Category: War

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Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Leadership of the highest kind Manly Stuff One Hell of a Good Fight Soldiering Stand & Deliver The Green Machine This great Nation & Its People War

Meet Sergeant Major Payne:

He’s a senior NCO in the Delta Force. SGM Payne enlisted in 2002, serving as a sniper in the 75th Ranger Regiment until 2007, when he joined the Delta Force.

(SGM Payne in Afghanistan)

In 2015, then-SFC Payne’s unit was deployed to Iraq to help combat ISIS. His unit advised and trained the newly formed Kurdish Counter Terrorist Group. One day, fresh graves are seen outside of a known ISIS prison. The joint team is given the green light.

Payne’s team arrives with the CTG at night time. Upon arrival, they’re hit with volleys of gunfire. The Kurds not having conducted any operations before, are nervous and don’t move forward. The Deltas lead the way, giving their friends courage to press forward. Master Sergeant Joshua Wheeler is killed leading his comrades into battle.

Meanwhile, SFC Payne and his team press into the building. They reach a bolted door that holds in the Iraqi hostages. The team attempts to break it, but there is too much fire coming their way. Payne braves the fire and breaks the bolt. The joint team then starts getting all of the hostages out. As the firefight continues, ISIS terrorists start setting off bomb vests, causing fires which cripple the building’s stability. After securing multiple hostages, they move outside.

(Then-SFC Payne, left or center)

However, plenty of hostages are left. SFC Payne keeps moving back inside to make sure no man is left behind. By doing so, he is risking getting crushed or burnt to death. At one point, a tired hostage believes he is going to die in the fire and can no longer walk to the outside. Payne helps him up and gets him outside.

Overall, due to then-SFC Payne’s actions, over 75 Iraqis are rescued. At first, he is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest American military award. However, on September 11, 2020, SGM Payne was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military award in the US.

(President Trump awarding SGM Payne the MoH)

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The Green Machine This great Nation & Its People War

How The US Army Restored it’s Honor By Taking Hill 609 In Tunisia, 1943

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The Horror! War

Panzermeyer and the Ardenne Abbey Massacre by WILL DABBS

A fairly common thread among incarcerated populations is difficulty controlling one’s emotions.

Most heinous crimes are crimes of passion. Penitentiaries are brimming with folks who suffer from poor impulse control. Whether it is spontaneous road rage or a husband spurned, it is the heat of the moment that drives so many people to do so many things they might later regret. Little is more emotionally heated than modern combat.

Young folks make the best soldiers. They don’t tend to think too deeply about the extraordinary things they’re called upon to do

The most effective soldiers are, with few exceptions, young and impressionable. Lord knows I was. Old guys with a little mileage wouldn’t be willing to do the job. If nothing else we have come to better appreciate the reality of our own mortality. The toxic combination of youth, patriotic fervor, and the very real prospect of imminent violent gory death can be an explosive milieu indeed.

The Waffen SS was a curious elite army within an army during World War 2.

In June of 1944, the entire world was changing. The Allies had a foothold in Normandy, and the Germans were appreciating for the first time what a self-inflicted catastrophe they had created for themselves. Realizing the stakes, Hitler and his general staff mobilized a number of first-rate combat divisions on the Western front to oppose the British, Canadians, and Americans during their breakout from Normandy. Among them was the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend.

We modern folk are really not in a position to fully appreciate the depth of depravity implicit in the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler had a great many repugnant things for which to answer when he finally faced divine judgment in 1945. Right after the cold-blooded murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, primary among them was the Hitler Youth. The Hitler Youth dates back to 1922. Its formal title was “Hitler-Jugend, Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend.” That mouthful of kraut-speak translates to “Hitler Youth, League of German Worker Youth.” This paramilitary organization indoctrinated German boys age 14 to 18 to prepare them to become good little Nazis.

The 12th SS Panzer Division was crewed with what were essentially child soldiers.

Your typical fourteen-year-old lacks the sense to pick out his own clothes, much less intelligently assimilate political ideology. As a result, the Hitler Youth did a simply fantastic job of creating fanatical Hitler acolytes. When Hitler’s total war finally caught up with Germany, the 12th SS Panzer was formed from the ranks of the Hitlerjugend. Senior NCOs and officers were typically drawn from other experienced SS divisions, but the rank and file junior enlisted men were products of the Hitler Youth.

The Germans, for all their well-documented moral failings, produced some simply superb combat soldiers. Weapons like the assault rifle, the modern combat submarine, the general purpose machine-gun, and the jet fighter all had their genesis as German wartime projects.

The 12th SS Panzer was a well-equipped and well-trained combat unit that first saw action on June 7, 1944. During defensive operations around Caen they suffered heavy casualities. The stage was set for Something Truly Horrible.

The Setting

Standartenfuhrer Kurt Meyer was a True Believer, a real Nazi’s Nazi.

Waffen-SS Standartenfuhrer Kurt Meyer commanded the 12th SS Panzer Division during this critical time following the Allied landings in Normandy. He was revered by his men. Behind his back they called him “Panzermeyer.”

Standartenfuhrer Kurt Meyer is seen here on the right alongside Fritz Witt, and Max Wunsche.

Meyer’s command post was established in a Premonstratensian monastery in Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herb near Caen. The towers of the Abbaye d’Ardenne offered a commanding view of the battlefield. These relatively unbloodied SS troopers were arrayed against Canadian forces moving inland from Juno Beach. Canada was a critical partner with the Allies during the D-Day invasion, providing some 14,000 combat troops to the effort.

Modern war is unimaginably destructive.

By the evening of June 7, the Norman countryside was a battlefield. Battlefields exemplify chaos. Now some 36 hours into the close fight there were eleven Canadian prisoners being held at the Abbey. Five were assigned to the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, while the remaining six hailed from the 27thArmoured Regiment (The Sherbrooke Fusiliers). The 12th SS Panzer was being pressed mightily, and Kurt Meyer felt cornered.

Standartenfuhrer Kurt Meyer felt he had no time for prisoners during the frenetic fight for Normandy. Such stuff was common on the Eastern Front where Meyer had learned his trade.

A Polish-born SS trooper named Jan Jesionek was present for what came next and testified for the prosecution at the war crimes tribunal after the end of hostilities. Jesionek reported that a pair of SS soldiers arrived at the command post with seven Canadian prisoners on June 8. One of the guards queried Jesionek regarding the location of Standartenfuhrer Meyer. Meanwhile the Canadians were remanded to a stall adjacent the Abbey for safekeeping. When informed of the seven prisoners, Meyer reportedly said, “What should we do with these prisoners? They only eat up our rations.”

This happy-looking guy was a stone cold combat leader. His fanatical commitment to his cause and his mission precipitated a massacre.

Meyer then purportedly had a quiet discussion with one of his officers out of earshot of the troops working nearby. He supposedly said, “In the future, no more prisoners are to be taken.”

Political fanaticism in combat is the breeding ground for atrocity.

The officer with whom Meyer had been speaking then questioned each prisoner individually. As each prisoner’s name was called he was led into the garden of the Abbey where this officer subsequently waited. As each Canadian turned into the garden the officer shot him in the back of the head with his machine pistol. All seven prisoners were brutally executed in this manner.

In the heat of the moment very bad things can happen to frightened soldiers in combat. It behooves leaders at all levels to be ever mindful of the more sordid aspects of soldiering to help keep things from getting out of control.

Once the officer and guards departed, Jesionek and three fellow drivers examined the bodies lying in the garden. Jesionek reported that the Canadians realized what was happening, and that each prisoner shook hands with his comrades before walking to the garden to be shot. Jesionek admitted that he never heard Meyer give the order to kill the Canadians, but the calculus of the event was fairly self-evident.

The Gun

The German MP40 became emblematic of the war effort.

The German MP40 was the seminal submachine gun used by German forces during the war. Like the American Thompson and the Russian PPSh, the MP40 became a national icon. Roughly one million copies were produced before the gun was supplanted by the MP44 assault rifle.

In the prototype MP36 you can see the vestiges of what would eventually become a legendary weapon.

The MP40 was a streamlined development of the MP38 that was itself an evolutionary successor to the MP36. The MP36 was developed by Berthold Geipel working at Erma Werke with funding from the German Army. The MP36 never made it past prototype stage but laid the foundation for the profoundly successful guns to come.

The MP38 is most easily differentiated from the later MP40 by the grooves in the receiver and the small holes in the magwell.

The MP38 featured the same familiar layout as the subsequent MP40 but was built around a milled receiver formed from a piece of drawn tubular steel. The MP38 can be identified at a glance by the longitudinal grooves milled into the receiver as well as the dime-sized holes cut in the sides of the magazine well.

The MP40 changed the way the world made weapons.

The definitive MP40 employed a pressed steel receiver and synthetic Bakelite furniture. As a result, the MP40 was the first general issue infantry weapon in the world to eschew wood in its manufacture. The underfolding steel stock was copied almost exactly onto the AKMS folding stocked Kalashnikov rifle.

Though heavy and bulky, the MP40 is one of the most controllable and effective subguns of the war.

The MP40 runs from the open bolt and feeds from a double-column, single-feed 32-round magazine. The rear sight is flip adjustable between 100 and 200 meters. The gun fires full-auto only at a sedate rate of around 550 rounds per minute. While fairly heavy at 8.75 pounds empty, the front-heavy nature of the design makes the MP40 exceptionally controllable in action.

The Rest of the Story

SS formations were some of the most effective units in the German military. A friend who fought them in Europe once told me, “We didn’t take many of those SS men prisoner.”

All totaled, as many as 156 Canadian POWs were executed by members of the 12th SS Panzer during the Normandy Campaign. A few bodies were discovered by members of the Regina Rifle Regiment a month later on July 8 when they liberated the Abbey. The first eleven victims were not discovered until spring of the following year when locals accidentally stumbled across the remains. The forensic analysis demonstrated that, while many had been shot in the head as described by Trooper Jesionek, others had been bludgeoned to death with either rifle butts or entrenching tools.

Kurt Meyer ultimately faced military judgment for his wartime crimes.

In December of 1945, Kurt Meyer was formally charged with murder by the Allied War Crimes Tribunal. Trooper Jesionek along with SS Private Alfred Helzel testified for the prosecution, with Helzel reporting that Meyer had commanded that no prisoners be taken. SGT Stanley Dudka, a Canadian survivor, offered first-person damning testimony as well.

A friend who was there told me that after the war there was a surprising dearth of Nazis. Everybody claimed they had been unaware of the darker, more sordid activities of the regime.

For his part, Kurt Meyer denied all knowledge of the killings. He later claimed that he was aware of the presence of the bodies, but that he had not seen them until two days after the murders. Throughout his trial Meyer denied having issued the order not to take prisoners.

Kurt Meyer went to prison for his role in the massacre of Canadian prisoners during the Normandy campaign.

Meyer was convicted of incitement to commit murder for his role as Division Commander at the time of the atrocities. He was sentenced to death on December 28, 1945, though his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on January 14, 1946. He served nine years of his sentence before being released on September 7, 1954.

This fun-loving mob is HIAG, a political action group comprised of former SS troopers that was active after the war.
Worn with both dress and combat uniforms, the Knight’s Cross was the most coveted combat decoration in the German military. Men vying to earn the award were colloquially described as having a sore throat.

After his release from prison Meyer became an active member of HIAG, a lobbying group formed from high-ranking Waffen SS troops. HIAG stands for “Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS,” which literally translates to “Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members.”

The Waffen SS was a controversial though brilliant military construct. SS troopers developed a reputation for fanatical devotion to der Fuhrer.

Throughout the rest of his life Meyer remained a vocal SS apologist, painting SS troops as non-politically affiliated, profoundly brave fighters who had little to nothing to do with the crimes of the Nazi regime. Historians have since reliably debunked these claims.

Kurt Meyer spent the rest of his life defending the actions of the SS.

In 1957 Meyer published Grenadiere, the memoirs of his time with the Waffen SS. In this book, Meyer condemned the “inhuman suffering” to which Waffen-SS personnel had been subjected”for crimes which they neither committed nor were able to prevent”. Historian Charles W. Sydnor subsequently described Grenadiere as “perhaps the boldest and most truculent of the apologist works” of the post-Nazi era.

Panermeyer lived hard and died young.

Later in life, Kurt Meyer’s health declined precipitously. He suffered from kidney failure and heart disease and required a cane to walk. Meyer died two days before Christmas in 1961 at age 51. 15,000 people attended his funeral.

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War Well I thought it was neat!

1959’S FUTURE G.I. CONCEPTS: HOW CLOSE WERE THEY? by Travis Pike

I recently stumbled across an old image of an atomic age soldier with a messy caption describing the image as “Future G.I. Concepts, 1959.” Although I can’t seem to find the exact origin of this specific image, there are several color photos from Life magazine from way back when that show some of the gear it contained in living color. Literally. Their take on the equipment of the Future G.I. is quite fascinating, and well worth exploring through 2021’s lens.

There is an atomic age character to the gear and setup. I mean that literally. The Future G.I. would fight on an atomic battleground radiated by nuclear destruction! Or so they thought. That idea drives a lot of the gear chosen, and we’ll explore why

Helmet Radio Antennae and Microphone

While I don’t think transistor helmets ever came to be, there are certainly way more comms within a squad today than ever before. Communication can be the key to victory, and the better a team or platoon can communicate, the better they can execute a plan. Modern squad comms allow for easy inter-squad and platoon communication, and offer more powerful radios for communication with higher.

Courtesy of Life Magazine

Beyond radios, we’ve seen the development and use of tablets to send pictures, maps, and more to Marines with the Marine common tablet. The Future G.I. program knew comms were critical but likely couldn’t conceive how advanced they would become.

Infra-Red binoculars

I’ve never seen Infrared spelled infra-red, but SIC and all that. The Infrared goggles or binoculars are night vision! In 1959, night vision had existed for quite some time, but the problem was the size, clarity, and power sources required for them to function. Despite all that, the Future G.I. concept really nailed what future night vision would look like.

It’s helmet-mounted, portable, lightweight, and would give the average infantryman the ability to own the night. Those pesky Russians would never see it coming!

Face Mask And Goggles

The face mask makes the soldier look a bit terrifying but was reportedly a heat-resistant mask. The heat of a nuclear explosion might be a bit much for even this piece of kit, but I imagine this wasn’t a constant piece of worn PPE. I do appreciate the goggles. These days, eye protection isn’t just a must-have but a necessity when you step outside the wire.

Goggles were issued when I was in, but the most common eye protection were simple ballistic glasses. The goggles were quite handy in dust storms, and a nuclear desert would present some sand you surely didn’t want in your eyes.

Layered Nylon Vest…and Diaper

The layered nylon armor didn’t necessarily predict the rigid, rifle-proof ceramic plates we’d have today but wasn’t too far off from traditional soft body armor we’ve seen in service for years. The Future G.I. and his armor would be frag and shrapnel resistant and potentially capable of stopping handgun fire. Layered nylon works a lot like Kevlar, but Kevlar proved to be the most resistant to perpendicular pressure, and therefore better for the future of warfare.

But layered nylon offered the soldier ballistic protection as well as radiation resistance. That’s not to say that Kevlar doesn’t offer the same radiation resistance. It just wasn’t developed until 1965, which would have been little if a nuclear war kicked off in 1961. The vest also included what appears to be some kind of crotch protection as well. I have a kevlar crotch protector on my issued plate carrier, so I guess it’s not all that off, at least until circa 2013ish.

Image Metascope

An Image metascope is a non-IR, passive form of night vision that was somewhat revolutionary for the time. These little systems are fascinating, and shrunk night vision down to a much more portable form than the infrared systems of the day. They had very limited range and very low visibility, but they were better than nothing. The metascopes served in Vietnam, but not too much longer after that.

Molded Plastic Gloves

Like goggles, gloves have also become a necessary piece of PPE for the deployed G.I. The Future G.I. clearly knew the value of protecting one’s hands. Plastic doesn’t seem like the best choice since it tends to melt, but I’m betting it was meant to resist radiation, rather than fire and explosions.

Courtesy of Life magazine

M14 Rifle

Nope, the M14 was the shortest-serving service rifle for a reason: it mostly sucked. This pic would have been much more appropriate with a AR 10 or even the earliest of AR 15 models, which had just hit the market in 1959.

“Welded “Combat Boots

When they say welded, they don’t mean welded in the way you think. What they mean is molded combat boots. Directly molded soles were much stronger than stitched soles and much stronger than glued soles. This was relatively new and fancy at the time and made for super tough boots. We’d begin to see molded boots become the standard in Vietnam, so I guess this prediction was dead on.

The AR-10 makes more sense in this world

Jump Belt

I did some digging and assumed this was some form of airborne thing my Marine self just didn’t understand. Boy, was I wrong! No, you see, this belt would attach to a jump pack… or what’s essentially a jet pack! Oh man, the defense engineers in the 1950s ruled. Sadly, we don’t have jump packs or jet packs of any type quite yet, though the British Royal Marines have been experimenting with them for things like ship interdiction. That doesn’t mean the Future G.I. concept was wrong. We just haven’t gotten that far yet.

Explosive Fox-Hole Diggers

My favorite piece of this getup is the explosive fox-hole diggers. I don’t know how they work and assume they would be heavy, and also loud… oh and super dangerous. But dang, I hate digging fighting holes.

If I could just plant a bomb and blow up my own, I would happily do so. Maybe weirdest of all… I remember an SOI instructor saying these were coming out soon when I went through training. I guess they’ve been in development since 1959!

The Future G.I. Meets the Modern G.I.

(U.S. Marine Corps Photo)

While the Future G.I. wasn’t entirely accurate, the themes were there. Troops would be armored, carry radios, see in the dark, and wear both modern eye and hand protection as well as super-tough boots. It’s fascinating to see what they envisioned in 1959 and how it aligned with 2021. I wonder what we’ll see in 2051. Maybe I’ll get my jet pack.

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All About Guns War

Which Was The Most Effective 75-76 mm Gun Fielded In a WW2 Tank?

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War

Russia struggles to replenish its troops in Ukraine By The Associated Press

FILE - A Russian mine clearing expert with a dog works to find and defuse mines along the high voltage line in Mariupol, on the territory which is under the Government of the Donetsk People's Republic control, eastern Ukraine, Wednesday, July 13, 2022. Despite getting bogged down in Ukraine, the Kremlin has resisted announcing a full-blown mobilization, a move that could prove to be very unpopular for President Vladimir Putin. That has led instead to a covert recruitment effort that includes trying to get prisoners to make up for the manpower shortage. This photo was taken during a trip organized by the Russian Ministry of Defense. (AP Photo, File)
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FILE – A Russian mine clearing expert with a dog works to find and defuse mines along the high voltage line in Mariupol, on the territory which is under the Government of the Donetsk People’s Republic control, eastern Ukraine, Wednesday, July 13, 2022. Despite getting bogged down in Ukraine, the Kremlin has resisted announcing a full-blown mobilization, a move that could prove to be very unpopular for President Vladimir Putin. That has led instead to a covert recruitment effort that includes trying to get prisoners to make up for the manpower shortage. This photo was taken during a trip organized by the Russian Ministry of Defense. (AP Photo, File)

The prisoners at the penal colony in St. Petersburg were expecting a visit by officials, thinking it would be some sort of inspection. Instead, men in uniform arrived and offered them amnesty — if they agreed to fight alongside the Russian army in Ukraine.

Over the following days, about a dozen or so left the prison, according to a woman whose boyfriend is serving a sentence there. Speaking on condition of anonymity because she feared reprisals, she said her boyfriend wasn’t among the volunteers, although with years left on his sentence, he “couldn’t not think about it.”

As Russia continues to suffer losses in its invasion of Ukraine, now nearing its sixth month, the Kremlin has refused to announce a full-blown mobilization — a move that could be very unpopular for President Vladimir Putin. That has led instead to a covert recruitment effort that includes using prisoners to make up the manpower shortage.

This also is happening amid reports that hundreds of Russian soldiers are refusing to fight and trying to quit the military.

“We’re seeing a huge outflow of people who want to leave the war zone — those who have been serving for a long time and those who have signed a contract just recently,” said Alexei Tabalov, a lawyer who runs the Conscript’s School legal aid group.

The group has seen an influx of requests from men who want to terminate their contracts, “and I personally get the impression that everyone who can is ready to run away,” Tabalov said in an interview with The Associated Press. “And the Defense Ministry is digging deep to find those it can persuade to serve.”

Although the Defense Ministry denies that any “mobilization activities” are taking place, authorities seem to be pulling out all the stops to bolster enlistment. Billboards and public transit ads in various regions proclaim, “This is The Job,” urging men to join the professional army. Authorities have set up mobile recruiting centers in some cities, including one at the site of a half marathon in Siberia in May.

Regional administrations are forming “volunteer battalions” that are promoted on state television. The business daily Kommersant counted at least 40 such entities in 20 regions, with officials promising volunteers monthly salaries ranging from the equivalent of $2,150 to nearly $5,500, plus bonuses.

The AP saw thousands of openings on job search websites for various military specialists.

The British military said this week that Russia had formed a major new ground force called the 3rd Army Corps from “volunteer battalions,” seeking men up to age 50 and requiring only a middle-school education, while offering “lucrative cash bonuses” once they are deployed to Ukraine.

But complaints also are surfacing in the media that some aren’t getting their promised payments, although those reports can’t be independently verified.

In early August, Tabalov said he began receiving multiple requests for legal help from reservists who have been ordered to take part in a two-month training in areas near the border with Ukraine.

The recruitment of prisoners has been going on in recent weeks in as many as seven regions, said Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the Gulagu.net prisoner rights group, citing inmates and their relatives that his group had contacted.

It’s not the first time that authorities have used such a tactic, with the Soviet Union employing “prisoner battalions” during World War II.

Nor is Russia alone. Early in the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised amnesty to military veterans behind bars if they volunteered to fight, although it remains unclear if anything came out of it.

In the current circumstances, Osechkin said, it isn’t the Defense Ministry that’s recruiting prisoners — instead, it was Russia’s shadowy private military force, the Wagner Group.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, an entrepreneur known as “Putin’s chef” because of his catering contracts with the Kremlin and reportedly Wagner’s manager and financier, brushed aside reports that he personally visited prisons to recruit convicts, in a written statement released by his representatives this month. Prigozhin, in fact, denies he has any ties to Wagner, which reportedly has sent military contractors to places like Syria and sub-Saharan Africa.

According to Osechkin, prisoners with military or law enforcement experience were initially offered to go to Ukraine, but that later was extended to inmates with varying backgrounds. He estimated that as of late July, about 1,500 might have applied, lured by promises of big salaries and eventual pardons.

Now, he added, many of those volunteers — or their families — are contacting him and seeking to get out of their commitments, telling him: “I really don’t want to go.”

According to the woman whose boyfriend is serving his sentence at the penal colony in St. Petersburg, the offers to leave the prison are “a glimmer of hope” for freedom. But she said he told her that of 11 volunteers, eight died in Ukraine. She added that one of the volunteers expressed regret for his decision and doesn’t believe he will return alive.

Her account couldn’t be independently verified, but was in line with multiple reports by independent Russian media and human rights groups.

According to those groups and military lawyers, some soldiers and law enforcement officers have refused deployment to Ukraine or are trying to return home after a few weeks or months of fighting.

Media reports about some troops refusing to fight in Ukraine started surfacing in the spring, but rights groups and lawyers only began talking about the number of refusals reaching the hundreds last month.

In mid-July, the Free Buryatia Foundation reported that about 150 men were able to terminate their contracts with the Defense Ministry and returned from Ukraine to Buryatia, a region in eastern Siberia that borders Mongolia.

Some of the servicemen are facing repercussions. Tabalov, the legal aid lawyer, said about 80 other soldiers who sought to nullify their contracts were detained in the Russian-controlled town of Bryanka in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, according to their relatives. Last week, he said that the Bryanka detention center was shut down because of the media attention.

But the parent of one officer who was detained after trying to get out of his contract told the AP this week that some are still being detained elsewhere in the region. The parent asked not to be identified out of safety concerns.

Tabalov said a serviceman can terminate his contract for a compelling reason — normally not difficult — although the decision is usually up to his commander. But he added: “In the conditions of hostilities, not a single commander would acknowledge anything like that, because where would they find people to fight?”

Alexandra Garmazhapova, head of the Free Buryatia Foundation, told the AP that soldiers and their relatives complain of commanders tearing up termination notices and threatening “refuseniks” with prosecution. As of late July, the foundation said it had received hundreds of requests from soldiers seeking to end their contracts.

“I’m getting messages every day,” Garmazhapova said.

Tabalov said some soldiers complain that they were deceived about where they were going and didn’t expect to end up in a war zone, while others are exhausted from fighting and unable to continue.

Rarely, if at all, did they appear motivated by antiwar convictions, the lawyer said.

Russia will continue to face problems with soldiers refusing to fight, military analyst Michael Kofman said, but one shouldn’t underestimate Russia’s ability to “muddle through … with half-measures.”

“They’re going to have a lot of people who are quitting or have people who basically don’t want to deploy,” said Kofman, director of the Virginia-based Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, on a recent podcast. “And they’ve employed a lot of measures to try to keep people in line. But ultimately, there’s not that much that they can do.”

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Art War

Part of the panorama of the Battle of Champigny-1870 Franco Prussian War

A Fragment from the Panorama of the Battle of Champigny, 1870 - 1 Painting by Jean-Baptiste-Edouard Detaille | Fine Art America

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Soldiering This great Nation & Its People War

CSM Patrick Gavin Tadina – Vietnam War’s Longest Continuously Serving Ranger

A 30-year Army veteran who was the longest continuously serving Ranger in Vietnam and one of the war’s most decorated enlisted soldiers died. Patrick Gavin Tadina served in Vietnam for over five years straight between 1965 and 1970, leading long-range reconnaissance patrols deep into enemy territory – often dressed in black pajamas and sandals and carrying an AK-47.

The retired Command Sergeant Major Patrick Gavin Tadina died May 29, 2020, in North Carolina. He was 77.

“Early this morning, my Dad … took his last breaths and went to be with all the Rangers before him,” his daughter Catherine Poeschl said on Facebook. “I know they are all there waiting for him.”

He is survived by his wife, two sisters, two daughters, four sons, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, the family, said in a brief online obituary. A funeral had not yet been scheduled.

A native of Hawaii, Tadina earned two Silver Stars, 10 Bronze Stars – seven with valor – three Vietnamese Crosses of Gallantry, four Army Commendation Medals, including two for valor, and three Purple Hearts.

After the second Rambo movie release, Patrick Gavin Tadina was profiled in Stars and Stripes, where he was contrasted with Sylvester Stallone‘s beefy – often shirtless – portrayal of a Vietnam combat veteran.

 

Patrick Gavin Tadina in the Vietnam War

“The real thing comes in a smaller, less glossy package,” wrote reporter Don Tate in December 1985. “Tadina stands just over 5-feet-5and swells all the way up to 130 pounds after a big meal.” His small stature and dark complexion helped him pass for a Viet Cong soldier on patrols deep into the Central Highlands, during which he preferred to be in the point position. His citations describe him walking to within feet of enemies he knew to be lying in wait for him and leading a pursuing enemy patrol into an ambush set by his team.

In Vietnam, he served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, 74th Infantry Detachment Long Range Patrol, and Company N (Ranger), 75th Infantry.

Tadina joined the Army in 1962 and served in the Dominican Republic before going to Southeast Asia. He also served with the 82nd Airborne Division in Grenada during Operation Urgent Fury in 1983 and with the 1st Infantry Division during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

A 1995 inductee into the Ranger Hall of Fame, he served with “extreme valor,” never losing a man during his years as a team leader in Vietnam, a hall of fame profile at Fort Benning said.

Some 200 men had served under him without “so much as a scratch,” said a newspaper clipping his daughter shared, published while Tadina was serving at Landing Zone English in Vietnam’s Binh Dinh province, likely in 1969.

Tadina himself was shot three times, and his only brother was also killed in combat in Vietnam, Stars and Stripes later reported.

The last time he was shot was during an enemy ambush in which he earned his second Silver Star, and the wounds nearly forced him to be evacuated from the country, the LZ English story said.

As the point man, Tadina was already inside the kill zone when he sensed something was wrong, but the enemy did not fire on him, apparently confused about who he was, the article stated. After spotting the enemy, Tadina opened fire and called out the ambush to his teammates before falling to the ground and being shot in both calves.

He refused medical aid and continued to command until the enemy retreated, stated another clipping, quoting from his Silver Star citation.

“When you’re out there in the deep stuff, there’s an unspoken understanding,” he told Tate in 1985. “It’s caring about troops.”

He was not one to boast of his experiences, his daughter said in a phone interview Monday.

After retiring from the Army in 1992, he continued working security jobs until 2013, Poeschl said, including stints in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

In recent years, he’d been struggling with dementia and other ailments, she said, and he often believed he was back in the Army with his buddies.

He always seemed most at home with his “Ranger family,” his daughter said. She was trying to get word of his death to as many as she could.

“He was my dad, but he belonged to so many other people,” she said.

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Soldiering War

Marine, 41 (Independent) Commando, Korea, 1950 – They were with the 1st Marine Division at Frozen Chosen in Korea

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All About Guns War

German Artillery Donated To Ukraine Is Already Failing After Just Weeks Of Use Tyler BY TYLER DURDEN

By Magyar Hirlap of Remix News

Barely a month since their delivery, the first German armored self-propelled guns have already ceased service in Ukraine, according to a report by German newspaper Der Spiegel.

The German Ministry of Defense was informed by Kyiv last week that an error message appeared on the cannons and that several of them needed to be repaired. According to the Bundeswehr, the reason behind the malfunction may be that the Ukrainians are firing the guns more intensively than the technology is capable of.

This means that the stress on the loading systems may be too high. Another problem could be that the soldiers reportedly fire the units from too far away with the special ammunition; the smart grenades used by these cannons were meant for shorter-range, precision hits.

The Bundeswehr explained that misuse of the weapons could have contributed to a more accelerated wear and tear. Despite the problems, however, they agreed to supply Ukraine with additional weapons packages.

At the same time, the arming of Ukraine by the West raises several problems. The unlimited flow of weapons can see arms easily end up on the black market or lost. Several European countries have already warned that weapons have on occasion been redirected to other nations. The authorities in Sweden, for example, revealed that anti-tank weapons have already appeared in the circles of criminal gangs in Sweden.

Meanwhile, security policy expert Robert C. Castel drew attention to the fact that Western weapon systems — the Javelin anti-tank missile and the Stinger anti-aircraft missile — can be used against civilian and industrial targets as well as military ones. According to him, it is only a matter of time before these weapons deliveries have unintended consequences. These weapons could still be lurking somewhere in Europe for many decades, as the modern equivalent of mines and air bombs left over from the World Wars, he added.