A tramp freighter will do

A tramp freighter will do.

It is difficult, in today’s “now” culture, to appreciate the happenings of seventy years ago.

The world had been viciously attacked by dictators who imposed their will upon hundreds of millions of people. America, along with her allies, beat back these dark forces and earned her place as the bastion of democracy. But the way was not smooth and decisions far from easy.

Germany was overcome in May of that year, 1945. But the battle for the Pacific continued to rage, with the Okinawa campaign spanning 82 days from April through mid-June. The Allies suffered over fourteen thousand killed in that short period, nearly twice as many brave souls than in all the fourteen years of our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But worse, we saw that the Japanese fought desperately to defend their homeland, with 77 thousand soldiers and up to 150 thousand civilians killed or dying by suicide. US planners, working on the invasion plans of mainland Japan (Operation Downfall), estimated that from 400,000 to 800,000 American troops would be killed because of the fanatic hostility of Japan’s defenders, both military and civilian. And judging from the Okinawan experience, we also anticipated over a million Japanese military deaths and two million civilian deaths. The cost of this operation, in human life, was beyond imagining.

So it was against this calculus of three million Japanese and many hundreds of thousands of American deaths that President Truman made his most difficult decision. To use the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or execute the war plans for Operation Downfall and invade the mainland.  

Our nascent atomic program had been proceeding desperately, quietly, secretly, but ultimately successfully. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexican desert.

And on that same day, upon learning of the results of the test, the USS Indianapolis departed San Francisco bearing atomic bomb components including over half the world’s known uranium 235 supply. Racing for Tinian Island, the speedy cruiser arrived on July 26. Bomb components and scientists were offloaded, and construction began. By August 6, seventy years ago, they were ready. The bomb, “Little Boy,” was loaded on a B29 Superfortress called “Enola Gay,” and was dropped on Hiroshima.

Exploding with the force of fifteen thousand tons of TNT, Little Boy was devastating. Intense heat and light, shock waves and radiation, nearly instantly killed over 100,000 people, and started raging fires which finished the destruction of the city. Slowly, later that day, the Japanese military command began to comprehend that a single American bomber had completely destroyed a city. Their analysis confirmed that an atomic weapon had been used, but they estimated that only one or two additional bombs could be assembled. The Emperor decided to continue the war.

Three days later, on August 9, another atomic bomb was prepared on Tinian. “Fat Man” used 14 pounds of plutonium-239, and when dropped by the B29 “Bockscar,” exploded on Nagasaki with a force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. Once again, a city was obliterated, with 75,000 killed.

Not assuming that this was decisive, the United States pressed forward with preparing additional bombs, with as many as seven to be ready over August, September, and October.

But it was decisive, and on August 14, Emperor Hirohito signaled his surrender to the Allies.

And with this, World War II finally ground to a halt. The world began to heal and rebuild.

Germany and Japan are now strong economies, close friends, and stout allies. But other things have changed in seventy years. These early weapons, which devastated whole cities, were puny. Modern atomic weapons are 2,500 times more powerful than Fat Man and Little Boy. A single contemporary atomic weapon could destroy Los Angeles and all of its environs. Millions of people instantly killed.

It is for this reason that we have tried hard, for seventy years, to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle. For the longest time, only the US, Great Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. Now the club has expanded to include India, Pakistan, and North Korea. (Israel is also rumored to have the bomb).

This is why it’s so important that the club not be expanded. Iran, in particular, must not be admitted. Because while we think our technology and power and broad oceans protect us, an advanced ICBM is not required to deliver nuclear holocaust to Los Angeles.

No, a single tramp freighter will do.

A cult of life

The “baby boomer” generation, when we were young, read tales of World War II, seeming distant to young minds but actually quite proximate. As close as the dreadful events of September 11, 2001, are to the current crop of kids, who view it as history, something which happened before they were born, or before they remember. So was World War II to us.

We read of grinding land wars in Africa and Europe. Of swirling naval battles and island campaigns in the Pacific. We read of the Holocaust, and the unthinkable cruelty of the Nazis to those viewed as “other.” We read of the fate of Allied prisoners imprisoned by harsh Japanese captors. And how seventy years ago this summer, it was all brought to a just and satisfactory conclusion.

There were many tales of heroism, from the small theater of a Marine falling on a hand grenade to save his buddies to the riveting drama of Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo. While militarily insignificant, the raid was the first truly good news of the Pacific campaign, that Japan was vulnerable to attack.

But as the war shuddered to its inevitable conclusion, there were disturbing accounts of desperation, of Japanese volunteers who willingly gave up their lives. Waves of kamikaze pilots, nearly 4,000 in number, attacked Allied ships with what amounted to human-guided, flying bombs. Kamikaze, “divine wind,” was a deeply foreign concept to young Western minds.

Perhaps from our foundation as a free country based on individual liberty, and certainly shaped by religion, we believed in the sanctity of human life. We admired heroism, but cheered the hero who survived as much as one who lost his life in an heroic act. The Marine falling on a grenade was deeply respected, but we did not expect thousands to do so. We would rather they would fight, win the battle, prosecute the war, and come home to take jobs and father children and mow the lawn and go to church on Sunday. We did not expect, nor would we admire, mass suicide.

If we had a cult, it was a cult of life. Death would come in God’s time, not ours.

But here we are, seventy years later, after the Japanese kamikaze waves proved ineffective, with a new cult of death.

We are now in a struggle with Islamic extremists, who twist their religion to justify their war on the West and Western values. Al-Qaeda, ISIS (or ISIL ), and Boko Haram are all examples of this theologically twisted philosophy. They share several fundamental features:

• A blind intolerance for other beliefs. Convert or die.
• Patriarchal and cruel. Women have no rights, gays are put to death.
• Regular use of suicide attackers. Your reward is in paradise, not on Earth.
• Unbelievable brutality. Kidnapping, torture, beheading, immolation, the more gruesome the better.
• Worldwide domination as a goal. International operations are underway, with recent attacks in France, Canada, Belgium, Australia, and the United States, among others.

What could be more antithetical to Western beliefs and culture?

And yet, and yet… we dither in the goal of containing a nuclear Iran. We stand by as the ISIL-declared Caliphate grows in Africa. We continue to avert our eyes… the Fort Hood terrorist attack is officially termed “workplace violence,” its victims denied crucial medical benefits. We refuse to openly recognize the Islamic roots of the enemy. A fringe, twisted, extremist Islamic belief system, but one with millions of supporters.

One only hopes that the next president, whoever he or she is, will recognize the existential nature of this struggle. That if we truly believe in the equality of women, gay rights, and the freedom of expression and religion, there is no accommodation that can be made, no moral equivalence that can be argued. It is time that we clearly state what we stand for: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is foundational. It is who we are.

Let’s only hope that January, 2017, is not too late.

In the Shadow of D-Day - Operation Dragoon

"Provence is free - August 1944"
A 70-year old newspaper kept by Jackie Gow

It was precisely seventy years ago that Marseille was freed from German occupation, August 28, 1944. Mademoiselle Jacqueline (Roux) Gow, now of North Attleborough, remembers. A young teen at the time, Jackie and her family had dealt with the Germans since November, 1942, when Marseille was first taken.

The oldest of six and daughter of two physicians, Jackie remembers the smoke and thunder of the Allied landings. Long lines of trucks, British and American and Canadian troops, the sheer joy of liberation. And the horror of a German aircraft, shot from the sky, the pilot perishing in the burning wreckage.

This was war, but with glimmers of hope. It was the end of an occupation that had included the confiscation of homes, brutality, arrests, and the deportation of Jews to German death camps. It is no wonder that the Allied troops were welcomed with celebration and joy.

Operation Dragoon, renamed for obscure reasons from its original “Anvil,” was Supreme Commander Eisenhower’s drive to open up the ports of southern France. Following close on the heels of the much better known Operation Overlord, the Normandy D-day landings, Dragoon solved the problem of landing huge amounts of troops and materiel needed to support the Allied drive into the heartland of Germany.

But this liberation of southern France had not been guaranteed in Allied planning. Indeed, Eisenhower said, Dragoon sparked “one of the longest sustained arguments I had with Prime Minister Churchill throughout the period of the war.” Churchill preferred to focus allied troops on the Balkans, the immediate goal to deny the Germans petroleum from that region. But longer term, the canny Churchill wanted troops in Romania and Greece to withstand a post-war takeover by the Russian bear, Stalin.

Eisenhower countered that the capture of the ports of southern France would speed the landing of American divisions from the homeland, protect the flank of the hard-earned Normandy landings, and get the Free French army quickly engaged in the fray. Churchill reluctantly concurred and preparations for Dragoon gathered speed.   

The ports of Toulon and Marseille were treasured prizes and the Germans were expected to fight fiercely to retain them. Allied planning was complex and detailed, including massive bombing raids, airborne troops landing inland, and an amphibious assault on the beaches, Alpha, Delta, Camel, and the saucily named Garbo. In a prelude, German artillery outposts on outlying islands were to be taken. The synchronization and secrecy demanded of this operation was an enormous challenge, and German defenses considerable.

But the Allied battle-hardened troops, fresh from Anzio, were not to be denied. On August 15, the assault began with commandos landing on the Hyeres islands under cover of darkness. This was followed by an orchestrated assault on the mainland beginning at first light with nearly 1,300 bombers from Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica. By 0800 the amphibious troops began their landings and the airborne troops, by parachute and glider, were inserted inland. Importantly, both strategically and for French morale, a division of the Free French Army joined the fray.

The fighting was hard, and it took nearly two weeks before Marseille was liberated. Good news emerged that the Germans, in their retreat, had not totally demolished the ports. The operation became one of a long, fighting pursuit, as the Germans slowly withdrew to the Vosges Mountains. In addition to the organized American, British, Canadian, and Free French troops, French resistance fighters, maquisards, kept up enormous pressure on the retreating Germans. Nothing was easy, and success was gained in fits and starts. The American  117^th Cavalry Squadron was nearly annihilated by the 11^th German Panzer Division, proof that the Germans were dangerous in retreat.

On September 10, elements of the Dragoon force met General George Patton’s Third Army, fresh from the liberation of Paris. The Allies now had a continuous front in eastern France, from the English Channel to the Mediterranean. While there was a lot of hard fighting to come (remember the Battle of the Bulge), the handwriting was now on the wall.

Operation Dragoon was a vital part of the Allied war strategy, but it is overshadowed by the earlier D-day landings in Normandy. The D-day veterans deserve every bit of recognition that they get, but so, too, do those who fought in the south. In Dragoon, the Allies suffered losses of 17,000 killed and wounded with the Germans having similar casualties. The very few veterans who remain remember.

As does Jackie Gow, who through the horror of war, still remembers the intense joy of liberation. And in her heart is compassion, not just for the foot soldiers on both sides, but for the countless mothers and wives and families who lent their treasured sons.

Let’s remember them all.

We have so little time to thank them

There is so much of import that deserves mention. The VA secret waiting list scandal. The stock market ascending to record heights. Kim and Kanye’s wedding.

But this week is the seventieth anniversary of D Day, when 156,000 allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy on one single day, June 6, 1944. The fresh faced boys who slugged their way into Europe are now in their late eighties and nineties. The ones who are still with us remember.

It was an enormous undertaking, hard to fathom. The front stretched from the Cherbourg Peninsula to the Orne River, some sixty miles. That is approximately the length of Cape Cod, from Falmouth to Provincetown. It involved thousands of naval vessels, tens of thousands of aircraft sorties, and ingenious artificial ports to protect offloading cargo ships from the fury of the storm tossed English Channel. Over 13,000 paratroopers and nearly 4,000 glider troops added muscle behind the lines.

The order of battle was simple: “You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other Allied nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.” This was the pivotal moment of the war in Europe. Till now, Germany had been stubbornly victorious.

The atmosphere of the time was grim. The Germans were known to be developing secret weapons in Norway and at Pennemunde in the Baltics and other locations. It was feared that bacteriological agents, nuclear bombs, and new unmanned rockets were all being created and refined for Hitler’s portfolio. The cost of failure would “carry consequences that would be almost fatal,” according to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, causing “a setback to Allied morale and determination… so profound that it would be beyond calculation.”

Russia, a fickle ally then as much as an enigma now, was closely watching. The overall strategy of the European conflict was to press Germany from both the east and the west. Russia had held up her end of the bargain, losing millions of casualties as the cost of pushing German forces from Ukraine and Belorussia. But the agreement made between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the Teheran Conference in 1943 was that America and Great Britain would open the western front with a cross-channel invasion. If we failed, it was feared that Russia would consider a separate peace with Hitler and withdraw from hostilities. In that event, an Allied victory would become sharply improbable.

It was with this background that southern England became a huge staging area in the spring of 1944. Hundreds of thousands of troops camped, trained, and prepared. Millions of pounds of materials and supplies were moved near ports. (Each division would require 700 tons of supplies per day while in combat and 47 divisions were to land.) The impact on the British populace was massive. Coastal shipping and ferries were diverted to the logistical effort, as were many railways. Their meager rations were further cut, travel was nearly impossible, and their fields and gardens were trampled underfoot as soldiers and supplies were staged. But in view of the consequences, these privations were cheerfully accepted.

The precise day of the landing was a bit slippery. First agreed in Teheran to be in May, the plan was changed to target early June. This was due largely to the challenge of amassing the necessary landing craft, but also to allow time for preparatory air attacks. These were intended to cripple critical transportation facilities in France to impede the  flow of German troops and to soften German defenses. Accordingly, “D Day” was moved to early June, with moonrise, sunrise, and tides dictating the 5th through the 7th. A fierce storm was forecast for that entire period, and it was feared that the invasion might need be delayed until the next favorable astronomical period in late June. The 5th of June dawned dark and stormy with wave-tossed seas, low clouds, and wind-blown, horizontal rain.

But later that night, a pause in the winds, a glimmer of starlight, a respite. June 6th it was to be.

The rest we know. Steven Speilberg and Tom Hanks documented the terror, mortality, and grim determination of that day in “Saving Private Ryan,” as did John Wayne in “The Longest Day.”

There can be no end to the thanks we owe. These veterans, few and fewer each day, deserve to be thanked and recognized and praised. Find them, and do it.

War and Secrets

Allied freighter attacked and sunk by German U-Boat

From the German point of view, it was the Second Happy Time. During 1942, the Axis sank 609 Allied ships totaling over 3 million tons at a cost of only 22 U-boats. It was, indeed, a happy time for the Germans as they focused their attention on the east coast of North America. Lack of preparation, no blackout of American cities, and an underequipped Atlantic U.S. Navy led to enormous German success.

(The First Happy Time was in 1940 and 1941, as Germany took on the unprepared British Royal Navy and the convoys they protected).

There was one other key to German dominance of the shipping lanes: Engima. Enigma was a German cipher machine used to encrypt messages. Enemy military commanders were able to gather intelligence and send orders with little chance of eavesdropping by the Allies. Convoys were discovered and submarines ordered to intercept in complete secrecy. The toll on Allied shipping was appalling.

The British established a top-secret effort at Bletchley Park to take on the challenge of breaking Enigma. To complicate matters, there were several variations of the machine in varying degree of sophistication. With the able assistance of Polish mathematicians, the British began to gain some success in decoding Luftwaffe and German Army messages. But the German Naval Enigma was a substantially different machine and defied cryptanalysis. Our convoys were sitting ducks.

And then fortune smiled. On October 30, 1942, the British Air Force spotted the German submarine U-559 on the surface off the coast of Egypt.  The airplane summoned the destroyer HMS Hero which closed on the submarine and forced it to submerge. Other destroyers joined the hunt and U-559 was severely damaged by depth charges. Losing trim, she came to the surface and was boarded by British sailors who retrieved her Enigma machine and code books.

Meanwhile, brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, who had been working on code breaking at Bletchley Park, turned his attention to the Naval Enigma. (Alan Turing is the father of our digital computer – thank him as you use your laptop computer or iPhone). Turing was finally able to break the Naval Enigma code using his deep experience at Bletchley and the newly obtained U-559 materials. The Second Happy Time came to an abrupt end for the Germans, and the sealift of men and materiel accelerated as we prepared for the invasion of the continent.

The Bletchley Park operation was very complex. It involved spies in the field, the best mathematical minds, radio listening stations, and science-fiction room-sized calculating machines like Colossus. And all of this was top secret and continued to be so long after the war had ended. All who were involved were required to sign the Official Secrets Act and vow to remain silent. And this secrecy was vital to ensure that the Germans did not know that their codes had been broken. The lives of millions and the very outcome of the war were at stake.

In thanks, the British recognized Turing by awarding him the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1945, then convicted him in 1952 of the criminal act of homosexuality. Turing kept his silence and committed suicide two years later. (Last month, over 60 years too late, the Queen issued a Royal Pardon “in fitting tribute to an exceptional man”.)

Which is why it is so incongruous that Edward Snowden has hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans.

Snowden revealed far more than the NSA collection of telephone metadata. A Pentagon report just sent to Congress asserts that most of the documents Snowden took relate to military operations. According to House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, "The vast majority of the material was related to the Defense Department, and our military services," not NSA operations.

You might think, “So what? We’re not in a real war.” And you would be wrong. Our struggle against the virus of radical Islamic jihad is no less grave than those earlier anti-submarine patrols on the dark, storm-tossed Atlantic.

The lives of our citizens and the lives of our troops are now less secure thanks to Mr. Snowden. You can be a fan if you like. But Alan Turing, who sacrificed much and contributed even more, would most likely disagree.

Celebrate! The war is over.

President Obama, in a major foreign policy speech at the National Defense University,  has declared that the war on terror is over. This is a very interesting tactic that might have been very useful if only known to Franklin Roosevelt. In June, 1944, sixty nine years ago, the beaches and fields of Normandy were a muddy, bloody cauldron as allied troops strove to wrest a beachhead from the Nazi juggernaut.  Over 200,000 American, British, and Canadian troops were killed or wounded in a campaign that could have been completely avoided if only Roosevelt had simply declared the war over.

But no matter. The current administration has elected to choose a path of lessening America’s role in the world. The president, his supporters, and confidantes are of the view that America is an enemy of freedom rather that its defender. The newly-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, has said: “Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. But much anti-Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others.”

So in support of this view, the administration is cutting military budgets, withdrawing from the heartlands of radical Islamic Jihadism, and is ceding the world  stage to our benevolent competitors. Surely the military planners in the Kremlin and Beijing are celebrating this wondrous gift. And in the vacuum created by America’s withdrawal, they will surely lead the way in advancing the cause of freedom and individual liberty. (News item – Russia backs Syria’s despotic leader, Bashar Al-Assad, and promises to deliver advanced anti-aircraft missile systems).

In the meantime, while asserting that America in the world is too big, the administration is simultaneously arguing that American government at home is too small. Even though the president has declared the end of the war on terror, his National Security Agency is spending billions to collate the phone calls, emails and tweets of hundreds of millions of Americans. The IRS, soon to be responsible for enforcing the onerous terms of the “Affordable Care Act,” was somehow unable to respect the constitutional rights of those who disagree with the President’s politics. And the Justice Department is going after journalists, wiretapping and threatening charges for simply reporting the news.

Where is this heading? Unfortunately, nowhere good. By reducing America’s presence in the world, the cause of freedom will be harmed. Likewise, by growing government’s scope and power at home, our individual liberties are lessened. If you believe that freedom and democracy are fundamentally good, this is not good news. Is this truly the path we want to follow?