“While their contributions to the final victory may seem miniscule when compared to those of other world powers, their participation is nonetheless noteworthy.” THE NATIONS OF LATIN AMERICA are not often counted among the foremost contributors to the Second World War. Countries like Chile and Uruguay largely stayed on the sidelines until the war’s final…
Category: Military History
Brush-Up On Your History: The Crusades and Syria
[Taken from the blog Bionic Mosquito.] The Battle for Syria Part I There ran down the edges of the desert a string of cities and their connecting road – Aleppo, Homs, Damascus…. As long as these cities remain in enemy hands, the seacoast (Lebanon and Israel) will not be secure. But this isn’t…
Espionage Non-Fiction Book Review: The Rice Paddy Navy
Osprey Publishing; November 2012; 316 pp. Before Navy SEALs stormed mansions in Pakistan, the notion of sailors waging war on land sounded ludicrous to many. So when Gen. George C. Marshall learned that Navy captain Milton Miles intended to train an army of Chinese guerillas to disrupt Japanese army operations in China and create a…
Iranian Basij Fighting Forces Bolster the Assad Regime in Syria
This fanatical Para-Military Volunteer pipeline stretches from Tehran to Damascus Tehran downplays its presence in Syria, but its volunteers are hard to hide. The most obvious clue as to their presence is the fact that Iranian troops have died in the conflict, including high-profile commanders such as Brig. Gen. Hossein Hamedani of the Iranian Revolutionary…
Military Weapons from the Past: The MAT-49
Although it does not mention it here, this weapon was used quite frequently by American MACVSOG and LRRP Units in Vietnam. John L. Plasters’ excellent book, Secret Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines with the Elite Warriors of SOG, talks about it. Plaster also wrote one of the best books IMO on Long Range Shooting and Sniping…
World War II History: Legacies, Short Audio Clips of the Second World War
Recently a close friend told me about this website Audioburst that features short audio clips of Veterans recounting memories of their experiences in World War Two. I urge you to visit this website and take some time listening to some of these stories. They are all very short, most of them under 2 or 3 minutes,…
Military History: The U.S. Navy’s “Douche” Boat Washed Away Viet-Cong Bunkers
In the early morning hours of June 10, 1969, U.S. Navy vessels sailed down a stretch of the Vam Co Dong River in South Vietnam. The force included a special weapon sailors called a “douche boat,” which could literally wash away Viet Cong fortifications. “My assigned mission was to search out and destroy … bunkers,…
How NATO Can Disrupt Russia’s New Way of War
Here are a few things the West can do against Moscow’s potent combo of special forces and electronic warfare. The Ukrainian soldiers peered over the cold dirt edge of their trench. The artillery had abated, but the whine of a nearby spotter UAV promised its imminent return. In the distance, they could see camouflaged spetsnaz…
World War II History: Hitler, The One That Got Away?
Quentin Tarantino reimagined the end of World War II as only he could — with Hitler being machine-gunned to death in a movie theater by Jewish GIs. Inglourious Basterds, the director’s 2009 eight-time-Oscar-nominated moneymaker of a flick, made absolutely no effort to tell the truth, and maybe we’re all better off for it. But film…
World War Two History: Landing at Scarlet Beach
This sketch by Roy Cecil Hodgkinson depicts the situation at the south end of Scarlet Beach in New Guinea on 22nd September 1943 – half an hour after the first wave of Operation Diminish had landed. ‘Diminish’ was the name given to the initial phase of the Huon Peninsula campaign of the Second World War,…