had been trained to disembark from submarines in calm waters, but a gale was howling on the Libyan coast that night. Rough seas hampered the operation. Instead of the estimated 90 minutes, it took seven hours to get 28 men and Colonel Keyes, the operational commander, ashore from the slippery deck of the first submarine, the Torbay.

When the Talisman neared the shore to disembark her Commandos, she touched bottom. In the resulting turmoil, seven landing boats with 11 men were swept overboard. Several were never seen again. A few men managed to scramble ashore, but the Talisman withdrew with many members of the raiding force still aboard.

Early in the morning of November 14, Keyes assembled his men in Haselden’s cove, a dozen miles from Beda Littoria. All were wet, chilled to the bone, and critically short of vital weapons and equipment. The little force was considerably understrength for its mission. Keyes was furnished with directions and an Arab shepherd as his guide, while Haselden slipped away to get ready for the second part of his assignment—to blow up a German communications outpost on the same night that Keyes’s team hit Rommel’s headquarters.

Colonel Laycock, meanwhile, decreed that under the circumstances the Commandos’ objectives must be curtailed. It was agreed that only two of the four planned attacks would be undertaken—on the communications systems at Cyrene and the German headquarters at Beda Littoria. The plan to hit Rommel’s villa was dropped.

Laycock stayed at the landing site to coordinate operations while Keyes, Captain Robin Campbell, his second in command, and the 28 Commandos set off at nightfall on November 15 for a grueling trek to their objectives. Rain poured for 48 hours, and the raiders were soaked as they splashed through ankle-deep mud, slipped on greasy rocks, and picked their way over rock-strewn sheep tracks and a 1,800-foot ridge in the darkness. Their Arab guide refused to go farther as the weather deteriorated, and morale began to flag. But Keyes’s stolid resolve kept his men moving forward. By the night of November 16, the column had reached a small cave about five miles from Beda Littoria.

The Commandos spent the rest of the night and most of the following day there. Keyes stayed on the beach through the night to meet any men who might have managed to get ashore from the second submarine. The hideout was odorous and uncomfortable, but the raiders found shelter from the torrential rain and cold that had plagued them almost continually since coming ashore. They lit a fire to warm themselves and dry their clothing, cleaned their Sten submachine guns and .38-caliber pistols, and groused about the absence of the blazing sunshine that reputedly bathed the southern Mediterranean shore.

On the afternoon of November 17, Colonel Keyes made a short reconnaissance foray then briefed his men at 6 pm. He divided his small force in two, sending one half off to detonate a communications pylon near Cyrene while the rest listened to his detailed plan for the assault on Rommel’s headquarters. Then, with blackened faces and wearing plimsolls (sneakers), they set off on the final stage of their mission.

The raiders bided their time during the waning daylight hours and moved forward in darkness to a ridge just above Beda Littoria. Pushing on, they reached the outskirts of the village around midnight and crept forward stealthily toward the German headquarters in the Preffetura, an austere, two-story building standing away from the main village. Keyes and Sergeant Terry were in the lead, about 50 yards ahead.

Suddenly, one of the Commandos tripped over a tin can, setting off frenzied barking from neighborhood dogs and a scream from an Arab villager. When two Italian soldiers emerged from a hut to investigate, the quick-thinking Captain Campbell shouted to them in fluent German that they were an Afrika Korps patrol. The disgruntled Italians went back into their hut.

By this time, Colonel Keyes had cut through the wire surrounding the headquarters building. The rain that had hampered his men now yielded a dividend, confining the enemy sentries to their tents, except one. Keyes dispatched him quietly with his fighting knife, and the rest of the force joined him, carrying enough explosives to wreck both the Prefettura and a nearby power plant.

With a covering party blocking the approaches to the building and guarding the exits from neighboring structures, Keyes, Campbell, Sergeant Terry, and three other ranks crept forward through the security fence. But the mission was about to turn into a fiasco. Keyes, Campbell, and Terry planned to sneak into the Nazi headquarters. Keyes hoped to climb through a window or find a back door but a quick investigation revealed no easy access. So the raiders took the bull by the horns.

Captain Campbell pounded on the front door and demanded entry in his fluent German. When a sentry eventually opened the door, Keyes jammed his revolver in the startled soldier’s ribs. But the brave, well-trained German grabbed the muzzle and backed Keyes against a wall. The colonel struggled to draw his knife while the enemy soldier shouted an alarm. The element of surprise was lost. Campbell shot the struggling German over Keyes’s shoulder, and the colonel flung the door open.

The six British raiders dashed inside, and the next few minutes brought a chaos of Sten-gun and pistol fire, shouts of anguish and alarm, slamming doors, and running feet on stone steps. A duty officer had aroused sleeping Germans. A man came clattering down the stairs, but Sergeant Terry chased him off with a burst from his Sten gun.

The raiders checked one of many rooms off the main hall and found it empty. Then a door on the left side of the hall started to open. A light shone inside, and the Commandos could hear the occupants moving about. Keyes kicked the door open wide to see about 10 Germans in helmets frozen in shock. After the colonel emptied his Colt .45 automatic pistol into the room, Campbell appeared at his elbow and said he would toss a hand grenade in. Keyes shut the door while Campbell pulled the pin, reopened it, and the grenade and a burst of Sten-gun fire went in.

The grenade exploded with a loud crash, but some of the surviving Germans fired back at the raiders. A single shot hit Keyes just above the heart. Campbell and Terry quickly carried him outside, and he died within a few minutes. An eerie silence then fell upon the Prefettura and every light went out.

Captain Campbell stole back into the house to check for further signs of enemy activity and then ran around to the rear of the building where the covering party had been left. The Commandos were there, crouching in the darkness, but they heard no password and thought that Campbell was a German. A Sten gun round smashed his shin bone. He ordered his men to withdraw and leave him behind. The raiding party was left without an officer.

Sergeant Terry took over. He brought up enough explosives to demolish the Prefettura but discovered that the fuses were rain-soaked and unusable. The only damage that the raiders could inflict now was by dropping a grenade down the breather pipe and blowing up the main generator and by destroying some Afrika Korps vehicles. Terry and the other survivors then withdrew, hoping that the enemy would tend their wounded. Several Commandos had been captured by Germans alerted to their assault.

By the following evening of November 18, the 22 survivors reached Colonel Laycock at the shore. Then followed several frustrating hours while their signals to HMS Torbay—surfaced 400 yards out—were unacknowledged. Belated return signals to the exhausted Commandos were incomprehensible, and no boats came in to fetch them. So, just before dawn the following morning, Laycock and the survivors filed into a wadi to lay low for the day and plan how to get to the British lines. But hostile Arabs and then Italian troops attacked them. Laycock ordered the men to split into small groups and disperse before an inevitable and more serious assault came from the Germans.

All of the Commandos except two were eventually seized by the Germans or shot by Arabs. Colonel Campbell was carried off to a German prison camp, where he was well treated but had to have his shattered leg amputated.

Colonel Laycock and Sergeant Terry managed to get clear of the wadi and spent 41 wearying days trekking across the desert toward the Eighth Army lines. They were given food by friendly Senussi tribesmen, and water was not a problem because it rained almost every day. They reached the British lines on Christmas Day. Captain Haselden also managed to get away from the wadi and linked up with an LRDG patrol. After a rest, Laycock was flown back to England to take command of the Special Service Brigade. The intrepid Haselden, who had been promoted to lieutenant colonel, was killed in a raid on Tobruk in September 1942.

Operation Crusader, the big offensive by Lt. Gen. Sir Alan Cunningham’s Eighth Army for which the Keyes raid was a diversion, had meanwhile got underway. One hundred thousand men, more than 700 Cruiser and Matilda tanks, and 5,000 artillery units, armored cars, trucks, and personnel carriers rolled forward during the weekend of November 16-17.

A masterpiece of deception, Crusader was a wide-scale armored sweep toward besieged Tobruk from the south while British Commonwealth infantry forces pinned down Axis positions on the Libya-Egypt frontier. The Afrika Korps and its Italian allies were driven back to Benghazi with severe losses, and the British kept up the pressure through December.

Rommel was forced to abandon Cyrenaica, the eastern province of Libya, and fall back to defensive positions at El Agheila. But the Desert Fox quickly recovered. The gallant General Cunningham, who had defeated the Italians in Ethiopia but who lacked a grasp of armored warfare, suffered a nervous breakdown. He was soon replaced by the vigorous, self-confident Lt. Gen. Sir Neil Ritchie. From Operation Crusader until the climactic Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, the desert war continued to rage back and forth.

While it was a daring operation carried out with heroism, the raid on Rommel’s headquarters had turned into a costly and unnecessary disaster. British intelligence was correct that the Prefettura in Beda Littoria had been used by the general, but only briefly. It was only by chance that Captain Haselden had spotted him there; Rommel was making a routine visit to the Afrika Korps quartermaster general’s staff, which had taken over the building.

The Desert Fox had long since shifted his lair to a location much closer to the front lines. In fact, and unknown at the British intelligence offices in Cairo, Rommel was not even in North Africa at the time of the raid. He had been flown to Rome two weeks before to rest and celebrate his 50th birthday.

Toward the British raiders who had sought to capture or kill him, Rommel reacted with characteristic chivalry. He defied Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s newly issued directive ordering the immediate execution of captured Commandos and arranged for Colonel Keyes to be buried with full honors. The German general’s chaplain conducted the ceremony as Keyes was laid to rest beside four Afrika Korps soldiers killed in the raid. Rommel gave a funeral oration and, in an unprecedented soldierly gesture, pinned his own Iron Cross on the Briton’s body.

The young colonel was subsequently gazetted on June 19, 1942, and awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest decoration for valor. A memorial service in London’s Westminster Abbey was attended by some of the Commandos who had survived the doomed raid. Colonel Keyes’s remains were later reburied at the Eighth Army cemetery in Benghazi.

The raid served to point up flaws in the training and tactics of British Special Forces units. Eighteen months after the raising of the Commandos, and despite the fighting spirit displayed in Beda Littoria, there was still much to be learned. Inadequate planning and faulty intelligence were stressed as the Combined Operations chiefs critiqued the mission.

The Commandos learned their bitter lessons and went on to serve in many World War II campaigns as a peerless special force—mentoring the U.S. Rangers and setting an example for other elite assault units in the years to come.

Frequent contributor Michael D. Hull has written on numerous topics for WWII History. He resides in Enfield, Connecticut.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by Michael D. Hull originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Warfare History Network

Security, Eurasia

The Soviets lost nearly their entire navy, and therefore the whole war, at Tallinn.

Key Point: 

Early in World War II, a bitter joke circulated within the Soviet military. It ran, “What is the first thing Russia does when war is declared? It scuttles the fleet!” The joke referred to sad events in Russian naval history. In 1855, after the Crimean War, Russia lost the right to maintain a fleet in the Black Sea, and in 1904-1905 during the disastrous Russo-Japanese War, Russia lost two out of its three fleets. In 1941, the Soviet Union, born out of old Imperial Russia’s ashes, almost lost its Baltic Fleet.

Containing the Soviet Fleet

In 1940, without firing a shot, the Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland. Along with territorial acquisition, this move was a major coup in projecting Soviet naval presence westward. Besides taking in the tiny navies and merchant marine fleets of the three states, the Soviet Red Banner Baltic Fleet acquired a number of important naval bases on the Baltic Sea. Chief among them was Tallinn, capital of Estonia and a major port city. A chain of several other bases, including a large one at Riga, the Latvian capital, extended farther west along the coast.

On June 22, 1941, mutual expansionist policies inevitably brought Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union into armed conflict. Lacking capital ships in the Gulf of Finland, which rated a low priority, the German Marinekommando Nord fleet consisted mainly of torpedo boats, minesweepers, and submarine flotillas, augmented by the small but skilled Finnish Navy. In contrast, its opponent, the vastly superior Soviet Baltic Fleet, was composed of two battleships, four cruisers, and 15 destroyers plus numerous smaller craft and submarines.

The rapid pace of the German invasion of the Soviet Union took the Soviet High Command by surprise. As German troops briskly pressed eastward through the Baltic States, the Soviet naval bases began falling like dominoes. The escaping Soviet naval vessels were being pushed farther east into the Gulf of Finland. By mid-August 1941, Tallinn had become the westernmost Soviet naval base on the Baltic Sea.

Just days before hostilities began, the German Kriegsmarine and its Finnish allies had begun laying extensive minefields in strategic locations in the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Germans and Finns relied heavily on mines to negate the Soviet advantage and to protect their own shipping lanes. East of Tallinn, in the immediate vicinity of Cape Juminda, was a heavily mined area of the Gulf of Finland. This major minefield was designed to interdict Soviet operations between their Kronstadt base on Kotlin Island near Leningrad and the rest of the Baltic Sea. Overall, more than 2,000 mines were in place in Juminda waters.

From the opening of hostilities, the Soviet Navy lost the initiative despite its numerical and qualitative superiority. Its losses began to mount steadily, mainly falling prey to mines. Hardly a day went by without a ship sunk, often with all hands. Aggressively led German and Finnish light forces effectively cowed the Soviet naval presence in the Baltic.

On the landward side, Red Army forces were led by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who possessed the highest Soviet military rank but was not a capable military tactician. His paramount attribute was complete political reliability and unquestioning obedience to the instructions of Premier Josef Stalin. Despite his best efforts, Voroshilov was completely unable to shore up his crumbling front.

Driving toward Leningrad, German Army Group North brushed aside the Soviet Eighth Army, the closest Soviet formation to Tallinn. No plans to defend the city from a land-based attack were prepared before the war, and it was too late now. On July 22, the Germans struck at the juncture of the X and XI Rifle Corps of the Eighth Army. As a result of this action, the X Rifle Corps was cut off from the rest of the army and fell back to the vicinity of Tallinn. On August 5, the Germans cut the Tallinn-Leningrad railroad and reached the coast of the Gulf of Finland. Tallinn now lay 200 miles behind the German lines.

The Defense of Tallinn

Responsibility for defending the city and the naval base fell to the commander of the Baltic Sea Fleet, Admiral Vladimir F. Tributs. The Red Army forces available for defense were woefully insufficient, consisting mainly of the depleted X Rifle Corps and the 22nd NKVD (Secret Police) Division, which had performed guard and escort duties in the Baltic states before the war, shuttling prisoners to the horrific gulags.

To supplement the Army troops, any sailors who could be spared from the ships were formed into naval infantry detachments to fight on land. In addition, all naval shore facilities were swept of nonessential personnel, and they were placed in naval infantry detachments as well. These measures produced more than 10,000 sailors to bolster the city’s defenses. Additionally, several militia regiments totaling close to 4,000 Latvian and Estonian communists and volunteers joined the defenders. There was no time to train the sailors and militia units in infantry skills, and they suffered appalling casualties in the subsequent fighting. Initially, there were not enough rifles to arm them, and the weapons had to be flown in from Kronstadt.

Because of the weakness of the ground forces, artillery became the backbone of Tallinn’s defenses. Ships anchored in Tallinn’s harbor provided fire support for ground units. Numerous naval spotter teams were placed with the ground units to facilitate fire control, but frequent communication difficulties made the massive naval gunfire often ineffective. Still, on many occasions, all that prevented German breakthroughs was the tremendous volume of fire provided by the cruiser Kirovand her destroyer escorts. Additional fire support came from large-caliber shore batteries, some mounting 305mm guns.

As the Germans came closer and closer, the Red Air Force lost its airfields as well, with most of the surviving aircraft flying east where they joined in the defense of Leningrad. A small number of older Ilyushin I-16 fighters belonging to the Soviet Navy continued operating for a time from a tiny landing strip jammed between a fishing village and the water’s edge. Eventually, they followed their Air Force counterparts eastward, and Tallinn was left without air support.

On August 21, the Germans breached the defenses of the city itself. Despite valiant efforts, the dwindling Soviet forces could not hold them back. Tallinn’s harbor was now within range of German field artillery, and Soviet ships began taking hits. This caused the ships to frequently change positions, reducing the effectiveness of their fire and further weakening the land defenses.

The Red Army Evacuates

Despite the gravity of their situation, nobody at the headquarters of the Baltic Sea Fleet, including Admiral Tributs, dared to ask Voroshilov for permission to evacuate the city. Punishment for being labeled a “panic-monger” was very real, often carrying the death penalty. Finally, on August 25, Tributs went over Voroshilov’s head and submitted a carefully phrased request for instructions to Chief of the Navy Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov. The last portion of the report stated, “The harbors and piers are under enemy fire. The Military Council … is requesting your instructions and decisions concerning the ships, units of the 10th Corps and fleet shore defenses in case of enemy breakthrough into town itself and the pullback of our forces to the sea. Embarkation on transports in this eventuality would be impossible.” Tributs’s concern mirrored Admiral Kuznetsov’s own misgivings, and he took this matter directly to the high command. After much deliberation, permission to evacuate Tallinn and break through to Kronstadt was finally granted late on the evening of August 26.

With permission granted, the Soviets began frantic planning for the evacuation of over 200 ships and close to 40,000 military personnel and civilians. The ships gathered in Tallinn’s harbor were a hodgepodge of both warships and support vessels ranging in size from massive civilian passenger liners converted into transports to the heavy cruiser Kirov, destroyers, submarines, and tugboats.

Fortunately, while waiting for final orders, senior Soviet commanders had already put together contingency plans for evacuation. Now these plans had to be finalized and last-minute corrections made. At the same time, special teams began destroying military equipment that could not be evacuated. The city’s utilities and other infrastructure were also rendered inoperable to deny their use to the enemy.

Three Routes of Retreat

There were three routes of retreat to Kronstadt through the Gulf of Finland, which is only 20 nautical miles wide in some places. The northern route, close to the Finnish shore and under the enemy air support umbrella, was immediately ruled unacceptable even though it was almost completely free of mines. According to intelligence reports that the British government passed on to its Soviet allies, there were no German capital ships in the Baltic Sea or the Gulf of Finland. Lacking their own intelligence sources, the Soviet commanders still classified the British reports as unconfirmed and unreliable. Without any concrete data about the German surface fleet, Soviet admirals allowed for the possibility of German warships attempting to interfere with the run to Kronstadt.

The southern route would have taken the fleet along almost 200 miles of coastline occupied by German forces. Orders arrived from Voroshilov’s headquarters expressly forbidding Tributs to evacuate his fleet along this route. Ostensibly, these categorical instructions stemmed from the fact that this route would expose the fleet to treacherous and shallow waters and fire from German shore batteries. Several senior officers headed by Rear Admiral Yuriy F. Rall argued that this channel already had been successfully navigated by more than 200 ships. German artillery fire that could be brought to bear on the fleet would be conducted mainly by field artillery, easily countered by the heavier and more numerous guns of the Soviet naval vessels. Even a shore battery mounting 150mm guns captured by Germans at Cape Juminda was no threat to the Soviet ships.

The real reason for denying the southern route was Soviet mistrust of the Latvian and Estonian crews of numerous transports carrying evacuees and equipment. This paranoia was fed for two reasons. There was an incident in which a converted transport captained and crewed largely by Estonian civilian sailors had been intentionally run aground on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland so that the crew could defect to the Germans. It was also feared that the crews of Soviet naval vessels, given an opportunity, might defect to the Germans.

Therefore, the Soviet high command ordered the evacuation from Tallinn to proceed along the middle route, even though it was thickly sown with German and Finnish mines. The Germans and Finns had been mining the waters of the middle route even before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Axis sailors had been amazed at the apparent Soviet passivity.

Planning the Evacuation

The mission was made further hazardous by the dearth of minesweeping vessels. Obsessed with powerful warships, the Soviet shipbuilding industry had severely neglected the production of support vessels, and the Soviet Navy entered the war with a pronounced shortage of minesweeping capability. To further aggravate the problem, those minesweepers that were available were often used in capacities for which they were not designed, especially as transport ships. Admiral Rall and his staff estimated that almost 100 minesweepers would be necessary to adequately lead the Baltic Fleet during the breakout from Tallinn. Instead, only 10 modern minesweepers were available. They were supplemented by 17 older and slower converted trawlers and a dozen converted Navy cutters.

This small number of minesweepers was tasked with the gargantuan responsibility of shepherding more than 200 vessels to safety. The civilian transports, including 22 large ones, were divided into four convoys, each closely guarded by a few small naval vessels and led by older trawler minesweepers. The naval force was split into three elements: the main force, the covering force, and the rear guard. Ten modern minesweepers were allocated five each to lead the first two combat elements, particularly safeguarding the Kirov.

According to plan, the civilian and military convoys were to leave Tallinn on a staggered schedule. The Soviets were well aware of the danger posed to the convoys by mines off Cape Juminda, and they developed a schedule to allow the ships to traverse the minefields during daylight hours.

The evacuation route was divided into two portions, from Tallinn to Gogland Island, roughly in the middle of Gulf of Finland, and from Gogland to Kronstadt. The first section presented the most danger because of the minefields off Cape Juminda and the lack of air cover. Reaching Gogland Island by nightfall, the fleet would be within range of air cover based at Leningrad and Kronstadt. In addition, a task force of ships from Kronstadt was organized and stationed at Gogland to assist in any rescue and recovery efforts.

The whole operation would require very careful timing. Under relentless German pressure, Soviet ground units were barely holding the line on the outskirts of Tallinn. Admiral Tributs and his staff realized that some of these troops would have to be sacrificed and abandoned to fight hopeless rearguard actions, allowing the majority of forces to embark aboard ships. To avoid a panicked retreat to the harbor, the forward units were not informed about the pullback until the afternoon of August 27. Barricades were erected in the streets for the last-ditch defense. But as they observed NKVD troops manning barricades, many people came to realize that the barricades went up not to halt the Germans but to prevent a panicked rush to the harbor.

Chaos at the Pier

By 8 pm, the withdrawal began in earnest under a protective barrage of naval gunfire. Instead of an orderly retreat, the embarkation immediately deteriorated into complete chaos. The Soviet defenders could no longer hold back the Germans, who continually shelled the harbor. Several transport ships, with shells falling around them, were forced to leave their embarkation stations without picking up their designated units and evacuees.

Crowds of soldiers, sailors, and civilians were surging back and forth along the piers, storming the gangways of waiting transports. People were trampled underfoot in the maddened rush to the ships. The scene was punctuated by exploding German artillery shells and backlit by the burning city. “The whole town appeared to be engulfed in flames; burning and exploding,” recalled Admiral Tributs in his memoirs.

While several transports cast off largely empty, the majority of vessels were overcrowded. Writer Nikolai G. Mikhailovskiy, attached to the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet, recalled, “The staterooms are filled to overflowing. People are standing, sitting and lying down in the narrow corridors and on decks. Many, coming off line after sleepless nights, settled on deck. One had to step over them in order to get from one point to another … The whole shore is aflame. It is strange that during a bright sunny day the harbors are darkened by smoke. Signals relayed by flags are impossible to see. The searchlights shine brightly. Only they can penetrate this incredible darkness.”

As the transports filled up, they cast off and slowly moved to their staging areas off Naissar and Aegna Islands across the bay from Tallinn. In many cases, people desperate to get aboard continued clinging to the gangways, often forcing the crews to cut the gangways in order to get clear of the pier. Over 23,000 troops, including more than 4,000 wounded and several thousand civilian evacuees, were taken aboard. Despite Vice Admiral Yuriy A. Panteleyev’s claim in his memoirs that not a single platoon was abandoned to the enemy, almost 10,000 more men were left behind on Tallinn’s piers.

The wind continued picking up throughout August 27, creating choppy seas and further exacerbating the chaotic embarkation. Because of these delays, the first convoy did not sail until noon on August 28, a full 12 hours behind schedule. The naval and civilian convoys stretched in a line more than 15 miles long. Owing to deployed minesweeps, which required slow speeds to be effective, the convoys crept along at under 10 knots.

Bombs from the Air, Bombs in the Sea

Things quickly began to go wrong. Less than one hour into the voyage and several miles east of Aegna Island, one of the minesweeping trawlers leading the first convoy hit a mine and disappeared under the waves within seconds. The appearance of a mine in waters considered to be safe shocked everyone. The most likely explanation for this tragedy was that the heavy winds and waves generated by the previous night’s storm tore loose the moorings of a mine and the gulf’s current carried it into the midst of the Soviet ships. This loss was the forewarning of swarms of loose mines that were to plague the Soviet convoys for the next two days.

Undeterred, the convoy sailed on. German bombers appeared overhead and cautiously attacked the strung-out convoys. The Soviet Navy ships, spaced along the line of civilian transports, put up a spirited antiaircraft barrage and managed to keep the German planes at bay for a time.

Around 6 pm, the first civilian convoy arrived off Cape Juminda and its minefields. The nightmare began. At 6:05, a large explosion went up at the head of the convoy. The transport Ella, a passenger ship converted into a military transport, hit a mine and began to sink. The tugboat S-101, following in her wake and herself overloaded with evacuees, moved in to assist and hit a mine as well, virtually disintegrating. Of more than 1,000 passengers and crew aboard Ella, most of them wounded, fewer than 100 people were subsequently rescued. No one was saved from S-101.

German aircraft now renewed their attacks. Shortly after Ella went down, the icebreaker Voldemarswas hit by a bomb and sunk with significant loss of life. The large transport Vironia, a converted liner, was damaged by two near misses. Its upper decks, thickly packed with evacuees, were swept by steel fragments, tossing people aside in disfigured heaps and throwing overboard many passengers, both alive and dead. The rescue vessel Saturn moved in and took the damaged transport in tow. Several minesweepers, desperately attempting to keep the 200-meter channel clear, hit mines themselves and went down in quick succession.

Under relentless air attacks, Soviet ships were forced to maneuver to avoid the bombs. This compelled them to leave the narrow channel cleared by the minesweepers. Several naval vessels went down as if chasing each other to the bottom of the gulf. One of them was Saturn, leaving the practically immobile Vironia bobbing in the water.

Around 6:30, with the Soviet convoys floundering in the minefields in full view of Cape Juminda, a German battery, well-camouflaged in the wooded terrain, opened fire on the Soviet ships. However, its 150mm guns were no match for the ships’ heavier armament. One of the destroyers closed in and laid down a thick smoke screen, while Kirov replied with several volleys of its nine 180mm main guns. It was unknown whether the German battery was destroyed, but it fell silent.

More Casualties to Mines

There was no safety anywhere. Just before 10 pm, the submarine S-5, closely following Kirov on the surface, hit a mine and disappeared under the waves. Shortly thereafter, Kirov caught a mine in the right paravane, forcing the cruiser to stop. While a welder was lowered almost to the water’s surface to cut loose the metal pole with a torch, another mine became entangled in the left paravane. Valuable time was lost cutting loose and replacing both paravanes. While this was going on, the destroyer Gordiy, escorting the cruiser, hit a mine and lost mobility. It was eventually able to get moving again and limped to Kronstadt on its own.

Shortly after Gordiy was damaged, the venerable Yakov Sverdlov, originally commissioned in 1913 as Novik and lending its name to a class of destroyers, went down. Enjoying a distinguished combat record in World War I, this ship held a special place in Tributs’s heart as the only vessel the admiral had ever commanded. He witnessed the Sverdlov’s demise from Kirov’s bridge: “At 20:47 hours, suddenly a column of fire and smoke 200-250 meters high burst out from under Yakov Sverdlov’s body and settled down hissing, burying the surviving crew members … only several dozens of men were saved.”

As more and more ships sank or became disabled, the convoys lost cohesion and became intermingled. Naval detachments, moving on a nearly parallel course to the civilian convoys, often passed by the vulnerable and defenseless transports without providing fire support for them.

In the gathering darkness, lookouts were posted on the ships’ bows to spot mines. At about 10 pm, a mine exploded near the destroyer Minsk, the flagship of Rear Admiral Pantelyev. The explosion reverberated through the destroyer, bursting seams in multiple compartments and leaving the vessel inoperable. Pantelyev ordered another destroyer, the Skoriy, to render assistance. The majority of Pantelyev’s staff officers transferred to the other destroyer. Skoriy hardly had time to cast off and attempt to take Minsk in tow before also striking a mine, breaking in two, and sinking in front of stunned onlookers.

The slaughter continued. The frigate Tsiklon went down, falling prey to a mine. Only 15 minutes after Skoriy was lost, another destroyer, Slavniy, was soon damaged but remained afloat and continued moving under its own power. Shortly thereafter, the destroyer Kalinin, with Rear Admiral Rall aboard, hit a mine and began slowly sinking. As the destroyer Volodarskiy was transferring wounded crewmen from the Kalinin, it hit a mine as well and went under. Admiral Rall, suffering from a concussion, was taken aboard a cutter. The destroyer Artyom also went down.

The toll of noncombatant vessels was also high. The damaged transport Vironia hit a mine and sank. Even a near miss from an exploding bomb would create havoc on ships overflowing with evacuees. The fate of immobilized wounded men, swathed in bandages and plaster and often trapped below decks in compartments blazing with fire or filling with icy water, was particularly terrifying. The ships of the first civilian convoy experienced particularly heavy casualties.

The Convoy Recuperates

As the convoys doggedly continued eastward, many of them had to navigate through floating debris fields and spreading oil slicks of destroyed and damaged vessels. In many instances, unable to stop, they mowed under the survivors bobbing in the water among dead bodies. Whenever possible, though, every effort was extended to rescue the survivors. Still, hundreds perished, succumbing to wounds and exposure. Hundreds more were plucked from sure death in cold water, desperately clinging to whatever pieces of debris that would float. In one truly miraculous instance, a sailor was rescued after clinging to a floating mine for hours.

Throughout the day there were multiple false sightings of German submarines. Every time a phantom periscope was spotted on the surface, one or two destroyers or sub chasers would dart out and drop depth charges. Despite multiple claims by Soviet eyewitnesses, no German submarine operated in the area at the time.

Worried about attacks by German and Finnish torpedo boats as well, the Soviet ships twice opened fire on a group of unidentified small vessels racing toward the fleet. Because of the lack of coordination and communication, the torpedo boats thought to be enemy vessels turned out to be a Soviet detachment returning from screening and scouting north of the main channel. The friendly fire incident resulted in one Soviet torpedo boat taking a direct hit and disintegrating.

With darkness falling, it became impossible to navigate the mine-studded waters, and Admiral Tributs ordered all ships to halt where they were. Even though this went against accepted naval doctrine, the halt at least eliminated the possibility of ships running into stationary mines. German aircraft disappeared with nightfall as well, and now the only danger lay with floating mines cast adrift in the waves. On most ships men lined up along the sides, armed with poles for pushing away the mines. In many cases volunteers took turns jumping into the water to guide the mines away from the ships with their bare hands.

During the halt, almost no crewmen were able to rest. Those not directly standing watch or dealing with floating mines were frantically conducting whatever repairs they could. Small cutters darted from ship to ship assessing damage. The scope of the disaster began to take shape. The destroyer force, representing the bulk of Tributs’s naval contingent, was cut in half. Admiral Rall’s rearguard force ceased to exist, and he was injured. Of the main force, only one destroyer and one frigate still accompanied the Kirov. Even worse, a significant number of the priceless minesweepers had been lost.

Abandoning the Transports

At dawn on August 29, good weather meant the return of marauding German bombers. Having moved clear of the minefields, the naval vessels, now unencumbered by mine sweeps and paravanes, raced ahead at more than 20 knots. Around 5 pm, Kirov’s group arrived at Kronstadt. Its hasty departure left the virtually defenseless transports at the mercy of German aircraft, which appeared around 7 am.

While significant numbers of German planes pursued the departing warships, especially concentrating on Kirov’s group, the majority of Luftwaffe aircraft fell upon the defenseless civilian transports. Beset by German dive-bombers, most transport captains gave up any hope of reaching Kronstadt. At most, they hoped to reach Gogland Island and disgorge their human cargo before German bombs could send them to the bottom of the gulf.

Shortly before 8 am, the large transport Kazakhstan, loaded with almost 5,000 soldiers and civilian evacuees, was damaged by bombs. Its captain, N. Kalitaev, was tossed overboard by the shockwave. Severe panic ensued aboard, with people jumping into the water. After heroic efforts, however, the crew of the transport managed to make minimal repairs and keep the ship afloat. After being thrown overboard and suffering a concussion, Kalitaev was rescued by a submarine and delivered to Kronstadt on the evening of August 29, a full day before Kazakhstan limped in. Arrested by the NKVD and accused of cowardice and abandoning his post, Kalitaev was promptly shot despite multiple testimonies of his innocence.

Under a rain of German bombs, the transports continued their race to Gogland. On many ships the soldiers desperately attempted to keep German aircraft at bay with rifle and pistol fire. As the hours ticked by, transport losses mounted to include Naissaar, Ergonautis, Balkhash, Tobol, Ausma, Kalpaks, Evald, Atis Kronvaldis, Skrunda, and Alev.

Several damaged transports managed to limp to Gogland and run themselves aground, disembarking their passengers. German aircraft easily found the immobile transports and finished them off. By the end of the day the burned-out hulks of transports Vtoraya Pyatiletka, Ivan Papanin, Lake Lucerne, and floating workshop Serp-i-Molot smoked on Gogland’s beaches. Still, despite tragic losses, more than 12,000 people were offloaded on Gogland Island and eventually shuttled to Kronstadt and Leningrad. But before they were taken off the island, German aircraft made several low-level passes, strafing the survivors with machine guns and dropping bombs. Scores of people who thought themselves safe died on this tiny speck of land.

As the transports were being pounded into oblivion by German aircraft, scores of smaller vessels slipped by Gogland Island and headed to Kronstadt. They continued the struggle until the afternoon of August 30. The Tallinn breakout was over.

A Success or a Disaster?

Events at Tallinn were comparable to the Allied evacuation of Dunkirk over a year earlier. At Dunkirk, 338,000 Allied soldiers escaped the Germans. This was accomplished under British air cover and over a much shorter distance, 20 miles compared with 200 at Tallinn.

The results of the Tallinn breakout are disputed as simultaneously a success and a disaster. Despite the loss of more than 11,000 evacuees, including roughly 3,000 civilians, almost 17,000 people, mostly evacuated ground troops, reached Leningrad and joined in the defense of the city. The Kirov was saved, along with the destroyers Minsk and Leningrad. Of the original 10 destroyers, five were lost, mostly of the old Novik class. The guns mounted on Kirov and the destroyers assisted in the defense of Leningrad, and the majority of the smaller naval vessels made it back as well. The real losses were among the civilian vessels, with more than 40 of them, including 19 large transports, sunk.

The Soviet government offered little official comment about the events. To this day, virtually no declassified information exists on the evacuation of Tallinn.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by Victor J. Kamenir originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Dan Goure

M1 Abrams, Europe

Helping frontline nations such as Poland acquire the means to operate as a stand-in force is of vital importance to the Alliance’s deterrence mission.

NATO’s 2021 summit in Brussels came and went without much fanfare, largely overshadowed by the Biden-Putin meeting that immediately followed. Yet significant steps were taken with respect to enhancing the Alliance’s security. Chief among these was a clear statement by the Biden administration of its support for NATO. Washington also reaffirmed the importance of the Article V commitment to respond to an attack on one Alliance member as an attack on all.

The summit’s communique stated the Alliance’s determination to strengthen and modernize the NATO force structure both now and, in the future, to ensure deterrence. In addition, the communique put members on record that they would build a flexible, agile, and resilient force architecture “with the right forces in the right place at the right time.”

But for what contingencies? While the NATO summit discussed a range of threats to allies’ security, it made clear that the primary focus of NATO’s deterrence and defense mission was Russia. In this context, the communique noted the significant growth of the military threat Moscow poses to the free and democratic nations of Europe.

“We reaffirm our commitment to respond in a measured, balanced, coordinated, and timely way to Russia’s growing and evolving array of conventional and nuclear-capable missiles, which is increasing in scale and complexity and which poses significant risks from all strategic directions to security and stability across the Euro-Atlantic area,” the communique stated. “We will continue to implement a coherent and balanced package of political and military measures to achieve Alliance objectives, including strengthened integrated air and missile defence; advanced defensive and offensive conventional capabilities.”

The 2021 summit also reaffirmed the importance of NATO 2030, the Allies’ plan to ensure that NATO remains strong politically, militarily, and technologically through the next decade. Recognizing that more than strong words were necessary, the members directed the secretary-general to make concrete proposals for implementing a more robust capability to respond to a range of threats.

In response to this directive, the secretary-general commissioned a Reflection Group in 2019 to propose concrete actions that the Alliance could undertake to meet objectives identified in the NATO 2030 document. The Reflection Group called on the Alliance to focus its military investments on portions of Alliance territory under threat from Russia. In particular, it concluded that NATO should do more to strengthen defenses along its eastern flank. In its final report, the Reflection Group recommended that “NATO must maintain adequate conventional and nuclear military capabilities and possess the agility and flexibility to confront aggression across the Alliance’s territory, including where Russian forces are either directly or indirectly active, particularly on NATO’s eastern flank (emphasis added). Non-U.S. Allies need to step up their efforts to ensure that their financial commitments and military contributions match NATO’s strategic needs and can deliver an effective balance between U.S. commitments and the development of other Allies’ capabilities.”

NATO has taken important steps to strengthen its capabilities along its eastern flank to deter Russian aggression. The presence of NATO forces in the area has been enhanced by the deployment of multi-national groups in frontline nations. Notably, fighter aircraft from different NATO countries are providing routine air policing above the Baltic states.

The United States has significantly enhanced its military presence along the eastern flank, including around the Baltic and Black Seas. In November 2020, Warsaw and Washington signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement that provided for the stationing of U.S. forces and military equipment on Polish territory. These include the rotational presence of an armored brigade combat team (ABCT), prepositioned stock for an additional ABCT, key enablers such as long-range fires and drones, and the forward element of the newly reactivated V Corps.

NATO members on the front line with Russia—the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania—have taken concerted steps to enhance their capabilities to confront the threat posed by improving Russian conventional forces. The Baltic states and Poland have each met or exceeded the NATO defense spending goal of two percent of their GDP. All have sought to replace their aging Soviet-era equipment with modern Western systems that also provide enhanced interoperability.  

Poland, the keystone to the defense of NATO’s eastern flank, has undertaken a long-term, multi-billion-dollar program to modernize its military. Poland has acquired the Patriot air and missile defense systems and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System long-range rocket artillery platform. Most recently, it signed a contract for fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets.

U.S. and NATO forces along the eastern flank are the equivalent of the stand-in force Commandant David Berger envisions for the U.S. Marine Corps. They will be operating from the start of a conflict within the engagement zones of Russian long-range anti-access and area denial capabilities. They must be able to withstand an initial blow, slow down the advance of Russian forces, and strike critical targets.

To pose the kind of deterrent that would dissuade Russia from military adventurism, Poland needs to finish modernizing the remainder of its tank fleet before Russia can achieve an overwhelming advantage in conventional forces. Poland’s army still operates some five  hundred obsolete Russian-designed tanks that are more than thirty years old. The Biden administration should encourage and support a Polish effort to acquire the M1 Abrams tank.

This action would have several benefits. First, it would substantially improve Poland’s capabilities for high-end heavy combat. When it comes to conventional war, even in the twenty-first century, tanks matter. Second, it would send a further signal to Moscow that Washington intends to back up its words in support of NATO with deeds. Third, it would support interoperability between Polish and U.S. forces and improve sustainment for the Polish military.

Helping frontline nations such as Poland acquire the means to operate as a stand-in force is of vital importance to the Alliance’s deterrence mission. Providing Poland with a version of the M1 Abrams tank and encouraging its industry to be involved in sustaining U.S. and Polish Abrams tanks would be a significant statement of NATO’s commitment to the defense of its eastern flank.

Dan Gouré, Ph.D., is a vice president at the public-policy research think tank Lexington Institute. Goure has a background in the public sector and U.S. federal government, most recently serving as a member of the 2001 Department of Defense Transition Team. You can follow him on Twitter at @dgoure and the Lexington Institute @LexNextDC.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Child Tax Credit,

One of the criticisms of government assistance—both the Child Tax Credit in previous years and the last three rounds of stimulus payments—is that it is often not means-tested strictly enough.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Children who provide at least half of their own financial support—child actors, for instance—are not eligible for the credit.

Starting on July 15, roughly thirty-six million American households will receive the first of six Child Tax Credit payments. Each month from July until December, eligible families will receive either $250 or $300 per child per month, depending on the child’s age. At the end of the six-month period, the families will have received half of the total tax credit; the other half can be deducted from a family’s taxes when it comes time to file in April 2022.

Around 92 percent of all American families will be eligible for the Child Tax Credit. However, this means that just under one in ten families will not receive it. This is largely because of the income restrictions included with the tax credit, but there are a number of other, less common reasons a family might be ineligible, too.

Making Too Much Money

One of the criticisms of government assistance—both the Child Tax Credit in previous years and the last three rounds of stimulus payments—is that it is often not means-tested strictly enough. For instance, in 2011, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, then worth $18 billion, was able to claim $4000 in Child Tax Credit assistance for his four children.

The updated Child Tax Credit payments, passed in March 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act, have partially addressed this problem. Prior to the legislation, the upper income cut-off for Child Tax Credit payments was $400,000 for couples and $200,000 for single parents. The March bill reduced it to $150,000 for couples and $75,000 for single parents.

If a person makes more than this amount, then they might still receive a partial credit, but the payment amount will be substantially decreased.

Other Disqualifications

Parents who share joint custody of their children cannot both qualify for the credit; one or the other must be eligible. Along the same lines, children must live with the receiving parent for at least six months out of the year.

Additionally, both the recipient and the dependent must be U.S. citizens, although if one parent is a non-citizen, the family as a whole is still eligible for the credit.

Children must have either a social security number or an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number to receive the credit. Children with only Adoption Taxpayer Identification Numbers are not eligible.

Finally, children who provide at least half of their own financial support—child actors, for instance—are not eligible for the credit.

A Note to Non-Filers

The IRS is basing its payment scheme based off of the 2019 and 2020 tax returns for families. This means a family that received the Child Tax Credit in 2020 will likely receive it again this year, if their children are still below the age of eighteen.

The reliance on previous tax returns means that the IRS does not know to send the credit to non-filers. However, non-filers are still eligible for the credit; they simply have to register on the IRS’s website, using a portal specially created for this purpose. The payment will be sent out, even if a recipient does not ordinarily make enough money to pay taxes in the first place.

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

Image: Reuters

Warfare History Network

Security, Europe

U.S. Army Rangers were some of America's finest soldiers in the Second World War.

Key Point: They were members of the U.S. 1st Ranger Battalion, recruited earlier that month in Northern Ireland from among the 34th Infantry Division and the 1st Armored Division. Their leader was a lean, young West Pointer from Arkansas named William Orlando Darby. He marched resolutely ahead, setting an example for his men to keep up the pace.

On a June morning in 1942, a battalion of American soldiers stepped down from a train at Fort William in the northern highlands of Scotland. Bagpipes of the Cameron Highlanders’ band sounded the call to battle, and the Americans were greeted by Lt. Col. Charles Vaughan, a burly, ruddy-cheeked British Army officer. Radiating enthusiasm and goodwill, he welcomed the Americans to Scotland and told them he would lead the way to Achnacarry Castle, site of the British Commando training depot.

The GIs slung their rifles and packs, formed a column, and followed the band up a hilly road. Heartened by the skirling of the pipes, the Americans strode toward misty blue hills in the distance. The road grew steeper and feet began to drag after the first mile or two. On the Americans marched, mile after mile, as their packs seemed to grow heavier and sweat trickled down their backs.

The band played louder, as if to encourage the GIs, and Colonel Vaughan marched steadily ahead. Feet began to blister and the Americans groused to themselves, but they dared not fall out. They were all volunteers and had made a choice for action with a new, elite unit.

They were members of the U.S. 1st Ranger Battalion, recruited earlier that month in Northern Ireland from among the 34th Infantry Division and the 1st Armored Division. Their leader was a lean, young West Pointer from Arkansas named William Orlando Darby. He marched resolutely ahead, setting an example for his men to keep up the pace.

On the column marched through a picture-book landscape of forested mountains, tangled undergrowth, lakes, and cold streams plunging down steep glens. The Camerons’ bagpipers skirled, and the weary Americans struggled on. At last, after 14 miles, the ancient turrets of Achnacarry Castle came into view, and then its vine-clad walls and emerald lawns. They had made it.

Colonel Vaughan praised the GIs on their marching and, with an impish grin, promised them more of the same in the future. The Americans rested and then toured their new home where they were to undergo training with the legendary British Commandos.

Set in a remote glen between Loch Arkaig and Loch Lochy, the Inverness-shire castle had served for centuries as the seat of Lochiel, chieftain of the Cameron Clan. Once a refuge for Bonnie Prince Charlie, it was now the finest infantry training center in the world, due largely to the untiring efforts of Colonel Vaughan, nicknamed the “Laird of Achnacarry” and “Rommel of the North.” Darby’s Rangers made their quarters in British bell tents and were invited to use a nearby icy stream for bathing. They had to get used to unappetizing British Army food—bully beef, beans, porridge, fish, and plum pudding—and endless quantities of tea. The Americans chafed, but when they complained, Colonel Vaughan would tell Darby, “It’s all part of the training, William, it’s all part of the training.”

The Rangers began their training without delay, and the Commandos did all they could both to make them feel at home and to find out what sort of men they were. At the depot were also Free French and Dutch soldiers, as well as Commando veterans of the ill-fated Norway and Lofoten Islands campaigns, numerous hit-and-run raids on the European coasts, and some who had escaped from Singapore and Somaliland.

Colonel Vaughan’s personality dominated the depot. A former drill sergeant in the crack Coldstream Guards and an officer in World War I, he had served as deputy commander of No. 4 Commando during the Norway raids in March 1941. He was tough but fair, and exacted maximum effort from his trainees. Vaughan and Darby quickly grew to like and respect each other, although some of the Britons harbored doubts about the stamina of the Americans.

William Darby was born on February 11, 1911, in Fort Smith, Ark., where he had a typical small-town childhood. He was a Boy Scout, part-time delivery boy, churchgoer, and avid reader. In high school, he displayed a flair for leadership and also seemed to be a born salesman. Friendly and willing, he was a handsome youth with blue eyes, a high forehead, a firm jaw, and a ready smile.

Young Bill decided on a military career, but it was not easy to secure appointments to the U.S. Military Academy in the 1920s. The Darbys persuaded their local congressman to recommend their son as a second alternate candidate. The young man eventually won a nomination and was admitted to West Point on July 1, 1929.

Darby became an enthusiastic member of the Long Gray Line. He was an exemplary cadet and a conscientious student, showing a fine balance of mental ability, leadership, and personality. He became a cadet company commander in his first class year, and was active in soccer, the glee club, 100th night shows, and as hop (dance) manager. When he graduated on June 13, 1933, with a bachelor of science degree, he stood 177th in a class of 346. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the field artillery.

Darby served with the 82nd Field Artillery Regiment, the only horse artillery regiment left in the Army, and fulfilled assignments in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Iowa. He gained experience as a troop leader, took school courses, and was rated as a superior young officer on his efficiency reports. In October 1940, at the age of 29, he was promoted to captain.

Early the following year, Darby was chosen to learn about amphibious warfare by taking part in a joint Army-Navy training operation in Puerto Rico. In November 1941, he was assigned to duty in Hawaii, but after the Pearl Harbor attack, he was reassigned as aide to Maj. Gen. Russell P. Hartle, commanding the 34th Infantry Division. The division sailed for Northern Ireland in January 1942. Early that May, Darby, itching for action, requested a transfer. It was turned down, but his chance was coming.

While the division had been training in Ulster, General George C. Marshall, Army chief of staff, had visited the Achnacarry depot and decided that an American commando force should be formed. It would be called the “Rangers,” after the famous hit-and-run raiders led by Major Robert Rogers in the French and Indian Wars preceding the American Revolution. Marshall wanted U.S. troops to gain combat experience before the eventual Allied invasion of continental Europe. Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of British Combined Operations, agreed to allow the Americans to train under his Commandos in Scotland.

Almost 2,000 Enlisted Soldiers Volunteered to Serve As Rangers; 575 Were Chosen

General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., implemented the project and authorized Hartle to raise the first American commando unit. Darby was assigned to it, and the 1st Ranger Battalion was activated on June 19, 1942. Notices were pinned on bulletin boards at the American camps in Ulster inviting GIs to sign up for adventure and a hardy life in the new Rangers. Darby set up a headquarters in Carrickfergus, 20 miles north of Belfast, and spent almost two weeks interviewing officer volunteers and about 2,000 enlisted men. Only those in good physical shape with athletic ability, stamina, and good judgment were chosen.

The original 1st Battalion comprised 575 officers and men organized in a headquarters company and six line companies. Truscott and Hartle took a special interest in the new unit. The volunteers ranged in age from 17 to 35 years and came from all parts of the United States. There were few regular soldiers and Darby was the only regular officer. The first Rangers included a Golden Gloves boxing champion, a bull fighter, a lion tamer, a wrestler, a professional gambler, a jazz trumpeter, a burlesque stagehand, a hotel detective, a Hollywood screenwriter, a church deacon, cowpunchers, American Indians, and a Cuban who was a machine-gun expert.

They were a tough bunch, but Colonel Vaughan’s grueling 12-week training course at Achnacarry was a rude awakening for them. They marched, ran, and climbed over the moors, up cliffs, and across frigid rivers as charges exploded in the water and live rounds were fired at them. Darby pushed them on, and Colonel Vaughan told the Americans, “It’s all in the mind and the heart.” After an unimpressive first 10 days, according to a British instructor, the fledgling Rangers “got with it.” They mastered a tough assault course, crawled across rope bridges, scaled cliffs, and paddled across the lochs while instructors fired machine guns at them.

They learned to kill with a twist of rope, a knife, or their boots or bare hands. They trained to fire a weapon accurately on the run, march 14 miles in just over two hours, build shelters from tree boughs, make a cooking fire that gave off little smoke, and to butcher and cook a doe in the woods. Some trainees even cooked and ate rats.

Most important, the Rangers learned the value of stealth and surprise in combat. The Commando training was rigorous and realistic (40 recruits were killed at Achnacarry during the war). The Americans adopted the Commandos’ methods and added some of their own. They specialized in night fighting, sleeping by day and rising at nightfall. They sat for an hour in darkness to adjust their eyes, and learned that you can hear distant sounds better if you stick a bayonet in the ground and put your ear to it.

After the Rangers completed their course, they were sent to a bleak island in the Hebrides for the “most miserable part of the training.” They endured driving rains, cold nights, and Royal Navy rations. There was some inevitable brawling between the Americans and British servicemen in the inns, the most notable being a 48-hour donnybrook during a leave in Oban. The Rangers did not fight with the Commandos, who by now were their comrades in arms, but there was resentment among the British because the Americans were paid twice as much. Some Britons were sure that all Rangers were paroled convicts. Eventually, the Americans were happy to move into civilian billets in Dundee.

Some of the Rangers received their first taste of action when 50 of them, led by Captain Roy Murray, took part as observers in the bloody, ill-fated raid on the French port of Dieppe by Commandos and Canadian infantry in August 1942. Sniping from a stable, Corporal Franklin Koons was the first American soldier to kill a German in ground action in World War II. He was later awarded the Military Medal by Lord Mountbatten. Another Ranger, when captured at Dieppe by the Germans, was asked how many more there were like him in England. “Three million, all as tall as I am,” he replied. When the survivors of the raid returned to England, a Ranger pronounced, “Commando training is real battle life insurance.”

Of the Americans who went to Dieppe, one British officer observed, “Everyone liked them and enjoyed their company.” That month, Darby was promoted to lieutenant colonel (temporary).

Darby’s 1st Ranger Battalion officially went into action for the first time in Operation Torch, the November 1942 Allied invasion of North Africa. The Western Task Force, commanded by Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., comprised infantry units and elements of Maj. Gen. Ernest Harmon’s 2nd Armored Division. The Central Task Force going ashore at Oran was led by Maj. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall and included the 1st Infantry (“Big Red One”) Division and Darby’s Rangers. At Algiers, the landing force included a British infantry division, a U.S. regimental combat team, and three British Commando units.

A total of 107,000 Allied troops took part, landing along the French North African coast from Algiers to Casablanca. After rehearsing for a major landing, Darby’s battalion had sailed from Glasgow aboard Royal Navy ships and joined a convoy from the United States.

The Central Task Force’s objective was the coast between Oran and Arzew. The plan was to land the 1st Division with the 16th and 18th Infantry Regimental Combat Teams at Arzew Bay and the 26th Infantry Regiment west of Oran. The Rangers were to land at Arzew, 30 miles east of Oran, and capture two coastal batteries, thereby ensuring for the Allies the port of Arzew and the naval base at Mers-el-Kebir.

Rangers Carried Rifles to Make Them Indistinguishable From Their Men so as not to Attract Enemy Snipers

A haze veiled the North African coast as the Rangers and Commandos began to land at 1 am on November 8, 1942. Colonel Darby led his men through the surf and up a steep cliff path. He had decided to split the 1st Battalion and attack the two batteries simultaneously. Four companies under his command would hit the larger Batterie du Nord on a hill overlooking Arzew Bay, while the other two companies under his executive officer, Major Herman Dammer, attacked the smaller Fort de la Pointe at the harbor’s edge. The Rangers were tense and ready for action.

Colonel Darby wondered how the Vichy French defenders would respond to an attack by Americans and gripped his trusty Springfield rifle. All Ranger officers carried rifles to make themselves indistinguishable from their men and not present special targets to enemy snipers.

While Darby led his four companies toward the Batterie du Nord, the Dammer force disembarked from five landing craft and converged on the harbor fort from two directions. All was quiet ashore as the Rangers stealthily cut through a barbed wire fence, overpowered a curious French sentry, and poured into the fort. After 15 minutes and a few quick shots, the Americans captured the batteries and a 60-man garrison. Even the wife of the post adjutant was captured.

Darby’s force trekked four miles from its landing beach over bluffs, along a coastal road, and up a ravine behind the Batterie du Nord. The Rangers had to seize the fort swiftly, otherwise they would be caught in Allied naval gunfire which was scheduled if the position was not captured. The Rangers cut through barbed wire and, supported by fire from light machine guns and trolley-borne 81mm mortars, dashed across open ground to seize the fort. Several men pushed Bangalore torpedoes into the muzzles of the fort’s big guns, others tossed grenades into ventilators, and still others barged through the main entrance, shooting a sentry. Sixty French defenders came out with their hands raised.

Major Dammer, meanwhile, radioed that he had taken his objective. Darby was jubilant. The action had cost only two dead and eight wounded through token resistance, and the Rangers had acquitted themselves admirably in their baptism of fire. At 4 am, four green Very lights shot into the sky from the Batterie du Nord to inform elements of the 1st Infantry Division five miles out to sea that the forts at Arzew would not hamper their landing. As planned, the signals were supposed to be followed by four white star shells. These, however, had been lost during the Rangers’ landing.

Colonel Darby grew nervous; he did not want his men endangered by naval gunfire. Eventually, he persuaded a Royal Navy forward observer party to signal a British destroyer, and she in turn transmitted the message to the American forces. Maj. Gen. Terry Allen had already started moving his 1st Infantry Division units when he saw the green flares, and by dawn the 16th and 18th Regimental Combat Teams were ashore.

Darby’s force captured more French officers and men, and Dammer’s soldiers cleaned out snipers in the harbor area. Sniping went on for three days, and when a French 75mm battery began firing at an Allied ship in the harbor, the Rangers stormed it. With Arzew in Allied hands the fighting moved inland. A Ranger company joined the 16th Infantry along the coast, while the rest of the 1st Ranger Battalion stayed in Arzew. Colonel Darby even acted as mayor of the town for a while.

He was pleased with his men. Several hundred prisoners had been taken and the Ranger losses were light, a total of four killed and 11 wounded. The training in Scotland had paid off. Darby said his men “hit the ground, fired their weapons, crawled or ran forward without deliberate or conscious thought … each Ranger knew his job, and anticipated events.”

When the 16th and 18th Regimental Combat Teams met stiff opposition at the villages of St. Cloud and La Macta, the Rangers went to assist. Lieutenant Max Schneider’s E Company commandeered a squadron of half-track personnel carriers and attacked a French 75mm battery at La Macta. The defenders threw up heavy rifle and machine-gun fire, but the Rangers, aided by supporting fire from a British ship offshore, captured the village. At St. Cloud, Company C, led by Lieutenant Gordon Klefman, encircled the village, charged across a field, and pushed the defenders back. Klefman was mortally wounded, and his last command was: “Keep going! Keep going to the right and don’t worry about me.” The French surrendered around midafternoon.

When the fighting around Oran and Arzew ended, the Rangers felt they deserved a rest, but Colonel Darby disagreed. He thought they needed more training, so for almost three months they practiced night fighting, speed marching, mountain climbing, and amphibious landings. Darby devised a way for his men to maintain contact in the dark by using flashlights with pinpoints of different-colored light. The soldiers groused, wondering if they were going to spend the rest of war in training.

Darby’s Battalion Moved Swiftly and Silently in the Darkness, Covering 14 Miles in Just 2 Hours

Then, on February 1, 1943, the battalion was ordered to stand by for action. The Allied command in central and southern Tunisia needed information about the movements of German troops retreating from Tripolitania, particularly the identification of German and Italian divisions. Darby’s men climbed aboard 32 C-47 transports at Oran and flew to the Youks-les-Bains airfield near Tebessa. German planes bombed the airfield as the last truckload of Rangers left for the Tunisian front.

The trucks hauled the soldiers to a French outpost 20 miles west of their objective: a German-supported Italian strongpoint guarding the Sened Pass, where the road to the coast (at Sfax) runs between the Majoura and Biada Mountains. The Rangers were to raid three enemy positions in the Sened area, capture prisoners, and inflict as many casualties as they could, making the enemy think that Allied strength was greater than it actually was.

On the night of February 11, 1943, Darby’s battalion marched across the boulder-strewn slopes of the central Tunisian mountains toward Sened. Their faces were blackened, their boots saddle-soaped to prevent squeaking, and their dogtags taped down. They moved silently and swiftly, guided in the darkness by their red and green pinpricks of light. They bivouacked at dawn in a bowl between two peaks, having covered 14 miles in just over two hours.

When the sun rose, Captain Roy Murray pointed out to the section leaders the Sened Pass six miles away across a plateau. “We have got to leave our mark on these people,” he said. “They’ve got to know that they’ve been worked over by Rangers. Every man is to use his bayonet as much as he can. Those are our orders.”

The Rangers hid among the rocks during the day, and after dusk they moved down the slopes. The moon was bright. The Americans could hear enemy tanks and trucks rumbling along the road through the pass. The Rangers filed across the plateau around midnight. The moon set, and the desert became dark. The Americans scrambled silently up a rocky hill toward the Italian strongpoint, and at 2 am the companies formed a skirmish line.

Darby, his blackened face glistening with sweat and his uniform tattered, used a radio set to monitor his companies’ progress. As his men moved to within 200 yards of the enemy position, the Italians sensed danger and opened fire. Blue tracers crisscrossed over the Americans as they crawled forward on their bellies. Fifty yards from the wire, A Company on the left flank was fired on by a machine gun. The Rangers heard nervous sentries calling, “Qui va la? Qui va la?” (“Who goes there?”).

A 47mm cannon began raking the ground in front of the Rangers and then other guns opened up. Darby’s men crawled forward until they were below the Italian guns. The Americans tossed hand grenades and screamed and shouted. They scrambled up the final slope, blasting with rifles and Tommy guns, and jabbing with bayonets. Corporal James Altieri lost his footing and slipped into a slit trench occupied by an Italian soldier. The American whipped out his commando knife and jerked it into the man’s belly. He screamed and fell. Warm blood spurted over Altieri’s hand, and he turned away and vomited.

It was a brief but brutal melee as the Rangers went after the enemy swiftly and without mercy. “We swarmed over the remaining centers of resistance,” Altieri reported later, “grenading, bayoneting, shooting, screaming, cursing, and grunting. The remaining Italians never had a chance. We worked them over furiously, giving no quarter. It was sickening, brutal, inhuman.”

Six supporting mortars hammered the Italian position. Bedded down for the night, most of the enemy had been surprised. Many streamed from their tents, some tried to mount motorcycles and ride away, and others begged for mercy. The Rangers cleared the hill and captured 11 soldiers of the 10th Bersaglieri Regiment. The Americans destroyed six cannon and a dozen machine guns and gained useful information from the prisoners about enemy dispositions in Tunisia. More than a hundred Italians lay dead at the Sened Pass, while Darby lost only one man dead and 18 wounded.

Their mission accomplished, the Rangers rounded up their captives and prepared to withdraw. The 18 wounded Americans were placed on improvised stretchers slung between rifles. The Ranger code decreed that wounded were to be left behind after a raid if they were likely to delay a withdrawal, but Colonel Darby had no intention of adhering to the rule. The battalion formed two columns and made its way down the ravines in the dark. The men took turns carrying the wounded, and what little water remained was given to them. Dirty, weary, hungry, and thirsty, the Rangers struggled on, with Darby encouraging them: “Keep pushing, keep pushing!” He feared that they might be cut off by enemy tanks. The Americans made their way to the cover of mountains 12 miles away, and eventually to the French outpost, now guarded by British armored cars.

Darby was again proud of his men. They had defeated both the enemy and the inhospitable desert and had earned from the Italians the nickname “Black Death.” General Fredendall awarded the Silver Star for gallantry to Darby, four of his officers, and nine enlisted men.

On February 14, 1943, German panzer columns punched through the American lines in the Kasserine Pass area, sending the inexperienced U.S. II Corps reeling. The Rangers covered the corps’ withdrawal, and British Guards and armored units went to the rescue. Eventually, the U.S. 1st Armored and 1st Infantry Divisions were able to regroup and stabilize the lines. For several weeks Darby’s Rangers patrolled, took 30 prisoners, and defended the Dernaia Pass until the Battle of Kasserine was over. On March 1, the Rangers were ordered to the village of La Kouif for rest and refitting.

Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., had taken over and shaken up II Corps, which was expanded and ordered by the British First Army to mount an offensive to divert enemy reserves from the Mareth Line and to seize airfields from which the hard-fighting British Eighth Army could be supported. The British were making the main Allied effort in Tunisia. The II Corps was to capture Gafsa and then move toward Maknassy to threaten the enemy line of communication from Gabes. The Rangers were to spearhead the 1st Infantry Division by clearing concealed enemy positions in the mountains east of El Guettar on the road to Sfax.

Facing Nearly 2,000 Enemy Troops, the Rangers Were Outnumbered Nearly 4-to-1

At La Kouif, meanwhile, Colonel Darby had become sick and periodically delirious. His executive officer, Major Dammer, made plans for the march to Gafsa. The Rangers moved out on the night of March 13, 1943. Darby, not about to miss a fight, left the hospital and rejoined his unit, though still sick and doped with sulfa. His men dug foxholes at Gafsa and waited in the olive groves while American armor and artillery units moved up. The 1st Armored Division rolled into the northern battlefront over the rutted track leading to Maknassy, while the southern front was left to the Big Red One and the Rangers.

Darby’s soldiers strapped on their light packs and strode out toward the mountains. They scrambled up the slopes in the dark and in two hours approached El Guettar. No lights showed in the town on that night of March 18, although they believed there were 2,000 enemy troops there. The Rangers would be outnumbered four to one. Scouts approached the town warily, and reported that it was empty. The enemy had withdrawn to the heights because of the advance of II Corps. The Rangers occupied the town.

Darby was now ordered to seize the pass at Djebel el Ank so that General Allen could anchor his Big Red One’s left flank on the mountain that separated the areas east and southeast of Gafsa into two battle arenas. The Rangers would attack the pass as a spearhead for a battalion of the 26th Regimental Combat Team.

As the 1st Division moved more men, guns, and ammunition forward on March 19-20, Ranger patrols scouted the peaks overlooking El Guettar for possible flanking routes to Djebel el Ank. After sundown on March 20, Darby’s men left El Guettar and headed westward toward Gafsa. Accompanied by their attached engineers and infantry, they climbed steep rocks and a mountain track. It was 12 miles to the pass at Djebel el Ank. The moon shone brilliantly and then disappeared. Mortar tubes and their bases clanked, but the hard-breathing Rangers moved silently. As the sun began to rise, they reached a plateau overlooking Italian positions.

At 6 am on March 21, Darby’s men opened fire on the rear of the Italian emplacements. Rifles cracked, machine guns clattered, infantry mortars thumped, and shells boomed in the valley. Gray smoke wafted across the mountains. A German 88mm gun opened up on the Rangers’ silhouetted command post, and Darby sent two squads to silence it. The Rangers then formed a skirmish line and, howling American Indian war cries, dashed down toward the Italians.

Running, crouching, and jumping from boulder to boulder, the Americans knocked out one enemy gun position after another, while other Rangers attacked up the valley to clean out strongpoints. The Rangers charged the Italians without cover, but were stopped by a fortified machine-gun nest. It was now 8 am, and they had no mortar rounds left. Then the engineers arrived and one of their 81mm mortars blasted the position. The defenders were overrun, and the 26th RCT arrived at Djebel el Ank at 10 am.

The Rangers mopped up and took 200 prisoners, a motley group of Italians in ankle-length overcoats. The Germans had pulled out and left them two days before. Many of the Italians were persuaded to surrender by the 1st Ranger Battalion’s Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Albert Basil, who wore the green beret of a British Commando. At 2 pm that day, Colonel Darby reported to the 1st Division that the valley was in American hands.

The Rangers held the heights as the Battle of El Guettar raged for 21 days. Several companies went down to the plain to support two battalions of the 18th Infantry Regiment, which were cut off from the rest of the Big Red One. The Rangers, in turn, were almost cut off, but they did not yield an inch to the Germans.

Darby’s force was eventually relieved by elements of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division on March 27; its primary task in Tunisia was completed. General Allen issued a glowing commendation to the Ranger Battalion for its actions at El Guettar, the first significant American victory in North Africa, and a year later the unit was awarded a coveted Presidential Unit Citation. Darby received the Distinguished Service Cross for his leadership and “extraordinary heroism.”

Next came Operation Husky, the July 1943 invasion of Sicily. Three U.S. divisions spearheaded by Rangers were to land on the south coast of the Mediterranean island and drive northward across the western part to the port of Palermo. Four British Eighth Army divisions and Commandos would land on the southeastern tip and advance northward up the east coast to Messina.
The Rangers had grown by now. Darby commanded the 1st and 4th Battalions, Major Dammer led the 3rd, and a fourth—the 2nd Battalion—was training in the United States. Before the invasion, the Rangers underwent more amphibious training at Algiers and Bizerte.

At dawn on July 9, 1943, the invasion force, comprising 130 Allied warships and 324 vessels laden with troops and equipment, put to sea. The ships rendezvoused in the Tunisian channel and steamed eastward to Sicily. Shortly after midnight on July 10, the British and American assault troops began clambering into landing craft as they rocked in the choppy seas.

Major Dammer’s battalion splashed ashore near Licata on the flank of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division. The landing was initially unopposed, but then enemy machine guns and 47mm guns opened up on the Americans from the rocks overlooking the beach. Dammer’s men scrambled to the enemy positions and seized them one by one.

As Darby’s battalions headed for the beach at Gela, the Italian defenders switched on six searchlights and fired depressed antiaircraft guns toward the landing craft. Red and blue streaks of fire flew into the boats, and seasick Rangers vomited and groaned. An Allied rocket ship fired back and hit an ammunition dump in the town. Twenty-eight assault boats hit the beach, and Darby’s soldiers jumped out, ran across the beach, and hugged the seawall. Supported by mortar fire, the Americans then pushed into Gela. The 1st Battalion swung to the left and the 4th to the right, leaving the town center to an engineer battalion. Warily and with grenades ready, the Rangers moved through the darkened streets toward a fort on the town’s flank. Darby called for the cruiser USS Savannah to shell the citadel, and then his men captured it.

German fighter planes strafed the Americans, and a Ranger sergeant managed to shoot down a Messerschmitt 110 with his Browning Automatic Rifle.

Around 7 am, six Italian tanks clanked into Gela. Rangers worked their way onto rooftops and tossed sticky grenades down on the tanks. Others fired rocket launchers at point-blank range, threw grenades, and even tried dropping 15-pound blocks of TNT. The Rangers also used a 37mm antitank gun that was hauled frantically from one street corner to another, taking potshots at the tanks.

Fighting Against Snipers, Pillboxes, and 18 Tanks, Darby’s Men Began to get Desperate

Colonel Darby spotted an Italian tank rolling along the main street toward the city square. His driver swerved his jeep into an alley, and Darby swung its machine gun around and fired a belt of rounds at the tank. The bullets bounced off harmlessly. Darby then sped off in the jeep to find the antitank gun, hitched it to the jeep, and dashed back to the square. Bareheaded and with his sleeves rolled up, he helped Captain Charles Shunstrom hastily wheel the gun into position. They fired several shells and flamed the tank. Bazooka rounds knocked out the second tank, and a pole-charge dropped from a building demobilized the third. When the other tanks were also hit, the Italians withdrew. The gallant and quick-thinking Colonel Darby was awarded an oakleaf cluster to his DSC.

The Rangers fought on that morning against snipers and pillboxes. Around noon, 18 big German Tiger tanks rumbled into the town for a second counterattack, and things looked desperate for Darby’s outgunned men. He called for support from chemical mortars and the Navy. Shunstrom used a captured 77mm gun against the enemy tanks, and 12 of them were blasted out of commission. Then a battalion of Italian infantry approached. The Rangers let them advance to within about 2,000 yards and then poured 4.2-inch mortar rounds into them. The Italians fled. By late afternoon Gela had quieted down, and the weary Rangers were able to liberate a supply of cognac and champagne from a restaurant.

Two days after the landings, Darby’s men advanced northwest from Gela to attack San Nicola. The spearheading Rangers and the Big Red One fought for 50 sleepless hours, through bombings and tank and artillery attacks, before pushing northward to assault the fortress of Butera perched on a 4,000-foot hill. With artillery support, two platoons under Captain Shunstrom managed to take the citadel, which could have been held against a division.

Major Dammer’s battalion, meanwhile, had captured Licata and Port Empedocle and moved on to other objectives. Allied reinforcements were landing from the sea and air. The British Eighth Army battered its way northward against the main enemy force, while Patton’s Seventh Army swung eastward along the road from Palermo.

As Darby’s Rangers slogged through the dusty little towns and villages, they perfected the art of house-to-house fighting. Virtually every stone house was a fort that had to be stormed. Darby tried to even the odds for his men by getting hold of half-dozen 105mm self-propelled howitzers and later forming the 18-gun Ranger Cannon Company.

His leadership became an Army legend, and his concern for his men never flagged. “His optimism and confidence were the source of the Ranger spirit which translated into ‘it can be done,’” reported Dammer. Captain Murray, who had led the Rangers at Dieppe, said, “Darby believed he could lead anyone into combat and bring him back safely.” Darby refused to leave his Rangers, turning down the offer of a full colonelcy and command of a combat team in the 45th Infantry Division.

By August 17, 1943, the Allies had secured Sicily. The hard-fighting Rangers’ uniforms were in tatters, their shoes worn thin, and most of their gear was ready for salvage. Only their weapons and morale were still in good shape.

There would be little respite for them before their next assignment: the Allied invasion of mainland Italy. That September, the Eighth Army crossed the Straits of Messina to the Italian toe and started pushing up the long peninsula. Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark’s U.S. Fifth Army landed on the west coast below Salerno at dawn on September 9. The main Allied landing was set for the beaches 15 miles below Salerno and 45 miles south of Naples.

Darby led a mixed U.S.-British force of Rangers, Commandos, U.S. paratroopers, gunners, tank units, and engineers ashore. Their assignment was to seize and hold the scenic Sorrento Peninsula west of Salerno. The force was to capture strategic passes overlooking the Naples plain and ease the way for British and American units when they moved up through Salerno and Nocera. The Rangers were to observe German concentrations in the Naples plain for the naval gunners and prevent the enemy from mounting a flanking attack on the Salerno beachhead through the 4,000-foot Chiunzi Pass.

“We Have Taken up Positions in the Enemy’s Rear, and We’ll Stay Here Till Hell Freezes Over.”

The Rangers went ashore in darkness at the fishing village of Maiori, a dozen miles west of Salerno. They overran a loosely organized panzer reconnaissance company and, with the 4th Battalion holding the beachhead, the 1st and 3rd Battalions marched six steep miles to the Chiunzi Pass. By 8 am, they had dug in on both sides of the pass road. A paratroop regiment and British Commandos held the other passes near Nocera and Chiunzi. Colonel Darby radioed Allied headquarters, “We have taken up positions in the enemy’s rear, and we’ll stay here till hell freezes over.”

His men pinpointed enemy targets for Allied artillery and naval batteries. One observer spotted Germans issuing ammunition in a park near Nocera and called in a barrage from a Royal Navy battleship. One 15-inch salvo touched off a series of huge explosions.

The Rangers and British observers used a stone-walled farmhouse near the crest of the Chiunzi Pass, nicknaming it “Schuster’s Mansion” after Captain Emil Schuster, who had set up a medical aid station there. Targeted by naval gunfire, the Germans repeatedly bombarded the pass, but the command post was sturdy enough to withstand hundreds of direct artillery and mortar hits. The Rangers’ mission would have been a routine one if the main Allied force had arrived on schedule, but it took three weeks before the main drive could get started through the gap to Naples. Darby’s men were out on a limb for 21 days, lacking enough field guns for adequate defense and outnumbered by the enemy at least eight to one.

Nevertheless, they held on, beating back seven large-scale attacks by German mountain troops and Waffen SS units. The Americans huddled in foxholes hacked in the mountainsides and withstood relentless mortar and artillery barrages. Strung along a nine-mile front, the two Ranger battalions deployed four half-track howitzers against the deadly enemy 88mm guns. ‘We held on by our fingernails,” said one Ranger. “We were spread so thin that we had a hell of a time stopping the Germans. But we did, thanks to our speed, versatility, and rugged training. When the Germans came up the hill, we’d all rush over to plug the gap and let them have it.” Four- and seven-man patrols crept out at night to probe the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and to bring back prisoners for interrogation.

Meanwhile, the 4th Battalion had captured Amalfi, swept across the Sorrento Peninsula, and occupied Castelammare on the Gulf of Naples.

Shot at from all directions, Darby’s men clung to the Chiunzi Pass. They were exhausted, but the price was high: Many had contracted malaria in Sicily, and some Ranger units suffered up to 30 percent casualties. The wounded were trucked down to Maiori, where Royal Army Medical Corps doctors performed surgery 24 hours a day in a monastery chapel. Italian nuns and nurses tended the wounded soldiers. The survivors at the pass ran short of food, water, and ammunition.

Finally, the Allied forces broke out of the Salerno beachhead and stormed up Highway 18 toward Salerno. The Rangers were then able to pull out of the Chiunzi Pass and head for Castelammare. They pushed rapidly past historic Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius, followed airborne troopers into Naples, and fell asleep in the botanical gardens. They went into bivouac, but just as they were beginning to relax, they were ordered back into the mountains. After action at Venafro, near Cassino, they returned to Naples for the 1943 Christmas season.

Darby tried to lift his weary men’s spirits with good food, wine, whiskey, dances, movies, and USO shows, and Father Basil returned to conduct Masses for them, at the same time good-naturedly fining them for their soldierly profanity. With the start of the new year, the Rangers began intensive training at Pozzuoli for a new operation, the Allied invasion of Anzio. Supported by engineer, mortar, and airborne units, the three battalions were to land directly in front of Anzio, burst into the town, and sweep out to occupy a half-moon of beachhead territory.

At midnight on January 22, 1944, Darby’s men disembarked with the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division from British ships south of Nettuno and rode landing craft to the pier at Anzio. Darby’s 1st and 3rd Battalions landed unopposed, and the 4th followed. The Rangers fanned out through the town, and some moved on to Nettuno. Darby set up a command post in the Anzio casino. Enemy resistance was scattered and by dawn the Rangers had carved out their beachhead. On the left, the 3rd Battalion linked up with the Scots Guards of the British 1st Infantry Division. Darby’s men patrolled while Allied reinforcements poured ashore and German resistance stiffened. The enemy counterattacked, but the Rangers and the British held firm.

On the night of January 28, Darby’s force was relieved by a British reconnaissance unit, and the Americans marched back to an assembly area near Nettuno. Something big was coming up.

For a week, General John P. Lucas, commander of the U.S. VI Corps, had consolidated the Anzio beachhead. But he was a cautious officer, more interested in putting the harbor into operation and building up strength than in breaking out and mounting an offensive. General Clark prodded him to get moving, and by January 29 Lucas felt ready. While the British 1st Armored Division made the main effort toward Albano, the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, spearheaded by two Ranger battalions, was to take the town of Cisterna di Littoria on the Appian Way, thereby cutting strategic Highway 7. Darby was ordered to infiltrate his two battalions into the town during the night of January 29, with the other battalion clearing the road for armor and infantry the following morning.

Leadership of the Rangers had been diluted. Darby and Major Dammer were assigned to force headquarters, and the 1st and 3rd Battalions were now led by Major Jack Dobson and Major Alvah Miller, respectively. Darby had misgivings, believing that the Rangers’ combat effectiveness had been weakened.

The Rangers arrived at an assembly area at San Antonio before dawn on the 29th. Due north about eight miles was Cisterna, a cluster of stone and cement houses on the Appian Way. It was about four miles outside the beachhead in enemy territory, but the front was fluid and there were no signs of German concentrations. Actually, the enemy had gathered considerable strength in Cisterna in readiness for a counterattack on February 2.

The Rangers spent January 29 in bivouac, resting, cleaning and oiling their weapons, sharpening bayonets and trench knives, and getting haircuts. After a quick supper at nightfall they were ready to move out. Riflemen carried extra bandoliers of ammunition and hand grenades stuffed in their pockets, while the mortar crews carried three rounds for each weapon. There was a plentiful supply of sticky grenades and bazookas, but the machine guns were left behind. The Rangers were accompanied by a tank destroyer company, a cannon company, and the 83rd Chemical Mortar Battalion.

The Germans Had No Idea the Rangers had Crept Silently Past Their Defenses

In good spirits, Darby’s Rangers strode out for a seven-mile hike to the line of departure. It was a cold and moonless night. At midnight, the three battalions and accompanying troops reached a road junction about four miles from Cisterna. Darby called a final conference with his subordinate commanders, and at 1:30 am, the soldiers started for Cisterna. They moved in a column through deep irrigation ditches leading northward. The Rangers crept silently past German sentries. There was no gunfire and no challenges.

The Americans plodded on, listening to orders barked at nearby enemy machine-gun positions. There was no sign that the Germans knew their defenses were being breached.

While the 1st and 3rd Battalions moved through the ditches, the 4th Battalion on the left flank ran into determined resistance from farm buildings, emplacements, and a roadblock. Half a dozen medium tanks rolled up to support the battalion, but all night it had a running fight. By dawn, the 4th was still short of its objective, Isola Bella.

About two miles from Cisterna, the 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions, moving single-file, lost contact and were strung out for a mile and a half. Major Miller was leading the 3rd Battalion when a German tank suddenly loomed around a bend and opened fire. The Rangers returned fire immediately, but the leading Americans were killed or wounded, and Miller died. The tank was demolished with a sticky grenade, and the battalion hastened to catch up with the 1st.

The Rangers thought they had surprised the Germans, but it was really an ambush. When they climbed out of the ditch to deploy for the assault on Cisterna, the Americans were blasted on all sides from snipers, machine guns, mortars, and howitzers. Darby’s force had run into the crack Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the 4th Parachute Division. Tank guns swung toward the Rangers, who by now were surrounded. They broke up into small groups and fought until they dropped. There was no pulling back.

As the sun came up, the Rangers found themselves exposed in front of Cisterna, where enemy snipers and mortars picked them off from farmhouses. Major Dobson, leading the 1st Battalion, was seriously wounded. The Americans demolished several German tanks with bazookas and sticky grenades, but more armor and enemy infantry appeared. Some of the Rangers hurled themselves onto the tanks, exploding them—and themselves—with sticky grenades. Others used bazookas to blast off the tank treads while riflemen shot the crews that emerged. But it was a losing battle, and Darby’s men were being slaughtered.

At 8:30 am, the 1st and 3rd Battalions radioed back that they were surrounded and had suffered heavy casualties. They fought desperately against heavy odds for five hours. The 4th Battalion tried to push through to them but was held up at the hamlet of Femina Morta (Dead Woman). Colonel Darby listened with frustration to the calls for help, but his headquarters at Femina Morta was also surrounded.

Outnumbered 10 to 1, the 1st and 3rd Battalions fought on, making every shot count. Around midday, German tanks overran them. The Americans still fought, but with their ranks depleted and ammunition running out, they had no choice but to try to escape or surrender. Darby listened to a sergeant send the last message from the 1st Battalion: “Some of the fellows are giving up. Colonel, we are awfully sorry. They can’t help it, because we’re running out of ammunition. But I ain’t surrendering. They are coming into the building now!” Another message said, “They’re closing in, but they won’t get us cheap!”

The fighting continued that afternoon, but the Germans began rounding up the Rangers. Eight made a dash for the irrigation ditch, but shells and sniper fire bracketed them. Only two Rangers managed to get through the German lines. Of the 1st and 3rd Battalions, only six men escaped from Cisterna.

On January 31, a regimental combat team fought its way up to the 4th Ranger Battalion, and together they cleared the enemy from Femina Morta.

Although the gallant action at Cisterna had helped to save the Anzio beachhead from counterattack, Darby blamed himself for the disaster. The Germans had seen his men coming, and Darby believed that the outcome would have been different if he had been with the forward columns. When told that his men could not pull back because they were cut off, Darby had “put his head down on his arm, and cried … he broke down,” reported his jeep driver, Sergeant Carlo Contrera.

The destruction of the 1st and 3rd Battalions at Cisterna was the result of faulty Allied intelligence and good planning by the Germans. A captured German officer stated later that the town had been reinforced on the night of January 29. A Polish deserter from the German Army had tried to explain to the Rangers about the enemy buildup, but no one could understand him, and he was evacuated to the rear.

Before their ranks were broken up and they were ordered home for a long and well- deserved rest, Darby’s surviving Rangers had been awarded the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, the Combat Infantryman Badge, the blue-and-gold Presidential Unit Citation, a number of Distinguished Service Crosses, and British, French, and Russian decorations. They were proudest of their citations for teamwork.

Darby himself had received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Purple Heart with two clusters, the Croix de Guerre, the Soviet Order of Kutuzov (third degree), and the British Distinguished Service Order.

Only 87 of the Original 500 Rangers Remained

He said of his men, “They had done their duty, had fought to the limit of human endurance, and almost inevitably—as with other groups of soldiers in history who had taken the long chance by raiding into enemy-held territory—they had met their fate…. In this war, the Rangers had asked only for the opportunity to fight…. They were proud soldiers, confident warriors, and evidence that the spirit of battling against any odds lives strong among the American nation.”

By Darby’s count, there were only 87 remaining out of the original 500 Rangers who had trained at Achnacarry. Officers and men became instructors at several Army camps, and new Ranger battalions carried on the gallant tradition forged by Darby’s original units.

In the great Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, Lt. Col. James E. Rudder’s 2nd Ranger Battalion distinguished itself by scaling 100-foot cliffs under fire at Pointe du Hoc to destroy German guns that could have threatened Omaha Beach and Allied ships in the English Channel. The 5th Ranger Battalion fought gallantly in France, Belgium, and Germany, and the 6th Battalion served in New Guinea and the Philippines, where it spearheaded the drive on Manila and rescued American prisoners from behind Japanese lines.

Colonel Darby was slightly wounded by a bomb fragment on the night of February 15, 1944, and was relieved. He was given command of the battered 179th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division, which had fought in the bloody Anzio Campaign for two months. In April 1944, Darby was sent home and assigned to the Operations Division at the War Department. He supervised training programs, was reunited with the survivors of Cisterna, and visited many bases to assess the quality of troops being trained for overseas duty. But he disliked staff work and repeatedly asked for an assignment in a combat theater.

In March 1945, Darby was sent on a 90-day tour of the European Theater to evaluate air support of ground units. Then he made his way to Italy to visit the 10th Mountain Division, where he succeeded Brig. Gen. Robinson E. Duff as assistant commander when the latter was wounded and evacuated. The division was campaigning east of Lake Garda in northern Italy to try and head off Wehrmacht units retreating into Austria.

Late on the afternoon of April 10, 1945, Darby was standing with a small group of officers outside their command post at a hotel in the town of Torbole. Suddenly, a round from a German 88mm antiaircraft gun exploded 30 feet from the group at the side of the hotel. All the officers were hit by shell fragments, and Darby received a dime-sized fragment in his heart. Two medical corpsmen laid him gently on a cot, but he died two minutes later. The U.S. Army had lost one of its outstanding combat leaders of World War II.

“Never in this war have I known a more gallant, heroic officer,” Lt. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott notified the War Department. Colonel Darby’s West Point obituary read, “He lived up to every tradition at West Point and became, through his qualities, one of the finest soldiers.” Original Rangers also paid tributes to their leader. “Bill Darby was a man of destiny, and he knew it,” said Walter F. Nye. “Everything he did had a purpose.” William S. Hutchinson wrote, “Darby had a vision beyond price, the first essential for any great public service, military or other. He saw the march of history ever struggling upward. His faith persuaded others.”

Darby, who was posthumously promoted to brigadier general, had been in the thick of every action his men had fought. He was always up front. One officer recalled arriving at Sorrento and asking a Ranger where he could find Colonel Darby. The soldier grinned slowly and replied, “You’ll never find him this far back.”

Michael D. Hull has written numerous biographical accounts of World War II commanders. He is also a contributor to the forthcoming Eisenhower Center for American Studies World War II Desk Reference.

Originally Published December 26, 2018

This article by Michael D. Hull originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Flickr.

Alex Hollings

Space, Europe

Although the Americans canceled their MOL program in 1969, the Soviet effort continued, reaching even further beyond America’s canceled program with plans to equip these space stations with the world’s first ever cannon in space.

In the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, many Americans have taken to assuming that victory for the United States was assured. From our vantage point in the 21st century, we now know that the Soviet Union was, in many ways, a quagmire of oppression and economic infeasibility — but in the early days of mankind’s effort to reach the stars, it was the Soviets, not the Americans, who seemed destined for the top spot.

On October 4, 1957, it was the Soviet Union that first successfully placed a manmade object in orbit around the earth, with Sputnik. Less than a month later, the Soviets would capture another victory: Launching a stray dog named Laika into orbit. While the dog would die as it circled our planet, Laika’s mission seemed to prove (at least to some extent) that space travel was possible for living creatures. On September 14, 1959, the Soviet space probe Luna II would be the first manmade object to land on the moon, but the Soviet’s greatest victory was yet to come.

When the Soviets were winning the Space Race

On April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union once again affirmed to the world that they were the global leader in space technology, launching cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit where he remained for 108 minutes before reentering the earth’s atmosphere.

To the Americans, these early victories in the Space Race were about far more than international prestige. Each victory for the Soviets not only represented a greater lead in securing “the ultimate high ground” for the Soviet military, they also served as proof of the validity of the Soviet Communist economic and political model — making the Soviet space program as much an ideological threat as it was a military one.

Despite assuming an underdog status in the early days of the Space Race, however, the U.S. leveraged its post-World War II industrial and economic might to begin closing the gap created by these early Soviet victories, launching their own satellite less than four months after Sputnik. America’s first astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, would follow behind the Soviet Gagarin by less than a month.

America’s come-from-behind victory

By 1969, America’s technological prowess, coupled with a massive influx of spending, would secure victory for both the U.S. and, in the minds of many, its capitalist economic model. On July 20, 1969, two former fighter pilots, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, triumphantly landed on the moon.

Just like that, the Soviets went from leading the way in orbital space to lagging behind, and in the midst of an ongoing nuclear arms race, the Soviets saw this shift as a significant threat. Furthering their concern were reports of the American Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) program, which was intended as an early space station from which crews could conduct orbital surveillance, or even mount operations against Soviet orbital bodies.

In response to the MOL program, the Soviets poured funding into Almaz, which was an early space station design of their own. Hidden behind a public-facing civilian space station effort, the program called for a number of military-specific space stations in orbit around the earth, each capable of conducting its own high-altitude reconnaissance. Although the Americans canceled their MOL program in 1969, the Soviet effort continued, reaching even further beyond America’s canceled program with plans to equip these space stations with the world’s first ever cannon in space.

The Soviet Space Cannon: R-23M Kartech

The Soviets were not mistaken when they considered America’s MOL program a threat. In fact, within the corridors of the Pentagon, a number of plans and strategies were being explored that would enable the Americans to spy on, capture, or otherwise destroy Soviet satellites.

It was with this in mind that the Soviet Union decided they’d need to equip their space stations for more than just taking pictures of the earth below. Instead, they wanted to be sure their orbital habitats could fight whatever the Americans threw their way.

The decision was made to base this new secret space cannon on the 23-millimeter gun utilized by their supersonic bomber, the Tupolev Tu-22 Blinder. For its new purpose as the world’s first true space cannon, the Soviet government looked to the Moscow-based KB Tochmash design bureau responsible for a number of successful aviation weapons platforms.

Engineer Aleksandr Nudelman and his team at KB Tochmash changed the design of the cannon to utilize smaller 14.5-millimeter rounds that could engage targets at distances of up to two miles with a blistering rate of fire of somewhere between 950 and 5,000 rounds per minute (depending on the source you read). According to reports made public after the fall of the Soviet Union, the cannon successfully punctured a metal gas can from over a mile away during ground testing.

The cannon was to be mounted in a fixed position on the underbelly of the Soviet Almaz space stations, forcing operators to move the entire 20-ton station to orient the barrel toward a target. The weapon system was first affixed to a modified Soyuz space capsule, which was then dubbed the “Salyut” space station, and launched in 1971. By the time the Salyut was in orbit, however, interest in these manned reconnaissance platforms was already beginning to wane inside the Kremlin, as unmanned reconnaissance satellites seemed more practical.

The only cannon ever fired in space

While American intelligence agencies were well aware of the Soviet plan to field military space stations, it was still extremely difficult to know exactly what was going on in the expanse of space above our heads. Under cover of extreme secrecy, the Soviet Union successfully completed a test firing of the R-23M on Jan. 24, 1975 in orbit above the earth. There was no crew onboard at the time, and the exact results of the test remain classified to this day. Uncomfirmed reports indicate that the weapon fired between one and three bursts, with a total of 20 shells expended. In order to offset the recoil of the fired rounds, the space station engaged its thrusters, but it stands to reason that the test may have been a failure.

In fact, any footage of the test firing of the weapon was lost when the Salyut 3 platform was de-orbited just hours later, burning up upon reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. When the Soviet Union designed an upgraded Almaz space station for future launches, they did away with cannons in favor of interceptor missiles — though the program was canceled before any such weapons would reach orbit.

This article first appeared at Sandboxx News.

Image: Wikipedia.

Alexandra B. Hall

Culture, United States

The path to true equality in the national security and policy space is a long road, but with commitments and accountability mechanisms, WCAPS is setting an example for a way forward

Just over a year ago, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, and national protests for racial justice, many organizations began to take a hard look at how their structures and systems perpetuate, or at minimum contribute to, racial inequalities.

In the national security and peacebuilding spaces, Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security & Conflict Transformation (WCAPS) drew together leaders across the international peace and security space committed to change in their field. On the latest episode of the Press the Button podcast, Shalonda Spencer, the Executive Director of WCAPS, and Maher Akremi, the project lead for OrgsInSolidarity, spoke with co-host Michelle Dover about the progress made thus far to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the barriers that remain.

In response to an outpouring of support for systemic change, the OrgsInSolidarity initiative created a community of organizations dedicated to advancing twelve commitments to achieve their goals. Leaders across the peace and security space signed on to these through a joint statement. But, before this work could truly make progress, they needed to understand the field. The OrgsInSolidarity team surveyed the community and released their results in a Baseline Survey Report, published last month. The survey, titled Standing Against Racism and Discrimination, sheds light on the reality of the work it takes to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion.

While the answers remain anonymous, Akremi says, “the anecdotes are really honest.” For instance, when asked how issues of discrimination are addressed within organizations, Akremi remembered, “one of the answers was literally—the blatant is punished, the subtle is ignored.” Spencer notes that the benefit of these surveys is not only that organizations can learn from each other, but that they are a useful form of accountability for staff and leadership, and can spur conversation.

When asked about his biggest takeaway from the survey, Akremi notes that a year is “a long time for [organizations] to sustain their efforts.” He explains that for some organizations, “entropy is taking hold, and in a lot of ways, people are burning out because it's hard to always be trying to work on these issues.” From this, Akremi learned that “we have to redouble our efforts, we have to stay engaged because one year doesn't fix these problems, one year makes organizations better, one year makes individuals better, but it does not change [the] field, it does not change systems.”

Spencer points out that “organizations have to be honest with themselves as far as work, culture, and the racial discrimination issues that they may have.” The biggest thing she has learned is that creating more equitable workspaces “takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of effort, but most of all it really takes honesty.” Individuals and organizations must ask themselves hard questions to do this transformational work because it takes a lot of time to permanently fix the systemic roots of these problems.

To help maintain momentum, OrgsInSolidarity has thirteen working groups tackling several issues, from confronting racism and white supremacy to supporting safe workplaces and more diversity at the leadership level.

Moving forward, Spencer’s goals in the next five years are to connect domestic and international policy, grow WCAPS within the United States and its international chapters, and “network with women who are on the ground, fighting on these issues, that we don’t often think about.” Her hope is this work will also help increase the number of women of color in the international and government policy space, building on the legacy of WCAPS founder Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins. Despite the challenges that remain, Spencer is hopeful. “More organizations are creating spaces for these conversations to happen about racial equity,” she said, “[and] we're…hoping that we can continue to do this work alongside with them.”

The entire interview with Shalonda Spencer and Maher Akremi is available here on Press the Button. Visit WCAPS and OrgsinSolidarity to learn more about their initiatives and become a member. You can find their Baseline Survey Report here.  

Alexandra B. Hall is the policy associate and special assistant to the president at Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation.

Image: Reuters.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Child Tax Credit,

Available exclusively on IRS.gov, the Child Tax Credit Eligibility Assistant allows parents to answer a series of questions about themselves and their family members that will determine whether they indeed qualify for the credits.

Here's What You Need to Remember: For those who are looking for more options regarding their credits, make sure to check out the Child Tax Credit Update Portal, which, according to the IRS, will allow them to “choose to, unenroll, or opt out from receiving the monthly payments so they can receive a lump sum when they file their tax return next year.”

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service are urging potentially eligible families to take advantage of a newly launched online tool that can help them determine whether they qualify for the expanded child tax credits.

These new recurring monthly payments, approved under President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, will begin heading out to eligible parents beginning on July 15 and will continue till the end of the year.

Available exclusively on IRS.gov, the Child Tax Credit Eligibility Assistant allows parents to answer a series of questions about themselves and their family members that will determine whether they indeed qualify for the credits, which amount to as much as $3,600 per year for a child under the age of six and up to $3,000 for children between ages six and seventeen. Broken down further, that’s a $250 or a $300 direct cash payment for each child every month.

“This new tool provides an important first step to help people understand if they qualify for the Child Tax Credit, which is especially important for those who don't normally file a tax return,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in a statement.

“The eligibility assistant works in concert with other features on IRS.gov to help people receive this important credit. The IRS is working hard to deliver the expanded Child Tax Credit, and we will be rolling out additional help for taxpayers in the near future. Where possible, please help us help others by distributing CTC information in your communities,” he added.

Another tool that is particularly useful for those who generally don’t file a federal tax return is the Non-filer Sign-up Tool, which will give the IRS the necessary information, such as an address and bank account and routing numbers, to properly issue the child tax credits.

This tool was “developed in partnership with Intuit and delivered through the Free File Alliance … (and will provide) a free and easy way for eligible people who don't make enough income to have an income tax return-filing obligation to provide the IRS the basic information needed,” according to the IRS.

For those who are looking for more options regarding their credits, make sure to check out the Child Tax Credit Update Portal, which, according to the IRS, will allow them to “choose to, unenroll, or opt out from receiving the monthly payments so they can receive a lump sum when they file their tax return next year.”

“The Update Portal is a key piece among the three new tools now available on IRS.gov to help families understand, register for and monitor these payments,” Rettig noted in a statement.

“We will be working across the nation with partner groups to share information and help eligible people receive the advance payments,” he added.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Reuters.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

The popular conception of the struggle in the air over northern Europe during World War II is of squadrons of sleek fighters racing over the German heartland to protect contrailed streams of lumbering bombers stretching beyond sight.

Key point: Thanks to the introduction of better fighters and the use of aggressive, realistic offensive fighter doctrines, American airmen attained—not the air superiority they sought, but—total air supremacy over the whole of western Europe.

The popular conception of the struggle in the air over northern Europe during World War II is of squadrons of sleek fighters racing over the German heartland to protect contrailed streams of lumbering bombers stretching beyond sight. This is as it was during the second half of America’s air war against Germany, but it was as far from the truth as it is possible to get at the start of that great aerial crusade. It took until late 1943—nearly two years after the United States entered World War II—before the United Kingdom-based Eighth Air Force mounted strategically significant bombing missions against targets in occupied northern Europe. The fault for this lay partly in the availability and slow development of the equipment, but it is also a fact that the two men at the top of the Eighth Air Force command structure stubbornly clung to old and discredited theories that stunted the effectiveness of the strategic-bombing effort and cost thousands of their countrymen their freedom or their lives.


In the beginning, the fighter was a short-legged creature whose role of protecting the bombers was eclipsed by its role of guarding friendly territory and installations. The difference, which is crucial, was the product of technology—range and the power of aircraft engines—and intellect. Until late 1943, surprisingly late in the war, the use of the fighter as an offensive weapon was stunted by the defensive mind-set of the “pursuit” acolytes of the interwar decades.

The pursuit airplane had evolved over the fixed battlefields of Western Europe during World War I. Pursuit aircraft had been developed to prevent enemy reconnaissance airplanes from overflying friendly lines and to protect friendly observation airplanes from enemy pursuits while the observers overflew enemy lines. The pursuit was conceived as a tactical and a defensive weapon, and it was limited to these roles both by conception and by the technologies of the day.

The Army Air Corps

Between the world wars, the development of American pursuit aircraft was hobbled by budgetary restrictions that for many years slowed or obviated altogether the creation of new technologies or even methodical experimentation with new tactics. The U.S. Marine Corps did advance the use of the single-engine pursuit as a nascent close-support weapon to bolster the infantry, but the interests of various intra-Army constituencies prevented similar advances in what had come to be called the Army Air Corps. To the degree that it developed at all, the Air Corps saw increasingly heavy and longer ranged bombers in its future. And, as the limited available research-and-development dollars were expended on speedier bombers, the pursuits of the day were increasingly outranged and outrun.

Inevitably, American bombers of the late 1930s were designed to be “self-defending” because they could fly much farther and at least somewhat faster than could the pursuits of the day. The pursuits, which were being developed at a much slower pace, were relegated to a point-defense role—guarding cities, industrial targets, and air bases. When World War II began, the Air Corps—shortly to be renamed the Army Air Forces—was divided into two distinct combat arms, fighters and bombers. And, by virtue of the fighter’s stunted development, there appeared little chance that the two would spend much time working together.

As soon as the Army Air Corps was pulled into World War II it became focused on the defense of American coastal cities, several Caribbean islands, bases in Greenland and Iceland, and on the strategically indispensable Panama Canal. There were few airplanes of any type to devote to these defensive missions, and those that were deployed defensively also had to serve as on-the-job trainers for hundreds of the raw young pilots emerging from the Air Forces’ burgeoning flight schools.

Through the first half of 1942, all of the very few pilots and airplanes that could be spared from the defense of the U.S. coasts and sea lanes were rushed to defend Australia and the South Pacific. Dozens of precious airplanes and pilots were lost in the pathetic defense of Java, in the Netherlands East Indies, and many more were lost in the early defensive battles around Port Moresby, New Guinea, but Army Air Forces’ training commands were able to catch up with combat and training losses as well as with the heavy burden imposed by the formation of new fighter, bomber, and other-type groups. And better fighters with a higher probability of survival began to reach operational air groups.

Committing to American Air Power

Fortunately, the United States could afford to be a bit late off the mark in her war against Germany. German efforts in 1940 to bring Great Britain to her knees all had failed miserably and, by the end of 1941, the bulk of Germany’s air and land forces were mired in a frightful war of attrition deep inside Russia. The British had the situation in northern Europe reasonably well in hand, though they would have collapsed had not vast infusions of weapons and supplies from the United States sustained them. British forces in Egypt and Libya were teetering on the edge of defeat, but there was little the United States would be able to do for many months to influence the outcome—assuming the British held on that long.

So, while the Army Air Forces devoted the bulk of its limited expendable resources to defensive measures against Japan, new air groups were created, and new and better combat aircraft began rolling off newly created assembly lines. Finally, in the spring of 1942, it was decided in high Army Air Forces’ circles to commit American air power to northern Europe. At first, the commitment would be little more than a meager show of force masking an advanced combat-training program overseen by the Royal Air Force (RAF). Only later, when training bases and factories in the United States had caught up with the planning, would the U.S. Army Air Forces take on a strategic air campaign against the German industrial heartland.

Brigadier General Ira Eaker arrived in England on February 20, 1942 to establish the headquarters of the new VIII Bomber Command. He opened his headquarters at High Wycombe, England on February 23, 1942, but the VIII Bomber Command had no combat airplanes to its name; they would not be available for several months. Rather, it fell to Eaker to argue with his British hosts in favor of an independent role for the forthcoming Army Air Forces in Europe. The RAF and the British government wanted America’s commitment to the air war in Europe to be subordinate to or an adjunct of the British Theatre air war. The Americans, however, felt they deserved an independent role, and it was Eaker’s job to win the British over to this viewpoint.

The American notion was strongly bolstered—in argument, at least—by the fact that the Army Air Forces had developed over many years a theoretical strategic air doctrine that was quite different from the RAF’s experience-based strategic doctrine. The Americans favored and had equipped their bomber force to wage a precision daylight-bombing campaign against industrial targets hundreds of miles inside enemy territory. The RAF was the only other air force in the world that had developed long-range, four-engine, heavy bombers, but its doctrine—the result of bloody experiences early in the war—favored “area” bombing at night. Doctrinal arguments aside, the British victims of the Nazi Blitz of 1940-1941 were less squeamish than their American Allies about bombing German civilians. Besides, the RAF had few long-range heavy bombers to its name, and thus felt it needed to co-opt the promised infusion of American heavies.

For the time being, Eaker’s arguments with the RAF hierarchy were moot. There would be no American air-combat units in the United Kingdom for several months, and then there would not be enough of them to make a dent in Hitler’s Fortress Europa for many more months.

A Symbolic Commitment between Allies

The first VIII Bomber Command unit to arrive in England—on May 10, 1942—was the 97th Heavy Bombardment Group, which was equipped with Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress four-engine heavy bombers. This was a symbolic commitment, for the 97th had been activated in February 1942 and thus had not had time to be adequately trained to fly combat missions over heavily defended European targets. It would be months before the 97th saw any live action.

Around the time the 97th Heavy Bombardment Group became the first nominal combat unit to join Eaker’s VIII Bomber Command, Brig. Gen. Frank “Monk” Hunter arrived in England to establish the headquarters of his VIII Fighter Command, also at High Wycombe. Unlike Eaker, Hunter, a rather flamboyant World War I ace, quickly came to terms with British beliefs and aspirations regarding the employment of forthcoming American fighter groups. The RAF had opted for powerful, short-range, point-defense fighters that could defend friendly air bases and attack nearby enemy air bases, and its doctrine appeared to have proven itself during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. Hunter, who had spent most of his career arguing the point-defense case for the U.S. Army’s fighters, was eager to augment the British fighter plan.

On June 10, 1942 personnel of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ 31st Fighter Group arrived in England by ship. After being outfitted with British Spitfire fighters, the green American fighter group was to begin rigorous advanced combat training overseen by a number of the RAF’s leading Battle of Britain aces. As with the 97th Heavy Bombardment Group, the 31st Fighter Group was not expected to begin combat operations for several months.

On June 18, 1942 Maj. Gen. Carl Spaatz arrived in England to establish the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force at High Wycombe. Spaatz was one of the handful of Army Air Forces officers with the moral authority to win an independent role for American air units over the forceful arguments of Britain’s top military and political leaders. Leaving the training of pilots and aircrews to Eaker and Hunter, Spaatz set out on a political path to forge an independent role for American air units. It was Spaatz’s brief from his superiors to integrate and modulate the projected American daylight air offensive with—but not subordinate it to—Britain’s night-bombing effort.

The Army Air Forces’ first combat mission against a German-held target took place on July 4, 1942. Six American-manned RAF-owned Douglas A-20 light attack bombers accompanied six RAF-manned A-20s in an attack on several German airfields in the Netherlands. Two of the American A-20s were downed by flak, seven crewmen were killed and one was captured, two failed to reach the target, and a fifth A-20 was severely damaged. The U.S. Army Air Forces could not have asked for a less auspicious or more humiliating inauguration of what would become the greatest aerial offensive in the history of the world.

The very first U.S. Army Air Forces fighter mission over Occupied Europe took place on July 26, 1942. As part of their training syllabus, six 31st Fighter Group senior pilots joined an RAF fighter sweep to Gravelines, a French town on the English Channel. German fighters challenged the American and RAF Spitfires, and the 31st Fighter Group’s deputy commander was shot down and captured.

31st Fighter Group Joins the RAF for a “Big Show”

The 97th Heavy Bombardment Group had to wait until August 17, when a dozen B-17s, with General Eaker along as an observer, conducted an afternoon raid against railroad marshaling yards near Rouen, France, 35 miles from the English Channel. Escort for the bombers was provided by four RAF Spitfire squadrons. The results of the mission were negligible. One B-17 was damaged by a German fighter, but there were no losses and no injuries.

Two days later, on August 19, the entire 31st Fighter Group joined with the RAF for a “big show” across the Channel, the tragic invasion rehearsal at Dieppe. While completing four 12-plane missions over the beaches during the day, pilots from the 31st were officially awarded two confirmed and two probable air-to-air victories.

The 31st Fighter Group continued to fly fighter-sweep missions over coastal France, but it was awarded only one probable and no confirmed victories before it was withdrawn from combat operations in October to prepare for its upcoming role in the invasion of French Northwest Africa. Meanwhile, on September 12, 1942 the RAF’s three independent Eagle squadrons—fighter units composed entirely of American citizens who had enlisted in the Royal Air Force or Royal Canadian Air Force—were absorbed into the VIII Fighter Command as the new 4th Fighter Group.

Thanks to the withdrawal and diversion of other VIII Fighter Command groups for the North Africa Campaign, the 4th Fighter Group, which was outfitted with Spitfires, was the only operational American fighter unit in northern Europe until May 1943. Already endowed with experienced combat pilots, including a number of aces, from its RAF days, the 4th did about as well during its first six months of combat service as did RAF Spitfire units that took part in similar fighter-sweep missions. Between September 1942 and mid-April 1943, the 4th Fighter Group was awarded credit for 15 confirmed victories over France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

The essence of the U.S. Army Air Forces campaign over northern Europe between October 1942 and the spring of 1943 was that, for practical purposes, there was no air campaign. The diversion of most of the small Eighth Air Force—fighters and bombers—to North Africa left the VIII Bomber Command and the VIII Fighter Command virtually no assets with which to wage any sort of offensive battle.

”The 4th Fighter Group was as Predatory a Fighter Unit as Ever Fought in a War”

From October 1942 until May 1943, only the 4th Fighter Group remained operational in the United Kingdom. The handful of other fighter groups that had reached the British Isles by October 1942 had been diverted or, in the case of the 78th Fighter Group, stripped of its airplanes, which were needed as replacements by groups in North Africa. Between early October 1942 and the end of April 1943, 4th Fighter Group pilots accounted for just 16 German airplanes. (Between mid-March and April 8, the 4th was withdrawn from combat so it could transition from Spitfires to Republic P-47 Thunderbolts. The group’s first aerial victories in the P-47—and the P-47’s first victories, ever—were scored on April 15 over the Belgian coast.)

As was to emerge in time, the paucity of aerial victories—even the paucity of aerial encounters—had less to do with the scarcity of American-manned fighters than it did with American fighter tactics. The 4th Fighter Group was as predatory a fighter unit as ever fought in a war. In better times, with better tactics, it became one of America’s premier fighter units. But during the period it flew as the only American fighter unit in operation in northern Europe—and for several months beyond—it attained negligible results because it was hobbled by idiotic tactics.

The immediate culprit was Maj. Gen. Monk Hunter, the commander of the VIII Fighter Command, but it must be said that Hunter was a product of his training and, to a degree, poor technology. Both of these factors obliged him and his eager fighter pilots—Hunter was eager, too—to work apart, virtually in a separate war, from the Eighth Air Force’s other combat arm, the VIII Bomber Command. Indeed, the doctrines that defined bomber and fighter operations were so far apart as to obviate direct cooperation.

The bombers had been built and the bomber crews had been trained to attack enemy targets without protection from fighters. Even as late as 1942, non-German air strategists honestly believed that wars could be won by bomber campaigns alone. Since the mid-1930s, Americans who accepted this outlook had developed what they called the self-defending bomber. That innovation, however, had more to do with the fighter technology of the 1930s; fighters of the day possessed neither the range nor the speed required to protect modern bombers. Fighter technology improved, but by mid-1942 the concept of the self-defending bomber had taken on a life of its own. It was believed that Germany could be bombed into submission by long-range self-defending bombers that were capable of flying—without fighter escort—to industrial targets anywhere in western or even central Europe. There was no offensive role for fighters.

As with most self-fulfilling prophecies, fact came to match belief. In 1942, American heavy bombers (and their British counterparts) had the range to strike targets in distant Berlin and beyond. The British had attempted daylight raids against Berlin early in the war, but they had been trounced by German fighter and antiaircraft-gun defenses. So they had switched to night “area” raids, nominally against industrial targets but, in reality, against whomever or whatever their bombs happened to strike.

Terror Bombings

The U.S. Army Air Forces, on the other hand, had developed qualms against “terror” bombings. And besides, America’s leading bomber enthusiasts believed strongly in the efficacy of both their precision daylight-bombing doctrine and their self-defending heavy bombers. Moreover, American fighters of the day, though powerful and powerfully armed, still lacked the range to accompany the bombers all the way to the nearest point in Germany and back.

Denied a role in escorting bombers to distant targets, and blinded by an outmoded and actually quite silly doctrine he had helped develop in the 1930s, Monk Hunter opted to send his meager fighter assets on “fighter sweeps” over those areas of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands that were within the meager operational range of the one fighter type that was then in his hands—the immensely heavy (7 ton) and short-ranged Republic P-47 Thunderbolt.

It must be said that it was not Hunter’s fault that he had inadequate airplanes (forget that there was only one group flying!), and he was not alone in his misperception of the role of fighters in World War II. The VIII Fighter Command’s failure to make a dent in the German fighter force—fewer than 20 confirmed victories in seven months—also goes to the role to which the Army Air Forces both aspired and had been relegated by 1942.

The key to every decision Allied commanders made in 1942 and 1943 was the projected invasion of France. At first, when the United States entered the war, it was hoped that the invasion would take place in mid-1943. By the late summer of 1942, however, the North Africa Campaign—and a huge number of other factors—made it clear that D-day was going to be delayed until mid-1944. As the first symbolic raids and sweeps were undertaken over northwestern Europe by Eighth Air Force fighter and bomber units in mid-1942, there were two full years to achieve preinvasion goals from the air. North Africa threw the margin into a cocked hat. If luck held, it would be mid-1943 before the strategic-bombing campaign could be resumed, and then only one year would be left for cracking the vast array of German objectives that would have to be overcome before the invasion could safely commence.

The primary role of American and British air power in Europe from mid-1942 until the invasion was to be the defeat of the Luftwaffe. Operation Pointblank, the specific plan by which the Allies were to accomplish this feat, was promulgated in May 1943 following acceptance of the common goal by the RAF and the U.S. Army Air Forces. The defeat of the Luftwaffe was of primary concern to the Allies because, at heart, it was constituted as a tactical ground-cooperation air force; it had been developed in its entirety to support German Army ground operations. Its bombers, for example, were light or medium models, and its bomber crews were trained to support ground troops at close or medium range. The Luftwaffe had no long-range capability—no strategic capability whatsoever; its role was tactical and, at most, operational. (This is precisely why the Luftwaffe alone was unable to overcome the RAF as a strategic objective during the Blitz; it was too lightly built to undertake a purely strategic mission.) As a superb tactical air force, however, the Luftwaffe was an enormous potential threat to an invasion fleet or a fledgling toehold on the soil of France.

Operation: Pointblank

In order to assure a safe landing by tens of thousands of Allied soldiers from thousands of ships, two things had to happen in the air before the invasion began—or could begin. The Luftwaffe had to be whittled down in strength and it had to be pushed as far back from the English Channel and North Sea coasts as possible. By forcing German tactical and operational air units to operate at the extremity of their ranges and in the smallest possible numbers—and only by doing so—could the mid-1944 invasion foreseen in mid-1942 be reasonably assured of success?

The goal of Operation Pointblank was to be accomplished in two ways: first, by simply shooting down German airplanes wherever they could be induced to fight and, second, by destroying Germany’s ability to build airplanes. To accomplish the latter, the destruction of the German aircraft industry and related targets, the British and Americans opened the Combined Bomber Offensive. The RAF would undertake night “area” bombing attacks against the German aircraft industry and the U.S. Army Air Forces would undertake daylight precision-bombing attacks against the same or similar targets.

Conceptually, the simultaneous Anglo-American program of aggressive (but, alas, short-range) fighter sweeps over the French, Belgian, and Dutch coasts was aimed at engaging the Luftwaffe fighter wings in a battle of attrition that over time would destroy the bulk of whatever reduced numbers of fighters the shattered German aircraft industry managed to produce. Further, by destroying German fighters, the Allies hoped to induce the German aircraft industry to switch over from the production of tactical bombers to the increased production of replacement fighters, which were less likely to hurt the invasion forces.

Sadly, while American fighters were being assiduously avoided by the crack Luftwaffe fighter units within their meager range, the “self-defending” daylight heavy-bomber groups charged with attacking strategic targets deeper inside France, the Netherlands, and northwestern Germany were being butchered. While the German fighters were sidestepping needless and avoidable attrition simply by ignoring the American fighter sweeps, the bombers were locked in a one-sided form of attrition that did not bode well for their survival.

American Fighters Down 7 German Airplanes

Beginning in April 1943, the 4th Fighter Group’s new P-47 Thunderbolts were joined over the Channel and North Sea coasts by the Thunderbolts of the 78th Fighter Group—and another P-47 unit, the 56th Fighter Group, was in training in England. Despite the doubling of assets, the results remained abysmal. Meanwhile, losses of American heavy bombers continued to rise. Major General Ira Eaker, who had replaced Spaatz as Eighth Air Force commander when the latter went to North Africa, continued to champion the self-defending bomber, but he also alibied that there were not yet enough heavies available in northern Europe to make the strategy efficacious. However, in April 1943, after scores and then hundreds of unescorted “self-defending” bombers had fallen and thousands of American airmen had been killed or captured, Eaker finally did ask Monk Hunter to provide fighters for escort duty to the extremity of their range—going into the Continent (penetration), and coming out (withdrawal). The bombers would be on their own a good part of the way, but some protection at the margins apparently was deemed to be better than none at all. From May 4 onward, nearly all VIII Fighter Command sorties were devoted to escorting the bombers.

Seven German airplanes were downed by American fighters over northern Europe in May 1943, and 18 fell in June (seven in one day, June 22). Action during the first three weeks of July was sluggish, but an extremely aggressive new commander, Maj. Gen. Frederick Anderson, had just taken over the VIII Bomber Command on July 1, and he needed some time to make his aggressive new policies bite. On July 24, Anderson’s VIII Bomber Command opened “Blitz Week” with the first of hopefully daily appearances over Germany. Weather shut down bomber operations on one of seven consecutive planned mission days, but the other six days saw strikes aggregating just over a thousand bomber sorties against 15 targets all over northern and western Germany. Claims by bomber gunners were, as always, extravagant—330 victory credits were awarded—but there is no doubting that the German fighter forces were worn down somewhat, at least operationally, by the unrelenting appearances by the bombers.

The American escort fighters put in fewer claims by far, but the fact that their claims were closer to reality made them startling in their own right. In July 1943, American fighter combat produced 38 victory credits, of which 33—nine and 24, respectively—were scored during just two Blitz Week missions. Not coincidentally, the two missions in question were not only bomber-escort missions—they were the first nominally long-range bomber-escort missions ever flown by Eighth Air Force fighters.

On July 28, 1943 the 4th Fighter Group significantly increased the range of its P-47 fighters in an experiment with auxiliary fuel tanks. In so doing, its pilots took the Germans by surprise by flying much deeper into enemy territory than they ever had before. Nine German fighters were downed in what for the Germans was an unexpected melee around the American heavy-bomber stream. Two days later, on July 30, all three P-47 groups were able to use for the first time what the pilots referred to as “bathtub” belly tanks. The 115-gallon tanks—which were designed for use in long-distance ferry flights—were not pressurized, and they gave the pilots a lot of problems, but they did add 150 to 200 miles to each Thunderbolt’s operational range. Until then, the heavy fighter could barely reach Antwerp. With the tanks, the P-47s could make it well into the Netherlands. Thus, on July 30, when the target was the Focke-Wulf assembly plant in Kassel, Germany, more than two hundred VIII Bomber Command B-17s and B-24s took part in a mission that was covered to the greatest depth ever by friendly fighters.

An Incredible 24 Confirmed Victories in 1 Day

On the watershed July 30 mission, the 56th Fighter Group gave the bombers penetration support, the 78th Fighter Group provided early withdrawal support, and the 4th Fighter Group provided late withdrawal support. That meant that the 78th Fighter Group’s P-47s would be with the bombers quite soon after the heavies came off the target. The overall tactical plan was simple—protect the bombers and drive away the German fighters. The surprised German pilots either attempted to ignore the P-47s as they drove their fighters into the bomber stream, or they were sucked into dogfights at the expense of attacking their primary targets, the bombers.

There it was—24 confirmed victories in one day, on a single mission. The tactics and technology had changed, and American fighters had knocked down as many German airplanes in one mission as they had been able to in dozens of fighter-sweep and even escort missions in the preceding two months. In a short time, the large numbers of sturdy, reliable, streamlined, auxiliary fuel tanks that were shipped to or manufactured in England forever changed the tenor of the daytime air war in Europe. Indeed, the routine commitment of American long-range fighter escorts in mid-1943 changed the substance of war in the air as profoundly as the routine use of flimsy reconnaissance aircraft had transformed ground warfare in 1915.

The Germans knew there was no profit in attacking American fighters for the sake of engaging in dogfights that could go either way once they were joined. Fighters, per se, were no danger to the Third Reich. Bombers were. Bombers were a threat to everything—home, loved ones, and German morale and equanimity. American bombers, if they were allowed to get through to their targets, were an especial danger to the Luftwaffe itself, for they had shown a propensity to concentrate on the German industries from which German fighters and bombers emerged—ball bearings, machine tools, and airplane factories themselves. German fighters would never attack American or British fighters unless there was an overwhelming opportunity to win. But bombers had to be attacked, no matter where or when they appeared over Germany or her satellites. And, so, if the American fighter enthusiasts wanted to destroy the Luftwaffe at least in part through a strategy of attrition, they had to tie their fortunes to those of the bombers. To do that, better or much-improved fighters needed to emerge from the American industrial behemoth, better escort tactics needed to evolve, and better operational ranges needed to be achieved by the fighters.

The VIII Fighter Command’s three P-47 groups were credited with 58 German airplanes in August 1943, all of them during bomber-escort duty. In stark contrast, the American P-47s flew 373 fighter-sweep sorties over France on August 15 and did not see a single German airplane. Despite the numbers and mounting pressure from his superiors in Washington to adopt changes, Hunter continued to argue vehemently in favor of his discredited fighter-sweep tactic. In this, Hunter continued to be supported by the Eighth Air Force commander, Eaker, who remained a strong supporter in his own right of the self-defending bomber.

The ‘Aggressive’ William Kepner

Eaker was very close personally to the Army Air Forces chief, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, so his job was secure. But, though Hunter was also an old friend of Arnold’s, he had become an annoying relic. Hunter was replaced as head of the VIII Fighter Command on August 29 by Maj. Gen. William Kepner. A fighter pilot’s fighter pilot, Kepner was, in a word, aggressive. Moreover, his outlook was in full accord with the reality of the air war over northern Europe. He simply wanted to do whatever worked.

The VIII Fighter Command’s tally continued to rise, but the early escort tactic—stay with the bombers—quickly became ossified. Eaker eventually became an escort advocate, but next he refused the counsel of his escort commanders. As the range of their airplanes increased—especially after the introduction of the long-range Lockheed P-38 Lightning in late 1943 and the development of the North American P-51 Mustang—the fighter men thought they should range ahead of the bombers to break up Luftwaffe fighter formations before the bombers were molested—in other words, to go over to the offensive. Eaker, however, gave in to the wishes of his seriously demoralized bomber men, who wanted to see their escorts close up—an effective but nonetheless defensive mind-set. As a result, the fighters remained only marginally effective, and bombers and their crews continued to fall in record numbers.

At length, despite Eaker’s obstructionism, the Eighth Air Force forced the Luftwaffe to abandon its forward bases and defend the German heartland. This fit the preinvasion plan—move the German fighters far back from the invasion beaches—but the highly concentrated German defensive fighter effort (heavily augmented by improved antiaircraft protection) downed yet a higher percentage of bombers even while providing more fruitful hunting for the American fighters. The deadly spiral persisted until, at last, Eaker was replaced on January 6, 1944 by Maj. Gen. James Doolittle, who was brought in from the Mediterranean.

Doolittle and the new theater air commander, the redoubtable Carl Spaatz, immediately gave the Eighth Air Force fighters their offensive head. Thereafter, aggressive roving (“freelancing”) American fighters often dispersed the German fighters before the American bombers arrived on the scene. It was Bill Kepner and Fred Anderson, working together under Doolittle and Spaatz, who finally broke the back of the German fighter force, the one by shooting it down over Germany and the other by making a shambles of the German industrial base, especially the aircraft industry.

American Air Supremacy

The strategic air campaign leading up to the invasion was long and bloody. In the end, there was only one fair way to measure the success of Operation Pointblank and its many related phases and strategies: How much opposition was the Luftwaffe able to muster over the beaches and invasion fleet when Normandy was invaded on D-day, June 6, 1944?

On D-day itself two German fighters appeared over the invasion beaches. Two. No German fighters rose to challenge the hundreds of fighter-escorted transport aircraft that dropped three airborne divisions behind the Normandy beaches, and no German fighters or bombers—not one—attacked the invasion armada or landing force. On June 6, 26 German airplanes—fighters and light bombers—were destroyed over France by U.S. Army Air Forces fighters, but none of these came within sight of the Normandy coast. The Luftwaffe never meaningfully contested the invasion or any of the subsequent Allied land campaigns in Europe. By the time the invasion began, American bomber losses had dropped to negligible proportions, and the Luftwaffe had been virtually driven from the skies over its own homeland.

From mid-1944, thanks to the introduction of better fighters and the use of aggressive, realistic offensive fighter doctrines, American airmen attained—not the air superiority they sought, but—total air supremacy over the whole of western Europe.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network. Originally Published April 16, 2019.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Trevor Filseth

Stimulus Payments,

Polling has indicated that four in ten Americans’ wages are lower now than they were in 2019, underlining the idea that the economic recovery is still far from over.

In March 2020, after Covid-19 lockdowns caused thousands of businesses to close their doors, Stephanie Bonin, a Colorado restaurant owner, started a Change.org petition calling for recurring stimulus checks. Bonin’s suggestion, echoing proposals made by legislators on Capitol Hill, was a recurring payment of $2,000 per month to all American adults throughout the pandemic.

The proposal in question had been advocated before—around the same time, it was put forward by Humanity Forward, a universal basic income (UBI) advocacy group, and it is difficult to tell who came up with the idea first. However, the petition quickly gained outsized attention as millions of people signed; its current tally sits at 2.45 million signatures—gaining roughly 50,000 in the past week alone. If the current trend continues, the petition will pass 2.5 million signatures next week.

The petition has been peripheral to the actual stimulus debate in Washington. However, while it probably has not affected any policy decisions, it has exposed a deep undercurrent of support for further stimulus payments. Nor is it the only place that this support has become apparent. According to one survey, 90 percent of Americans believed that the stimulus check gave them a noticeable economic benefit. In a separate Data for Progress poll, 65 percent expressed their support for another stimulus measure.

The moral case for another stimulus check is clear-cut. The U.S. unemployment rate is still at roughly 6 percent, far higher than its pre-pandemic level. Polling has indicated that four in ten Americans’ wages are lower now than they were in 2019, underlining the idea that the economic recovery is still far from over.

For these reasons, the stimulus payments are popular. More than sixty members of the House of Representatives, and more than twenty senators, have indicated their support for a fourth stimulus payment, although there is disagreement on what form such payment would take. The issue of recurring stimulus checks, in particular, has been taken up by progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

However, eighty out of five hundred and thirty-five is not a majority, and both Republicans and moderate Democrats have opposed the extra spending that a stimulus bill would entail. So, in all but words, has President Joe Biden, who has scrupulously avoided addressing the stimulus issue, pushing instead for a more traditional bipartisan infrastructure bill. While a second, larger spending bill is also in the works, it does not contain a stimulus, either. Barring an extreme event—such as a deadlier strain of Covid-19, forcing Americans back into their homes—another stimulus payment seems very unlikely.

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

Image: Reuters.

Wes Martin

Armenia, Iran, South Caucasus

Were the Nakhchivan corridor to run through Iran, it hands Tehran still yet more leverage and integration into the global economy.

With the exception of tragedy, trains rarely stir the international media. But when a new rail-line could hand one of America’s greatest threats renewed clout in a region currently closed to it, that should change. Particularly when that country has a new hardline leadership on the cusp of power.

Formerly a hanging judge, Iranian president-elect Ebrahim Raisi will be the least trustworthy of his recent predecessors. More ruthless and zealous in his revolutionary Islamist conviction, the distinguishing feature of his career was his role in a “death commission” that oversaw the secret executions of 30,000 thousand political prisoners in 1988. But though struggling under the weight of sanctions and isolation, Iran and its new leadership may soon be thrown a lifeline in the South Caucasus. Perhaps bizarrely, Armenia may inadvertently cast it to them. With renewed influence with Yerevan, America must prevent this at all costs.

Some geographical and historical context is necessary. Last autumn, Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a conflict over a region called Nagorno-Karabakh. The result was a return of internationally recognized lands to Azerbaijan that had been occupied since the two nations went to war as the USSR collapsed. Another consequence of their ceasefire agreement was the re-opening of transit routes between and within one another’s countries.

This is of grave importance to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. For Yerevan, its thirty-year occupation had left it isolated and reliant on Russia, with neighboring Azerbaijani Turkish borders closed to it. For Baku, it means the reopening of a transit line that runs twenty-six miles across Armenia’s southern border with Iran, reconnecting Azerbaijan with its long-isolated exclave Nakhchivan. However, Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan—until recently in the midst of a post-conflict crisis election—has said he will never entertain the idea of the Nakhchivan corridor, in spite of its explicit mention in the ceasefire agreement.

Few realize there could be an alternate rail line south of the border, through Iran, that mirrors the one envisaged in the ceasefire agreement. This would weaken Armenia’s hand in post-conflict negotiations; it should be cause to exercise caution.

Re-establishing direct connection is of great symbolic importance to Azerbaijanis, and therefore figures highly in any geostrategic calculation. Traveling to or from Nakhchivan currently entails a lengthy circumvention through Iran on poor roads—or freighting through Georgia and Turkey to the enclave. Up until now, the most logical line was to run it where it once was; and was assumed possible with the resolution of the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute.

But this calculation is changing due to Armenia’s intransigence. Within some circles in Baku, it is leading to consideration of this alternate Iranian route. Not only would this cut Armenia out of the future regional economy but it would hand Tehran renewed influence where it had recently been lacking.

Last autumn’s conflict blindsided Iran’s leadership in a region it believes is part of its domain. Russia and Turkey, allied respectively to Armenia and Azerbaijan, emerged as the key external power brokers. Tehran, waking up, has been touring the region post-war to re-establish its presence. The rail line will be that fix.

Regional connectivity, long stymied by the dispute, is the key to prosperity in the South Caucasus. Handing a critical role within that infrastructure to a malign actor to obstruct at will—or at least threaten to—delivers them undue leverage. For a regime known to move against rational economic incentives, this bodes ill. But if it is Azerbaijan’s only feasible option, Baku will take it.

Then there are the wider ramifications. The South Caucasus sits along the so-called middle corridor for freight between the Asia-Pacific and Europe. Infrastructure on both sides of the continents is ready to be connected. The final Azerbaijan-Nakhchivan jigsaw piece, whether it runs through Armenia or Iran, would form the fastest link. Were it to run through Iran, it hands Tehran still yet more leverage and integration into the global economy.

That is why America must impress upon Armenia to step up—for its own economic future and regional security. After being initially side-lined in the conflict’s resolution, Washington has recently managed to broker the first diplomatic breakthrough since the cessation of hostilities: Azerbaijan released fifteen Armenian detainees and, in return, Yerevan handed over maps detailing mines it had laid in one of the seven districts Azerbaijan reclaimed during the conflict.

But more importantly, the Biden administration has broken with precedent and officially recognized the Armenian genocide—much to Turkey’s ire. It risked worsening relations with a NATO ally to do something for Armenia from which Washington would gain nothing. Armenia will therefore listen.

In theory, Pashinyan shouldn’t take too much convincing: the corridor is after all in Armenia’s interest. Despite losing the conflict, he has touted the links now possible as a transformational opportunity. Hopefully, his previous denial of the Nakhchivan corridor was to mitigate against electoral attacks from an opposition crying traitor. With his election victory secured, he now has a mandate to make perceived concessions for Armenia’s future good.

Still, with the specter of Iranian influence possible through potential miscalculation, Washington would do well to remind him why the Nakhchivan corridor is in his interest. 

Colonel (Retired) Wes Martin has served in law enforcement positions around the world and holds an MBA in International Politics and Business.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

economy, Americas

One of the IRS’s stated priorities has been to ensure that government assistance programs, including stimulus checks and the newly increased Child Tax Credit, are made available to all Americans who qualify for them.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The agency announced Wednesday that it has partnered with civil society organizations, including churches, community organizations, and nonprofits to assist people with filing their taxes in twelve major cities. The assistance programs will be conducted over two weekends, from June 25–26 and again from July 9–10.

The years 2020 and 2021 have been unusual years for the Internal Revenue Service. During the coronavirus pandemic, millions of Americans lost their jobs, thousands of businesses were closed. The IRS, like all government agencies, was forced into remote work, complicating its ability to process tax returns submitted in the spring and summer of 2020. In addition to its normal duties, the agency was also tasked early on with sending hundreds of millions of stimulus checks out to American families—a task it largely succeeded at, albeit with some minor missteps. 

One of the IRS’s stated priorities has been to ensure that government assistance programs, including stimulus checks and the newly increased Child Tax Credit, are made available to all Americans who qualify for them. A primary issue of concern has been “non-filers,” Americans who, usually because they do not make enough income to be taxed on it, do not file their tax returns. Due to the fact that these Americans’ stimulus and Child Tax Credit payments are tied to tax returns —which are used to determine who is eligible based on income, as well as to determine what address to send the payments to—non-filers are often difficult for the IRS to send payments to. This is an especially significant problem because non-filers, by virtue of their lack of income, are in the most urgent need of assistance. 

To reach non-filers, the IRS has launched a number of programs. The agency’s website has an online portal assisting non-filing Americans to claim the Child Tax Credit, as well as the $1,400 (or possibly the earlier $1,200 or $600) stimulus checks. The credit’s advance payments will begin on July 15, imparting a sense of urgency to the IRS’s outreach. 

In addition to this, the agency announced Wednesday that it has partnered with civil society organizations, including churches, community organizations, and nonprofits to assist people with filing their taxes in twelve major cities. The assistance programs will be conducted over two weekends, from June 25–26 and again from July 9–10. The IRS has advertised the events on its website, and provided guidelines for what attendees should bring to each session—encouraging attendees to bring their Social Security information for themselves and their children, mailing and email addresses, and, if signing up for direct deposit, bank account information.

The events will be held in Atlanta, Houston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Miami, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Phoenix, and Washington, DC. 

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Reuters.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

The Mark 1 Boys initially fired a .55-caliber (13.9x99mm) steel-cored AP (armor-piercing) projectile with a muzzle velocity of around 2,500 feet per second, which was changed to a lighter bullet with a velocity of 2,900 feet per second in the Mark 2 load.

Key point: The ATR wasn't the best, but it did an important job during the early stages of the war.

When the first tanks appeared in World War I, they were relatively lightly armored and protected the crews only against small-arms fire. In addition, much of the armor was riveted. Projectiles striking the exterior of the armor could pop off rivet heads or flake armor from the internal surfaces, creating fragments that would fly around the vehicle interior, causing injuries or death. In fact, British tank crews had to wear protective goggles and chain-mail masks to guard against fragments made by bullets striking close to their open vision slits.

The Imperial German Army’s first attempt to give the infantry a man-portable antitank weapon resulted in the company Waffenfabrik Mauser AG creating and manufacturing the first antitank rifle in 1917. This was the Mauser Tank-Gewehr Model 1918, essentially a standard Mauser bolt-action rifle on steroids, firing a huge 13.2mm round and equipped with a bipod. A very unpleasant brute to fire, the T-Gewehr’s most impressive feat was that it was being fielded to frontline infantry within nine months of the tank’s first appearance on the battlefield.

Setting the Stage for the Boys ATR

The Mauser set the stage and ushered in the age of the antitank rifle, or ATR. Most major combatants, with the notable exception of the United States, fielded these weapons during the interwar years and through the beginning of World War II. Countries such as Finland, Switzerland, and Japan went the big-bore route, utilizing 20mm weapons. The Germans and Poles used 7.92mm weapons firing steel- or tungsten-cored small projectiles at incredibly high velocities. To the tanks of the 1930s, these weapons were a potent threat. By 1942, they were hopelessly outclassed.

The British Mark 1, Mark 1*, and Mark 2 Boys Anti-tank rifles were typical of the breed. Originally to be dubbed the Stanchion Rifle, instead the weapon received its name from the designer, Captain H.C. Boys, the Assistant Superintendent of Design for the British Small Arms Committee. Captain Boys died only a few days before his weapon was adopted into British military service in 1937, and the antitank rifle was renamed in his honor. It was often misspelled as Boyes.

An Ox of a Rifle

The Boys had a three-foot-long barrel, was 631/2 inches long overall, and weighed 36 pounds. This particular weapon was a repeater, a bolt-action that was fed by a five-shot detachable box magazine mounted atop the weapon in a fashion similar to the famous Bren light machine gun. Empty cartridge cases were ejected from the bottom of the action rather than the top. Just the loaded magazine weighed some 2.6 pounds, and weight does not endear any weapon to the infantryman.

The Mark 1 Boys initially fired a .55-caliber (13.9x99mm) steel-cored AP (armor-piercing) projectile with a muzzle velocity of around 2,500 feet per second, which was changed to a lighter bullet with a velocity of 2,900 feet per second in the Mark 2 load. Later, an even more effective tungsten-cored APCR (armor-piercing composite rigid) was developed, which boasted a muzzle velocity of well in excess of 3,000 feet per second. This load proved capable of penetrating 20mm of armor plate at 300 yards.

“Charlie the Bastard”

The early production Boys Mark 1 had the circular muzzle brake, which vented gases in all directions. Fired from an otherwise good low-profile position, the rifle regularly kicked up a blast of dust and debris that could give the operator’s position away. Later designs featured a flat harmonica-style muzzle brake, which vented all gases to the sides to correct this problem and had the added benefit of being easier to manufacture.

The harmonica-shaped (Mark 1*) muzzle brake or “recoil reducer” helped tame the weapon’s massive kick. In addition, the barrel itself recoiled an inch against a heavy shock absorber mounted in the butt. The improved later version of the .55-caliber Boys Mark 1* not only had the flat muzzle brake, but also simpler fixed sights and a Bren gun bipod to simplify its manufacture. The butt plate itself was heavily padded with rubber. A front bipod and rear grip were also fitted. Still, recoil was quite significant, causing Australian troops who were issued the Boys to nickname it “Charlie the Bastard.”

First Action in Finland

The first combat action for the Boys was actually with Finnish forces during the 1939-1940 Winter War against the Soviet Red Army. Great Britain sent 200 examples of the Boys to Finland. In the hands of the Finns, the Boys reportedly proved adequately effective against the early Soviet tank designs. Tanks such as the T-26 and BT-5 had thin armor and a distressing tendency to catch fire easily. The Finns were impressed enough with the Boys to later purchase another 200 of the weapons from the Germans, who had captured many of them during the campaign of spring 1941 that ended with the evacuation of Allied troops at Dunkirk. The Germans renamed them Panzerbuchse Boyes.

Later, the very first German tanks of World War II to be destroyed by British ground forces fell to a Boys. The 1st/5th Leicesters, who had been sent to aid in the defense of Norway after the German invasion of the neutral country, made a stand at the village of Tretten. Platoon Sergeant Major John Sheppard was commanding a small subunit guarding the right flank of a British position when he noticed German tanks approaching on the far side of the Laagen River. Taking up the unit’s .55-caliber Boys, which he had never used before, Sheppard assumed a steady prone position and proceeded to precisely and methodically smack each tank with three AP rounds, knocking out two of them and making the rest back off out of sight.

“A Terrifying Weapon”

The success of the Boys, or lack thereof, was also noted during the German invasion of France in May 1940. Despite the fact that the vast majority of the German tanks in use at the time were small, lightly armored Mark I and Mark II panzers, the former originally intended as nothing more than a training vehicle, the Boys was not a decisive factor in the infantry’s defense against armor.

Sergeant Edward Doe of the Kings Royal Rifle Corps was not impressed by the Boys: “The Germans had brought the tanks in and they were blasting … I actually fired the Boys anti-tank rifle for the first time in my life—a terrifying weapon. To even fire, you had to hang onto it like grim death because it would dislocate your shoulder if you didn’t. I fired at a tank coming over the bridge that wasn’t blown—and I couldn’t miss it from about 50 yards away. An officer was right beside me, and I saw this hit the tank and all it had done was to just about knock the paintwork off. It made a noise like a ping-pong ball. The officer who was beside me said to me, ‘Leave the blasted thing there, Doe—get the hell out of it.’”

Sergeant William J. Gilchrist of the Irish Guards had considerably better luck with the Boys. A later report confirmed, “France/Belgium 1940: Boulogne 23rd May 1940. Sgt. Gilchrist was in personal charge of an Anti-Tank Rifle which protected the rear of the Battalion during its withdrawal into Boulogne on the 23rd May. For two hours this NCO, with a few men, succeeded in holding their post at a street corner, thus enabling the remainder of the Battalion to move on unmolested. Although under extremely heavy machine-gun fire he showed the greatest contempt of danger and continued to keep his anti-tank gun in action. He was instrumental in hitting and setting on fire an enemy tank, thus blocking a street down which the enemy were trying to move. Later in the action he himself was wounded but refused to leave his Anti-Tank Rifle until it, and the Bren guns supporting it, became jammed through over firing. Throughout the whole action Sgt Gilchrist showed courage and bravery of a very high order and set the finest example to the remainder of his Platoon.”

65,000 Manufactured During the Course of the War

After losing so much war material at Dunkirk and facing the possibility of a German amphibious invasion, the British were desperate to reequip their armed forces in the shortest time possible. New and improved weapon designs were neglected for the moment; industry concentrated on pouring out as many current weapons from existing assembly lines as possible. Thus, obsolete and obsolescent designs such as the Boys and the 2-pounder antitank gun continued to be produced in great numbers despite their disappointing performance. Approximately 65,000 Boys weapons were manufactured during the war.

The Boys was quickly rendered ineffective as an antitank weapon by rapid improvements in German tank armor. In North Africa, however, it still proved somewhat effective against lighter vehicles and some Italian tanks, such as the Fiat light tanks and the thin-skinned machine-gun-armed Carro Veloce L3/35 tankettes. In one single engagement in the desert, the 7th Hussars knocked out five of these CV tankettes in rapid order with their Boys antitank rifles.

In the North African campaigns the Boys also found use against bunkers, machine-gun nests, and against infantry at long range. In the stony Western Desert, where the ground was often too hard to yield up good foxholes, infantrymen were forced to make fighting positions of piled stones known as sangers. The impact of the large .55-caliber bullets striking these sangers often produced casualties among enemy infantrymen from splinters and rock fragments. This trick was used again to engage German paratroopers fighting amid the rubble of Monte Cassino during the Italian campaign.

“Noted For its Uselessness”

As in Western Europe, the ordinary Commonwealth desert infantryman did not give the Boys rave reviews as an antitank weapon, as attested by one Australian account. “The Italians counterattacked with nine tanks and hundreds of infantrymen. Private O.Z. Neall knocked out three Italian tanks with his Boyes anti-tank rifle, a feat that astounded everyone —the Boyes rifle was noted for its uselessness.”

The British Universal or Bren Gun Carrier was a small, fully tracked, open-topped light armored vehicle that was mass produced during World War II and used by Commonwealth forces on all fronts. A total of some 113,000 of these carriers was manufactured, and they can be likened to an armored, tracked equivalent of the American jeep. In addition to the Bren gun, early models were also armed with a Boys ATR to provide some limited anti-armor defense.

In addition to the Universal Carrier, the Boys antitank rifle was also frequently used to supplement the machine-gun armament of numerous other light armored vehicles. These included the Morris CS9 Light Armored Car and Morris Light Reconnaissance Car, the Lanchester 4×2 and 6×4 armored cars, the Humber Light Reconnaissance Car, and the World War I-vintage Rolls Royce Armored Cars. As the war progressed, some attempts were made to improve the Boys. The Mark 2 was a shortened, lightweight version intended for use with airborne troops, but it was just as ballistically ineffective as its predecessors, and the recoil was even more brutal than the full-size model. A taper (or squeeze) bore barrel was tried to increase muzzle velocity in the same manner that the Littlejohn Adapter tried to extend the useful life of the 2-pounder gun, and experiments were also conducted with the .55-caliber cartridge casing necked down to fire a .303 bullet at extremely high velocity. However, by that time the Boys was already being retired.

Replaced by the PIAT

With the advent of improved infantry antitank weapons utilizing the very effective high- explosive shaped charge warhead, the Boys quickly disappeared. In English and Commonwealth service it was replaced by the PIAT, Projector Infantry Anti-Tank. Essentially a spring-loaded spigot mortar, the PIAT was also rather despised by its users owing to its nasty spring recoil and short range, but its powerful warhead could penetrate some four inches of tank armor.

Although the Boys antitank rifle rapidly became obsolete during World War II, it served its purpose as a stopgap defense against marauding Axis armor.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by Bob Cashner originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Flickr.

Warfare History Network

History, Asia

The M60 was used in every conceivable role for a machine gun.

Key point: The M-60 is iconic because it was a very good weapon that all knew to beware of.

The time was early 1967, the place a crowded square over a body of water on a narrow bridge in downtown Saigon. A 19-year-old American Army gun jeep commander in the 199th Light Infantry Brigade stood at his post in the rear of the vehicle. Both he and the driver wore .45-caliber pistols and carried M16 rifles. Besides the pistols and rifles, the Americans also had an M79 grenade launcher on the floorboards of the jeep, covered with heavy sandbags in case the vehicle hit a Vietcong landmine.

The jeep’s principal weaponry that day was the deadly United States Army standard-issue M60 machine gun, which—like the M14 rifle—fired the basic NATO round of 7.62mm ammunition. With the exception of the 1911-introduced .45, the other three weapons had been brought into the NATO arsenal at about the same time, in the early 1960s. The reason was simple, to ensure that all NATO armies were armed with the same weaponry and ammunition for ease of common supply in case a land war erupted in Europe with the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Albania.

Surrounded by a Sea of Swarming Humanity

Instead of Warsaw Pact soldiers, however, American weapons that day were being employed against two Communist armies on the other side of the world in Southeast Asia: the North Vietnamese Regular Army and the South Vietnamese civilian guerrilla forces, the Vietcong. As combat military policemen, the Americans in the jeep had been assigned to road convoy duty, getting infantry into and out of the field under fire. The young lieutenant was somewhat alarmed to be surrounded by a sea of swarming humanity, their intentions unknown. On the other hand, he knew that he was armed with one of the best machine guns in the world, mounted on a cast-iron swivel just under his right armpit. If he and his men had to fight their way out, they were ready. As it happened, they were in luck; the Vietnamese allowed them to pass unharmed.

The M60 machine gun was what the military called a “crew-served weapon,” requiring a team of three soldiers to transport, load, and fire it. It was capable of several types of fire: grazing, plunging, flanking, oblique, and enfilading. Aside from vehicular-mounted fire, it could be fired from the shoulder (kneeling and standing) and from a prone position as well. Its available ammunition consisted of ball (for use against light materials and personnel and for range training); armor-piercing (for use against lightly armored targets); tracer (for observation of fire, incendiary effects, signaling, and training); dummy (for use during mechanical training); and blanks (for use during training when simulated fire was desired; a blank firing attachment was required to fire this ammunition).

WWII Origins

In any modality, the M60 machine gun was a fearsome weapon of great potency. Like other weapons in the American military inventory, the M60 general purpose machine gun (GPMG) began its evolution at the end of World War II. The Allies had been impressed with the flexibility provided by the German GPMGs, and the American M60 incorporated a modified feed mechanism based on that of the German MG42, with the operating mechanism of the FG42 assault rifle. The initial version of the M60 was officially adopted by the U.S. Army in 1957.

Eventually, the M60 would go on to replace both the Browning light and heavy machine guns in the American arsenal, with its initial prototype being the T44. Its feed mechanism was bettered with two more variants until the T161 was produced and was introduced into the U.S. armory as the M60 GPMG. It could be used in both a bipod configuration for rapidly advancing infantry on the move or for defense when mounted on a M112 tripod as a heavy machine gun.

Some Drawbacks to the Design

The M60 was 42 inches long and weighed a little over 23 pounds. It was gas operated, with a 50-round link belt of 7.62mm ammunition and a muzzle velocity of 2,800 feet per second. Its maximum effective range was 1,200 yards with the bipod and an additional 329 feet when the tripod was added. Optimal operating range was about 3,900 feet. Moving away from the recoil mechanism of the Browning machine guns, the M60 was designed as a gas-operated weapon. As the first round traveled down the barrel, it pushed gas into the gas cylinder through a hole in the bore. The pressure in the cylinder then forced a piston down the chamber, moving back the bolt and chambering the next round into place. The cycle could be repeated for as long as the trigger was depressed.

With no gas regulator on the gun, however, there were drawbacks to the mechanism. Accumulated dirt or dust could slow down the piston and result in the M60 jamming or “running away”—continuing to fire even when the finger was removed from the trigger. This could prove unnerving during the heat of battle, when the assistant M60 gunner would be forced to hold onto the ammunition belt manually to stop it from feeding. One distinctive feature of the M60 was the chromium-plated barrel and satellite liners for the first six inches along the muzzle from the chamber. The nonferrous lining considerably increased the lifespan of each barrel although there were complaints that the barrel was heavy.

Used in Every Conceivable Role in Vietnam

The M60 was used in every conceivable role for a machine gun: mounted on trucks, jeeps, armored personnel carriers, and other vehicles; on tripods inside fortifications; on aircraft and boats. The M60 saw its widest use with American infantry forces on the ground in Vietnam. An infantry machine-gun section officially consisted of three soldiers: the gunner, the assistant gunner, and the ammunition carrier. In practice, all members of a patrol carried extra machine-gun ammunition, which was passed up to the gun crew when needed. American infantrymen carried belts of ammunition draped around their bodies. This was the easiest way to carry the heavy load, and it left the soldiers’ hands free to use other weapons.

The most common complaint about the M60 was that it was heavy, particularly when humping through the Southeast Asian jungle. It was also prone to jamming, especially when dirty. The safety was awkward to operate and worked opposite the M16 rifle, requiring an upward movement of the thumb to free the safety and make the gun ready to fire. Fired cartridges could also become torn and required extra time to remove an empty case—a less than ideal situation in combat. Marine units in particular resisted using the M60, preferring their longtime BARs.

100 Rounds Per Minute

The weapon had a sustained rate of fire of 100 rounds per minute, with a recommended barrel change every 10 minutes. It could also rapid fire at a rate of 200 rounds per minute with two or three seconds between bursts and a barrel change recommended every two minutes, and at the cyclic rate of approximately 550 rounds per minute, with a barrel change every single minute. The M60 had a bandolier capacity of 100 rounds, with a tracer round burnout of approximately 3,300 feet.

The M60 operator’s manual recommended that soldiers not open ammunition containers until the ammunition was to be used, noting that ammunition removed from the airtight containers, particularly in damp climates, was likely to corrode. The manual further directed: “Do not expose the ammunition to the direct rays of the sun. If the powder is hot, excessive heat may be developed when the gun is fired. Do not oil or grease ammunition. Dust and other abrasives collecting on oiled or greased ammunition will damage the operating parts of the gun, and oil on cartridges will produce excessive chamber pressure.”

Some Short-Lived Variants

Variants of the M60 included the short-lived M60B, which was designed to be fired by hand from helicopters. The B model had no bipod and featured a different rear stock than the regular model; it retained its pistol grips. The M60C lacked pistol grips, but its main difference was the electronic control system and hydraulic swivel system, which allowed it to be fired from cockpits on OH-13 Sioux, OH-23 Raven, UH-1B Huey, and Ov-10 Bronco helicopters.

This article by Christopher Miskimon originally appeared on Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Warfare History Network

Security, Asia

Twelve years of unabated Japanese military triumph came to an end during a period of only 90 days.

Key Point: Japanese aggression and territorial expansion had been justified as a crusade to rid Asia of European and American colonialism.

Since 1931, Japan’s army had asserted control over territory on the continent of Asia, brushing aside Chinese resistance, condemnation and political pressure from other nations, and most recently, the Allied military. Further, Japan had gained control over a vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, creating an outer ring of defenses extending thousands of miles from the home islands.

Japanese aggression and territorial expansion had been justified as a crusade to rid Asia of European and American colonialism. Their slogan “Asia for the Asians” actually meant “Asia for Japan.” Years of conquest led to the creation of the so-called “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” a weak attempt to legitimize Japan’s preeminent position in the region.

As the Japanese government debated the future of relations with the United States, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto warned that the prospect of a protracted war would surely end in defeat for his country. Yamamoto had visited the United States. He had served as a naval liaison officer and even attended Harvard University, studying English and petroleum management. He had seen firsthand the industrial might of America and warned that the only hope Japan had for ultimate victory would be to strike at Pearl Harbor, crippling the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and following that up with a string of rapid victories.

Yamamoto prophesied that in the wake of Pearl Harbor he would run wild in the Pacific for six months. After that, he made no guarantees. That prophecy proved eerily accurate. Following great victories in Burma and the fall of Singapore and Hong Kong, the terrific blow to Allied morale with the sinking of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, the seizure of the Philippines, the capture of thousands of American soldiers on Corregidor, and the Bataan Death March, Yamamoto was poised to seize Port Moresby at the tip of the island of New Guinea. From there, he would threaten Australia.

Yamamoto’s Prophecy was Eerily Accurate, Almost to the Day

During the first week of May 1942, however, the Japanese endured their initial setback as the Port Moresby invasion force was obliged to retreat following the Battle of the Coral Sea. A month later, Yamamoto again went on the offensive, this time with Midway Atoll as his objective. The capture of Midway would provide a staging area for a potential invasion of Hawaii, just 1,100 miles to the southwest.

During the first week of June, the complicated Japanese plan of attack unraveled. At Midway, the loss of four aircraft carriers and hundreds of combat aircraft compelled the Japanese to relinquish the initiative. From that time on, the Imperial forces would be fighting a defensive war. Yamamoto’s prediction was accurate almost to the day.

During the first week of August, American troops splashed ashore on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons. Their task was to capture the island, particularly its unfinished airfield, from which the Japanese had hoped to provide aircover for operations in the Southwest Pacific. The Guadalcanal campaign was the first offensive land action by U.S. soldiers during the War in the Pacific. The loss of the island after six months of bloody struggle sealed the fate of Japan.

Halted at the Coral Sea, soundly defeated at Midway, and confronted at Guadalcanal, the Japanese were astonished that their timetable of conquest could be upset so thoroughly and so quickly. Yamamoto did not live to see the final defeat of his nation. In April 1943, two months after the loss of Guadalcanal, his bomber was ambushed by a flight of American fighter planes and sent crashing into the jungle on the island of New Britain.

Twelve years of unabated Japanese military triumph came to an end during a period of only 90 days. The island road to Tokyo was long and costly for the Allies; however, from the summer of 1942 forward, the outcome was never in doubt.

Originally Published December 11, 2018.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Kyle Mizokami

Nuclear Weapons, Americas

The service developed many schemes over the span of 30 years to modernize the most powerful American battleships ever built.

Here's What You Need to Know: These ideas were dead in the water.

In the early 1980s, four Iowa-class fast battleships originally built during World War II—Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey and Wisconsin—were taken out of mothballs and returned to active duty.

Nearly 900 feet long and displacing close to 60,000 tons, the battlewagons could fire a nine-gun broadside sending 18 tons of steel and explosives hurtling towards their targets.

The battleships were modernized to include cruise missiles, ship-killing missiles and Phalanx point-defense guns. Returned to the fleet, the ships saw action off the coasts of Lebanon and Iraq. At the end of the Cold War the battleships were retired again. All were slated to become museums.

Few knew, however, that returning the battleships to service in the ’80s had been only part of the plan. The second, more ambitious phase was a radical redesign of the massive warships that would have combined the attributes of battleships and aircraft carriers.

The resulting ship, a “battlecarrier,” was merely one of many schemes over the span of 30 years to modernize the most powerful American battleships ever built. The various proposals—all of them nixed—had the World War II-era ships carrying hundreds of U.S. Marines or launching Harrier jump jets or even firing atomic projectiles.

A Hole in the Navy:

Before World War II, planners had assumed that the big-gun ships would win wars by duking it out with enemy vessels of the same kind. Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway dispelled that notion, as the flexibility and long-range striking power of aircraft carriers proved superior to battleships’ broadsides.

The battlewagons were relegated to a secondary role in the fleet, shelling shore defenses ahead of landings by the Army and Marines. And after the war, the Navy shed most of its heavy cruisers and battleships while retaining its aircraft carriers. The rush to embrace missiles further reduced the influence of the big-gun vessels, and the era of the battleship appeared to be over for good.

For the U.S. Marine Corps, this was a worrying trend. The seaborne invasion of Inchon during the Korean War showed that the age of amphibious assaults was not yet over. Military planners liked aircraft for their flexibility, but from the Marines’ perspective a ship that could sit off a coastline and bombard it with heavy guns for hours on end was vital.

There was a solution. The four Iowa-class battleships, in mothballs since World War II, were briefly reactivated during the Korean War to provide gunfire support for U.N. forces—and retired again after the war was over.

For some Navy planners, battleships were back in vogue. There were frequent attempts to return the battlewagons to service.

Nuclear Battleship:

In 1958, the Navy proposed overhauling the Iowa-class ships by removing all of the 16-inch guns and replacing them with anti-aircraft and anti-submarine missiles.

The new “guided missile battleships” would also carry four Regulus II cruise missiles, each of which could flatten a city a thousand miles distant with a nuclear warhead more than 100 times as powerful as the bomb used on Hiroshima.

The result would have certainly been the most powerful battleship ever, but the concept was riddled with inefficiencies. Under the proposal, 2,000 sailors would have had to sail into hostile waters in an expensive, 900-foot vessel to attack just four targets with nuclear weapons. An Air Force bomber could attack as many targets, at a greater range, with fewer than a dozen crew.

And at $1.5 billion in today’s dollars, the conversion would have been expensive.

At the same time, the Navy had put in orders for submarines to carry Polaris ballistic missiles. The proposed missile submarines could attack targets more than twice as far away as the Regulus II-armed battleship could, while carrying four times as many missiles and spending most of their time underwater avoiding detection.

The nuclear battleship concept was dead in the water.

Amphibious Battleship:

In 1961 a new proposal would have utilized the Iowa-class battleships to increase the navy’s troop-carrying capability. The rear turret and its three 16-inch guns would have been removed. In its place would be a hangar and a flight deck capable of carrying 30 helicopters.

The ship would also haul 14 landing craft to bring tanks and vehicles ashore. Accommodations for 1,800 Marines would be added.

Each of the amphibious Iowas would have been a one-ship expeditionary force.

Capable of laying down its own fire support with the remaining six 16-inch guns and deploying a battalion-sized Marine amphibious unit by air and sea, the ship would have been a hive of activity.

But it would still be expensive to convert and operate, and the Navy had many surplus aircraft carriers that could more cheaply be converted to amphibious platforms. Three such older carriers were modified, and the Iowa-class again stayed in mothballs.

Battlecarrier:

The cost of the Vietnam War put a temporary hold on talk of reviving the Iowas in some new form. One of the battleships, New Jersey, was briefly reactivated to serve in Vietnam.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration began an ambitious shipbuilding program. It was decided to yet again bring back the four Iowas. In phase one, the ships were modernized with the addition of Tomahawk land attack missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles and Phalanx defense guns. By the mid-1980s, all four had returned to duty.

There was a phase two that was never executed, and it was more interesting.

This phase again involved removing the rear 16-inch gun turret. In its place would be built an overhanging flight deck and two forward-facing ski jumps that would hurl Marine Corps Harrier jump jets into the air. The ship would carry up to 20 Harriers, as well as a hangar and an aircraft elevator.

And that’s not all. Nestled between the two ski jumps would be a large field of missile silos, each holding Standard anti-aircraft or Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles.

The firepower of the battleships—and their destructive range—would have increased substantially. Trading one turret for 20 Harrier jets was a pretty good deal. Add the Tomahawks and their ability to strike with precision at a thousand miles and the improvements looked even better. The resulting warship would have equaled the firepower of a Nimitz-class supercarrier.

But as before, the Iowas’ inherent inefficiencies worked against them. With a crew of nearly 2,000 each, the ships’ high personnel costs made them prohibitively expensive to run in an all-volunteer navy. Harrier jets could already be carried by the Tarawa-class landing ships, and missile silos were proliferating across the fleet.

The Navy came to the conclusion that if the country was going to get its money’s worth from the four battleships, the vessels had to concentrate on their unique abilities: firing massive artillery shells at the enemy.

That meant keeping all three main gun turrets. The cool conversion schemes would have to stay just that, schemes.

Future Battlewagon:

Today the naval gunfire argument rages on. Even in the age of drones and precision warfare there are still occasional calls to bring the heavily manned, imprecise Iowa class back to service. There’s a certain romance to battleships, and having four Iowas sitting around in good condition has beguiled naval enthusiasts and planners for more than 60 years with schemes to bring them back.

The Zumwalt-class destroyers will go a long way towards providing battleship-quality naval gunfire support for the Marines. Minimally manned, relatively small, stealthy and precise, the Zumwalts are the antithesis of the Iowas, but functionally their successors.

Although each Zumwalt can only provide the explosive mass of a single one of an Iowa’s 16-inch guns, the newer ship can fire its smaller shells with GPS-aided precision up to 83 miles away, versus 20 miles for an Iowa.

Should the Zumwalt design be successful, the torch of the battleship could finally be transferred to them, and the Iowas can finally slumber in peace as museums, safe from the schemes of those who would revive them.

This article appeared earlier in 2019.

Image: U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons

Warfare History Network

Security, Americas

The week of May 4-10, 1942, saw the loss of 300,000 deadweight tons of Allied shipping to German U-boats, loss rates that were twice new ship launches.

Key Point: Hughes settled on a design gross weight of 400,000 pounds.

The Time magazine article was titled “It Flies!” It was a note of triumph and vindication, but also an epitaph, of an aircraft that was five years in the making—the “Spruce Goose,” a plane that should not have existed. Many things were against it, even, to a certain degree, its creator.

The week of May 4-10, 1942, saw the loss of 300,000 deadweight tons of Allied shipping to German U-boats, loss rates that were twice new ship launches. Imaginative use of America’s industrial and technological strengths to deal with such problems was the mission of the War Production Board’s planning committee.

On May 22, F.H. Hoge, Jr., a member of the committee, proposed the use of extremely large flying boats, pointing out that current aircraft on transoceanic flights devoted 38 percent of their takeoff weight to fuel and oil, but that a 300,000-pound plane would use only 20 percent, and, that since flying boats did not require landing gear, an additional 15 percent in aircraft weight would be saved.

But it was the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser who saw the opportunity. He approached such problems with big schemes, limitless energy, and a genius for organization and improvisation. He had moved from constructing mammoth hydroelectric dams, such as the Hoover and Grand Coulee, to shipbuilding in 1941.

Faced with the terrible loss of shipping that was threatening the Allies, Kaiser suggested two possible solutions. One was to convert some of his shipyards to the mass production of giant seaplanes. The other was to mass produce antisubmarine aircraft carriers on Liberty Ship hulls. In the latter case, Kaiser facilities would produce some 70 escort carriers during the war.

But in the summer of 1942, after the Germans sank 681 Allied ships in the first seven months of the year, the idea of flying boats captured the nation’s imagination. In July, Kaiser outlined plans for flying boats of 200 to 500 tons and launched a publicity and lobbying campaign telling the press that he envisioned a fleet of 5,000 flying boats.

He followed with a proposal to the Army and Navy. And, though they considered it impractical, they knew that the public and some members of Congress believed otherwise. The Aircraft Division of the War Production Board was asked to review Kaiser’s proposal.

Merrill C. Meigs, deputy director of the board’s Aircraft Division, told Kaiser that it took more than four years to develop a new aircraft, but Kaiser was undaunted. Regarding possible resource requirements, Kaiser said he would build a steel foundry and educate and develop technicians and engineers in support of his proposal.

Meigs then set up a committee of aircraft manufacturers to hear Kaiser’s plans. But the manufacturers were not enthusiastic about the possible entry of another aircraft company into their industry. Donald Douglas, head of Douglas Aircraft, advised that to prepare a preliminary design for a 200-ton aircraft would require at least 100,000 engineering hours.

During July and August, Kaiser made two proposals—mass production of the Martin Mars flying boat and the design and development of the 200-ton flying boat––both taken under consideration by the War Production Board, headed by Donald Nelson. The Mars, first flown in June 1942, was a four-engine, 200-foot wingspan, 75,000-pound aircraft capable of carrying a 32,000-pound payload, or 133 troops, over a range of 5,000 miles. But Nelson was concerned about the possible impact on existing programs by manufacturers working at full capacity.

Kaiser then approached the well-known aviator, Howard Hughes, with a pitch to jointly develop the large flying boat. Though aware of the problems in designing a new aircraft, Hughes was intrigued with the possibility of coming up with the world’s largest airplane, especially after being told that the Douglas, Martin, and Northrup aircraft companies all thought that it couldn’t be done.

By August 22, 1942, after several weeks of discussion, a handshake agreement was reached—Hughes would design the plane and Kaiser would build it. Subsequently, a written contract between Hughes and Kaiser called for the design and construction of 500 aircraft.

The Gigantic Spruce Goose

On September 17, Kaiser-Hughes received authorization to proceed with design engineering and construction of three prototype flying boats. Among the conditions imposed were that all construction would use a minimum of any critical or strategic materials, that no engineers or technicians working for manufacturers already engaged in the war effort could be employed without the permission of their employers, that they could spend no more than $18 million, and that the program would be limited to 24 months. But the Kaiser-Hughes partnership soon dissolved and Hughes proceeded alone. During the first seven months of the project, Hughes acted as general manager. Kaiser, unsuccessful in his attempt at combining forces with Hughes, had nothing more to do with the project except to help out with providing a few personnel.

Design presented several challenges— such a plane would require an overhang wingspan 50 percent greater than the Martin Mars, which would present new torsional, wing flutter, vibration, deflection, and control problems never before tested.

Seven aircraft configurations were drawn up, including twin-hull and single-hull designs with four to eight engines. Hughes settled on a design gross weight of 400,000 pounds. This number was reached based on creating the largest aircraft possible using eight of the largest engines then under development. Eight was considered the maximum number of engines that seemed practical.

In the final design, the HK-1, as it was called, would be built mostly of wood, its elevators and rudder fabric covered. It was referred to as the “Flying Lumberyard” by critics, while Hughes detested the other nickname, “Spruce Goose.” To him she was “The Flying Boat,” though one story was that Hughes’s nickname for the plane was the “Jesus Christ,” since those were the first words out of the mouths of individuals when Hughes took them into the hangar where the plane was being built.

The giant airplane was made mostly of birch, not spruce, with a wingspan of 320 feet, a vertical fin of 85 feet, and a weight of 300,000 pounds. It was designed to carry 120,000 pounds of cargo, or 750 combat-ready troops, or two Sherman tanks. Its eight massive engines, with 17-foot propellers, generated over 3,000 horsepower each. It was to have a range of 3,000 miles at a speed of approximately 200 mph.

The Project That Wouldn’t Die

During the design phase, Hughes was rarely seen by other members of the team. He was a night owl, had a penchant for secrecy, and was involved in multiple simultaneous projects, as well as a reluctance to delegate authority. Key decisions were delayed for days in some cases because of problems contacting Hughes. Even as the project began to fall behind schedule, Hughes refused to relinquish control. He continued to be involved in the smallest of details but then would disappear for weeks.

Despite Hughes’s management style, some progress was made during 1943 on the aircraft’s design, but major problems resulted from combining wood construction with the plane’s giant size. Elaborate and costly jigs had to be devised and new glues and gluing processes developed. Development of new tools, materials, and methods was by trial and error, consuming time, material, and money.

Years later Hughes partially blamed delays on the requirement that he build the plane of nonstrategic materials; however, government records indicate that Hughes was given the option of switching to metal, but declined. Given the progress that had been made in pioneering innovative methods in wood construction, and Hughes’s attraction to the smooth finish of the Duramold plywood used, he was reluctant to change materials. Hughes was meticulous regarding materials, workmanship, and appearance.

Numerous elements lined up against the project. In October 1943 the Aircraft Production Board proposed cancelling the contract because it offered no useful contribution to the war effort. In early 1944 it was determined that successful development of the Mars flying boat would make the HK-1 unnecessary. In March 1944 the Cargo Plane Committee of the War Production Board was of the opinion that a change in the character of the war had abated a need for a giant cargo aircraft.

The War Production Board dispatched Grover Loening, seaplane designer and consultant to the board, to evaluate the plane’s design. But his report called the plane’s design amazing and the most remarkable flying boat he had ever seen.

On March 17, Hughes advised the board against stopping construction,saying, “If we are going to keep abreast of development in aviation, then we must reconcile ourselves to the necessity of building bigger and bigger airplanes.”

Despite the many efforts to kill the project, highly placed administration officials renewed it, though the plan was reduced to one plane.

At the same time that the HK-1 was under development, Hughes was also active in pushing development of the Lockheed Constellation—a postwar, four-engine transport and civilian airliner.

The First and Last Flight of the Spruce Goose

The project continued into 1947, when a Senate committee began investigating Hughes for defense contract irregularities. Hughes was called before the Senate War Investigating Committee in the late summer of 1947. During testimony Hughes stated, “The Hercules was a monumental undertaking. It is the largest aircraft ever built. It is over five stories tall with a wingspan longer than a football field. That’s more than a city block. Now, I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation all rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if it’s a failure, I’ll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it.”

During a break in the Senate hearings, Hughes returned to California to run taxi tests on the renamed H-4 Hercules. On November 2, 1947, the taxi tests began with Hughes at the controls. His crew included Dave Grant as co-pilot, two flight engineers, Don Smith and Joe Petrali, 16 mechanics, and two other flight crewmen. In addition, the H-4 carried seven invited guests from the press and seven industry representatives.

After the first two taxi runs, Hughes made a third and surprised all the onlookers and crew as the Hercules lifted off, remaining airborne at 70 feet off the water at a speed of 135 miles per hour for around a mile. Having proven to his detractors that the aircraft was flight worthy, Hughes felt vindicated in the development of the aircraft and receipt of the government’s $18 million funding.

But the flight was not without concerns. Harry Kaiser, engine man, went down to the cargo deck after touchdown and saw the tail twisting around. Bill Noggle, hydraulic mechanic, posted in the tail, reported, “It’s about ready to leave us.”

After landing, Hughes was asked if he had expected to get the plane airborne. “Exactly,” said Hughes. “I like to make surprises.” Carl Babberger, Hughes’s chief aerodynamicist, stated, “All the factors were present for take-off—a high head wind, the 15-degree flap setting, and a light load. It probably got airborne before he expected it to, but on the other hand it wouldn’t surprise me that being under fire from Senator [Ralph Owen] Brewster, he was prepared to gamble. If it took off, fine. If it didn’t, fine.”

Several months after the test, through a spokesman, Hughes wanted it understood that the Hercules was only a research aircraft. That it would never be used in competition with military or commercial planes, but would help to deal with the problems of large aircraft—that the Hercules would point the way for big planes.

After the test a full-time crew of 300 workers, all sworn to secrecy, maintained the aircraft in flying condition in a huge, $1.75 million, climate-controlled hangar. A million dollars a year was spent maintaining the plane, as the engines were cycled and flight controls exercised weekly. Many modifications were designed and installed. For several years the crew expected that it would fly again as several more test flights were scheduled, then cancelled.

There was a great deal of speculation about why the aircraft was never flown again. Some said Hughes was afraid to, but his closest associates denied this.

The aircraft did have its weaknesses. According to one of Hughes’s mechanics, “Maybe one of the reasons why they didn’t fly it [again] was there was a little fluctuation in the tail, and maybe it wasn’t beefed up enough to suit him.”

But there was also no reason to continue the project because the need for big seaplanes had evaporated, especially an aircraft made of wood.

Even before the flight Hughes admitted that the plane was too large to be economical. However, claiming there were still research lessons to be learned, he stubbornly kept the work going. But he was distracted by other ventures and increasingly reclusive. After Hughes’s death on April 5, 1976, the plane was put on exhibit at Long Beach, California. In 1977, the U.S. Navy considered test flights with the H-4 as part of its research into low-altitude transoceanic flight, but never carried out the tests. The plane was moved from Long Beach to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, southwest of Portland, in 1992.

Perhaps the key reason Hughes continued maintenance of the plane was that he saw it as his greatest aviation achievement. Despite being a short flight, the one and only flight of the Hercules may have been Hughes’s finest hour.

Originally Published December 31, 2018.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Flickr.

Michael Peck

History, Americas

American troops helped to support their European allies across the Atlantic, but what would have happend had those troops been forced to stay in America to fight an invading army from the south?

Here's What You Need to Remember: The focal point of global events in 1918 was France and Belgium, not Mexico or Texas. Russia, gripped by Bolshevik revolution, had pulled out of the war by 1918, leaving Germany free to transfer fifty divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front. In spring 1918, the Germans launched a massive offensive in France that nearly won the war.

It was one hundred years ago when Mexico almost invaded the United States.

In January 1917, German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann dispatched a coded telegram to Heinrich von Eckardt, the German ambassador to Mexico. With Germany locked in bloody stalemate with the Allies in France, and Britain’s naval blockade strangling the German economy, Kaiser Wilhelm’s government was about to make a fateful decision: declare unrestricted submarine warfare, which would allow U-boats to sink merchant ships on sight.

That also meant sinking the ships of neutral powers, most especially the United States, which would likely respond by declaring war on Germany. But Zimmermann had instructions for his ambassador: “We make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”

This was the famous Zimmermann Telegram. Decoded by the British, who passed it on to  the Americans, it became a justification—along with unrestricted submarine warfare—for the U.S. declaration of war on Germany in April 1917.

In the end, Mexico turned down the proposal. But what if Mexico had declared war on the United States?

In fact, Mexican president Venustiano Carranza did order his government to study the German offer, according to Friedrich Katz, in his book The Secret War in Mexico. Carranza’s decision wasn’t surprising. In Mexican eyes, the United States had illegally seized one-third of Mexico’s territory during the 1847 Mexican-American War, including what are now the states of California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. In 1916, a U.S. Army expeditionary force had entered Mexico in pursuit of the notorious revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had raided American territory.

However, when Mexican officials studied the proposal, they concluded that Germany would never be able to ship sufficient munitions (especially given the inevitable American blockade), and that annexing three U.S. states would lead to permanent conflict with America. Ironically, given the current furor over Mexican illegal immigrants in the United States, the Mexican government worried in 1917 that adding millions of Americans to Mexico’s population would mean that Mexicans couldn’t be sure “whether we had annexed them or they had annexed us.”

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As Katz, an Austrian refugee from Hitler who became one of Mexico’s most important historians, put it: “All these reports show that Carranza did not want to rush into war with the United States, and certainly not on the basis of a German offer of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. But it can also be surmised from these indications that he wanted to keep Germany in reserve for the eventuality, which Carranza considered a probable one, of an American attack on the Mexican oil fields.”

So what if Carranza had decided to ally with Germany and attack the United States, either to recover lost territory or to preempt a feared American seizure of Mexican oil? In 1917, the Mexican army numbered perhaps sixty-five thousand to one hundred thousand soldiers. In 1914, the U.S. Army had just ninety-eight thousand men. By the end of 1918, it had swelled to four million, of which two million had been sent to France. America also had tanks and aircraft (provided by the British and French while American industry geared up for war), a huge navy and plenty of money.

Short of Kaiser Wilhelm’s spike-helmeted legions storming New York and Baltimore, there was no way Mexico could seized the southwestern United States. Yet this didn’t matter to Germany. What Mexico could do was tie down American troops and equipment that otherwise would have been sent to Europe. Not that many U.S. troops would have been needed to stop a Mexican invasion, though recent history warns that many, many troops would have been needed to occupy Mexico. But a second Mexican-American war could easily have triggered a disproportionate response, as the American public demanded that the troops stay home and defend the nation.

And that’s where history might have changed. The focal point of global events in 1918 was France and Belgium, not Mexico or Texas. Russia, gripped by Bolshevik revolution, had pulled out of the war by 1918, leaving Germany free to transfer fifty divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front. In spring 1918, the Germans launched a massive offensive in France that nearly won the war.

What helped revive the exhausted British and French armies were the divisions of fresh Yank troops streaming off the transport ships and into the trenches. If those troops had stayed in America, it is possible that World War I might have ended later than it did, or perhaps even in a compromise peace instead of a German defeat.

Fortunately, none of this happened. In the end, the Zimmermann Telegram did accomplish something: it hastened Germany’s downfall.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in 2017, the 100th anniversary of the Zimmerman Telegram. It is being reposed due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Naval Warfare, Global

Hint: none of them are really modern.

Here's What You Need to Know: Topping the list are naval actions that decided the fates of civilizations, empires, or great nations. This is decisiveness of the first order.

Ranking battles by their importance has been a bloodsport among military historians as long as there have been military historians. Creasy's classic Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851) set the standard for the genre.

But what makes a battle decisive? And what makes one such test of arms more important than another?

Defining the term too loosely produces howlers like a recent US News catalogue of decisive battles of the American Civil War. By the US News count, 45 engagements qualified as decisive during that four-year struggle alone. Zounds!

The term must be defined less cavalierly than that to be meaningful. If every battle is decisive, no battle is. That's one reason I always ask students whether some legendary triumph—a Trafalgar, or a Tsushima Strait—was decisive, or just dramatic, or just featured the star power of a Nelson or Togo.

Even the masters of strategy, however, appear ambivalent about what constitutes decisive victory. Carl von Clausewitz supplies a working definition, describing a decisive engagement as one that leads directly to peace. This implies an action carrying not just tactical but strategic and political import. Such an encounter impels the vanquished to accept the victor's terms at the bargaining table, whether because he's no longer capable of fighting on, believes he stands little chance of turning the tables and winning, or estimates that victory will prove unaffordable. A decisive battle, in this expansive interpretation, is the chief determinant of a war's outcome.

So far, so good. But how direct must direct be for a battle to earn the lofty status of decisive? Must peace talks take place immediately following the clash of arms that precipitates them? Can a settlement come weeks or months afterward, so long as the cause/effect relationship is clear? What's the time horizon?

The great Carl is silent on such matters. It's possible he's too casual about them. Combat, methinks, can be decisive while achieving more modest goals than winning a war outright. To see how, interpret the word literally: something decisive decides something. (Admittedly, this is probably how the US News team got in trouble. Every action decides something in a tactical sense, no matter how mundane or inconsequential. If nothing else, it determines who holds the field of battle at day's end, or reveals that the fighting stalemated. This says little about its larger meaning, if any.) Armed clashes can yield decisive results on different levels of war. A tactical encounter could decide the outcome of a campaign or the fate of a combat theater without leading directly to peace. Right?

In short, it appears wise to define a decisive victory more three-dimensionally than Clausewitz does, namely as a trial of arms that lets a belligerent accomplish some positive or negative aim beyond mere tactical results. Winning the war would still qualify, obviously, but the broader view would allow historians to rate a Battle of Trafalgar as decisive.

Fought in 1805, Trafalgar scarcely brought about final peace with Napoleonic France. That took another decade of apocalyptic warfare. But it did settle whether the French could invade the British Isles and, through amphibious conquest, crush the offshore threat to French supremacy. The heroics of Nelson, Collingwood, and their shipmates decided the outcome of Napoleon's scheme while enabling Great Britain to persevere with the struggle. Trafalgar, then, directly accomplished the negative goal of keeping French legions from invading Britain. That must qualify as decisive in the operational sense.

Speaking of pugilism on the briny main, here's another wrinkle in this debate. Clausewitz says next to nothing about maritime conflict. Water barely exists in his writings. Fin de siecle historian Sir Julian Corbett, the best in the business of sea-power theory, doubts naval warfare is ever decisive by itself, except perhaps through gradual exhaustion. Close or distant blockades, however, grind down not just the enemy but your allies and your own businessfolk who rely on seaborne trade. They impose costs on everyone.

Like Clausewitz, Corbett thus seems skeptical about the decisiveness of any single engagement. Sure, a dominant seafaring state can and must make the sea a barrier to invasion and other direct assaults on its homeland. That's the Trafalgar model. At its bottom, though, maritime strategy is the art of determining the relations between the army and navy in a plan of war. It's ultimately about shaping affairs on land, which, after all, is where people live. But how do you rank a purely naval engagement on the high seas against an army/navy operation that unfolds at the interface between land and sea?

Tough question. So there's a lot to ponder in the seemingly simple question, what is decisive? To rank naval battles against one another, let's assign a pecking order among degrees of decisiveness. Derring-do, tactical artistry, or gee-whiz technology are not among the criteria. Nor are lopsided tactical results enough to lift an encounter into the upper echelon. That's why the Battle of Tsushima, which left wreckage from the Russian Baltic Fleet littering the Yellow Sea floor in 1905, doesn't make my list.

Topping my list are naval actions that decided the fates of civilizations, empires, or great nations. This is decisiveness of the first order. Such encounters stand in a category apart. Next come engagements that reversed the momentum in a conflict of world-historical importance. They set the endgame in motion, even if a long time elapsed between the battle and the peace settlement it helped set in motion. Direct needn't mean fast. And if battles meeting one of those standards don't exhaust the field—read on to find out—last come tests of arms that settled the outcome in a particular theater of war, helping set the stage for eventual victorious peace.

So, this leaves us with a rough hierarchy of sea fights. The more fateful and enduring a battle's ramifications, the higher it stands on the list. All of which is a roundabout way of getting to my Top Five Naval Battles in World History. In order from least to most important:

5. Lepanto (1571). The Battle of Lepanto stemmed the westward spread of Ottoman power across the Mediterranean Sea. With papal sanction, the Holy League, a consortium of Catholic seafaring states, assembled a navy to engage the main Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Corinth, off western Greece. Lepanto was the last major all-galley naval engagement in the Mediterranean. The League put its advantages in gunnery and ship types—notably the galleass, an outsized galley bearing heavy armament—to good use against the Turkish fleet, which disgorged far less weight of shot. The Ottomans lost the bulk of their vessels to enemy action. More importantly, they lost experienced crews. They found that regenerating human capital isn't as easy as fitting out wooden men-of-war. Shipwrights soon built new hulls, letting the Turkish navy reassert its supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean for a period. By 1580, however, the new navy was left to rot at its moorings. Galley warfare assured permanent European, not Ottoman, command of the middle sea. That's a decisive result by any measure.

4. Battle of Yamen (1279). Sometimes dubbed “China’s Trafalgar,” this clash between the Mongol Yuan Dynasty and the beleaguered Southern Song determined who would rule China for nearly a century. It was far more decisive than Horatio Nelson’s masterwork. Over one thousand warships crewed by tens of thousands of men took part in the engagement. Yuan commanders deployed deception and bold tactics to overcome at least a 10:1 mismatch in numbers. Most important, Yamen claimed the life of the Song emperor, clearing the way for Kublai Khan’s dynasty to take charge of Asia's central kingdom. The results of Yamen thus reverberated throughout Asia for decades afterward.

3. Quiberon Bay (1759). The year 1759 has been called a year of miracles for Great Britain. Land and naval operations determined whether Britain or France would emerge triumphant in North America. British troops under Wolfe subdued Montcalm's defenders at Quebec and Montreal, sealing the fate of New France. France stood little chance of recouping its fortunes because Admiral Sir Edward Hawke's Royal Navy fleet ventured into Quiberon Bay that November—in a westerly gale, no less—and put paid to the French fleet in its home waters. Having wrested away command of Atlantic shipping lanes, Britain could bar access to the Americas. Lesson: to score decisive victories, hire commanders with fighting names like Wolfe and Hawke. British exploits settled the destiny of a continent while setting a pattern for North American politics that persists to this day.

2. Spanish Armada (1588). This was the duke of Medina Sidonia's purportedly invincible fleet, ordered by Spain's King Philip II to cross the Channel and land in England. There Spanish forces would unseat England's Queen Elizabeth I. By installing a friendly regime, the expeditionary force would terminate English support for the Dutch revolt roiling the Spanish Netherlands while ending English privateering against Spanish shipping. The Catholic Philip sought and obtained papal approval for the enterprise against the Protestant Elizabeth. Weather, however, conspired with English seamanship and gunnery tactics to condemn the expedition. The Spanish host was unable to land. Instead Medina Sidonia found himself compelled to circumnavigate the British Isles under foul conditions to reach home port. The failed cross-Channel crusade heartened the English crown. Had the Armada replaced a Protestant with a Catholic monarch, it's conceivable that the British Empire never would have been founded—and certainly not in the form it actually took. How would Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean history have unfolded then? The implications of that question boggle the mind—and qualify the Armada's defeat as decisive in the largest sense.

1. Salamis (480 B.C.). Taken in tandem with its immediate precursors, the sea battle of Artemisium and the land battle at Thermopylae, the Battle of Salamis was part of a joint campaign that would gladden Corbett's heart. Themistocles, the founder of the Athenian navy, led an outnumbered, outmanned allied fleet against King Xerxes' Persian armada. Artemisium kept Persian sea forces from linking up with the colossal horde that had crossed the Hellespont and was lumbering overland through Greece, with the ultimate goal of conquering Europe. Themistocles' fleet then retired to the waters off Salamis Island to defend the Athenian populace, which had abandoned its city to the Persians. Guile and artful tactics let the allies overcome Persian numbers in this narrow sea. If not for Spartan and Athenian audacity, at sea as on shore, Xerxes may have throttled Western civilization in its infancy. Fending off the Great King's onslaught entitles Salamis to enduring fame. It was the most decisive naval battle in history.

Needless to say, drawing up a list like this one is tough. Many worthy candidates ended up on the cutting-room floor. China's Ming Dynasty was born through inland naval warfare, at the Battle of Lake Poyang (1363). The Battle of the Virginia Capes (1781) doomed Lord Cornwallis' army at Yorktown and assured American independence. The naval battles at Guadalcanal (1942-1943) reversed the tide of war in the Pacific, while the Battle of the Philippine Sea (1944) doomed Japanese naval aviation—paving the way for history's last major fleet engagement, at Leyte Gulf later that year. None, however, compares to the top five for world-historic significance.

Lastly, it's fun and enlightening to speculate about the dogs that didn't bark. About, that is, the naval engagements of immense consequence that could have, and perhaps should have, yet never did take place. For instance, the U.S. Navy just celebrated the bicentennial of the Battle of Lake Erie. Despite the dismal results of the War of 1812, small-scale engagements such as Lake Erie and the Battle of New Orleans impressed the British leadership with the United States' latent military and naval strength. Trivial-seeming U.S. victories implanted the idea among British statesmen that a conciliatory policy toward Washington was more prudent than trying to outmatch a republic predestined for primacy in North America and its marine environs.

Why the rise of America didn't produce a cataclysmic naval war with the supreme sea power of the day is worth mulling over. But that, as they say, is a story for another day.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and author of “Visualize Chinese Sea Power,” in the current issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in October 2013.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

David Axe

History, Americas

She was an expert of disguise named Emma Edmonds.

Here's What You Need to Know: Edmonds wanted revenge on the Confederacy.

In 1862, Confederate authorities captured a Union spy in Richmond, Virginia and executed him. The agent’s death created a job opening in the secret service of the United States—one that the unlikeliest candidate ultimately filled.

The Union’s new spy was a woman and an expert of disguise named Emma Edmonds. In the spring of 1862 she infiltrated Confederate lines by dyeing her skin black with silver nitrate, donning a wig and posing as a male slave.

Edmonds was Canadian. Born in 1841, in 1861 she enlisted in a Michigan infantry unit while disguised as a man. The secret woman soldier was on the front lines around Fortress Monroe, on the Virginia coast, when she learned of the spy’s execution in Richmond.

She applied to fill the agent’s position—a gambit she recounted in her bestselling 1864 memoir Unsexed, or the Female Soldier. Historian Philip Van Doren Stern included a chapter from Unsexed in his 1959 book Secret Missions of the Civil War.

Edmonds had an ulterior motive in wanting to be a spy. During the fighting around Fort Monroe, Confederate sharpshooters had killed a Union lieutenant named James Vesey. Edmonds was “obviously in love” with Vesey, Stern wrote.

She wanted revenge. And to get it, she would pretend to be a male slave and enter Confederate territory.

First, she had to prove to Union spymasters that she was loyal … and could use a firearm. She attended her interview in her “normal” disguise as a man. “My views were freely given, my object briefly stated, and I had passed trial one,” Edmonds wrote.

Next, she demonstrated her prowess with a weapon. “I sustained my character in a manner worthy of a veteran,” she crowed.

Federal spymasters gave her three days to prepare for her first mission into Confederate-held Virginia. “I purchased a suit of contraband clothing, real plantation style, and then I went to a barber and had my hair sheared close to my head.”

With silver nitrate she dyed her “head, face, neck, hands and arms” black. To test her disguise, she approached a Union postmaster who knew her as a white man.

Edmonds asked the postman to bring her a wig from Washington. The postman did not recognize the apparent black man standing before him and demanded to know what the whig was for.

“No matter, that’s my order,” Edmonds recalled saying. The postmaster agreed to fetch it. Edmonds was confident her disguise would work. Pocketing a revolver, she slipped through the Union picket outside Fortress Monroe and strolled into Confederate lands.

After a cold, sleepless night, Edmonds encountered a group of slaves carrying coffee and supplies to rebel pickets. She fell in with the slaves and wound up as part of a work party building fortifications for the Confederate army.

For two days no one saw through her disguise. While working, Edmonds noted the positions of the Confederate artillery. She sketched a map of the rebel defenses and slipped into her shoe for safekeeping.

On the third day, one of the slaves in Edmonds’ work party looked at her curiously. “I’ll be darned if that fella ain’t turning white,” the man commented. Catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, Edmonds realized with horror that her silver nitrate skin dye was wearing off. She hurriedly reapplied her disguise.

Returning to Confederate positions, Edmonds observed rebel soldiers gathering around a civilian man. She recognized the man’s voice—he was a peddler who also frequented the Union Fort Monroe.

“There he was, giving the rebels a full description of our camp and forces,” Edmonds recalled. The peddler boasted that he had tipped off rebel snipers to Vesey’s position. “They lost a splendid officer through my means,” the peddler said.

Finally, Edmonds could have vengeance, by warning the Union of the peddler’s betrayal. “I thanked God for that information,” the spy wrote. Handed a rifle and commanded to stand guard, Edmonds instead seized the opportunity to slip away into the forest … and return to her own army.

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

This article first appeared in March 2020.

Image: Wikimedia Commons