Category Archives: US Army

Any excuse to go hunting

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Note the Enfield M1917 in 30.06

Note the Enfield M1917 in 30.06– still a great hunting rifle today.

From Fort Wainwright’s PAO:

On June 16, 1941, Lieutenant Milton Ashkins and his crew chief Sargent R.A. Roberts took off from Ladd Army Air Field (outside of Fairbanks) in an obsolete Douglas O-38 observation plane with the intention of checking in on an old prospector friend.

Ashkins directed the plane southwest of Fairbanks and once he reached the prospector’s camp, he flew a low, slow pass-over. Seeing their friend and satisfied that all was well, Ashkins advanced the throttle and the engine responded with a cough and then quit. Unable to restart the engine, Ashkins crash landed the plane into the soft tops of some nearby fir trees and both men survived unscathed.

Once on the ground again, Ashkins radioed their location back to Fairbanks and within a few hours a Douglas B-18 Bolo bomber flew over to drop emergency supplies including a rifle, a rubber raft, ammunition, and rations. The two men then made their way overland, accompanied by their prospector friend, to a rendezvous point 20 miles outside of Fairbanks. Ashkins recalled the trip back to Ladd as taking, “10 wonderful days” that were filled with fishing and hunting, “and just plain loafing with our prospector friend.”

Ashkins, who at the time was chief of the Fighter Test Section at Ladd Field, went on to command the 54th Fighter Squadron, Adak Island, Aleutians, and served in Alaska through 1943, finishing the war as deputy group and group commander, Headquarters 1st Fighter, 15th Air Force, Italy.

He retired from the Air Force in 1965 as a Brigadier Gen as deputy commander, Mobile Air Materiel Area, Brookley Air Force, Ala. He died in 2008.

The crashed O-38 was deemed a total loss at the time and, as the Army was busy ridding themselves of the type anyway, no efforts were made to retrieve the wreckage.

The wreckage was eventually rediscovered nearly thirty years later during an aerial survey of the area, and the plane’s type was soon identified. The staff of the Air Force Museum recognized it as the last surviving example of the type, and quickly assembled a team to examine the aircraft for possible retrieval and restoration.

Upon arriving at the crash site they found the aircraft surprisingly well preserved, with only the two seats and the tailwheel curiously missing. The team was even able to light their campfires using the aircraft’s remaining fuel.

Plans were soon made to remove the aircraft by a CH-47 Chinook from Fort Greeley on 10 June 1968, and it was transported back to Dayton, Ohio. Meanwhile, the missing seats were found in the shack of a local frontiersman where they were being used as chairs. The missing tailwheel was taken because he thought he might build a wheelbarrow someday.

The restoration by the museum’s staff took several years, and many structural pieces of the wings had to be reverse engineered from original plans and damaged parts. The finished aircraft with its original engine was completed and placed on display in 1974.

It is currently displayed hanging in the museum’s Interwar Years Gallery.

Ashkin's O-38, as restored after 27 years in the Alaskan bush

Ashkin’s O-38, as restored after 27 years in the Alaskan bush

Combat Gallery Sunday: The Martial Art of Don Troiani

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Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sundays (when I feel like working), I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, photographers and the like that produced them.

Combat Gallery Sunday: The Martial Art of Don Troiani

If you like military art at all, Don Troiani needs no introduction.

Here is a painting he has been working on for the Saratoga National Park that he has chronicled on his social media page from pencil to finished work.

The scene depicts the attack of the 62nd Regiment of Foot on the Connecticut Militia and 3rd New Hampshire Regiment on a wooded slope during the Battle of Freeman’s Farm. Major Harnage of the 62nd is wounded in the left foreground.

Thank you for your work, sir.

Hell for leather

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The Great War saw the U.S. Army balloon from 100,000 regulars who were spending most of their time in the Philippines and along the border with Mexico, to a modern fighting force of nearly 3 million– and this from a country that had a population less than a third of what we have today.

With so many hardlegs pulled from the fields, factories, police forces and offices, many women stepped forward to do their part for the war effort. While Germany was still an ocean away, very real threats of sabotage by enemy agents and U-boats stalking towns up and down the East Coast led to mobilization of home guards and auxiliary police units.

One of the most interesting is the “Cavalry Corps of the American Woman’s League for Self Defense” in New York City.

A troop-sized unit of some 20 horse-mounted uniformed women organized by one Ethel May Schiess, the group performed messenger and scouting duties in the city through the end of 1918. If there were serious landings in the NYC area by the Germans, they no doubt would have become a noteworthy irregular partisan unit.

Original Caption: Cavalry corps of the American Women's League for Self Defense. Cavalry Corps of the American Woman's League for Self Defense held its first public drill in the 1st Field Artillery Armory, Broadway and 60th Street, New York. Miss Ethel May Schiess, who is seen in the front, put the 20 prospective scouts and message bearers through their paces, while the 1st Field Artillery band played. Photographer: Kadel and Herbert

Original Caption: Cavalry corps of the American Women’s League for Self Defense. Cavalry Corps of the American Woman’s League for Self Defense held its first public drill in the 1st Field Artillery Armory, Broadway and 60th Street, New York. Miss Ethel May Schiess, who is seen in the front, put the 20 prospective scouts and message bearers through their paces, while the 1st Field Artillery band played. Photographer: Kadel and Herbert

Original Caption: New York's female cavalry drilling in city streets. The American Woman's League for Self Defense who have organized a cavalry troop, started outdoor drilling in the streets adjacent to the 1st Field Artillery at 67th St. & Broadway, New York, where their first lessons were received under the supervision of army officers. Photo shows Captain Ethel Schiess giving orders to the troop. Photographer: Western Newspaper Union

Original Caption: New York’s female cavalry drilling in city streets. The American Woman’s League for Self Defense who have organized a cavalry troop, started outdoor drilling in the streets adjacent to the 1st Field Artillery at 67th St. & Broadway, New York, where their first lessons were received under the supervision of army officers. Photo shows Captain Ethel Schiess giving orders to the troop. Photographer: Western Newspaper Union

For an article I did on the similar and very well-armed women’s machine gun squad police reserves of New York City over at Guns.com, click here.

Anatomy of an Airborne combat jump, Alaska style

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A by-the-numbers look at a Joint Forcible Entry Exercise featuring paratroopers of the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment and 3rd Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Some 513 paratroopers dropped on the objective in less than 90 seconds by a flight of 7 C17s. (U.S. Army video by Staff Sgt. Daniel Love, U.S. Army Alaska)

They fought the LAW but the law won, or, Is that a LAW in your closet or are you happy to see me?

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You know you laughed...

You know you laughed…

The last of three Washington State National Guard soldiers who swapped a live M72A5 LAW rocket and launcher among themselves after returning from Afghanistan has been hit with probation last week.

According to court documents, it all started in September 2011 when a woman, Sabrina Hale met with Pierce County Sheriff’s Department detectives in a park in Puyallup, Washington and handed over the anti-tank weapon. Hale told authorities it came from Victor Naranjo, a National Guard soldier. After the LAW was handed over to the feds, it was disarmed and found to be a Norwegian-made device manufactured by Nammo Raufoss in 2007 for the Canadian military.

How it came to be in a Puyallup park was the interesting part.

More in my column at Guns.com

225 years ago: The shame of Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair

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Miami sharpshooters cover their comrades at the Battle of the Wabash, 4th November 1791. Via Osprey. Click to big up.

Miami sharpshooters cover their comrades at the Battle of the Wabash, 4th November 1791. Via Osprey. Click to big up.

Born in Scotland in 1736-ish, Arthur St. Clair was a professional soldier, at age 21 purchasing a commission in the newly formed 62nd (Royal American) Regiment (now 2nd Battalion, Royal Green Jackets), coming to the New World with Adm. Edward Boscawen’s fleet to fight the French in the colonies during the Seven Year’s War (know on this side of the pond as the French and Indian War). During the conflict he served under Amherst at Louisburg and Wolfe in Quebec. He had lots of campaigning behind him but had never led more than a company-sized unit.

When peace came, St. Clair resigned his commission from the shrinking regiment before Pontiac’s War and settled in Western Pennsylvania, able to buy large lots of land very cheap. A landed gentleman in the colonies, St. Clair cast his lot with the rebels and in 1776 accepted a command as colonel of the under-strength 3rd Pennsylvania Regiment, fighting six months later at the embarrassing skirmish that was the Battle of Trois-Rivières.

Although his baptism of fire in the War of Independence was a defeat, it nonetheless led to a promotion to general of brigade, a stint remolding the New Jersey militia, and St. Clair lending his support to the crossing of the Delaware and the resulting battles of Trenton and Princeton, which meant to a promotion to major general and command of strategically important Fort Ticonderoga.

Court-martialed for the loss of Ticonderoga the next year, St. Clair nonetheless was an ADC to Washington at Yorktown, an general without a command. After the war he served as President (of the Continental Congress) and governor of the Northwest Territory (what is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, along with parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota).

In March 1791, at age 55, he was still one of the most experienced officers in the new country, even if his last command of troops in the field ended really badly more than a decade before and he had never led more than 300~ men prior.

However, St. Clair was placed over the 2,000 poorly armed and trained men of the First and Second Infantry Regiment, fleshed out by some local militias and levees, to take the field against 1,000 warriors from the Miami, Shawnee, Potawatomis and Delaware tribes.

The natives, led by Little Turtle of the Miamis, Blue Jacket of the Shawnees and Buckongahelas of the Delawares; were fresh off the defeat of some 1,500 men of Brig. Gen. Josiah Harmar some six months before at present day Fort Wayne, Indiana, and, by the time St. Clair closed in with the warriors, his force had dwindled through desertion and low morale to just over 1,100– putting the two armies at roughly equal size when they met on 4 Nov. 1791 near present-day Fort Recovery, Ohio.

It wasn’t pretty.  St. Clair, suffering from gout, never really had a firm grip on his command who more or less resembled Braddock’s column from 1755.

Attacking at dawn, the war party was a total success:

The casualty rate was the highest percentage ever suffered by a United States Army unit and included St. Clair’s second in command. Of the 52 officers engaged, 39 were killed and 7 wounded; around 88% of all officers became casualties. After two hours St. Clair ordered a retreat, which quickly turned into a rout. “It was, in fact, a flight,” St. Clair described a few days later in a letter to the Secretary of War. The American casualty rate, among the soldiers, was 97.4 percent, including 632 of 920 killed (69%) and 264 wounded. Nearly all of the 200 camp followers were slaughtered, for a total of 832 Americans killed. Approximately one-quarter of the entire U.S. Army had been wiped out. Only 24 of the 920 officers and men engaged came out of it unscathed.

Indian casualties were about 61, with at least 21 killed.

The number of U.S. soldiers killed during this engagement was more than three times the number the Sioux would kill 85 years later at the Battle of Little Big Horn. The next day the remnants of the force arrived at the nearest U.S. outpost, Fort Jefferson, and from there returned to Fort Washington (Cincinnati).

It was St. Clair’s last command and spurred a host of changes in the Army, after an investigation which placed the blame on the quality of the troops rather than their commander. The engagement is known interchangeably as St. Clair’s Defeat, the Battle of the Wabash, the Columbia Massacre and the Battle of a Thousand Slain.

Born in Scotland and a veteran of the British Army, Arthur St. Clair had come to America and settled in the State of Pennsylvania. During the Revolutionary War he fought in the American Army and was made a Brigadier General in 1776. After the debacle of "St. Clair's Defeat," in which the U. S. Army suffered its greatest loss to Native American forces, St. Clair was asked by President George Washington to resign from the Army and later died in 1818. (Photo Credit: USAMHI)

Born in Scotland and a veteran of the British Army, Arthur St. Clair had come to America and settled in the State of Pennsylvania. During the Revolutionary War he fought in the American Army and was made a Brigadier General in 1776. After the debacle of “St. Clair’s Defeat,” in which the U. S. Army suffered its greatest loss to Native American forces, St. Clair was asked by President George Washington to resign from the Army and later died in 1818. (Photo Credit: USAMHI)

I feel like this could be equal parts good and bad

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Picatinny Arsenal engineers created a glass-formed “amorphous explosive” pellet, on right, that mimics the shape of a dime. Mission Impossible stuff here. (Photo: U.S. Army)

Picatinny Arsenal engineers created a glass-formed “amorphous explosive” pellet, on right, that mimics the shape of a dime. Mission Impossible stuff here. (Photo: U.S. Army)

Engineers at Picatinny Arsenal are in the midst of crafting a generation of transparent explosives that can be used on everything from invisible mines to self-destructing optics.

Deep inside the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, or ARDEC, at Picatinny Arsenal are engineers Victor Stepanov and Rajen Patel who are busy burning lean muscle tissue into the night to craft what they term “amorphous explosives.”

Accomplished with nanotechnology, the concept is to modify already proven battlefield shaping explosive compounds to create new ones that are clear as glass.

“If you ever seen a glassblower work, they heat the material above its glass transition point (Tg) until the glass softens. Then, the glassblower manipulates the glass, easily molding it before it cools,” said Patel. “Well, with this project, we can basically do the same thing with amorphous energetics: heat them above Tg and manipulate the structure to form complex shapes.”

What would the shapes be used for? Lots of stuff for the next gen warfighter like clear reactive armor for use in detonating anti-tank weapons, optics that can be blown up if they fall into enemy hands– such as on a drone that is lost or shot down– and even invisible mines.

In short, if you want it clear, and to go boom, this tech is key.

Patel says that key to the development is being able to keep it in its amorphous state long-term.

“This is especially true when we talk about its military application, where we could keep something in a bunker for twenty years in a hot desert,” he said.

More here

A .50 cal gunner from the Meat Hound

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right-waist-gunner-staff-sergeant-frank-t-lusic-of-eighth-air-forces-meathound-a-boeing-b-17f-55-bo-flying-fortress-sn-42-29524-1943

Right waist gunner Staff Sergeant Frank T. Lusic of Eighth Air Force’s “Meat Hound” a Boeing B-17F-55-BO Flying Fortress (s/n 42-29524) assigned first to the 423th Bomb Sqn, 306th Bomb Group in early 1943 then chopped to the 358th Bomb Squadron, 303th Bomb Group at RAF Molesworth in England.

On her 25th mission over Oschersleben Germany on 26 January 1944, Meat Hound was hit hit by enemy aircraft over Durgerdam, and her crew bailed over the huge Ijsselmeer lake, Holland (the largest lake in Western Europe) while the pilot kept her in the air as long as he could.

Four crewmembers drowned. One who did not, co-pilot Clayton David evaded capture while another four fell into German hands and became prisoners of war.

The pilot, Jack Wilson, managed to coax the stricken bird back to England and crash landed near Metfield in Suffolk. Meat Hound was written off.

As for Cook County, Illinois-native Lusic, 23, he was a quest of the Reich and was sent to Stalag 7A near Moosburg, Germany where 8,209 other American POWs were held. In the end he was imprisoned for at least 382 days until he was liberated.

According to public records he died in Wisconsin in 1977.

Transferring bases, 1921 style

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From the Old Guard Museum:

3rd-infantry-regiment-marching-from-camp-perry-ohion-to-fort-sheridan-ill-1921

On 26 September 1921, the regulars of the 3d Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) set out for their newly assigned post– Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Due to the post-World War I cuts in defense, there was no funding for transportation. Nonetheless, the Regiment set out on a 938-mile road march to comply with its orders.

The 3rd had already been on the move that year, all by foot.

At the start of 1921, the Old Guard was stationed at Camp Sherman, Ohio, having left Camp Eagle Pass, Texas the previous year. In August 1921, orders came down from the War Department. The Old Guard was to march from Camp Sherman to Camp Perry, Ohio (173 miles).

At Camp Perry, the Regiment, along with the 2d Infantry Regiment, helped run the annual National Rifle Match (which continues today). On 24 August, the day after their arrival at Perry, regimental command passed from Colonel Paul Giddings to Colonel Alfred Bjornstad.

Once the rifle matches were completed on 25 September, both the 2d and 3d Infantry Regiments started their march to Fort Sheridan. Once at Sheridan, the Regiment stayed four days to rest and resupply. The Perry-Sheridan leg of the march would be 308 miles, taking the brigade just 19 days to cover (including two rest days).

They arrived at Sheridan on 15 October, some 95 years ago today, averaging 16.21 miles per day– a feat besting that of Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry” of the Shenandoah Valley Campaign which covered 650 miles in 48 days (13.54 miles per day), though with slightly less gun play and with much better boots.

From Fort Sheridan, the 3d was to march on to Fort Snelling, where they would spend the next 20 years and earn the nickname, “Minnesota’s Own” before WWII service and finally duty in the Washington Military District where they endure today.

Cool before it was cool

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Source http://defenseimagery.mil; VIRIN: DA-ST-86-06121

Source http://defenseimagery.mil; VIRIN: DA-ST-86-06121

What better way to celebrate the 11th of October with this snap of members of the 11th Armored Cavalry stooped to talk with West German Bundesgrenzschutz border police while patrolling the border between the DDR and FGR in Ford M151 MUTT light vehicles (marked with 7th Armored Cav Regt). Date 1979.

Dig the M1911s in leather holsters, OD green uniforms which would be replaced by woodland BDUs in just a few years, distinctive Blackhorse patches and black berets long before it was cool– as a homage to the British Royal Tank Regiment who adopted the headgear as standard in 1924 (while the German Panzer units did the same in the late 1930s and brought them back in 1956 with the Bundeswehr).

As noted by an 11th Cav veteran’s group, “In the US Army, HQDA policy from 1973 through 1979 permitted local commanders to encourage morale-enhancing distinctions, and Armor and Armored Cavalry personnel wore black berets as distinctive headgear.”

Formed in 1901, the Blackhorse served in the Philippines, along the border, and in the 1916 pursuit of Villa in Mexico (where they rode 22 hours straight to the rescue of United States forces besieged in Parral), before cooling their heels stateside in the Great War. Ditching their horses for armor in 1940, they served in Western Europe during WWII, fighting at the Bulge, then alternated Cold War service between West Germany and Vietnam (1966-71) and finally Kuwait before being sent to the NTC at Ft. Irwin in 1994 as the designated OPFOR (with breaks since then to go to the sandbox for real).

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