This past Friday I had the great opportunity of attending the 12th Annual American Veterans Center Conference at the Navy Memorial in Washington DC.  With its mission to “preserve and promote the legacy of America’s servicemen and women from every generation,” the American Veterans Center had an amazing array of speakers.  Moreover, my fellow attendees ranging from World War II veterans to JROTC high school students demonstrated the center was remaining true to its motto, “From the greatest generation to the latest generation,” although GEN Petraeus would later challenge this notion.

The day started with a panel on the current operations of SeaBees.  It’s really quite amazing to see all the work that’s being done by this small force 16,000.  CDR Odenthal, Assistant Chief of Staff for Logistics, First Naval Construction Division, spoke about his time in Southwest Asia where SeaBees served in 13 countries on 4 continents.  Now that’s keeping busy!  During their time in Asia, SeaBees were responsible for building schools, clinics, and other structures to satisfy local needs.  During the Q&A portion, one audience member asked, “Who provides security for you while you’re building?” Those who are familiar with the SeaBees know they build and fight, but this question highlighted to me just how incredible their capabilities are.

GEN Petraeus spoke next.  FbL at The Castle Argghhh! has already given a complete play-by-play of GEN Petraeus’s talk and I won’t repeat it here.  The most interesting point GEN Petraeus made was regarding the surge of 2007.   In his opinion this was most importantly a “surge of ideas not just troops.”  Ideas such as living in the community, instead of only in the large, luxorious bases went a far way in GEN Petraeus’s opinion.  For example, Coalition Forces took to 77 additional locations in Baghdad–77 of the most violent  spots.  GEN Petraeus emphasized that the key to success in Iraq was the increased risk we were willing to take, a sentiment echoed by the battalion commanders at the Counterinsurgency Leadership event I attended in September.

GEN Petraeus also spoke fondly of today’s servicemember.  While the event used the phrase “From the Greatest Generation…to the latest generation,” GEN Petraeus suggested that sacrifices and efforts of the newest generation have deemed the worthy of the title “the Next Greatest Generation.”

It was extremely humbling to witness the panel of Marines who fought on Iwo Jima.  It was also interesting to see how each of them shared a different impression of the battle.  COL Caldwell, who was the commanding officer of F Co., 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines, which suffered the highest KIA rate of any unit in Marine Corps history, was present.  COL Caldwell recalled one incident in which a Japanese soldier came running ablaze in fire at his men.  The soldier was promptly shot by Caldwell’s men and upon searching his body, the Marines found a picture of the man with his five children standing at attention.  This scene caused Caldwell’s “salty,” tough gunnery sergeant to break down in tears. Ralph Griffiths was a veteran of E Company, 28th Marines and served with the flag raisers of Iwo Jima.  Unfortunately, he was wounded by the same shell which killed flag raisers Sgt. Strank and Cpl. Block.  He also spoke of how hellish the island itself was.

After COL Caldwell and Mr. Griffiths spoke, Mr. Donald Mates and Mr. James White recounted their time together on Iwo.  Part of an eight man team sent to disable Japanese mortars, White was credited with giving aid to a severely wounded Mates as well as beating back a Japanese attack.  Laughter broke out in the audience as White recounted dispatching Japanese soldier after soldier.  It was quite a different tone than the talks by COL Caldwell and Mr. Griffiths!

For me one of the most interesting moments of the day was Maj. Theodore Van Kirk’s presentation. As the navigator of the Enola Gay, Maj. Van Kirk dismissed any arguments against the dropping of the bomb.  While he noted the nuclear bomb and war are terrible things, it was his firm belief that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved Japanese and American lives.  Members of the audience who lived through World War II broke out into applause.  In an academic setting it’s great to discuss President Truman’s decision, but as I sat there it became even more clear that this was the right decision.  It ended a war  through which many members of the audience suffered.

History and heritage seemed much more alive and personal to me, a midshipman, as the veterans of wars past and present shared their experiences at the American Veterans Center’s Conference.  It was a fulfilling experience and a great reminder of the wisdom our veterans have to share.

———–

NavyTV.org has put video of the event online:
Click here to watch the remarks by the veterans of Iwo Jima. The first speaker is COL Caldwell, followed by Mr. Donald Mates.

Here for remarks by GEN Petraeus and here for a presentation by LT Thrun of the Civil Engineering Corps who served on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan.

Posted by jwithington in Uncategorized | read comments (2)

Every year, millions of Oslo vehicles roll over these nondescript metal plates. Put down by workers to cover road construction, they lay undignified and unnoticed. But, there is history in these plates. They belong to Tirpitz.

Tirpitz sunk on November 12, 1944, an event brilliantly described last week by UltimaRatioReg. After the war, the Lonely Queen of the North was cut up and sold as scrap. A few of her armor plates were sold to the Norwegian Road Authority, who to this day use them in Oslo as temporary road surface. It is an anonymous but noble end to an august vessel.

Posted by Christopher Albon in Navy, history | read comments (4)

Savannah, GA is one of my favorite cities and so it was a real treat to e-interview Tony Cope about his book, On The Swing Shift:  Building Liberty Ships in Savannah.

What inspired you to write On the Swing Shift: Building Liberty Ships in Savannah?

I am a native of Savannah and was a child during World War II. I never saw the shipyard, but remember hearing the various whistles during the day and seeing the lights from my second story bedroom windows at night. The yard closed just after the war and the site remained basically derelict for many years. As an adult I drove past the site twice a day on the way to work with no recollection of what took place there. In the late 1980s, I was asked to chair a local committee established to develop some interest in establishing a museum to commemorate the Mighty Eighth Air Force which was created in Savannah and then moved to Britain to fight the air war against Germany. To create this interest, I wanted to come up with a slide show to use for talks to civic clubs and other groups and asked a friend at the local paper to run a request in his column for wartime photographs of Savannah. I received a call from a woman who had a set of six photos of her mother christening one of the Libertys launched by the yard in Savannah. That got me thinking about the yard and wondering that if I had forgotten what happened there maybe most other Savannahians had as well. That assumption was correct…the only people who remembered it were the people who had worked there or sailed on the ships. I just thought that there was a great story there and those people ought to be remembered.

What were some of your more insightful sources for On the Swing Swift?

The most insightful sources were certainly the people involved…the 120 shipyard workers, merchant seamen, Navy and Coast Guard personnel that I was able to interview. All were so excited to talk about their experiences and that someone was taking an interest in what they had done. Some were people that I had known in other circumstances, but never knew anything about this part of their lives. All were fascinating, but one early interview stands out. A friend who worked at the Georgia Ports told me of a retired Merchant captain who had sunk a U-boat, but warned me that he didn’t suffer fools gladly. I had a great two hour interview with Capt. Clifford Thomas who was master of a number of Libertys after the war, but was Third Mate on the S. S. James Jackson when it did fire on a U-boat, but was not credited with its sinking. Captain Thomas not only related his own experiences, but also gave me many names of other merchant seamen who could help with my project. It was a really enlightening and enjoyable interview and contrary to my friend’s warning, we got along splendidly. Unfortunately, when I got home, I found that I had failed to punch the record button on my brand new tape recorder. It was with great fear and trepidation that I called Capt.Thomas and asked if he could do the interview over again. He understood perfectly and we did the two hours again the next night. After I moved to Ireland, we talked by phone a number of times and he wrote very detailed accounts of situations that I asked him about. Unfortunately, he died before the book was published.

Can you tell us a little bit about a day in the life of a shipyard worker?

From the various interviews that I conducted with workers, a typical day at Southeastern was exciting and often very dull. The assembly line method of building Libertys meant that much of the work was repetitious; doing the same job over and over. Many of these workers had never seen a ship before much less built one and had to be trained to be welders, shipwrights and the various other skills necessary to building a ship. It was hot…over 100 degrees in the summer made even hotter by working on and around so much steel. It was freezing in the winter with any bare skin sticking to frozen steel. Then there were the bugs, swarms of mosquitoes and deer flies that bred in the marshes close by the yard in the summer. It was dangerous work; banging, cutting, shaping steel, huge ship parts being carried overhead by gantries. It was exciting though…to see a completed hull slide down the ways or a fully loaded Liberty sail down the river past the yard on its way to a war zone, to know that they were part of the effort to defeat the Axis powers.

Savannah has such a proud history. Can you tell us a little bit more about the city’s contribution to the war effort?

Savannah’s contribution to the war effort was certainly great. Southeastern was one of three shipyards building ships during the war and many other industries produced ammunition, trailers, boxes and bags for military use and many other products vital to the war effort. Many of its sons and daughters went to war and many never returned. As school children we participated in scrap drives, war bond drives, collecting Bundles For Britain and tending Victory gardens. There are monuments dedicated to the dead of that war and The Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum is now a very successful reality in Savannah. There is no monument to commemorate the shipyard and those who worked there. There are displays in the Savannah History Museum and the Ships of the Sea museum. There was a monument to Merchant Marine seamen killed in that war and the other prior wars that our nation has been involved in, but it was taken down and replaced with a monument to commemorate the Viet Nam War dead. The bronze plaques from the Merchant Marine monument are in storage somewhere in Savannah and it is my hope that “On The Swing Shift” will help to develop interest in restoring that monument and recognizing the workers at Southeastern, some of whom died or were injured doing very dangerous work there.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

The research for and the writing of this book was an amazing experience for me; meeting the people and hearing their stories, trying to find information from a variety of sources in an attempt to be as accurate as possible in telling the story of this shipyard. It was a bit like a detective trying to find pieces of evidence in different places and putting it all together to solve a case. For me, some of that evidence came from across the continent and across the Atlantic Ocean. I have been fortunate in that I have had the opportunity to do a lot of very interesting things during my lifetime. This ranks right up there.

If you need additional information, I have a website, http://ontheswingshift.wordpress.com which gives a description of the book, my bio and some reviews.

Posted by Jim Dolbow in Books, Travel | read comments (2)

A few of us (here and over at Galrahn’s site) have been banging the drum for the last few years re. the potential threat posed by China’s ASBM (Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile) which appears to be a variant of the DF-21 (itself, an apparent derivative of the Pershing II MRBM). There has been limited releasable (e.g., unclassified) information from DoD agencies, most of it in the annual DoD report on China’s capabilities. What little else can be gleaned from the open press is primarily Chinese in origin and oft times, in Chinese. Most of the extensive writings have tended to be more generalistic as a result, focusing at the strategic-political level on the implications and challenges such a weapon would pose in a future Taiwan Straits scenario (or some other that takes place at or inside the first island chain). Chief focus has been on the aspect of sea denial to US carriers and the attendant impact that would have on providing tactical airpower in the face of land-based PLAAF forces conducting bluewater ASUW and land attack strikes. The most recent open press article was that found in the May 2009 issue of the Naval Institute’s Proceedings

With the autumn 2009 issue of the Naval War College Review, that body of knowledge has been significantly expanded via two articles. The first, “Using the Land to Control the Sea?” (link directly downloads a PDF of the article) addresses the larger technical and political challenges, opening with an argument is a familiar to readers of this and the aforementioned blogs:

For China, the ability to prevent a U.S. carrier strike group from intervening in the event of a Taiwan Strait crisis is critical. Beijing’s immediate strategic concerns have been defined with a high level of clarity. The Chinese are interested in achieving an antiship ballistic missile (ASBM) capability because it offers them the prospect of limiting the ability of other nations, particularly the United States, to exert military influence on China’s maritime periphery, which contains several disputed zones of core strategic importance to Beijing. ASBMs are regarded as a means by which technologically limited developing countries can overcome by asymmetric means their qualitative inferiority in conventional combat platforms, because the gap between offense and defense is the greatest here.

Today, China may be closer than ever to attaining this capability. In addition to numerous outside reports suggesting Chinese efforts in this area, technical and operationally focused discussions on the topic are appearing in increasing numbers and in a widening array of Chinese sources, some clearly authoritative. This suggests that China may be close to testing and fielding an ASBM system—a weapon that no other country currently possesses, since the United States relinquished a distantly related capability in 1988. In the view of Chinese and Western analysts, even the mere perception that China might have realized an ASBM capability could represent a paradigm shift, with profound consequences for deterrence, military operations, arms control, and the balance of power in the western Pacific.

Discussion that follows is worth the read, but of particular interest is the end analysis where the authors contemplate the impact a range of US responses would have, spanning from indifference to measured and then major response,and what the implications would be if the Chinese were to go ahead and conduct an operational tes:

Responding to the unprecedented strategic challenge presented by an ASBM capability would require the American military and civilian leadership to face hard truths, and continue to develop innovative new capabilities. The United States has many options here, and it must be prepared to exercise them. The most perilous approach would be to neglect such military innovation while continuing to insist that the United States maintained its ability to keep the peace, when in fact the military capabilities that underpin that ability were diminishing, at least in a relative sense. Such a discrepancy between rhetoric and reality would erode America’s regional credibility and fuel Chinese overconfidence. The prospect of documenting that discrepancy publicly might motivate China to conduct a demonstration of an ASBM; a successful test could create the impression that American power projection capabilities—and the regional credibility that depends on them—had been dramatically diminished. Managing the proper response to this potential “game changer” will demand close scrutiny from scholars, analysts, and policy makers alike, as it will critically influence America’s place in the Pacific for decades to come.

Two events point to the efficacy of such a scenario: one, the operational ASAT test conducted in 2007 and the other (and used by the authors) – the bombing tests off the VACAPES prompted by General Billy Mitchell and carried out by Army and Navy aircraft against stationary capital ship targets. In the case of the former, it clearly illuminated not only China’s tchnological capabilities, but some have said that it also demonstrated a certain ascendancy of the military and its ability to veto civilian policy makers who were not favoring an operational test. In the case of the latter – there were major budgetary, policy and even changes in tactics as the nascent Army Air Corps received substantive funding boosts, the Navy began to seriously investigate the use of dive bombers as a means to attack ships and other nations, notably Japan, began to redraw their force structures.

But what of the system itself? How much of it is real and how much is just vaporware? Maskirovka designed to confuse and direct US allocation of forces and funding down blind alleys? The second article, “China’s Antiship Ballistic Missile: Developments and Missing Links” (same warning as above re. the hyperlink) takes a systemic approach to assessing this ’system of systems’ by an extensive analysis of available open-press Chinese literature. It is worth noting that when conducting a content analysis, one not only focuses on what is found in the body proper of individual texts, but as that body grows, there are larger trends and directions that can be ascertained and from which, judgments as to the status and progress of a program may be made – even absent declaratory supporting statements. As the authors point out, for example, early literature tends to view the problems presented in the complex kill chain of an ASBM with a wider aperture, with wide-ranging, generalist discussions that identify problem areas. As sub-groups of supporting literature grow in number while parsing ever-finer details, say in developing algorithms used to detect, identify and track large surface vessels using space-based assets, or there is wider discussion of the problems associated with exo-atmospheric maneuvering while maintaining targeting (as is the case in the civilian space program and the problems associated with unmanned docking), the fact that such bodies of literature exist lends credence to assessments of the state of development and deployment of a weapons system.

Beyond the ASBM, the authors see far-reaching impacts on the larger military capabilities and force structure. Developing, building and deploying an operational ASBM with all of the technical, operational and even political challenges posed along the way would have reverberating effects throughout – from Command and Control, to multi-spectral imaging, rapid re-targeting, battle assessment and more – every bit a modern revolution in military affairs and industry as the US experienced in the late 80’s and 90’s with technology crossovers from the space and micro-computer industries.

Points to ponder while working on a “balanced” approach to forces…

(cross-posted at steeljawscribe.com)

Posted by SteelJaw in Navy | read comments (7)

The investigation into the mass murder on Ft. Hood continues, but there is no doubt who was responsible, and his motivations are clear.  He (his name doesn’t deserve mentioning) acted out of a radical belief in Islam and a hatred of the United States.

One decision by the Army will determine how the service, and the administration, view this attack.  Will it be viewed only as a crime, or will it be viewed as a terrorist attack committed by an enemy of this nation?  The answer lies in whether or not the victims are awarded Purple Hearts.

Army Regulation 600-8-22 (regulation page 20, pdf page 40), article 2-8 b.(6), requires that “the act must be recognized by the Secretary of the Army as an international terrorist attack.”

(6) After 28 March 1973, as the result of an international terrorist attack against the United States or a foreign nation friendly to the United States, recognized as such an attack by the Secretary of Army, or jointly by the Secretaries of the separate armed services concerned if persons from more than one service are wounded in the attack.  (http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/r600_8_22.pdf)

The victims of this cowardly and monstrous attack deserved better than to die or be wounded in what was otherwise a place of safety.  Their sacrifice must be properly recognized.  They earned and deserve the Purple Heart.  What, and when, will the Secretary decide?

Posted by Fouled Anchor in Army, Homeland Security | read comments (34)