This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Historical

  • Some People’s Kids….

    This one is a little unusual. Well, really, it’s quite unusual, but it’s true.

    Our friends at Military Phony checked this story thoroughly, because the late Jonn Lilyea did not believe it was true.

    But it is true.

    The young man in the photo below was 14 years old when he enlisted in the U.S. Army to go fight in World War II.  According to his story, he dropped out of grammar school, and told the recruiters he was 16. He was 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds at the time he enlisted, which gave him an appearance older than he really was.

    Just looks like an affable soul, doesn’t he?

    He enlisted at the age of 14, spent a year in training including going to paratrooper training, and made the jump into Sicily in the dark of night when he was 15. He is now retired from the military.

    He did get slightly hurt on landing, but found his cricket clicker, which all the airborne soldiers were given to find each other in the dark, and quickly found his unit. Below, you will see his assignments and his training for WWII.

    He was literally following in his father’s footsteps. After the CCC was ended, Ove Schmidt enlisted in the Army ahead of his son, on the eve of World War II.

    When the Army discovered through a letter from his mother that Jim Schmidt was ‘just a kid’, he was sent home.  They wouldn’t take him back, so he joined the Navy, because the war was still underway and he was assigned to a munitions ship. Then the Navy found out his real age and sent him home (again). When he reached his 18th birthday, he re-upped with the Army and went to Germany, stayed there until 1946, and after that to Japan, to fight in Korea. In 1962, he was sent to Laos as an American advisor. The war in Viet Nam was yet to be an undeclared war.

    He was the sergeant major of all 7th Special Forces A Teams in Vietnam until he was reassigned to 5th Special Forces Group in 1964. He retired in 1965.

    Among his awards and decorations, Schmidt received the Silver Star with one Oak Leaf Cluster, Bronze Star Medal with two Oak Leaf Clusters, Purple Heart Medal with one Oak Leaf Cluster, Air Medal with one Oak Leaf Cluster, World War II Victory Medal, European-Africa Middle Eastern Campaign Medal and Army of Occupation Medal with Germany and Japan Clasp. – Article.

    The peeps at Military Phony sent mostly the WWII stuff, so some things are just not included here.  I did not see a full list of his awards in what they sent.

    After three wars and 22 years of military service and going into retirement, he decided a desk job was not what he wanted, and he went to work for the CIA’s Air America in Vietnam. In 1969, he left SE Asia for home.

    He is now in his 90s. His 14 year old grandson, in awe of his granddad being part of a war at the same age, started a letter writing campaign for his grandpa’s birthday.

    Schmidt 2018 article

    If Mr. Schmidt  seems to exaggerate something, I’d let it go. He has done more in a single week of his life than most people do in a decade.

    The least he deserves is our thanks for stepping up and serving in three different conflicts because he wanted to do it, not because he had to.

  • A Brief Review of 2nd and 10th Amendments

    The Bill of Rights

    That small firecracker storm stirred up by yesterday’s posting of an article about a newly-minted Congress critter from California showed that this incipient Congress critter is ignorant of both Federal and state laws about everything.

    Here’s my attempt to clear up that ignorance as simply as possible.

    First of all, the US Constitution has Amendments that specify such things as what authority is delegated to the Federal government, and what is delegated to the states and to the people of the United States.

    The specific Amendment regarding this comes out of the Articles of Confederation, which was the original document meant to provide for a national and expanding, federal government. When the Articles of Confederation were dumped, the resulting Amendment designating states’ rights was created during the drafting of the US Constitution.

    The 10th Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights to create a class of powers, known as reserved powers, exclusive to state governments. The amendment specifically reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

    Now, that’s quite clear language, in my view. It is plain English, unlike some of the bills passed by either or both Houses of Congress, bills in which gobbledygook is meant to cover the cracks in the system that come from quarrelsome parties in Congress. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/amgovernment/chapter/state-power-and-delegation/

    I will repeat it. Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

    The U.S. Constitution is silent on the dispersion of power between states and localities within each state. This means that because local jurisdictions are not mentioned specifically, then local power lies within the purvey of the states themselves.

    The other Amendment which is brought up here so frequently is the Second Amendment, which is as follows:  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    That’s pretty clear, too. At the federal level, your right to own guns is inviolate. The most recent example of a localized attempt to overstep the US Constitution as well as state law occurred  when the Mayor of Deerfield, IL, not only passed an ordinance banning guns in Deerfield, but also included a search-and-seizure procedure with no notice to homeowners, which was tested in court, and was found to not only violate Illinois state laws by not providing due process or warrants, but also violated the US Constitution. She lost, and lost badly.

    That was the first test of this kind of thing. I believe more will follow. Prepare yourselves mentally for that, and if necessary, get to be friendss with an attorney who knows both state and US Constitutional laws.

    It was this bout of illegal activity by one person that prompted the County of Effingham downstate to offer itself as a sanctuary county for gun owners. That ‘sanctuary county’ program continues in Illinois,  as I indicated a few weeks ago, with many counties following suit and more with the sanctuary proposal on their legislative books.

    Try to speculate on what will happen if state legislatures decide to go full potato about it, and declare themselves sanctuary states for gun owners.? We’d probably have another test of both state and federal laws. That would be my guess. That’s how you do things in this country. It is “We, the People”, not ‘The Government’.

    The newly-elected and very arrogant individual Swallwell from California voiced threats toward anyone who fails to obey a federal gun ban, including dropping a nuke on you. I’d like to see him try that.

    He is not only ignorant of the US Constitution, he is also colossally ignorant of laws in general.

    The US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment is a federal law, whether he likes it or not. It is backed up by the 10th Amendment. His authority is a lot more limited than he can possibly imagine by the language of the 10th Amendment:  “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

    Bear that last phrase in mind: “or to the people”, and review the Deerfield debacle. This Amendment has withstood the test of time and the court system.

    The 10th  Amencment is quite clear. It is within the rights of each and every state government to create legislation regarding owning guns. It is, in fact, reserved to the states to create such laws as they see fit, which has resulted in the State of Illinois passing rather stringent but valid FOID and CCW laws, both of which meet legal requirements and state laws, and constitutional terms at the federal level. This is what tripped up the Mayor of Deerfield.

    I want to remind everybody reading this that Prohibition, a Constitutional amendment passed by Congress and ratified by the states, did not work and was repealed within a few years. Among other things, it provided room for the rise of organized crime, which started with Al Capone.

    It is extremely necessary on the part of all of us to be aware of these vultures and give them as much room as possible to expose themselves for what they really are.

    Without awareness of them and their agenda, we lose the very things we value most.

  • They Also Served

    Airman First Class William “Pits” Pitsenbarger was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously after he sacrificed himself to save numerous wounded soldiers. (Air Force)

    You may remember one alleged LTC by the name of Margaret deSanti, whose claims of this and that seemed out of bounds to reasonable people, and decidedly far-fetched to others of us.

    You can revive your memories of deSanti at the link below to her 2014 claims that she was a nurse on medevac helos in the Nam, and “repelled” out of helicopters, when there is zero record of her service. https://www.azuse.cloud/?p=57300

    That was put up on TAH in 2014. There is no record of her service, period. There is, as noted in the original article, only one person received the Silver Star since WWII, and that was Leigh Ann Hester. It is easy enough to check on such things. Yet, Ms. deSanti claims that she received that award.

    Ms. deSanti, who cannot even produce a correct salute, has literally spit in the faces of the women who did serve before she tried to add herself to their honored group.

    I’ve gathered together a bit of information about various things that happened during World War II, such as women who were in nursing schools being recruited to serve in the US Cadet Nurse Corps, to replace nurses who joined the Army and were deployed to the various theaters. You can find that history at the site below in some of the stories that these ladies left behind.

    This year  is the 75th Anniversary of the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps. Some of them did go on to serve in the Army Nurse Corps once they finished their nursing degrees. Their stories are at this link: https://uscadetnurse.org/weremember

    Some of them are rather poignant, as they were written by children and/or grandchildren after the Nurse Corps member passed on.

    The U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps’ 75th Anniversary is going on now, in 2018.

    “They saved lives at home, so others could save lives abroad.”
    The website is a compilation of information about the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps—the nation’s first integrated uniformed U.S. service corps—which fulfilled an urgent need for nurses during World War II. At that time many nurses were called overseas to military service, and other women were attracted to the defense industry, while understaffed civilian hospitals in the United States were on the verge of collapse.

    Nursing and Medicine During World War II

    There are many links at the ceufast.com page, including links to WWI history of nursing.

    https://ceufast.com/blog/nursing-and-medicine-during-world-war-ii

    The following article includes references to the struggles of black women to be accepted as nurses during WWII. Some 500 black women served in various theaters during that War.

    https://www.americannursetoday.com/three-red-cross-women-persevered-african-american-history-month/

    In the end, they all served.

    Let’s lift a glass to all of these women who filled in for their departing counterparts and served at home, and for the those who joined the Navy and Army Nurse Corps and were sent overseas, some of whom did not make it back home, and for all those who followed in their footsteps in Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, OIF/OEF, and whatever has followed since then.

    They also served, all of them.

    Ms. deSanti, to my knowledge, did not.

  • Weekend Open Thread

    Yeah, I know Top Gun was (as far as accuracy goes) pretty much crap. But there’s one scene in the movie I absolutely love – because I’m convinced it’s based, somewhat loosely, on a real event.

    My spouse and I saw the movie when it came out 30+ years ago. And I spent a lot of my youth as well as part of my early Army career around Army aviators – so I think I understand the aviator mindset fairly well.

    One scene in the movie had me LMAO. Here’s a still:

    As soon as I stopped laughing, my first thought was: “That has to be based on a real event.” But at the time I had no idea what that event was, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever find out any details of the real event that inspired it.

    Fast forward 15+ years. I was reading a book; it was Ben Rich’s Skunk Works – his autobiography focusing on his years at Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects Division (AKA the Lockheed “Skunk Works”). A couple of chapters in the book are devoted to accounts from or about U-2, SR-71, and F-117A pilots and missions (all three aircraft were Skunk Works products – as were the P-38, the P-80, the F-104 and several other aircraft).

    One of those firsthand SR-71 accounts was attributed to a Lt. Col. William Burk, Jr., USAF. It recounts a mission over Lebanon in late 1982, after the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing. Burk was the pilot for the mission.

    The flight originated at RAF Mildenhall. At the time, the French wouldn’t give the US clearance to overfly France, so the mission’s route was planned to go via the Straits of Gibraltar.

    The outbound leg and overflight of Beirut went well, though not without a bit of high APF time (they were tracked by a Syrian SA-5 during the mission). However, while in the Western Mediterranean on the return leg Burk got a low oil pressure indication on one engine.

    The engine appeared to be operating properly, but he shut it down anyway. As the pilot, since he was now flying on one engine Burk decided to take the short way home (e.g., to cross France) instead of going home the long way via Gibralter.

    He and his Recon Systems Officer had nearly finished crossing France and were nearing the English Channel. At that point, they were intercepted by a French Mirage.

    The French pilot came up on the radio and asked them for their diplomatic clearance number. Per Burk, the Mirage was about 10 feet off his left wing at the time.

    Burk had no idea what the man was talking about. So he told the French pilot to hold fast, while he checked with his RSO.

    He asked his RSO if he knew what the French pilot was talking about. His RSO’s reply: “Don’t worry about it, I just gave it to him.”

    Burk’s RSO had given the French pilot the finger out of his side window. At that point, Burk’s account says he “lit the afterburners and left that Mirage standing still” – and was crossing the English Channel a couple of minutes later.

    As soon as I read that, my thought was: “Bingo! That’s it!”

    Burk’s account can be read here. (Regrettably, I can’t find that particular excerpt of Skunk Works online.) My recollection is that it appears to be a faithful transcript of Burk’s account from Ben Rich’s book. What appears to be same account also exists, in non-verbatim form, on several other websites.

    Personally, I’m convinced the account is legit.

    . . .

    Now, I don’t know with absolute certainty that that is in fact the real-life incident that inspired the cockpit finger scene in Top Gun. But the timing fits; the incident occurred in late 1982, and Top Gun didn’t start filming for at least 2 years. And aviators tend to talk about stuff they did over a drink or two – particularly the outlandish or dangerous stuff they managed to survive. So I’m guessing that story, in sanitized and/or garbled form, had circulated throughout military aviation circles by then. And I’m also guessing the story had come to the attention of the film’s writing team.

    The rest, as they say, is cinematic “history”.

    Anyway, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” (smile)

    OK, enough Blackbird history for today. Enjoy the WOT, everyone – and the weekend.

  • Navy Mines Explode near Vietnam

    In 1972, the US Navy dropped sea mines off the coast of Vietnam south of Haiphong to disrupt supply shipping to North Vietnam. No, not like the mine in the photo. They looked more like torpedoes.

    In August of 1972, Navy ships’ crews watched while these mines detonated for no obvious reason. In reviewing archived and now declassified materials, the conclusion is that a magnetic solar storm on the order of a Carrington event caused the detonations.

    Space Weather has published a report on the solar research involved in this. It is available as a pdf at this link: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018SW002024

    This is one part of the abstract:

    Abstract:

    Today the extreme space weather events of early August 1972 are discussed as benchmarks for Sun-Earth transit times of solar ejecta (14.6 hr) and for solar energetic particle fluxes (10 MeV ion flux >70,000 cm?2·s?1·sr?1). Although the magnetic storm index, Dst, dipped to only ?125 nT, the magnetopause was observed within 5.2 RE and the plasmapause within 2 RE. Widespread electric and communication grid disturbances plagued North America late on 4 August. There was an additional effect, long buried in the Vietnam War archives that add credence to the severity of the storm impact: a nearly instantaneous, unintended detonation of dozens of sea mines south of Hai Phong, North Vietnam on 4 August 1972. The U.S. Navy attributed the dramatic event to magnetic perturbations of solar storms. Herein we discuss how such a finding is broadly consistent with terrestrial effects and technological impacts of the 4 August 1972 event and the propagation of major eruptive activity from the Sun to the Earth. We also provide insight into the solar, geophysical, and military circumstances of this extraordinary situation. In our view this storm deserves a scientific revisit as a grand challenge for the space weather community, as it provides space?age terrestrial observations of what was likely a Carrington?class storm.

    —

    The original and now declassified report from 1972 is held in Texas Tech University’s Vietnam archives. It is 143 pages long, divided into 3 pdfs, if you want to read it.

    The pdfs are at this link:  https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/83295

    Title: U.S. Navy Report, Mine Warfare Project Office – The Mining of North Vietnam, 8 May 1972 to 14 January 1973

    Item Number: 1070416001

    A Carrington event refers to the extreme solar storm and flare that overheated telegraph wires, which were noninsulated copper, and set some telegraph offices on fire. The solar storm of 1859 was a powerful geomagnetic solar storm during solar cycle 10 (1855–1867). A solar coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetosphere and induced one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record, September 1–2, 1859.

    Things have changed considerably since then, including several solar CMEs that just missed our planet by a hair.

    As everything moves more and more toward high-end technology dependent on what are essentially radio signals, there is widespread speculation on what will happen to all of that technojunk that people depend on now.  Maybe the old-fashioned windup stuff isn’t so dated, after all.

  • Veterans Day Is Not Memorial Day

    poppy

    There seems to be some confusion in the public about Memorial Day and Veterans Day.  This should clear things up. They are observed in different months (May vs. November) and one is a federal holiday, which means government offices are closed, while the other is not.

    Memorial Day is always the last Monday in the month of May every year. It’s a federal holiday, which means that it is officially a day when government is shut down, just like Thanksgiving Day (and sometimes the day after turkey day!). Originally known as Decoration Day, the name was officially changed to Memorial Day in 1971.

    Decoration Day was started as a way to remember the fallen and missing in the aftermath of the Civil War. It started as local and sometimes individual events, but the town of Waterloo, NY, had already begun to hold a communitywide event, starting in 1866.

    The full history of Memorial Day, including the reason for making it a 3-day weekend for government employees, is here at https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/memorial-day-history

    Established as the last Monday in the month of May, every year, it is a day when everything government is closed for a day off. There is no specified calendar date for Memorial Day. It is always the last Monday in May.

    The establishment of Armistice (Veterans) Day as a national holiday, but not a government day off, followed Decoration (Memorial) Day, and is always the date of the signing of the peace treaty ending World War I, which was November 11, 1918.

    I wrote an article for Veterans Day, outlining the history of this date.  https://www.azuse.cloud/?p=82786

    Originally known as Armistice Day, President Eisenhower’s administration changed it to Veterans Day in 1954 to honor the fallen of World War II, in which he was posted to the European theater, and the Korean War. It now includes all those fallen in warfare as well as living veterans and frequently, active duty people, too, and is always observed on November 11th, the date of the signing of the Armistice ending World War I.  The day of the week does not matter. This year, it fell on Sunday and a large memorial event took place at Arlington National Cemetery on Sunday, as well as observations and ceremonies in France at American cemeteries there and elsewhere.

    The difference between these two days honoring the military and those fallen in warfare is simple.

    They both have a specific month, but one has a permanently fixed week day, and the other is a permanently fixed calendar date.  What’s the difference in these two words: day versus date? Friday is not always Friday the 13th, but Christmas Day is always December 25.

    Memorial Day has a permanently designated weekday, the last Monday in May, every year. It is a federal holiday, meaning banks will be closed and the government has a three-day weekend, as do a lot of private businesses and some banks.

    Veterans Day is observed always on November 11 every year, regardless of the day of the week. It is not a federal holiday, but if it fell near a weekend when I was working, I usually took a long weekend. A lot of people I knew did the same thing.

    I don’t know how much more plainly these differences can be explained.  However, it should clear up any confusion in people who decided that somehow, Veterans Day this year fell on Monday, November 12, when it did not. The ceremony was held at Arlington National Cemetery on November 11, not on the next day.

  • Patton Was a Poet? Who Knew?

    Band of Brothers

    Well, if that don’t beat all. It explains a lot, though.

    From a MilitaryNews article dated 11 Nov 2018 at Military.com | By Richard Sisk

    From the article:   Not everybody was happy that World War I ended on Nov. 11, 1918, possibly least of all an Army colonel named George S. Patton.

    https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/11/11/legendary-general-patton-hated-peace-so-much-he-wrote-poem-about-it.html

    Patton, then 32, wrote a poem titled “Peace — Nov. 11, 1918” in which he expressed contempt for civilians cheering the silencing of the guns that would deprive him and other warriors of “the whitehot joy of taking human life.”

    “The poem described Patton’s ‘dismay’ at the popular excitement that greeted the peace, which he characterized as the ‘cruel glee of the weak,’” the notes continue. “Patton’s poem mourned the loss during peacetime of the virtues that he believed war inspired, such as sacrifice and purpose.”

    Patton was dyslexic, which left the poem full of misspelled words, but the original draft is on disply as part of a display by the Library of Congress.

    The library’s notes say “an editor, possibly Patton’s wife Beatrice, has crossed out those lines that express especially strong sentiments like comparing peaceful life to ‘a festering sewer’ ” in the draft of the poem on exhibit.

    The reference is to the following lines:

    “Looking forward I could see

    Life like a festering sewer

    Full of the fecal Pacafists [sic]

    Which peace makes us endure”

    If you bring this up to current events, does it almost seem prescient, as in a vague way, a reference to the disturbances we see now in politics?

    If you go back into the histories of both World Wars, neither Woodrow Wilson nor Franklin Roosevelt wanted to be involved in the war in Europe. Both of them were Socialists in their thinking, with Wilson wanting a one world government through the League of Nations, and Roosevelt leaning toward government work programs to resolve the economic issues of the Great Depression. Both of them were reluctantly dragged into those wars, Wilson by a U-boat sinking the Lusitania in the Atlantic, and Roosevelt by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Neither of them understood (or seemed to want to understand) that pacifism of the kind that Angela Merkel has offered Europe for some time now leads to destruction of your society. And she’s lost her majority because the AfD received enough votes to take a seat in Parliament.

    What Patton forgot, in his disdain for peacetime, was that while it is necessary to be prepared to defend your home from invaders, peacetime is the reward for successfully doing so… until the next bunch of barbarians show up at the gates.

    I think Pres. Trump understands it quite well and is willing to rattle Vlad’s doorknobs and confront Xi JinPing as he did Li’l Fatty Kim da T’ird, who, BTW, has been squabbling over negotiations with South Korea, although they are continuing to dismantle the guard posts.  (See  below)   https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2018/11/11/2-koreas-complete-the-disarming-of-22-guard-posts/

    That’s something to consider and discuss at length.

  • The Ghost Army of World War II

    This was a well-kept secret. It was, in fact, so well-kept for over 50 years, that no one knew anything about it, including the families of these people who worked in this unit, until it was finally declassified. It was the Ghost Army, a replicated army of equipment, tanks, landing craft, planes, etc., placed where Hitler’s spies and army could see them, and be fooled into believing they were real.

    Most of the people who participated in this project just put it behind them and got on with their lives, so much so, that when Bernie Bluestein, a local Chicago area artist who is now 95, decided he wanted to take an Honor Flight to Washington, DC, all those memories he’d let fade into the past started coming to the surface. When he went to Europe with his son Keith, now 63, he began to tell his son all of this buried, long-suppressed stuff, astonishing him.

    Mr. Bluestein was 19 when he was drafted into the Army. Because of his ability to sketch comic strips and pinup girls in Cleveland, OH, he was placed with the 603rd Camouflage Engineers Battalion, the objective being to create an entire army that would fool Adolf Hitler’s spies and aerial observers. These people were all levels of skill in art, from professional artists to students. They created everything from fake airplanes parked on what appeared to be airfields to convoys emplaced in France, to inflatable tanks with loudspeakers playing tank noises – all to fool the German army. And they couldn’t tell their families where they were (23rd Headquarters Special Troops unit) or what they were doing.

    The full story on Mr. Bluestein is here:  https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-ghost-army-veteran-20181110-story.html

    To keep historical records intact, an organization titled The Ghost Army Legacy Project has been formed. The link is here: http://www.ghostarmylegacyproject.org

    The first ever Ghost Army historical marker was dedicated September 26, 2018, in Bettembourg, Luxembourg.

    The marker stands on the exact spot where the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops carried out Operation BETTEMBOURG, one of their longest and most important operations.  http://www.ghostarmylegacyproject.org/news