Yeah, I know that makes me suspect in the World of Guys.  It also makes me suspect in the world of military historians.  You want talk about war movies?  Sit around with a bunch of historians of war and wait.  Ten minutes or so into the conversation, I promise that someone will drop in a quote from Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, or Patton …

This post originally appeared on World War II magazine’s Front and Center blog; click here to read the rest of this post and find more blog entries on the Second World War by Rob Citino.

And so, rather than discuss issues of strategy and tactics this time out, praising this general and criticizing that one, identifying “correct” and “incorrect” decisions made by both sides during World War II, let me turn to the words of that great American artist and philosopher, Harry Lillis (“Bing”) Crosby …

This post originally appeared on World War II magazine’s Front and Center blog; click here to read the rest of this post and find more blog entries on the Second World War by Rob Citino.

Talk about stating the obvious. We can call Hitler many things. Fanatic. Megalomaniac. Warmonger. War criminal. Mass murderer. No one fits the bill like the Führer.

And yet, there was one rather obvious crime that this world-class criminal refused to commit. And I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why. My students ask me the question every single semester, and after 25 years of college teaching, I have to confess that still don’t have a really satisfactory answer.

Why didn’t Hitler use poison gas in World War II?

This post originally appeared on World War II magazine’s Front and Center blog; click here to read the rest of this post and find more blog entries on the Second World War by Rob Citino.

Small unit leaders would do well to remember the events of January 22-23, 1879, when a handful of British soldiers, alone and without the benefits of today’s technology, faced certain annihilation against an overwhelmingly large Zulu force. I am speaking of course of B Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th Regiment of Foot and the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in present-day South Africa. That engagement demonstrated what a properly trained and disciplined company-sized force can achieve against impossible odds. Lieutenants John Chard and Gonville Bromhead successfully defended the mission station with a force of 139 British soldiers against an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 Zulu warriors. By the battle’s end, the station was still in British hands, and the Zulus had suffered a tremendous defeat. Additionally, the British won 11 Victoria Crosses – the most ever awarded for a single engagement.

While there are certainly differences between the Battle of Rorke’s Drift and the current conflict in Afghanistan, there are a number of important lessons to be learned by small unit leaders. First and foremost is the use of intelligence platforms for the commander to develop an understanding of the battlefield, as well as the enemy’s composition, disposition and intent. Chard and Bromhead did not have access to the advanced collection platforms available today and instead relied upon human-based methods of surveillance and reconnaissance before, and after the battle. Chard ordered soldiers to summit the dominant local terrain feature, the Oskarberg, to act as an early warning listening post/observation post (LP/OP) before the battle to warn of the Zulu’s approach. A second soldier was placed atop the hospital for the same purpose. Scouts were also employed after the battle to search for stay-behind forces amongst the Zulu dead and purge the battlefield of weapons.

A great deal has been written since the start of the Global War on Terror regarding the need for soldiers to know, and more importantly understand, the culture of their adversaries. This knowledge goes well beyond the polite aspects of cultural awareness. It helps soldiers anticipate how, where, when, why and in what manner the enemy will fight. Clearly, both Chard and Bromhead were familiar with Zulu military tactics and culture that contributed to their decision to stay and defend the mission station rather than confront the Zulu force in the open plains.

Perhaps the most important lesson current soldiers can learn from Chard and Bromhead are the advantages provided by well-trained and disciplined soldiers. The soldiers of B Company were posted to an isolated location and left behind as the remainder of the regiment marched off to battle against the Zulus at Isandlawana. Rather than allow their unit to fall into complacency or a state of ill-preparedness, B Company’s leaders drilled their soldiers daily under the watchful eyes of their non-commissioned officers. These drills ensured B Company was both physically fit and proficient with their bayonet skills, both of which paid off during the Zulu’s human wave assaults. The battle raged for hours with little respite for the defenders. Lesser men would have crumbled.

B Company’s training also showed itself in the marksmanship exhibited during the engagement. Although official distances are impossible to verify, the Martini-Henry can effectively fire well beyond 1,000 yards. Post-battle assessments confirmed deadly rifle shots at over 700 yards. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the soldiers did not utilize volley fire under the direction of their superiors. The men selected and engaged targets individually – further testament to their preparation and self-control.

The United States and NATO are now entering their eighth year of combat against radical Muslim insurgents in Afghanistan. It is a given that American and allied soldiers will fight in company or smaller-sized units against an enemy that can achieve local force superiority. Those soldiers must stand ready, through superior training and iron-willed discipline, to meet that threat.

Davis: You describe the 1967 film about Eddie Chapman, Triple Cross, in your book as a rather poor film that bore only a superficial relation to the truth.

Macintyre: I think it tried to turn Chapman into a James Bond character, which he was not, and missed the opportunity to make a really interesting and challenging film about the nature of heroism. It was essentially propaganda, in my view.

Davis: I thought it was a good thriller, if poor history. The cast – Christopher Plummer, Yul Brynner, Gert Frobe and others – were very good, in my view. Frobe portrayed Auric Goldfinger in the film Goldfinger and Triple Cross‘ director, Terence Young, as you know, directed the first two Bond films and the fourth in the series.

Macintyre: The film was entirely inaccurate, and despite some very good actors, I found the acting very wooden.

Davis: As you wrote a book, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, do you find it curious that Young knew both Chapman and Fleming?

Macintyre: I think there is a direct link between Chapman and the film version of Bond, in the sense that Connery modeled his performance on Young, who in turn modeled his own image on his former friend and flatmate, Eddie Chapman.

Davis: In part, yes, but I see more of Fleming’s Bond from the novels in the early films. Did Fleming know Chapman?

Macintyre: Not as far as I know.

Davis: Have you received any offers to make a film based on your book?

Macintyre: The film rights have been bought by New Line (Warner Bros.) with Tom Hank’s production company Playtone as co-producer. The first script has now been completed.

Davis: What actor would you like see portray Chapman?

Macintyre: The actor I would dearly love to play Chapman is James McAvoy. He is not only a brilliant actor, and British, but he has that callow, slightly dodgy expression, while being extremely good-looking. That would fit Chapman perfectly.

Davis: How, and why, should we remember Chapman?

Macintyre: As both an example and warning: he was a very bad man who managed, for one very brief period of his life, to find the inner mettle to do something very good indeed.

Davis: Are you working on a new book?

Macintyre: Yes, another wartime espionage and deception story, coming out next year. I cannot say any more, as it is under wraps!

Davis: I read and enjoy your Times column online. Does being a columnist for a major British newspaper that maintains historical archives help you in your research of books on historical people?

Macintyre: I have found the Times archive hugely useful for all my books, but these archives are now full digitized and accessible to the public, so working for the Times does not really give the advantage it once did!

Davis: I truly enjoyed Agent ZigZag and I look forward to reading your new book as well.

Read parts one and two of the interview.

Paul Davis also writes an American crime blog for GreatHistory.com. You can visit Paul Davis’ web site here . You can reach him at pauldavisoncrime@comcast.net

Men (and today, women) fight wars.  They are, we are always told, ordinary individuals who find themselves in the most extraordinary situations imaginable.

The Battle of Midway was one of those situations … one of the war’s great stories was the amazing experience of Ensign George H. Gay, Jr. of Waco, TX.  He was the pilot of a Devastator torpedo bomber in VT-8, and like every single man in his squadron, he experienced the terror of being shot down at sea …

This post originally appeared on World War II magazine’s Front and Center blog; click here to read the rest of this post and find more blog entries on the Second World War by Rob Citino.

All of the major media outlets pulled their correspondents from the city by Thanksgiving, but the fight was far from over. Some insurgents had gone to ground inside the bunker-like houses within the city while others fled to the countryside. The fighting inside the city would not really end until Christmas, and the hunt for insurgents would go on for months.

Below is an excerpt from my upcoming book, New Dawn The story is of one of the fights in early December, along the Euphrates River:

On December 5, 2004, Dan Wittnam’s Small Craft Company went out again on a sweep along the Euphrates River, east of Ramadi with engineers from Colonel Patton’s 44th Engineer Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division. After a productive day of clearing caches, the boats turned west to return to Camp Blue Diamond. And again, the enemy had set up a large ambush to attack the Marines as they returned to their base. They were only seven or eight kilometers from Blue Diamond when the insurgents attacked with Rocket-Propelled Grenades (RPG) and heavy machine guns.

An RPG whizzed across the water and hit the side of Staff Sergeant Iversen’s boat. It pierced the hull and severed the port fuel line, killing his port engine. The starboard engine took a round in its block. The engine sputtered and coughed and Iversen’s boat slowed to a crawl. Now, they were sitting ducks in the hot zone. Iversen’s crew lit up both sides of the river, allowing the other boats to safely navigate through the ambush, but four soldiers had been hit, one in the neck. Pfc Andrew M. Ward was bleeding out and in urgent need of surgical attention. Iversen called Vasey for help and Doc Rubio jumped to Iversen’s boat and started working on the wounded.

Rubio had two of the soldiers bandaged before he learned of the critically-wounded soldier in the front of the boat. Rubio rushed to Ward’s side. Ward was bleeding profusely, but was still alert. Soldiers and Marines quickly moved Ward to the back of the boat and Rubio went to work. He knew that if he didn’t stop the bleeding, this young soldier would die. Rubio quickly sliced into Ward’s neck, located the damaged artery and clamped off the bleeding with and IV hose clamp. Just as he finished, Iversen said, “Doc, we need to move the people off to another boat.” Parrello, driving Vasey’s boat, was already alongside.

“What?” This was not the time to be moving this soldier. Rubio didn’t know that Iversen’s engines were nearly dead and that they were still in the kill zone. Rubio was so focused on treating the severely wounded soldier that he didn’t notice the bullets whizzing over his head. If Rubio had learned anything in his years with the Marines, it was that when you are told to do something, you don’t ask why, you just do it. Rubio rallied the soldiers around him. They lifted Ward and Rubio straddled the two boats. Rounds crackled by Rubio, standing with one foot on Vasey’s boat, the other on Iversen’s.

“Oh my God, I cannot believe I’m doing this.” He thought.

[1] Petty Officer First Class, Hospital Corpsman 1, E6 is equivalent to a Marine Staff Sergeant.

Watch for New Dawn: the Battles for Fallujah by Richard S. Lowry (author of Marines in the Garden of Eden and The Gulf War Chronicles). It tells the entire story of Operation Phantom Fury and will be in bookstores in May of 2010. Visit www.RichardSLowry.com to learn more about Richard and his work.

Wanted by the police for a safecracking job in Scotland prior to the start of World War II, Chapman fled to the Island of Jersey. The Nazis captured Jersey in 1939 and imprisoned Chapman. An accomplished con man as well as a safecracker, Chapman convinced the Abwehr, the German foreign intelligence service, that he would make a fine spy for them.

The Abwehr trained Chapman in wireless radio, codes, explosives and other spy tradecraft. Chapman parachuted back into Great Britain in 1941 with orders to destroy an airplane factory.

Once on the ground, Chapman quickly turned himself in to MI5, the British Security Service. For the rest of the war, Chapman operated as a double agent. He ended the war with a German Iron Cross and a British pardon for his pre-war crimes.

Ben Macintyre’s Agent ZigZag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal tells the amazing story of Chapman’s double life as a Nazi spy and British agent.

Below is part two of my interview:

Davis: How did you research your book? Did you interview people who knew Chapman?

Macintyre: The research material was a combination of documentary material from the files, interviews with living associates and relatives of Chapman, memoirs, diaries, photographs and other sources.

Davis: Did you receive cooperation from the British Security Services when you were researching the book?

Macintyre: Yes, principally from MI5, which even provided an additional, missing file just before publication. For a secretive organization, the Security Service could not have been more open.

Davis: Do you believe Chapman was treated poorly by the British Government after the war?

Macintyre: In some ways, yes. He certainly thought so. On the other hand, he had manipulated his handlers thoroughly, and escaping prosecution for his many crimes was probably reward enough. He was never going to get a medal, however much he thought he deserved one.

Davis: You also wrote another book,  The Napoleon of Crime, a book about Adam Worth, the criminal that Conan Doyle modeled Sherlock Holmes’ nemeses Professor Moriarty on. Do criminals and con men make good subjects for books?

Macintyre: I certainly seem to be attracted, as subjects, to these people who live on the fringes of society. I find I am far more interested in the unknown and the uncertain than the great and the good: and people like Chapman, who managed to be great and very bad at the same time.

Davis: Although their characters and actions are certainly interesting, criminals do lie and cheat for a living. Did you have any difficulties separating Chapman’s boasts and lies from the truth?

Macintyre: Yes: he wrote an autobiography that was largely fiction, and maintained many of his own myths until his death.

More of my interview with Ben Macintyre in my next blog.

Paul Davis’s web site can be read here He can be reached at pauldavisoncrime@comcast.net

This is an additional installment in the series of articles considering how the United States armed forces became the dominant military force in the world – not just quantitatively, but qualitatively. Last time I wrote about how the US Army made some inspired procurement decisions in the wake of the Vietnam War and how those decisions paid off in the 1990s and 2000s. But what about the Air Force?

Turns out, they made some smart equipment buys as well, as good or better than the Army’s. That round of aircraft procurement decisions provided the Air Force with the foundation for a world-class fighting organization.

The Air Force stumbled into the air war over Vietnam. It had banked so heavily on long-range missile fire that it fielded a generation of fighters without guns – then found itself in an aerial environment so confused and crowded that it had to close to visual range before engaging to make sure of friend or foe, as a back-up to some pretty good electronic Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) technology. Once that close, the fight became a dogfight, and the Air Force scrambled to get guns back on their aircraft.

The large aircraft losses over Vietnam meant that a new round of aircraft procurement was necessary in any case. Experience in Vietnam persuaded the Air Force that air-to-air capability must be central to any new aircraft design. Even aircraft tasked with ground attack and provided with escorting fighters had to be capable of self-defense – the enormous loses of F-105 Thunderchiefs (382 lost, nearly half of the entire production run of slightly over 800) over Vietnam demonstrated that.

Two new combat aircraft came from that re-examination: the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon. The F-15 was intended as a high-end air superiority fighter. It delivered. It has great avionics, amazing power, can carry lots of ordnance, and has proved easy to upgrade. The F-16 was a more all-purpose fighter-bomber, but its light weight and agility made it a good platform in an aerial fight, and its relatively low cost and ease of maintenance made it a much-exported aircraft. The F-16 became, in effect, the standard all-purpose fighter of NATO in the 1980s and 1990s and remains in wide use today.

The Air Force also adopted the A-10 Thunderbolt II in this period as a dedicated ground-attack aircraft. Its design violated the “air-to-air first” philosophy of the F-15 and F-16 and it is safe to say that the Air Force has had mixed feelings about the A-10 ever since. It is a slow but heavily protected aircraft, enabling it to survive in the low altitude ground attack environment. By the early 1990s, all A-10s had been shifted to the reserve component (Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard), and the Air Force intended to replace it with F-16s optimized for close support. The First Gulf War changed all that. The 192 A-10s that fought in the war turned in such a great performance that plans for the “strike” F-16 were shelved. The A-10 remains in service and will remain so until replaced by the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

The F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter was also a product of this period, making its first flight in 1981. Talk about a revolutionary aircraft! It even looked spooky. Few planes in history have so epitomized the application of cutting edge technology. The last F-117 has been retired from service, being superseded by the more capable (and stealthy) F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, but it left an indelible mark on aviation history.

Finally, and perhaps the most revolutionary of them all, was the E-3 Sentry aerial warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft. Based on the Boeing 707 – one of the great commercial aircraft of all time – the E-3 Sentry changed the face of aerial combat forever. It entered squadron service in 1977 and we are still figuring out new ways to use the capability an airborne radar and command control system provides.

That Was Then, This Is Now

Man, they just don’t build ‘em like that any more.

No, really, they don’t. Something has gone terribly wrong with aircraft procurement since then.

We have new generations of aircraft which are so expensive we cannot procure enough to even come close to replacing existing aircraft as they wear out. The B-2 Spirit bomber has a per-unit all-up procurement cost of over two billion dollars.

Two billion dollars per bomber!

As a result, aircraft buys are tiny – and not because we are starving the military. Our defense budget is larger than that of every other country on the planet combined, and we still can only afford a total of twenty B-2 Spirits. We have been buying a trickle of F-22 Raptors each year, and only managing that – as its cost escalated through the stratosphere – by robbing the procurement funds for the F-35 Lightning II.

The decision this year to shut down F-22 Raptor production and re-channel the available funds into F-35 Lightning II production shows an emerging glimmer of sanity. Unit costs on the Raptor have ended up at over 300 million dollars per aircraft, although if we cranked up the assembly lines and really started grinding them out we could get that down to about 150 million per aircraft. (Oh boy!)

The F-35 is cheaper, more capable in the ground attack role, and is vastly better in air-to-air combat than anything flying, or likely to fly for the next thirty years – with the obvious exception of the Raptor. We’ll be able to make larger buys of F-35s, and that’s a step in the right direction, but it’s a baby step. We need to start making great big steps, and soon.

In 2007 we had to temporarily ground 700 older F-15 Eagles pending upgrades. We are currently in the unbelievable – and to the best of my knowledge unprecedented – position of having an air force which has an average aircraft age older than the average age of the warships currently in service with the US Navy!

Come on, guys.

Although Christopher Plummer portrayed Chapman as a crook and Bond-like character, the real Chapman, I would later discover, was a bit more complicated.

Chapman was imprisoned by the Nazis after they captured the Channel Island of Jersey in 1939. A safecracker and con man, he convinced his captors that he would spy for them against the British.

He was trained in spy tradecraft and then dropped by parachute into England, where he promptly contacted British Intelligence. His double game began.

Chapman would go on to be awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans and pardoned for his past crimes by the British.

Ben Macintyre’s Agent ZigZag: The True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal (Harmony Books), is a well- written and researched book that shines a light on Chapman’s character and his incredible actions during the war.

I contacted Macintyre, a writer-at-large and associate editor of the London Times, and interviewed him about his book.

Davis: Why did you write a book about Eddie Chapman?

Macintyre: I wrote the book for, essentially, three reasons: the obituary we published in The Times when Chapman died in 1996 intrigued me: it seemed that the obituary writer really did not believe all the things Chapman had claimed about his life, and that if I could find out the truth, it would be fascinating. I began collecting material on Chapman from that point on. Then, in 2002, there was a change of philosophy in MI5 about the release of secret material, and gradually the files on Agent Zigzag began to be released to the National Archives. The final reason was that I became utterly obsessed by Chapman, who seemed to me to be a character unlike any I had come across before: entirely dishonest, resolutely selfish, opportunistic and manipulative, but also charming, generous and astonishingly brave.

Davis: What did he accomplish as a double agent? Did his spying greatly aid the war effort?

Macintyre: In practical terms, Chapman’s main achievement was in diverting the pilotless V1 bombs that Hitler unleashed on London in the last stages of the war, by sending messages indicating false positions for the impact of the bombs. By convincing the Germans that the bombs were overshooting, the plan was to persuade them to shorten the range, thus ensuring that the bombs fell in under- or unpopulated areas. It was extraordinarily successful. He also extracted a great deal of money from the Abwehr, provided MI5 with a complete picture of how the enemy espionage machine worked and general helped to convince the Abwehr that it had a fully functioning spy network in Britain, when it had nothing of the sort.

More of the interview with Ben Macintyre in my next blog.

Paul Davis also writes an American crime blog for GreatHistory.com.

Paul Davis’ web site can be accessed here He can reached at pauldavisoncrime@comcast.net.