Military History

Posted by Christopher Eger

When Imperial Japan invaded the Royal Dutch East Indies (what is now Indonesia) at the start of World War Two in the Pacific, Admiral Helfrich was the man charged with stopping them. Born 1886 to a native Indonesian mother in the islands that would be his home for decades, he started his naval career in 1908 as an officer. Steady appointments and service in the Far East brought him to the rank of Vice Admiral and commander of all Dutch vessels in the Pacific in October 1939. His small surface force consisted of a few light cruisers and destroyers. This surface force, under his subordinate Rear Admiral Kaarl Doorman, joined the impossible ABDA fleet on the suicide mission to try and stop the Japanese in the Java Sea. After the combined fleet was annihilated in February 1942 Helfrich was made Operational Commander of all Allied Naval Forces in the Southwest Pacific until the Allied command was dissolved.

The Admirals small fleet of submarines sank or damaged no less than 18 Japanese ships in the first ninety days of the war- including Lt AJ Bussemakers O-16 which sank three Japanese troopships in a single day. This feat brought Helfrich the nickname of "Ship-a-day Helfrich" when these much needed victories were announced and renounced in every newspaper across the Pacific.

Bearing stigma from the loss of his surface fleet, the rest of the war was uneventful for the Admiral who rode a desk in Ceylon for the next few years. At the end of the war he was made commander of all Dutch Ships afloat both in the Pacific and in Europe (there were not many) and was present for the surrender of the Japanese aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor, by far getting the last laugh.

Posted by Christopher Eger

When Japan opened World War Two in the Pacific it did it like a fat kid through cake. The Emperor’s Imperial war machine swept threw the Philippines, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Guam, Malaysia and Singapore within the first two months of the campaign. One road bump on their conquest was the naval forces of the Royal Dutch East Indies. The small force of light cruisers and destroyers was annihilated taking along their Admiral Karel Doorman and a number of allied ships to the bottom at the Battle of the Jave Sea.



This left the Royal Dutch Naval minesweeper HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen, now trapped in Japanese controlled waters, in a very tight spot. The ship was modern but was very small (186 feet long- 460 tons displacement, about the size of a gunboat). Its armament was of token value so it could not fight its way out. Designed to poke around mine fields she was not fast enough to outrun the Japanese Navy. The only option left was to outthink them.



The ships crew disguised the boat as a tropical island, covering it with jungle foliage to make it blend in with the surrounding inlets of the Indonesian coastline. By staying hidden during the day in such a manner and moving only at night the Abraham Crijnssen was able to make Australia and survived the war.

Posted by Christopher Eger

1983, lets go back. It was the time of Sally Ride, Flashdance, and Michael Jackson’s Beat It. It was also the scene of a number of sensational international incidents that progressively cranked up the tensions between the East and the West to breaking point. In March Ronald Regan called the Soviets Union “the focus of evil in a modern world’ publicly then proposed Star Wars nuclear missile defense program. In September the Soviets downed Korean Airlines Flight 007.On October 25th more than 200 American Marines were killed in Beirut when their barracks was attacked. Less than a week later the US invaded Grenada, fighting Soviet proxy state Cuba over airstrips, medical students and nutmeg.





Then came Exercise Able Archer 83 on November 2, 1983. The exercise involved a few things that really creeped the Soviets out. It was designed to simulate a period of escalation leading to a nuclear exchange. When the exercise started the huge increase in NATO radio traffic, using a new code system that the Soviets ELINT people were unfamiliar with lit a lot of fires inside the Kremlin. This phase of the exercise mimicked what the Soviets knew of the actual upgrade from DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 3. When the NATO forces moved to a simulated DEFCON 2 on November 9th, the Soviets placed their own forces on actual alert, thinking this could be the real deal.





Luckily western observers noticed this and canceled the more provocative elements of the final exercise which was to include top leadership (Ronald Regan, etc) to disappear from public eye and go into a bunker. That last step may have led to a Soviet first strike and we would all be in a much more radioactive millennium.

Posted by Christopher Eger

Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger de Saint Exupéry was born to a wealthy family with ties to old France in 1900. At 21 he joined the army in a cavalry regiment but quickly transitioned to the fledging inter-war era French Air Force. After leaving the army in the mid-1920s he became a pioneering mail serve aviator and the author of many books including the Little Prince Le Petit Prince.

When war broke out in WWII and his country was overrun he joined the Free French Air force. As a reconnaissance pilot in an American made P-38 Lightening he was lost on a flight over the Mediterranean from Corsica July 31, 1944. His flight was to inspect the southern French coast for the coming allied invasion. For more than sixty years his ultimate fate has been a mystery. A drinker and branded a traitor by the Petain government in France it was thought that the author may have even committed suicide.

Now apparently it has been solved. In 1998 a fisherman found a bracelet given the author-aviator by his wife. Using that fisherman's location a wrecked P-38 verified as being Saint-Ex's plane was found in 2000. Now a researcher has found the man who shot down that plane, a German fighter pilot by the name of Horst Rippert. Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger de Saint Exupéry died a warrior's death

Posted by Christopher Eger

Cannibalism in military environment has been seen often throughout history. Tribal headhunters have for eons resorted to cannibalism of both their own and captured peoples. During the First Crusade the knights of Europe practiced cannibalism when they ate the bodies of their vanquished foes during the terrible Siege of Maarrat-al Numan. Aztec warriors ate human flesh as part of ritual. In 1945 on the island of Chichijima starving Japanese officers and men ate five US airmen who had been shot down on the island. During the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia cannibalism was commonplace. In modern times African peacekeepers and United Nations personnel alike were killed and eaten on the battlefield of Liberia by Charles Taylor's militiamen.

Not to be outdone, a pair of Sergeants in the peacetime German Air force has been making sausages using their own blood as an ingredient. The recipe they used quoted from the article above read: “Make sure the blood is fresh and the bacon cubes diced finely with a nice proportion of fat to lean. Do not use too many breadcrumbs but if the blood starts to curdle stir in a teaspoon of wine vinegar.”

This type of sausage, called black pudding in Great Britain, boudin noir in French cultures and blutwurst in Germany has been popular for years but is usually made from pork blood. It is only recently that the phenomenon was introduced of using human blood. In a performance in 2003, performers of the group monochrom prepared blood pudding out of their own blood and ate it.

Posted by Christopher Eger

When the HMAS Sydney sank in 1941 it became the greatest loss of life in Australian Naval history and the largest warship crew lost with all hands. The 6800ton 562 foot cruiser constructed in 1933 could steam at a very fast 32 knots. She carried eight 6-inch guns, a secondary battery of four 4-inch guns as well as a brace of torpedo tubes and machineguns for anti-aircraft use. She carried a walrus scout plane and was designed to be the eyes and ears of the larger combat fleet. In the opening stages of the Mediterranean naval war she sank the Italian destroyers Espero and Zeffiro as well as several Axis merchant ships. The year 1941 found the HMAS Sydney back in the Pacific. When she was interrogating what appeared to be a newly built 19,000 ton Dutch merchant ship some 100 miles offshore of the Australian coast. When she pulled within gun range the merchant showed itself to be the German Kriegsmarine auxiliary cruiser Kormoran. The ensuing naval battle left both ships lost at sea forever. The larger Kormoran was armed with six 5.9 inch guns and got the drop on the Aussie cruiser but the Sydney took her down to the locker with her. The entire Austrailian crew, some 645 men, went with her.

After six decades of fruitless searches the ships have both been found. Oddly enough the HMAS Sydney that was lost in 1941 was named after another HMAS Sydney which was lost in 1914 during the First World War. That ship also sank in a mutually destructive battle with a German cruiser, the SMS Emden

Posted by Christopher Eger

An undisclosed quantity of plutonium oxide powder is soon to leave Britain for France. This is not too unusual as at any given time nuclear weapons, fuel, depleted uranium, plutonium and nuclear waste of all kinds are on the move somewhere. What is unusual is that this shipment will be moved with almost no security. According to an article in the Independent, the plutonium will be moved in an old unescorted, unarmed roll-on ferry. While reportedly the shipment will be guarded by side armed equipped officers from the UK's Civil Nuclear Constabulary, no fixed armament will be carried.

This may not be too big of a deal on closer look. Most plutonium of this type is carried in special casks. According to standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the specialized casks "are built to standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The casks are massive, made from thick forged steel, and weigh around 100 tons. Their security and reliability are carefully tested, including being dropped 9 meters onto an unyielding target, immersed in 15 meters of water for at least 8 hours, and fire tested, where the cask is fully engulfed in 800-degree-Celsius temperatures for 30 minutes."

However this voyage should be compared to other around the world. For instance Japanese nuclear fuel is carried by armed freighters escorted by the Shikishima (PLH 31), a 6500-ton destroyer sized Japanese Maritime Defense vessel with helicopters, 30mm cannons, machine guns, and an embarked commando force.

If you ask me, by doing this is such an apparently slapstick way and leaking the operation to the media, maybe the SAS is setting up a mousetrap for Al Qadea with this ship as the cheese?

Posted by Christopher Eger

Heinrich Boere is 86 years old and leads a quiet life in Germany. He used to be a Dutch citizen but that was a long time ago. Once upon a time, in 1941, just after the Adolf Hitler's German Army crashed into tiny Holland, young Heinrich Boere eagerly volunteered for service in the SS. Boere was a Dutchman and became part of a classified SS unit, code-named Silbertanne, or “Silver Pine”. The small 15-man force was put together for 'wet-works' - politically deniable assassinations. This group was responsible for no less than 54 assassinations in Holland during World War Two of people suspected of being members of the Dutch Resistance. They operated in the shadows and wore civilian clothes instead of the black uniforms of the Storm troopers on their missions. The brave Nazi hit man Boere personally shot at least three of these unarmed men by surprise in 1944 including a pharmacist in his shop, a bicycle shop owner in his own doorway and another man while feigning to change a tire.

Boere escaped to Germany after the war but was tried in absentia in 1949 in a Dutch court and sentenced to life imprisonment. This sentence however was never carried out as Boere now claims German and not Dutch citizenship. Germany has for years refused to either imprison the war criminal or extradite him to the Netherlands. However this may be subject to change.

Posted by Christopher Eger

Master Sergeant Woodrow Wilson Keeble was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on March 3, 2008. Master Sergeant Keeble was awarded the medal posthumously, having died in 1982.



Keeble is a Native American and the first full-blooded member of the Sioux Indian Nation to receive the Medal of Honor. He was a volunteer member of the North Dakota Army National Guard when World War Two broke out (Native Americans are exempt from the draft) and soon found himself with the first US Army unit at Guadalcanal. There, a master of the redoubtable BAR, he became something of a legend. Keeble chose the Army as a career and it was later in that career, while involved in the Korean conflict that he performed the actions for which he is finally being recognized. With all of his companies officers killed or incapacitated, Master Sergeant Keeble led his company of over a hundred men in successive assaults for a Chinese-held hill in 1951. During this assault he was wounded at least five times by no less than 83 grenade and shrapnel fragments but refused to retreat or give up command.



Master Sergeant Keeble was recognized in 1951 as a candidate for the MOH was instead awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and later the Silver Star. His family and his nation were finally given his MOH that his actions earned some 26 years after his death.

Posted by Christopher Eger

Lying about his age in 1917, 16 year old Frank Buckles joined the Ambulance Service with the US Army and was soon a “doughboy” in General Blackjack Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force to France. Born in 1901 he served the US Army for two years in Europe, including occupation work in Germany. In his postwar life he survived a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines during World War Two and now lives quietly on his farm in West Virginia where, at 103, he still spends his days working on his tractor.



The remaining World War One vets include one last French veteran, age 110, eight living British Commonwealth veterans including the last female WWI vet and British pilot Henry Allingham, and aged 111 who served in the Royal Flying Corps. Two still living former Italian servicemen round out the Allied powers. The last German veteran Dr. Erich Kästner, died earlier this year leaving former Austro-Hungarian artilleryman Franz Kunstler, 107 who now lives in Bavaria and 109 year old Turkish veteran Yakup Satar as the last of the Central Powers veterans. The third oldest man in Europe, Finn Aarne Arvonen, who served in the Russian Army as well as in the Finnish Red Guard, is also a survivor of this great and terrible conflict.