On Palm Sunday morning April 18 1943, 18 American P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Guadalcanal at dawn. 16 of them would continue on a 1,000 mile round trip mission across open ocean. Their target was a single Mitsubishi G4M Betty bomber. Inside that bomber was the Japanese admiral who had planned the attack on…
Category: Military Naval History
On This Day in History: May 7th, 1915
The sinking of RMS Lusitania during WWI RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat on 7 May 1915. The luxury passenger liner was crossing the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool when the German submarine U-20 fired without warning. After a second explosion – the cause of which is still debated – the ship quickly sank. It…
Know Your Real WW2 History: The War in the Pacific
Via: War Views Military History Blog Pacific War 1 – Preliminary Moves Road to the Pacific War Beginning of the war in the Pacific came unexpectedly, at least for some people. Attention was on Europe, where war had been raging for two years. Poland had been invaded by Germany and USSR in September…
On This Day in History: 480 B.C. – The Battle of Salamis
Battle of Salamis: The Greek fleet under Themistocles defeats the Persian fleet under Xerxes I For further reading on this amazing subject, I highly recommend: The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece — and Western Civilization.
Remember the U.S.S. Liberty
The Loss of Liberty – A Documentary
Know Your WW2 Naval History: Hunting the Bismarck – Part I
Hunting the Bismarck – Part I Without doubt, the Bismarck is the single best-known German warship of World War II. Large, fast, hard to sink and equipped with the latest in German radar and optics technology, it quickly earned notoriety after it sank the HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy. The panicked British response eventually brought low the German monster, but only after…
The US Submarine Force is Sunk
H/T WRSA The US Submarine Force is Sunk When you look at the larger disaster of American arms and readiness, all the services are in the hazard of being mission ineffective. The US Navy surface fleet has been an unmitigated building debacle with the Little Crappy Ships, Zumwalt class and the USS Ford carrier not performing up…
Ghost Fleet
Military unveils New Underwater Technology For those of you out there who have not yet read P.W. Singer’s 2015 WW3 novel Ghost Fleet, I highly recommend it. The rapid development of drone tech just in the last decade is both amazing and scary: Navy Releases Videos From Mysterious Drone Swarms Around Warships Off California Russia’s…
Last of the Cold War Gunfighters: Vought F-8 Crusader
Vought F-8 Crusader: Last of the Gunfighters The Vought F-8 Crusader was a single-engine, supersonic, carrier-based, high-performance jet fighter that first flew in 1955, a mere decade after the end of World War II. The Crusader was the first American fighter to break 1,000 miles per hour. The F-8 earned its testosterone-besotted moniker because…
Texas News: What Lurks Below
The Texas drought caused some World War I-era shipwrecks to resurface on a river near Beaumont Susan Kilcrease was worried a piece of U.S. history would be altered or damaged after it surfaced on the Neches River last week. Parts of several shipwrecks recently surfaced on the southeast Texas river due to lower water…