Military History

From Defence Talk Protecting North Americans for half a century: NORAD turns 50 Canadian Department of National Defence | Sep 14, 2007 Yesterday marked 50 years since Canada and the United States decided to form a new command responsible for protecting North America and its citizens. Our two nations made the decision to activate the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) command on September 12, 1958, while a more formal agreement was signed on May 12, 1958. Because the stand-up of NORAD has two dates attached to its formation, military personnel at NORAD Headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs, Colorado plan a year-long celebration between now…

Great sailor, also plastic kit and railway modeller, and scenario fodder: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11393406/Rear-Admiral-David-Cooke-obituary.html

Reviewed by Dr. Joseph Moretz In Turret Versus Broadside, Howard J. Fuller, a Reader in War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton in Great Britain, relates the history of the Royal Navy’s struggle to retain maritime supremacy in the face of ironclad warships innovated by the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. The engagement between ironclads in April 1862 off Hampton Roads might have ended in a tactical draw, but the strategic effects of the encounter between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia were of an altogether higher order. It represented a continuance of the Union Navy’s blockade against the Confederacy to be sure, but also across the sea there was a rea…

Reviewed by CAPT Derick R. Fix, USN Unlike Anything That Ever Floated is one of the newest additions to the Savas Beattie Emerging Civil War Series, which offers compelling, easy-to-read overviews of some of the Civil War’s most important battles and stories. Author Dwight Sturtevant Hughes provides a captivating narrative of the Battle of Hampton Roads and the clash of the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia. Hughes, a United States Naval Academy graduate, retired surface warfare officer, and Civil War naval historian is well-suited to this task, having previously published A Confederate Biography: The Cruise of the CSS Shenandoah and currently serving as a cont…

“The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Mess Attendant First Class Doris Miller (NSN:3561235) United States Navy, for exceptional courage, presence of mind, and devotion to duty and disregard for his personal safety while serving on board the Battleship USS WEST VIRGINIA (BB-48), during the Japanese attack on the United States Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, on 7 December 1941. While at the side of his Captain on the bridge of the battleship USS West Virginia, Mess Attendant First Class Doris Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing and in the face of a serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain…

Interesting page full of rare data linked to other Israeli UAVs in the chaotic site Israeli-Weapons (if you accede from the front page, you obtains almost nothing ... ): http://www.israeli-weapons.com/weapons/air...eron/Heron.html

Reviewed by CAPT Richard Dick, USN (Ret.) The German Armoured Cruiser SMS Blücher is a 2018 offering in the Kagero Publishing series, “Super Drawings in 3D.” It truly lives up to the series title. It is a collection of breathtaking color 3D renderings of the Blücher, commissioned in 1909 and sunk at the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915. The short book includes representations from above, both sides, bow, and stern of the ship as built, as well as exquisitely detailed renditions of the starboard side from bow to stern. The illustrator then narrows his focus to individual positions and areas of the ship, including the foredeck, steering position, conning tower, boa…

Reviewed by CDR Tobias R. Philbin III, PhD, USNR (Ret.) This is a professionally executed and beautifully produced exposition of the original plans of the second class of German dreadnought, the originals of which now reside in the collections of the UK National Maritime Museum (NMM). As it happens, this reviewer has some familiarity with the remaining collections of the World War I era Naval Inter-Allied Commission of Control (NIACC) which ended up in the NMM. Whilst a graduate student in War Studies at Kings College London, I sought assistance from Rear Admiral Percy Gick, R.N. (ret) in locating the NIACC collection, as previous inquiries in the German archives indi…

By Pam Ribbey, Opus (2022) Rebuttal Review By Capt. J.R. Reddig, USN (Ret.) I read a review of this book and wanted to respond. By way of background, I served in three wars in uniform. Three that were declared, anyway. Others were undeclared, like the war in the Navy about communications intelligence. The issues were stark, and play out today in the review you published. Who owned the management of the radio intercept system that collected it? Who provided authoritative analysis of the material that was collected? I joined in 1977, when the lines had been drawn. SIGINT collection had been consolidated at NSA, and the old and sometimes bitter struggle betwe…

Dreaming of Genie, Americas Anti-Aircraft Nuke (War is Boring blog)

By Pam Ribbey, Washington, DC: Opus Self-Publishing, Politics and Prose Bookstore (2022) Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. This self-published booklet is, in the main, a biography of Pam Ribbey’s grandfather, focuses on her own research and discussions with him on his is role before, during, and immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Capt. Charles Hamilton Maddox, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1909, served as a United States naval officer and was a veteran of both World Wars. He had also attended the Harvard Graduate School of Applied Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Captain Maddox retired in 1946 and passed away …

Discussions on HarpGamer are always relevant (well, almost always). We were discussing on IRC the role of aircraft carriers in WWII and whether a German carrier would have made any difference. Then I see this report today from Defence Talk: Divers find Hitler's aircraft carrier Times Online Thu, 27 Jul 2006, 00:51 The location of the wreck of the Graf Zeppelin had been a mystery for more than half a century POLISH divers have discovered the rusting wreckage of Nazi Germany’s only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin, solving one of the most enduring maritime riddles of the Second World War. For more than half a century the location of the huge vess…

From Air Force Magazine, June 2012 issue [excerpt]

Nagasaki: The Last Bomb (New Yorker)

Our November Second Saturday webinar commemorating the Centennial of the World War I Unknown Soldier’s arrival at the Washington Navy Yard aboard USS Olympia. This program features Patrick K. O’Donnell, author of The Unknowns: The Untold Story of America’s Unknown Soldier and WWI’s Most Decorated Heroes Who Brought Him Home, and a panel including Naval Historical Foundation Staff Historian Dr. David Winkler with current Air Force and former Marine historian Kara Newcomer. The post Blog first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

By Staff Historian Dr. Dave Winkler It was an honor back in 2011 to meet Tom Hudner who toured the Cold War Gallery that the Naval Historical Foundation had raised funds for. Ten years earlier the NHF hosted a symposium about the Korean War to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Korean War and the Hudner rescue attempt to save Ens. Jessie Brown was discussed in detail and retired Vice Adm. Gerald Miller stood up in the back of the Navy Memorial theater to state he had been on the bridge of Leyte when radio transmissions of the loss of Brown’s aircraft and Hudner’s subsequent ditching of his aircraft to attempt to extract Brown were received. Miller recalled Le…

I am trying to find a list of Royal Fleet Auxilliaris (British), AO, AFS, etc. extant in June 1965. Can any one help?

Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. Mrs. Smoot is an intelligence historian who is especially interested in 20th-century cryptology and communication and has published in Cryptologia, Federal History Journal, and Intelligence and National Security; she retired from the Center for Cryptologic History (CCH) of the National Security Agency in 2017. She is also the author of the forthcoming CCH monograph From the Ground Up: American Cryptology during World War I, and a frequent lecturer at the Cryptologic History Symposia, including the May 12, 2022, meeting where she presented “The Case for Parker Hitt as the Father of American Military Cryptology.” In October 2007…

By Sean Walsh Last week I was able to watch the new movie Devotion along with three other NHF members. The movie centers around the real-life friendship between Ens. Jesse L. Brown, the first African American naval aviator* and Lt. (JG) Thomas Hudner and is based on the book of the same name by Adam Makos, previously reviewed here. I suspect many of you have seen trailers for Devotion on television and are familiar with the basic story. Prior to seeing the film I also re-read portions of Such Men As These by David Sears, about naval carrier aviation during the Korean War and watched the classic film The Bridges at Toko-ri to get additional background. The movie st…

Old missile sites hold Cold War mystique By Jeff Martin - USA Today Posted : Thursday Dec 4, 2008 6:43:24 EST Merle Paaverud was raised on a farm near a nuclear missile site outside Finley, N.D. He remembers how missile sites in the area were “shrouded in mystery.” “Here we were farming around them, raising kids and going to school, and we were sitting in one of the most powerful areas in the world as far as nuclear weapons,” Paaverud, 59, says. “We never really knew what was going on, but it was life and death, part of the chess game that was going on in the world.” Today, Paaverud is the director of the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Next…