Category: War
The man lived on his rural farm on the outskirts of his tiny Mississippi town. His yard was meticulously maintained, and Old Glory fluttered quietly in the breeze from an imposing flagpole set in concrete. The flag didn’t stay out overnight…ever. It had been raised and lowered every day on this pole for more than half a century.
He was the very image of a good Christian man of character. He had served as a deacon in his church and teased a modest living out of the farmland that surrounded his modest three-bedroom home. He had raised his kids well and selflessly helped his neighbors. Now well into his eighties, he had agreed to spend an afternoon with me and my young son.
The man was soft-spoken as we nursed our iced tea and soaked up every word. He looked off into nothing as his mind wandered back to very different times. Though we sat in peace, security, and comfort, his memory took him somewhere else.
This unassuming man described being a 19-year-old Infantryman heading ashore in a Higgins boat on June 6, 1944. His destination was Omaha beach. It was about 1400 in the afternoon.
He charged terrified down the open ramp into the very bowels of hell. Wrecked equipment and shredded bodies littered the sand, surf, and shale. The smell of cordite, dirty smoke, ruptured bowels, and death pervaded everything. German mortar and artillery fire still slammed into the beach as well as the advances inland.
A Steep Learning Curve
The man survived the Longest Day to advance with the Allied vanguard. A product of the Mississippi backwoods and a survivor of the Great Depression, this tough teenager found that he had a knack for soldiering. When his company needed intelligence he and a fellow Southern redneck boy would slip off into the night looking for trouble. Sometimes they came back with a prisoner. Sometimes not. The man told me he got comfortable with a knife in the dark.
By late August the man and his buddies had taken the full measure of the enemy. The hard fighting through the bocage hedgerows had brought him face to face with the Nazi superman. He found the German Wehrmacht to be a hardened professional fighting force.
He called the Waffen SS “those Gestapo men.” Decades later his hatred for these fanatical racist lunatics modulated the timbre of his conversation. He told me unapologetically, “We didn’t take many of those Gestapo men prisoner.”
He explained that the SS frequently left a couple of snipers behind when the Germans finally abandoned a position of strategic importance. The carnage they inflicted made little difference in the grand scheme. They just dealt death whenever they could.
Kill or Be Killed
My buddy’s unit was tasked to seize Orly airport outside Paris. The Luftwaffe had used Orly as a fighter and bomber base throughout the occupation of France, and the Allied air forces had pounded it into rubble as a result. In August of 1944, however, the wrecked aerodrome was deceptively quiet.
The company commander called a tactical halt. My friend and his battle buddy crept around the periphery of the wrecked airport before ascending one of the taller structures for a proper vantage. Taking cover such that they could just peer over the edge of the roof they finally saw the two German snipers. Tucked into a pile of debris on the roof of a nearby structure the two SS sharpshooters were well-camouflaged and fixated on the approaches to the aerodrome. The two Germans had no idea that they had only moments to live.
Speaking in hushed whispers my buddy and his comrade estimated the range to their targets and adjusted the rear sights on their heavy M1 rifles to compensate. My friend called the man on the left and his counterpart oriented on the one on the right. On the soft count of three, both men squeezed their triggers.
Both rifles rolled back in recoil as their 152-grain M2 ball rounds covered the distance to the pair of German snipers at 2,800 feet per second. Both of the American grunts had grown up with guns, and they knew how to shoot. Each GI center-punched the coal-scuttle helmet of his respective SS target, killing them both instantly.
The Guns
In 1936 the United States military was woefully behind those of most other major powers. The Great Depression had ravaged the American economy, and a lack of attention to military readiness had taken a horrible toll on such stuff as tanks and combat aircraft. The gleaming exception was the M1 rifle. American troops entered WW2 with what General George Patton described as, “the finest battle implement ever devised.”
Designed by a Canadian-American inventor named John Cantius Garand (properly pronounced, I’m reliably told, so as to rhyme with “errand.”), the M1 was a .30-caliber, gas-operated, 8-shot, clip-fed, semiautomatic rifle. The weapon weighed 9.5 pounds and was 43.6 inches long. By the time the M1 reached US Army troops in 1937, production at Springfield Armory was ten rifles per day. Two years later output languished at 100 per day. By the end of the weapon’s massive production run, however, some 5.4 million had been made by four major manufacturers.
By modern standards, the M1 was heavy, cumbersome, and grossly overpowered. However, at the outset of the Second World War, the M1 was a wonder weapon. Ammunition was supplied in spring steel 8-round en-bloc clips that were pressed in place from above with the bolt locked to the rear.
En bloc simply means that the ammunition clip became part of the weapon’s action during firing. When loading the rifle, the operator pressed the clip down from above and snatched his thumb clear as the bolt automatically flew home. The clip was ejected out of the top of the action after the last round fired.
An M1 rifle cost Uncle Sam about $85 during the war. That’s about $1260 today. The M1 was rugged, accurate, and powerful. I have never spoken with a combat veteran who carried one who had anything but unvarnished praise for the piece.
The Rest of the Story
There was a still a great deal of fighting left to be done after my friend and his comrades cleared Orly airport. There is no telling how many lives these two young warriors saved just in this one exchange. However, the worst was yet to come.
The Ardennes Offensive has become known as the Battle of the Bulge from the vantage of comfortable hindsight. My buddy said at the time it was pure unfiltered chaos. German Army Group B led by Joachim Peiper and the 1st SS Panzer Division slashed deep into Allied territory, shredding American defenses and scattering combat units randomly among the detritus. The US response devolved into tiny packets of troops fighting for their lives. My pal found himself leading a handful of bedraggled survivors deep behind the German spearheads.
Otto Skorzeny’s Operation Greif involved the insertion of English-speaking Germans in American uniforms to sow confusion in Allied rear areas. The effect that had on the Allied defense was outsized beyond their pure numbers. Suddenly nobody trusted anybody they didn’t already know well, and jumpy sentries shot first and asked questions later.
After a protracted escape and evasion, my buddy’s motley band finally made it back to friendly lines exhausted and spent. The first sentry they encountered covered them with a BAR and demanded to know who won the World Series in a particular year. My buddy not so gently explained that he had no idea. He expounded that while the Yankees were comfortably enjoying their baseball he was out hunting opossums in the Mississippi swamps to keep his family from starving. The sentry let them pass.
My buddy rendered his professional opinion on all of the major US small arms. He explained that there was always only one M1. The M1 Carbine was simply the Carbine, and the M1A1 Thompson was always the Thompson. Nobody used the term Garand. The standard US Infantry rifle was always just called the M1.
He said for an entire year some part of his skin was touching that rifle. Awake, asleep, shaving, eating, or defecating, that weapon was always at arm’s reach. He said that the Carbine was an effective and handy combat tool, but that it did frequently require several shots to take a German soldier out of the fight. By contrast, he said that so long as you caught him center of mass, the M1 would put an enemy soldier down instantly every single time.
We went back to the man’s barn neatly populated with tractor components and the sundry detritus of a working farm. The open building smelled like motor oil, horse manure, and dirt. Hanging obscurely in the corner was a dusty German helmet, the faded SS runes still visible. There was a .30-caliber hole running cleanly in and out both sides. How do we make such men as these?
Full Disclosure: I intend to step on some toes today. I’ve been at this for years now. There are hundreds of these history columns in circulation. I read every word in the comments. The politically controversial topics always make for the most engaging discussions.
Table of contents
Bottom Line Up Front
Antisemitism seems to be the only flavor of racism that yet remains politically acceptable these days. Point out anything good about the Confederacy (the Civil War was about more than just slavery), Apartheid-era South Africa (modern liberated South Africa seems pretty horrible today), or Hitler (he seemed to genuinely love his dog Blondi), and expect ritual evisceration by the anonymous keyboard commandos relentlessly patrolling the Internet. However, publicly advocate for a Holocaust redux by chanting “From the River to the Sea” or “Globalize the Intifada,” and folks like George Soros and David Rockefeller Jr will purportedly give you money.
It’s curious. I have never really understood why so many folks hate the Jews so. I’ve spent some time in Israel. It’s a secular state these days, but the Israeli people seemed industrious, responsible, and friendly. They produce some simply gorgeous women. Every square meter of that country was cultivated or otherwise put to some useful purpose. It was clean. Folks clearly took pride in their space.
Why then does the modern Israeli state find itself standing essentially alone amongst the community of nations? Much of the world seems to inexplicably revile them. A shockingly large percentage of the human species wants to see them exterminated. It’s weird, but why is that?
Origin Story
Had it not been for the Holocaust, there never could have been a modern state of Israel. The Jews were effectively scattered nearly 2,000 years ago. It is legitimately miraculous that they could retain their independent national identity across the centuries despite not having a homeland. However, it took the egregious nature of the Holocaust to galvanize the world into allowing the Israelis to establish their state. The day after they declared their independence in 1948, the surrounding nations banded together to obliterate them. They’ve been fighting ever since.
Everything changed in 1967. Besieged on all sides, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) utterly spanked the combined armed forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon. At the end of this 6-day conflict, Israel held the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, and the West Bank of the Jordan River. This brought the Israelis control of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Arabs understandably call this war “The Setback.”
I’m not Jewish. The claims that Palestinians aren’t real, or that the indigenous peoples of this area were nomads without true attachment to the land, aren’t mine to adjudicate. I’m also not rendering an opinion on the legitimacy of Jewish settlements. Not my circus, not my monkeys. However, it’s been 77 years. During that time, the entire map of Eastern Europe was redrawn. Countless international borders have been reimagined. North and South Korea fought a bloody war. Vietnam did, too. None of that was perfect, but it eventually found its level. Why then have we not seen things calm down in the Holy Land?
Ample blood has been spilled by both sides. Nobody is innocent. However, there is a palpable bias in the media and the larger world against Israel. This manifests in countless little ways.
October 7
7 October 2023 began with 4,300 rockets launched into Israeli territory. Hamas and sundry Palestinian terrorist organizations followed this up with 6,000 fighters who crossed into Israel, murdering as they came. At the end of that one day, 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals had been killed. 251 were taken hostage. Between 20 and 50 hostages purportedly remain alive as of August 2025.
One out of every 8,300 Israelis died on October 7. Scaled up for our population, that is the equivalent of having somebody murder 41,000 Americans…in a single day. In response, the Israelis attacked Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the terrorist theocracy of Iran. As in all wars, this spawned a great deal of collateral misery.
Gaza
I honestly don’t know what to believe. The media began screaming about famine and widespread starvation in Gaza before the end of 2023. That was nearly two years ago. Gaza has been leveled and looks hideous in the newsfeeds. However, the adults in the videos bear little similarity to Somali famine victims. They seem to retain a fair amount of meat on their bones. I’m not saying it’s great, but Google it for yourself if you’re curious.
Amidst widespread international outrage, such otherwise-reasonable nations as Australia, Canada, France, and the UK now stand poised to recognize Palestinian statehood in a collective snub against the state of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump. It’s in the news every single day. American universities and major cities have been shut down due to the pro-Palestinian protests. Donning a keffiyeh and chanting pro-Palestinian slogans is cool in many circles. Meanwhile, in other news…
It All Depends on What Church You Go To
Nobody cares about Africans. Never have, never will. Bill Clinton tried back in 1993. That resulted in Blackhawk Down—a great movie, but a bit suckier for the folks who lived it. The world did indeed come together to rightfully crush Apartheid, but South Africa is ranked the 5th-most dangerous country on earth today.
The recent civil war in Sudan has claimed between 20,000 and 150,000 lives. Nobody is really sure, because nobody cares enough to figure it out. Regardless, those numbers certainly put the carnage in the same bracket as that of Gaza. And then there is Boko Haram.
The Devil Walks Among Us
Boko Haram translates to “Group of the People of Sunnah for Dawah and Jihad.” This merry mob of psychopaths hung out a shingle in 2002, and they have been bathing in blood ever since. Their stated mission is to establish an African caliphate by force. The resulting relentless conflict has displaced 2.3 million people. Their primary stomping ground is Nigeria.
Nigeria is a West African nation of some 230 million people. It is the most populous country in Africa, and the sixth-most populous country in the world. A true polyglot nation, there are some 525 languages in use there among dozens of different people groups. 50% of the population is Muslim, living mostly in the north. Between 46 and 48% of Nigerians are Christian, most commonly found in the south. And therein lies the problem. Christians want to be left alone to worship as they please. Radical Muslims want to exterminate all Christians.
A Typical Example
In July of 2014, members of Boko Haram captured a Nigerian Air Force officer named Umar Abubakar and aggressively interrogated him, asking why he served the state rather than Allah.
They displayed his ID card and chanted, “Allah has given us an unbeliever today!” Abubakar claimed to be a Muslim himself. Regardless, Boko Haram members shouted “Allah is Great!” and decapitated the poor guy before parading about town brandishing his freshly severed head.
This wasn’t an outlier. These maniacs cut folks’ heads off all the freaking time. Their real forte is churches. They hit places of Christian worship while services are being held and systematically slaughter the parishioners. That’s kind of their thing.
In the first half of 2022, these lunatics murdered more than 6,000 people. Unlike the carnage in Gaza, this is not collateral damage from formal military operations. This is maniacal mobs of goons with Kalashnikovs and machetes descending upon villages to murder the men, rape the women, and drag off any female captives young enough to seem interesting–all because their dark god told them to do so. Nobody is completely sure of the body count these days, but Wikipedia claims they have thus far killed 300,000 children. And the Israelis are the problem?
Will’s Solution
Nigerian Christians have grown justifiably weary of this. They are screaming for their government to provide security. I’m not convinced that’s a reasonable ask. Nigeria has 356,669 square miles of territory. The Nigerian Army can’t be everywhere at once, and Boko Haram is crafty.
I’m a committed evangelical Christian myself. I try to live my life according to Biblical precepts. Matthew 5:38-40 says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.”
I read that to apply to the individual believer. To me, the passage is not a command to stand idly by while 300,000 kids are murdered. I am armed every time I darken the door at my church (and anywhere else, for that matter). I think the solution to the Nigerian conundrum is guns, lots and lots of guns.
Somebody needs to pony up about 20,000 AK rifles and distribute them among the Nigerian Christian population. Then a bunch of Special Forces types could sweep through the place to teach them the rudiments of weapons handling and basic security. If they ask nicely, Donald Trump might foot the bill. That might not stop the Boko Haram attacks, but it would sure make these monsters work a little harder for it.
READ MORE HERE: Alejo Garza Tamez: Always Respect an Old Man with a Gun
Ruminations
Screaming about Gaza is the very pinnacle of hypocrisy. The Israelis attacked Gaza after Hamas murdered 1,197 Israelis in a day. The IDF has been trying to get out of that godforsaken place ever since. Hamas could disband and release those last hostages, and the war would be over tomorrow. However, they won’t. The Hamas playbook is to kick the Israelis in the shins until they finally feel compelled to fight back, and then rush out to play the victim card for the international press. It is beyond my comprehension that the world cannot appreciate that. I don’t have a dog in that fight, but it just seems so blatantly obvious.
The Nigerians do not need foreign peacekeepers or gobs of international aid. They need a 2nd amendment. Nigeria currently has some ridiculously draconian gun laws. Hunting weapons are allowed but only to individuals who endure a suffocating licensing scheme. Handguns and military weapons are illegal. Despite this fact, the place is nonetheless awash in contraband guns. That’s where Boko Haram gets theirs. The Nigerian police force has misplaced 178,479 military-grade weapons, yet law-abiding civilians face a mandatory minimum 10 years in prison if they are caught with an illegal firearm. As is always the case, those stupid rules only apply to the good folks who choose to respect them. The terrorists couldn’t care less. See Newark or Chicago for some similar examples, a bit closer to home.
So, Israel invades Gaza in response to one of the most egregious terrorist attacks in modern history, and the world had a conniption over it. Putin has snuffed as many as 400,000 lives in his ill-conceived invasion of Ukraine, and activist college students aren’t making a peep about that. Boko Haram regularly empties Christian churches to behead the men, rape the women, and enslave the children, and the world literally cannot be bothered. There are lots of different ways to quantify insanity these days, but that seems like a pretty good one to me.
Addendum: I obviously wrote this a while ago. Since then, peace does seem to have sort-of broken out in Gaza. We have Donald Trump to thank for that. Those few hostages remaining alive have been repatriated, most of the IDF has gone home, and Hamas now occupies itself murdering any other Palestinians with whom they might have had a philosophical disagreement. Time will tell if the world allows this sordid cycle to continue…
During 1942 and 1943, as German U-Boats lurked off the east coast of the United States, the Florida Straits proved a particularly fertile hunting ground for Nazi submarines.
As America was unprepared when war arrived in December 1941, there were few resources available to defend America’s eastern seaboard and the valuable merchant shipping that hugged the coast. In those dangerous early days of the war at sea, one of America’s prime defenders was the normally docile “blimp”.
The Solution?
In 1939, the U.S. Navy developed the K-Craft airship, or blimp, which would become a workhorse during WWII used to patrol for Nazi U-boats and provide important cover for Allied convoys. The blimps were equipped with the ASG-type radar, featuring a detection range of 90 miles and magnetic anomaly detection (MAD) equipment.
The K-ships carried four Mk-47 depth bombs (with two in a bomb bay and two on external pylons), as well as a .50 cal Browning M2 machine gun in the front of the control car. A crew of 10 was standard on K-ships, made up of a commander/pilot, a navigator/pilot, two co-pilots, an airship rigger, an ordnance chief, two aircraft mechanics, and two radio operators.
The K-Ships could remain aloft for about 24 hours, making them ideal for anti-submarine warfare as well as search and rescue missions. Blimp patrols were generally long and uneventful, but one remarkable incident involving a Navy blimp made for one of the most amazing stories of World War II.
The Duel
On the night of July 18, 1943, the U.S. Navy blimp K-74 (from Blimp Squadron ZP-21 based at NAS Richmond, Florida) was engaged in convoy escort duties over the Florida Straits.
During this flight, K-74’s onboard radar located a German submarine running on the surface. As no American units were available to engage the enemy and as the U-Boat was proceeding directly towards the convoy, K-74’s commander decided to attack with everything they had.
There is some confusion if K-74’s depth bombs failed to release during the attack, but damage below the sub’s waterline would indicate that at least one depth bomb did explode nearby. K-74’s crew engaged the sub with the .50-caliber MG mounted in the nose of the gondola, as well as their personal weapons — including a Thompson SMG and M1911 pistols.
Return fire from the U-Boat’s 20mm AA guns knocked out one of K-74’s engines, punctured the gasbag in several places and wounded one crewman.
In return, K-74’s fire damaged the submarine, the hammering from the big .50-caliber rounds damaged the sub’s hull, rendering it unable to submerge. U-134 left the area, limping back to its base in France on the surface. She never made it home. U-134 was sunk with all hands aboard on August 27, 1943, in the Bay of Biscay, by the British frigate HMS Rother.
As for K-74, the damaged blimp crashed into the sea. While the crew was in the water waiting to be rescued by the U.S. Navy destroyer Dahlgren, tragedy struck when the wounded crewman was attacked by sharks and disappeared.
The rest of the crew was rescued. Thus ended the only known gun battle involving a U.S. Navy blimp, and the only loss of an airship crewman due to enemy action.
Before withdrawing from the area, crewmen from U-134 boarded K-74’s floating gondola and photographed parts of the wreck. These images were passed to another U-boat along with the description of the battle with K-74. The U.S. Navy did not know of their existence until they were discovered in West Germany in 1957.
Additional Firepower
About 15 years ago, I found a handful of photos in the U.S. Navy collection at the U.S. National Archives — the images showed an experimental mounting of a Browning Automatic Rifle in the gondola of a Navy K-ship blimp.
Although the photos were dated “October 1943”, there is no way to know for sure if the experimental BAR mount was initially conceived before or after K-74’s gunfight with U-134, but testing of additional armament for the K-Ships was accelerated after the blimp’s combat with the sub.
No doubt that the accurate and hard-hitting BAR would have been a tremendous help to the K-74 crew in their gunfight with U-134. As far as is known, no BARs were ever mounted on K-ships on active duty.
Conclusion
So there you have it — what must be one of the most bizarre battles of World War II, fought off the coast of the United States by two extremely unlikely opponents. One was a blimp never truly intended for battle, but one that did in fact manage to wound its deadly opponent and seal its ultimate fate.