Harry Milton Beal was born Aug. 16, 1930, in Meyersdale, Pennsylvania. Not wanting any part of the coal mines, he volunteered for the Navy in 1948 as a gunner’s mate, his first duty was aboard the destroyer tender USS Shenandoah (AD-26). Sounds boring, right? So much so that Harry, after his first three-year stint was up, tried to join the circus but in the end, remained working for Uncle Sam.
Soon volunteering for more exotic duty, Harry made the ranks of the Navy’s frogmen of Underwater Demolition Team 21 in 1955 where he had a chance to “run around in swim trunks and boondockers all day.”
“President Kennedy wanted some idiots who could see lightning, hear thunder, bounce a ball off their nose and has stupid written right there and I put my hand up,” said Harry.
After retiring from the Navy in 1968 after a couple turns in Vietnam, Harry went back home to the Keystone State, where he worked for PennDOT for another 20 years.
He pushed off from the beach for the last time on 26 January, striking out for his next assignment.
“It’s so vitally important to preserve as much of history as possible so that the narrative of history doesn’t get lost or twisted in the process,” he said. “Once this stuff is gone, it’s gone.”
Bezjian was inducted into the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command 38G Monuments Officer training program.
A large boat by WWII standards, some 357-feet overall, I-58 was completed 7 September 1944. Besides her six torpedo tubes and 19 Type 95 torpedos, she could also accommodate as many as four Kaiten human-torpedoes on her deck.
Under the command of LCDR Mochitsura Hashimoto throughout her career, she took part in the unsuccessful attack on Guam in January 1945 as well as Operation Ten-Go off Okinawa, which was also unsuccessful. As a hat trick in failed missions, two of her Kaiten tried to make a run on the 6,214-ton cargo ship Wild Hunter, escorted by the Sumner-class destroyer USS Lowry (DD-770) north of Palau on 28 July, without luck.
Then, to Hashimoto’s great surprise, late on the night of 29 July he came upon the unescorted heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35). The mighty ship, identified at the time by I-58’s nav officer as an Idaho-class battleship– whose profile it did resemble– was not zigzagging and only steaming at 12 knots. What Hashimoto of course did not know was that it had just dropped off the key components of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs to the B-29 base carved out of windswept Tinian Island.
Firing all six tubes at the Indy, a lucky ship that had hosted FDR on peacetime cruises, at least two hit, and the cruiser sank just after midnight on 30 July. While I-58 would make a number of further attacks on other American vessels before the end of the conflict, Indianapolis was her only success.
Surrendered and disarmed after VJ Day, on April Fool’s Day 1946, I-58, long stripped of all usable equipment and material, was towed from Sasebo to an area off the Gotō Islands by the submarine tender USS Nereus and scuttled in 660 feet of water.
As for Hashimoto, he had already controversially testified at the December 1945 trial of Charles B. McVay III, the commanding officer of Indianapolis, saying that zigzagging would have made no difference in his attack on the cruiser– a key charge in the case against McVay.
The son of a Shinto priest, the former submarine commander and Imperial Japanese Naval Academy graduate would himself become a priest as well. Ironically, most of his family had been killed in the A-bomb drop over Hiroshima.
Warship Wednesday, Jan.27, 2021: Of Kamikazes, Space Monkeys, and Exocets
Photo by Robert Huhardeaux via Wikicommons.
Here we see the Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer USS Borie (DD-704), in all her Cold War glory, anchored off Cannes, France, circa 1963. She would have a curious and extremely active 40-year career, bookending two eras of naval warfare with some stops in between.
The Sumners, an attempt to up the firepower on the previous and highly popular Fletcher-class destroyers, mounted a half-dozen 5″/38s in a trio of dual mounts, as well as 10 21-inch torpedo tubes in a pair of five-tube turntable stations. Going past this, they were packed full of sub-busting and plane-smoking weapons as well as some decent sonar and radar sets for the era.
Sumner class layout, 1944
With 336 men crammed into a 376-foot hull, they were cramped, slower than expected (but still capable of beating 33-knots all day), and overloaded, but they are fighting ships who earned good reputations.
Speaking of reputation, the subject of our tale today was named after Adolph Edward Borie, who appreciated bespoke top hats and served for a few months as Grant’s SECNAV in 1869.
Honorable Adolph E. Borie, Secretary of the Navy, and his top hat. Matthew Brady photograph via the LOC
The first ship to carry the former SECNAV’s name was the Clemson-class four-piper tin can, Destroyer No. 215, which joined the fleet in 1920, some 40 years after Mr. Borie’s passing. Earning three battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation, on All Saints Day 1943, DD-215 rammed and sank the surfaced German submarine U-405 in the North Atlantic. With 27 men lost and too badly damaged by the collision to be towed to port, Borie was scuttled by USS Barry (DD-248) the next day.
Painting of the action between USS Borie (DD-215) and German submarine U-405 in the Atlantic, 1 November 1943. Borie rammed and sank the U-Boat but was so badly damaged that she had to be scuttled. Painting by US Coast Guard artist Hunter Wood, 1943. 80-G-43655
The second Borie, our Sumner-class destroyer, was constructed at Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co., Kearny, N.J.; and commissioned 21 September 1944.
By 24 January 1945, she had completed shakedown trials and shipped to the Pacific, announcing her arrival with the fleet in a bombardment of Iwo Jima that day while part of DESRON 62’s Destroyer Division 124, a group of brand-new Sumners that besides Borie counted USS John W. Weeks (DD-701) and USS Hank (DD-702).
Joining Task Force 58, acting as an escort for the battleships USS New Jersey and South Dakota as well as the carriers Bunker Hill and Essex, they carried out a raid on the Tokyo area in February before switching to the push on Okinawa. This included a close-in destroyer raid on Japanese airstrips on the night of 27/28 March via shore bombardment and star shell illumination.
“After three minutes of rapid salvoes, fires were observed in the vicinity of the airstrips. March proved to be a fighting moth for the Borie with almost continual picket and screening duty with the powerful “58” that was striking Japan a blow from which she would never recover,” noted her war history.
However, she was soon sidelined after smashing into Essex on 2 April while transferring pilots and mail via breeches buoy in heavy seas, demolishing her aft stack, one of her 40mm mounts, and “bending the mast at a crazy angle.”
USS Borie (DD 704) collides with USS Essex (CV 9) while transferring the mail during a storm. Damage to Borie was light and the ship was still operational on 2 April 1945. Note damage to the smokestack. 80-G-373755
Sent to Ulithi for repairs, she returned to Spruance’s merry band on 1 May. Assigned to nearly perpetual radar picket duty against kamikazes, alternating with more shore bombardment runs on Minami Daito Jima, Borie also clocked in as needed for lifeguard duty, plucking one of the battleship USS Alabama‘s Kingfisher pilots from the drink on 23 June and returning him home. She would later pick up an F6F pilot as well as two crewmen of a downed SB2C while tagging along on a carrier air strike against Kyushu.
Then came the afternoon of 9 August– notably just six days before the Japanese surrender. On that day, the four tin cans of Destroyer Division 124 were on radar picket duty just off the Japanese port of Sendai, just hours after a USAAF B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a force of five Imperial Navy Aichi B7A Grace torpedo bombers came out looking for some payback.
At 1454, somehow the first B7A Grace reached the picket group undetected and without being engaged by combat air patrol fighters. Despite the surprise, the destroyers opened fire and the Grace was hit multiple times but kept on coming. The damaged Grace flew right over Hank at low altitude as fuel pouring from perforated fuel tanks soaked the destroyer’s bridge crew in gasoline. The plane then went into a sharp bank and came in on Borie from the port quarter. The Grace released a large 1,764-pound bomb just before it crashed into Borie’s superstructure just aft of the bridge between the 5-inch gun director and the mast. This started a large fuel fire and blew many men over the side (most of whom were not recovered). Fortunately, the bomb passed clean through Borie and detonated off the starboard side, but the ship was sprayed with many bomb fragments that cut down even more men. All communications from the bridge were knocked out and control was transferred to after steering. Firefighting was complicated by 40-mm ready-use ammunition continuing to cook-off, but, finally, the fires were brought under control and, as the ship had suffered no below-the-waterline damage, she was not in danger of sinking.
Over the next hour, the other four Graces attacked the destroyers, and all were shot down without significant damage. Hank suffered one man missing and five wounded. Despite the fires and damage, Borie remained in her position in the formation and her guns continued to fire on the following Japanese aircraft. Borie’s casualties were high: 48 killed or missing and 66 wounded. Commander Adair was awarded a Silver Star for his actions in saving the ship and continuing to fight despite the severe damage.
This would also be the last battle damage suffered by the U.S. Fast Carrier Task Force.
As detailed in the destroyer’s after-action report, that afternoon alone she fired 191 5-inch, 810 40mm and 1,426 20mm shells at her attackers.
One of the first ships to respond to the stricken Borie, Alabama transferred a medical party to the destroyer in payback for her Kingfisher pilot.
Borie Kamikaze damage
Her men buried at sea were the last lost to the Divine Wind
USS Borie (DD-704) at Saipan in late August 1945, after being damaged by a kamikaze off Japan on August 9. Note wreckage at fore stack and bridge. It was after transferring her wounded to the hospital ship Rescue and while heading to Saipan for emergency repairs that her radio shack picked up the flash that Japan had surrendered. NH 74693
Heading to Hunter’s Point for more permanent repairs, by February 1946 peace had settled on the world, and Borie, made new again, was dispatched to join the Atlantic Fleet. She received three battle stars for her World War II services.
As a sobering aspect, she was luckier than several of her sisters. Between December 1944 and May 1945, USS Cooper, USS Mannert L. Abele, and USS Drexler were all sunk in the Pacific– the latter two by kamikazes.
Jane’s entry for the class in 1946.
The Cold (and sometimes hot) War
Shipping back to the Pacific in 1950, Borie earned four battle stars for her participation in the Korean conflict as part of TF 77, proving key in the Hungnam Evacuation of Chosin survivors. She also supported the Marines at Wonsan and was the only NGFS available to cover the U.S. Army landing at Iwon. Finally, Borie was near the beach for the second Inchon landing.
She was also a familiar sight in the Med, where she helped evacuate American citizens and UN truce teams from Israel and Egypt in 1956. It was then that she was the first U.S. warship through the Suez Canal after its nationalization by Nasser.
Borie, like many ships, also clocked in as a recovery vessel for NASA.
Before Alan Shepard lifted off on Freedom 7 in 1961 and became the first American astronaut in space, there were over 20 unmanned Program Mercury launches with boilerplate capsules and animals. The one most related to Borie was that of a seven-pound rhesus macaque named Sam who hailed from the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas.
Sam was locked into a restraining couch then buckled into an erector-set-like cradle in the capsule of a boilerplate Mercury vehicle dubbed Little Joe 2 (LJ-2). Lit off from Wallops Island, Virginia on 4 December 1959, Sam flew 194 statute miles, reaching a suborbital altitude of 53 miles above ground, and did so in just 11 minutes, 6 seconds, which works out to a max speed of 4,466 miles per hour, grabbing over 14 G in the process.
The same type of rocket fired the next month: LITTLE JOE IV LAUNCH, 1/21/60, FROM WALLOPS ISLAND, VIRGINIA. LAUNCH VEHICLE-LITTLE JOE SUBORBITAL MERCURY CAPSULE TEST, MONKEY “MISS SAM” USED. REF: NASA HG LITTLE JOE 1/13. (MIX FILE)
And the little guy made it, landing in 20-foot seas while Borie made for the splashdown site, arriving “several hours later.”
“The monkey was inside in a large aluminum can, which was bolted down. We took the top off, and I crooked my finger and put it down in there. He took a hold of it. So, we got some [diagonal wire cutters] to cut him out of his contour couch. I set him down and told the chief petty officer to go get some apples and oranges. The monkey was hungry. He ate up most of the oranges.”
“After his ride in the Little Joe 2 Spacecraft, Sam the Monkey is safely aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer,” NASA photo via Johnson Space Center.
Other notable recoveries that Borie was a part of was Gemini VI-A in 1965– carrying Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford– although our destroyer was in a supporting role to USS Wasp.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
FRAM!
Noting that their WWII-era destroyers were increasingly anachronistic against nuclear-powered submarines and jet aircraft, the Navy in the late 1950s/early 1960s embarked on a sweeping Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization program. As part of it, no less than 33 Sumners were given the FRAM II treatment while others received the less invasive FRAM I upgrade. Borie picked her modernization in 1961, just in time to take part in the Quarantine of Cuba during the Missile Crisis.
Gone were the myriad of anti-aircraft guns, 21-inch torpedo tubes, depth charges, and obsolete sensors. Added was an AN/SQS-29 fixed sonar dome on the bottom of the bow, an AN/SQR-10 variable depth towed sonar on the stern, Mk. 32 ASW torpedo tubes amidships, a stubby helicopter deck for QH-50 DASH drones in place of the aft torpedo tube station, lots of EQ antennas, and a big SPS-40 surface search radar.
1968 Charleston Naval Shipyard plans for USS Allen M. Sumner (DD-692), Borie’s FRAM II sister/class leader. Via DD692.com. Click to big up.
Borie post-FRAM underway at sea, June 1968. NH 107165
Borie at sea, pounding in hard, as the class was notorious for. Note the AS-1018/URC UHF antenna on the forward mount and broadband whip antenna receiver on the No. 2 mount.
USS Borie (DD-704), post FRAM
A Navy Memorial Interview with a radioman who was part of her crew at the time:
Showing up for her third war, the destroyer made for Vietnam where she worked as part of the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club, delivering over 7,000 rounds of naval gunfire support against NVA and VC targets ashore in a repeat of her 1944-45 and 1950-51 days.
By 1969, she was back home from the gunline and placed in semi-retirement as an NRF training vessel for reservists, a role she maintained until 1972, at which point the Navy had tired of the class.
Entering Argentine service as the ARA Hipolito Bouchard (DD-26) in honor of the Latin American corsair of the same name, Borie was modernized in 1978 to include a four-pack of MM38 Exocet anti-ship missiles and a French-made Aerospatiale SA-319B Allouette III in place of a Sea Sprite/OH-50.
Argentine Sumners, 1978. Note the Exocets between the stacks of the closest destroyer. Photo via Histamar
During the Falklands conflict, at one point it was thought that the Bouchard and her sisters could close within 20 miles of the British fleet and ripple off their Exocets, then beat feet. Thankfully for their crews, this crash test dummy plan was not attempted. Photo Via Histarmar
Via Histamar
She was a proud vessel and served more than a solid decade on active service with the Argentine fleet.
When the Falklands conflict erupted, Borie/Bouchard and her sister Collett/Piedra Buena were assigned escort duty for the Argentine carrier Veinticinco de Mayo during the initial invasion of Port Stanley on 2 April 1982. Soon after, the two destroyers picked up screening duty for the pride of the fleet, the Brooklyn-class light cruiser ARA General Belgrano (ex-USS Phoenix).
What the two dated destroyers didn’t know was that a very quiet British hunter-killer, the Churchill-class SSN HMS Conqueror (S48), stalked Belgrano for three days before her skipper was cleared to splash the 12,500-ton Pearl Harbor veteran. Firing a trio of appropriately WWII-era Mk 8 mod 4 torpedoes rather than the new and unproved Mk 24 Tigerfish, two hit the Argentine cruiser and sent her to the bottom, making Conqueror the sole nuclear-powered submarine to have a combat kill (so far) in history.
By many accounts, Borie/Bouchard was hit by the third British Mk 8, which luckily for her did not explode, but did cause flooding and hull fissures. Together with Collett/Piedra Buena and a passing Chilean vessel, they stood by a rescued 772 men from the Belgrano.
Her fourth war over, Borie/Bouchard was deactivated in early 1984 at Puerto Belgrano and on 15 November 1988 was authorized to be used as a naval target for airstrikes.
While repeatedly mentioned as being scrapped in 1984 by U.S. sources, several images are circulating that contend the vessel, in hulked and holed condition, was still around in the shallows near Puerto Belgrano as late as 1992 and perhaps beyond.
Either way, she may have outlived her old foe Conqueror in usefulness, as the submarine was decommissioned in 1990.
The last two Sumners in foreign service– USS Stormes (DD-780) and USS Zellars (DD-777) — were used by the Shah until 1979 and then inherited by the modern Islamic Republic of Iran Navy who retained them in a semi-active state into the mid-1990s.
Of note, the only Sumner retained in the U.S. as a museum ship, USS Laffey (DD-724) located at Patriots Point in Charleston, South Carolina, is a FRAM II vessel like Borie.
USS Laffey, DD-724 as a museum ship today
As for Sam, the intrepid space monkey that Borie fished from the Atlantic during the Eisenhower administration, according to a 2017 story by Richard A. Marini published in the San Antonio Express-News:
Sam underwent 11 years of medical scrutiny by researchers at the School of Aerospace Medicine — formerly the School of Aviation Medicine — at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. He retired to a quiet life at the San Antonio Zoo.
“Sam died Sept. 19, 1978, at 21, several years short of the expected rhesus monkey lifespan,” the Express-News reports. “Even after death, Sam served the cause. A necropsy performed at Brooks found no space-related abnormalities, only that Sam had signs of old age and arthritis.”
Specs: Displacement: 2610 tons standard displacement Length: 376’6″ Beam 40’10” Draft 14’2″ Machinery: 2-shaft G.E.C. geared turbines (60,000 shp), 4 Babcock & Wilcox boilers Maximum speed (designed) 36.5 knots, actual usually about 33. Range: 3300 nautical miles (5300 km) at 20 knots on 504 tons fuel oil Complement: 336 Sensors: SC air search radar, SG surface search radar, QGA sonar Post FRAM II: Variable Depth Sonar (VDS), SQS-20, SPS-40 Armament 3 x 2 5″/38 dual-purpose guns 2 x 4, 2×2 40mm Bofors AA guns 11 20mm Oerlikon AA guns 2 x 5 21″ torpedo tubes 6 depth charge throwers 2 depth charge tracks (56 depth charges) (1961, post-FRAM-II) 6 x 5 in/38 cal guns (127 mm) (in 3 × 2 Mk 38 DP mounts) 2 x triple Mark 32 torpedo tubes for Mark 44 torpedoes 2 x single 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes for Mark 37 torpedoes 1 x Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter (DASH) (1982) 6 x 5 in/38 cal guns (127 mm) (in 3 × 2 Mk 38 DP mounts) 2 x triple Mark 32 torpedo tubes for Mark 44 torpedoes 4 x MM38 Exocet AShMs 1 x SA-319B helicopter
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Archäologisches Landesamt Schleswig-Holstein, the archives of Germany’s most northern state, this week announced that a further six German Enigma machines have been discovered and retrieved from the shallow depths of the Geltinger Bucht/Gelting Bay, a coastal offshoot of the Baltic.
The machines, some of which seemed to have been smashed before being dumped, likely stem from the famous Regenbogen-Befehl, the “Rainbow Order” issued by Dönitz in early May 1945 to deep-six his treasured U-boat fleet.
On 4 May 1945, the crews of the doomed Geltinger Bay boats cleared their vessels and distributed provisions and materials in the villages in the area, a windfall in war-torn Germany. Like the plains Indians and the buffalo, all the parts were used. For instance, the local women sewed so-called “Dönitz dresses” from the checked sheets and blankets used on the submariners’ bunks. All but one of the 47 boats scuttled in the bay were raised by 1953 and scrapped at Flensburg. Photo: Kirchspielarchiv Steinberg via NDR.de
While numbers vary widely from scholars, partly over the question of if inoperable, damaged, or incomplete boats should be counted, the most conservative estimates are that the Kreigsmarine scuttled no less than 184 U-boats of all stripes in compliance with the order, mostly in North German ports.
This makes the recent find the largest haul of Enigmas since 28 early three-rotor commercial machines were discovered in an attic of the Spanish Army headquarters in Madrid in 2008. Those were part of a 50-unit supply passed on to Franco during the Spanish Civil War to help coordinate his Nationalist units with German and Italian legions sent in to aid him in his fight against the Soviet-backed Republicans.
RN photo of frigate HMS Active escorting Lanistes through the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, mid-1987, on the Armilla patrol
The Royal Navy’s 12th HMS Active, a Vosper-built Amazon/Type 21-class frigate (F171), was a child of the Cold War.
Launched in 1972, she fought in the Falklands during Operation Corporate a decade later as part of an epic 93-day cruise in which Active not only weathered persistent Argentine airstrikes while supporting landings by British troops of 3 Commando and 5 Guards, but also closed with land positions in East Falkland to break out her relatively short-range 4.5-inch Mark 8 gun (max range 24,000 yards with an HE shell) on five occasions, softening up the Argies at Bluff Cove, Fitzroy, Berkley Sound, Mount Tumbledown, and Port Stanley in the last ten days of the conflict.
She was sold to the Pakistan Navy in 1994 and was renamed PNS Shah Jahan (DDG-186), where she served as a destroyer for another two decades.
Active/Jahan, pushing age 50, was sent to the bottom in the Northern Arabian Sea earlier this month on 12 January after a barrage of anti-ship missiles and torpedoes from an Agosta-class submarine and a Zulfiqar-class frigate.
While in RN service, her motto was Festina lente, Hasten Slowly.
Heavy artillery ferry of the German Air Force’s Einsatzstab Fähre Ostparading at the Finnish mouth of the Aura River at Lahdenpohja, Laatokka, 13.08.1942.
Note the twin 88 mm flak guns, camo pattern, and her assembled crew. SA-Kuva
The above was a 143-ton “Siebel” pontoon ferry, named after designer Fritz Siebel. Some 23 of these shallow-draft vessels were constructed for the aborted Sea Lion invasion of England in 1940 but never used. Once Finland entered WWII on the side of Germany– against the Soviets only, not the Western Allies, an event known in Finland today the the “Continuation War” as something of the second season of the 1939-40 Winter War– the Luftwaffe moved a number of Siebels from Belgium in the summer of 1942 to Kiel by inner waterways then dismantled and transported by ship to Finland where they were put into service on Lake Ladoga, the huge inland sea just to the Northwest of Leningrad.
Other Siebel ferries served in the Black Sea against the Soviets.
German Siebel Ferry with 8.8cm 88mm Flak Gun, operating in the Black Sea out of Romania. Photographer Horst Grund
Powered by a mixture of Ford truck engines and surplus aviation motors, the Siebel flak ferries were all-Luftwaffe manned and equipped with a variety of flak guns of all sizes.
Over the weekend I got a chance to stop off at one of my favorite places, the Battleship Alabama Park at the top of Mobile Bay.
Doesn’t the old girl look great?
This brings me to a semi-related video that I recently caught.
I remember first touring Big Al when I was in elementary school in the early 1980s– at a time when Ingalls in my hometown of Pascagoula was busily reactivating mothballed Iowa-class battlewagons to be ready to take on the Soviet Red Banner Fleet as part of the Lehman 600-ship Navy of the Cold War.
One of the questions asked by a young me while touring Alabama at the time was “do the guns still work?” followed up by “could the ship be put back into service like the Iowas are?”
The tour guide at the time shook it off, saying the guns were permanently deactivated, breeches removed, welded shut in the elevated position, and filled with cement, which I accepted as I was a kid, and what adults said was the end of the story.
In later years, I found this is not entirely true, but the likelihood of the SoDaks like Alabama and the even earlier North Carolina-class fast battleships ever being reactivated after the late 1950s was slim to none– hence their disposal by the Navy.
But when mothballed they were sent to red lead row with reactivation manuals and work packages in place.
Battleship North Carolina’s reactivation manual…
…from when she was mothballed in 1947
Mothball preservation lockout tag with follow up “to put back in commission” tag, Battleship Massachusetts. The ship is filled with equipment that was sidelined when it was laid up.
When the Iowas were called back from mothballs in the early 1980s, even though three of the four had been in storage since Korea (and New Jersey since Vietnam), it was found their guns had weathered the floating reserve status very well and were restored to service with only minor hiccups.
From a 1987 report:
With that being said, check this recent video out from the USS New Jersey, which was decommissioned for the fourth time in 1991, stricken in 1999, and opened as a museum in 2001.
In the distance in the above photo are M4 Sherman medium tanks under tarps while PVT Hamilton is passing “Devil Dogs,” what looks to be an early model M24 Chaffee light tank, which may be new as the unit had used M5 Stuarts as their light track during the push across Northern Europe the year before.
They have been called “one of the most effective tank battalions in World War II.” In all, the battalion earned almost 300 Purple Hearts– impressive for a 700-man unit. This is in addition to a Medal of Honor for SSG Ruben Rivers, 11 Silver, and 69 Bronze Stars. All were garnered in their seven-month drive from Normandy to the Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria where they linked up with the Russians pushing from the East.
The 761st was deactivated on 1 June 1946 in Germany. When it was reactivated in 1955, it was fully integrated.
Offical caption via NATO last week, “Romanian Gepards of Battle Group Poland training in command and control procedures and target selection and distribution.”
Photos by Romanian Army Cpt. Liviu Burtica.
Unlike the U.S. Army– which has been trying to play SPAAG catch-up in recent years following the retirement of the 20mm VADs and many of the M3 .50cal/Stinger-equipped Avengers– the Germans have long felt a decent gun-armed anti-aircraft vehicle was a must. After all, their brass remembered getting hammered relentlessly by P-47s, Typhoons, and Sturmoviks back in WWII.
Thus, Flugabwehrkanonenpanzer Gepard (Cheetah) was first fielded by the Bundeswehr in the 1970s.
Equipped with a pair of radar-guided superfast 35mm/90cal Oerlikon GDF autocannon, each capable of 550 rounds per minute (although Gepard only carries about 700 rounds) they are spooky deadly to low-flying aircraft and helicopters not to mention any light vehicle short of a main battle tank.
While the Germans have moved on to the LeFlaSys system, which is just a Wiesel with Stingers (while keeping a number of these gun systems in reserve), they gifted the Romanians some 43 ex-Bundeswehr Gepards in recent years.
Of course, everything is going to be counter-drone in the coming years, as witnessed in the recent dust-up between Azerbaijan and Armenia, but, provided enough jamming can keep the quadcopters and other UAVs away, some good AAA never really goes out of style. Doubtless, the NATO forces in Poland are happy to have a few around in the event that things get hot suddenly and a couple of Krasnovian Hinds pop up on the horizon.
