“Train Advise Assist Command – Air (TAAC – Air) advisors from the 438th Air Expeditionary Wing fly Afghan Air Force’s newest MD 530F Cayuse Warrior helicopters for a training event. The new helicopters are capable of firing 2.75” rockets and .50-cal machine guns for close air support.”
The U.S. Army adopted the Hughes OH-6 Cayuse (nicknamed “Loach”, after the program acronym LOH—Light Observation Helicopter) in 1965 and fielded more than 1,400 of these egg shaped killers in the Vietnam era and, while largely replaced by the 1980s, the AH6/MH6 Little Bird variants did yeoman work with special operations units in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere during the Reagan era (see Operation Prime Chance).
Over Mogadishu during the Blackhawk Down affair, it was four MH-6s (Barbers 51-54 of the 160th SOAR) that kept the city at bay overnight.
“In the movie, the gunships are shown making only one attack. In fact, they were constantly engaged all night long. Each aircraft reloaded six times. It is estimated that they fired between 70 and 80,000 rounds of minigun ammo and fired a total 90 to 100 aerial rockets. They were the only thing that kept the Somalis from overrunning the objective area. All eight gunship pilots were awarded the Silver Star. Every one of them deserved it.” (source)
Today the Army still has about 47 Little Birds of various marks, and the Afghan Air Force is using the next best thing.
The MD 530F Cayuse Warrior, shown turning and burning above, is flown jointly by U.S. and Afghanistan forces and see combat just about every day. The last four of 27 MD 530Fs arrived at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul aboard a U.S. Air Force Boeing C-17 Globemaster III airlifter in late August as noted by Janes.
They are all moving to use the Enhanced-Mission Equipment Package (EMEP) which offers the FN Herstal 12.7 mm Heavy Machine Gun Pod (HMP) or 70 mm rockets.
Caption: Members of the 108th company of the FTP (Francs-tireurs et partisans français), the communist resistance group pose with their weapons at a mountain base. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Marion Loewenstein
Claude Lowenstein (lying down at lower left behind the British-made Bren light machine gun, notably the other weapons are captured German models), was born on 12 February 1928 in Luxembourg, making him a preteen when the Germans thundered across the country in a single day in 1940. Soon, the Germans instituted anti-Jewish measures and young Claude was exiled to an internment camp in France with his family.
In July 1944 a cell from the underground Franc-Tireurs et Partisans raided the farm to search for gasoline. They also asked the Jewish farm hands if they cared to join the cell. All 15 teenagers left with the partisans. England gave the partisans orders for their operations, guns and ammunition which they provided by parachute drop. In one operation the partisans climbed a mountain over-looking a road and dropped home-made grenades on an open truck filled with German soldiers thereby disrupting the convoy.
Just 16, Claude participated in the liberation of Lyon and other fighting as the Allies moved into the country from Normandy and the Riviera.
By the autumn of 1944, De Gaulle merged both the nationalist French Forces of the Interior (Forces françaises de l’intérieur) and the now 100,000-stong communist FTP, which Claude was a part of, into the overall French Army under Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny.
As the Germans withdrew East, Claude was reunited with his family in early 1945.
Pushing a hardy 17, he joined the reformed Luxembourg army (whose coat of arms includes a lion) and assisted in the occupation of Bitburg near the Luxembourg border before the war ended.
The 2nd Battalion of the Luxembourg Army took command of the Caserne in 1945 and would remain in the area until 1952, two years longer than the armistice required.
Combat Gallery Sunday: The Martial Art of Emil Hünten
Emil Johannes Hünten was born the son of a German composer residing in Paris on 19 January 1827. Studing at the at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, then later in Antwerp and Dusseldorf, he was a painter who specialized in oils on canvas. Choosing to cover historical subjects, his work on Fredrick the Great and his battles drew attention.
This led to Hunten being attached to the Prussian Army in the 1864 war with Denmark, the 1866 conflict with Austria and, in his magnum opus period, the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71.
Marshall Forwards
Prussian Hussar
Raid on rail line. Note the dead Prussian sentry.
Wounded Lifeguard
Prussian Army Crown Prince and Chief of Staff Helmuth Moltke (the elder) meet at Battle of Königgrätz. Note our lifeguard from above is making a cameo
Prussian Army Crown Prince and Chief of Staff (Generalstabschef) Helmuth Moltke
He became a member of the Berlin Academy, was well liked, garnered numerous awards, and created some of the most memorable portraits of the German Kaisers out there before his death in 1902.
Hunten’s paintings hang throughout Europe, mostly in Germany.
Portrait of female partisan, Sara Ginaite at the liberation of Vilna, 10 August 1944. She is just over 20 years old.
Her weapon? A Soviet-made M44 Mosin-Nagant rifle, likely newly acquired, and (at least) two German Eierhandgranate 39 egg-type hand grenades, which the Soviets put into production post war as the modified RDG5.
Ginaite was just 15 when the war started. The Soviets came into Lithuania in 1940 and the Germans occupied the country in June 1941 during Barbarossa.
As noted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sara was among the first group of 17 underground members of the Kovno Ghetto who in mid-December 1943, left for the Rudninkai Forest and became partisans.
Over the next nine months she repeatedly snuck back into the ghetto to lead more partisans out, pretending to be a nurse and claiming that she needed to escort sick workers to the ghetto hospital, bringing them to the forest instead. Her unit helped liberate Vilna (Wilno/Wilna), where the above image was taken by a Soviet major who was surprised to see a female, Jewish partisan standing guard when they entered the town.
Ginaite survived the war, married her wartime boyfriend who was another underground member, and settled in Vilna.
160817-N-PM781-002 WASHINGTON (Aug. 17, 2016) An M1 Garand rifle used by U.S. Marine Corps Raiders during the World War II attack on Japanese military forces on Makin Island is at Naval History and Heritage Commands (NHHC) Underwater Archaeology Branch. Due to the rifles significant surface concretions, corrosion and other physical damage, NHHC Underwater Archaeology Branch is performing an assessment of the artifacts stability. (U.S. Navy photo by Arif Patani/Released)
During the darkest part of the war in the Pacific, a group of Marine Raiders stormed Japanese-held Makin Island. Today one of their Garands left behind is undergoing long-term preservation.
Scarcely eight months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and just weeks after the fall of Corregidor, the U.S. Navy was planning to take the war to Imperial Japan at a little known island in the Solomons by the name of Guadalcanal. As part of the initial assault on that chain, “Carlson’s” 2nd Marine Raider Battalion were to carry out a diversionary strike on Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands.
Carried to Makin by two submarines, USS Argonaut and USS Nautilus, some 211 Raiders came ashore in rubber rafts in the predawn hours of August 17, 1942. By the end of the day they had annihilated the Japanese garrison, sunk two of the Emperor’s boats, and destroyed two of his planes. As part of the withdrawal the next morning, 19 fallen Marines were left behind in graves on the island.
In 1999 the military returned to Makin, now known as Butaritari in the island nation of Kiribati, to recover the Marines, 13 of whom are now interred at Arlington National Cemetery.
Now, attention is being paid a rifle found during the recovery process, a corroded M1 Garand discovered in the grave and returned to Hawaii before its eventual transfer to the Raiders Museum located at Marine Corps Base Quantico.
After an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team inspected the rifle to make sure it was not loaded, it has now been transferred to the Naval History and Heritage Command’s Underwater Archaeology Branch at the Washington Navy Yard.
There, the archaeological conservators are formulating a plan to treat the rifle, buried in wet sand on a Pacific battlefield for over 50 years, and preserve it for future generations.
Alan Seeger was born in New York City on June 22, 1888, and received a BA from Harvard University in 1910 where he edited and wrote for the Harvard Monthly– alongside future 10 Days that Shook the World author John Reed and had T.S. Eliot and Walter Lippmann in his classes.
A poet and idealist of sorts, he moved to Paris and was a resident of the City of Lights when the Germans came in 1914. A foreigner in France, he did what many both before and after did– joined up in the Foreign Legion. Fighting at the time in metropolitan France, a rarity for the unit, Seeger was killed at Belloy-en-Santerre in the Somme, riddled by a Boche Spandau while cheering on a charge of his fellow legionnaires, age 28.
He gave his last full measure on July 4, 1916 along with 900 other legionaries, including fellow poet, Camil Campanya. Able to seize the battlefield, the Germans withdrew from the ruined village on July 8.
The Legion remembered him in a ceremony on the 100th anniversary last month, and unveiled a marker.
Seeger is perhaps best remembered for his poem, I have a rendezvous with Death.
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ‘twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear…
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
YouTube gun reviewer Mr.Guns N Gear visited the mecca of full-auto publicly accessible weapons at Battlefield Vegas (if you are ever in Vegas, check it out, I go there every time I am in town) and came across a Japanese Type 99 light machine gun captured from the Imperial Army during WWII.
The very Bren Gun like Type 99 was chambered in 7.7x58mm Arisaka, an upgrade from the traditional 6.5x50mm Arisaka used in the previous Type 11 and Type 96 LMGs. Capable of 700 rpms, it was limited by its 30-round magazine in practical rate of fire. Still, the Nambu-designed LMG weighed just 23-pounds and as over 50,000 were produced, they were very frequently encountered in the war in the Pacific. Going past 1945, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Indonesian communists used inherited Type 99s well into the 1960s and likely would have continued to use them even longer if their ammo caches had lingered.
Still carved in the buttstock of the captured gun in Vegas is the name of the Marine who laid hands on it: PFC Anderson, 4th Platoon, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 21st Marines, 3rd Marine Division.
When the U.S. entered WWII, the entire garrison of tiny Kiska Island in the Aleutians consisted of a 10 man U.S. Navy radio/weather station. As a diversionary attack as part of the Battle of Midway, on 6 June 1942 the Japanese landed in force, some 550 men of an elite Naval Landing unit.
Over the next year, the Japanese build up on the remote island grew to 3,700 Navy personnel at Kiska Harbor and some 3,500 Army personnel at Gertrude Cove despite U.S. air and naval attacks. They put in fire hydrants and the beginnings of a water system, laid hundreds of foxholes, personnel trenches and barbed wire entanglements; dug underground bunkers into the hillsides; constructed a power and telephone network and erected a Shinto shrine.
Japanese propaganda design of the Aleutian Islands Campaign, 1942
In the harbor floated Kawanishi H6K ‘Mavis” flying boats, Nakajima A6M2-N ‘Rufe’ floatplane fighters and Aichi E13A ‘Jake’ floatplane bombers/reconnaissance aircraft. They also crafted a slipway and repair facilities for midget submarines (more on this later).
With a looming Canadian-U.S. force ready to invade the frozen tundra near the Bearing Strait in July 1943, the Japanese swiftly withdrew their troops and when the 34,000-man Allied force hit the beaches the next month, they found nothing but a ghost town– and three wrecked Japanese midget submarines.
They were actually pretty fast– 19 knots submerged– but due to not being able to recharge their batteries, had a very short range (about a half-hour at full speed, 24-hours if barely spinning the contra-rotating propellers). The two-man crew of these boats carried a pair of 17.7-inch Type 98 (Type 97 “Special”) torps in a pair of blackpowder-fired tubes forward (each with a 772-pound warhead and a 3.4-mile range), and a 300-lb scuttling charge for when things went wrong.
Interior of a Type A Japanese midget submarine. Copyright Newspix/News Limited, via NWS.gov.au.
The IJN completed about 105 of these vessels in four slightly different variants, of which a few were based at Kiska for coastal defense against encroaching U.S./Canadian vessels, and others lost in raids on Australia and Madagascar.
As noted by Combined Fleet.com, on 28 June the seaplane/submarine tender Chiyoda left Yokosuka with six Type A’s (HA-28, HA-29, HA-31, HA-32, HA-33 and HA-34) as well as the 150-man crew of the future midget submarine base, a detachment of the 12th Construction Battalion and 200-tons of cement.
The submarines on Kiska were launched to and from their base via a beaching railway with four sets of launch rails in the Western part of Kiska Harbor, and all the structures around the bases, when abandoned, were rigged with 155mm IEDs, sulphuric acid cans set to explode via live grenade, and other booby traps, making souvenir hunting hazardous to a GI’s health.
Arriving 5 July, the submarine force joined the 5th Guard Unit, Special Purpose Unit and was under command of Lt ( j.g.) Otozaka Shoichi. With Chiyoda leaving, the aging L-class submarine RO-61 (1,000-tons, completed 1920 to a British design) arrived in August to serve as a pier-side battery charger for the midgets, three of which were afloat in the harbor at a mooring buoy and three more retained on land.
By November 1942, with the submarine base built and the vessels operational, they begin taking regular personnel casualties in air raids from American bombers. Larger subs stopped coming as often.
Losses mount, with HA-33 sunk in a heavy storm in early April 1943 and on the 14th P-40 Warhawks from Amchitka strafe HA-29 and HA-34, leading to the cannibalization of HA-29 and HA-34 for spare parts, but as a result of continuing air attacks and storms repair cannot be completed.
This led Vice Admiral Kawase Shiro in May to order the midgets redeployed to nearby Attu but when two fleet submarines arrive to accomplish this, the news that Attu has fallen leads the midget crews to instead embark on I-31 and I-35 for the Kuriles.
On June 8, the two remaining midget submarines in the harbor are scuttled with demolition charges and one midget submarine is blown up using two Type 98 torpedo warheads, ending in watery graves. The three partially cannibalized midget submarines in the maintenance shed (including HA-32 and HA-34) are also demolished and the cache of some 20 remaining torpedoes are thrown in the harbor.
The sheds and buildings are burned with the stored fuel.
When the Americans arrived in August all they found were ruins.
Entrance to tunnel near Japanese sub base on Kiska, August 1943. Tunnels gave protection to the Japanese against bombs and provided sleeping quarters; image and caption Alaska State Library/Alaska’s Digital Archives (as with three following images).
Inside view, looking seaward, of covered, Japanese submarine beaching railway, tracks leading to waterfront; a soldier passes large submarine handling cradles on left; warships are visible through opening.
Japanese winches used to pull submarines into work shed on Kiska, August 1943.
Two-person submarines, damaged by internal explosions, on Kiska, August 1943. Fleet Air Wing Four military personnel remove incapacitated submarines from marine railway track leading to waterfront; lumber is scattered along one side; sandbags line top of hillside; winches for hauling subs are at right. All of the submarines, as with other equipment left on the island by the Japanese, were captured in thoroughly disabled condition as to be expected.
Submarines converted into scrap on Kiska Island, August 1943. Fleet Air Wing Four military personnel use torches to cut up submarines for scrap
Kiska is federally owned and forms part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which is administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service, though the National Park Service and others are also stakeholders.
In 1961, Los Alamos National Laboratory started work on a project known then as TX-61 to come up with a 700~ pound tactical nuclear bomb with a yield that could range from 0.3-340 KT of glow in the dark.
Put into production at the Pantex Plant (Zone 11) near Amarillo, Texas in 1968, an estimated 3,155 B61 bombs were completed by the 1970s and, with the steady paring down of Russo-American nuclear stockpiles in the START and SALT treaties as others, the current number of operational devices stands at around 1,200 with only about 200 deployed.
The old school B61 (DOE image). Seems pretty simple.
Today the B61-3, -4, -7, and -10 series bombs, most of which are stockpiled on U.S. bases abroad such as in Europe and the Pacific, are the oldest items in the American nuclear triad and it is doubtful they could penetrate ultra modern strategic C4I facilities deep underground such as the ones believed to exist in Russia, China, DPRK and Iran, built since the 1990s, which can run over 1,000 feet deep and are protected by granite.
Still, they serve as something of “NATO’s Nukes” giving regional powers such as Italy, Spain, Germany and Turkey the nominal capability to carry an American-owned nuke under extreme circumstances (a B61 can be toted aloft by a Tornado or F-16).
Last week, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) announced they formally authorized the production engineering phase of its B61-12 warhead life extension program (LEP), which will include some capability for deep digging, dial-a-yield warheads, upgraded guidance packages and tail units.
The new B61-12, graphic by engadget
“Reaching this next phase of the B61-12 LEP is a major achievement for NNSA and the exceptionally talented scientists and engineers whose work underpins this vital national security mission,” said NNSA Administrator Lt. Gen. Frank G. Klotz (Ret.). “Currently, the B61 contains the oldest components in the U.S. arsenal. This LEP will add at least an additional 20 years to the life of the system.”
They expect it to be able to send the B83-1—the last megaton-class weapon in America’s nuclear arsenal— into retirement when the program gets fully fleshed out by 2020.
Here we see an image of a typical late 1940s/early 1950s U.S. anti-tank team with a 75mm M20 recoilless rifle. Fielded by March 1945, the M20 saw limited service in WWII, but did yeomen work in Korea and in the early days of Vietnam. The three-man team looks pretty standard: M1 combat helmets sans covers, OD uniforms to include M1943 field jackets, leather holstered M1911 and M1 Carbine with buttstock mag pouch for sidearms. The mountains could be the hills of Georgia or North Carolina, or they could be West Germany…or Korea.
Speaking of which, Ethiopia was the first nation in Africa to contribute a complete unit of ground troops to the UN Korean command– the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Kagnew Battalions. The names of the three Ethiopian gunners from Addis Ababa preparing to fire a 75mm recoilless rifle are, from left to right: Cpl. Alema Welde, Cpl. Chanllo Bala and Sgt. Maj. Bogale Weldeynse.
Formed from the Royal Guards division of the Imperial Ethiopian Army, the Kagnew Battalions drew their name from Haile Selassie’s father’s warhorse. They served alongside the U.S. 7th Infantry Division suffering 121 dead and 536 wounded during the course of the conflict. They had none of their members counted among the captured. In general serving one-year tours (with several men serving two or more), some 3,158 Ethiopians served in Kagnew Battalions from 1951-54.
“We knew there was going to be sacrifice. But this sacrifice was not for nothing. It was for peace and liberty,” Col. Melesse Tessema, an Ethiopian veteran of the Korean War, said in a 2010 interview. “My friends, they gave their lives for history and for the freedom of human beings.”
