Dabbs made this little handcrafted wooden model tank as a gift for a friend,
and truly extraordinary man, who crewed these things during the war.
They’re pretty much all gone now. When I was a kid, the country was blanketed with a thin patina of World War II veterans. They sold cars, ran service stations and populated local government. Making sweeping generalizations, they were responsible, industrious and selfless. They had seen so much pain and suffering they just wanted to make the world a better place. We are all beneficiaries of that today.
I both loved and hated working at Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital. The hours were long, and the patients were just crazy sick. However, I hit that sweet spot when the old WWII guys populated the place. That bit I absolutely loved. Every time I had a free minute, I just found a door ajar with the lights on, plopped myself down in a handy chair, and said, “Tell me a story.”
I have dozens, but this one guy became a proper friend. His name was Powell Mahaffey. He died at age 95 after a rich, long, productive life of blessing people. I don’t think he’d mind my using his real name.
War Stories
Mahaffey was a tanker. He landed shortly after D-Day and fought all the way until the end of the war in Europe. Along the way, he had five Shermans shot out from under him. He was the only member of his original crew to survive the war. I cannot imagine how that must have felt. If you have seen the movie “Fury,” it was probably something like that — only worse.
He didn’t talk much about the bad stuff. Like most of those awesome old guys, he’d just get a twinkle in his eyes and relate the mischievous or funny tales. That’s the way the human animal is wired. It helps us survive in the face of unimaginable tragedy.
To my recollection, Mahaffey didn’t drink. However, booze back in the war zone was the universal currency. It could be bartered for anything, and it would serve as a welcome diversion in a world gone insane. He said one day, he and his crew happened upon a warehouse full of cognac in some bombed-out little town in Belgium. Appreciating the unique opportunity, they pulled their M4 tank up outside the building and began stacking crates of liquor on the back engine deck. While they were feverishly working, a German kubelwagen with three Wehrmacht soldiers happened to cruise by. All involved grabbed their weapons in a frenzy. The German vehicle passed within feet of the American tank before disappearing around the corner, and nobody fired a shot. Gobsmacked by the sheer weirdness of that exchange, his crew beat feet, their tank now stacked high with pilfered spirits.
Later that day, Mahaffey’s tank was cruising along a forgotten Belgian road when, out of the clear blue sky, a single 60mm mortar round impacted on the back engine deck. For those unfamiliar, mortars are fairly imprecise indirect fire weapons. They are designed to be fired en masse against area targets to saturate a space with fire, not to strike moving targets with surgical precision. Though the explosion did not damage the tank, it utterly obliterated the stolen cognac. He told me he felt that was a sign from God that he shouldn’t drink alcohol or steal other people’s booze. In the grand scheme, he felt it was a cheap lesson.
Powell Mahaffey immediately recognized the case of
cognac stacked on the back engine deck.
A Mark of Friendship
Mahaffey and his delightful wife lived in the same little town as did we. Once we got him tuned up and discharged from the hospital, he sought me out and had my family over for dinner. We had a simply wonderful time. I made him a present in appreciation.
Back before I did so much writing, I lived in my workshop. I have a lot of nervous energy and have to be doing something productive all the time, or my brain will explode. Yeah, my wife is indeed an exceptionally longsuffering lass. One of my favorite pastimes was building wooden models.
I made tanks, ships, airplanes and helicopters. Plastic models are way more detailed, but mine were crafted by hand and customized to the situation and the recipient. When I made one for somebody, I typically made them in pairs and kept one for myself. That’s where my copy of Mahaffey’s Sherman came from.
The tank is cut from 2×4 white pine. I shaped the components on a sanding wheel improvised out of an old lawnmower chassis. The tracks are formed from strips of black sewing elastic. It is an M4A1 with the stubby 75mm gun patterned after the one Mahaffey described as his favorite of the five he crewed. On the back, I took a little block of wood and sunk half a dozen nails in two rows of three. When I gave him the tank, he recognized that immediately as a case of cognac.
“Expeller of evil” (mušēṣu lemnūti) with white pigment and red spots “Catcher of the enemy” (kāšid ayyāb) with red pigment “Don’t think, bite!” (ē tamtallik epuš pāka) with white pigment “Biter of his foe!” (munaššiku gārîšu) with turquoise pigment “Loud is his bark!” (dan rigiššu) with black pigment
There are some surprising parallels between the National Socialists
and certain modern American institutions.
How many of you have had a great experience with your health insurance company? Who here can say that their health insurance company is altruistic, easy to contact and forever has their best interest at heart? Just a quick show of hands. Take your time. I’ll wait.
You should never type while angry. That’s sage advice, to be sure. However, I’m about to, with malice and aforethought, intentionally ignore it.
I’m going to give you a peek behind the curtain that surrounds the modern practice of medicine in America. While all jobs have their administrative headaches, these are mine. If anyone gets their feelings hurt, then I hate it for you.
As part of some truly diabolical medical research, the Nazis forced certain Jews in the death camps to fill out a questionnaire while standing at a podium. The form was of a prescribed length and asked a bunch of mundane demographic questions. After the forms were completed, the Germans just threw them away. They didn’t care one whit about the information. It was simply that to fill out the forms, you had to stand still for a set period of time while a powerful x-ray emitter built into the podium irradiated your groin.
The point was not to gather information. The point was to bombard these poor unfortunates with high-intensity x-rays in hopes of creating a quick and convenient way of sterilizing large numbers of people without their knowledge. Needless to say, that didn’t work. Such a scheme seems about par for the course for the Nazis, the absolute scum of the earth. Now hold that thought …
Many modern medications are expensive. There are a lot of reasons
for this, some of which could be easily addressed with a little political will.
However, creating artificial impediments to good health care seems
counterproductive to me.
PA is a Four-Letter Word
Forgive my bias, but from my perspective, it seems that your health insurance company doesn’t much care whether you live or die. They would sell your kidneys on eBay if they thought they could get a decent rate of return.
There are times that literally half of my professional day is spent worshipping at the profane altar of modern electronic medical records, all the while trying to placate the dark gods of plaintiff’s attorneys and health insurance companies. To wit …
Insurance companies have done a splendid job of shaping my prescribing practices toward cheap generic drugs. In fact, we no longer see drug reps at my clinic simply because I am sick of fighting insurance companies to get them to pay for any drug that costs more than about a nickel a month. As a result, when I prescribe an expensive branded medication, it is always because I already can’t divine a cheaper alternative.
Now, health insurance companies could just explain to the patient in straightforward prose that they will only cover cheap meds and that anything else is the patient’s responsibility. However, that’s not how they do it. They just demand a PA.
In medical parlance, PA stands for prior authorization. I have no idea who ever thought this was a good idea. Satan, the Lord of Darkness, would be my guess.
The online PA clearing house is called covermymeds.com, like consolidating this diabolical monster into a single digital location is somehow doing me a favor. I have to log in and then work through a series of online menus begging the insurance company to approve a patient’s medications. Sometimes they demand to know everything that has been tried before and failed. These are things that only the patient knows, and they’ve already gone back home. I don’t have time to do these stupid things until late at night when the rest of the day’s work is done.
The one I did yesterday, by contrast, only had me laboriously enter the name, address, phone number, and sundry other mundane information about my clinic, all stuff that is available automatically from dozens of sites online. They didn’t ask anything about my patient or his history. All this just takes time.
On a slow day, I’ll see 20 patients. A stupid busy day flirts with 40. Spending 10 minutes verifying my address online so some insurance company will cover Eliquis (a fairly safe but expensive blood thinner) for an 82-year-old woman who honestly cannot manage her own coumadin (a fairly dangerous but cheap blood thinner) is time I just don’t have. And, just like the Nazis, that is the point. If they can put enough artificial impediments in my way, maybe I’ll just give up. The patient won’t get the medicines they need, but taking care of sick people is my problem, not theirs.
Some medicines are just stupidly expensive. I get it. I really do. Somebody has to pay for all those obscene billboards adorning every goat trail in America. You know the ones I’m talking about. There will be some two-story grinning ape in a suit alongside stuff like “1-800-SUE-ANYTHING-THAT-BREATHES. We work hard to get you more.”
Nobody wants to see insurance executives sitting on the side of the road holding signs that say, “Will frivolously waste your time for food.” Actually, never mind. Upon further introspection, that might be kind of cool.
The American Military Industrial Complex ultimately produced scads of handy things in common use today.
If you had every dollar America spent on defense from the end of WW2 to the end of the Cold War you could raze and rebuild every manmade structure in the United States. Spinoff technologies brought us such stuff as duct tape, GPS, digital photography, and many common feminine hygiene products (first improvised out of cellulose bandages by British and American Army nurses in World War 1).
This Navy patrol aircraft is shadowing this Soviet-era surveillance trawler. The Cold War unfolded via countless tense exchanges like this one.
The Cold War raged from 1947 until the fall of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991. This protracted period of geopolitical tension was characterized by a tit-for-tat arms race that saw each side responding to advances of the other. Military Intelligence was and still remains an inexact science. Sometimes the various thrusts and parries resulted in truly astronomical monetary expenditures.
The B-58 Hustler was one of the sexiest airplanes ever contrived. Much of this remarkable plane was actually derived from WW2-era technology.
In few other areas did the arms race achieve more rarefied heights than in the competition over warplanes. Between 1903 and 1943 aviation technology went from the Wright Flier to the B-29 Superfortress. From 1943 until 1956 the state of the art advanced from the lumbering B-29 to the supersonic B-58 Hustler. With each advance in bomber technology came corresponding bounds in fighter tech to counter it. Then came the XB-70 Valkyrie.
The North American XB-70 Valkyrie was the most advanced bomber in the world when it was developed.
The B-58 had a maximum speed of 1,319 mph (roughly Mach 2) and a service ceiling of 63,400 feet. By contrast, the XB-70 topped out at 2,020 mph (Mach 3.08) and could reach 74,000 feet. This put it out of reach of Soviet interceptors. For the Russians this was a world-class crisis.
The Soviet MiG-25 was purpose-designed to counter the threat of the expected fleets of American nuclear-armed B-70 bombers. This is the two-seat trainer version.
Paranoia ruled the day. Loss of parity could result in a first strike weapon that would become an existential threat. When faced with a supersonic bomber of unprecedented capabilities, Soviet fighter designers got busy. The end result was the MiG-25 Foxbat.
At the time of its development, the MiG-25 sported the most powerful engines ever mounted in a fighter plane.
Developed emergently by the Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau using radical applications of existing technology, the MiG-25 was Russia’s answer to the XB-70 Valkyrie. First flown in 1964, the type saw its first operational deployment in 1970. On the surface, the MiG-25 was terrifying.
This is a two-seat trainer version of the Foxbat. The MiG-25 is one seriously huge airplane.
At 78 feet long the MiG-25 was an absolutely massive fighter plane. Additionally, its wings were enormous, intimating a highly maneuverable airframe. The two Turmansky R-15B-300 afterburning turbofan engines on the MiG-25 had originally been designed to power drones and were not intended to have a lengthy service life. The first examples were only good for about 150 hours between engine changes. The final package, however, was the fastest fighter interceptor ever created.
One Disgruntled Pilot Changes Everything
Here we see LT Viktor Belenko with his three-year-old son. The cruel exigencies of life would soon separate them forever.
Viktor Belenko was born in Nalchik, Russia, on February 15, 1947. By his 29th birthday, LT Belenko was at the top of his game. He had a wife and a young son and was posted to Chuguyevka Air Base flying the most advanced fighter aircraft his nation fielded. LT Belenko was the poster child for 1970’s-era communism. Under the surface, however, all was not well with the Soviet Air Defense Force’s fair-haired boy.
The US was rabid to get its hands on a MiG-15 during the Korean War.
The CIA and the USAF had an illustrious history of trying to coax communist pilots into defecting with their combat aircraft. Operation Moolah was an unsuccessful effort at bribing North Korean pilots to defect with a then-state of the art MiG-15. North Korean LT No Kum-Sok did land his MiG-15 at Kimpo Air Base in South Korea in 1953, but he had been unaware of the program.
The MiG-21 was an interceptor pure and simple.
Operation Fast Buck was a similar effort aimed at North Vietnamese pilots. Operation Diamond was an Israeli enterprise that did actually bag them an Iraqi MiG-21. In 1976, however, Belenko’s motivations were a bit closer to home.
Corruption in the System
What a bunch of freaking losers. The sheer volume of innocent blood spilled both directly and indirectly by these four goobers boggles the mind.
Communism is based upon a few flawed premises. The most glaring is that Communists presume that people are innately good. Communism asserts that if left to their own devices human beings will sacrifice for the collective. By and large, that’s just not true.
Kim Jong-Un’s extraordinary haircut has a name. The North Koreans call it “Ambition.”
The second orbits around propaganda. Totalitarian regimes must control the flow of information to survive. That goal gets ever more difficult in the Information Age, but Kim Jong Un stands in portly testimony that it can yet still be done.
So much stupid in such a tight enclosed space. Communism always ultimately equals pain and misery for everybody but the leadership.
There is a common thread in every communist sympathizer in the West. That is an assumption that the only reason that communism has failed to improve people’s lives every single time it has ever been attempted is that it was always just done wrong. The reality is that the communist leadership, like most government leaders, eventually evolve to believe that the rules do not apply to them. Vladimir Putin is a product of that defunct system, and he is currently worth some $70 billion.
Behold classic Soviet-era workmanship. In the absence of competition, people lose their impetus to create a quality product.
LT Belenko’s wife Lyudmila had grown unhappy with military life and announced her intent to file for divorce and move back to her parents in Magadan with their three-year-old son. The infrastructure and support facilities at Belenko’s base were also badly lacking. Whenever Belenko would voice his concerns to his political officer he was derided for complaining. All these influences synergistically drove the young Soviet pilot to take some fairly drastic action.
The Event
LT Belenko had planned his fateful mission months in advance.
On the morning of September 6, 1976, LT Belenko launched in his single-seat MiG-25P Foxbat on a training mission alongside several of his mates. When over open water Belenko claimed engine trouble and fell out of formation. He then dropped the massive fighter down to thirty meters and made a beeline for Japan.
The only handy Japanese airfield LT Belenko could find was much too small for his powerful Russian fighter jet.
Belenko’s maps were sketchy concerning Japanese airfields. His intended destination was a military field at Chitose. However, thick cloud cover, his crummy maps, and a critical lack of fuel drove him to a smaller civilian field at Hakodate.
Little draws a crowd faster than a Soviet pilot defecting with his state-of-the-art combat aircraft. Just as important, Belenko brought along the classified manuals for the jet as well.
Belenko circled the field three times, nearly colliding with a civilian Boeing 727 on climb out. The runway was markedly shorter than what the MiG-25 typically required. Despite deploying his drogue chute and standing on his brakes hard enough to blow out the front tire the heavy fighter still overran the runway by 240 meters. Belenko shut down his engines with thirty seconds of fuel remaining. When civilians began to gather around the plane and take pictures Belenko dissuaded them by firing his pistol into the air.
The Gun
During the Cold War, the Soviets did not necessarily view the handgun as a proper combat tool. Unlike the American M1911A1 .45, the Makarov was used more as a badge of rank and for straggler/deserter management on the battlefield.
LT Belenko almost assuredly packed a Makarov service pistol when he landed in Japan. This compact little handgun is called the PM in Russian parlance. PM stands for Pistolét Makárova or “Makarov’s Pistol.” The PM is a fairly uninspired unlocked blowback handgun designed by Nikolay Fyodorovich Makarov and first adopted in 1951. The PM fires the stubby little 9x18mm Makarov cartridge.
The PM pistol is easy to carry and easy to conceal. It has seen widespread distribution.
The PM feeds from an 8-round single-stack box magazine retained via a heel-mounted catch. The overall layout and function of the gun strongly favor that of the Walther PPK. Unlike the PPK, the slide-mounted safety is pressed up for safe and down for fire. More than five million copies have been produced.
The Rest of the Story
LT Viktor Belenko was the archetypal Soviet-era warrior. However, he saw through the lies of the totalitarian regime that dominated his life and sought out freedom at any cost.
Belenko was arrested by Japanese police upon his exit from his warplane. He immediately requested asylum in the United States. The Soviets for their part announced that Belenko had gotten lost and had subsequently been drugged by the Japanese. When granted an interview with the young pilot, Russian officials were predictably unable to persuade him to return home.
The MiG-25 was shockingly crude. Much of the plane was crafted from heavy stainless steel welded together by hand.
American and Japanese aviation experts tore Belenko’s MiG apart to learn its secrets only to find that it was a pretty lousy airplane. The Soviets had not yet perfected the capacity to work with titanium for high-temperature applications, so much of the plane was actually formed from stainless steel. This made the aircraft incredibly heavy with a max gross weight of 80,954 pounds. Additionally, the big wings were not designed to enhance maneuverability. The MiG-25 needed these large wings simply to stay aloft given its portly weight. The Russians eventually got their plane back…in forty different boxes after Western intelligence personnel had picked it literally to pieces.
Here we see LT Belenko in disguise being escorted to America by security agents.
George Bush was director of the CIA at the time and declared the defection of LT Belenko to be an “intelligence bonanza.” In 1980 the US Congress passed S.2961, a specific act that granted LT Belenko citizenship in the United States. Jimmy Carter signed the act into law on October 14 of that year.
Here LT Belenko is shown flying American T38 Talons in an OPFOR role against USAF fighter pilots. Belenko ultimately developed a friendship with American flying legend Chuck Yeager.
Viktor Belenko married a music teacher from North Dakota and fathered two sons. They later divorced. Belenko never divorced his first wife, though he did visit Moscow once on business in 1995 after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Soviets alternately claimed that Belenko had been killed in a car wreck, repatriated to Russia to be arrested and executed, or otherwise brought to justice. In reality, Belenko served as a consultant to the US government and an aerospace engineer. By all accounts, he still loves it here.
Viktor Belenko has kept a fairly low profile since his defection. The CIA gives him a stipend, and he landed a successful book deal. Honestly, his story would make a great movie today.
Belenko seldom grants interviews, but he purportedly said this in 2000 during a conversation in a bar, “Americans have tolerance regarding other people’s opinion. In certain cultures, if you do not accept the mainstream, you would be booted out or might disappear. Here we have people — you know who hug trees, and people who want to cut them down — and they live side by side!”
Belenko once opined that American cat food was better than what they served him in the Soviet Air Force.
Belenko said he once ate a can of American cat food by mistake. He later claimed, “It was delicious. Better than canned food in the Soviet Union today!”
The XB-70 ended up being one gigantic unintentional ruse. It ultimately cost the Russians billions of rubles unnecessarily.
The XB-70 that drove the whole MiG-25 project was a big nothing burger. Only two prototypes ever flew, one of which was destroyed in a horrible accident. You can see the video of the event here.
The B1 ultimately succeeded the XB-70 and was a much more versatile aircraft. It has served ably throughout the War on Terror.
The subsequent B1 Lancer was actually designed for low altitude deep penetration missions for which the MiG-25 was utterly unsuited. Spoofing the Soviets into building what was at the time one of the most expensive and strategically worthless warplanes in history yet remains one of the greatest Western intelligence coups of the Cold War.
I read MiG Pilot as a teenager and enjoyed it tremendously.
I read Viktor Belenko’s autobiography MiG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lieutenant Belenko back in the 1980s and loved it.
After Belenko’s Foxbat got dissected by Western intelligence the plane was widely exported. It actually saw some significant success in air-to-air combat, even going so far as to damage an American F-15 during Operation Desert Storm.Hasegawa produced this model kit of the then-classified MiG-25 Foxbat on the strength of photographs taken of Belenko’s plane after it landed in Japan. Among geeks like me, it was quite popular.
What makes men gravitate toward war? War is, after all, the most horrific of all human pursuits. Killing a lazy Saturday afternoon behind my favorite black rifle perforating paper or ringing steel is pure unfiltered recreation. By contrast, kicking in the door of a mud house dirty with tooled-up ISIS fanatics at three in the morning would be fairly horrifying. Given the obligatory terror, deprivation, physical pain, and emotional suffering concomitant with modern combat, why on earth would anyone do it willingly?
Foreigners have flocked to Ukraine by the thousands to fight.
That’s a thorny question. There are roughly 20,000 foreigners fighting in and for Ukraine as I type these words. They make up seven full battalions. I’m told most hail from the US, the UK, and Georgia (the country, not the state). Their respective nations warned these insanely brave adventurers not to do this. In the event of capture, they have literally zero support. Yet they went anyway.
The fight for Ukraine has most of the planet united against the Russian bully.
We humans do seem quick to embrace a proper crusade. In Ukraine, the Bad Guys are very, very bad, while the Good Guys seem pretty decent. We’re all going to die of something. It might as well be something that matters.
This is Tom Berenger as SSG Barnes from the Oliver Stone epic Platoon. I once served with a guy who was a bit like this. He was a force of nature.
On a certain visceral level, however, some folks are just addicted to the rush. SSG Barnes from the movie Platoon is the archetype. Once Barnes discovers that war is his calling he just cannot get enough.
I served with a guy like that back in the day. He did three combat tours in Vietnam and found it difficult to thrive away from a war zone. He was forced to retire with more than 30 years of service after beating the crap out of four MPs at once. He succumbed to a brain tumor shortly thereafter.
This dapper guy had more real-world combat cred than anyone I have ever heard of.
Today we will explore the extraordinary life of Ivor Thord-Gray. Thord-Gray was a combat addict. While history and his own memoires might have embellished his experiences somewhat, the places he went and the things he did are amply impressive even when viewed through that lens. His journey began in Stockholm, Sweden.
Origin Story
Ivor Thord-Gray was Swedish. His Viking ancestors would have been proud.
Ivor Thord-Gray was born Thord Ivar Hallström on April 17, 1878. The reasons he changed his name at some point have been lost to history. Ivor was the second son of a primary school teacher named August Hallström and his wife Hilda. He came from gifted stock.
Ivor’s older brother Gunnar was an artist of some renown.
Ivor’s older brother was the esteemed artist Gunnar August Hallström. His baby brother was an accomplished archaeologist named Gustaf. By all accounts, Ivor’s upbringing was typical for his geography and his era. However, from an early age, young Ivor was found to suffer from a most deplorable wanderlust.
Young Ivor saw the Merchant Marine as his ticket to adventure.
In 1893 at the age of fifteen Thord-Gray enlisted in the Merchant Marine in pursuit of adventure. For the next two years he sailed aboard three ships and explored the world. In 1895 at age seventeen he left the service to settle in Cape Town, South Africa.
Things Get Salty
Nelson Mandela served time at Robben Island. It is a tourist attraction today.
In 1896 at age 18 Ivor took a job as a prison guard at the South African prison on Robben Island. I obviously wasn’t there, but I rather suspect the young man got to meet some fascinating personalities in that job. While working at the prison Ivor became both a master fencer and a world-champion archer. The following year Ivor Thord-Gray thought he might try his hand at soldiering.
Ivor served a wide variety of causes. He tended to gravitate toward fighting regardless of the politics.
Over the course of the next decade, Ivor Thord-Gray fought in five conflicts. The first and last were under the Union Jack. One stint was served alongside the Germans.
In his prime, Ivor Thord-Gray cut quite the dashing figure.
Thord-Gray first fought as a Private soldier with the Cape Mounted Riflemen during the Boer War. As a native Swede, the argument could be made he really didn’t have a dog in that fight. However, this was his first taste of proper war, and he found he had a knack for it.
Along the way, Ivor Thord-Gray mastered the Maxim machine gun.
With the formalized violence abating, Thord-Gray found that the weight of a pistol on his belt suited him. He therefore signed on with the South African Constabulary and served as a policeman from 1902 through 1903. During his time in the Boer War and the South African Constabulary, Ivor served as an instructor in the care and feeding of the Maxim machine gun.
This is CPT Thord-Gray while a member of Royston’s Horse.
Following a brief period in the Transvaal Civil Service, Ivor joined the German Schutztruppe of European volunteers fighting in Africa. During this time he would have at least touched the Namaqua and Herero genocides, the first such travesties of the 20th century in which some 80,000 people perished.
He later joined the Lydenburg Militia, this time as an officer. He fought through the Bambatha Zulu Rebellion as a Lieutenant in Royston’s Horse. He battled the Zulus at Mome Gorge where between 3,000 and 4,000 African warriors fell in battle. During this gory fight, Thord-Gray commanded a battery of Maxim machine guns. The resulting contest between assegai spears and belt-fed machineguns was a proper slaughter.
Here we have Ivor Thord-Gray in the uniform of the paramilitary Philippine Constabulary.
There followed a year as a Captain of the Nairobi Mounted Police in Kenya before Thord-Gray grew dissatisfied with the available chaos on the African continent. After an unsuccessful effort to join the Kaiser’s forces fighting in Morocco, Thord-Gray migrated to the Philippines to become part of the US Foreign Legion. By now he was serving as a Captain with the Philippine Constabulary. He was at this point in our tale 30 years old and had already carried a gun under more flags than I can reasonably catalog. It turned out he was just getting started.
Sundry Bush Wars
In 1911 the Italians were fighting the Turks in Libya, so Thord-Gray made his way there looking for trouble.
Ivor tried his hand at farming in Malaya for a couple of years but soon grew bored with it. He joined the French Foreign Legion in the Tonkin Protectorate of North Vietnam in 1909 and fought in Hoang Hoa Tham’s rebellion. He spent 1911 fighting alongside the Italians as they forcibly evicted the Ottomans from Tripoli. By 1913 he was fighting in the Chinese Revolution.
Thord-Gray is second from the right alongside one of his Mexican gun crews. This picture was taken at Hermosillo, Mexico, in December 1913.
From China, Ivor sailed to Mexico to offer his now-extensive martial expertise to Pancho Villa. In short order, he had been appointed a Captain in Villa’s army in charge of the revolutionary’s artillery. At this time Villa and his rebels were supported by the United States against the Huerta political regime, though Uncle Sam obviously soured on Villa in fairly short order.
Ivor repaired disabled guns and smuggled weapons from the United States. Over the next twelve months, he quickly rose through the ranks to Colonel. He ultimately served as Chief of Staff of the 1st Mexican Army. However, it turned out all this was simply preparation for the Main Event. Back in Europe, things were heating up fast.
The First War to End All Wars
Ivor Thord-Gray served as a battalion commander in an esteemed British regiment in combat during WW1. This guy was an epic piece of work.
The British Army was a growth industry in 1914, so Ivor Thord-Gray signed up. His extensive military history secured him the rank of Major in the King’s service. You recall Thord-Gray was still technically Swedish.
Within a year he was the commander of the 11th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers. In late August 1914, Thord-Gray and his Fusiliers landed in France ready to scrap. Two weeks later they were on the front line. Before the war finally wrapped up, Thord-Gray had grievously offended his British commanders but had also been awarded the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal, and the Allied Victory Medal.
After the armistice he wrote the Military Secretary at the War Office as follows, “Would you kindly inform me whether you have any objection to my offering my sword to France, Belgium, or Serbia.” Throughout it all there was a persistent allegation that Ivor Thord-Gray was actually a German spy.
Here we see Ivor Thord-Gray (right) in his Canadian uniform during the war in Russia.
Thord-Gray tried and failed to join the American Army and settled for Canada instead. He served for a time as Inspector of the Imperial Munitions Board in Montreal. He eventually deployed as part of the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force to fight in the Russian Civil War.
This is Thord-Gray in his Russian uniform. You could make a decent career out of cataloging this guy’s multinational combat decorations.
Thord-Gray transferred to the Russian “White” Army in the winter of 1919 as a Colonel serving under Admiral Alexander Kolchak. Before the year was out he was a division commander of the 1st Siberian Assault Division.
Less than a year later he was a Major General serving in the Provisional Siberian Government. One of his tasks was to sell gold reserves to foreign banks. Ivor was captured by the Soviets in the winter of 1919 with the capitulation of Vladivostok but successfully concealed the gold receipts in his pocket. One was valued at $146,946, a king’s ransom at the time. With the Communists clearly in their ascendency, Thord-Gray thought he’d just hang onto the cash.
The Golden Years
By 1923 the world was getting smaller, so Ivor Thord-Gray thought he might give making money a whirl.
Finally in 1923 at the age of 45, Ivor Thord-Gray was ready for a break. He returned to Sweden, the country of his birth, and penned a popular tome on Mexican archaeology. Two years later he emigrated to the US and started an investment bank under the flag I.T. Gray and Co in New York City. He used the pilfered Russian gold money as a seed for his new banking endeavor.
This was but a portion of Ivor Thord-Gray’s chest salad.
Thord-Gray’s final mercenary foray saw him serving as a Lieutenant-General in the Army of Venezuela in 1928. While there he fought the dictator General Juan Vicente Gomez but lost. He then returned to Sweden yet again and, in his free time, earned his Ph.D. from Uppsala University.
Here we see Major General Ivor Thord-Gray in his American uniform.
Getting rich in America suited the man. By 1934 he was married and had two children. He settled with his family in Greenwich, Connecticut. In the summer of 1935 Thord-Gray was appointed Major General and Chief of Staff to Florida Governor David Scholtz. By 1942 his primary mission was counter-espionage in Florida.
In his declining years, Ivor Thord-Gray wrote fairly prolifically using his many-splendored exploits as grist for his typewriter. He was ultimately kind-of married five times and penned seven books.
His most popular work was titled Gringo Rebel: Mexico 1913-1914, a tome relating his experiences fighting in the Mexican-American War. Thord-Gray eventually established a winter home in Coral Gables, Florida.
By the end of his life, Thord-Gray had thrived through fully six careers as a sailor, soldier, ethnologist, linguist, investor, and commercial writer. He served in ten identifiable armies across sixteen wars. This remarkable man peacefully shuffled off this mortal coil in the summer of 1964 at the age of 88. His extraordinary life was that of the archetypal war junkie.
