Target Centermass

Category: Military History

  • More Tributes from the Blogroll

    The grilling has commenced, war movies play on the television, and the fine folk on my blogroll keep honoring the day.

  • Memorial Day around the Blogroll

    I took a look around my favorite blogs overnight. Now, as I watch the NCAA lacrosse finals (Duke vs. Johns Hopkins) and prepare to grill, here are the tributes and honors I found.

  • Memorial Day 2005

  • Timing of Statue’s Unveiling Upsets Vets

    Nobody is questioning the honor, only the date.

    Maj. Robert Rogers, the frontiersman whose 18th century manual on guerrilla warfare has become a blueprint for Army Ranger fighting tactics, is getting what some consider a long-overdue honor: a statue in his memory. But some veterans believe unveiling the monument on Memorial Day is insensitive because Rogers was loyal to England during the Revolutionary War.

    “I think it’s a travesty that we would think about honoring a person, especially someone who fought against us, on that day,” said Bob Bearor, who served in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in the 1960s. “It’s a sacred day. … Let’s honor our dead who died for our country.”

    The life-size bronze statue is scheduled to be unveiled during a ceremony on Rogers Island in the Hudson River, 40 miles north of Albany. The island served as the base camp for Rogers’ Rangers during the late 1750s, when the British and French fought for control of North America.

    On a day set aside to pay tribute to our fallen soldiers, what is the rationale for selecting Memorial Day for the unveiling of a man who fought against our soldiers?

    Bearor says Rogers, a New Hampshire-born frontiersman who led his Rogers’ Rangers on guerrilla raids for the British during the French and Indian War, turned against his fellow Americans in the Revolutionary War.

    But organizers of the May 30 event defend the timing, saying that holding it on the holiday allows the greatest number of local dignitaries and the public to attend.

    The local newspaper, the Post-Star of Glens Falls, has editorialized against the Memorial Day ceremony, but some veterans aren’t so vexed. “I don’t see any problem,” said Harold Murray, commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Glens Falls. “That’s going quite a ways back in history.”

    I don’t care how far back in history we’re talking about, this unveiling is directly contrary to the meaning and spirit of Memorial Day. If the concern is wanting an open holiday to spur attendance, try Labor Day.

    Richard Fuller is caretaker of the private portion of Rogers Island where the statue will stand. The property is owned by retired construction executive Frank Nastasi of Syosset. Both men are veterans and neither believes that holding the event on Memorial Day shows disrespect for America’s war dead, Fuller said.

    But the head of a group of former and active-duty Rangers argues the although tribute may be well-intended, it is problematic.

    “Memorial Day? They’re not thinking that through,” said retired Army Capt. Steve Maguire, president of the U.S. Army Ranger Association. “It just seems like I would try a different day.”

    Although he doesn’t deny Rogers’ military legacy, Bearor, a French and Indian War re-enactor and author of several books on the conflict, questions holding a Memorial Day tribute to a man who George Washington didn’t trust.

    Fearing Rogers was a British spy, Washington turned down his request to join the Continental Army at the outset of the American Revolution. Rogers went on to raise a company of loyalist rangers, but failed to have the impact he had in the previous war. A heavy drinker, he died a pauper in England in 1795 and lies buried somewhere beneath the streets of London.

    “Even the English don’t look at him as a hero,” Bearor said. “They buried him in an unmarked grave.”

    Honor the man as his contributions deserve. Just not Memorial Day.

  • Last WWI Cavalryman Dies

    And off a brave man goes to Fiddler’s Green.

    The last surviving British cavalryman from the First World War has died at the age of 108.

    Albert Marshall lied about his age to sign up for service in the Great War and even volunteered to return to the front line after being injured and sent home to convalesce.

    In 1998, he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest honour, in recognition of his gallantry.

    He was believed to be the second oldest man in England.

    His son, John Marshall, 73, said his father died in his sleep on Monday at his home in Ashtead, Surrey, from pneumonia and old age.

    He added: “He went to join up (in 1915) and the man behind the desk said ‘How old are you lad?”’.

    “My father replied 17, but the man said ‘Would you leave the room’. He went outside then came back in after a bit and the man asked him again how old he was. ‘Eighteen,’ my father said, and was allowed to join up.

    “We as a family never knew a thing about his war experiences. We knew he was in the First World War, obviously, but it was not a subject spoken about.

    “It was only when he joined the veterans’ association and all the media attention he received after his 100th birthday that we learnt about what he did.”

    Mr Marshall, known as Smiler, was born on March 15, 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, in Elmstead Market, a small Essex village.

    He had a life-long passion for working with horses and in January 1915, aged 17, joined the Essex Yeomanry.

    His carer, Graham Stark, a volunteer from the World War One Veterans’ Association, said: “The young men that joined up didn’t think they were being brave.

    “The old Victorian values just kicked in. People didn’t put themselves first – it was a duty. We consider them heroes but they wouldn’t consider themselves in that way.”

    ‘Tis a far different story than what is so common these days.

    The soldier took part in his first major battle during the autumn of 1915 at Loos in northern France.

    Mr Marshall once said: “The cavalry’s job in winter was to hold the front line. There were three lines of trenches, mud and devastation.”

    Mr Stark said the old soldier told him he worked in small mounted units of four. One man would hold the reins of the other three horses while his comrades fought the enemy on foot.

    While serving in Flanders he was shot through the hand and spent 1917 convalescing in a Newcastle hospital but volunteered to return to the front and was back in position by spring 1918, now with the Machine Gun Corps.

    Sleep well, Albert Marshall. You’ve earned the rest.

    By the way, Fiddler’s Green is a reference to an old poem, embraced by American cavalrymen and carried on today by some tankers and scouts. It goes as follows:

    Fiddler’s Green

    Half way down the trail to Hell
    In a shady, meadow green,
    Are the souls of all dead troopers camped
    Near a good, old-time canteen,
    And this eternal resting place
    Is known as Fiddler’s Green.

    Marching past, straight through to Hell
    The Infantry are seen,
    Accompanied by the Engineers,
    Artillery, and Marines,
    For none but the shades of Cavalrymen
    Dismount at Fiddler’s Green.

    Though some go curving down the trail
    To seek a warmer scene,
    No trooper ever gets to Hell
    Ere he’s emptied his canteen.
    And so rides back to drink again
    With friends at Fiddler’s Green.

    And so when horse and man go down
    Beneath a saber keen,
    Or in a roaring charge or fierce melee
    You stop a bullet clean,
    And the hostiles come to get your scalp

    Just empty your canteen,
    And put your pistol to your head
    And go to Fiddler’s Green.

  • Fall of Saigon — Thirty Years Later

    Vietnam Marks War’s End

    Tens of thousands of people gathered here today to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war with the fall of Saigon to Communist forces and the defeat of the US-backed South Vietnamese regime.

    Gala celebrations got under way in the southern economic capital, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, as people massed on the street in front of the former regime’s presidential palace, now called Reunification Palace.

    Top leaders including Communist Party General Secretary Nong Duc Manh, state President Tran Duc Luong and Prime Minister Phan Van Khai were joined by Raul Castro, Cuba’s defence minister and brother of President Fidel Castro at the ceremony.

    “The victory of April 30, 1975 opened a new era for the Vietnamese people. This glory and this victory belongs first of all to the heroic Vietnamese people,” declared Nguyen Minh Triet, politburo member and party secretary of Ho Chi Minh City.

    The glory and victory of the invading North, the actual aggressors along with their Soviet allies, were not to be shared by all of the Vietnamese people, as thousands were subsequently killed by the conquering communists and thousands upon thousands more suffered for almost two generations under the dictatorship of a gasping, dying ideology that now turns to the “aggressor” U.S. for friendly cooperation.

    The day is also marked rather differently by John and the denizens of Argghhh!!!. I especially direct you to the remembrances of the day in the comments, where several, including some vets, have posted their memories of the moment. Here’s a painful one from John:

    I just stood behind my Dad in the family room, watching the blood flow from the 5 Purple Hearts his tour in Vietnam garnered… as a little bit of his soul leaked out of each one, as he sat watching the television.

    In his book Summons of the Trumpet, an excellent history of the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, Dave R. Palmer did not write of the glory of the fall of Saigon but instead looked at how the U.S. failed an ally and scrambled to save what and whom it could.

    Meanwhile, with the time bought by the ARVN stand above Saigon, the United States was able to evacuate most Americans and tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who were related to Americans or were marked for death because of their affiliation with various U.S. activities in South Vietnam. The last group out was extracted in a day-long helicopter shuttle started after North Vietnamese gunners began shelling the city. Two American marines were killed when a round struck the building which had once housed the MACV headquarters. The last to die in the long war, neither had been born when the United States began to back Diem with advisors in 1954.

    When the final chopper lifted off, carrying the last marine guards, it signalled the humiliating end to a once bright American dream of preventing a communist takeover of South Vietnam. The trumpet was silent.

    That is the true heritage of the day. And the U.S. military has unfairly been forced to labor vigorously to salvage its reputation — globally, historically and in the eyes of the American people — ever since that day thirty years ago, a day when the American military did not lose but the U.S. did.

  • Gallipoli Dead Remembered at Dawn

    Ninety years ago tomorrow, one of the bloodiest blunders in military history began. At dawn, the World War I star-crossed campaign of Gallipoli will be honored.

    The bloody World War I landing of Australian and New Zealand troops in Gallipoli will be remembered at a solemn dawn ceremony on Monday.

    Australian Prime Minister John Howard, his New Zealand counterpart Helen Clark and Britain’s Prince Charles will make the pilgrimage to the Turkish bay.

    The campaign was aimed at capturing Istanbul and providing a supply line to Russia 90 years ago.

    But more than 100,000, including 20,000 Irish and British, never returned home.

    The site of the down service is named Anzac cove after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who landed there on 25 April 1915.

    Thousands of visitors from the two countries are expected to attend the largest gathering ever at the site.

    The campaign ended eight months later, when the Allied Forces abandoned the peninsula.

    “To walk on the battlefields of Gallipoli is to walk on ground where so much blood was shed it has become almost sacred soil,” Helen Clark said at a ceremony to honour Turkey’s fallen troops on Sunday.

    “For New Zealand as for Australia it was at Gallipoli that our young nations came of age.”

    Go read for much more on the tragic campaign. I would also recommend the Mel Gibson flick of the same name.

    I, for one, will mark the day with the haunting tune “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” by the Pogues.

    But the band played Waltzing Matilda
    As we stopped to bury our slain
    We buried ours and the Turks buried theirs
    Then we started all over again

    Full lyrics can be found here.

  • An Anniversary Sadly Marked

    Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the discovery by British troops of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the site where Anne Frank spent her final days.

    Thanks to Alan at Petrified Truth for the reminder and this set of relevant links.

  • A Particular Soldier’s Letters Home

    The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s David M. Shribman has the tale of letters from a certain World War II soldier, letters that are just now surfacing.

    The sad thing about our time is that war letters have become a genre. We’ve all read them. They’re in books, they’re online. They’re also in our own homes. In this country, in this age, is there a family that does not have a file of letters from a soldier, sailor or aviator tucked away in the closet or the attic? In some of our homes, those files get thicker every day.

    Right now there’s a new set of war letters circulating. Not exactly new, it turns out; they’ve been around for 60 years. But almost nobody knew about them, including the fellow who wrote them. They have been hidden away, until now.

    They are the war letters of an Army grunt named Robert Joseph Dole, and the people who first looked through the trove inevitably described them as “extraordinary.” But they aren’t extraordinary at all. They’re ordinary, which in the end makes them even more extraordinary.

    Yes, that Robert Dole. Former senator, vice-presidential and presidential candidate.

    Go read more about the words from the pen of a great man, and how those words are just now reaching the public as the man confronts adversity again.

  • Dying for Another Tet II

    After the second recent attack on Abu Ghraib, I blogged that the terrorists were trying to use the dramatic attacks to create another Tet.

    The terrorists, despite vows to the contrary, had to watch an Iraqi citizenry give the finger to fear and vote for their own future. The attacks against U.S. troops have repeatedly failed and casualties are declining. It is time for the terrorists to turn back to the Viet Nam playbook – they need another Tet.

    Now, one week and another glorious failure by the terrorists, this one an assault on a Marine encampment near the Syrian border, columnist Austin Bay reaches the same conclusion.

    While bomb attacks on unarmed Iraqi civilians continue (particularly against Shiites), public opinion now matters in Iraq, and the thugs’ public slaughters have killed too many Iraqi innocents. January’s election dramatically lifted public morale and changed the media focus — suddenly, democracy looks possible, and an Arab Muslim democracy is Al Qaeda’s worst nightmare.

    Hence the “Tet gamble.” Bombs haven’t cowed the Iraqi people — but perhaps the American people will lose heart and buckle if Al Qaeda concocts a military surprise.

    U.S. forces, however, are “hard targets” — unlike civilians standing in line to vote, U.S. troops shoot back. Since 9-11, Al Qaeda has never won a military engagement at the platoon level (30 men) or higher. Coalition forward operating bases are heavily fortified.

    But the Tet fantasy is so compelling.

    Go give it a read. Hat tip to In the Bullpen‘s Chad Evans, who adds some solid insight to expand on Bay’s column.

    Al Qaida is not just losing because they are outnumbered, have inferior technology to that of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers, rely on old weaponry funneled in through Iraq’s borders, the fighters have the marksmanship of a virgin hunter, are suffering from heat exhaustion because they have to hide their identity or even because they have had their leaders captured or killed at an alarming rate. Most importantly, Al Qaida and similar terrorist groups are losing in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the entire world because the world public rejects their ideology of hatred.