Diplomacy & Crisis News

UN World Food Programme (WFP) has been forced to reduce its food and cash assistance for refugees in Eastern Africa by up to 30 per cent, the agency has said, voicing fears that the reductions could worsen in the coming months unless urgent additional funding is received in time. 

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for greater attention to the Rohingya refugee crisis – which entered its fourth year – and for addressing the root causes of the conflict. 

La rédaction de Politique étrangère vous offre à (re)lire des textes qui ont marqué l’histoire de la revue. Nous vous proposons aujourd’hui un article de Roger Lévy, intitulé « Problèmes de la Chine populaire », et publié dans le numéro 6/1957 de Politique étrangère.

1. Le voyage

Une gageure : quitter Paris, le 13 mai 1957 ; aller par le chemin des écoliers, c’est-à-dire Hong-Kong, à Pékin ; rentrer, via Moscou, en quelque trente heures de vol ; être dé retour, après six semaines d’absence ; avoir observé les traits distinctifs de la Chine populaire, son régime, ses hommes ; écrire non la relation du voyage mais les réflexions qu’il suggère ; livrer le manuscrit, fin août, à l’éditeur ; voir, à la mi-octobre, le volume rouge et or aux devantures des librairies parisiennes ; cela tient du prodige. La vérité veut que M. Edgar Faure était préparé à cette performance. Deux fois président du conseil, depuis cinq ans, et ministre des affaires étrangères, il avait fait précéder son exploration du continent chinois de celle du continent soviétique. Il avait pris, autrefois, ses diplômes de russe à l’Ecole des langues — introduction à la connaissance de l’Asie, par le truchement des comparaisons. Il avait acquis l’habitude de survoler les problèmes politiques à l’échelle de la planète. Il est animé, comme tout vrai politique, de l’esprit de synthèse. Donc voici explicitée en deux cent trente pages, la Chine de Mao Tso-tong.

Ni redites, ni anecdotes inutiles. Dès l’abord, l’auteur trace les limites qu’il s’assigne. Politique, il se devait de traiter politiquement de la Chine ; bien entendu dans des perspectives françaises. Ni moraliste, ni sociologue, ni économiste, ni soldat, ni érudit (foin de l’érudition !) mais politique, en vérité, auquel s’imposent les arguments d’une éventuelle reconnaissance diplomatique de la Chine populaire. Que M. E. Faure en soit partisan, cela semblerait vraisemblable. Mais attention ! Ici interviennent les nuances nécessaires. M. Faure marche hardiment au-devant des critiques. Ayant souligné, à diverses reprises, l’irréalisme de la politique occidentale à l’égard de la Chine, pourquoi, objecte-t-il à lui-même, n’avoir pas pris, comme Président du conseil, l’initiative de reconnaître le gouvernement de Pékin ? Il lui est aisé de rappeler que la reconnaissance s’entoure d’un contexte international : problème de Formose, situation de l’O.N.U., etc. Une initiative isolée pouvait, il y a vingt mois, paraître moins valable qu’une avance vers un règlement d’ensemble. En 1955, il fallait s’abstenir d’une action prématurée, incomplète, que la Chine aurait sans doute accueillie en disant : « Et s’il me plaît à moi, de ne pas être reconnue ? »

Le livre, articulé en trois parties — Le voyage et les hommes — La politique intérieure — La politique économique — présente des essais de réponse à ces questions majeures : 1°) Existe-t-il un communisme russe et un communisme à la chinoise ? 2°) La politique intérieure chinoise se décompose-t-elle en des oppositions ou des antagonismes ? 3°) Dans l’évolution économique, qui comporte la réforme agraire et la prime à l’industrie lourde, une économie mixte est-elle destinée à durer ?

2. Les hommes

Des hommes il est proposé trois esquisses celles de Chou En- lai ; de Mao Tso-tong ; de M. L.W.M.

Chou En-lai, venu au communisme en France, dès les années 1920, a déclaré : « II n’était pas possible de transformer les salariés en capitalistes, mais il était possible de transformer les capitalistes en salariés. » Formule qui projette un pinceau lumineux sur l’ensemble du tableau.

De l’entrevue avec Mao, on retiendra que le Chef parle de la Chine « avec une passion contenue, une expression mélangée d’accablement et de confiance ». Deux fois, M. Faure reprendra ces termes émouvants : accablement et confiance. Le grouillement des humains, la pénurie des ressources, le retard des techniques assaillent évidemment le Président Mao. Les conditions lui interdisent de placer de niveau les coopératives françaises et les coopératives chinoises. « Les terres, chez nous, sont trop réduites, dit Mao ; le paysan ne peut pas se diviser entre une exploitation coopérative et une exploitation personnelle. »

Témoignage de la finesse de Mao, qui est de lignée paysanne, vieil étudiant, et toujours poète : son propos de politique étrangère habillé d’une de ces allégories qu’il affectionne :

Le héron et la moule

« Nous avons en Chine une histoire, celle d’un héron et d’une moule. Le héron trouve la moule sur une plage, mais la moule se referme sur le bec du héron. Alors commencent entre eux de longues controverses. Dans trois jours, dit la moule au héron, tu seras mort. Et toi aussi, dit le héron à la moule, dans trois jours tu seras morte de sécheresse. Aucun ne veut céder, et cependant un pêcheur passe et les prend tous les deux. »

M. Edgar Faure interroge tout de go : « Est-ce que c’est un pêcheur russe ou un pêcheur américain ?» La réponse attendue vient avec un sourire : « A mon avis, ce serait plutôt un pêcheur américain. »

M. L.W.M., personnage imaginaire, dont la fiction garantit la modestie et dont l’orthodoxie ne va pas jusqu’au psittacisme, représente, en style composite, l’intellectuel, l’un ou l’autre ministre qu’a tour à tour rencontrés M. Edgar Faure, le Chinois moyen, l’homme de la rue. M. L.W.M. dira notamment :

« Le communisme, si souvent qualifié d’international est d’abord, ici, un nationalisme. En Chine la « face » reflète l’extérieur et non pas l’intérieur, elle ne traduit ni ne trahit les vicissitudes de l’âme. »

M. L.W.M. , aux prises avec un Français redoutable, — car M. Faure refuse de s’en laisser accroire — rétorque : « Votre expérience démontre que l’on peut trouver en Chine, bien qu’ils soient pourchassés et en petit nombre, des mendiants et des voleurs ; que l’on peut trouver des mouches, bien qu’elles soient exterminées, et des chiens, bien qu’ils soient interdits. Mais ce que vous ne trouverez pas sur tout le territoire de la Chine, c’est un nostalgique du gouvernement de Nankin, un authentique adepte du Kouo-min tang, un admirateur sincère de Chiang Kai-shek. »

3. Démontage d’une politique intérieure

Dans la seconde partie du livre on assiste au démontage des rouages de la machine de politique intérieure ; à l’enregistrement de ses modulations.

Il est en Chine, on le sait assez, un parti — le Parti. Que penser des nombreux « petits partis » qui subsistent ou que l’on encourage ? Ces petits partis autorisent une coloration générale « démocratique » du système. Le Parti compte 12 à 14 millions de membres ; les petits partis, 100.000. Ces petits partis eux-mêmes méritent-ils d’être considérés comme non-communistes ? « Ce sont en quelque sorte, dit M. Faure, des partis communistes à recrutement social différencié. »

Dans l’histoire des huit dernières années, on n’omettra pas certaine « Commission consultative », héritage du Kouo-min tang, qui précédait l’élaboration de la constitution et la mise en place d’une Assemblée nationale. Cette Commission consultative de 1949 se survit ; elle « consulte » toujours. Il faut, en effet, que l’on puisse discuter, critiquer, un peu partout, sur de nombreux plans, sur la place publique. Sinon Mao Tso-tong craindrait qu’il ne se forme, dangereusement, des nœuds d’irritation, d’incompréhension.

Ainsi un parti de treize millions d’adhérents, une dizaine de partis minuscules, une Consultante prolongée, une Assemblée préludent au Front uni. Ce front compte quatre classes : bourgeois, capitalistes, intelligentzia, autour des communistes. Mais l’intégration de la bourgeoisie ne comporte aucune renonciation aux thèses du communisme ; car l’intégration intervient à titre transitoire. Ce n’est pas un contrat d’installation, c’est un contrat d’adaptation. Parti et petits partis, Constituante et Assemblée permettent de déceler l’opposition — l’opposition de Sa Majesté.

Tous ces instruments sont indispensables à qui doit gouverner 600 millions d’hommes ; ils servent à tâter le pouls de la patiente — la patiente, c’est la Chine. Or les courbes de températures ne sont jamais si révélatrices qu’en période de fièvre. On provoquera, en conséquence, des accès, des crises. On a connu, fin 1951, la campagne des san fan ou trois anti, dirigée contre les vices des fonctionnaires. Elle précédait, de peu celle des wou fan, les cinq anti (cinq, chiffre fatidique en Chine) contre les vices des réactionnaires et des bourgeois. Ces campagnes se développaient avant le tcheng feng, rectification du style ; avant « les cent fleurs » ; avant le déviationnisme de droite, de 1957. Campagnes où l’on aperçoit des contradictions. L’erreur serait de les croire irréductibles. Si des divisions existent — telles que s’emploie à les étaler le politburo chinois — elles ne menacent le régime que dans les esprits d’Occident ! Elles ne résistent pas aux manœuvres de l’autorité.

L’analyse d’une de ces campagnes ; le dessin d’une courbe qui la définit — qui s’élève, passe au zénith avant de retomber — a sollicité l’attention de M. Edgar Faure. C’est de la campagne du tcheng feng qu’il s’agit. Annoncée à Moscou, le 4 avril dernier, elle n’est partie de Pékin que… le 1er mai ! Elle n’est arrivée à Paris que vers le 20 juin. Ce décalage a surpris M. Faure, à Pékin. Penché chaque matin sur la presse pékinoise, il en confrontait les éditoriaux avec des textes de journaux russes apportés ou reçus de Moscou. Et M. Faure de constater qu’à l’heure où la campagne était divulguée en Europe, elle semblait presque terminée au Pays du Milieu. Elle y faisait place à la campagne inverse, contre les déviations de droite. Des leaders non-communistes, membres du gouvernement compris, avaient été accusés d’un « gauchisme » exagéré ; ils ont professé des aveux expiatoires. Qu’à cela ne tienne ! Ces ministres démasqués ne se sont pas démis. De ces observations M. Faure sait tirer des enseignements sur l’art de gouverner : les maîtres doivent exciter les esprits, occuper le tapis.

Aucun autre visiteur de la Chine actuelle n’était parvenu à définir si lumineusement le mécanisme du régime, les raisons de ses succès ; à proposer trois clefs qui ouvrent la boîte magique. […]

>> Lire la suite de l’article sur Persée <<

The wild poliovirus has been eradicated in Africa, health officials announced on Tuesday, calling it a “momentous milestone” for the continent. 

The recent agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates has the potential to change dynamics across the Middle East, the UN’s top envoy in the region told the Security Council on Tuesday, urging Palestinian and Israeli leaders to re-engage in efforts to resolve their protracted conflict.

Lack of investigation into the killing of a journalist three years ago in South Sudan is indicative of a wider climate of hostility towards journalists in the country, an independent UN human rights expert has said. 

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Ethen Kim Lieser

Health,

The novel coronavirus might be grabbing most of the headlines these days, but people often forget that over the past hundred-plus years, there have been several other notable virus-related pandemics that were responsible for millions of lives lost.

The novel coronavirus might be grabbing most of the headlines these days, but people often forget that over the past hundred-plus years, there have been several other notable virus-related pandemics that were responsible for millions of lives lost.

Even in an average year, the seasonal flu virus can be incredibly deadly. According to a 2017 collaborative study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and global health partners, between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year.

In the United States, on average, between nine and forty-five million Americans catch the flu each year, which leads to anywhere between 12,000 to 61,000 deaths. Between October 2019 and April 2020, CDC’s data revealed that there were an estimated thirty-nine to fifty-six million influenza infections and 24,000 to 62,000 fatalities.

More than eight months into the current pandemic, roughly 810,000 deaths have been reported due to COVID-19, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University. A substantial and fast-growing figure for sure, but it pales in comparison to the total number of lives taken in other major flu outbreaks. Let’s take a closer look at five of them.

1889 “Russian Flu”

Known as the “Russian Flu,” this particular influenza outbreak is believed to have started in St. Petersburg, but it quickly made its way across Europe and rest of the world. It was also one of the first pandemics to be covered widely by newspapers via telegraph reports. At the conclusion of the outbreak, an estimated one million people had died.

1918 “Spanish Flu”

The 1918 flu outbreak is often remembered as the deadliest pandemic in recent history. Lasting from February 1918 to April 1920, the contagion infected a third of the world’s population in four successive waves and killed at least fifty million people—roughly 675,000 of them in the United States, according to the CDC. The estimated population in the United States in July 1918 was roughly 103 million—so approximately 0.65% of the entire population died from the virus.

1957 “Asian Flu”

First reported in Singapore in February 1957, the new H2N2 virus spread throughout China and other nearby countries before arriving in the United States by that summer. About 1.1 million people died worldwide, including 116,000 in the United States, according to the CDC.

1968 “Hong Kong Flu”

H3N2, the virus responsible for this outbreak, is believed to have evolved from the strain of influenza that caused the 1957 pandemic through “antigenic shift”—a process by which two or more different strains of a virus, or strains of two or more different viruses, combine to form a new subtype. According to the CDC, an estimated one million people died worldwide, with 100,000 of those deaths occuring in the United States.

2009 H1N1 Pandemic

In 2009, the H1N1 virus emerged in the United States and spread quickly around the world. Initially called the “swine flu,” this particular subtype of virus contained a brand-new combination of influenza genes that had not previously been identified. The CDC estimates that between 151,700 and 575,400 people died worldwide during the first year that this virus circulated. Surprisingly, roughly 80% of the fatalities are believed to have been individuals under the age of 65.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Health,

However, that may likely not happen even if they are comparable.

The 1918 flu outbreak is often remembered as the deadliest pandemic in recent history.

Lasting from February 1918 to April 1920, the contagion infected a third of the world’s population in four successive waves and killed at least fifty million people—roughly 675,000 of them in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Now eight months into this current pandemic, it appears that the novel coronavirus will surely head into the history books as well. Whether it will topple the 1918 pandemic in terms of lives taken remains to be seen.

From current trends, however, the infection and mortality rates are only going in one direction—and they are rising quickly.

In all, there already have been about 23.5 million global cases and about 810,000 deaths due to the coronavirus, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University. In the United States, there are 5.7 million cases and 177,000 related deaths.

According to a recent study published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, researchers were able to focus specifically on the number of excess deaths during the first two months of the coronavirus outbreak in New York City and the peak of the 1918 pandemic in the same city.

“This cohort study found that the absolute increase in deaths over baseline observed during the peak of 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic was higher than, but comparable, to that observed during the first two months of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City,” said the study, which analyzed public data from the CDC, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the U.S. Census Bureau.

The overall mortality rate with today’s coronavirus pandemic was found to be lower, the researchers noted, but that is in part due to “improvements in hygiene and modern achievements in medicine, public health and safety.” In 1918, there were no viable vaccines or antibiotics that could effectively treat secondary infections that inevitably emerged in flu-stricken patients.

Given these facts, the increase in deaths during the early coronavirus outbreak was considered “substantially greater” than during the peak of the 1918 flu pandemic, the researchers wrote.

“For anyone who doesn’t understand the magnitude of what we’re living through, this pandemic is comparable in its effect on mortality to what everyone agrees is the previous worst pandemic,” Jeremy S. Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who led the team of researchers, told The Washington Post.

Despite stricter mandates to follow public-health guidelines in many parts of the world, the coronavirus is still continuing to spread quickly and putting more lives at risk.

According to new forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, nearly 300,000 Americans could be dead from the coronavirus by December 1.

The data, however, predicts that consistent mask-wearing by 95% of the U.S. population has the potential to save 70,000 lives.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Security, Middle East

Experts warn that Iran could respond to a perceived threat with its combat-tested and highly combat-capable cruise missiles.

This past January Iran launched a number of ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq in response to the U.S. killing of Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—Quads Force commander. The strikes weren’t complete misses but were largely seen as militarily ineffective.

Multiple experts suggested Iran “missed” on purpose so as not to escalate the crisis, but by launching its missiles still, the Islamic Republic was able to save face by responding to Suleimani’s assassination in a U.S. drone strike. 

Experts also warned that next time Iran could respond with its combat-tested and highly combat-capable cruise missiles. This includes its Mobin, which was displayed at the MAKS 2019 defense trade show in Russia last summer. That cruise missile has a range of 280 miles, a speed of 560 miles per hour and can carry a warhead of up to 265 pounds, while it also has a low radar cross-section and high radar-evading capability. 

Iran has the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East—one that includes land-attack cruise missiles as well as anti-ship cruise missiles that can be launched from land, sea or air. Stopping a cruise missile isn’t impossible, but right now there are no operational weapons systems that can provide air defense against terrain-hugging cruise missiles over land.   

Exporting These Weapons 

While Iran hasn’t been able to build up a robust domestic defense industry, the Islamic Republic has looked to eventually export its indigenously-developed cruise missiles.

“Iran’s displays of advancements in arms development and production are not only a strategic exercise to attract new buyers, but also reveals the possibility of the country being a bedrock of arms imports to fill gaps in its capabilities,” Mathew George, Ph.D., aerospace & defense analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, said in an email to the National Interest. 

“Iran has developed its military capabilities domestically over the past decade or so to circumvent the arms embargo, leading to the occasional demonstration and announcement of new aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and developments in armaments,” George added. “Yet, concerns still exist around whether the specifications mentioned are definite capabilities or whether they are hyped versions of older devices, with the latest Qasem Soleimani missile looking identical to the older Shahab 3 ballistic missile.” 

Regional Stability 

Iran is going down a road other “isolated” nations have been forced to travel—developing a local way to produce weapons. This is because western sanctions and arms embargoes that have been directed against Iran have only served to create a vacuum that the country’s nascent has struggled to fill. Iran has what can be described as an enthusiastic, if not quite cutting-edge military-industrial complex. 

Now it is beginning to take the first step toward being an arms supplier—something that could be a concern to the stability in the Middle East and beyond.

“While these developments are a cause of concern for many countries in the region, an additional supplier of arms into the global market will be welcomed by many countries interested in these technologies, but without the deep pockets and rigorous prerequisites required to purchase from traditional suppliers,” explained George.  

However, those embargos and sanctions can go both ways. So not only can Iran not purchase small arms, but it could be very difficult for the Middle Eastern nation to actively try to sell its wares on the open market—at least not without any potential buyers facing their own sanctions from the UN or United States. 

“Iran will work to ensure that nothing domestic will hamper the lifting of the arms embargo,” added George.  

Arms could be a future revenue stream for the country, and potentially an important one as its oil reserves certainly won’t last forever. 

“Stakeholders will most likely allow for the embargo to be lifted and a new round of arms commerce to ensue until an event linked to spurious organizations and clear evidence of Iranian support of that event leads to another suspension of arms trade with the country.”

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. 

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

The incident remained shrouded in secrecy for decades.

Key Point: The memory of shadowy episodes like the battle of Lima 85 must be preserved.

Fifty years ago on March 12, 1968, a top-secret U.S. base on a mountain top in Laos was overrun by an elite force of Vietnamese commandos. Only six of the eighteen CIA and Air Force personnel manning the remote outpost escaped with their lives in an incident that would remain veiled in secrecy for three decades.

This was because the U.S. military was legally prohibited from operating in Laos. The southeast Asian nation had been wracked by a civil war pitting right-wing royalists against Pathet Lao communists—the latter backed by North Vietnam, which used Laotian territory to clandestinely funnel troops into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh trail. However, in 1962 Washington, Hanoi and Laotian factions all signed a peace treaty in which the foreign powers agreed to withdraw their forces from the country.

However, North Vietnam only withdrew a minority of its forces, and the United States continued transferring extensive military aid to the royalist and instead began a secret but large-scale aerial bombing campaign in the kingdom known as Operation Barrel Roll. Though warplanes based in Vietnam and Thailand flew missions into Laos, CIA-run mercenary contractors and ‘airlines’ such as Air America flew transport and observation aircraft from Laotian bases.

CIA personnel also recruited local Hmong, an ethnic minority present in several southeast Asian states, to fight a guerilla war against the Pathet Lao. It was with this purpose in mind that CIA personnel first established a base atop the steep cliff of Phou Pha Thi mountain, a sacred place in the Hmong’s animist faith which happened to be strategically located near the border with North Vietnam.

This base was one of many ‘Lima Sites’ in Laos intended to facilitate aerial supply of U.S.-allied forces. The main facility was at the peak of the 5,600-foot high mountain surrounded by steep cliffs; you can see the base’s layout in this photo. A path wound downslope to a short 700-meter long airstrip at the base of the mountain was used for resupply and staff rotations, delivered in covert weekly flights by CH-3 helicopters of the 20th U.S. Air Force helicopter squadron.

In the summer of 1966, the U.S. Air Force decided to adapt the base with a new purpose—to serve as radar-navigation system, a or TACAN, by installing a power generator and first a transponder. In the era predating GPS, TACAN sites helped warplanes find their targets, especially, while flying under low visibility conditions or at night. (The first radio navigation system, known as Knickebein, was developed by Nazi Germany, to enable more precise night bombing of England.) In 1967, this was further upgraded to a TSQ-81 antenna and remote bombing system that allowed the base to remotely control U.S. bombers.

Hanoi was only 135 miles northeast of Lima 85, so the clandestine base was able to direct very precise coordinates for U.S. aircraft bombarding the North Vietnamese capital. Because those strikes could involve anything from F-105 fighter bombers to dozens of huge B-52 bombers, this made the base a deadly force multiplier. In just six months, Lima 85 directed between 25 and 55 percent of the air strikes pounding North Vietnamese and Laotian targets.

Because Laotian Prince Souvanna refused to accept U.S. military personnel in Laos, U.S. Air Force personnel deployed to Lima 85 had to sign papers temporarily discharging them from the U.S. military before deploying to Lima, a farcical process known as ‘sheep dipping.’ These technicians were supposed to go unarmed, though they did eventually end up acquiring a handful of small arms. Instead, the base’s security was supposed to be assured by a battalion each of Hmong militia—advised by CIA agents—and Thai Border Patrol policemen deployed around the base of the mountain.

However, Lima 85 may have been concealed from the U.S. public, but it’s presence and purpose were not a secret to the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Scouts probed the base’s defenses in December 1967, and on January 12, 1968 a flight of four An-2 biplane transports attacked Lima 85 using underwing 57mm rockets, and 120mm mortar shells dropped out the side doors, killing four Hmong. An Air America UH-1 helicopter was scrambled to intercept the slow transports shot down one of the transports using AK-47 fired out the side—one of very few helicopter-on-airplane kills on record. Another An-2 crashed, either due to ground fire or a failed evasive maneuver.

The base was subsequently hit by a mortar barrage on January 30, then on February 18 Hmong militia ambushed and killed a team of NVA artillery observers near the mountain and recovered plans for a coordinated bombardment of the facility. American military leaders knew the isolated base was surrounded by stronger enemy forces and likely to come under attack, but the base’s TACAN support was considered so valuable that Amb. William Sullivan resisted evacuating the site. Unable to deploy significant defenses, the base’s technicians instead began dispatching hundreds of airstrikes against nearby communist forces to secure their position.

Elite North Vietnamese commandos from the 41st Special Forces battalion had already scaled the seemingly impassible cliffs on Phou Pha Thi’s northside without being detected on January 22 and reconnoitered the most feasible infiltration routes. Early that March, a thirty-three man platoon under the command of Lt. Truong Muoc assembled near the mountain, where they were reinforced by a nine-man sapper squad. The commandos were equipped with AK-47s, SKS carbines, explosives, hand grenades and three rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

At 6PM on March 11 an artillery bombardment gave cover for Truong’s pathfinders to clear out mines and secure the infiltration paths to Lima 85. A few hours later, regular troops of the 766th Regiment of the NVA and a Pathet Lao battalions launched an attack that pinned down the Hmong troops in the valley around the mountain. Finally around 9 PM, Truong’s men began scaling up the cliff, the operators splitting into five “cells” to launch a multiprong attack. Cells One and two would concentrate on the command post, cells three and four would seize the TACAN equipment and airstrip respectively, and the fifth cell would remain in reserve.

The base personnel reported the artillery bombardment, but Ambassador Sullivan decided not to order an evacuation unless the attack proved to be overwhelming. Only by 8 AM the following morning did he dispatch helicopters and air support to cover the personnel’s escape.

This was far too late. The Truong’s infiltrators were in position by 3 AM that morning and knocked out Hmong guard posts and the base’s TSQ-81 radar and power generator using rocket propelled grenades. When base commander Maj. Clarence Barton and several Air Force technicians rushed out to assess the situation, they were gunned down by the commandos. By 4 AM, the first three cells had captured all of their objectives. Some were captured and then flung over the cliff on Truong’s orders. Only cell 4 was forced to disengage from its objective, unable to dislodge a superior Hmong force of two infantry platoons and a mortar squad deployed around the airstrip.

Surviving U.S. personnel had fled to a ledge on the side of the cliff, where they were trapped as grenades and small arms fire rained down upon them. Firing back with their assault rifles, they attempted to call down an airstrike nearly on top of their position.

Finally at dawn, Air America helicopters covered by A-1 Skyraider attack planes swooped down upon the mountain. Hmong troops, led by two CIA agents and supported by Skyraiders, engaged in a fierce firefight as they attempted to dislodge the NVA commandos from the TACAN site. Though North Vietnamese platoon held its ground, the fracas provided a distraction for five surviving Air Force technicians and two CIA agents to be extracted.

Chief Master Sergeant Richard Etchberger, one of the airmen trapped on the cliff, refused to board a rescue chopper until he had loaded three of his injured comrades on the Huey’s rescue sling. As he was being lifted away, the Pennsylvanian was mortally wounded by a parting burst of assault rifle fire. Communist forces would retain control of Phou Pha Thai mountain and later repel a Hmong offensive to seize it back.

Muoc’s assault on Lima 85 had significantly weakened the U.S. air campaign over North Vietnam and Laos. According to Vietnamese accounts, he lost only one commando and killed at least forty-two Thai and Hmong troops as well as a dozen U.S. airmen. However, Truong would return home to a court martial rather than a hero’s welcome; his superiors were outraged that he had destroyed the valuable TACAN equipment and killed the technicians instead of capturing them.

Ironically, both Washington and Hanoi collaborated in preserving the secrecy of their war in the Laos. North Vietnam needed to maintain and secure the Ho Chi Minh trail’s route through Laos, while the U.S. military was compelled to try to stop them there. That both were violating a treaty they had signed was merely something that had to be concealed from the public.

In a tragic postscript, Etchberger would be posthumously nominated for the Medal of Honor, but would have the request denied by the Air Force due to the need to maintain the secrecy of the U.S. air war in Laos, which would actually escalate under the Nixon administration and be exposed with the release of the Pentagon Papers. The United States dropped one ton of bombs for every person living in Laos, delaying but not preventing, the eventual communist victory in 1975.

Only thirty years later did the United States officially acknowledge the battle at the clandestine site. Etchberger would finally be awarded the Medal of Honor in a ceremony on September 1, 2010. Earlier in the 2000s, Vietnamese veterans of the battle helped U.S. military personnel locate the remains of airmen that had been cast over the side of the cliff, and later those of Major Barton as well.

Preserving the memory of shadowy episodes like the battle of Lima 85 may not heal the wounds of the past, but it can help bring about an honest reckoning of the mistakes that were made and inspire reflection as to how to avoid repeating them in the future.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

This article first appeared in 2018 and is reprinted here due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Fred Lucas

Politics, Americas

Why the President is staying away from his former associate's arrest.

A month ago, President Donald Trump lashed out on Twitter about a 3-mile section of border wall built by a private company. 

On Thursday, after former campaign and White House adviser Steve Bannon was indicted for fraud for his role in the privately funded wall project, Trump offered little sympathy.

He said he thought Bannon’s project was “showboating.”

Bannon pleaded not guilty Thursday afternoon in federal court in Manhattan. 

He was arrested for allegedly ripping off donors to the “We Build the Wall” campaign in a case brought by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. 

The prosecutors charged Bannon and three others, including group founder Brian Kolfage, a triple-amputee Air Force veteran. 

Asked by reporters Thursday about news of Bannon’s indictment by the Justice Department for fraud in raising private funds to build a section of wall, Trump noted that Bannon has a lot of affiliations. 

“He worked for Goldman Sachs, he worked for a lot of companies. But he was involved likewise in our campaign, and [was] part of the administration early, early on. I haven’t been dealing with him at all,” Trump said at the White House. 

“I know nothing about the project other than I didn’t like it when I read about it. I didn’t like it. I said, ‘This is for government [to oversee]. This isn’t for private people,” Trump said, adding:

It sounded to me like showboating. I think I let my opinion be very strongly stated at the time. I didn’t like it. It was showboating and maybe looking for funds. You’ll have to see what happens. I think it’s a very sad thing for Mr. Bannon. I think it’s very surprising.

The president added: “I didn’t know he was in charge. I didn’t know any of the other people, either. It’s sad. It’s very sad.”

Building an extended border wall was a key part of Trump’s 2016 campaign for president. In early 2019, he declared a national emergency to use federal funds for the wall construction. 

Bannon, who left his executive role at Breitbart News in 2016 to help run the Trump campaign, was credited—along with veteran Republican political operative Kellyanne Conway—with helping steer Trump to victory. 

Both Bannon and Conway got White House jobs, but Trump fired Bannon after just seven months over suspicions that he was a leaker to reporters. 

After the parting, Trump would refer to Bannon as “Sloppy Steve.” 

Bannon, however, continued being a fierce defender of Trump in the media. 

The other two men indicted by the Justice Department were identified as Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea.

The ProPublica-Texas Tribune first reported in July that a 3-mile section of the group’s wall in the Rio Grande Valley had severe structural problems. 

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany issued a statement Thursday asserting that Trump had no involvement in Bannon’s project. 

“President Trump has always felt the wall must be a government project and that it is far too big and complex to be handled privately,” McEnany said in the statement, adding:

The Trump Administration has already built over 300 miles of Border Wall, thanks to the great work of our Army Corps of Engineers, and will have almost 500 miles completed by the end of the year.  Our southern border is more secure than it has ever been.

President Trump has not been involved with Steve Bannon since the campaign and the early part of the Administration, and he does not know the people involved with this project. 

This article by Fred Lucas first appeared in the Daily Signal in 2020. 

Image: Reuters

Charlie Gao

Security, Asia

Koreans hate -- and love -- their Russian tanks.

Key Point: The T-80U is still a relic, but one that has served admirably.

One of the great ironies of the military balance in the Koreas is the fact that South Korea operates more advanced Russian tanks than North Korea. This situation came about in the 1990s after Russia inherited a $1.5 billion debt to South Korea. A deal was made: Russia would give many items of then top-of-the-line military equipment, in exchange for South Korea canceling 50 percent of Russia’s debt. Interestingly, this included the T-80U Main Battle Tank. Nowadays, South Korea fields three “modern” main battle tanks, the T-80U and the indigenous K1 and K2. But how do Korean tankers think the T-80U stacks up against the Korean tanks, which were designed with a more Western philosophy?

In a pure technical comparison, the T-80U lags behind the K1A1 and K1A2. The T-80U has been kept in a relatively stock configuration, while the K1A1 and K2 have been receiving upgrades from the Korean defense industry. While the T-80U has a Day/Night panoramic commander’s sight in the PNK-4S, the K1A1 and K2 both have thermal commander sights. The Korean defense industry puts out the modern M279 APFSDS round for the 120-millimeter cannons of the K1A1 and the K2, but the T-80U is still using imported Russian ammunition. The K2 also has many features that the T-80U doesn’t have, being one of the newest MBTs in the world.

The reliability of the T-80U also doesn’t gain it favors in South Korean service. Reports state that the T-80U’s reliability isn’t the best, although it is better than the BMP-3. Although some T-80U parts, such as the tracks, are produced in South Korea, the majority of parts must be ordered from abroad. The cost of ordering replacement parts from Russia has been steadily increasing over the years (with the cost of some parts doubling or tripling from 1996 to 2006), so many in the South Korean government are considering getting rid of the T-80U to cut maintenance costs.

Not all is bad, though. Koreans do report some advantages over the K1A1 and K2 domestic tanks. The T-80U’s engine has better acceleration performance and is lighter than the domestic tanks due to its turbine nature. Unfortunately, this also makes it consume more fuel. The reduced weight compared to domestic also allows it to be more nimble in the mountains of Korea.

Soldiers who crewed the T-80U generally didn’t have nice things to say about it. The more cramped internal design compared to the K1A1 and K2 could seem claustrophobic, and in gunnery, the T-80U was found to underperform the domestic tanks, both in accuracy and in reload speed.

However, one must take into account the time period in which these criticisms were made. Most soldiers who made these comments compared the T-80U to the K1A1, which only started seeing service in 2001. Compared to the original K1 tank which was Korea’s most advanced tank at the time, the T-80U possessed far more advantages, packing a 125-millimeter gun to the K1’s 105-millimeter, as well as better advanced armor technology. The T-80U was the most advanced tank on the Korean Peninsula when they first arrived. The lack of modernization due to the foreign nature of the parts for the tank and lack of will to “domesticize” a foreign design impeded the T-80U from being fully embraced by the South Korean military. As a result, nowadays Korean tankers don’t find the T-80U to be favorable, as it’s still a relic. But it is one that served admirably, and even contributed to the K2 Black Panther project when it was in its infancy.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national-security issues.

This article first appeared in 2018 and is reprinted here due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Rachel Bucchino

Politics,

If you can figure out his stance, that is. 

In the crucial, battleground state of Pennsylvania, recent polls indicate a tough road for President Donald Trump — but strong support for fracking that’ll preserve gas industry-related jobs might just grant him a shot at still winning, as Democratic nominee Joe Biden plans to cut all oil and gas drilling on federal property if elected in November.

Pennsylvania general election polls show a considerable lead for Biden, as RealClearPolitics polling data revealed that his lead over Trump hovers from 4 to 9 points for polls conducted in August. FiveThirtyEight also collected polls from the battleground state, with Biden holding a number of leads. Most recently, a poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies showed Biden with a 7-point lead over the president.

Although Biden has maintained a wide margin over Trump in Pennsylvania, both John Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, and Bill Peduto, Pittsburgh’s mayor — who are Democrats — agree that any ban on fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, could destroy all chances of winning the state’s support.

Fracking is a method of removing natural gas from the ground — a process that involves drilling that injects water, sand and chemicals into the ground, which fractures rocks and releases natural gas.

A complete ban on fracking would create a substantial job loss in the gas industry, according to a report by the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute published in December 2019. The report concluded that a ban in 2021 would produce a loss of 5.9 million jobs in nearly seven states in just four years, with about 600,000 job losses in just Pennsylvania — a key state that a candidate must win in the upcoming election.

“In Pennsylvania, you’re talking hundreds of thousands of related jobs that would be — they would be unemployed overnight,” Fetterman told The New York Times in January. “Pennsylvania is a margin play. And an outright ban on fracking isn’t a margin play.”

Peduto echoed his concerns, particularly noting that a “ban-all-fracking-right-now” position would “absolutely devastate communities throughout the Rust Belt.”

“If a candidate comes into this state and tries to sell that policy, they’re going to have a hard time winning,” Peduto said.

Biden’s stance on banning fracking, however, remains unclear.

In a Democratic primary debate from last year, Biden noted that there wouldn’t be any place for fracking in a Biden administration, but then followed up his response with “we would work it out.” Since then, then Biden’s campaign team said that he does not want to ban fracking.

In his climate proposal, Biden calls for clean energy and net-zero emissions by 2050, in addition to a ban on all new oil and gas permits on federal property. Biden reiterated this position at a CNN Town Hall in September, saying he does not back a nationwide fracking ban.

Biden’s inconsistent responses on fracking also came up during a debate in March, when former presidential rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spoke about his firm beliefs on banning all fracking if he were to become president. Biden agreed with Sanders’s stance, but then followed it up with “no more — no new fracking.”

Biden’s unclear and changing beliefs on fracking could cost him one of the most crucial states come November.

Trump, a supporter of fracking, won Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes in 2016. As a battleground state, there could be a number of reasons for the win, but it’s likely that his advocacy for fracking and preserving gas industry jobs helped him rally support from voters. During his time in office, Trump opened fields for fracking in California and promised to improve energy sector policies on oil and gas extraction, with the intention of creating new jobs for Americans.

Even though Biden towers over Trump in the polls for the state, the real results are unknown, as Biden wants to partly eliminate fracking — which could ultimately lead to him losing the state in the upcoming election.

Rachel Bucchino is a reporter at the National Interest. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report and The Hill.

Image: Reuters. 

Peter Suciu

Security, Europe

There have been more than two hundred reported successful flight sorties coordinated with NATO allies and partners since the Bomber Task Force missions began.

While the 1980s pop band The B-52s went on tour in Europe during the summer of 2019, the U.S. Air Force’s B-52 Stratofortress bombers will be rocking and rolling in theater and flight training across Europe and Africa in the coming weeks. This weekend six of the aircraft from the Fifth Bomb Wing out of Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, arrived at Royal Air Force (RAF) Fairford, England for the planned training mission.

Strategic bomber missions, which the Air Force reported have been occurring since 2018, are to provide theater familiarization for the aircrews as well for the Air Force to have an opportunity to integrate with NATO allies and regional partners. The bomber mission will further enhance readiness and provide the necessary training to allow the Air Force to respond to any potential crisis or challenge in the region.

There have been more than two hundred reported successful flight sorties coordinated with NATO allies and partners since the Bomber Task Force missions began. 

“B-52s are back at RAF Fairford, and will be operating across the theater in what will be a very active deployment. Our ability to quickly respond and assure allies and partners rests upon the fact that we are able to deploy our B-52s at a moment’s notice,” said Gen. Jeff Harrigian, U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa commander via an Air Force statement. “Their presence here helps build trust with our NATO allies and partner nations and affords us new opportunities to train together through a variety of scenarios.” 

History of the B-52 in Europe 

Even before the Berlin Airlift, British and American military planners saw the need for strategic bombardment capabilities in Western Europe and this included the forward deployment of the B-29 Superfortess bomber in bases in Europe. It was in July 1948 that British prime minister Clement Attlee approved the deployment of American bombers to bases in the UK—which marked the first time the U.S. Air Force would station combat aircraft in another sovereign nation during peacetime. 

In the late 1950s, the B-52 Stratofortress made its debut in the UK, while the first B-52s—from Loring Air Force Base, Maine—were deployed to Moron Air Base in Spain, and marked the first such use of a Spanish base. 

It was during the 1991 Gulf War campaign that B-52s forward-deployed to U.S. Air Force Bases in Europe (USAFE) conducted coalition operations in Iraq. In recent years, the venerable B-52 has been joined by the newer B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit.

Last year a bomber task force of B-52s, along with airmen and support equipment from the Second Bomb Wing, Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, were deployed to the U.S. European Command area of operations to conduct theater integration and flying training. Those bombers were also deployed to RAF Fairford. 

Despite the age of the B-52, the Cold War bomber has remained a reliable workhorse for the United States Air Force. There are currently fifty-eight B-52 bombers in active service, with another eighteen in reserve and another dozen or so in long term storage. The bombers have flown under various commands during those sixty-seven years, beginning with the Strategic Air Command (SAC), until it was disestablished at the end of the Cold War in 1992 when its aircraft were absorbed into the Air Combat Command (ACC). Since 2010, all B-52 Stratofortresses fly under the Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC). 

The B-52 could also be seen to be on a “world tour” of sorts. Over the Fourth of July weekend, the U.S. Air Force deployed a B-52H Stratofortress nuclear-capable bomber to Andersen Air Force Base in Gaum. The bomber, which is assigned to the 96th Bomb Squadron, 2nd Bomb Wing, was deployed from Barksdale Air Force Base—and had flown to Guam in a twenty-eight-hour mission and demonstrated the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s commitment to the security and stability of the region. 

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. 

Image: Reuters

Oleg Shcheka

Security, Asia

The risks are real.

Key Point: While North Korea’s nuclear weapons program gets most of the international attention, implications of Pyongyang’s pursuit of civilian nuclear energy should be a concern, too.

Chronic power shortages are one of North Korea’s major vulnerabilities. The country is extremely reliant on hydropower stations which, according to North Korean official sources, provide 56 percent of the national power-generating capacity. Hydropower output depends on precipitation and drops drastically in dry years. Developing nuclear energy has long seemed an obvious option for North Korea to bolster its energy security. Already for many decades the DPRK has been making efforts to build an atomic power industry, although the lack of funding and Pyongyang’s severely restricted access to the international market of civilian nuclear technologies have seriously hampered the its progress in this area. Still, the DPRK continues to pursue nuclear-power generation. In particular, progress is being made on the 100 megawatt-thermal Experimental Light Water Reactor (ELWR) at the North’s Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, of which construction began in 2010. There might also be other, as yet undisclosed, nuclear facilities in development and under construction designed to combine civilian (power generation) and military (plutonium production) functions.

This article originally appeared on 38 North.

Until recently Pyongyang has not treated its civilian atomic sector as a top priority, with most of the resources going into military-related nuclear programs instead. This, however, may be changing, especially with the specter of an external trade and energy blockade looming ever larger after the adoption of increasingly harsher international sanctions measures in 2017, including severe limitations on the supply of oil and petroleum products to North Korea. In order to deal with potential oil shortages, Pyongyang may be banking on coal liquefaction. The technology of turning coal into hydrocarbon liquids is not particularly sophisticated, but requires large energy inputs, which might serve as another argument in favor of the speedy deployment of civilian nuclear energy.

Part of the rationale for nuclear power plants may also be strategic—using them as a shield to deter possible attacks on the North. The United States and South Korea might have to think twice before conducting military strikes in the areas where North Korea’s active nuclear power plants would be located given how close they are to Seoul and other densely populated areas.

Pyongyang’s newfound interest in jump starting nuclear energy projects is evidenced by the shift in priorities in the specialization of North Korean science interns sent to study in Russia. Before the late 2000s, mostly physicists came to Russia, including those who demonstrated their interest in nuclear physics. However, since the early 2010s, they were increasingly replaced by specialists in the fields of heat engineering, cooling systems and other areas of energy engineering required to build and operate nuclear power reactors. It should be noted that Russia has always maintained due diligence when admitting North Korean interns to science and technical departments in order to prevent any leaks of dual-use tech. Controls have been considerably strengthened since 2016, after the adoption of UN Security Council resolutions which made studies and research in proliferation-sensitive areas off limits to the DPRK citizens.

Soviet Legacy

As is well known, North Korea’s nuclear energy program has Soviet origins. In 1956, an agreement was concluded with the Soviet Union on the DPRK’s membership in the international nuclear research center at Soviet Dubna. In 1964, a research center was established at Yongbyon, where a year later the Soviet research reactor—an IRT-2000—with a capacity of 2 megawatts was built. This is a pool-type reactor in which the active zone is submerged in an open pool filled with light or heavy water. The water serves simultaneously as a moderator, neutron reflector, coolant and biological shield. This design is easy to use, since all elements of the core and the first cooling circuit are at atmospheric pressure. It also provides easy access to the reactor parts. For a nuclear fuel, a dispersed composition is used—the uranium dioxide particles are distributed in an aluminum matrix. The reactor makes it possible to achieve a flux density in the active zone of 1013 cm-2·s-1. Those technical capabilities were the starting point for the establishment of a nuclear power industry in North Korea.

What kind of reactors can North Korea build for its nuclear power plants with the available technical and intellectual capabilities? Most probably it could build reactors similar to the Soviet RBMK-1000, a variety of light water graphite reactor—the same type as the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl. Such reactors are channel-type, heterogeneous, uranium-graphite (graphite and/or water are used as the moderators of neutrons), boiling-type on thermal neutrons, which use boiling water as a coolant in a single-circuit scheme and can produce saturated steam at a pressure of about 70 kgf/cm.² The creation of such an open-frame reactor is much easier for the DPRK compared to reactors using high-strength large-sized casings that require significant industrial production capacity. In addition, a casing puts limitations on overall dimensions. Absence of a casing allows for greater generating capacity of the power unit. Moreover, in an open-frame design, the fuel assemblies can be replaced without shutting down the reactor, which ensures an increase in the reactor power factor. However, such a simple design feature, together with the desire to crank up more power to generate electricity, inevitably leads to an increased risk of disasters associated with human errors as well as imperfect operation and protection systems. The most tragic example is the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, when the plant’s staff, running the reactor in an experimental mode, made gross errors while manipulating the graphite moderators of neutrons.

High Risks of a Reactor Accident

The concern is that the North Koreans may attempt to launch nuclear power plants with substandard and poorly tested reactors. Doing so would keep with the North Korean tradition of sacrificing safety standards to accelerate construction of high-priority industrial facilities. Soviet technical specialists who assisted the DPRK in the 1960s repeatedly noted North Koreans’ willingness to cut corners in terms of safety standards for the sake of construction speed.

Based on the political and economic realities of the DPRK, one can assume with a high degree of certainty that the North Koreans will try to wring out the maximum capacity from their nuclear reactors. However, even slight movements beyond safe operating parameters of an RBMK-type reactor can cause rapid irreversible consequences, namely destruction of the fuel assembly, deformation of the core’s graphite masonry, and injection of a significant amount of radioactive substances from the destroyed fuel assembly into the reactor space. If this happens, a brief increase in pressure may occur in a section of the gas circuit, which will result in large volumes of water flooding the reactor space. Its instantaneous evaporation will cause a sharp increase in pressure in the reactor space, which in turn will lead to extrusion of the reactor’s hydraulic locks and, as a consequence, release of the radioactive vapor-gas mixture from the reactor space into the atmosphere. In other words, rapidly increased pressure inside the construction will destroy it, and the radioactive elements in the vapor mixture will be thrown out. As a result, a huge territory could be contaminated with radioactive substances. Based on the reactor’s power generating capability, and depending on weather conditions, such as strength and direction of the wind, up to 100 million people in North and South Korea, the eastern provinces of China, in the south of Russia’s Far East and on the west coast of Japan could be exposed to mortal danger.

While North Korea’s nuclear weapons program gets most of the international attention, implications of Pyongyang’s pursuit of civilian nuclear energy should be a concern, too. Indeed, just as already happened with the DPRK’s nuclear and missile program, which—unexpectedly to many—has made great strides in a relatively short time, it may not take very long for North Korea to launch power-generating nuclear reactors whose technical parameters may be far from the best standards of safety. Any search for solutions to the Korean nuclear crisis must take this concern into account as well.Image: Reuters

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

The air war contributed significantly to the eventual defeat of the enemy.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The advocates of strategic bombing and carrying the war to the civilian population had argued that these campaigns would bring the Third Reich to its knees without the need for brutal, bloody combat on the ground. They were wrong. By May 1945, the people of Germany may have lost their enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler’s regime and its wars, but they continued to carry on. It was only after the Allied armies with their superior manpower and firepower overran the German forces that surrender came.

Behind the strategy that governed the American air war in Europe during World War II lay events and ideas that dated back to World War I and the 1920s. The first strategic bombing raid in 1915 deployed not airplanes but German Zeppelins, rigid airships that dumped ordnance on the east coast of Great Britain. Two years later Germany’s Gotha bomber, a machine capable of a round trip from Belgian bases, struck at Folkestone, a port through which British soldiers embarked for the front. This raid killed 300 people, including 115 soldiers. The bomber had proven itself as a weapon against a military target.

A few weeks later, 14 Gothas attacked London in the first fixed-wing assault upon civilians and their institutions. The dead and wounded totaled 600, and the raid wrought consternation among the public and the government. The British hastily summoned fighter units to gird the cities. To counter the defensive cordon, the Gothas flew night missions. With primitive navigational tools and no bombsights, the raiders drizzled explosives without any pretense of hitting military or industrial targets. Theoreticians of war now had a new factor to enter into equations: the terror of massive strikes upon workers producing the stuff of war.

Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, who had only earned his wings in 1916, commanded the air force for General John J. Pershing and his American Expeditionary Force in France. Mitchell met Maj. Gen. Hugh M. Trenchard, commander of the Royal Flying Corps, who quickly persuaded the American that the “airplane is an offensive and not a defensive weapon.” Mitchell grasped the possibilities of taking the war behind the lines and plotted a huge raid that would blast German military and industrial targets in the autumn of 1918. A correspondent for the Associated Press wrote, “His navy of the air is to be expanded until no part of Germany is safe from the rain of bombs…. The work of the independent force is bombing munitions works, factories, cities and other important centers behind the German lines…. Eventually Berlin will know what an air raid means, and the whole great project is a direct answer to the German air attacks on helpless and unfortified British, French and Belgian cities.”

World War I ended before Mitchell could demonstrate what his “navy of the air” might achieve, but he continued to expound his ideas. While accepting the need for control of the skies through destruction of the enemy air forces, he said, “It may be … the best strategy to damage and destroy property, and to kill and disable an enemy’s forces and resources at points far removed from the field of battle of either armies or navies.” Implicitly, Mitchell accepted war on civilians.

In 1921 and 1923, Mitchell demonstrated that bombers could sink some anchored warships. The experiments confirmed that aircraft could destroy substantial stationary targets, but admirals scoffed that vessels under way could easily avoid the attacks. The Army dismissed the show as irrelevant for its vision of warfare, which was to slug it out with hostiles while capturing territory.

While Mitchell and Trenchard promulgated their ideas of aerial offensives, a contemporary Italian, General Giulio Douhet, preached that modern war involved the entire society, including “the soldier carrying his rifle, the woman loading shells in a factory, the farmer growing his wheat, the scientists experimenting in the laboratory.” Douhet spoke not only of smashing wartime production but argued, “How could a country go on living and working, oppressed by the nightmare of imminent destruction.” He conceded that such a war without mercy eliminated considerations of morality.

Americans partially bought into the Douhet’s theories. They buried the idea of indiscriminate raids that slaughtered nonmilitary people and emphasized hitting industrial production, transportation facilities, and military centers. Promoters of strategic bombing hypothesized that by destroying the goods of war and the will of the people to resist, conflicts could be shortened and the wholesale carnage of the World War I battlefield avoided.

Mitchell’s outspoken demands for an independent air force ended his career, but acolytes like Henry “Hap” Arnold, Carl Spaatz, and Ira Eaker retained positions in the military hierarchy. They successfully promulgated the doctrine of strategic bombing, accurate targeting of enemy installations and facilities. Toward that end, in 1933 the War Department approved a prospectus for a plane capable of traveling at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour and with a range of more than 2,000 miles. The new bomber could be used to defend either coast, but if deployed overseas it would require bases in England or sites like the Philippine Islands. Boeing produced the first model of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, which roared through the sky at 232 mph during a 2,100-mile trip from Seattle to Dayton. The advocates of air power were delighted, but unfortunately the prototype crashed and burned on a test flight. Instead of ordering 65, the War Department scaled back to a mere 13.

To carry out daylight precision bombing the Army adopted a tool ordered and then discarded by the Navy as unsuitable for dive-bombers: the Norden bombsight. In the crucial seconds over an objective, a bombardier manipulated the device to guide the plane as he lined up the target and then released the explosives.

“I Can Shoot Those Things Down Very Easily.”

Douhet also taught his disciples that heavily armed bombers in mass formations could operate by day against fighter defenses. The publicity on Boeing’s creation hailed the new airplane as a “Flying Fortress,” but it was hardly as impregnable as the name indicated. The first B-17s lacked armor plate to protect the crew, carried only five machine guns, and made no provision for a tail gunner. The B-17 faithful believed that was sufficient since, in their minds, the aircraft could attain altitudes beyond reach of interceptors. In the late 1930s, a hot shot fighter pilot, Lieutenant John Alison, confounded the assurance of promoters of the early B-17 when he convincingly demonstrated he could push his fighter close enough to the weaponless rear of a Flying Fortress and shoot it down. His feat, however, did not immediately persuade the bomber command to install a tail gun. Nobody in the Air Corps was going to listen to a pursuit pilot, a second lieutenant who claimed, “I can shoot those things down very easily.”

The conviction that strategic bombers could operate unmolested by enemy aircraft influenced the development of U.S. fighters. Escorts to protect the big planes would be unnecessary, and the design for a fighter focused upon a machine that would protect the ground forces. Not until the Battle of Britain in 1940 and the appearance of the Messerschmitt Me-109 did the American experts realize that the speed and altitude of an enemy fighter challenged their assumptions about the invulnerability of the B-17. The standard American fighter, the Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk—a good gun platform, while speedy in a dive—had a limited ceiling and rate of climb. It would not be deployed in the European Theater.

Desire for an interceptor with longer range and performance higher in the sky had belatedly resulted in the twin-engine Lockheed P-38 Lightning, and aeronautical engineers returned to their drawing boards to blueprint what would become the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt and the North American P-51 Mustang. At the same time manufacturers modified the big bombers, now including the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, which had slightly more range and bomb weight capacity than the B-17, adding better means to defend themselves: up to 12 .50-caliber machine guns, a tail gunner, and armor for the crew. When the enemy changed tactics during World War II and began head-on attacks, a chin turret would be added to give greater firepower forward.

From the start of World War II, the British intended to follow Trenchard’s maxims on carrying the war to the industrial centers and the population of the foe. In May 1940, when the Royal Air Force attempted daylight strategic raids by its fleet of bombers, German ack-ack and interceptors killed more flyers than the enemy lost on the ground. B-17s purchased from the United States carried out a few daylight missions with dismal results and curdled RAF enthusiasm for the Flying Fortress. American analysts noted that the Brits insisted on operating above 30,000 feet, which overloaded the oxygen systems, froze weapons, and reduced airspeed, making the planes vulnerable to the Me-109s. The RAF B-17 missions relied on an inferior bombsight, and the maximum number of aircraft in formation was a mere four. The British, using their own bombers, switched to nighttime assaults, on industrial areas. They made no pretense of discriminating between residential neighborhoods and factories.

The British tried to convince the Air Corps that it too should operate after dark. That would have negated the entire basis for the designs of the B-17 and B-24 and wasted the hundreds of hours training of bombardiers with the Norden device. Faith in daylight precision bombing thus remained intact as the United States entered World War II. There was no disagreement with the British on the purposes and potentials of air power. Maj. Gen. Ira Eaker, who headed the American bomber command in 1942, said, “After two months spent in understanding British Bomber Command, it is still believed than the original all-out air plan for the destruction of the German war effort by air action alone was feasible and sound and more economical than any other method available.” He did agree that since the resources then available were limited, a ground effort might be required.

The Eighth Air Force opened for business in England in May 1942, but neither B-17s nor B-24s were available. Most of the handful of combat-ready heavyweights had been sent to the Philippines, where Japanese attacks destroyed many of them. As a result, when the Eighth inaugurated its campaign against the Axis powers on July 4, 1942, the mission had little resemblance to strategic bombing. The 15th Bombardment Squadron borrowed 12 A-20 twin-engine Bostons from the RAF, and only half of these were flown by U.S. crews. They struck at four airfields in Holland, flying at an extremely low level before unloading their bombs and strafing the base. They inflicted minor damage, and three were shot down.

Not until some six weeks later did the Eighth launch a true daylight strategic bombing mission. On a beautifully sunlit day, a dozen B-17s from the 97th Bomb Group headed for the Rouen (France) railroad yards. Accompanied by RAF Spitfires, they encountered light flak and no serious interference from German fighters. All returned safely, leaving behind them, said Eaker, head of the Eighth Bomber Command who flew in the lead plane, “a great pall of smoke and sand.” General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the Air Corps commander, declared, “The attack on Rouen again verifies the soundness of our policy of the precision bombing of strategic objectives rather than the mass bombing of large, city size areas.”

The Rouen raid achieved only nuisance value, and euphoria dissipated rapidly as the strategic bombing campaign intensified. Practice revealed substantial holes in theory. The Luftwaffe, manning high-performance Me-109s and Focke Wulf 190s, greeted marauders with a skill and savagery that tore huge holes in the fabric of the Eighth. Losses of from 10 to 20 percent frequently resulted from the deadly combination of flak and fighters. Air Corps analysts calculated that adequate self-defense required a minimum of 300 bombers, a figure difficult to achieve during the first 18 months of U.S. aerial combat in Europe. Nevertheless, the Americans strove to meet their responsibilities for round-the-clock assaults. The RAF, exclusively bombing at night, including an occasional thousand-plane raid, endured heavy losses of air crews to flak and night fighters. Post-mission photo analysis indicated their destruction of industrial works was far from commensurate with the casualties.

By the spring of 1943, the Allied air command realized that there were not sufficient aircraft to hammer day and night the entire war industry of occupied Europe and Germany with precision. The RAF had no accuracy with its night raids, and the scattershot approach of the Eighth Bomber Command did not cripple production. Eaker, as commander of the Eighth’s Bomber Command, proposed a “Combined Bomber Offensive,” suggesting “it was better to cause a high degree of destruction in a few really essential industries than a small degree of destruction in many industries.”

Toward this end, the U.S bomber command mounted an attack on Romania’s Ploesti oil fields and refineries using B-24s flying from fields in North Africa. To avoid detection and increase accuracy, the participants in Operation Tidal Wave flew at low level. The raiders inflicted modest harm. Ploesti had been functioning well below capacity, and it was a simple matter for production to recoup. The Tidal Wave bombers suffered horrendous losses: more than 300 killed, hundreds wounded or captured, 79 interned in Turkey. Just 33 of the 178 Liberators involved could be listed as fit for duty after the mission. No one could seriously propose any further low-level daylight attacks for the heavyweights.

Because of the Luftwaffe’s success and with an eye to controlling the air when the time arrived for an invasion of Europe, in June 1943 the Allied high command created Operation Pointblank, announcing, “It has become essential to check the growth and to reduce the strength of the day and night fighter forces which the enemy can concentrate against us … first priority in the operation of British and American bombers … shall be accorded to the attack on German fighter forces and the industry upon which they depend.” German airbases and factories producing planes and essentials like ball bearings drew priority.

General LeMay Calculated That Flak Gunners Needed to Fire 372 Rounds to Guarantee a Hit on a B-17

The enemy met Pointblank with ferocity. In August 1943 a maximum effort that put up 300 bombers to strike Schweinfurt and Regensburg cost the Americans 60 planes—600 crewmen—shot down with many additional aircraft badly damaged. A basic problem lay in vulnerability to interceptors. Spitfires, with a range limited to 100 miles beyond the British coast, could not provide protection on longer missions. Bereft of escorts, the 10 or 12 .50-caliber machine guns of the B-17s and B-24s were not enough to fend off the swarms of Me-109s and FW-190s. Another weakness centered on use of the Norden bombsight, which required a clear view of the target and a steady hand. In the cloudless, peaceful skies over Texas, it might have been possible for a skilled operator in the boast of the times to put a bomb in a pickle barrel. But frequently over Europe heavy rain or snow, thick overcasts, and buffeting winds obscured or misled bombardiers. Even when the target was clearly visible, torrents of antiaircraft shells intimidated the men at the toggle switches and those in the cockpits. Bombs fell away prematurely, or the plane suddenly veered off because the pilot seized the controls and yanked the ship out of imminent danger.

General Curtis LeMay, commander of the 305th Bomb Group, after analyzing the photo reconnaissance intelligence, decided a prime culprit for poor accuracy was failure to maintain a steady course. He decreed that none of his pilots could take evasive action over a target. He had calculated that flak gunners needed to fire 372 rounds to guarantee a hit on a B-17 in level flight. Whether his arithmetic was correct or not, LeMay sought to persuade his subordinates by announcing he would fly the lead aircraft on missions. In fact, the first ship over a target had a better chance for survival because antiaircraft personnel adjusted for range and speed as a flight passed. Disciplined behavior, however, added effectiveness, although no one could compensate for weather that obscured a target.

LeMay also innovated a better defense for the big bombers. He insisted upon a tight, stepped-box formation that enabled gunners to provide mutual assistance. A bomb group could bring to bear from 200 to 600 machine guns on an attacker. His demands for more training by navigators and bombardiers and closed-in formations earned him his nickname of “Iron Ass,” but the 305th proved his point with more effective results and fewer losses.

In contrast to LeMay’s carefully worked out stepped-box formations, inexperienced Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, newly installed as an air division commander, ordered the 95th Bomb Group to use a flattened formation, with aircraft wingtip to wingtip. Over Kiel, the Luftwaffe feasted upon the 95th, shooting down eight, including the bomber carrying Forrest. The disaster proved the efficacy of LeMay’s design.

Pointblank failed to halt aircraft manufacture because the enemy had decentralized its critical industries. In particular, the Third Reich had arranged to import vital ball bearings from neutral Sweden. To inflict lasting damage required repeated raids on factories, and in 1943 the Air Corps lacked enough planes and crews. It was also during Pointblank that the initial desire to minimize civilian casualties by concentrating on military installations, manufacturing plants, and transportation hubs began to give way. Bomber command directed the crews on a mission against the rail junction at Munster to unload on the city center, hitting the town’s workers. According to one historian, the attack upon civilians “did not produce any moral qualms among the airmen; some cheered … their own sufferings had bred bitterness.”

Throughout the last months of 1943, the U.S. bomber campaign staggered from the continued onslaughts of German fighters and the increasingly effective flak aided by improved German radar systems. Losses continued to soar above a prohibitive 10 percent. P-38 Lightnings and P-47 Thunderbolts with American pilots had replaced the Spitfires, but without drop tanks they could only venture as far as the Rhine River, leaving the big fellows exposed to the depredations of interceptors. At the beginning of 1944, newly arrived P-51 Mustangs equipped with Rolls Royce engines debuted and quickly won recognition as the best fighter in the theater.

The tide turned with Big Week, starting February 20, 1944. The occasion introduced new features to the American effort. Lt. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle had replaced Eaker at the helm of the Eighth Air Force. Doolittle modified his predecessor’s policy that no fighters, the Little Friends, could ever leave the bombers to chase the enemy. Doolittle ordered the P-38s, P- 47s, and P-51s to attack the Luftwaffe on sight, provided they left some guardians to screen the Big Friends. The open season on German fighters was a product of an abundance of fighter squadrons and the development of fuel drop tanks that gave the Lightnings, Thunderbolts, and Mustangs hundreds of additional miles of flight distance. The Germans, in spite of the raids upon their industrial areas, were able to replace downed aircraft, but the predatory tactics of the Americans slashed the number of skilled, experienced pilots dueling with the Allied air arm. As the war progressed into 1944, the reservoir of capable German airmen suffered severe attrition.

For the first day of Big Week, the Eighth Air Force, working with British Bomber Command and the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force operating from Italy, dispatched 880 Fortresses and Liberators along with 835 fighters deep inside Germany. The Eighth alone claimed 115 enemy fighters shot down. That may have been an exaggeration, but the ability to launch similar massive raids six times within seven days surely knocked the Luftwaffe back on its heels. The incessant battering of German cities and their people forced the Third Reich to withdraw some fighter squadrons from the Eastern Front and bring others back from France and the Low Countries to protect the home front. Similarly, antiaircraft batteries were redeployed from both fronts.

With Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, now planned for June, Allied strategy switched from attacks deep inside Germany and began to work over the defensive infrastructure along the French coast: rail lines, roads, bridges, tunnels, viaducts, and the communications network. While the bombers struck at German airfields and marshalling yards, the P-47, equipped with bombs, proved to be a great train buster and general interdiction tool. Gradually, many of the Thunderbolt squadrons transferred to the Ninth Air Force, which was more of a tactical support weapon, while the Eighth added P-51s to its rosters.

On D-day, a thick, nearly impenetrable overcast of more than 10,000 Allied bombers and fighters hovered over the English Channel and the Normandy shoreline. The pre-D-day campaign had produced sensational results. At most two or three German planes dared to appear as the invaders struggled ashore. The Luftwaffe preferred to husband its assets rather than risk confrontation with the canopy of American bombers and fighters, along with numerous planes from the RAF.

Fighter pilot Martin Low, in a P-38, said, “From June 6th until about 10 days later, we flew three missions a day, bombed and strafed anything that moved within 50 to a hundred miles of the coast, mostly trains.” The air attacks sharply curtailed movement of German reinforcements to help defend the beaches. Patrols like that mentioned by Low menaced daylight convoys or trains. One serious failure of the Allied air effort was the inability to destroy the blockhouses and emplacements that guarded the shores. Fearful of dropping bombs on friendly forces, the landing area missions were confined to drops a few miles beyond the beaches, and most of the bombs exploded harmlessly in empty fields.

Lt. Gen. Fritz Bayerlein Reported That 70% of His Soldiers Were “Either Dead, Wounded, Crazed or Dazed.”

Six weeks later, as the U.S. Third Army prepared to break out of Normandy toward the end of July 1944, it was exposed to the perils of high-altitude bombing aimed at tactical situations. Poor visibility prevented two-thirds of the scheduled 900 bombers to even reach the target near St. Lo, but 343 B-17s and B-24s unloaded on a poorly defined zone outlined by ground forces commander General Omar Bradley. Many of the bombs fell in no-man’s land between the opposing armies, but some exploded among GIs, killing 25 and wounding more than 60. A subsequent 1,500-plane attack that included fighter-bombers from the Ninth Air Force and the dreadnoughts of the Eighth devastated the Germans. Lt. Gen. Fritz Bayerlein of the Panzer Lehr Division said, “Artillery positions were wiped out, tanks overturned and buried, infantry positions flattened and all roads and tracks destroyed… The shock effect on the troops was indescribable. Some of my men went mad and rushed around in the open until they were cut down by splinters.” He reported 70 percent of his soldiers “either dead, wounded, crazed or dazed.” The aerial assault opened the gates for the St. Lo breakout.

Campaigns like Overlord and the St. Lo mission mandated detours from the strategic bombing program. Similarly, when the first V-1 pilotless bombs struck London in June 1944, the British demanded immediate attacks to neutralize the launch installations near the French coast. Starting June 16, bombers with fighter escorts in what were called Noball raids hit several of the V-1 emplacements. By September, the advances into Normandy by the invaders eliminated the V-1 bases, but the more deadly V-2, a rocket-propelled explosive with a primitive guidance system fired from territory still held by the Third Reich, killed more than 9,000 Londoners. The Allies attempted to erase the source of the rockets with assaults on Peenemunde, where German rocket engineers using slave labor developed and then deployed the V-2.

During the run-up to D-day, there had been one exception to the concentration on the defenses against the Allied invasion. After much debate about priorities for bombing campaigns, the British and Americans agreed to target oil, which was critical to the enemy war effort. Although the initial strike at Ploesti cost the Air Corps dearly, Allied planes pounded the Romanian fields and refineries regularly, reducing the flow to Germany. After the Soviet Red Army invaded Romania, driving the country to change sides and shut off the spigot, the Third Reich relied on its reserves and production of synthetics.

Starting in May 1944, the Americans struck at depots and manufacturing sites for ersatz oil 127 times, while the RAF mounted 53 raids. Acutely aware of the threat to their lifeline, the Germans massed antiaircraft around the synthetic fuel installations. Tail gunner Eddie Picardo recalled one mission: “The flak was so thick it blotted out the sun. For a full 10 seconds it was like a total eclipse.” The ship next to his disappeared in a bright flash of fire. His plane returned home with basketball-sized holes in the fuselage.

On a single day in October 1944, during the missions to Politz, Ruhland, Bohlen, and Rothensee, the Eighth Air Force counted 40 planes shot down, only 3 percent of the more than 1,400 on the raid, but still more than 358 air crew missing in action. Furthermore, 700 bombers reported damage. However, the campaign against synthetic petroleum paid off. The amount available to the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe fell to half the total needed. The Me-262 jet fighters were towed to runways by cows, recruits received ever fewer hours of flight instruction, and artillery literally depended on horsepower to move.

As the strategic bombing campaign resumed in earnest after D-day, the Allied air forces attempted to extend their reach farther east. Diplomatic negotiations resulted in an agreement that U.S. bombers flying out of England could blast the most distant targets of the Third Reich and then continue several hundred miles to land at Soviet airbases. Refueled and rearmed, they could hit enemy installations on the way back to their home fields. The Soviets welcomed planes and crews. Unfortunately, their hospitality did not include the right for P-51s to fly protective patrols while the hosts threw a lavish banquet for their guests. A German reconnaissance plane discovered the sleek bombers sitting on the ground. A subsequent raid wrecked nearly 70 aircraft. The shuttle program fizzled out after a few more operations.

“If You Saw London Like I Saw It, You Wouldn’t Have Any Remorse. I Don’t Know Anyone Who Was Remorseful.”

With streams of bombers blasting targets even as far as Poland, there was talk of using the aircraft to halt the genocidal program at the Auschwitz concentration camp, either by targeting the buildings there or the rail lines that hauled the condemned to the gas chambers. The U.S. War Department opposed any diversion for that purpose as weakening “decisive operations elsewhere.” It was suggested that surely a handful of aircraft could have been spared from the thousand plane raids, but a detour that split off a few bombers would have denied them the protection of the massive formations. Furthermore, high-altitude strikes often missed small objectives like a rail line or bridge and the enemy could repair smashed tracks rather quickly. In any event, there was little political or military desire to attack the murder camps.

While the British openly wreaked havoc on civilians, the United States claimed it restricted its bombing to war facilities. That may have been a guiding principle, but invariably American bombers killed or maimed noncombatants. In the turbulence of flak and enemy fighters, with targets obscured by weather, and due to navigation errors, ordnance frequently exploded well off the mark. A miss by only 500 yards could plant a bomb in a residential area, and there were instances in which the drop struck miles from the objective. Toward the end of the war, the U.S. air command accepted the RAF policy and struck Berlin and Dresden without any firm strategic goal.

Few airmen cringed at the indiscriminate use of air power. Dave Nagel, an engineer and gunner with the 305th Bomb Group, said, “If you saw London like I saw it, you wouldn’t have any remorse. I don’t know anyone who was remorseful. We didn’t know whether an area was populated or not. We were supposed to be over a target, normally a factory, when we let the bombs go, but we assumed it was surrounded by civilians.”

Curtis LeMay, who departed Europe to direct the devastation from the air upon Japan, said, “As to worrying about the morality of what we were doing, nuts! I was a soldier, soldiers fight. If we made it through the day without exterminating too many of our own people, we thought we’d had a pretty good day.”

The advocates of strategic bombing and carrying the war to the civilian population had argued that these campaigns would bring the Third Reich to its knees without the need for brutal, bloody combat on the ground. They were wrong. By May 1945, the people of Germany may have lost their enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler’s regime and its wars, but they continued to carry on. It was only after the Allied armies with their superior manpower and firepower overran the German forces that surrender came.

A post-V-E Day survey estimated that Germany lost less than 4 percent of its productive capacity, and even a devastated city like Hamburg recuperated to 80 percent of its output within a few weeks. That said, the air war contributed significantly to the eventual defeat of the enemy. Foremost, the raids on fuel depots and synthetic plants curtailed the Luftwaffe’s ability to train pilots and deploy their new jet fighters in sufficient numbers. The Allied ground forces operated without interference from the air. The attacks on fuel sources destroyed the vaunted mobility of German armor, and the battering of rail and road nets strangled supply lines.To be sure, the successes of the Soviet forces on the Eastern Front played a major role in weakening the ability to resist, but at the same time, the armies on the Western Front could not have advanced as swiftly without the strategic bombing campaigns.

Acclaimed author Gerald Astor has written numerous books on the topic of World War II, including Voices of D-Day and The Mighty Eighth. He resides in Scarsdale, New York.

This article originally appeared on Warfare History Network. This article appeared in 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kyle Mizokami

Security,

Meet the Barrett M82.

Key Point: The utility of the Barrett M82 sniper rifle has been repeatedly proven over numerous conflicts.

One weapon system not only revolutionized the field of military sniping but also created an entire new category of weapon systems. Using an existing large caliber bullet and adapting it to the precision rifle platform, the innovative Barrett M82 sniper rifle practically created the category of large caliber rifles that equip military snipers worldwide to this day.

In 1982, Ronnie Barrett was a professional photographer taking photos of a military patrol boat on Tennessee’s Stones River. The patrol boat was armed with two M2 .50 caliber heavy machine gun mounts. Barrett was intrigued by the guns and wondered if a rifle could be designed to fire the .50 BMG bullet.

With no firearms design experience or training, Barrett hand drew a design for a .50 caliber rifle. Barrett drew the rifle in three dimensions, to show how it should function, and then took his design to local machinists. Nobody was interested in helping him, believing that if a .50 caliber rifle was useful someone would have developed one by then. Barrett finally found one sympathetic machinist, Bob Mitchell, and the two set to work. Less than four months later, they had a prototype rifle.

Barrett’s first rifle, the Barrett .50 BMG, was completed in 1982. The Barrett .50 BMG was a shoulder fired, semi-automatic rifle designed around the .50 BMG cartridge. Unique among firearms, Barrett rifle’s barrel recoiled backward after firing. A rotating-lock breech block equipped with an accelerator arm used part of the recoil energy to push back the block on firing. This cycled the action, cocked the firing pin, and loaded a new round from a ten-round steel magazine.

The result was a weapon that should generate sufficient recoil to make repeated firings uncomfortable, but the use of recoil energy to cycle the action and the weapon’s weight reduced felt recoil. A double baffle muzzle brake that vented exhaust gasses to the left and right was added later and further reduced recoil.

Barrett built thirty initial production rifles and placed an ad in The Shotgun News. The initial order quickly sold out and Barrett increased production. The Central Intelligence Agency saw the ad and placed an order for rifles to equip the Mujahideen guerrillas that were fighting Soviet Army occupiers in Afghanistan. The CIA saw the Barrett rifle as the ideal weapon for engaging the Soviets from long range. The Barrett’s ability to destroy enemy war material such as communications equipment, vehicles, weapons and other items with the heavy .50 BMG round created a new category of weapon—the antimaterial rifle.

The Barrett M82 was fifty-seven inches long, had a twenty-nine-inch barrel, and weighed 28.44 pounds. The M82 delivered previously unheard levels of energy and distance in a sniper rifle. The M33 .50 BMG bullet weighed 661 grains, or 1.5 ounces, compared to the fifty-five grains of 5.56mm ammunition used in M16 type rifles. The M33 round had a velocity of 2,750 feet per second at the muzzle and delivered an amazing 11,169 foot pounds of energy, compared to just 1,330 foot pounds for the 5.56 round. The Barrett round was so powerful it still retained 1,300 foot pounds of energy after traveling 2,000 yards downrange. At a distance of 1.4 miles the M33 round still packs 1,000 foot pounds of energy—more than three times the power of a 9mm pistol bullet.

The Barrett M82A1/M33 combination could also hit at very long ranges. While the M16 series of rifles had a maximum effective range of approximately 600 yards, the Barrett can reach out to 1,500 yards or more, and the company warns new owners that stray bullets can travel up to five miles. Properly trained shooters can push the round out to 2,000 yards or more but must contend with a considerable amount of bullet drop due to the effect of gravity on a slowing bullet.

In 1989, the Swedish Army placed the first military order for the Barrett Model M82A1, ordering 100 rifles. In 1990, the U.S. Marine Corps placed an order for 125 M82A1s and the rifles participated in Operation Desert Storm, the campaign to liberate Kuwait. The Marines bought 400 more rifles in the 1990s, and the U.S. Army finally came onboard and purchased the rifle as the M107 in 2002. The utility of the heavy caliber sniper rifle, which as Ronnie Barrett once pointed out can disable a multi-million dollar jet on the ground with a two dollar bullet, has been repeatedly proven over numerous conflicts, including the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and against the Islamic State.

Today the Barrett M82A1 is used by more than sixty countries, mostly NATO countries and U.S. allies in Asia and the Middle East. All the major military powers field their own 12.7mm/.50 caliber-class sniper rifles, with Russia’s OSV-96 rifle serving with the Russian Ground Forces and China’s Zijiang M99 serving with the People’s Liberation Army. The Barrett M82A1, the rifle nobody wanted to build, ended up starting a revolution.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009 he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami.

This article first appeared in 2018 and is reprinted here due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Caleb Larson

Security, Americas

A new paper by three officers suggest that low-profile, semi-submersible vessels like those that traffic illicit drugs into the United States could provide an inexpensive, low risk solution to keeping groups of Marines fed and supplied during a war in the Western Pacific.

The Marine Corps is changing. In a future high-end fight in the Pacific, teams of Marines could be flung far and wide throughout the Pacific operating relatively autonomously. These groups of Marines, stationed on islands or small boats hundreds or even thousands of miles away from Navy ships and deep in enemy territory would have to battle not only the enemy, but also the tyranny of distance and keep themselves supplied. But how?

One unlikely source of inspiration: narcotrafficers.

Homemade Submarines

This was the advice of three officers in a piece recently published in the foreign policy and commentary website War on the Rocks. In the piece, the three officers argue that in order to keep groups of scattered Marines supplied with food, fuel, and ammunition, the Corp needs to ditch ships and aircraft and try to “mimic drug traffickers.”

Specifically, the Marine Corps could do well to study the narco-submarine. “Manned, semi-submersible, low-profile vessels, also known as narco-submarines, have profitably solved covert logistics across the maritime tyranny of distance. These air-breathing vessels evade detection by staying almost entirely underwater, trading speed for semi-submerged invisibility.”

They argue that a vessel optimized for long-range transport of illicit substances could easily be adapted into an unmanned system for transporting tons of critical supplies for the Marine Corps.

The authors also suggested that the Navy’s current fleet of shipping vessels are dangerously exposed when close to shore, especially in hotly contested environments. They are “too few, too visible, and therefore too vulnerable.”

The authors cite the Drug Enforcement Administration, which says that about a third of the U.S.-bound cocaine travels on semi-submersibles designed and built in remote jungle locations. The homemade vessels are quite adept at staying hidden too.

“Drug traffickers have evolved low-profile vessels to be incredibly difficult to detect without specialized equipment. A surface vessel has about a 5 percent chance of detecting a low-profile vessel at sea without an embarked helicopter or support from shore-based aviation. Consequently, very few interdictions come from stumbling across a low-profile vessel on patrol. Only 10 to 15 percent of low-profile vessels are intercepted at all, meaning that known trafficking activity represents just the tip of the iceberg.”

The authors envision something that combines both the semi-submersible narcosubmarine’s wave-piercing bow with a Higgins Boat-style offloading ramp for quick and easy cargo unloading into one low cost, nearly-expendable platform.

Postscript

Admittedly, a narcosubmarine-like low-profile vessel would not fulfill all of the Marine Corps’ logistical needs in the Western Pacific and are limited by their modest payload when compared to other naval supply ships. Still, they would be a cheap, low-risk solution that could easily be put into mass production and would be the “very epitome of the Marine Corps commandant’s “low signature, affordable, and risk-worthy platforms.”

Caleb Larson is a defense writer with the National Interest. He holds a Master of Public Policy and covers U.S. and Russian security, European defense issues, and German politics and culture.

Image: Reuters