Category: War

The Wolf Truce

Fact Checker: Was There a Ceasefire During WWI to Hunt Wolves?

SPENCER NEUHARTHAug 20, 2019

Myths, lies and old wives’ tales loom large in the outdoor pursuits. Here at MeatEater, we’re dedicated to separating facts from bullsh*t, so we created this series to examine suspect yarns. If there’s a belief, rumor or long-held assumption you’d like us to fact check, drop us a note at factchecker@themeateater.com.

Claim During World War I, German and Russian forces declared a temporary ceasefire and banded together to hunt wolves. The voracious animals were attracted to the prolific and gruesome scavenging available in the warzone, attacking soldiers and civilians alike.

Origin Multiple newspapers in 1917 reported on this story, including the El Paso Herald, Oklahoma City Times, and New York Times. Since then, it’s become a favorite bit of bar room banter among amateur historians, like the powerful Joe Rogan.

Facts In February of 1917, a dispatch from Berlin noted large packs of wolves moving into populated areas of the German Empire from the forests of Lithuania and Volhynia. Locals hypothesized that war efforts displaced the wolves, so the canines started seeking out new hunting grounds.

The hungry wolves infiltrated rural villages, attacking calves, sheep, goats, and in two cases, children. They also showed up on the front lines, feeding on the fallen and sometimes taking advantage of incapacitated fighters.

“Parties of Russian and German scouts met recently and were hotly engaged in a skirmish when a large pack of wolves dashed on the scene and attacked the wounded,” reported a 1917 Oklahoma City Times article. “Hostilities were at once suspended and Germans and Russians instinctively attacked the pack, killing about 50 wolves.”

The Russian and German soldiers temporarily stopped being enemies once they found a common foe. Both sides agreed to a cease fire if the wolves interrupted another battle.

“Poison, rifle fire, hand grenades, and even machine guns were successively tried in attempts to eradicate the nuisance,” according to a 1917 New York Times article. “But all to no avail. The wolves—nowhere to be found quite so large and powerful as in Russia—were desperate in their hunger and regardless of danger.

“As a last resort, the two adversaries, with the consent of their commanders, entered into negotiations for an armistice and joined forces to overcome the wolf plague.”

Takeaway Though seemingly far-fetched, it turns out these claims are mostly accurate. Historians estimate that soldiers killed hundreds of wolves during the war, and that the surviving wolves fled to escape a “carnage the like of which they had never encountered.”

For a brief moment, a kind of peace spread across the battlefield, even though gunshots and grenade explosions continued to ring out.

Sources Battle Halts While Troops Fight Wolves — Oklahoma City Times
Russian Wolves — New York Times
WW1 Wolves Attacked Soldiers — War History Online
German and Russian Soldiers Banded Together to Fight Wolves — Mental Floss

Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad I am so grateful!! Leadership of the highest kind Manly Stuff Our Great Kids The Green Machine This great Nation & Its People War

The Greatest Hero America Never Knew The true story of Waco’s Col. Robert Howard. By David Feherty

Post author By Grumpy
Post date January 28, 2023
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photography courtesy of the Howard family

The name was always spoken with reverence, but I had no idea who he was. Then an Army Ranger I’ll call Leroy (because that’s his name) told me he couldn’t go on my T1F Taliban Pheasant Hunt in South Dakota last year because he had a chance to meet Bob Howard, who was on his deathbed in Waco. Leroy’s decision really piqued my interest. Nobody turns down the Taliban Pheasant Hunt—and, perhaps more telling, nobody goes to Waco without a really good reason. It was then that I decided I had to find out who Howard was.

A-googling I went. And it turned out that Robert Lewis Howard was a Green Beret and a TCU grad. He had appeared in two John Wayne movies, making a parachute jump in The Longest Day and playing an airborne instructor in The Green Berets—not exactly a stretch for him. Howard was the only soldier in the history of the United States to be nominated three times for the Medal of Honor, our country’s highest military decoration, which is awarded to members of the armed forces who distinguish themselves “conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States.” The men who fought with Howard all agreed that he should have received a Medal of Honor for each one of his three citations—which explains why he was awarded two Distinguished Service Crosses (the second-highest honor, given in the Army). No matter. He had plenty of other gongs and ribbons. He had a Silver Star, several Bronze Stars, and eight Purple Hearts (though he was wounded 14 times). Then there was all the stuff awarded to him by the armed forces of other grateful nations.

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why neither I nor anyone else outside of the Army had heard of this extraordinary American. I had theories. First, many of Howard’s actions in theater were still classified. We know he was in Laos and Cambodia before we knew we were in Laos and Cambodia, but we just don’t know what he was up to, apart from getting nominated for the Medal of Honor every few months or so. This was back in the days when a clandestine operation could be run without having to broadcast it on C-SPAN first.

Then there was the rest of the Vietnam war, the part we knew about. Howard received his Medal of Honor from Nixon in 1971, with his sweet little first-grade daughter Missy looking on from the front row. None of the TV networks covered the event. Though Audie Murphy and Alvin York both received a Medal of Honor for their actions in World War II and the Great War respectively, and got the ticker-tape parades, fame, and fortune they both deserved, Howard got nothing, because he fought in the war that the Flower Power generation, led by Jane Fonda and her ilk, who exercised the very rights that the men and women who served in Vietnam fought to protect, demonstrated against by (among other things) spitting in the faces of returning soldiers. You can probably guess how I feel about this issue.

So after reading up on Howard, I decided to follow my friend Leroy’s lead and head down to Waco to meet the man myself. But before I could get down there, on Wednesday, December 23, 2009, Col. Robert Howard died at the age of 70. The next day, the Associated Press ran a 10-sentence obituary. The New York Times and Washington Post followed with slightly longer obits. I couldn’t believe the man’s passing had generated so little notice.

I went to Waco anyway.

Driving down I-35 toward Waco to visit Missy, the second daughter of Col. Robert Howard, I noticed for the first time that this stretch of the interstate is known as The Purple Heart Trail. I was still thinking about the coincidence when I sat down in Missy’s living room to watch a video that few people have ever seen. The video was given to Howard by the Medal of Honor Foundation.

It is Missy’s daddy at 64 years old, with a short, pale blue ribbon and small gold medal covering the knot in his tie, his jaw square and strong, his face still scarred, angular, and violently handsome. He is talking about the day he received his Medal of Honor from President Nixon, of whom he says, “He had nice hands. They were, you know, decent.”

Missy tells me that when her daddy came home to San Antonio, which wasn’t that often, he was a gardener, a gentle man with massive hands and a velvet voice who worked on his roses and never once spoke of what he did in the war. “He could make anything grow,” Missy says.

Now the Colonel’s ocean-blue eyes are focused on some far-away hellhole jungle clearing. Howard says the Hueys took ground fire on the way down to the landing zone, and his platoon suffered casualties even before it landed. But there was no peeling off for this group. Silver wings upon their chests, these are men, America’s best. (No longer do these words remind me of Bill Murray in a greenskeeper’s shed.)

“We finally got in on the ground, and I got with [the] lieutenant,” Howard says. “He says, ‘Bob, we need to secure this LZ [landing zone], and I want you to get a couple of men and secure the exterior of the LZ.’ And I got three men behind me, and I can remember being fired at. I fell backward and they killed three men behind me, and I’m firing and killing the North Vietnamese that’s trying to kill us. So I made my way back to the lieutenant and told him that the LZ was completely surrounded. By that time, one of the helicopters had been shot down.”

This is the only personal account on record of the events for which he received the Medal of Honor. To begin with, Howard seems uncomfortable talking about it. But this is not the most difficult thing he has done. He pauses and draws a breath, then begins to explain dispassionately what happened when the men resumed their operation and a grenade explosion knocked him unconscious.

“When I come to, I was blown up in a crump on the ground, and my weapon was blown out of my hand. I can remember seeing red and saying a prayer, hoping I wasn’t blind. I couldn’t see. And I knew I was in a lot of pain and my hands were hurting. I couldn’t get up, and I really didn’t want to get up anyway because I couldn’t see. And then I finally starting getting the vision back and it was like blood was in my eyes, and I started feeling, but my hands were all blown up.

“And then it was like there was a big flame and there was smoke and there were people screaming and hollering. It in fact was an enemy soldier that was burning the people that would have been ambushed with a flamethrower. And the guy walked up to me and was getting ready to burn me, and he looked at me and he didn’t burn the lieutenant. The lieutenant was about 5 feet away from me, and he’s laying face forward, and he was hollering and he was screaming. I knew he was hurt. And the guy looked at me with the flamethrower, and then I looked at him. I guess I looked so bad and pitiful, he decided not to burn me up. He just turned and walked off.”

Now Howard was unarmed, and his hands had been blown apart. He was peppered with shrapnel. He couldn’t walk. So he grabbed the lieutenant’s shirt and starting dragging him—a big man, maybe 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds—toward safety as an estimated two enemy companies fired on them.
The great man’s face changes as he talks. His jaw stiffens, and his eyes, though narrowing, seem to take on an even more penetrating blueness. I am mesmerized as he relives these moments.

“So I’m pulling him back down the hill, and there was a sergeant that was laying down behind a log with a weapon that hadn’t been wounded that had seen this. But he was crying and not using his weapon. Here I am, begging him to help me because I can’t walk and drag the lieutenant back down.
“I said, ‘Well, give me your weapon,’ and he wouldn’t give me his weapon, but he did give me a .45. Just as he gave me the .45, and I’m trying to tell him to give me a couple more magazines of rounds for it, a bunch of enemy soldiers come running toward us. So here I am trying to fire the handgun, and I can remember shooting this enemy soldier that was fixing to stick me with a bayonet. He was running toward me. In fact, he fell across the lieutenant that I was dragging, and so just as he fell across there was another one behind him. They were trying to get us alive is what they were trying to do.”

The sergeant finally began to fire his weapon, and Howard got hit again. A bullet smashed into a magazine in his ammo belt for his rifle, setting off the rounds he was carrying. Howard estimates he was hit with 15 or 20 rounds of exploding ammunition.

“Here I am thinking, I’m blowing up again,” he says. “And there were other soldiers back behind him that hadn’t been hurt at all that had been watching us being almost executed by the enemy and not doing anything, not even firing their weapons.”

Howard eventually got the lieutenant to a medic. His platoon was trapped under heavy fire and had now suffered too many casualties to fight the enemy on their terms. The medic propped Howard up, and he told his brothers, “We are going to establish a perimeter right here, and you’re going to fight or die.” Then Howard did the unthinkable. He got a radio and called in an air strike on his own position. He ordered the men to make a triangle with three strobe lights around their position to keep from getting hit.

“They brought the fire into our position,” Howard says. “In fact, I remember fire landing right between my feet and, you know, ricochet hitting me in the face. You know, that’s how intense it was.”

Eventually, helicopters were able to extract the men. Out of 37 soldiers who were ambushed that day, six survived, largely due to Howard’s heroics and quick thinking. He acted in a similarly heroic manner and endured similar injuries, saving the lives of many others on two other separate occasions for which he was nominated for the Medal of Honor.

Ten lines. That’s what the Associated Press gave Col. Robert Howard.

Back among the living in Waco, I notice that Missy has inherited her father’s looks. She is slender and beautiful. Her husband Frank Gentsch is athletic and carries his badge and handgun in the comfortable, easy manner one might expect of Waco’s chief of detectives. Frank says that before his first date with Missy, the colonel showed him how he’d kill a man with his bare hands. That must have been a little unsettling, but Frank still has a bullet in his back, so you know the old man was proud of him. On Missy’s lap sits their adopted 3-year-old daughter, Isabella, with a snubby little nose and the cutest fuzzy fro held back with a pink headband. Howard adored her—as he did his other children and grandchildren.

The life of a soldier, especially a Special Forces one, is complicated. There are top-secret stories that can’t be told and endless questions. “When is Daddy coming home?” Or worse: “Will Daddy come home?” Howard was married three times and remained close only to those who “got him.” Like so many of our fighting men and women, he felt tremendous guilt over the many times he was forced to choose between his country and his family.

After his discharge when he was 53 years old, Howard spent 13 years processing claims for the Department of Veterans Affairs and spent most of the last three years of his life in Iraq and Afghanistan, visiting troops, giving talks, and boosting morale. For a soldier, meeting Bob Howard was like a religious experience. Shaking his hand was an honor never to be forgotten. You see, they knew who he was. They got him.

We American civilians can say what we like about the morality of any war, but we should support the American soldiers and their allies whom we have sent to wage it. I’ve visited military hospitals, psych wards, and VAs in Dallas and around this country, and I’ve seen them. Mostly from Korea and Vietnam. Old, unkempt men, the military bearing and pride they once had now gone. Sometimes the only evidence it ever existed is on a battered regimental or naval ball cap. They rock back and forth, mumbling into full jungle beards, with rheumy, blast-zone-empty eyes. Or they sit in pairs, often holding hands, together and alone with horror-story memories that play over and over in their heads. Some sit with their imaginary long-dead friends, whose body parts still lie in the killing fields upon which they once so bravely fought. To America’s eternal shame, for many of them home is a sterile corner of the Cuckoo’s Nest, freezing and drunk under a highway bridge, or, if they are lucky, a spare room in the house of a worn-out son or daughter.

At least Bob Howard was spared that fate. Pancreatic cancer finally stopped him. As the disease spread to his lungs and lymph nodes, his expiry date drew closer, and he was visited by more and more soldiers, most of them old friends. But there were a few lucky youngsters, too, of whom Leroy was one of the last.

And there was always Missy, there with him every day with Isabella. Sometimes his granddaughter Holley, the starting catcher for the Texas Tech softball team, would visit. Or Tori, whom the colonel always called “Victoria.” Tori was always heartbroken when she had to leave her grandpa’s bedside and was a constant comfort to both the colonel and Missy at the end. Howard’s eldest son, Robert, is at Fort Bragg, going through Special Forces school.

As a soldier, Robert had already seen how his father acted around other military men. But for Missy and the other children, their father’s illness, and the parade of visitors it occasioned, showed them something new about their father. When Missy and the grandchildren were around, Howard was the gentle old gardener, the same man they had always known. But when a soldier entered his hospice room, he would stiffen. His voice changed to gravel, and any sign of vulnerability evaporated. He would laugh and bellow orders until the soldier was gone, and then there he’d be again: the gardener with the sparkling blue eyes, smothered in children whom he’d caress with rough, scarred hands.

By all accounts, Howard was a spectacularly bad patient. He was a nightmare for his nurses, refusing to take the painkillers, often swilling them around, then spitting them out after the nurse had left. He was going to be clearheaded until the end.

After yet another astonishing fight, during which the family was told on several occasions that Howard had only hours left, the head of the world’s most dangerous gardener finally fell sideways onto his beloved Missy’s shoulder, and America lost what was arguably her greatest warrior ever.

The name Robert Lewis Howard belongs beside George Washington, John Paul Jones, Chesty Puller, Alvin York, and Audie Murphy, to name a few of the greatest. By the time anyone reads this, Howard will have been lain to rest at Arlington the day before I became an American citizen. I would have given anything to have been with Missy, Frank, and the rest of the family on that day, but I know the colonel would have barked at me to get my worthless foreign ass to my swearing-in ceremony.

Col. Robert Howard’s funeral cortege should have started at the foot of the Jefferson Memorial. His flag-draped casket should have passed through streets lined with thousands of grateful, flag-waving Americans to Arlington, where, in preparation for his final resting place, some politician had been dug up and tossed into the Potomac. But that didn’t happen.

Ten lines. A couple of longer obits here and there. That’s all he got.

On the drive back to Dallas from Waco, I got to thinking. We should rename that stretch of I-35 after him. The Col. Robert Howard Highway. People would shorten it, of course: the Howard.

His life deserves more. But it’s a start.

David Feherty is a golf analyst for CBS Sports.

Gear & Stuff War

The Vietnam Stopgap: A Look at the short lived US M1967 Modernized Load Carrying Equipment

Post author By Grumpy
Post date January 28, 2023
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All About Guns War

Frag Out! High Explosive Snowballs by WILL DABBS

Post author By Grumpy
Post date January 27, 2023
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The scale of destruction wrought during the Second World War was unprecedented. Such carnage is literally unimaginable today.

It’s tough for the modern mind to comprehend the scope of the Second World War. During those six years, the combatant nations produced enough bullets to shoot every human being on the planet forty times. 12.2 million Americans served. 407,316 died.

The industry of death was perfected during WW2.

The final planetary death toll was somewhere between 70 and 85 million people. That’s roughly 3% of the world’s population. Nearly one-fifth of the Soviet population perished.

The world’s nation states threw all they had into the war.

WW2 touched almost everybody on earth. If you didn’t have a loved one serving you certainly knew someone who did. My friend enlisted in 1940.

My buddy fought past Monte Cassino, shown here after extensive Allied aerial bombardment.

He fought in North Africa before heading to Sicily for Operation Husky. He then landed at Salerno in September of 1943 as part of Operation Avalanche. Afterward, he fought past places like Rome and Monte Cassino. Nearly 70,000 Allied soldiers died in the Italian campaign.

For the most part, WW2 was a war of mobility. However, things still got bogged down on fairly frequently.

By the mid-1940s warfare was a very dynamic thing. The advent of the tank and, more importantly, the military truck ensured that battle lines ebbed and flowed with the vagaries of fate, strategy, and logistics. The Italian campaign, however, lasted nearly two years. This gave the combatants time to get to know each other.

Steep ridged terrain favored the defender. Foul weather made things hugely worse.

Italy was a grunt’s nightmare. Steep natural defiles impeded maneuver while minimizing the effectiveness of air power and artillery. When combined with cold, wet, miserable weather this all conspired to create a relatively static battlefield, particularly in wintertime. In 1944 with the offensive temporarily stalled my friend’s unit dug in and made itself at home.

German and American forces exchanged both profane epithets and the errant hand grenade as the opportunity allowed. This staged photo of a German Landser prepped to throw a stielhandgranate stick grenade on the Eastern Front has been widely reproduced.

Things then got a bit weird. In some areas, the German and American positions were within shouting range, sometimes for days on end. In my buddy’s unit, nobody spoke German. However, a few of the corresponding Germans did speak English. The two sides would pass the time by hurling insults at each other punctuated by the occasional hand grenade. My friend acquired a decent repertoire of German profanity.

The Germans and Americans shot at each other as the situation demanded, but neither side really wanted to be noticed unduly.

In this particular area, the Americans held the ridgeline, while the Germans occupied the valley. Each side would sporadically exchange rifle and machinegun fire as necessity dictated. However, most grunts on both sides just wanted to live long enough to go home.

German courier and supply vehicles like this Kubelwagen transited within sight of American positions.

A surprising lot of the German Wehrmacht in WW2 still relied upon horses for transportation. Hard to believe shooting like this was ever a real thing.

A modest road snaked through the valley at the base of my buddy’s ridge. Fairly frequently German troops would cruise down the road, sometimes in vehicles like trucks or Kubelwagens, occasionally on horseback, and often on foot. The road was at the limits of effective rifle range but oriented directly underneath the American positions.

These guys generally got activated in response to sniper fire. This kept an effective damper on Infantry mischief.

My friend said neither side was in any real hurry to shoot at the other. Small arms fire invariably precipitated mortars or artillery in response. Nobody likes being on the receiving end of the field artillery. One frigid evening as my buddy sat shivering in his foxhole he had an epiphany.

The Mk 2 hand grenade was the standard American grenade of WW2.

The next afternoon late he and his pals took a bunch of Mk 2 hand grenades and packed snow tightly around them before pouring water over the whole frozen mess. The water froze in short order, locking the grenade spoons in place. The US troops then gently removed the safety pins from the grenades and gave these high explosive snowballs a gentle shove down the mountainside.

The frozen Italian winter offered these particular GIs a novel way to employ their hand grenades.

By the time these frosty bombs reached the bottom of the hill, they were thoroughly encased in ice and ample accumulated snow. The geography of the situation was such that each diabolical frozen snowball came to rest in the road below. Then they just waited.

The Grenades

I guess a pomegranate does look a bit grenade-like.

The English word “grenade” dates back to the 1590s and is derived from the French word “pomegranate.” The hand grenade’s obvious similarity to this poly-seeded fruit was the overt inspiration. The concept of the hand grenade dates back much farther, however.

These are early Byzantine grenades shown alongside period caltrops. Caltrops were area denial weapons designed to damage horses’ hooves. No matter how they’re dropped there is always a pointy side facing up. Ouch.

The earliest grenades were ceramic fuse-fired affairs that were likely not terrifically effective.

Simple incendiary grenades were used by the Byzantines as far back as the 8^th century. Byzantine troops found that they could fashion glass and ceramic containers filled with Greek Fire and use them to visit chaos upon a nearby enemy. Greek Fire was some fascinating stuff indeed.

Experts still disagree on the chemical composition of Greek Fire. I just know you wouldn’t want to get any of it on you.

Even today nobody is completely sure what made up Greek Fire. The stuff was most typically expelled from a device similar to a modern-day flamethrower and was used in ship-to-ship naval battles. Greek Fire was rumored to continue burning once in contact with water. Some suggested components included quicklime, naphtha, pine resin, sulfur, niter, and calcium phosphide.

This early Chinese “Thunder Crash Bomb” was excavated from a 13^th-century shipwreck.

True explosive grenades as we appreciate them really arose in China about a thousand years ago. They were rather theatrically called Zhen Tian Lei or “Sky-Shaking Thunder.” These rudimentary devices consisted of gunpowder packed into metal or ceramic containers. Fuse-fired cast iron versions first saw service in Europe in the mid-1400s.

The Ketchum Grenade was relatively widely used by Union forces during the American Civil War. The fins supposedly kept the bomb flying nose forward for reliable detonation. Confederate troops were known to catch these things in Army blankets and then vigorously return them to their original owners.

The Ketchum Grenade was fin-stabilized and featured a nose-mounted impact fuse. These weapons were first used by Union forces during the American Civil War. Confederate counterparts were simpler spherical things that weighed up to six pounds and used sensitive paper fuses.

The British Mills Bomb was compact, reliable, and effective. Most of the world’s modern hand grenades followed its general pattern.

In 1902 the British War Office declared hand grenades to be obsolete. However, nobody bothered telling the Germans so they started churning out stick grenades by the zillions in 1915. In that same year, the British saw the light and began producing the Mills Bomb, the world’s first truly modern fragmentation grenade.

This WW1-era photograph shows a British officer demonstrating the proper technique for delivering a Mills Bomb.

The Mills Bomb was a product of the fertile imagination of one William Mills and was deeply serrated. In theory, this was supposed to create predictable fragmentation. In practice, these knobs made very little difference to exactly how the grenade burst. The typical British Tommy was expected to be able to throw a Mills Bomb at least thirty meters, though the danger zone was advertised as being closer to 100. By the end of WW1, the warring nations had produced about 75 million hand grenades.

The Mk 2 Pineapple Grenade

The WW1-era American Mk 1 grenade was a flawed design, but it laid a foundation for more effective things to come.

The Mk 1 grenade was one of the world’s first time-fused grenades. However, deploying the Mk 1 was a fairly convoluted chore, and many were thrown without being properly lit. The Germans were frequently all too willing to light these things up and toss them back. This led to the definitive Mk 2.

The Mk2 Pineapple grenade was an iconic weapon among American troops in WW2.

The classic Mk2 Pineapple grenade was first introduced to US forces in 1918 just as the First World War was winding down. Despite orders for some 44 million copies very few of these handy little bombs saw service before the armistice. By the onset of WW2, however, the Mk 2 was ready for prime time.

The knobby design of the Mk2 made it easier to grip but didn’t much enhance its tactical effectiveness.

The Mk 2 hand grenade featured a cast iron body with a grooved surface divided into forty prominent knobs in five rows of eight columns. Like the Mills Bomb, these knobs actually did very little for controlling fragmentation but did make the grenade easier to grip. The obvious similarity to the pineapple fruit forever associated the two terms.

Though they all looked similar on the outside, Mk 2 hand grenades came with a variety of explosive fillers.

The Mk 2 typically sported a time fuse with a 4 to 5-second delay. Fillers included TNT, Grenite, a 50/50 combination of amatol and nitrostarch, a proprietary explosive called Trojan comprised of ammonium nitrate, sodium nitrate, and nitrostarch, or smokeless EC powder.

Some Mk 2 grenades had a 3/8^th-inch threaded plug in their base for loading the explosive. Those charged with EC powder were typically left solid on the bottom and filled through the fuse well.

EC powder was a 19^th-century formulation of potassium nitrate, barium nitrate, and nitro-cotton gelatinized with ether alcohol. This same stuff was sometimes used as a propellant in shotgun shells. The Mk 2 weighed about 21 ounces depending upon the particular filler and was most unpleasant up close, particularly in enclosed spaces.

The Rest of the Story

The broadly fluctuating temperatures allowed my friend and his buddies to improvise a bunch of low-cost time-delay IEDs with which to harass German forces in the valley below.

By late winter, the snow was thick on the ridgeline, but the temperature fluctuated from sunny and warm in the daytime to well below freezing at night. My friend and his buddies would liberally seed the German road below with frozen snowball grenades at night and then go about their business. The following day the sun would come up and gradually melt the ice-encased bombs.

This is the original movie prop Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch from the inimitable British comedy *Monty Python and the Holy Grail.* It was crafted from a toilet bowl float with some fake plastic pearls glued on. The original screen prop sold at auction in September of 2019 for 55,000 pounds. That’s about $67,000. Wow.

The end result was a steady stream of random detonations along the German road throughout the day. My friend said he had a clear conscience as he was effectively harassing the enemy without exposing himself or his men to any incremental danger. After the first few days of random grenade explosions, the Germans lost their enthusiasm and stopped running couriers and supply vehicles within sight of American positions.

All major combatant nations in WW2 fielded their own unique hand grenade designs.

My pal told me that, as near as he could tell, they never killed anybody with their curious explosive snowballs. However, they did effectively deny the enemy use of a handy supply and communications route while suffering no casualties in the process. Eventually, the weather improved and Allied forces resumed pushing the Germans back up the Italian peninsula.

Yesterday’s Mk 2 (left) and today’s M67 grenades are philosophically similar.

Like most heroes of his generation, my friend came home from the war ready to create and to build. He went decades without discussing his wartime experiences with anybody, preferring to focus on more pleasant stuff. I was blessed with this story sitting on a porch swing with him soon after I finished Airborne School back in the 1980s.

Though the campaign in Normandy still gets most of the press, the Germans fought like lions in Italy. This Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger 1 is shown guarding a road intersection in Rome.

Our friendship blossomed, and I got to hear many such tales. Along the way, I also married his granddaughter. He was and remains one of my heroes.

We will never fully appreciate the profound debt we owe those old guys who fought in World War 2.

These old grenades still show up from time to time unexpectedly. The dirt-covered live specimen shown here was discovered underneath an American McDonalds parking lot by workmen expanding the facility.

War

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War

Russian Soldiers Ask: ‘We Have Nothing To Fight With. Why Should We Go Up Against Tanks With Only Machine Guns?’ By Timofei Rozhanskiy

The video appeared this week on Telegram and other Russian social-media networks: a group of more than two dozen men in masks and camouflage, standing in a snowy field and appealing for help.

“We are the soldiers of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Platoons, 254th Regiment, 7th Company, 3rd Battalion. Please help us sort out the situation,” the soldiers say. “Our commander gave us an order not to retreat from our positions. But the commander gave us no cover and no support. We had only machine guns, and all the rest of the weapons were damaged.”

“Now they’re accusing us of desertion, since the company commander says he didn’t give the order,” they said. “In sum, command doesn’t care about us.”

The video is undated and does not indicate where it was shot, except to suggest it was in Ukraine or near staging grounds used by Russian forces to enter Ukraine.

But the complaint, and the soldiers’ decision to go public with it, highlights the continuing battlefield problems facing some of the tens of thousands of newly mobilized troops that Russian commanders have enlisted to wage war against Ukraine.

In an effort to reverse the military’s flagging campaign to pound Ukraine into surrender, the Kremlin in September ordered the call-up of 300,000 men, many of them reservists. In the months prior, Russian authorities had conducted what experts called a “covert mobilization,” recruiting volunteers with offers of high salaries.

But Russia’s national logistics and recruiting infrastructure was largely unprepared to deal with the influx of troops who needed to be housed, clothed, equipped, and trained before being deployed.

Troops have complained, even before arriving on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, of things like not getting paid, not having enough rations, or merely a lack of discipline and organization among commanders.

Desertion Persuasion

A law signed by President Vladimir Putin in September stiffens the penalties for desertion during a period of mobilization or wartime, with violators facing up to 10 years in prison, while conscientious objectors will risk up to three years behind bars. The law also criminalizes “voluntary” surrender, which is punishable by sentences of up to 15 years.

Still, that hasn’t dissuaded a growing number of soldiers willing to brave the possibility of criminal charges.

WATCH: “There is deep cold, frozen earth, and fighting.” RFE/RL correspondent Maryan Kushnir sent this special report after spending time recently on the front line in Soledar. After he filed this material, Russian forces claimed to have seized control of the town, but this has not been independently confirmed.

“They were sent to the front line with only their naked asses, so to speak, to fight tanks with only machine guns,” said Alyona Savochkina, whose husband, Viktor, was one of the soldiers appearing in the video. “Basic kit, grenades. All of them. They had no reinforcements. Nothing.”

In an interview with Current Time, Savochkina, who lives in the western Oryol region, said her husband had previously volunteered for service in July and was sent to work as a driver. But when he was ordered into the infantry, he broke his contract and returned home.

On October 24, she says, he was called up under the Kremlin’s mobilization order, and initially sent to Smolensk, near the Belarusian border. After a couple more moves, his unit was sent to the front line in Ukraine’s Luhansk region on December 31.

She says her husband’s unit is badly underequipped and underfed. She said they are supplied with food items sent by relatives. “But now they are threatening to deprive them of even this,” she said.

Asked about the soldiers’ public appeal, the regional government in Yaroslavl, where the unit is formally based, said it was investigating the appeal.

Relatives of the soldiers also said they planned to file a formal complaint with military prosecutors in Moscow.

What Are We, Cannon Fodder?

There are no known figures for how many Russian soldiers have deserted since the beginning of the invasion in February 2022. At least three deserters are known to have been prosecuted in Russian courts.

In a report published in November based on Russian media reports, the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank, said hundreds of soldiers were believed to have deserted and were hiding in at least seven locations in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

“The morale and psychological state of Russian forces in the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts are exceedingly low,” the report said. “Significant losses on the battlefield, mobilization to the front lines without proper training, and poor supplies have led to cases of desertion.”

Viktoria, the wife of another soldier who appeared in the video, says her husband, Ivan, was sent to the front line with little or no preparation. After he received his orders to report for duty on October 23, she says they began quickly buying personal equipment for him: clothing, first-aid kits, berets. He was issued a sleeping bag and a uniform at the recruitment office.

Ivan’s unit was first sent to Smolensk, where they went through basic training, and training on weapons, says Viktoria, who asked that her last name not be used.

After moving to a series of locations, they were issued weapons on December 31 while in the Voronezh region, near the Ukrainian border, and then they were sent to the front.. “They were taken to Ukraine, there was no more training. Nothing,” she said. “They were given new weapons that they had never even held in their hands. They may have sat there for three days, and then they were sent to the front line immediately.”

Ivan told her that commanders ordered them to start attacks, but Ukrainian artillery opened up, and they ran for 7 kilometers, she says. “‘We don’t even have anything to defend ourselves with; no equipment, nothing, just the guns in our hands,'” she quoted him as saying.

After that, Viktoria says, the unit began refusing orders to return to the front line. “They want to charge them with desertion for this. And they say: ‘We have nothing to fight with. Why should we go up against tanks with only machine guns?'” she said.

“There are quite a lot of guys, and they all seem to be sticking together” as a unit, she said. “But now they are trying to split them up so that they can’t resist.”

After they were taken out, she said, the unit told its commanders: “We won’t go further. It makes no sense for us to go up against tanks with these weapons. What are we, cannon fodder?”

The commander then swore at them and threatened them, she says her husband told her: “Take off your bulletproof vests, turn over your weapons, go back to your Russia. If you get there, well done; if you don’t get there, you’ll be MIA” — missing in action.

Written by Mike Eckel based on reporting by Timofei Rozhanskiy of Current Time

Timofei Rozhanskiy

Timofei Rozhanskiy is a correspondent in Kyiv for Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. Born in Russia, he graduated from St. Petersburg State University and also received film and video production training at Bard College in New York. Before joining Current Time’s Moscow bureau in 2019, Rozhanskiy worked for the independent Russian television channel TV Rain.

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The Remote Control Assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: Beware the Killer Robots by WILL DABBS

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Post date January 22, 2023
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This big teddy bear of a guy was actually Iran’s chief nuclear bomb maker.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was an Iranian scientist born in 1958 in Qom, Iran. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In 1987 he earned his BS in nuclear physics from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. Literally translated Shahid Beheshti supposedly means “Martyr Paradise.” I would find it a bit unsettling to attend “Martyr Paradise University” myself. If nothing else I doubt it was much of a party school. He later earned a Ph.D. in nuclear radiation and cosmic rays.

The Iranians seem absolutely rabid to join the nuclear club. Given their unfettered institutional antipathy toward Israel, the Israelis find this prospect justifiably unsettling.

Fakhrizadeh technically taught physics at the Imam Hossein University. However, in 2007 the CIA announced that this was simply a cover story. Apparently, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was actually scrambling madly to build a nuclear bomb.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was the public face of the Iranian nuclear program.

The AMAD Project ran from 1989 until 2003 and was suspected of being the cover for an Iranian nuclear weapon program. The Iranian government denied its existence, but keep in mind that these are some sneaky rascals. Fakhrizadeh subsequently founded the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND). I have no idea how they got that acronym out of that name. I don’t read Farsi. Fakhrizadeh was SPND’s director from 2008 until 2011.

One can only speculate as to how fascinating this technical conference might have been.

Fakhrizadeh also chaired FEDAT, the Field for the Expansion of Development of Advanced Technology. That acronym I can understand. I’m pleased to see that the creation of bizarre acronyms is not solely an American disease. While the Iranian government has claimed throughout that their nuclear program is entirely peaceful, apparently somebody else felt otherwise. This all came to a head one fateful day in November of 2020.

The Attack

This is Qasem Soleimani. Perhaps it’s just me, but I think this guy looks like the Devil.

Fakhrizadeh was a strategic national asset for Iran, and everybody involved knew that there were forces at play in both the US and Israel who felt that the world might be better off without him. Donald Trump came to a similar conclusion about Qasem Soleimani and blew him straight to hell. Soleimani was known locally as “The Shadow Commander” due to his propensity to skulk about killing people, equipping terrorists, and generally fomenting chaos. Good riddance.

This part of the Middle East is literally forever at war. Truly, it never ever stops.

In the year leading up to November 20, 2020, tensions escalated between Iran and the US as well as Iran and Israel. There were rumors of a pending assassination attempt, but these reports got lost in the mind-boggling clutter that is intelligence gathering in the Information Age. There has been some fairly impressive retrospective self-flagellation in Iran as a result.

The Fakhrizadeh hit was undeniably elegant in its execution. Somebody really outdid themselves on this one.

Fakhrizadeh’s security team begged him not to travel. However, he had an important meeting and claimed he also needed to lecture his students. He was traveling on a rural road in his Nissan Teana near Absard between Tehran and his weekend villa. His Nissan was part of a three-vehicle convoy. He had eleven trained security operatives in tow and sat alongside his wife. Along a deserted stretch of road, the little convoy approached a Nissan truck parked on the shoulder. During a subsequent debriefing, the security forces claimed it looked like the pickup truck was carrying a load of wood.

The attack lasted less than three minutes. Fakhrizadeh was shot a total of thirteen times from a range of 150 yards. His chief security officer purportedly threw himself on top of the Iranian scientist and caught four rounds for his trouble. Fakhrizadeh’s wife was sitting some ten inches away and was unharmed. Apparently, Fakhrizadeh was hit, climbed out of the car, and was then cut to pieces. The gun clearly tracked him as he moved. Once the attack was complete the Nissan pickup truck simply exploded.

The intrinsic precision of the Fakhrizadeh attack was just incredible.

In the immediate aftermath, the Iranian government spun an elaborate yarn about multiple attackers and a suicide bomb. They claimed that three bodyguards died while either three or four of the attackers were killed. They even dredged up a few witnesses who corroborated part of the story, claiming that the suicide bomber lingered on for a bit after the blast before succumbing to his injuries. Apparently, all of that was made up.

The Fakhrizadeh killing proved that it’s a brave new world out there.

The Fars News Agency later reported that Fakhrizadeh had actually been killed by some kind of killer robot. They stated that a remotely-controlled machinegun linked to Israel by satellite and utilizing both Artificial Intelligence and facial recognition had identified Fakhrizadeh and gunned him down. A subsequent article in The Jewish Chronicle quoted unnamed intelligence sources claiming that the attack was indeed the work of the Israeli Mossad using a remote-controlled automatic weapon. Holy crap.

The Fakhrizadeh assassination reflected a remarkable degree of sophistication.

The article went on to state that the entire system weighed about a ton and was smuggled into Iran in small components before being assembled and deployed. They asserted that it was Fakhrizadeh’s predictability in going to his villa every Friday that ultimately killed him. The operation purportedly involved some twenty individuals between Mossad operators and disaffected Iranian resistance fighters. The Chronicle article claimed that there were actually operatives onsite but that the explosive destruction of the gun was adequate to cover their escape. We’ll likely never really know the details.

The Iranians claimed that their favorite nuclear bomb scientist also developed their own home-grown COVID vaccine. While that is some sweet sentiment, I remain skeptical. Conjuring life-saving vaccines and building atomic weapons require some very different skillsets.

After his untimely death, the Iranians even announced that this Ph.D. physicist with a specialty in nuclear radiation and cosmic rays was actually the primary force behind the Iranian COVID-19 test and vaccine. Iran’s Defense Minister Amir Hatami went so far as to say that Fakhrizadeh had made “great strides in the field of developing COVID-19 vaccine.” He added that the center led by Fakhrizadeh went through the first phase of clinical human trials in the field of developing corona vaccine and “did great things for our dear people.” I struggle to believe that, however. The Iranian government lies a lot.

Modern life is complicated. Getting really good at something requires some degree of specialization.

I’m no scientist myself, but in my experience, nuclear physicists do not develop vaccines. Those are two very different disciplines. It would be like having an auto mechanic regulate your cardiac medications or your plumber cook your meals. Once again, consider the source.

The Weapon

I thought *The Jackal* was a simply epic movie. If you haven’t seen it give it a watch. You’ll thank me later.

The 1997 thriller The Jackal starred Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, and Jack Black and orbited around a shadowy international assassin who used a remote-controlled machinegun to try to take out a high-value target. This was one of Jack Black’s first major roles. Though the critics were not kind to the film, I thought it was awesome. At the time it seemed fairly far-fetched. Nowadays it appears technology has caught up with the filmmaker’s vision.

The CROWS is a tactical game-changer. This nifty trinket allows the US warfighter to run his primary weapon system from under cover. However, it is no great technological leap to let Snuffy run that same gun from the comfort of his living room.

The CROWS (Common Remotely Operated Weapon System) is a fixture on US military vehicles operating downrange today. The CROWS will host a variety of automatic weapons and allows the operator to deliver effective fires while under armor. Whether it is an Mk19 automatic grenade launcher, an M240 GPMG, or a Ma Deuce .50-caliber machinegun, the CROWS allows more accurate fire while keeping the friendly operator safe.

The Talon from Paradigm SRP is a drop-in remotely-operated precision weapon mount.

The Talon gyrostabilized weapon mount from Paradigm SRP takes things one step farther. The Talon compensates for movement to provide a stable and accurate firing platform even from a maneuvering vehicle. The mount accepts a variety of conventional rifles and machineguns and has an effective range in excess of 700 meters. The Talon was originally designed to operate off of helicopters, though it is comparably at home on ground or maritime mounts as well.

The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh may seem a small thing in a geopolitical sense. It isn’t. This remote killing signals a sea change in covert direct action operations. The mind boggles as to where this technology could take us.

As soon as mounts like the Talon could be operated wirelessly they could be managed from anywhere in the world. A system like the Talon could be placed in an ambush position and left for a protracted period of time before a target or vehicle came within range. Solar cells could even free you from battery constraints. Powerful long-distance cameras allow the host weapon to be accurately and precisely targeted.

I’m fairly certain this improvised killer robot began life as some little kid’s Power Wheels ride-on toy.

Remotely operated weapons are actually becoming more and more common in the internecine conflicts that seem to define the Middle East and elsewhere. I couldn’t find any specific references to the weapon system used in the Fakhrizadeh hit beyond that it might have been built around a modified FN MAG gun. However, I did find images of a wide variety of improvised remote-controlled gun stations.

Behold, the tasteless DIY skateboard of death.

You need not have particularly mad tech skills to improvise one of these things out of stuff you can order off of Amazon.

A disposable gun, a little scrap steel, a cellular camera, and some servos are really all you need to build your own killer robot at home.

Teleoperated weapon systems are the wave of the future in the exploding field of remote control assassination. It’s clearly a growth industry.

The current term is “teleoperated weapon systems,” and they are rapidly becoming commonplace. Several companies make commercial versions like the Paradigm SRP Talon and Smart-Shooter Smash Hopper. However, the most impressive to me are the homebuilt improvised DIY versions. The ready availability of inexpensive servos, immensely capable high-resolution cameras, and widespread cell coverage make improvising these things ever easier. Anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card can track down the components.

I found references to improvised mounts using SVD Dragunov sniper rifles, FN FALs, PKM light machineguns, MG74 LMGs, and AKM rifles. All that is required is to construct a gimbaling mount, equip it with a remotely accessible video camera, and rig a solenoid to the trigger assembly. Surplus rifles can be used to build these things up on the cheap. The most compelling example I found came out of Syria and was built around a WW2-era MP44 assault rifle.

The WW2-vintage German MP44 is the gift that keeps on giving. Apparently, folks are still killing each other with these things even today in Syria.

Syrian rebels purportedly captured around 5,000 of these vintage weapons from Syrian government stocks. A friend who has been over there recently tells me that these classic guns sell for between $25 and $50 apiece. However, he said magazines are rare and 7.92x33mm ammunition is all but nonexistent. Suffice to say that transferable examples on this side of the pond are quite a bit spendier.

Ruminations

The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was indeed a setback for the Iranian nuclear program.

Whoever carried this out covered their tracks beautifully. Without a literal and figurative smoking gun, Iran cannot retaliate without risking a massive international outcry. Meanwhile, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh remains quite very dead.

Iranian honor guards are such snappy dressers. I’m particularly digging the spiffy white disco boots.

It is only a matter of time before the Iranians do indeed complete an operational nuclear weapon. It may yet take a while, but the fateful day is coming when Iran joins the rarefied ranks of nuclear-capable nations. Let us hope that when that time comes cooler heads prevail and the Iranians do not opt to exercise their sparkly new plaything. If recent events are any indicator, however, the Israelis, or whoever it was that actually ganked Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, will be thoroughly prepared come what may. Lord help us all.