A Day That Will Live In Infamy – 74th Anniversary

74 years ago today, on December 7th, 1941, fighters and bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the US Pacific Fleet in their home port of Pearl Harbor at 7:55am local time. IJN fighters and bombers also attacked US Army Air Force installations at Hickham, Wheeler, Bellows, and other air fields destroying most of the aircraft on the ground.

Most of the veterans on both sides have now passed away due to age. The National Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, in fact, disbanded at the end of 2011 due to the advanced age of the remaining survivors.

One of the few live broadcasts of the attack was from KGU Radio in Honolulu.

A list of the ships of the Pacific Fleet in port on December 7th can be found here along with the damage suffered. As bad as the attack was, most of the battleships went on to fight again later in the war.

The battle for Wake Island began simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor. The IJN and the Japanese Imperial Army launched widespread attacks beginning December 8th on the British in Malaya , the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), and the Americans and Filipinos in the Philipines and Guam.

One immediate impact of the attack was that the industrial base of the United States shifted from a peacetime to a wartime footing. The propaganda poster below was meant to urge workers on.

A Cool Bit Of History Found In British Columbia

Like so many “secret weapons” late in World War II, the Japanese fire balloons or Fu-Go (Windship Weapon) were a failure. Of the 9,300 hydrogen balloons launched with incendiaries attached, about 300 were found to have landed or been shot down in North America. The Japanese hoped that these balloons would have reached the forests along the Pacific coast and started massive fires that would divert resources from the war in the Pacific Theater.

The bombs did kill six people, a pregnant woman and five kids, in southern Oregon who were out on a church camping trip. However, no massive fires were started and no resources diverted.

Until this month, the last time a balloon bomb was found was in the 1970s. A forestry worker in Lumby, British Columbia discovered one last Thursday.

On Thursday morning RCMP in Lumby were asked by one of Tolko’s employees to come to an area off Thunder Mountain Forest Road. The employee suspected that he had found an unexploded Japanese balloon bomb. The bomb is partly embedded in the ground within the bush in the area east of Lumby. Officers photographed the bomb and the military disposal unit from Esquimalt is heading to the area to deal with the unexploded bomb.

The RCMP said that they hoped to be able to salvage parts of the bomb such as the aluminum ring seen in the picture below for display at the local Lumby Museum.

This is a cool bit of history. I hope they succeed in preserving as much of it as possible. Looking at Lumby on the map, it is in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. This means this balloon bomb, after crossing the North Pacific, drifted over the coastal mountains and about two-thirds of BC to land in Lumby. That’s incredible.

Purl Harder!

One of the more unusual propaganda posters published after the attack on Pearl Harbor has to be the one below.

It is trying to encourage the women of America to do their part by knitting wool socks and sweaters for the fighting men. You will notice that the knitting needles form the “V for Victory”.

The poster above is part of the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Still Dangerous In His Old Age

I came across this interview with Trooper Stan W Scott, No. 3 Army Commando, in which he demonstrates the proper use of a Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife. He was giving a lecture at the National Army Museum in London in connection with a 2011-2012 exhibition. The exhibition was entitled “Draw Your Weapons: The Art of Commando Comics”Commando Comics are a military oriented series of comic books dating from the 1960s that are still being published in the UK.

These old WWII veterans fought in a brutal war where both strength and cunning were prized. It shows in his demonstration on how to fight with a knife.

A Bit Of History

Old NFO has a very interesting post up about an abandoned airstrip located on the Pacific island of Tinian. What makes North Field and Runway Able of note is that it is where the instruments that ended WWII took off from.

Those instruments were two B-29s – the Enola Gay and Bockscar – which carried “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”. In other words, the planes that carried the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My dad was in an Overseas Replacement Depot in Florida having returned from service with the Army in the Caribbean Defense Command. He could very well have been reassigned to Operation Downfall for the invasion of Japan. As it was, VJ Day was August 14th and my parents were married later that month.

Read Old NFO’s full account as it makes interesting reading for those interested in the history of WWII.

Logistics Wins Wars

The Complementary Spouse’s uncle sent me the video below. It describes the Allied effort in World War II to get gasoline from Great Britain to the front in continental Europe. It was called Operation Pluto for Pipe Lines Under the Ocean.

Mike Vanderboegh recently had a post about the importance of logistics for the Russian Army in their Chechnya campaign. It was based upon an article that had appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette. The article found that the Russians struggled in their battle due to their logistical problems.

Now This Is An Interesting Auction

The National Military History Center in Auburn, Indiana is auctioning off part of their collection in order to settle their mortgage. Auctions America is handling the auction for them. The auction catalog is here.

They will be offering 100 lots of WWII artifacts and 82 lots of military vehicles.

Worried about Predator drones flying overhead? Then how about an 88mm flak gun – demilled unfortunately?

Tired of having to fight traffic? How about this – a 1944 M16 half-track with double M-2s in a motorized mount?

 

You say you like that idea but want German engineering? How about this 1940-41 Hanomag S.P.W. Ausf. C SdKfz 251/1 Armored 3/4-Track?

I didn’t see any tanks in the catalog but there are a lot of motorcycles, trucks, and other assorted vehicles along with the uniforms and demilled MP-40 sub-machine guns. None of these auctions have reserves but I expect collectors will be paying a fair price for some of these items.

The German – A Short Film

The Complementary Spouse’s uncle sent me this yesterday. Given that the Oscars are tonight, I thought the timing was appropriate.

It is a short film featuring aerial combat between an RAF Spitfire and a German ME-109 during WWII. What makes this film so unique is the surprise ending. That and the attention to detail including the Webley revolver and the SMLE rifles.

The short film is approximately 10 minutes long. If you want to know more about the movie and how it was made go here.

The German from Nick Ryan on Vimeo.

WWII In Pictures – North Africa

The Atlantic is running a 20-part weekly feature on key events in World War II in pictures. The current one is on the campaigns in North Africa including pictures of German, Italian, British, Commonwealth, and American troops. An Australian unit in shown below.

Family legend has it that my father’s combat engineer unit was to have been part of the invasion of North Africa but their ship was diverted to the Caribbean. I don’t know how true that is but he did have the European/African/Middle Eastern Campaign Medal.

As Rick Atkinson writes in the Prologue to his great history of Operation Torch and the American battles in North Africa, An Army at Dawn, this campaign marked the beginning of the United States as a great power.

From a distance of sixty years, we can see that North Africa was a pivot point in American history, the place where the United States began to act like a great power — militarily, diplomatically, strategically, tactically. Along with Stalingrad and Midway, North Africa is where the Axis enemy forever lost the initiative in World War II. It is where Great Britain slipped into the role of junior partner in the Anglo-American alliance, and where the United States first emerged as the dominant force it would remain into the next millennium.

None of it was inevitable — not the individual deaths, nor the ultimate Allied victory, nor eventual American hegemony. History, like particular fates, hung in the balance, waiting to be tipped.

Measured by the proportions of the later war — of Normandy or the Bulge — the first engagements in North Africa were tiny, skirmishes between platoons and companies involving at most a few hundred men. Within six months, the campaign metastasized to battles between army groups comprising hundreds of thousands of soldiers; that scale persisted for the duration. North Africa gave the European war its immense canvas and implied — through 70,000 Allied killed, wounded, and missing — the casualties to come.

No large operation in World War II surpassed the invasion of North Africa in complexity, daring, risk, or — as the official U.S. Army Air Force history concludes — “the degree of strategic surprise achieved.” Moreover, this was the first campaign undertaken by the Anglo-American alliance; North Africa defined the coalition and its strategic course, prescribing how and where the Allies would fight for the rest of the war.