Military History

Reviewed by Master Chief David Mattingly, USN (Ret.) One need only mention 9/11 and most people will recall the confusion that spilled from televisions and radios throughout the country. September 11, 2001 was a beautiful day with clear skies in New York when the world turned upside down as two planes careened into the World Trade Center towers. New York City streets were soon a melee of victims, survivors, and first responders who quickly clogged the streets around the World Trade Center. Authorities soon saw New York Harbor as a means to evacuate the injured and other survivors from Lower Manhattan. Bestselling author and documentary producer L. Douglas Keeney h…

Reviewed by Jeff Schultz Marc Lohnstein’s The Netherlands East Indies Campaign 1941-42: Japan’s Quest for Oil covers a typically unheeded early Pacific campaign, fought for the resource rich Dutch East Indies, which showcased a dysfunctional Allied coalition effort conducted under fraught circumstances exacerbated by prewar decisions but which fought desperately until overwhelmed. Lohnstein is a historian, assistant curator of the Royal Home for Retired Military Personnel and Bronbeek Museum in Arnhem, and a writer who focuses on Dutch colonial topics.This 96-page Osprey monograph is divided into several sections: “Origins of the Campaign,” “Chronology,” “Opposi…

Reviewed by LCDR Bryan Hayes, USN (Ret.) In the Claws of the Tomcat is a thoroughly researched and detailed book about U.S. Navy F-14 operations in the Middle East, including Operation Desert Storm and other less-known encounters between U.S. aircraft and Iranian and Iraqi adversaries. I highly recommend it to serious students of naval aviation as well as aircraft modelers interested in accurately depicting the F-14. This book’s greatest strength is its reliance on interviews with aviators who flew the missions described in its pages. The interview subjects include not only U.S. Navy pilots and radar intercept officers (RIOs), but also Iranian and Iraqi airmen. …

May we never forget those who gave the Nazis their first defeat.

Reviewed by Charles H. Bogart This book is a must read for anyone interested in U.S. Naval aviation in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Lt. Commander Harry “Dirty Eddie” March Jr. joined the Navy in December 1940 and pinned on his naval wings in August 1941. He would serve in the Pacific Theater during the course of World War II and be promoted from Ensign to Lt. Commander. Along the way he gained the distinction of being designated an Ace, having downed five Japanese aircraft. Contrary to regulations, Lt. Cdr. March, throughout the war, maintained a journal in which he wrote about what was happening in his life and his thoughts on the war as a whole. The…

With some interesting historical links and articles: http://www.ov-1mohawkassociation.org/home/the-mohawk-storys

Reviewed by Charles H. Bogart This remarkable book is much more than a biography of Lt. Col. Barry B. Bridger; it is also a guide to living life to the fullest. The story is of two parts, Lt. Col. Bridger’s life up and through captivity and his life after leaving the U.S. Air Force. His time as a POW started on January 23, 1967, when his F-4 Phantom fighter was shot down by a SAM over North Vietnam and ended 8 years later when he was repatriated home. One of the points that Lt. Col. Bridger makes in the book is that while PTSD affected 31 percent of those who served in Vietnam, it affected less than 5 percent of those held POW. This difference, he holds, was of the re…

By David F. Winkler, Ph.D. Staff Historian Finally on the morning of Saturday November 18, Cdr. Kenneth Whiting, the executive officer of the USS Langley, climbed into the cockpit of a PT seaplane which was positioned on that trolley contraption connected to the end of the catapult that had been installed on the flying deck of the U.S. Navy’s first aircraft carrier that was nicknamed “Little David.” What he was attempting to do would not go unnoticed. An hour earlier, representatives from five different motion picture companies set up their cameras alongside those of the Navy as the ship remained anchored in the York River. Not only did the Bureau of Naval Aeronautics…

WWII torpedo boat wreck surfaces in Pacific The Associated Press Posted : Monday Apr 30, 2007 5:48:52 EDT WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The explosive-laden wreck of a World War II torpedo boat has risen from the Pacific Ocean off the Solomon Islands, pushed above the water by a powerful earthquake, an official said Friday. The boat was exposed when reefs rose 10 feet above sea level during a 8.1-magnitude quake that caused a devastating tsunami, killing 52 people in the western Solomons in early April, said Jay Waura of the National Disaster Management Office. The Solomons’ main island, Guadalcanal, was the scene of fierce fighting during World War II. The co…

CV32: Hard to believe in some ways that UAVs are old enough to constitute "military history", but there it is. Air Force UAVs: The Secret History This comes by way of Bill Sweetman at Aviation Week's Ares Blog, who offers this synopsis: Tales from the Crypt: Secret UAVs Tales From The Crypt - Secret UAVs Posted by Bill Sweetman at 7/19/2010 1:07 AM CDT Click-of-the-month-club selection at Ares is Tom Ehrhard's report on the history of UAVs in the US Air Force, just published by the Mitchell Institute. It is based on Ehrhard's unpublished 1000-plus-page thesis on the subject, and sheds new light on many programs - some of which were, at the time, close…

We are joined in our discussion, by Admiral Vern Clark, Admiral Robert Natter, Admiral William Fallon, and Rear Admiral Samuel Cox to address the Navy’s response in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The post Blog first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

St Johann Press, Haworth, New Jersey, 2018. Reviewed by Chris Ketcherside First to Go is a collection of anecdotes from the USMC Combat Correspondents Association, with no specific author credited. It uses significant material from a previous publication, Last to Know, First to Go by Garry Cameron, the unofficial history of Marine Combat Correspondents, published in 1987 by Charger Books. First to Go builds on that work by adding material from conflicts since 1987. The book’s purpose, according to the preface written by Jack T. Paxton, Captain, USMC (ret), himself a correspondent, is to record the stories of combat correspondents and demonstrate that while they…

Very detailed in some items: http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-history-combat.htm#vietnam

Lessons from the Battle of the Paracel Islands (The Diplomat)

By Gerry Doyle and Blake Herzinger, Helion and Company (2022). Reviewed by Joseph F. Greco Much attention has been paid to the Chinese ASBM (Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile) program, a strategy that targets the U.S. Navy’s command over the East and South China Seas. As a consequence, the program brings into question the effectiveness of supercarriers that now face hundreds of missiles pointed at the American fleet. In their book Carrier Killer: China’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles and Theater of Operations in the Early 21st Century, journalists Gerry Doyle and Blake Herzinger, bring to life the current Chinese program giving even the casual reader a thorough and gr…

I've just finished watching The Sinking of the Laconia, a dramatisation of the events surrounding the sinking of a cruise liner turned troop transport by a German U-Boat in 1942. I don't know if you've heard the story, but it's described here. An interesting lesser known story from the Second World War. The dramatisation was very good with excellent production values, but honestly was about ten minutes too long.

Found casually when researching about Swedish ships (in concrete the elusive ex-Coast Guard Kbv 172/HMS Skredvisk): http://www.sinbadnavigation.com/flet.php?id=4

My part in sinking of the Belgrano BRIAN BRADY WESTMINSTER EDITOR (bdbrady@scotlandonsunday.com) Scotsman A REMARKABLE first-hand account of the hours leading up to one of the most controversial episodes of the Falklands War has emerged from a Scottish police constable. Steve McIntosh was a 17-year-old Royal Navy submariner when he helped hunt down and torpedo the General Belgrano, an action that cost the lives of 300 Argentinian sailors and remains hotly debated 25 years later. McIntosh, now a community beat officer with Strathclyde Police, was in the control room of HMS Conqueror, the submarine that sank the Belgrano, working in the key role of contact eva…

Whiskey on the Rocks 1981 incident, centered on Blekinge Museum near Karlskrona (in Swedish): Start (look for U137): http://80.78.212.10/08_00sok.asp Site entrance (not all researched): http://80.78.212.10/bmcd/u137/u137.HTML Images: http://80.78.212.10/bmcd/u137/galleri/galleri.html

Happy Canada Day! and the 95th anniversary of the Battle of Beaumont Hamel. Couple of links for you: The Memory Project: Stories of the Second World War The Newfoundland Regiment and the Great War