Bored? Check out Dr. Craig Nation, from the Dept. of Nation Security and Strategy, speaking for an hour about Athenian historian and general Thucydides, chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, at Carlisle Barracks.
Good stuff. Dry as melba toast, but good stuff nonetheless, in a “We read Homer at the Point. In Greek,” kinda way.
Former Armée de l’Air Dassault Mirage F1s could be a familiar sight over U.S. skies near aggressor bases
As noted by Flight Global, Textron subsidiary Airborne Tactical Advantage Company just picked up 63 former French Air Force (Armée de l’Air) Mirage F1B, F1CT, and F1CR for dissimilar air combat training and aggressor squadron purposes for the U.S. Air Force. The deal included 150 engines and a host of other gear the French weren’t using anymore.
“Textron is planning to retrofit the F1s with modern avionics systems such as digital radio frequency memory jamming capabilities and upgraded radars,” ATAC chief executive Jeffrey Parker says. “The requirements we’re seeing the air force describe clearly include a modern radar such as AESA or a highly capable mechanically scanned array radar.”
A tip-top dual purpose strike fighter when introduced in 1973, over 720 F1s were fielded with the French using the lion share (246) and the Ecuadorian, Greek, Iraqi (the Exocet attack on the USS Stark), Libyan, Moroccan, South African, and Spanish getting smaller quantities, though almost all have retired them.
The French disbanded the last squadron flying the F1 in 2014 and today only Gabon flies a few surplus Armée de l’Air jets, and the Libyans have a handful the French are upgrading while the Iranians are thought to have about a dozen operational F1BQs and F1EQs that escaped Desert Storm by skipping over the border in 1991.
Soldiers assigned to The Caisson Platoon, 1st Battalion, 3d U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) were awarded, for the first time in military history, the Military Horseman Identification Badge, during a ceremony in Conmy Hall, Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Va., Sept. 29, 2017:
(Photo by Spc. Gabriel Silva, 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment “The Old Guard”).
Requirements for the badge include the completion of 100 Armed Forces Full Honors Funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, the 10-week Basic Horsemanship Course (BHC), serve honorable for a minimum of 9 months at The Caisson Platoon and be recommended by the Commander of 1st Battalion, 3d U.S. Infantry Regiment.
Official U.S. Marine Corps Photograph 127-GW-1627-135889, now in the collections of the National Archives.
Marine Private First Class Lisle E. Mell, Jr. inspects a recaptured Army P-51 Mustang in a hangar at the former Japanese Navy Air Base at Omura in Kyushu.
The battered plane was discovered by occupation echelons of Marine Air Group 22. Photographed at Omura, Japan, by Lieutenant Battersby, September 29, 1945.
I thought this was great.
Australia is conducting their first nationwide firearms amnesty since the great melt-down of 1996 in an effort to get an estimated 300,000+ undocumented guns either on the books or in the furnace and they have had a lot of interesting stuff show up. These included this awesomely wicked specimen turned over to blue heelers in QLD.
The thing is, the impressive hand cannon is actually a British-made Thornton-Pickard Mk III H model “camera gun” of the type used by the Royal Air Force, and to a lesser degree the U.S. Army Air Corps, during WWI and the immediate post-war period.
The only thing it shoots if film.
Thornton Pickard Mk III H (Hythe) (PHO 75) British Thornton-Pickard Mk III H camera gun of the type used by the Royal Air Force during the First World War and immediate post-war period. See also PHO 22. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30004956
More in my column at Guns.com
Here we see the oddball that was the Westland Wyvern TF Mk I, one of the few “torpedo fighters” in naval history.
BRITISH POST WAR AIRCRAFT (ATP 14814F) Westland Wyvern TF Mk I Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205125735
Designed to replace the troubled Blackburn Firebrand, which is turn was produced in the tail-end of WWII to replace downright anemic Fairey Swordfish biplanes, Fairey Barracuda and Lend Lease TBM Avenger torpedo bombers with a more Typhoon-ish strike craft, the Wyvern used huge four-bladed contra-rotating propellers driven by a 24-cylinder H-block Rolls-Royce Eagle 22 piston engine to approach a 400 kt airspeed (though later models used either RR Clyde or Armstrong Siddeley Python).
Armed with four 20mm cannons, they could carry 3,000-lbs of bombs or a Mk.15 or Mk.17 airdropped torpedo. The American rival to this was the Skyraider.
Entering service in 1946, just 127 Wyverns were produced and some even saw service in the Suez in 1956 where 830 Squadron of the Fleet Air Arm flew 79 combat sorties from the Audacious-class aircraft carrier HMS Eagle. They were withdrawn in 1958, the days of dropping torpedos against missile-armed warships by strike aircraft seen as a non-starter by that time.
However, this did not stop the Argentines from trying to fit U.S. surplus Mk 13 anti-ship torpedoes to FMA IA-58 Pucara prop COIN aircraft in the Falklands in 1982.
Argentine IA-58 Pucara attack plane with a Mk13 in 1982. Via WWII after WWII
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2017: One Able Sims
Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.80-G-1671
Here we see an excellent image of the Sims-class destroyer USS Mustin (DD-413) with a Curtiss SBC-3 scout bomber, of Scouting Squadron Six (VS-6) from USS Enterprise (CV-6) during exercises on 26 May 1940. The aviation-heavy image was fitting due to Mustin‘s namesake and of her class’ job in staying close to the flattops.
The Sims were handsome 1930s ships, a dozen 2,300-ton (fl), 348-foot tin cans sandwiched between the smaller Benham-class and the slightly heavier Benson-class which used largely the same hull but a different engineering suite. Speaking of engineering, the Sims-class used a trio of Babcock & Wilcox boilers to push Westinghouse geared turbines at 50,000 shp, capable of making 37-knots and were the last single-stack destroyers made for the Navy.
Designed around a dozen 21-inch torpedo tubes, they could carry 5 5″/38 DP mounts– though in actuality they completed with eight tubes and four main guns, augmented by increasingly heavy AAA and ASW suites.
Built in the tense immediate lead-up to the U.S. entry into WWII, the 12 ships were ordered from seven yards to speed up completion and half were commissioned in 1939, the other half in 1940.
Our ship is named for one Henry Croskey Mustin, USNA 1896, Navy Air Pilot #3, Naval Aviator #11, seen below posing for his pilot certificate as a 40-year-old LCDR with a cigarette in his hand.
U.S. Navy Air Pilot Certificate Issued to Lieutenant Commander Henry C. Mustin in January 1915, certifying that he had been designated as U.S. Navy Air Pilot No. 3, with a 1 June 1914 date of precedence. It includes a photograph of LCDR. Mustin, probably taken at Pensacola, Florida, in 1914, and is signed by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and Rear Admiral Victor Blue, Chief of the Bureau of Navigation. In January 1918, after the Naval Air Pilot designation was merged with the Naval Aviator designation, Mustin was officially listed as Naval Aviator No. 11. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105934-KN
Mustin fought in the Spanish-American War, commanded the gunboat USS Samar on Asiatic Station, was court marshaled but pardoned by Teddy Roosevelt and became one of the Navy’s first pilots while serving as XO of the pocket battleship USS Mississippi in Pensacola. There, he went on to become one of the first to fly combat missions in 1914 and in 1915 the first to cat from a warship.
Pioneer naval aviators Godfrey deChevalier, Henry C. Mustin, and John H. Towers on a beach during service in Mexico in the aftermath of the Veracruz Insurrection. On April 20-21, 1914, naval aviation personnel and their aircraft deployed from the Naval Aeronautical Station at Pensacola, Florida, to Mexican waters, where they flew the first combat flights in the history of the United States armed forces.
Lieutenant Commander Henry C. Mustin performs the first catapult launch from a ship, launching from the armored cruiser USS North Carolina (ACR 12) in Pensacola Bay, 5 Nov. 1915 NNAM.2011.003.004.012
USS Mustin was laid down at Newport News in 1937, 14 years after Capt.Mustin’s untimely death, and commissioned 15 September 1939– just 14 days after Hitler invaded Poland.
The war was on, though the U.S. still on the sidelines officially for the next 28 months. As such, Mustin participated in the sometimes-hairy neutrality patrol along the Atlantic Coast and escorted convoys to Iceland, where U.S. troops took over from the British in June 1941.
Convoy to Iceland, September 1941. Caption: View of two of the screen of TF-15, C. 7 September 1941. These are two of the following ships: ANDERSON (DD-411), WALKE (DD-416), MORRIS (DD-417), MUSTIN (DD-413) or O’ BRIEN (DD-415). Description: Catalog #: NH 47006
On December 7, 1941, Mustin was in Boston and soon received orders to ship to the Pacific.
After cutting her teeth escorting convoys between Hawaii and San Francisco and Hawaii and Samoa, she sailed with TF 17, escorting the carrier USS Hornet to the great brawl off Guadalcanal. The class would earn something of a reputation for giving their last full measure in defense of their flattops.
USS Mustin (DD-413) At Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 14 June 1942. Note she has just 3 5-inchers, due to increasing topside weight. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #: 80-G-10124
Surviving the Battle of Santa Cruz in October (where her crews shot down five Japanese aircraft), Mustin closed with the mortally wounded Hornet and rescued over 300 of the stricken ship’s crew, then dutifully attempted to sink the listing hulk along with sister ship USS Anderson (DD-411) with torpedoes and 5-inch fire.
Mustin went on to find herself in every part of the Pacific war. She fought off Savo Island, bombarded Japanese positions at Guadalcanal and on the frozen island of Kiska in the Aleutians, let her 5-inchers warm up off Makin Island, Wotje, Kwajalein, and Eniwetok.
“The continuing operations on and around New Guinea gave Mustin varied duty, on escort, patrol, bombardment, and as fighter-director, as one landing after another moved up the coast to wrest the huge island from the enemy. Noemfoor, Sansapor, Mios Woendi, Humboldt Bay, Biak, all were struck by forces in which Mustin served with vigor and gallantry,” notes DANFS.
Then came the PI campaign– including the great Battle of Leyte Gulf– and Okinawa. She splashed kamikazes, hunted for Japanese submarines, directed landings, and escorted convoys from secure anchorages to the front lines.
By May 1945, she was in poor material condition and, with the war expected to take a couple more years, Mustin was dispatched to San Pedro, California for an extensive refit which lasted until the end of August. She ditched her torpedo tubes as Japanese ships were increasingly few, exchanging them for more 40mm mounts.
Shown off San Pedro, California on August 14, 1945, after completing her final wartime refit. The Kamikaze threat was now fully realized as both banks of torpedo tubes were replaced by twin mounts of 40mm guns and their controlling directors. Ahead of #3 5″ mount, which was retained, she has twin 40mm mounts, and all of her 20mm guns, forward of the bridge, remain in place. Via Navsource
Ready for more service, she headed for the Japanese Home Islands in September for occupation duty, with the war finished. In all, she picked up an impressive 13 battle stars.
In all, she picked up an impressive 13 battle stars for her part in the conflict. While this figure is outstanding, and one of the highest in the fleet, she was surpassed by her sisters Russell (16 stars) and Morris (15), a testament to the wringer this class was put through.
The war was especially hard on her class, with Sims sunk at the Battle of the Coral Sea, Hammann sunk at Midway while trying to screen USS Yorktown, O’Brien ultimately sunk by a torpedo she picked up trying to screen the carrier USS Wasp off Guadalcanal, Walke lost in the same campaign, and Buck sunk by a German U-boat. Morris was damaged so bad off Okinawa that she was considered neither seaworthy nor habitable by VJ Day.
With the Navy flush with Fletcher and Gearing class destroyers– which were brand new in many cases and much more capable– the rest of the Sims were on the chopping block. Russell and Roe, undergoing lengthy refits like Mustin‘s when the war ended, never saw service again and were instead sold for scrap.
The four still-mobile Sims left in active service by early 1946: Mustin, Hughes, Anderson, and Wainwright joined 13 other tin cans from two other classes at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to take part in the Operation Crossroads atomic tests.
Joint Task Force One press release chart depicting scrap costs of Operation Crossroads. (U.S. Naval Institute)
The ships were stripped of useful equipment as well as ceremonial items such as bells, nameplates, and commemorative plaques. At Bikini, without crews or ordnance but with a sampling of goats and chickens aboard, the fleet touched the sun.
Mustin was rather close to the Able Shot (number 30 on the above chart) where “Gilda” a Mk III style 23-kt bomb was dropped 2,130 feet away from the old battleship USS Nevada, the designated zero point. Sims-class sister Anderson (number 1 on the chart), who had helped to scuttle Hornet along with Mustin back in 1942, sank within hours
0900 1 July 1946 Through Protective Goggles on the USS Appalachian Painting, Watercolor on Illustration Board; by Grant Powers, USMC combat artist; 1946; Framed Dimensions 24H X 30W Accession #: 88-181-N USS Appalachian (AGC-1) was the press ship from which most of the observers watched the bombs of Test Able. Goggles were worn during the initial phase of the explosion–when the fireball was brighter than the sun–but then taken off later as the protective glass was too dark to view the rest of the bomb phenomena. Appalachian, class leader of a group of four purpose-built amphibious command ships, was 18 miles from the USS Nevada.
Still radioactive but afloat, Mustin was decommissioned August 1946 and sunk off Kwajalein, 18 April 1948 in deep water by gunfire.
The original destroyer, her namesake, and other famous members of the Mustin family, Vice Admirals Lloyd Montague Mustin and Henry “Hank” Mustin, along with Vietnam era LCDR Thomas M. Mustin, Officer in Charge of Patrol Boat River Section 511, are remembered in the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Mustin (DDG-89), built at Pascagoula and commissioned on 26 July 2003. I took part in her construction there while at Ingalls.
She still looks great 14 years later.
SHIMODA, Japan (May 19, 2017) The guided-missile destroyer USS Mustin (DDG 89) at anchor off the coast of Shimoda during the 78th Black Ship Festival. The Navy’s participation in the festival celebrates the heritage of U.S.-Japanese naval partnership first established by Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 port visit. (U.S. Navy photo by Daniel A. Taylor/Released)
Specs:
Displacement:
1,570 long tons (1,600 t) (std)
2,211 long tons (2,246 t) (full)
Length: 348 ft, 3¼ in, (106.15 m)
Beam: 36 ft, 1 in (11 m)
Draught: 13 ft, 4.5 in (4.07 m)
Propulsion: High-pressure super-heated boilers, geared turbines with twin screws, 50,000 horsepower
Speed: 35 knots
Range: 3,660 nautical miles at 20 kt (6,780 km at 37 km/h)
Complement: 192 (10 officers/182 enlisted)
Armament:
(as built)
5 × 5 inch/38, in single mounts
4 × .50 caliber/90, in single mounts
8 × 21-inch torpedo tubes in two quadruple mounts
2 × depth charge track, 10 depth charges
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The former USS Charles F. Adams (DDG-2) was ordered in 1957 and was a very important stepping stone in modern Naval history due to her being designed to complete as a guided missile destroyer, carrying a Mark 11 twin-armed launcher for Tartar missiles. Her design proved so useful that a total of 29 Adams-class DDGs were built including 23 for the USN (of which three later went to Greece), three for Australia (the Perth-class) and three to West Germany (the Lutjens-class) and they gave great service for 30 years from Southeast Asia and the North Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.
By the end of the Cold War, however, these tin cans were cramped and outdated, especially compared to VLS/Aegis ships, and they were rapidly removed from service. On 29 April 1993, the last of the class on active duty with the Navy, USS Goldsborough (DDG-20) was decommissioned and struck.
By 2003, the Germans, last to operate the type, removed theirs from the fleet. Of the 29 hulls built, 27 have been scrapped or sunk as targets.
Only two remain Mölders (D186) which has been preserved at Wilhelmshaven, and Adams herself, which has been laid up at the Philadelphia Naval Inactive Ship Facility for the past 27 years.
However, a group in Jacksonville has been raising money since 2008 to bring her there and set her up as a naval museum.
They posted this over the weekend, and I hope they can pull it off.
There, under the Krinkov, is a German StG44 in exploded view, which would probably be OK on any monument except that of Mikhail Kalashnikov
As I covered over at Guns.com, the Russians spent 35 million rubles (about $580K US) on a sprawling monument to the late firearms engineer Mikhail Kalashnikov that was unveiled in Moscow last week. Besides a nearly 30-foot high statue of Kalashnikov, the base of a monument to St. Mikhail, the Orthodox patron of gunsmiths and warriors, contains a representation of several of the engineer’s designs including an AK42 sub gun, AK47, AKM and AK74 rifles, as well as RPK and PK machine guns.
However, as noted by some sharp-eyed firearms enthusiasts and reported by Russian-based Kalashnikov magazine, just under a Krinkov AKS-74U is what appears to be the parts diagram for a German StG-44 Sturmgewehr.
Which some (notably outside of the Motherland) have contended that the AK was based on for decades.
This has caused understandable heartburn in Russia, and, as Russian firearms wonks pile on to disagree with the lineage of the AK– noting it is as Russian as a Florida pirated movie salesman, the offending diagram has been torched out.
Via the Marine Corps History Division:
You’ve heard the quote by President Reagan; do you know where it comes from? You do now! Thanks to our friends at the Reagan Library for doing the digging to find this.
The 1983 Beirut barracks bombing would occur exactly a month to the day after this letter was written, claiming the lives of 241 U.S. peacekeepers (primarily of 1st Battalion/8th Marines), 58 French peacekeepers (of the 3rd Company of the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment), and six civilians.