Monthly Archives: November 2022

Echohawk

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The 45th Infantry (“Thunderbird”) Division Museum in Oklahoma recently shared a gripping series of combat drawings by Brummett Echohawk.

An unofficial war artist, Echohawk was a Pawnee, Kit-Kahaki (warrior band) and “saw the elephant” firsthand as an infantryman with the 45th’s 179th Infantry Regiment, earning the Combat Infantry Badge, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart (3), after enlisting in the Oklahoma National Guard in 1940 at age 18.

His outfit was filled with depression-era cowboys, farmers, and more than a thousand Native Americans– recently brought back into the attention of many due to the recent Liberator series on Netflix– with Echohawk and William Lasley, a Potawatomie, leading a successful charge at Anzio Beach to take the “Factory” which insured that the Allied toe-hold at Anzio Beach was secure.

A number of his drawings made it into wartime publications.

The Thunderbirds suffered 26,449 casualties in 230 days of combat across Europe, some 187.7 percent of its authorized strength.

As for Echohawk, he went on to become a well-recognized artist specializing in Western and Native themes and is well-exhibited at the Gilcrease Museum and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Center.

Trail of Tears, by Brummett Echohawk, black, and whitewash, 1957 via the Gilcrest

SGT Echohawk passed at age 83 in 2006 and is buried in Pawnee’s Highland Cemetery.

For more information, visit the Echohawk Project and pick up his books, including Drawing Fire: A Pawnee, Artist, and Thunderbird in World War II.

Mr. Stoner, at 100

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Indiana’s own Eugene Morrison Stoner cut his teeth in small arms as a Marine Corps armorer in World War II and left the world some of the most iconic black rifles in history.

Born on Nov. 22, 1922, in the small town of Gosport, just outside of Bloomington, Indiana, Stoner moved to California with his parents and graduated from high school in Long Beach. After a short term with an aircraft company in the area that later became part of Lockheed, the young man enlisted in the Marines and served in the South Pacific in the Corps’ aviation branch, fixing, and maintaining machine guns in squadrons forward deployed as far as China.

Leaving the Marines as a corporal after the war, Stoner held a variety of jobs in the aviation industry in California before arriving at ArmaLite, a tiny division of the Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corporation, where he made soon made his name in a series of ArmaLite Rifle designs, or ARs, something he would later describe as “a hobby that got out of hand.”

 

Mines: Still a Thing Even as USN’s MCM Force Fades

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Deployed to the Baltic, Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group 1 (SNMCMG1) just found a cluster of old Russian M/12 moored pendulum contact mines laid in 1917 along Parnu Bay on the Estonian coast. Latvian Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams rendered them safe. It is estimated that there are 80,000 sea mines left over from the two World Wars in the Baltic.

Currently, SNMG1 comprises flagship Royal Netherlands Navy HNLMS Tromp (F803), Royal Norwegian Navy HNoMS Maud (A530), and Royal Danish Navy HDMS Esbern Snare (F342).

Mine warfare has been a task that the U.S. Navy has been fine with increasingly outsourcing to NATO and overseas allies over the past generation, as its own capabilities in this specialty have declined.

Cold War Force fading

Probably the peak of post-Vietnam mine warfare in the Navy was reached in about 1996 when the old amphibious assault ship USS Inchon (LPH-12) was converted and reclassified as a mine countermeasures ship (MCS-12) following a 15-month conversion at Ingalls. Based at the U.S. Navy’s Mine Warfare Center of Excellence at Naval Station Ingleside, it could host a squadron of the Navy’s huge (then brand new) Sikorsky MH-53E Sea Dragon mine-sweeping helicopters.

Going small, the Navy had just commissioned 14 new 224-foot/1,300-ton Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships by 1994 and another full dozen 188-foot/880-ton Osprey-class coastal minehunter (modified Italian Lerici-class design) with fiberglass hulls by 1999.

MEDITERRANEAN SEA (1 March 1999). USS Inchon (MCS-12) underway for a scheduled five-month deployment to the Arabian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea. US Navy photo # 990301-N-0000J-001 by PH1 Sean P. Jordon.

Ingleside, Texas (Sept. 23, 2005) A cluster of Avenger and Osprey class mine warfare ships at NS Ingleside. The base’s first homeported warship was the new Avenger-class sweeper USS Scout (MCM-8) in 1992. U.S. Navy photo 050923-N-4913K-006 by Fifi Kieschnick

This force, of an MCS mine-sweeping flattop/flagship, 26 new MCM/MHCs, and 30 giant MH-53E Sea Dragons– the only aircraft in the world rated to tow the Mk105 magnetic minesweeping sled, the AQS-24A side-scan sonar and the Mk103 mechanical minesweeping system on four-hour missions– in three Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadrons (HM)s, was only to last for a couple of years.

As part of the slash in minesweeper money during the Global War on Terror, the increasingly NRF mission dwindled in assets with Inchon decommissioned in June 2002 following an engineering plant fire.

In 2006, USS Osprey (MHC-51), just 13 years old, was the first of her class decommissioned with all of her still very capable sisters gone by 2007.

Naval Station Ingleside, hit by BRAC in 2005, transferred all its hulls to other stations and closed its doors in 2010, its property was turned over to the Port of Corpus Christi.

The first Avenger-class sweeper, USS Guardian (MCM-5), was decommissioned in 2013 and so far she has been joined in mothballs by USS Avenger, Defender, and Ardent, with the eight remaining members of her class scheduled for deactivation by 2027, meaning that within five years, the Navy will have no dedicated mine warfare vessels for the first time since the Great War.

Speaking of shrinking assets, the Navy’s three Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadrons (HM 12, HM 14, and HM 15) are soon to become just two, with the disestablishment ceremony of HM 14 to be held on March 30th, 2023. HM-15 will absorb “102 full-time and 48 reserve enlisted personnel and four full-time and eight reserve officers” from her sister squadron and keep on rolling for now at least with a mission to “maintain a worldwide 72-hour Airborne Mine Countermeasures (AMCM) rapid deployment posture and a four aircraft forward-deployed AMCM and VOD capability in the Arabian Gulf,” in Manama, Bahrain in support of the U.S. 5th Fleet.

HM-12, on the other hand, serves as a fleet replacement squadron for the declining Sea Dragons in service, making HM-15 the sole deployable MH-53E squadron. After 2025, when the big Sikorsky is planned to be retired, the Sea Dragons will be gone altogether without a replacement fully fleshed out yet.

HM-14 currently has a four-aircraft forward-deployed detachment in Pohang, South Korea, in support of the U.S. 7th Fleet, and they recently had a great Multinational Mine Warfare Exercise (MN-MIWEX) with ROKN and Royal Navy assets last month, giving a nice photo opportunity.

The future

The Navy’s Mine Warfare Training Center (MWTC), located at Naval Base Point Loma, looks to have graduated about 18 Mineman “A” School classes so far this year, each with a single-digit number of students. These 150 or so Minemen will join their brethren and be eventually relegated to a few Littoral Combat Ships that plan to have a secondary mine mission with embarked UUVs and supported by MH-60S Airborne Mine Countermeasures (AMCM) helicopters that are closer to being a reality.

Let’s hope so.

The planned future is deployable Expeditionary Mine Countermeasures (ExMCM) teams, using UUVs off LCS platforms: 
 

PHILIPPINE SEA (Dec. 28, 2021) – Sailors assigned to Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Charleston (LCS 18) and Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 5, transport a simulated Mk 18 Mod 2 Kingfish unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) during a mine countermeasures exercise. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ryan M. Breeden) 211228-N-PH222-1507

SEA OF JAPAN (May 15, 2022) – A Mark 18 MOD 2 Kingfish is lowered out Independence-class littoral combat ship USS Charleston (LCS 18) during Exercise Noble Vanguard. Kingfish is an unmanned underwater vehicle with the sonar capabilities to scan the ocean floor for potential mines. (U.S. Navy photo by Ensign James French) 220515-O-NR876-104

A standard ExMCM company is comprised of a 27-person unit with four elements: the command-and-control element (C2), an unmanned systems (UMS) platoon, an EOD MCM platoon, and a post-mission analysis (PMA) cell, all working in tandem, just as they would in a mine warfare environment.
 
The mission begins with and hinges on the UMS platoon providing mine detection, classification, and identification. The platoon, composed of Sailors from mixed pay grades and ratings, is led by a senior enlisted Sailor and employs the Mk 18 UUV family of systems.
 
The UMS platoon deploys the MK 18 Mod 2 UUVs to locate potential mine shapes. Upon completion of their detection mission, the data from the vehicles is analyzed by the five-person PMA cell using sonar data and produces a mine-like contact listing to the C2 element for review.
 

Another Milestone from Ukraine

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This recently from Oryx, the folks doing the very 2022 task of verifying both Russian and Ukrainian losses via photographs with location and vehicle markings in a war now pushing through its ninth month. Some 8,000 Russian vehicles have been accounted for either destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured, including 1,500 tanks. Staggering figures that haven’t been seen since Korea (or possibly the Yom Kippur War in 1973).

Of course, the Russians claim far fewer casualties while Ukraine figures are far higher, leaving those from Oryx likely to be those closest to correct.

Speaking of the staggering losses seen by Putin’s legions, most agree that the Russians seem to have forgotten the combined arms tactics learned so hard at Kursk and along the Eastern Front, contributing greatly to the amount of shattered armor left smoking on Ukraine’s roads. 

Regent found (again)

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HM Submarine Regent (N 41) was an R (Rainbow)-class boat ordered on 28th February 1929 from Vickers-Armstrong along with her sisters Regulus and Rover. The third such RN warship to carry the name, she completed in 1930.

Assigned to the Far East, her initial three WWII war patrols in 1939 were in the Sunda and Lombok Straits. Dispatched to join the Mediterranean Fleet via Colombo and Aden in July 1940 after a refit in Hong Kong, she was soon firing torpedoes at Italian battleships.

Following her 14th war patrol (11th in the Mediterranean) in late 1941, she sailed for refit at Philadelphia Naval Yard in the States and workups out of New London before heading back to the Med and her 15th war patrol out of Gibraltar in February 1943. In all, she accounted for three Italian merchantmen destroyed.

It was on her 16th war patrol in April 1943 that she went missing under the command of LT Walter Neville Ronald Knox, DSC, RN, commanding a crew of 61.

Throughout the first two weeks of May, at least four members of her crew washed up in three different areas near Brindisi, some wearing Davis escape apparatus. She is one of more than 70 British submarines lost in the conflict. 

As a statement of how hazardous it was to be one of HM Submariners, three of the four Rainbow-class boats were lost in WWII. 

Believed found by Italian divers in 1999, it was later determined in 2020 that the wreck thought to be Regent’s was in fact the hulked Italian submarine Giovanni Bausan which had been sent to the bottom by the RAF in 1944.

Now, it seems another dive team has had better luck in identifying Regent. She rests off the coast near Villanova di Ostuni, some 19 miles from Monopoli, upside down in 70m of water. The apparent victim of a mine.

Eternal Father strong to save
Whose arm has bound the restless wave,
Who bids the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep,
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in Peril on the sea.

So, SIG let me film at the factory…

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In Guns.com’s ongoing Select Fire series, I somehow talked SIG Sauer into letting us into its expansive and modern facility in Newington, New Hampshire.

While SIG Sauer had its origin in a 1976 team-up of Swiss-based SIG with West Germany’s J.P. Sauer & Sohn (which itself dates to 1751), by 1985 a U.S. spinoff, SIGARMS, was up and running in Tysons Corner, Virginia. After moving to New Hampshire in 1990, the latter company started domestic production here in America– turning blocks of steel and aluminum into firearms.

And they haven’t looked back, now making over 1 million guns per year in the “Live Free or Die” State.

Check out the video if you have 10 minutes to kill.

Freshman at 80

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Remembering Operation Freshman in Norway on 19 November 1942, the first glider mission by British airborne forces– and the first for any Allied force as a matter of fact.

A group of engineers set out by glider to link up with Norwegian resistance fighters to destroy a German research establishment working to develop an atomic bomb. All of the troops were killed, either when their gliders crash-landed in bad weather or were captured and executed.

While a failure, the mission showed the reach, flexibility, and audacity of airborne forces

Read more, here.

Tesla’s Fever Dream: Killer Kayaks

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From the spark that was Nikolai Tesla wowing the crowds of New York’s Madison Square Garden with his four-foot long, steel-hulled, radio-controlled boat (patented in 1898) and his follow-on “dirigible wireless torpedo,” we are now going on 125 years of unmanned surface and subsurface vehicles, with an easy bent towards using them in warfare.

With stops at the German Fernlenkboot (FL) of the Great War and the Italian Motoscafo da Turismo (MTS) unmanned explosive motorboats of WWII, today’s maritime lingering/loitering USV munition has been well proven in the Black Sea.

Following up on the dramatic attack late last month on the Russian 4,000-ton Admiral Grigorovich-class frigate Admiral Makarov and smaller Natya-class minesweeper Ivan Golubets by Ukrainian USVs more information on these “killer kayaks” have surfaced including an excellent photo essay that has popped up on Reddit of no less than a half-dozen of these little black boats under construction and testing, including design details and the mix of commercial-off-the-shelf components and local supplies (Rotax 3-cylinder engines from a Canadian Sea Doo jet ski– which only run about $2-3K each— a Starlink receiver, old Warsaw Pact-era contact exploders, et. al).

Like Tesla’s boat, they are low-lying and relatively deep of hull for stability

Note they appear to be arranged on portable launching cradles that can be reused.

H.I. Sutton over at Covert Shores, who has been covering these boats since the beginning, has compiled this rough specs list for these crafts which reportedly cost a bargain of just $250K each (as opposed to an MK-48 Mod6 torpedo which runs $10m in its current format):

Length: 5.5 meters
Full weight: up to 1,000 kg
Operational radius: up to 400 km
Range: up to 430 NM (800 km)
Autonomy: up to 60 hours
Combat load: up to 200 kg
Max speed: 43 knots (80 km/h)
Navigation methods: automatic GNSS, inertial, visual
Video transmission: up to 3 HD video streams
Crypto protection: 256-bit encryption

Odds are, Tesla can feel the connection.

Whistling up an Essex class carrier and matching Corsairs

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Ensign Jesse L. Brown, USN. In the cockpit of an F4U-4 Corsair fighter, circa 1950. He was the first African-American to be trained by the Navy as a Naval Aviator, and as such, he became the first African-American Naval Aviator to see combat. Brown flew with Fighter Squadron 32 (VF-32) from USS Leyte (CV-32). Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. USN 1146845.

This week is the opening of the J. D. Dillard/Erik Messerschmidt Sony Pictures war biopic Devotion, focusing on the too-short life of Ens. Jesse Leroy Brown and his “Fighting Swordsmen” wingman, Lt. (j.g) Thomas J. Hudner Jr., who flew side-by-side at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War.

The obligatory trailer:

And, from the Navy, Dillard and Glen Powell (who portrays Hudner) talk about the importance of maintaining historical accuracy while filming, which pulled in vintage Corsairs and F8F Bearcats from around the globe and the construction of a 1:1 scale CV-32 deck/island in a field in Statesboro, Georgia.

Nice they aren’t totally CGI!

As Brown was a Hattiesburg native Mississippian, his deeds have long been remembered at the Mississippi Military History Museum at Camp Shelby and the African American Military History Museum in Hattiesburg. The latter has a life-sized Brown standing on the deck of the USS Leyte.

It is great that this story is finally getting some bigger exposure.

In a deeper dive into the story overall, USNI host Eric Mills sits down with Thomas Hudner III, son of the real-life MOH recipient depicted in Devotion.

SIG Rattler, now in 7.62x39mm for SOCOM?

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SOCOM– which earlier this year for up to $5 million worth of “Reduced Signature” PDW weapons in the form of modified commercial SIG MCX Rattlers in both 5.56 NATO and .300 Blackout– posted the notice for 7.62x39mm uppers for the platform in late October.

“Due to developing requirements,” explains the notice, the force at the tip of the spear is seeking conversion kits to include all “required hardware and ammunition magazines that will fit with the SIG Sauer Rattler and RSAR/PDW converted M4A1 lower receiver groups.”

SOCOM may be in luck as SIG recently debuted their first 7.62×39-chambered offerings in the MCX Spear-LT series. One of the options in that series is a factory SBR with an 11-inch barrel and an overall length of 29.75 inches, something that puts the company within striking distance of the RFI notice.

More in my column at Guns.com.

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