Military History

From Defence Talk Sea King Helicopter Celebrates 50th Anniversary of First Flight US Navy | Mar 20, 2009 Share & Bookmark: NAVAL AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND, Patuxent River: The H-3 Sea King helicopter community celebrated the 50th anniversary of the aircraft’s historic first flight March 11. The Sea King is a twin-engine, all-weather, amphibious helicopter used for numerous roles that include anti-submarine warfare, anti-ship warfare, search and rescue, transport, communications, airborne early warning and executive transport. “The Sea King was the Jack of all trades and master of all,” said Capt. James “Walleye” Wallace, Support and Commercial Deriva…

Adm. Sir Max Horton and Western Approaches Command: Turning the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic (Defense Media Network)

The NHF Five Star Mess Night beyond the Fight Top in the Navy Museum With Covid restrictions finally lifted, the Naval Historical Foundation hosted its third annual Mess Night on Saturday, November 5 at the National Museum of the United States Navy. As with previous Five Star Mess Nights, the event was built around a theme and this year’s centennial of U.S. naval aircraft carriers provided the appropriate occasion for the event. Although the USS Langley (CV 1) had been placed in commission in March of 1922, it was not until the autumn of that year that the converted collier got underway to conduct the first launches and traps of “aeroplanes” from Langley’s “flying deck…

Apparently a little more serious than other Russian sites, including fighter bases. Also, I almost don't feel as strange to brownse in Russian sites easily without known Russian language (And my region in Spain is full of Russian inmigrants, it's usual for me to hear Russian daily, and it's a sweet tongue, perhaps some day I would understand it ...): http://tu-128.ru/

A curious blog about submarines, sometimes generic, sometimes with many details: http://rwhiston.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/11/

Some images of that historic day ...

A curious site with a lot of cruise books. Perousing in the commisioning or cruise books you can sometimes find valuable or unknown data, but regrettably very few times (Recently I saw in a commisioning book of HMS Eagle she was equipped with a multipurpose Sonar 184 (also for torpedo avoidance) from the 1964 refit, and I suppose also HMS Ark Royal from the 1964 refit). These sonars are not listed in any database, and probably them were previously equipped with Sonar 132 or other passive torpedo avoidance sonar, as the other big British warships. http://www.axfordsabode.org.uk/comishbk.htm As example http://www.axfordsabode.org.uk/pdf-docs/arkroy10.pdf were we can see…

Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, PhD Charles Stephenson is the author of previous works on naval and siege warfare and the history of fortifications, with four volumes in print: The Fortifications of Malta 1530-1945 (Fortress 16, Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004, 2010); The Admiral’s Secret Weapon: Lord Dundonald and the Origins of Chemical Warfare (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006); The Channel Islands 1941-45: Hitler’s Impregnable Fortress (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2014); and – especially relevant to the book under review here – Germany’s Asia-Pacific Empire: Colonialism and Naval Policy, 1885-1914 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,…

Many documents: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/cia-analysis-soviet-navy

Rear Admiral Thomas F. Brown III, USN (NHHC Photo) Thomas Francis Brown III entered Officer Candidate School in 1954 and served as an aviator until his retirement in 1985 as the Director, Strike and Amphibious Warfare Division (OP-954) in the Office of the CNO. In his 343 combat missions in Vietnam, he was awarded a Silver Star for dropping a bridge span in North Vietnam, four Distinguished Flying Crosses, and multiple other awards. His commands included VA-37, CVW-19, USS Caloosahatchee (AO-98), USS Midway (CV-41), Military Enlistment Processing Command, CARGRU 1, and CARGRU 5/CTF-77, during which he amassed 4,843 hours of accident-free flying and 1,017 traps. Tom…

Queenfish: A cold war tale By William J. Broad Published: March 18, 2008 International Herald Tribune Atop the globe, the icy surface of the Arctic Ocean has remained relatively peaceful. But its depths have boiled with intrigue, no more so than in the cold war. Although the superpowers planned to turn those depths into an inferno of exploding torpedoes and rising missiles, the brotherhood of submariners — the silent service, both Russian and American — has worked hard over the decades to keep the particulars of those plans hush-hush. Now, a few secrets are spilling through a crack in the wall of silence, revealing some of the science and spying that went i…

Many data, interesting Harrier researchs: http://www.harrier.org.uk/history/history_production.htm

Not sure if this is the right forum...I apologize in advance if I should have posted this elsewhere... What happens if war broke out in Germany, c. 1984, and the Soviets ended up using their "Seven Days to the Rhine" plan... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine At the end of the seven days, the Soviets have "won" in that they now occupy most of Germany. Parts of Western Germany have been destroyed, along with with most of Denmark and Poland, but France and Italy have been left untouched and the U.K. has only been hit with conventional weapons. (Lots of them, but just conventional ones.) Aside from naval actions, in which nuclear cruise missil…

Interesting site about the Cold War use of RB-29 in intelligence missions: http://www.rb-29.net http://www.rb-29.net/HTML/77ColdWarStory/03.01anscall.htm

Carrier Saratogas sad final journey begins (DefenseNews, Intercepts blog)

Reviewed by CAPT Richard Dick, USN (Ret.). Graham A. Thomas is a historian, biographer, journalist, and theatrical producer. He has written for the UK Ministry of Defence and has been editor of the British Army Review, the army’s official academic journal. He specializes in the history of the British Army and Royal Air Force in World War II and the Korean Conflict but has also written several books on the histories and biographies of pirates and pirate hunters. This book grew out of the author’s research on Captain Woodes Rogers, a Royal Navy pirate hunter and commerce raider in the Caribbean in the early eighteenth century. Pirate Killers looks primarily at the…

By David F. Winkler, Ph.D. Staff Historian Just over a century ago, on October 26, Langley, departed from a York River anchorage at 7:15 a.m., and steamed into the Chesapeake Bay off the “Tail of the Shoe” shoal just inside Cape Henry. Having taken over as the officer of the deck for the 8 till noon watch, Ensign Tate recorded the morning events noting “At 10:50 started maneuvering ship to land plane, at various courses and speeds.” With that, Langley turned into a 30 mile-per-hour northeast breeze that Chief Electrician Joseph Weller termed as “very rocky.”. Tate then recorded: “At 10:59 plane A-606 piloted by Chevy circling ship.” Flying over Langley’s stern in an A…

By David F. Winkler, Ph.D. Staff Historian Today marks the centennial of the first “Navy Day” existence. With the belief that a naval arms race had been a leading cause for World War I, general public sentiment supported President Warren G. Harding’s call in June 1921 to convene a Washington Naval Arms Conference. As documented in Ryan Wadle’s book Selling Sea Power, Navy leaders felt betrayed by the national leadership that had convened and approved of the outcome of the conference that curbed new battleship construction and invoked tonnage limits on other ship classes. Thus, they orchestrated through the Navy League of the United States a celebration that would be h…

Reviewed by Capt. Richard Dick, USN (Ret.) Crash Boat is a remarkable memoir in several ways. The story of an Army Air Forces (AAF) 63-foot crash boat, P-399 Sea Horse (an unofficial nickname), in the Pacific during the latter half of World War II, it was written in a cooperative effort between the skipper, Earl McCandlish, and the son of his chief mate, MSGT George L. Jepson. The authors’ crisp style, eye for color and detail, and sense of common humanity make the book a pleasure to read and highlight an aspect of the war—inshore air-sea rescue in the Pacific—about which little has been published. McCandlish narrates the book from his initial assignment to cras…

By Capt. James R. “Ros” Poplar, USN (Ret) As we approach Veteran’s Day many members of America’s Greatest Generation are no longer with us and in the not-too-distant future there will be none as 2025 will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. One of those silent warriors was my father James R Poplar, Jr. whose military service and subsequent contribution to American society typifies many of the silent warriors of that era. My father was enrolled in Duke University when the war broke out, but he was able to obtain his parents’ consent to enlist in the United States Navy at an early age where he volunteered to serve in submarines upon completion of …