This is a strange book. It reads like the memoirs of a World War 2 fighter pilot. It has many of the elements of similar books I have read. However, this one is a work of fiction.

Frankly, I don’t understand the point. There are plenty of fine fighter pilot memoirs and many exciting or intriguing ones. This one reads pleasantly enough, it’s a good mixture of action and human interest and is entirely plausible. However, I just don’t see what it adds to throw another one into the mix when it can only be derivative.

I suppose if you’ve never read a fighter pilot memoir before it might be interesting, but I read these books primarily to learn about history. While you could do so from this book—it seems reasonably accurate as these things go—it would only be second- or third-hand knowledge at best.

If anyone can explain to me the advantage of fiction over reality in an area like this, I’ll be interested to hear the argument.

Update and bump: Reader phil writes in with these excellent WWII fighter pilot memoir recommendations. Comments are his:

• Tumult in the Clouds by James Goodson: Started with the RAF Eagle Squadrons then transferred to the US AAF.


• Nanette by Edwards Park: Memoir of a P-39 pilot in New Guinea.


• Thunderbolt by Robert Johnson: Johnson was one of the highest scoring aces of the European Theatre; P-47 pilot.


• Gabby: A Fighter Pilot’s Life by Francis Gabreski: Served with Johnson, shot down 28 planes in WW2 and became an ace again in Korea.


• Into the Teeth of the Tiger by Donald Lopez: Memoir of a P-40 pilot in China.


• Ace by Bruce Porter: Memoir of a Marine night fighter ace in the Pacific.


• Mustang Ace by Robert Goebel: Memoir of a P-51 ace (12 kills) who flew out of Italy.


• The Jolly Rogers by Tom Blackburn: Memoir of the commander of the Navy’s first active Corsair squadron which operated from land bases in the Solomons.

Many thanks to Phil for his excellent suggestions, and I’ll toss in my own, Yeager by Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos, who was the first American pilot in the European theatre to be shot down, make it back to England, and return to flying combat missions.

—Posted by Nicholas.

Over at Frank Warner’s place a commenter was arguing that he would rather live in a police state or military dictatorship judging by how poor some of the free East European nations like Romania and Bulgaria are. I disagreed; I said I would gladly live in those countries and take advantage of the freedom afforded to me in order to make something of my life.

Well, after reading the Afghanistan news round-up from Miserable Donuts, and seeing that picture at right, I haven’t changed my mind. Romania seem like a fine, fine place to live. Is there a Global War on Ugliness? Because if there is I think we’re winning.

While looking for information for the next Lesser Known GWoT Allies post, I stumbled across this site which is an unofficial history of the ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps). It has a fantastic collection of Iraq/Afghanistan campaign patches, my favorite at right, including a number of American and international ones. I appreciate them from an artistic point of view, as well as for what they represent. For some reason I find art like this which has a practical application a lot more satisfying than art which is simply for arts’ sake.

—Posted by Nicholas.

(more…)

Reader Zapper passed on this South Florida Sun-Sentinel correction to their article (blogged on Murdoc here) that reported Rep John Murtha (D-PA) stated the United States is “…more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran”.

Instead, the Sun Sentinel corrects, Murtha was “misinterpreted”:

Murtha was citing a recent poll, by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, that indicates a greater percentage of people in 10 of 14 foreign countries consider the U.S. in Iraq a greater danger to world peace than any threats posed by Iran or North Korea.

Color me unimpressed. Murtha has a long track record over this last year or so of hyping the worst of the US situation in southwest Asia, the least of which would be his automatic, pre-investigation condemnation of his former service, the US Marine Corps, and the events that occurred in Haditha. Other prime examples are his constant rambling that we cannot win this thing, the forces are trashed, morale is low, etc so on and so forth.

Balderdash, all.

As far as this Pew Poll goes, I’ve never been one to be too concerned about how “other” nations perceive the United States and what/how we do things. A nod in the direction that this can be a slippery slope in some cases with regards to the international community we exist in, but that’s how it is, folks. I’m not concerned that other nations think we pay too little in taxes, have too many cars, spend too much on our military, export too much of our culture (people conveniently forget that other nations gladly accept those cultural exports), are too concerned with terrorism, over concerned about freedom and democracy around the globe, etc. The case is crystal clear, as far as I’m concerned, that something had to be done in Southwest Asia, because if it had been allowed to fester and develop along its own clear-cut lines, in a very short time we’d be facing a much more significant, dangerous and deadly threat from radical islamic terrorism.

So, correction noted, fine, wonderful, got that check in the block. Doesn’t change things with regards to Rep. Murtha, though, in my opinion.

Busy news cycle today, so wanted to get this out. The Hamdan decision is at the top of the fold, now.

Just breaking now….

Hamdan

The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti- terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and Geneva conventions.

5-3 ruling. This will get interesting.

First off, please let me apologise that many of my posts (esp. Lesser Known GWoT Allies) were not being formatted properly for Internet Explorer users. I use Linux myself and as such don’t have easy access to IE in order to test my posts. I had assumed that IE should render my HTML properly since I wasn’t doing anything too advanced, and that viewers would let me know if it wasn’t working properly. Well, when I assume, it makes an ass out of u and me.

The main problems were that the images, which were supposed to flow down the right-hand side of the article, were overlayed on top of each other, and the text alignment was not working properly. They should all be fixed now. Please let me know if anyone has further problems with the layout. And I do intend to continue the Lesser Known GWoT Allies series with at least one more post, but it takes quite a bit of time to put together, so it will be a few days. By the way, all the comments I got on those articles were about the part which appeared on the main page. Don’t forget that there’s a lot more if you click to read the entry! Hopefully people are reading the rest, but not commenting on it, rather than not reading it at all.

Anyway, the main thrust of this post is this: I updated the latest GWoT Allies post when Murdoc forwarded a message to me from one of the reporters whose articles I linked. They referred me to the MacDill Thunderbolt newspaper, a commercial paper oriented towards the 6th Air Mobility Wing and the military in general. It seems like an interesting read and you may want to check it out. I had read the article they wrote without actually browsing the site to see the rest, which I probably should have done, especially as there was another relevant article for my GWot Allies post there. (Check out the post itself, below, if you’re curious about that).

—posted by Nicholas.

Lately Airborne Combat Engineer has been on fire, posting several articles a day, many of them quite interesting. The latest one which caught my eye is this commentary on the latest U.S. Navy SinkEx. It seems they discovered that .50cals and 20mm cannons are capable of rapidly disabling destroyers.

Well, that is hardly surprising, and it reminds me of a story I read once about World War II. I tried to find more corroborating information on the story by searching the internet, but found little. It goes something like this: at some point during that conflict, fairly early I recall, .50 calibre machine-guns began replacing .30 calibres on fighter aircraft. The .30s just didn’t have the power to penetrate the armour of other modern fighters sufficiently—it’s depressing when you unload your entire store of ammunition into another fighter and it’s still flying. That someimtes happened even with .50cals and bigger, but that’s a story for another day.

Well, this move had other effects and the pilots soon realized they had real power against ground targets too. The .50cal bullets would easily penetrate trains, many buildings, and yes—you guessed it—ships. A favorite tactic was to rake the superstructure of a lonely destroyer, frigate, merchantman or similar with concentrated fire. often crippling the ship. Smaller ships could be quite easily sunk.

This doesn’t mean the modern exercise was unnecessary. They were looking into whether they could specifically disable a ship without sinking it, using .50cal or 20mm fire. But as this was often the outcome of strafing runs during WW2, if for no other reason than the command structure of the ship was shredded, it was to be expected.

And this brings me to my interesting story. Modern battle tanks have what is known as “composite armour”. The exact design of this armour is typically classified, but it is fairly well known that it’s often made of layers of ceramic with other substances embedded or surrounding it, likely including aluminium, steel and kevlar. The most famous is the British “Chobham” armour used in tanks such as the Abrams. But composite armour has been around since, and before, the Second World War.

Because strafing aircraft were so effective when targeting a ship’s superstructure, and because steel was relatively scarce, various countries experimented with alternatives for armouring their ships. The Germans fitted concrete around the steel of their superstructures, while the British developed a mixture of bitumen and pebbles they called “plastic armour”. The British armour turned out to be superior to the concrete type. Of course, concrete is used extensively as armour on land structures such as pillboxes, and if thick enough it will definitely protect against .50cal fire. But there was a limit to how thickly they could apply it outside the steel of the ship. So the boffins came up with the idea to set the material with lots of large pebbles in it. When hit by bullets, the pebbles would rotate inside the bitumen matrix, robbing the projectiles of much of their kinetic energy, and also deflecting them. Most bullets would no longer penetrate the composite armour, even though they could penetrate a similar thickness of plain bitumen. While modern composite armour is likely far more advanced, I bet it relies on much the same principle.

There were also ships made entirely from concrete (again because steel demand exceeded supply) but that’s a whole other story.

Update: Thanks to reader Bill Befort for pointing out to me that the armour was set in bitumen, not concrete, and giving me the name and link!

—posted by Nicholas.

Russian special services told to strike militants who killed 4 workers in Iraq

This is quite a development:

President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia’s special services to hunt down and “destroy” the killers of four Russian diplomats in Iraq, the Kremlin said.

Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Federal Security Service — the main successor to the Soviet KGB — later said that everything would be done to ensure that the killers “do not escape from responsibility,” the Interfax news agency reported.

“The president has ordered the special forces to take all necessary measures to find and destroy the criminals who killed Russian diplomats in Iraq,” the Kremlin press service said in a brief statement.

Interesting and possibly cause for a bit of concern. Thoughts?

While checking out locations in the Seattle area (where I’m vacationing), I noticed this photo offered on Windows Live Local (currently viewable here):

click for better view

I see three Essex-class carriers, two Iowa-class battleships, and the USS Midway (CVA 41). The battleships must be the New Jersey and the Missouri before their reactivation in the 80s, putting this photo between 1969 and 1982. But the Midway wasn’t retired until 1992, so I’m wondering what this pic is.

Note the stern of the carrier on the far right…it’s “bent” looking. At first I wondered if it might be the Antietam (the test-bed for the angled flight deck), but apparently not. I can’t figure out what ship that is. Does that help anyone?

One final clue is a super carrier getting some significant work of some sort (at right).

I’m sure that there are many other clues for the knowledgeable readers of MO. I’m obviously guessing here, and rather badly as far as my internet research can show me. Let me know what you think (and why).

Once we get this one nailed down we’ll take a look at another older pic of the area, so be sure to check back.

I think we’ll be seeing services that not only show you aerial (or satellite) photos of a particular area, but of a particular area at a particular time. There have got to be warehouses of imagery available, and at some point someone will try to make money by publishing it.

Australia As with Poland, Australia sent a number of special forces troops during the initial invasion of Iraq to help scout and take out some important target in advance. I heard that Australian soldiers fired some of the first shots in anger, one or two days prior to the official invasion began. Currently we have a number of soldiers (around 800) on the ground in Iraq training Iraqi soldiers, performing patrols, protecting convoys and guarding the “Green Zone”. The majority of them are deployed, along with 40 ALAVs (a variant of the LAV, I believe) in Al Muthanna in southern Iraq. Up until recently many had been deployed guarding the Japanese engineers (members of the JIRSG) but they’re going home, hence the redeployment scheduled to occur soon. The ALAVs are visible on the photo on at the right and seem to be pretty hand for patrolling the deserts and city roads, which probably not all that different from the desert terrain in the interior of our own country. There is also an Australian ship (HMAS Ballarat, which replaced HMAS Paramatta) patrolling the Gulf and a number of air assets including C-130 Hercules, AP-C3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft and F-18 attack jets. As well, have around 300 soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. Australia also provides some logistical support to the overall operation. Considering our remoteness, we have always needed to provide our own transport and logistics, and that seems to be coming in handy. As the saying goes, “Amateurs talk about strategy, dilettantes talk about tactics, and professionals talk about logistics” so I think this aspect of the support is important—we can’t have the USA and UK doing all the heavy lifting (pun intended). Judging by the number of soldiers, considering that we are such a strong ally and have fought with the US in every major conflict since 1914, the size of Australia’s contribution seems a little disappointing. However I think when you consider all the various assets we have contributed, as well as our peacekeeping forces in East Timor, you will hopefully come to the conclusion that we are serious about helping out. In fact, if you add up the number of personnel involved in all the various air, sea and land activities, there are at least 1500 and possibly close to 2000 involved. In addition to the interactions with the Japanese, our soldiers also work closely with many of the other countries in the coalition, but especially the US. In fact as I investigate the situation I am surprised by how integrated many of our people are with the overall command structure. Commodore Peter Lockwood is in line to take control of the maritime patrol activities in the northern section of the Gulf of Arabia* soon. And, there are 27 men who are involved in the Multi-National Force Headquarters. As an aside, isn’t Commodore a wonderful rank? If I were in the Navy, I’d rather be a Commodore than an Admiral, it just sounds so much better. I am only aware of two casualties so far. In one case a soldier patrolling in Afghanistan stepped on a mine and lost some toes. More recently, Private Kovco died under suspicious circumstances. It was initially reported as an accidental discharge but more recently it has emerged that it might have been a suicide. I haven’t been following the story, but either way it’s an unfortunate development. However I think overall we’ve been lucky so far. For vast numbers of great photos and videos of the Australian effort in Iraq you can go to the Operation Catalyst gallery, and for news and other information visit the News and Features page or the Defence Forces home. * I like calling it the Gulf of Arabia mainly to annoy the Iranian regime as much as possible. Below the fold: Denmark and El-Salvador.

(more…)