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Post by karl on Nov 26, 2012 11:43:22 GMT -7
J.J. Interesting presentation, I must say...But, I was rather in not so good disposition in a of the content. In this manner, to instead wait a bit before responding. John, what I have to respond is not to your self in any manner whats so ever, and, I will keep comments of personal in good standing.... The folks of reference of AIPAC is: American Israel Public Affairs Committee. For convenience, to then post their url of operations. It would so appear, the Saudies once again are showing their true face from their veil of smoke and mirrors in light of the currant and present support of their fellow Arabs in the Gaza. For they have not the internal fortitude to fight their own battles, but will pay for protection out of their own pocket books, in this manner, it is very seldom a terrorist situation will be known within the borders of the Saudies. Now with the Hamas out of ammunition after expending their supplies over the skies of Israel, they now enjoy a truce to buy time for new supplies. But, the fly in the oatmeal has arisen with international condemnation against Egypt allowing use through their land, through the tunnels into Gaza of resupply of weapons. In this stead, the Saudies are using their contacts of poisoning the Americans with distortions of Israeli Digital Iron Dome Tactics and infiltration into the US Military Establishment. Commensurately, to give the impression of their knowledge of secret plans to over throw the American Government. but then, it is to the individual to believe or not to believe. The following url is the stance the Saudies are taking in behalf of their support for their fellow Arabs. english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/10/12/243227.htmlWho is AIPAC: www.aipac.org/about-aipacThe following url is exampled of how confusing the confused are: theintelhub.com/2012/07/20/the-globalist-infiltration-obama-israel-and-the-muslim-brotherhood/Karl
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Post by kaima on Nov 27, 2012 0:41:55 GMT -7
This report is disturbing. Hope to see more on verifying this. The President’s text below, unedited: The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release November 21, 2012 Presidential Memorandum -- National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs Memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies Subject: National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs This Presidential Memorandum transmits the National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs (Minimum Standards) to provide direction and guidance to promote the development of effective insider threat programs within departments and agencies to deter, detect, and mitigate actions by employees who may represent a threat to national security. These threats encompass potential espionage, violent acts against the Government or the Nation, and unauthorized disclosure of classified information, including the vast amounts of classified data available on interconnected United States Government computer networks and systems. The Minimum Standards provide departments and agencies with the minimum elements necessary to establish effective insider threat programs. These elements include the capability to gather, integrate, and centrally analyze and respond to key threat-related information; monitor employee use of classified networks; provide the workforce with insider threat awareness training; and protect the civil liberties and privacy of all personnel. The resulting insider threat capabilities will strengthen the protection of classified information across the executive branch and reinforce our defenses against both adversaries and insiders who misuse their access and endanger our national security. Barack Obama John, I read that as a complete fake. It reads too much as if it were written by a very low level government employee trying to impress his bosses with packing as much bureaucratese as possible while obfuscating the topic at hand. If this was written by a top advisor to the president, he should be fired on his horrible mutilation of the English language alone! If the president did sign this bit of nonsense, then we should fire the bum! PS. You know I am a supporter of Obama and wish him all the best, because that will translate to all the best for this country, but this language is outrageous. I do believe it is fake.
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Post by Jaga on Nov 27, 2012 2:04:28 GMT -7
John, this is one of these fake news. Pres. Obama is too smart to sign it, if he would FoxNews would be all over it, instead of hyping Benghazi gate. We need to check snoopes in a couple of days. I check i sometimes, especially when my elderly friends sent me a chain about.... selling Arctic island to Russia for no money and similar nonsense. By the way. I found this interesting website that has this info: www.examiner.com/article/obama-issues-executive-order-to-government-agencies-of-potential-insider-threatsthey have equally nonsensical stuff: +++Site says Obama stole election through voter fraud +++ +++Obama fires 20,000 Marines, promises billions to Muslim green… +++ +++ Small business paramilitary raids by IRS, DOJ documentary released+++ and then they have something for their audience (FoxNews like): No love for Heidi Montag or her recent bikini photo shoot
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Nov 27, 2012 5:02:22 GMT -7
This report is disturbing. Hope to see more on verifying this. The President’s text below, unedited: The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release November 21, 2012 Presidential Memorandum -- National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs Memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies Subject: National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs This Presidential Memorandum transmits the National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs (Minimum Standards) to provide direction and guidance to promote the development of effective insider threat programs within departments and agencies to deter, detect, and mitigate actions by employees who may represent a threat to national security. These threats encompass potential espionage, violent acts against the Government or the Nation, and unauthorized disclosure of classified information, including the vast amounts of classified data available on interconnected United States Government computer networks and systems. The Minimum Standards provide departments and agencies with the minimum elements necessary to establish effective insider threat programs. These elements include the capability to gather, integrate, and centrally analyze and respond to key threat-related information; monitor employee use of classified networks; provide the workforce with insider threat awareness training; and protect the civil liberties and privacy of all personnel. The resulting insider threat capabilities will strengthen the protection of classified information across the executive branch and reinforce our defenses against both adversaries and insiders who misuse their access and endanger our national security. Barack Obama John, I read that as a complete fake. It reads too much as if it were written by a very low level government employee trying to impress his bosses with packing as much bureaucratese as possible while obfuscating the topic at hand. If this was written by a top advisor to the president, he should be fired on his horrible mutilation of the English language alone! If the president did sign this bit of nonsense, then we should fire the bum! PS. You know I am a supporter of Obama and wish him all the best, because that will translate to all the best for this country, but this language is outrageous. I do believe it is fake. After searching extensively for some corroboration and finding none, I have to agree with you. It has to be fake.
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Post by Jaga on Nov 27, 2012 16:29:55 GMT -7
John, I was reading through the previous information about fruitless wars. One of these strange and unnessesary wars was Granada invasion by pres. Reagan, considered as a hero.... I think pres. Reagan was a good man but not everything he did was so great
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Dec 1, 2012 5:56:32 GMT -7
Subject: WWII US Navy Submarine Derailment/Destruction of Japanese Munitions ...
REALLY a Great story!!!
Thirty-nine years ago, an Italian submarine was sold for a paltry $100,000 as scrap. The submarine, given to the Italian Navy in 1953 . . was originally the USS Barb . . an incredible veteran of World War II service . . with a heritage that should not have been melted away without any recognition. The U.S.S. Barb was a pioneer, paving the way for the first submarine to launch missiles and it flew a battle flag unlike that of any other ship.
In addition to the Medal of Honor ribbon at the top of the flag identifying the heroism of its Captain, Commander Eugene 'Lucky' Fluckey. And the bottom border of the flag bore the image of a Japanese train locomotive. The U.S.S. Barb was indeed, the submarine that SANK A TRAIN !
July 18, 1945 In Patience Bay, off the coast of Karafuto, Japan.
It was after 4 A.M. and Commander Fluckey rubbed his eyes as he peered over the map spread before him. It was the twelfth war patrol of the Barb, the fifth under Commander Fluckey. He should have turned the submarine's command over to another skipper after four patrols, but had managed to strike a deal with Admiral Lockwood to make a fifth trip with the men he cared for like a father. Of course, no one suspected when he had struck that deal prior to his fourth and should have been his final war patrol, that Commander Fluckey‘s success would be so great he would be awarded the Medal of Honor.
Commander Fluckey smiled as he remembered that patrol. Lucky Fluckey they called him. On January 8th the Barb had emerged victorious from a running two-hour night battle after sinking a large enemy ammunition ship. Two weeks later in Mamkwan Harbor he found the mother-lode... more than 30 enemy ships.
In only 5 fathoms (30 feet) of water his crew had unleashed the sub’s forward torpedoes, then turned and fired four from the stern. As he pushed the Barb to the full limit of its speed through the dangerous waters in a daring withdrawal to the open sea, he recorded eight direct hits on six enemy ships.
What could possibly be left for the Commander to accomplish who, just three months earlier had been in Washington, DC to receive the Medal of Honor? He smiled to himself as he looked again at the map showing the rail line that ran along the enemy coastline.
Now his crew was buzzing excitedly about bagging a train! The rail line itself wouldn't be a problem. A shore patrol could go ashore under cover of darkness to plant the explosives... one of the sub's 55-pound scuttling charges. But this early morning Lucky Fluckey and his officers were puzzling over how they could blow not only the rails, but also one of the frequent trains that shuttled supplies to equip the Japanese war machine. But no matter how crazy the idea might have sounded, the Barb's skipper would not risk the lives of his men. Thus the problem... how to detonate the explosives at the moment the train passed, without endangering the life of a shore party. PROBLEM ? If you don't search your brain looking for them, you'll never find them. And even then, sometimes they arrive in the most unusual fashion. Cruising slowly beneath the surface to evade the enemy plane now circling overhead, the monotony was broken with an exciting new idea : Instead of having a crewman on shore to trigger explosives to blow both rail and a passing train, why not let the train BLOW ITSELF up ? Billy Hatfield was excitedly explaining how he had cracked nuts on the railroad tracks as a kid, placing the nuts between two ties so the sagging of the rail under the weight of a train would break them open. "Just like cracking walnuts,"he explained. To complete the circuit [ detonating the 55-pound charge ] we hook in a micro switch... and mounted it between two ties, directly under the steel rail. " We don't set it off . . the TRAIN will." Not only did Hatfield have the plan, he wanted to go along with the volunteer shore party. After the solution was found, there was no shortage of volunteers; all that was needed was the proper weather... a little cloud cover to darken the moon for the sabotage mission ashore. Lucky Fluckey established his criteria for the volunteer party :
[ 1 ] No married men would be included, except for Hatfield, [ 2 ] The party would include members from each department, [ 3 ] The opportunity would be split evenly between regular Navy and Navy Reserve sailors, [ 4 ] At least half of the men had to have been Boy Scouts, experienced in handling medical emergencies and tuned into woods lore.
FINALLY, Lucky Fluckey would lead the saboteurs himself.
When the names of the 8 selected sailors was announced it was greeted with a mixture of excitement and disappointment. Members of the submarine's demolition squad were: · Chief Gunners Mate Paul G. Saunders, USN; · Electricians Mate 3rd Class Billy R. Hatfield, USNR; · Signalman 2nd Class Francis N. Sevei, USNR; · Ships Cook 1st Class Lawrence W. Newland, USN; · Torpedomans Mate 3rd Class Edward W. Klingesmith, USNR; · Motor Machinists Mate 2nd Class James E. Richard, USN; · Motor Machinists Mate 1st Class John Markuson, USN; and · Lieutenant William M. Walker, USNR. Among the disappointed was Commander Fluckey who surrendered his opportunity at the insistence of his officers that as commander he belonged with the Barb, coupled with the threat from one that "I swear I'll send a message to ComSubPac if the Commander attempted to join the demolition shore party."
In the meantime, there would be no harassing of Japanese shipping or shore operations by the Barb until the train mission had been accomplished. The crew would ' lay low' to prepare their equipment, practice and plan and wait for the weather.
July 22, 1945 Patience Bay [ Off the coast of Karafuto, Japan ]
Waiting in 30 feet of water in Patience Bay was wearing thin the patience of Commander Fluckey and his innovative crew. Everything was ready. In the four days the saboteurs had anxiously watched the skies for cloud cover, the inventive crew of the Barb had crafted and tested their micro switch. When the need was proposed for a pick and shovel to bury the explosive charge and batteries, the Barb's engineers had cut up steel plates in the lower flats of an engine room, then bent and welded them to create the needed digging tools. The only things beyond their control were the weather.... and the limited time. Only five days remained in the Barb's patrol.
Anxiously watching the skies, Commander Fluckey noticed plumes of cirrus clouds, then white stratus capping the mountain peaks ashore. A cloud cover was building to hide the three-quarters moon. So, this would be the night.
MIDNIGHT, July 23, 1945
The Barb had crept within 950 yards of the shoreline. If it was somehow seen from the shore it would probably be mistaken for a schooner or Japanese patrol boat. No one would suspect an American submarine so close to shore or in such shallow water. Slowly the small boats were lowered to the water and the 8 saboteurs began paddling toward the enemy beach. Twenty-five minutes later they pulled the boats ashore and walked on the surface of the Japanese homeland. Stumbling through noisy waist-high grasses, crossing a highway and then into a 4-foot drainage ditch, the saboteurs made their way to the railroad tracks. Three men were posted as guards, Markuson assigned to examine a nearby water tower. The Barb's auxiliary man climbed the tower's ladder, then stopped in shock as he realized it was an enemy lookout tower . . . an OCCUPIED enemy lookout tower. Fortunately the Japanese sentry was peacefully sleeping. And Markuson was able to quietly withdraw to warn his raiding party.
The news from Markuson caused the men digging the placement for the explosive charge to continue their work more quietly and slower. Twenty minutes later, the demolition holes had been carved by their crude tools and the explosives and batteries hidden beneath fresh soil.
During planning for the mission the saboteurs had been told that, with the explosives in place, all would retreat a safe distance while Hatfield made the final connection. BUT IF the sailor who had once cracked walnuts on the railroad tracks slipped or messed up during this final, dangerous procedure . . his would be the only life lost. On this night it was the only order the sub's saboteurs refused to obey, and all of them peered anxiously over Hatfield’s shoulder to be sure he did it right. The men had come too far to be disappointed by a bungled switch installation. 1:32 A.M. Watching from the deck of the submarine, Commander Fluckey allowed himself a sigh of relief as he noticed the flashlight signal from the beach announcing the departure of the shore party. Fluckey had daringly, but skillfully guided the Barb within 600 yards of the enemy beach sand. There was less than 6 feet of water beneath the sub's keel, but Fluckey wanted to be close in case trouble arose and a daring rescue of his bridge saboteurs became necessary.
1:45 A.M. The two boats carrying his saboteurs were only halfway back to the Barb when the sub's machine gunner yelled, ' CAPTAIN !' There's another train coming up the tracks! The Commander grabbed a megaphone and yelled through the night, "Paddle like the devil !",knowing full well that they wouldn't reach the Barb before the train hit the micro switch.
1:47 A.M. The darkness was shattered by brilliant light . . and the roar of the explosion ! The boilers of the locomotive blew, shattered pieces of the engine blowing 200 feet into the air. Behind it the railroad freight cars accordioned into each other, bursting into flame and adding to the magnificent fireworks display. Five minutes later the saboteurs were lifted to the deck by their exuberant comrades as the Barb eased away . ... slipping back to the safety of the deep.
Moving at only two knots, it would be a while before the Barb was into waters deep enough to allow it to submerge. It was a moment to savor, the culmination of teamwork, ingenuity and daring by the Commander and all his crew. Lucky Fluckey's voice came over the intercom. "All hands below deck not absolutely needed to maneuver the ship have permission to come topside." He didn't have to repeat the invitation. Hatches sprang open as the proud sailors of the Barb gathered on her decks to proudly watch the distant fireworks display.
Members of the sabotage team pose with the Ships
flag (The train mission is noted at the center bottom of the flag)
The Barb had sunk a Japanese TRAIN !
On August 2, 1945 the Barb arrived at Midway, her twelfth war patrol concluded. Meanwhile United States military commanders had pondered the prospect of an armed assault on the Japanese homeland. Military tacticians estimated such an invasion would cost more than a million American casualties. Instead of such a costly armed offensive to end the war, on August 6th the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped a single atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. A second such bomb, unleashed 4 days later on Nagasaki, Japan, caused Japan to agree to surrender terms on August 15th. On September 2, 1945 in Tokyo Harbor the documents ending the war in the Pacific were signed. The story of the saboteurs of the U.S.S. Barb is one of those unique, little known stories of World War II. It becomes increasingly important when one realizes that the [ 8 ] eight sailors who blew up the train near Kashiho, Japan conducted the ONLY GROUND COMBAT OPERATION on the Japanese homeland during World War II.
[ Footnote : Eugene Bennett Fluckey retired from the Navy as a Rear Admiral, and wore in addition to his Medal of Honor . . [ 4 ]FOUR Navy Crosses . . a record of heroic awards unmatched by any American in military history.] In 1992, his own history of the U.S.S. Barb was published in the award winning book,THUNDER BELOW. Over the past several years proceeds from the sale of this exciting book have been used by Admiral Fluckey to provide free reunions for the men who served him aboard the Barb, and their wives.
P.S. : He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1935 & lived to age 93 .
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Post by karl on Dec 1, 2012 10:58:35 GMT -7
J.J.
What a fascinating story....A tribute to the skill of the brave Capitain and crew of the good USS Barb underwater boat.
It is such shame such a war time craft was not saved and in this stead, placed as a maritime tribute for display.
With the accompanied plaque, would have provided an inspiration to the generation not of the war.
Karl
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Dec 3, 2012 7:05:53 GMT -7
When Britain made war on China
In June 1840 a fleet of British warships sailed into China's Pearl River Delta and unleashed a barrage of violence, overwhelming China's weak coastal defences and bringing the country to its knees.
This was the First Opium War in which thousands were killed in the name of free trade,
Trading opium into China was a lucrative but illegal business and two Scotsmen involved in the trade, played a crucial role in the onset of war.
William Jardine, a former ship's surgeon turned private trader from Dumfriesshire, and James Matheson, a trader from Sutherland, became business partners after first meeting in a Chinese brothel.
In 1832 they formed Jardine, Matheson and Company, based in Canton, southern China (now known as Guangzhou), in the 13 Factories district - the only area of the city where foreigners could trade.
They traded opium for tea, for which Britain had acquired a great thirst. By the end of the 18th Century Britain imported over six million pounds of tea per year from Canton.
At first Britain struggled to maintain the trade as China would accept only silver as payment.
Wedgewood pottery, scientific instruments and woollen goods were among the items Britain offered to trade, but all were declined.
"We possess all things and of the highest quality," Emperor Qian Long wrote in a letter to King George III. "I set no value on strange and useless objects and have no use of your country's manufactures."
Over a 50 year period Britain paid £27m in silver to the Chinese, but sold them only £9m of British goods in return.
Tea was becoming unaffordable and there was seemingly little way to make money in China.
Portraits of William Jardine and James Matheson William Jardine and James Matheson became rich from trading in opium
But British traders saw an opportunity from the conquest of Indian Bengal which had a large harvest of opium.
Opium had been banned in China even though it had been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years.
But in the 15th Century it was mixed with tobacco and smoked for pleasure. Soon people from all levels of Chinese society were hooked on the rituals of the opium den.
The social impact was huge and damaging, with addicts prone to sell all their possessions to feed their habit.
The sale and smoking of the drug was banned by Emperor Yongzheng in 1729, but 100 years later there was still strong demand and the British were exploiting it.
By 1836 30,000 opium chests were arriving in China each year from India. Jardine, Matheson and Company was responsible for a quarter of those.
By flouting the trade ban on opium, Britain found a way to increase its earnings from China.
"The British realised that because there was so much opium produced on the east side of India smuggling opium to China made sense," said Professor John Carroll of the University of Hong Kong.
And Canton's coastal location made smuggling easy for the British:
"They would transfer the goods to smaller boats that could make it up the coast much more easily. There was always someone there to help them bring in the drugs.
"From an economic perspective this all made perfect sense." Siege and revenge
But British law-breaking had not gone unnoticed and in 1839 Emperor Daoguang declared a war on drugs. A series of raids were ordered on the Western traders.
The traders in the 13 Factories warehouses were locked in by the Chinese army and forced to surrender.
Goods with a value of £2 million were seized, including 42,000 opium pipes and 20,000 chests of opium.
Incensed by the seizures, William Jardine left Canton for London, where he lobbied the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to strike back at China.
With opium responsible for a significant part of British India's tax revenue, it didn't take long for the government to send in the navy.
In June 1840 the British fleet of 16 warships and 27 transports carrying 4,000 men arrived in the Pearl River Delta, near Humen.
Among them was the Nemesis, a new iron warship armed with a deadly weapon - the Congreve rocket launcher, able to fire exploding rockets up to a distance of two miles.
The Chinese were prepared, but their antiquated defences were no match for the British. Their static canons and armada of war junks were destroyed in just five and a half hours.
Over the next two years the British navy travelled up the coast towards Shanghai. Chinese troops, many of whom were addicted to opium, were overwhelmed at every stage.
The British bombardments resulted in a considerable loss of life - between 20,000 and 25,000 Chinese were killed. Britain lost just 69 men. Legacy
The Chinese Empire was shattered. In August 1842 aboard HMS Cornwallis, near the town of Nanking, the Chinese signed what became known as the "unequal treaty".
They agreed to open five ports to foreign trade and pay 21m silver dollars to the British government, as compensation for loss of opium earnings and the cost of war.
For the British the highlight of the deal was the acquisition of Hong Kong Island, which would be used as a hub to increase trade in opium with China.
The Opium Wars have been consigned to history books in Britain, but that is not the case in China, according to Dr Zheng Yangwen, of the University of Manchester. She says students there are taught about the wars from an early age.
"Text books from elementary school, to middle school to high school, to university highlight the wrong doings of the so-called imperialists.
"We have become part of what they call the Patriotic Education Programme, to educate Chinese youths like me so that we remember what you have done to us".
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Dec 5, 2012 4:11:01 GMT -7
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Dec 7, 2012 6:26:26 GMT -7
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D The Legend of Lost Liquor. First published in MILITARY magazine. Authored by Flat Top. In 1940, in an astounding string of victories, the British Western Desert Force drove the Italians back 500 miles from the border of Egypt and virtually annihilated the entire Italian Tenth Army. By doing so, the British appeared to have ended the threat to Egypt and the Suez Canal. However, the year 1941 began rather roughly for the British, when in February, German forces, under General Erwin Rommel, soon to become a living legend as the "Desert Fox, began landing in Tripoli to come to the aid of the Italians. Consolidating his force, Rommel went on the attack with his Deutsches Afrika Korps and by June 1942, and the British were knocked back those 500 hard-earned miles, all the way back to the Egyptian frontier. In the course of the action, the Germans captured the port city of Tobruk in Libya. Along with the usual spoils of war, the Germans discovered a cache of nearly one and one-half million gallons of top quality Scotch whiskey, Jamaican rum, London gin and French cognac. The spirits were found, as the story goes, stored in huge oak casks in a cellar near the Tobruk docks. Liberal, happy "taste-testing" by the Germans and their Italian allies, and losses due to British bombing brought the amount down to about one million gallons. The remaining liquor was sent in Axis supply ships to Nettuno, a town near Anzio on the west coast of Italy, where it remained, more or less secure, until the fateful year of 1944. In 1944, the American Fifth Army landed at Anzio and captured Nettuno, along with the entire supply of booze, now labeled Afrika Korps liquor. Additional losses due to German bombing and extensive taste-testing, this time by American GIs, British Tommies and other assorted allied troops brought the total remaining liquor to about 265,000 gallons. United States Army authorities ordered the liquor to be transferred from the original casks into one-liter bottles at a local Italian distillery. It would take approximately one million bottles to do the job, but because of war damage and other shortages, the distillery had no ready source of one-liter bottles. So it provided raw materials for glass making to local individual entrepreneurs in the glass trade. This resulted in a fantastic array of one million one-liter bottles, not one of which was exactly the same as the other. Labels were printed by a company in Rome. The history of the liquor then begins to get a bit hazy. Due to repeated sampling by the Americans, the Italians, the British and anyone who happened to drop by the distillery, the total amount of liquor dipped to one-half million bottles. After VE Day in 1945, orders were received to transfer the remaining stock of Afrika Korps liquor to Linz, Austria. Speculation at the time was that high ranking American officers, who were transferred from the Fifth Army in Italy to occupation duty in Linz after VE Day, had somehow managed to have the liquor follow them. Once in Linz, the million bottles were layered in beds of straw, deep within the city’s central wine caves. For 31 years the liquor rested in the cool damp of the subterranean sanctuary under the streets of Linz. Apparently the officers who had had the liquor sent to Linz had been caught up in the rush to demobilize at the war’s end and the liquor was forgotten. Unfortunately, during those 31 years, this sanctuary was violated secretly on many occasions, believe it or not, by Danube River pirates, so that by the time the liquor came back into the possession of US officials in 1976, there were about 60,000 bottles left out of the original million bottled in 1944. The booze was really "lost liquor." It had been lost by the British to the Germans, then lost by the Germans to the Americans, then lost by the Americans to the Austrian Danube River pirates. But, finally, somehow, the Americans regained control of the liquor and in the early 1980's, the remaining bottles of Scotch, rum, gin and cognac were offered for sale through the Class IV (retail liquor stores) at various US Army bases in Europe. As a "government employee" in Germany after my retirement from the Marine Corps, I had the opportunity, given to me by the Marines at the American Consulate in Frankfurt, to purchase a liter of this very old, historical booze in 1983. I choose a bottle of Scotch. Tied to the neck of the bottle was a small booklet titled A Legend of Lost Liquor. The title was centered over an Africa Corps insignia, a palm tree with a swastika half-way up the trunk. The label rad, "Fine Scotch Whiskey," no brand or bottler was stated. On the back of the bottle was a label reading, " This liquor showed to be within standards of purity prescribed for use by Allied Military Personnel." The bottle survived a very turbulent move back to the States and several semi-turbulent moves after that. Because I am not a Scotch drinker, I recently decided to sell the alcoholic heirloom through an ad in the newspaper. I thought that there might be a well-heeled connoisseur out there who would pay big bucks for a 50-year old bottle of his or her favorite libation. Or, maybe an ex-dogface who might wish to savor some "Big War" booze that was bottled about the time he was humping up and down the Italian mountains. As I wrote ad, I thought that a picture of the bottle and the booklet with the Afrika Korps insignia might be good selling points. I went to the garage where I kept the bottle wrapped in bubble wrap and inside a wooden box. To my horror, the bottle was two-thirds empty (or two-thirds full depending on your outlook)! The cork had dried out and shrunk and allowed the Scotch to drain out drop by drop until just about a half a drinking glass of an ominous smelling, thick liquid remained. I had stored the bottle for many a long, freezing winter in northern Europe and then several sweltering summers in coastal Georgia. While the bottle had survived these extremes, the cork had not. Sure, I checked it occasionally, but was very lackadaisical about temperatures and positioning of the bottle, etc. Now I’ll never know what monetary value the Scotch might have had..Now some local Scotch lover will never experience the joy of the ultra-smooth, 60 year old premium Scotch sliding down their gullet – if 60 year old Scotch is really ultra-smooth and, in fact, slides down one's gullet.
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Post by karl on Dec 7, 2012 13:37:15 GMT -7
J.J.
I hold such little idea as for how or where you come up with these little gems, but non-the-less, how ever....This was priceless, and indeed so...
I was so engrossed/immersed into the story, it was a shared grief with the author with discovery of the precious bottle of Scotch to be mostly empty. All for the failing of the cork in the bottle.....
Thank you once again...
Karl
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Dec 10, 2012 6:31:38 GMT -7
Memories of WWII battle lead to family visit in GermanyJay Woelkers and father, May 2012 Courtesy Jay Woelkers By Nancy Montgomery Stars and Stripes “The German mortar crews correct their range settings and their shells begin dropping right among us. Joe Wannamaker sees a big shell fragment tumbling end over end by him. … Joe Behan goes down, hit in the leg. John Huffman suffers a crippling wound in the arm. Fred Woelkers drops with a leg wound. Their bodies lie concealed by the beet foliage and in the intense excitement their absence is scarcely noticed.” — From “Memories of Service in the Second Platoon, Company K, 407th Infantry, March 1944-Sept. 1945.” HEIDELBERG, Germany — Fred Woelkers’ war experience, after he was drafted and shipped off to Europe in 1944, had remained largely a mystery to his family, including his son, Jay. Fred, like most men of the era, didn’t discuss it. “He told me he was shot by a sniper,” Jay Woelkers said. “And he showed me the scar on his leg.” That was that. Until August, when Jay Woelkers, a Navy commander and medical administrator, was assigned to Sembach. “When I came to Germany, I thought I really need to know what happened,” he said. Before long, he found a detailed account on the website “World War II Stories — In Their Own Words” of what happened to the men in his father’s unit — Company K, 407th Regiment, 102nd Infantry Division — in a brutal, little-known battle for the town of Welz. All 11 in his father’s squad were hit. Four of them, including the then-20-year-old Fred, were hit on the first day of battle. “They really were sitting ducks,” Jay Woelkers said. The same month the commander arrived in Germany, he went to Welz. He wanted to see for himself where his father, now 88, had lain all night in a frosty beet field in November nearly 70 years earlier, then charged into a hail of gunfire and mortars. It was summer, and peaceful. “The sugar beets were growing. The apple orchard was still there,” Jay Woelkers said. He called his father in North Carolina to tell him what he’d found, and how he’d felt imagining his father, his hero, as a frightened young man. “I told him it was sad to me,” Jay Woelkers said. “I actually told him that I was sorry he had to go through that.” His parents, Fred and Sally, had told him before he left for Sembach that they were too old to travel. They told him to say his good-byes now in case they died while he was gone. The finding of the battlefield changed their minds. “I was shocked,” Jay Woelkers said. “They’ve maybe visited me twice the whole time I’ve been in the Navy. They’ve never spent more than two or three days alone with me in my life. And they bought their own tickets — the first time ever.” The elder Woelkers are to arrive at Frankfurt Airport on Tuesday — their son’s 49th birthday — and stay for Christmas. The family plans a trip to Welz within the first week. “I don’t know how he’s going to take it,” Jay Woelkers said. “It’s been so many years.” Woelkers is one of 15 children — the second-youngest — of devout, Detroit working-class Catholics. The family ate dinner together every night. They went to Mass every Sunday, always arriving late and causing a stir as 11 boys and four girls rushed up the aisle into their pew. “At 18, you were out the door,” Jay Woelkers said. “It wasn’t a mean thing. It was a necessity. There was no money. That was the reality.” Of the 15 Woelkers children, 10 joined the Navy; one, the Army; and another, the Coast Guard. All but one enlisted; two, including Jay Woelkers, later got college degrees and became officers. Jay Woelkers is the last one in the family on active duty, with more than 30 years of service. His duty in Iraq in 2006, at the height of the sectarian violence, and in Afghanistan in 2010 changed him, Jay Woelkers said. He believes war changed his father, who’d been studying engineering at Purdue University before he was drafted. He wants to give his father the chance to “go back and see it in a different light.” As for his mother, there are lighter, brighter trips in store. She, like her husband, is descended from German immigrants to the U.S. She grew up hearing about the Christmas traditions from her grandmother, Jay Woelkers said. “She wants to see the Christmas markets.” montgomeryn@estripes.osd.mil
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Dec 24, 2012 6:40:36 GMT -7
See how Marines from the 31st MEU respond after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake triggers a massive tsunami off the coast of Japan. Through combat camera footage, follow the Marines during Operation Tomodachi as they deliver more than 160,000 pounds of relief supplies to those in dire need.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Jan 4, 2013 5:16:36 GMT -7
The American Legion Magazine
Why we went to war in Vietnam
BY MICHAEL LIND - January 1, 2013
In the decades after the departure of the last U.S. combat troops from Vietnam in March 1973 and the fall of Saigon to communist North Vietnamese forces in April 1975, Americans have been unable to agree on how to characterize the long, costly and ultimately unsuccessful U.S. military involvement in Indochina. To some, the Vietnam War was a crime – an attempt by the United States to suppress a heroic Vietnamese national liberation movement that had driven French colonialism out of its country. To others, the Vietnam War was a forfeit, a just war needlessly lost by timid policymakers and a biased media. For many who study foreign affairs, the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake brought about by U.S. leaders who exaggerated the influence of communism and underestimated the power of nationalism.
Another interpretation, a fourth one, has recently emerged, now that the Vietnam War is history and can be studied dispassionately by scholars with greater, though not unlimited, access to records on all sides.
The emerging scholarly synthesis interprets the war in the global context of the Cold War that lasted from the aftermath of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this view, Vietnam was neither a crime, a forfeit nor a tragic mistake. It was a proxy conflict in the Cold War.
The Cold War was the third world war of the 20th century – itself part of what some have called the Long War or the Seventy-Five Years’ War of 1914-1989. Unlike the first two world wars, the Cold War began and ended without direct military conflict between the opposing sides, thanks to the deterrent provided by conventional forces as well as nuclear weapons. Instead, it was fought indirectly through economic embargoes, arms races, propaganda and proxy wars in peripheral nations like Vietnam.
The greatest prizes in the Cold War were the industrial economies of the advanced European and East Asian nations, most of all Germany and Japan. With the industrial might of demilitarized Japan and the prosperous western half of a divided Germany, the United States could hope to carry out its patient policy of containment of a communist bloc that was highly militarized but economically outmatched, until the Soviets sued for peace or underwent internal reform. The Soviet Union could prevail in the Cold War only if it divided the United States from its industrialized allies – not by sponsoring communist takeovers within their borders but by intimidating them into appeasement after convincing them that the United States lacked the resolve or the ability to defend its interests.
For this reason, most crises of the Cold War, from the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Korean and Vietnam wars, occurred when the United States responded to aggressive probing by communist bloc nations with dramatic displays of American resolve. The majority of these tests of American credibility took place in four countries divided between communist and non-communist regimes after World War II: Germany, China, Korea and Vietnam.
In an internal Johnson administration memo of March 1965, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton emphasized credibility as the most important of several U.S. objectives in Vietnam: In a speech the following month, President Johnson stressed America’s reputation as a guarantor: “Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of America’s commitment, the value of America’s word.”
Full-scale war was avoided despite repeated crises involving divided Berlin and Taiwan, where the remnant of China’s Nationalist government took refuge after the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong’s communists in China. The Cold War soon turned hot in divided Korea and Vietnam.
What Americans call the Vietnam War was the second of three wars in Indochina during the Cold War, in which the United States, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China intervened in shifting patterns of enmity and alliance. None of these would have occurred in the form that they did if Mao’s communists had not come to power in China in 1949. Although the regimes in Moscow and Beijing were enemies of one another by the end of the Cold War, in the conflict’s early years the triumph of the Chinese communists created a powerful Sino-Soviet bloc that opposed the United States and its allies around China’s periphery: Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam. Direct Chinese military intervention in the Korean War ensured a bloody stalemate rather than reunification of the peninsula under a non-communist regime. At the same time, indirect Chinese and Soviet support in the First Indochina War (1946-1954) helped Ho Chi Minh’s communists drive the French from their former colony.
Only a few years after the Geneva Accords in 1954 established the 17th parallel as the boundary between Vietnam’s communist north and non-communist south, the Hanoi regime resumed war by means of infiltration and southern insurgents. After the conquest of the south in 1975, Communist Party historian Nguyen Khac Vien admitted, “The Provisional Revolutionary Government was always simply a group emanating from the DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam). If we had pretended otherwise for such a long period, it was only because during the war we were not obliged to unveil our cards.”
The assassination in 1963 of South Vietnam’s dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, created anarchy that led to rising U.S. involvement – starting with advisers under President Kennedy, then turning to bombing and ultimately large-scale ground forces under Johnson. In 1964, the Johnson administration won congressional passage of the Southeast Asia Resolution after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, using as a pretext for U.S. military intervention the confrontation in which North Vietnam fired on the USS Maddox. The number of American forces peaked in 1968, when more than half a million U.S. troops were waging war in South Vietnam, as well as bombing North Vietnam and taking part in incursions into Laos and Cambodia. At great cost in American and Vietnamese lives, the attrition strategy of Gen. William Westmoreland succeeded in preventing the Saigon regime from being overthrown by insurgents. The Tet Offensive of January 1968, perceived in the United States as a setback for American war aims, was in fact a devastating military setback for the north. Thereafter, North Vietnam’s only hope was to conquer South Vietnam by means of conventional military campaigns, which the United States successfully thwarted.
In the United States, public opinion grew opposed to the costs in blood and treasure of the controversial war. President Richard Nixon sought to achieve “peace with honor” by combining a policy of “Vietnamization,” or South Vietnamese self-reliance, with a policy of détente with the Soviet Union and China, in the hope that the communist powers would pressure the north into ending the war. His strategy failed. Following the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, U.S. combat forces were removed, and the south, deprived by Congress of military aid, was invaded by the north. In 1975, upon uniting Vietnam under their rule in 1975, the victorious heirs of Ho Chi Minh imposed Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism on the south and helped their allies win power in Laos. The Third Indochina War soon followed. Mao’s heirs in China viewed communist Vietnam as a Soviet satellite on their border, and in early 1979 China invaded Vietnam in a brief war, following the 1978 Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia, during which Vietnamese communists ousted the Chinese-backed regime of the murderous Pol Pot.
Of the three great powers that intervened in Indochina after the ouster of France in the 1950s, the Soviet Union gained the most. By backing Hanoi, Moscow simultaneously obtained an ally on China’s border and reasserted its leadership of international Marxism-Leninism. The former U.S. base at Cam Ranh Bay became the largest Soviet military installation outside Eastern Europe. In “The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War” (1996), Russian historian Ilya Gaiduk wrote, “Inspired by its gains and by the decline of U.S. prestige resulting from Vietnam and domestic upheaval, the Soviet leadership adopted a more aggressive and rigid foreign policy, particularly in the Third World.”
But in December 1979, only months after China was humiliated in its brief war with Moscow’s Vietnamese ally, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. That decade-long conflict proved to be Moscow’s Vietnam.
Just as the Soviets and Chinese had armed and equipped Vietnamese opponents of U.S. forces in Vietnam, the United States and China – now allies against Moscow – armed and equipped the insurgents who fought the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was the third major proxy war in the Cold War.
In 1989, the year in which the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War effectively ended, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, as the United States had withdrawn its troops from Indochina a decade and a half earlier.
The United States lost the proxy war in Indochina but prevailed on a global level in the Cold War. The USSR not only lost the Cold War but ceased to exist in 1991. The discredited secular creed of Marxism-Leninism has survived in only a few dictatorships, including China, North Korea and Vietnam.
As the narrative of the 20th century is interpreted, historians are regarding the Vietnam War in a global context that spans decades and concludes with the fall of the Soviet Union. No matter their differences of perspective, they will define the Vietnam War as the Cold War in Indochina.
The interventions of the United States, the Soviet Union and China turned civil wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia into proxy wars. This provides an answer to those who claim that the United States, by its intervention, mistakenly turned a pure civil war in Vietnam into part of the Cold War. The United States shared its belief that Indochina was a major theater in the global Cold War with the Soviet Union and China. In “Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam,” Lien-Hang T. Nguyen writes, “While Moscow hoped to see Soviet technology defeat American arms in Vietnam, Beijing wanted to showcase the power of Mao’s military strategy on the Vietnamese battlefield.”
There is no evidence that Ho Chi Minh or his successors ever envisioned the kind of neutrality that Yugoslavia’s communist dictator Josip Broz Tito pursued during the Cold War. On the contrary, the North Vietnamese communists identified themselves with the main communist bloc of nations, sought to maintain the support of the Soviets and the Chinese alike, and by the end of the Cold War had turned their country into the Soviet Union’s major Asian ally.
Was South Vietnam too marginal an interest to justify a U.S. war in the 1960s and 1970s? To this day, the United States garrisons South Korea and provides arms to Taiwan. If you consider that in today’s world, the United States could go to war if China attacks Taiwan and almost certainly would go to war if North Korea attacks South Korea, the use of U.S. military force to defend South Vietnam against North Vietnam at the height of the Cold War seems less puzzling. Indeed, a U.S. decision in the 1960s not to try to avert a communist takeover of South Vietnam would need explanation.
Viewing the Indochina wars as Cold War proxy wars, along with the conflicts of that era in Korea and Afghanistan, answers one set of critics: the realists. It also provides an answer to other critics who claim that the United States should have been more aggressive toward North Vietnam. In 1978, Adm. William Sharp wrote, “Why were we not permitted to win? In my view, it was partly because political and diplomatic circles in Washington were disproportionately concerned with the possibility of Chinese and Soviet intervention.”
The late Col. Harry Summers Jr. argued that the United States allowed itself “to be bluffed by China throughout most of the war.”
Undermining this critique is the fact that China and the Soviet Union played a much greater role in the Vietnam War than Americans realized at the time. Fifty percent of all Soviet foreign aid went to North Vietnam between 1965 and 1968. Soviet anti-aircraft teams in North Vietnam brought down dozens of U.S. planes. According to former Soviet colonel Alexei Vinogradov, “The Americans knew only too well that Vietnamese planes of Soviet design were often flown by Soviet pilots.”
China’s indirect role in Vietnam was even more massive and critical. It is now known that in a secret meeting between Ho Chi Minh and Mao in the summer of 1965, China agreed to enter the war directly if the United States invaded North Vietnam. As it was, China’s indirect involvement in Vietnam was its greatest military effort after the Korean War. According to Beijing, between 1965 and 1973, there were 320,000 Chinese troops assigned to North Vietnam, with a maximum of 170,000 – roughly a third of the maximum number of U.S. forces – in the south at their peak. On Sept. 23, 1968, Mao asked North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong, “Why have the Americans not made a fuss about the fact that more than 100,000 Chinese troops help you building railways, roads and airports although they know about it?”
Historian Chen Jian concludes that “without the support, the history, even the outcome of the Vietnam War, might have been different.”
Nobody can ever prove that the People’s Liberation Army would have fought U.S. troops directly if the United States had invaded North Vietnam. But the depth of China’s involvement in the war suggests that U.S. policymakers were being prudent, not pusillanimous, when they worried that China would send troops to fight directly in Vietnam as it had done in Korea. Reviewing the evidence, historian Qiang Zhai concludes, “If the actions recommended by (Col. Harry) Summers had been taken by Washington in Vietnam, there would have been a real danger of a Sino-American war with dire consequences for the world. In retrospect, it appears that Johnson had drawn the correct lesson from the Korean War and had been prudent in his approach to the Vietnam conflict.”
From today’s perspective, the Vietnam War looks less like a senseless blunder on the part of the United States than like a replay of the Korean War in a different region with a different outcome. Elsewhere in Asia, including the Philippines, Malaya and Indonesia, communist insurgencies were defeated by local governments, sometimes with the help of British or French advisers and combat troops. It may be that those insurgencies failed, while communist regimes survived in part of Korea and unified Vietnam, because of one factor: the absence of a land border with post-1949 communist China, which provided material support, manpower and deterrence of a U.S. escalation that might risk wider war with China.
Ever since the fall of Saigon, Americans have sought to draw lessons from Vietnam, but some have been short-lived. In the late 20th century, U.S. policymakers and military strategists, hoping to put the memory of Vietnam behind them, focused on swift, high-tech warfare against technologically advanced adversaries – only to painfully relearn forgotten lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan about counterinsurgency and nation-building.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, the United States sought to put Asian conflicts behind it. But the recently announced “pivot” away from the Middle East toward Asia is widely viewed as an American strategy of containing China, with which the United States fought bloody proxy wars in Vietnam and Korea in living memory. In a Sino-American conflict in the 21st century, Vietnam might even be an American ally.
As a historical event, the Vietnam War is an unchanging part of the past. As a symbol, it will continue to evolve, reflecting the values and priorities of later generations. In discussing and debating the nation’s most controversial war, Americans would do well to remember the words of the poet T.S. Eliot: “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.”
Michael Lind is the author of “Vietnam: The Necessary War.”
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Jan 21, 2013 4:26:14 GMT -7
Code Talkers - America's secret weapon
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