Diplomacy & Crisis News

What began as a coup by the Myanmar military has ‘rapidly morphed’ into an all-out attack against the civilian population that has become increasingly widespread and systematic, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned on Tuesday.

A regime that bombs hospitals and blocks convoys of baby formula does not deserve a leading role in global health.

The ride-hailing app won the Chinese cab wars. Its next logical step turned out to be a huge mistake.

When it comes to equality at the ballot box, the United States has become a global outlier.

Humanitarian operations have been gradually resuming in the war-ravaged Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, but resupply of aid and fuel for civilians caught up in the fighting is urgently needed, the United Nations said on Tuesday, citing information from its emergency relief agency, OCHA.  

Mistaken notions of how characters work produce bad takes.

The world was not on track to meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) before COVID-19 struck, and now the challenge has been magnified many times over, according to a new flagship UN report that indicates countries must take ‘critical’ steps on the road out of the pandemic, during the next 18 months.

And that makes it all the more challenging to get to grips with.

Equitable distribution of equipment and medicines to fight COVID-19 is the only way out of the global crisis, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday, in remarks to a meeting of the advisory group making the case for investing in these tools. 

L'exceptionnel taux de participation au scrutin présidentiel français (près de 85 % au premier tour) et le déclin du Front national ont suscité une avalanche de commentaires euphoriques sur un « printemps de la démocratie ». Pourtant, des millions d'électeurs, loin de se déterminer à partir des (...) / France, Communication, Élections, Politique, Sondage d'opinion - 2007/05

The eruption of violence in the Kingdom of Eswatini in recent days is “deeply concerning”, amid reports that dozens of people have been killed or injured during protests calling for democratic reforms, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Tuesday. In a statement later in the day, the UN chief called for "inclusive and meaningful dialogue", to end the violence. 

Ten years after South Sudan achieved independence, more children there are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance than ever before, the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, said on Tuesday. 

Rémy Hémez propose pour le blog de Politique étrangère une analyse de l’ouvrage d’Anne Pouget, Les 200 meilleures ruses et tactiques de guerre de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Editions Pierre de Taillac, 2021, 192 pages).

Depuis quelques années, un regain d’intérêt pour la ruse se traduit par quelques publications en français[1]. Ce recueil de stratagèmes compilés par Anne Pouget, autrice de nombreux essais et romans historiques, prend place dans ce mouvement. Il est découpé en très courts récits (généralement dix à vingt lignes) de tactiques destinées à tromper l’adversaire, eux-mêmes regroupés en 12 chapitres thématiques (« ruser dans son propre camp », dissimulation », « tactique et mise en scène », etc.).

On retrouve dans ce livre toutes les grandes catégories de ruses. Par exemple, celles qui facilitent l’entrée dans une ville ou une place forte. On y lit évidemment l’un des exploits de Du Guesclin qui, en 1354, avec une trentaine d’hommes déguisés en bûcherons et en paysannes, surprennent les Anglais de la garnison du château de Grand-Fougeray. Certains procédés se répètent dans l’histoire, à l’instar d’« un coup faux un coup vrai ». Le général romain Cnaeus Domitius Calvinus, lors du siège de Luna envoie chaque jour ses troupes en exercice autour des murailles de la cité. Les assiégés finissent par ne plus y faire attention. Le temps est alors venu pour une attaque surprise. Cette ruse de désensibilisation a plusieurs échos dans l’histoire. Celui que lui donnent les Égyptiens en 1973 est particulièrement connu. Les ruses sont également employées pour des opérations spéciales, comme celle menée par les Israéliens à Entebbe en 1976 pour libérer les otages d’un détournement d’avion : « Tonnerre » voit notamment l’utilisation d’une Mercedes noire similaire à celle d’Amin Dada et de deux Land Rover identiques à ceux de ses gardes du corps. Les ruses navales sont regroupées en fin d’ouvrage. On y (re)découvre l’utilisation des « bateaux-tortues », premiers navires blindés de l’histoire, par les Coréens lors de la bataille de No Ryang en 1598, ou encore l’emploi de « bateaux-leurres », tel que le HMS Dunraven qui, pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, est maquillé en vapeur de commerce pour attirer les sous-marins allemands.

Riche et varié, cet ouvrage souffre néanmoins de quelques défauts. On regrette par exemple que, pour chaque stratagème présenté, au moins une référence ne soit pas associée. On déplore également la sous-représentation des ruses récentes (aucune postérieure à 1976). La guerre du Golfe (1990-1991), ou encore les conflits d’Afghanistan, d’Irak ou d’Ukraine offrent pourtant des exemples pertinents. D’ailleurs, il n’y a aucune évocation du cyber, pourtant au cœur de la question des stratagèmes aujourd’hui. Également, parfois, les descriptions manquent de précision (absence de date ou de lieu). Enfin, on remarque quelques erreurs factuelles. Pour n’en citer qu’une : « Fortitude » n’est pas uniquement l’opération chargée de faire croire que les Alliés vont débarquer dans le Pas-de-Calais, puisqu’une de ses composantes, « Fortitude North », vise notamment à accréditer l’existence d’une force alliée déployée au nord de la Grande-Bretagne prête à envahir la Norvège en mai 1943.

En démontrant bien que l’imagination et l’ingéniosité ont toute leur place aux côtés de la force dans l’art de la guerre, la lecture de ce petit format demeure agréable pour l’amateur d’histoire militaire.

Rémy Hémez

>> S’abonner à Politique étrangère <<

[1] Voir notamment : Jean-Vincent Holeindre, La Ruse et la Force, Perrin, 2017, recension dans Politique étrangère n° 2/2017 et Patrick Manificat, Qui ruse gagne. Une anthologie de la tromperie guerrière, Histoire et Collections, 2020 recension dans Politique étrangère n° 4/2020

Eric Chu

Coronavirus, Asia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Reuters.

Michael Lind

War, Americas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE

CIVIL LIBERTY

 

High

Low

High

Democratic Republic

Tributary State

Low

Garrison State

Castle Society

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Flickr / The U.S. Army

Washington and its allies need a shared semiconductor strategy. Only then will they be able to protect their national security and stave off another economic crisis.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four missions to go.

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

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

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

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

Three to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Roger, Squaw Man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carl named his replacement Mustang Quapaw Squaw II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally Published November 22, 2019.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally Published November 22, 2019.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia.

The UN chief on Monday extended his condolences to the families of those who died in a landslide, which struck the Japanese coastal city of Atami in Shizuoka Prefecture, over the weekend.

Warfare History Network

Security, Asia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trap Flops for Ozawa

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

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

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

Uncertainty Grows for the Japanese High Command

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

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

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

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

Mitscher’s Task Force 58

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

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

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

The Japanese Fleet Rendezvous in the Philippine Sea

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

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

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

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

A Major Battle on the Horizon…

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

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

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

“Let’s Do It Properly Tomorrow”

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

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

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

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

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

Carrier Commanders Spruance & Mitscher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search Planes At Dawn on June 19

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

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

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

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

A Great Fight In The Sky and In The Water

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

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

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

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

“Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”

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

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

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

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

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

Submarines In The Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ozawa Retires Northwest to Refuel

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

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

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

For the Americans, the Worst Was Yet to Come…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Resounding American Victory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally Published October 9, 2018.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.