On the beach lay a grounded enemy ship. The U.S. Navy decides to test their newest weapon on it. Gliding over the trees toward its target, the drone zooms in. Behind the drone is a tailing plane with a pilot, who is controlling the drone while watching its flight on screen. When the moment arrives, another pilot alerts the first and the drone dives into the wreckage in a brilliant explosion. The new, secret drone is a success. The Navy orders 2,000 more, which will see action before the conflict is over.
No, this isn't the latest Predator or Raptor drone attacking insurgents in the Middle East. The year is 1944 and the new weapon is the great granddaddy of our modern tactical weapons. This is the TDR-1, the first in a long line of military drones. It was made of wood, to circumvent the rationing necessary for the war effort. It utilized state-of-the-art technology to allow for remote control from up to eight miles away. When pushed into service, the drones performed well, hitting 21 out of 46 targets. All without the loss of a single life.
The core problem was not with the grainy image the pilot had to work off of, or the limited eight mile range. Rather, it was the speed of the drones -- which was way too slow. Japanese anti-aircraft guns were able to shoot them down too easily. Citing problems with production, the drone program was cancelled before the 2,000 unit order could be filled, only two months after being placed. Only 200 were built, and of those only 50 saw action. Many were converted to sports planes, most were lost to history. Only one remains: in the U.S. Navy's National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida.
Pete Wyshner was born in 1914 in the town of Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. He was right handed until, at the age of 6, he fell off his father's wagon and caught his right arm in the wheel, losing it above the elbow. He worked on building his skill with his left hand and, as a fan of baseball, he eventually developed a unique technique that allowed him to throw and catch.
Playing as Pete Gray, he made it into the minor leagues. In 1945, while most ballplayers were at war, he made it to the majors, playing for the St. Louis Browns between April 17, 1945 and September 30, 1945. The US Military, capitalizing on the fame of a one-armed baseball player, sent him to visit wounded and recovering veterans, who saw him as a hero for achieving success despite his disability. He never saw himself that way, however, and he was never comfortable with the label.
"Boys, I can’t fight, and so there is no courage about me. Courage belongs on the battlefield, not on the baseball diamond."
The end of his short lived major league career coincided with the end of WWII. He continued in the minors for the rest of the decade, then left the sport entirely.
Off the gulf coast of Mississippi is the barrier island Cat Island, named so because Spanish explorers mistook the native raccoons for cats. Its sandy shores hold a unique distinction for its role during WWII, ironically as the location for an experiment in dog training.
In November 1942, William A. Pestre, a Swiss refugee from New Mexico, convinced the U.S. Army to let him attempt to create a platoon of dogs. His plan was to train large breeds to sniff out Japanese soldiers on the assumption that different races had different odors. Therefore the dogs would be able to distinguish between an American soldier and a Japanese one. Japanese Americans were brought in, not as trainers but as bait. Originally the dogs were exposed to them without provocation. However, the dogs soon familiarized themselves with their intended targets and would not attack. So the subjects were told to hit the dogs until they bled to make them angry. Then the trainers would give the command, "Kill!" The dogs, who were already a bit peeved before that, attacked -- and the Japanese Americans, wearing protective clothing, were repeatedly bitten.
Pestre envisioned armies of twenty-forty thousand dogs unleashed on the islands surrounding Japan, tearing the enemy to shreds. However, he soon discovered that there is no discernible scent difference between the Japanese and Americans, and the project was canceled after ninety days. Pestre was not pleased with the cancellation of the program and began to make threats to his superiors. The FBI was assigned to watch him and he eventually faded to history. The dogs were moved into regular Army Corp service.
As war erupted in Europe, the US Army began to take a serious look at what would be necessary to provide emergency rations for its troops should they be drawn into the conflict. In 1937 Captain Paul P. Logan of the US Army Quartermaster Corps made a visit to Hershey to meet with chief chemist Samuel Hinkle. Logan's request was for Hinkle to create a chocolate bar that would be used as a ration for the troops. It would need to have greater nutritional value than traditional chocolate bars but couldn't taste as good so that soldiers would save them for emergencies rather than consume them all at once. It would also need to have a higher melting point to survive the journey to the troops and weigh four ounces. When asked what the bar should taste like Logan replied, "Make it taste about like a boiled potato."
Hinkle achieved this by creating a bar out of oat flour, cocoa fat, skim milk, sugar and coloring. The bar never received marks for taste, with some soldiers declaring them "Hitler's Secret Weapon" for the effect on the soldiers intestinal tract. It was so hard that they had to be cut with a knife for people with poor dentition. Even those with good teeth found it was better to cut than bite.
The bar become the D Ration and would be used throughout the war. Over 40 million of them were made for distribution throughout the conflict. Many of these bars went to the hungry in Europe and our allies until they were discontinued a the end of the war. The tropical version saw a larger distribution and was used into the late '60s.
Between October 11, 1962 and August 31, 1966 the television airwaves were graced with the American Comedy McHale's Navy. The show told the story of a small group of seamen who are led by Lieutenant Commander Quinton McHale played by Ernest Borgnine. Borgnine was a Navy veteran serving prior to and during WWII. In the role of McHale he found himself doing the things he couldn't do in the real Navy such as water skiing behind a PT Boat.
As Borgnine would later recount* two years into the show he was called by the Pentagon and asked to come have lunch with the Secretary of the Navy's Office. Borgnine asked why he was called in for the lunch and the response was, “You know something? You’re the greatest recruiter we’ve ever had."
During WWII the United States utilized the Boeing B-29 Superfortress as its "go to" bombing vehicle. The massive plane had an impressive range and performed admirably, even carrying the only nuclear bombs ever used in a war theater. The Soviet Union had no plane that could match it and lobbied for them under the Lend-Lease Act. The Soviet Union saw how the large planes could fly from remote bases, bomb The Empire of Japan, and return. Stalin wanted the same abilities to level the playing field. The U.S., however, wasn't particularly keen on the notion of giving away the technology.
Thus the Soviets were quick to take advantage when three B-29s were forced to make emergency landings in the USSR after bombing runs over Japan. The Japanese-Soviet Nonaggression Pact prevented the USSR from returning the planes to the United States, so Stalin ordered Tupolev, one of the nation's large airplane designers, to duplicate the B-29 exactly. Those direct orders would lead to seemingly endless problems for Tupolev.
They immediatly encountered an issue with the skin of the plane, which was in US measurments. Soviet manufacturers only used Metric. Committee after committee reviewed the necessary changes and Tupelov lobbied high ranking military figures for approval. The same effort would be repeated many times over. The engineers even had to obtain approval to use Soviet parachutes rather than American versions.
At the Aviation Day Parade on August 2, 1947 at Tushino Airport in Moscow, the new Tu-4 made its first public appearance. Initially thought to be the captured B-29s, it became clear that they were Soviet made when a fourth flew overhead.
In all, 847 Tu-4s were built before production ended in 1952. The planes were phased out of service in the 1960s. Three are known to still exist.
Intelligence experts in the United States are trusted with this nation's secrets. Within the hidden walls they perform their work, but upon emerging from their lairs they cannot speak of what they have done or even what classification level they have been working on. In order to talk "freely" a not-so-secret cover term has been used informally when these operatives where in public. Instead of saying, "I can't talk about that here it's Top Secret Umbra" or something similar they would say, "I can't talk about that here it's Secret Squirrel".
April 1945: the Empire of Japan was fighting for survival. After each of their confederates had fallen against the Allied forces, Japan stood alone as a relentless push came closer and closer to their homeland. Eventually Okinawa was the last remaining buffer. The Japanese government dispatched a fleet of ships on a suicide mission, in a final attempt to stop the forward motion of their enemies. Operation Ten-Go called for the fleet to position themselves between the advancing enemy and Okinawa -- then sink their own ships in shallow waters so that they would become unsinkable fighting platforms. Land based kamikaze planes would provide support. Their hopes rested on the notion that this tactic would slow, or even stop, the Allied advance, and inflict "unendurable" damage in the process.
What the Japanese did not know was that the Allied forces had an ace up their sleeve: Purple, the codebreaking machine for Japanese intelligence. Listening stations from the Philippines to Iwo Jima intercepted orders, passing them on to be quickly decoded. As a result, before Operation Ten-Go could reach its intended destination, the U.S. Navy launched hundreds of aircraft against the armada. The attack ended with a Japanese loss of over 4,000 soldiers and all but three badly damaged destroyers. Among the ships lost was the IJN Yamato, then the largest battleship in the world. In contrast, the U.S. Navy suffered the loss of 12 airmen.
The decisive battle ended Japanese sea power and solidified air-power as the guiding force in future conflicts. This also convinced the United States and Allied forces that Japan would fight to the last man, in a bloody, multi-year conflict if necessary. This realization influenced the decision to use atomic weapons to end the war.
At the start of World War II the British worked to exploit German communications at Bletchley Park. Their activities were successful, especially with the ENIGMA communications, thanks to the Polish Cipher Bureau who had broken many ENIGMA codes early on and smuggled them to the French and British prior to the German invasion of Poland. As the British worked to gather and disseminate the wealth of knowledge that came from the ENIGMA decrypts, they had to find a way to suggest that the source was human rather than signal intelligence, to prevent suspicion from the Germans that the ENIGMA had been compromised.
They chose to stamp all ENIGMA intelligence "BONIFACE," suggesting that the source was a spy burgling safes and cleaning wastebaskets at a German communications center. Unfortunately, BONIFACE didn't last because the breadth and detail of the data being collected could not, reasonably, be tied to one individual. All high-level decrypts were then stamped "ULTRA."
BONIFACE was a tongue in cheek name derived from Saint Boniface who lived from 672 to 754. He is the patron saint of Germany and the first archbishop of Mainz. He was a British Missionary whose work converted large portions of Germany to Christianity before he was martyred by a group of people he had intended to convert. When the mob approached, he told his comrades, "Cease fighting. Lay down your arms, for we are told in Scripture not to render evil for good but to overcome evil by good."
The ENIGMA decrypts have been credited by Winston Churchill with ending the war years earlier. In 1974 the decrypts of the ENIGMA were declared to no longer have a relevance to security, as computer based encryption had taken hold, and the material was declassified.
WWI ended abruptly for the soldiers in the field. Many Germans, including Adolph Hitler, felt that they had been sold out when the Treaty of Versailles had been signed. They believed this for many reasons, one was the fact that German soil had not been attacked, another was the crippling terms of the surrender. Among those terms was Germany's acceptance of blame for the war and reparations of 226 billion Reichsmarks to France and Belgium. The sum was so large that, even when it was reduced to 132 billion, it exceeded the ability of the nation to pay. When the Great Depression hit a financially crippled Germany would find itself looking to new options for leadership which included the 3rd Reich. Once in power Hitler stopped payments.
After WWII, as Germany rebuilt itself the debt still loomed. On September 26th, 2010 the last payment was due and WWI was officially, financially complete.
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