During World War II, the 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Battalion started an adventurous experiment as it prepared for D-Day: enlisting dogs into their ranks. The so-called "paradogs" (short for "parachuting dogs") were specifically trained to perform tasks such as locating mines, keeping watch and warning about enemies. As a side job, they also served as something of a mascot for the two-legged troops.
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Training began with getting the dogs used to loud noises. At the base in Larkhill Garrison, the dog handlers had the dogs sit for hours on transport aircraft with their propellers spinning. They also trained the dogs to identify the smell of explosives and gunpowder in addition to familiarizing them with possible battlefield scenarios, such as what to do if their master was captured, how to track down enemy soldiers and how to behave during firefights.
Training on the ground lasted roughly two months. But then the dogs started what wasn't part of the training of the other search dogs in the war: parachuting maneuvers.
The dogs' slim bodies proved to be advantageous because, during their test jumps, they could use the parachutes that had actually been designed to carry bicycles. In order to make it easier to get the dogs to jump out of the aircraft, they weren't given anything to drink or eat beforehand. On April 2, 1944, Bailey wrote in his notebook about the first jump with the female Alsatian Ranee. He notes that he carried with him a 2-pound piece of meat, and that the dog sat at his heels eagerly watching as the men at the front of the line jumped out of the plane.
Then it was their time to jump, which Bailey describes in this way:
"After my chute developed, I turned to face the line of flight; the dog was 30 yards away and slightly above. The chute had opened and was oscillating slightly. (Ranee) looked somewhat bewildered but showed no sign of fear. I called out and she immediately turned in my direction and wagged her tail vigorously. The dog touched down 80 feet before I landed. She was completely relaxed, making no attempt to anticipate or resist the landing, rolled over once, scrambled to her feet and stood looking round. I landed 40 feet from her and immediately ran to her, released her and gave her the feed."
Jump, land, eat: With each training jump, the dogs started enjoying their job more. In fact, the dogs sometimes allowed themselves to be thrown out of the planes or leapt out without any coaxing.
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In what followed, as one soldier in the 13th Battalion later noted, Bing and the other dogs proved to be very useful, especially for locating mines and booby traps. "They would sniff excitedly over it for a few seconds and then sit down looking back at the handler with a quaint mixture of smugness and expectancy," he wrote, noting that the dogs would then be rewarded with a treat. "The dogs also helped on patrols by sniffing out enemy positions and personnel, hence saving many Allied lives," he added.
No one can say for sure who the first dog to parachute was. This undated photo (most likely from between 1920 and 1924) shows members of the Colorado Air National Guard with dog Jeff, wearing his parachute. After making several successful jumps, he was killed in August 1924, when his chute failed to open.
On the night of July 5/6 1941 Flint and his all-sergeant crew took off in their twin-engined Hampden bomber to attack Osnabruck. Shortly after crossing the Dutch coast at 10,000ft the aircraft was caught and held in enemy searchlights. Flint took violent evasive action, but a night fighter attacked, causing extensive damage to the aircraft. As Flint dived away the fighter inflicted further damage. Eventually, after 10 minutes, and by descending to 500ft, Flint was able to shake off the fighter and escape.
Unperturbed, he climbed back to bombing height and headed for the target. But the aircraft was again caught by searchlights, and was unable to evade them until Flint had jettisoned the bombs. He finally escaped at 1,000ft, when he headed for the North Sea.
The Hampden was 50 miles from the English coast when two Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters appeared and set up a series of devastating coordinated attacks. Flares were ignited in the cockpit, and the aircraft’s radio and internal communication system was damaged, making it impossible for the crew to contact one another.
The fighters made three more attacks, and the port engine of the bomber was set on fire and some of the crew wounded. Flint turned off the fuel to the damaged engine and flew a few feet above the sea before the fighters finally broke away.
As he approached the coast near Cromer, Flint realised that he would be unable to climb over the cliffs. He turned away and ditched the bomber 800 yards from the shore.
Two of the crew were able to get out of the aircraft, only to discover that the dinghy had been holed. Flint also escaped, but immediately realised that the navigator was missing. He crawled back into the sinking bomber, where he found his badly wounded comrade. As the aircraft began to go down, Flint hauled the helpless navigator through the escape hatch. With no dinghy, Flint supported the unconscious navigator as he swam and dragged him towards the shore. Fifty yards short of the beach a soldier arrived to help, allowing Flint to scramble ashore. There was no sign of the air gunner, and he asked for boats to search for the missing man.
Flint refused to leave the beach until it was clear that the air gunner had been lost. He then walked a mile to a waiting ambulance and was taken to hospital.
He was awarded an immediate DFM for his “cool courage and determination to strike at the enemy”. When the full extent of his gallant efforts to save his crew became clear, he was also awarded a George Medal, the citation concluding: “This airman displayed great gallantry, fortitude and disregard of personal safety in his efforts to save his helpless navigator.” Sadly, the navigator succumbed to his wounds.
My post last night about Landing Signal Officers seems to have attracted a fair amount of attention, with more visits than usual.
March 1943: U.S. Army Air Corps parachutist versus Japanese Zero
2nd Lt. Owen Baggett was the co-pilot of an Army B-24 bomber sent to bomb Japanese facilities in Burma. Their plane shot nearly to pieces by Zero fighters, Baggett and four other crewmen bailed out. The Zero pilots made sport of the parachutists, machine-gunning and apparently killing two of them in mid-air.
Enraged, Baggett—still dangling from the silk canopy presumably thousands of feet in the air—drew his .45-caliber pistol and fired at a passing Zero. The Japanese plane stalled and crashed. Later, while a prisoner of the Japanese, Baggett learned that he had hit the Zero pilot in the head, killing him.
1948 & 1949: Royal Air Force Spitfires versus Israeli Spitfires versus Egyptian Spitfires
During skirmishes in the Middle East in 1948, the armed forces of Israel, Egypt and Great Britain all used pretty much the same models of Spitfire fighters, leading to fatal confusion.
British forces were pulling back from Palestine, leaving Egypt and the new state of Israel to fight it out over territory claimed by both Jews and Arabs. In May, waves of Egyptian Spitfires attacked the airfield at Ramat David, believing it to be held by Israel.
But in fact, British troops were still in charge of the base. The Egyptian planes unwittingly destroyed two Royal Air Force Spitfires and two transport planes and killed four men. With help from gunners on the ground, surviving British fighters destroyed five Egyptian Spitfires.
And after weeks of chaotic combat on three sides, in January 1949 two RAF Spitfires mistook two other RAF Spits as Israeli planes and shot them down, too.
The recognition of Israel's nuclear capabilities will continue to matter over the next six months because, if we are to take Tel Aviv seriously, Israel could undertake a unilateral military attack against Iran's known nuclear facilities. Should the IAEA's outstanding questions about the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear program go unaddressed, or access to sensitive sites remain restricted, there are intentionally ambiguous undefined conditions under which Israel might attack Iran, with or without the United States. For example, Iran's Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant could be one target of an Israeli nuclear weapon. Fordow is a uranium-enrichment facility located beneath 60 to 80 meters of granite near the city of Qom. The facility at Fordow, according to Iran's declaration to the International Atomic Energy Agency, is designed to contain up to 2,976 IR-1 centrifuges in 16 cascades. The Institute for Science and International Security has estimated that this set-up could produce one bomb's worth -- or "significant quantity" -- of highly enriched uranium per year.
In August, Yuval Steinitz, Israel's minister for international affairs, strategy, and intelligence, claimed that Iran's uranium-enrichment facilities can be "destroyed with brute force," which he described as "a few hours of airstrikes, no more." Yaakov Amidror, who recently stepped down as national security advisor, asserted this month that Israel can "stop the Iranians for a very long time." Asked whether this includes Iran's deeply buried nuclear installations, he responded, "including everything."
Most U.S. government and nongovernmental experts in weaponeering effects disagree with Amidror. They have concluded that Israel's conventional air-dropped bombs cannot penetrate the bedrock to reliably destroy the centrifuges located within Fordow. Moreover, both George W. Bush's and Barack Obama's administrations have refused to provide Israel with the Pentagon's largest (and recently further improved) conventional bunker-buster bomb, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. Respected defense reporter David Fulghum quoted an anonymous U.S. defense specialist as saying, "Right now the Israeli capability against deeply buried targets is not much more than a noise-level effect." Given Israel's inability to deliver what one U.S. official termed "a knockout blow" against well-defended nuclear sites like Fordow with conventional bombs, a low-yield nuclear weapon could be the only viable alternative for a unilateral Israeli strike.
The largest of Tarawa's islets is Betio measuring less than 3 miles in length and 1/2 mile in width. Here, the Japanese built an airstrip defended by 4,700 troops dug into a labyrinth of pillboxes and bunkers interconnected by tunnels and defended by wire and mines. The task of dislodging this force fell to the Marines of the 2nd Division. The resulting struggle produced one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles in Marine Corps. History
The landings began on November 20 and immediately ran into trouble. Coming in at low tide, the assault boats were forced to disgorge their men far from shore. Wading through waist-deep water over piercing, razor-sharp coral, many were cut down by merciless enemy gunfire yards from the beach. Those who made it ashore huddled in the sand, hemmed in by the sea to one side and the Japanese to the other.
The next morning, reinforcements made the same perilous journey bringing with them tanks and artillery. By the end of the day the Marines were able to break out from the beach to the inland. The fierce combat continued for another two days.
The cost of victory was high for the Marines who suffered nearly 3,000 casualties. The toll was even higher for the Japanese. Of the 4,700 defenders, only 17 survived. Their willingness to fight to the last man foreshadowed the fierceness of the battles to come.
Mavis Batey, who has died aged 92, was one of the leading female codebreakers at Bletchley Park, cracking the Enigma ciphers that led to the Royal Navy’s victory at Matapan in 1941.
She was the last of the great Bletchley “break-in” experts, those codebreakers who found their way into new codes and ciphers that had never been broken before.
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Arguably her most important role ... was in the collaboration with [Dilly] Knox and Margaret Rock on the breaking of the Enigma cipher used by the German secret service, the Abwehr.
MI5 and MI6 had captured most of the German spies sent to Britain, and those in the neutral capitals of Lisbon and Madrid, and turned them back against the Germans, feeding them false information designed to deceive them in an operation known as the Double Cross system.
But they had no idea whether or not the Germans believed this intelligence, as the Abwehr Enigma was so complex that Hut 6 had been unable to break it. It had four rotors instead of the standard three, and unlike other machines they rotated randomly with no predictable pattern.
Knox took over the task of breaking it, using Mavis Batey and Margaret Rock as his assistants, to test out every possibility. On December 8 1941 Mavis Batey broke a message on the link between Belgrade and Berlin, allowing the reconstruction of one of the rotors.
Within days Knox and his team had broken into the Abwehr Enigma, and shortly afterwards Mavis broke a second Abwehr machine, the GGG, adding to the British ability to read the high-level Abwehr messages and confirm that the Germans did believe the phoney Double-Cross intelligence they were being fed by the double agents.
This allowed the XX Committee, which was running the double agents, to send a stream of small pieces of false intelligence that would build up a complete picture of a fictitious First US Army Group, which was forming up in East Anglia and Kent to lead the main Allied invasion force.
The false intelligence led the Germans to believe that the main force would land on the Pas de Calais rather than in Normandy. As a result Hitler insisted that two key armoured divisions were held back in the Calais area.
Brigadier Bill Williams, Montgomery’s chief intelligence officer, said that without the break into the Abwehr Enigma the deception operation could not have been mounted. The forces in Calais would have moved to Normandy and could well have thrown the Allies back into the sea.
In June, 1943, the U. S. had secured Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands. They knew the Japanese had a huge base at Rabaul, but were certain there were other airfields being built in the Northern Solomon Islands. They asked for a volunteer crew to take photographs of Bougainville Island to plan for an eventual invasion, and of Buka airfield on the north side of the island to assess for increased activity there. It was considered a near-suicide mission — flying hundreds of miles over enemy airspace in a single, slow bomber. Not to mention photoreconnaissance meant staying in level flight and taking no evasive action even if they were attacked.
The only crew that volunteered ... was Jay Zeamer and the Eager Beavers. One of the crew, bombardier Joseph Sarnoski, had absolutely no reason to volunteer. He’d already been in combat for 18 months and was scheduled to go home in 3 days. Being a photo mission, there was no need for a bombardier. But if his friends were going, he wanted to go, and one of the bombardier’s battle stations was to man the forward machine guns. They might need him, so he went.
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Zeamer held the plane level (tilting the wings even one degree at that altitude could put the photograph half a mile off target) and Kendrick took his photos, which gave plenty of time for over 20 enemy fighters to get up to the altitude Old 666 was flying at.The photograph of the Japanese airstrip at Bougainville
taken by Capt. Zeamer's aircraft
The fighter group, commanded by Chief Petty Officer Yoshio Ooki, was experienced and professional. They carefully set up their attack, forming a semi-circle all around the B-17 and then attacking from all directions at once. Ooki didn’t know about the extra weapons the Eager Beavers had mounted to their plane, but it wouldn’t matter if he had; there was no way for a single B-17 to survive those odds.
During the first fighter pass the plane was hit by hundreds of machine gun bullets and cannon shells. Five crewman of the B-17 were wounded and the plane badly damaged. All of the wounded men stayed at their stations and were still firing when the fighters came in for a second pass, which caused just as much damage as the first. Hydraulic cables were cut, holes the size of footballs appeared in the wings, and the front plexiglas canopy of the plane was shattered.
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The battle continued for over 40 minutes. The Eager Beavers shot down several fighters and badly damaged several others. The B-17 was so heavily damaged, however, that they didn’t expect to make the several hundred miles long flight back home. Sarnoski had already died from his wounds. Zeamer had continued piloting the plane despite multiple wounds. Five other men were seriously wounded.
Flight Officer Ooki’s squadron returned to Buka out of ammunition and fuel. They understandably reported the B-17 was destroyed and about to crash in the ocean when they last saw it.
'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,’’ cries Shakespeare’s King Henry V before Harfleur, ''Or close the wall up with our English dead.’’ We are brought up to believe that these were fine words.
But was the king human-rights compliant? Did he have due regard to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007? As he called on the ''good yeomen,/ Whose limbs were made in England’’, did he not understand that the MoD’s ''duty of care’’ extends to procurement and that he was therefore liable for litigation over any body armour inadequate to protect those English limbs?
Did he not recognise that, once the bodies of the English dead had been removed from Harfleur’s wall and repatriated, his actions would be judged by the ''narrative verdicts’’ of a coroner from Brize Norton? In ordering his men to ''Follow your spirit, and upon this charge/ Cry 'God for Harry, England and St George!”’, was he inciting them to disregard the Right to Life as laid down in Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), written by Tony Blair’s government into British law and amplified in a series of judgments by our Supreme Court and the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg? Nowadays poor Harry would be a war criminal, not a national hero.
If you look at a well-named pamphlet, The Fog of Law, published by Policy Exchange, you will see what has happened. Its authors, Tom Tugendhat and Laura Croft Klein, take the reader painstakingly through what they call ''the legal erosion of British fighting power’’.
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The arrival of risk-averse military leaders is now not a future danger, which is what one usually hears, but a present reality. The people in charge are no less personally brave than their predecessors. But the encroachment of law forces them to turn their faces from scanning the horizon of potential conflict and look over their shoulders instead.
The problem is not the existence of law in military affairs as such ... The threat lies in the takeover of the military sphere by law designed by and for civilians. Worse, this takeover is carried out not merely by our judges acting under the ultimate authority of our elected Parliament, but by a melange of judges, domestic and continental, answerable, thanks to the ECHR, to no entity but themselves.
On the evening of July 13 [1944], four Typhoons of No 197 Squadron took off from an advanced landing ground in Normandy to carry out an armed reconnaissance sortie near Caen. Trott and his number two strafed an armoured vehicle, and were rejoining their two colleagues when a large force of Messerschmitt Bf 109s attacked.
Trott saw one of the enemy aircraft approaching him, and made a head-on attack firing his cannons. As he broke away, the starboard wing of his Typhoon struck the Bf 109. In the collision his head and shoulder struck the side of the fuselage as the canopy disappeared; his helmet, oxygen mask and goggles were torn off him, and he was catapulted into the air with only his parachute intact. Having succeeded in pulling the ripcord, Trott lost consciousness. He woke up to find himself suspended from a tree and surrounded by armed German soldiers. He spent the rest of the war as a PoW, much of the time in the hospital at Stalag Luft III.
In 1990 Trott and his wife returned to France to search for the spot where he had bailed out. When they approached a farmer and explained the reason for their visit, he revealed that, as a 12-year old boy, he had witnessed the collision of the two aircraft and Trott’s subsequent descent by parachute.
Such was his morale-boosting determination and genius for the feint and swoop that he was often described as a guerrilla leader equalled only by Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara; and Giap was certainly adept at utilising terrain and highly mobile troops to outwit stronger and better equipped enemies.
But he was far more than just an able coordinator of the small-scale jungle skirmish. Major set-piece battles and broad offensives were well within his compass too, though often at high cost. At home, only Ho Chi Minh was better loved. Abroad, even Giap’s opponents – perhaps particularly his opponents – suggested that he merited a place in the pantheon of great military leaders of modern times, alongside such figures as Wellington and Rommel.
The figure Giap himself most admired and studied, however, was Napoleon. By the time Giap had left school he was able to outline in chalk the phases of all Napoleon’s most celebrated battles. It was an irony later lost on few that, having absorbed those lessons, Giap would score perhaps his most dramatic victory against France.
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Giap ... taunt[ed] America as early as 1967 that its Army was bogged down in an unwinnable war. When Thanh was killed that year, Giap took direct command of the campaign against America in South Vietnam and within months had pulled off another tactical masterstroke.
This came in early 1968, when he appeared to be mustering his forces for a Dien Bien Phu-style ambush on an American fortress at Khe Sanh during the lunar New Year, or Tet. But as America reinforced Khe Sanh, Giap’s men instead launched a general attack on a host of targets across the South. The Tet Offensive, as it became known, did not sweep America from Vietnam or force its diplomats immediately to the negotiating table. But with Tet, Giap, a man who barely stood 5ft tall, had forced a fundamental change in attitudes to the Vietnam War in America, where commitment to the conflict soon began to crack.
