Arguably the United States had the best artillery of the Second World War, but the British and the Germans had very good artillery. This depicts a British 25 pdr with its artillery tractor.
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Showing posts with label 1950s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1950s. Show all posts
Friday, December 13, 2024
Saturday, December 7, 2024
Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Wyoming and the Korean War
Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Wyoming and the Korean War:
Sidebar: Wyoming and the Korean War
The Korean War is something that most Wyomingites don't particularly associate with our state, but the war did have a noticeable impact on the state, and Korea has been in the news a lot recently, so now might be a good time to take a look at it.
Part of the reason that we don't think much of the Korean War and Wyoming, is that we don't think much about the Korean War at all. The Korean War is one of several wars that have been tagged "forgotten wars" and, in the case of Korea, it's really true. Perhaps that was inevitable, coming between World War Two and the Vietnam War, as it did.
Wyoming's role in the Korean War is tied closely to the the decline in the Army's conventional war fighting abilities that followed World War Two. The largest war ever fought, World War Two was the largest conventional conflict of all time but it ended with the use of two nuclear weapons. Given that, the immediate assumption by the American military was that the age of conventional warfare had ended and that any future war, of any kind, would be a nuclear war. The Army was allowed to atrophy as a result. Between 1945, when World War Two ended, and 1950, when the Korean War started, the Army's training in conventional warfare dramatically declined.
An end to conventional warfare turned out to be a massively erroneous assumption, and the place we learned that was in Korea.
That the US would fight a war in Korea was something that, moreover, seemed an impossibility in 1945, when events took us there for the first time in the 20th Century. The US had actually fought in Korea once before, but in the 19th Century, oddly enough, when the Marine Corps landed briefly in Korean in an obscure punitive expedition. It was World War Two, however that brought the US back onto the Korean Peninsula, but only due to the end of the war.
Korea itself had been a Japanese possession since 1910, when the Japanese simply made a fact out of what had been the case following the Russo Japanese War. Korea had been more or less independent prior to that, but heavily influenced by its much more powerful neighbors. The Russo Japanese War effectively ended Korean independence in favor of the Japanese. The Japanese dominance was not a happy thing for the Koreans. Korea remained a Japanese possession up until after World War Two, when it was jointly occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, splitting the country in half. The US had no intention to remain there but the original concept of uniting the country in a democratic process fell apart, and the Soviets and the US left with the country divided. The US had weakly armed the South and failed to provide it with heavy weapons. The North, on the other hand, was heavily armed and trained by the Soviets, who left the North with the means, and likely the plan, on how to unite the peninsula by force. In 1950, North Korea invaded the South with a well equipped and well trained Army. They faced a poorly trained South Korean Army.
Soon after that they, quite frankly, faced a poorly trained American Army. The US hadn't really given much thought to South Korea after leaving it, but the fall of China, followed by the Berlin Blockade, followed by shocking early revelations about Soviet espionage inside the US, followed by the development of the Soviet bomb, suddenly refocused attention on a country that now seemed to be a dagger aimed at Japan. President Truman made the immediate decision to send the U.S. Army into South Korea to turn the North Koreans back.
That Army, however, wasn't the same Army the US had in 1945 after the defeat of Germany and Japan. After VJ Day the U.S. had rapidly demobilized. Moreover, convinced that all future wars would be nuclear in nature, the U.S. had let the Army deteriorate markedly. It was poorly trained and not all that well equipped in some ways.
The intervention in South Korea required the call up of numerous Army National Guard units, and Wyoming's 300th Armored Field Artillery was one of them. Deployed in February 1951, the unit made up of young recruits from northern Wyoming and World War Two veterans proved to be a very effective one. It achieved a fairly unique status in May 1951 at Soyang with the unit directly engaged advancing enemy infantry, a very rare event in modern combat and a risky one at any time. The unit came out of the Korean War with Presidential and Congressional Unit Citations in honor of its fine performance in the war. The individual Guardsmen of the 300th AFA largely came home after completing a combat tour, at a little over a year, but the called up unit remained in service throughout the war. Other Wyoming Army National Guard units were also called up in this time, but only the 300th AFA was sent to the Korean War.
The Air National Guard's 187th Fighter Bomber Squadron from Wyoming was called up. The new Air Guard saw combat service for the first time in the Korean War. Nine Wyoming F51 pilots were lost serving in the unit during the war.
Of course, many Wyomingites served in the war by volunteering for military service, or by being conscripted during the war. Like earlier wars, Wyomingites volunteered in high numbers.
Official painting of the Wyoming Army National Guard depicting Wyoming's 300th AFA in action.
Part of the reason that we don't think much of the Korean War and Wyoming, is that we don't think much about the Korean War at all. The Korean War is one of several wars that have been tagged "forgotten wars" and, in the case of Korea, it's really true. Perhaps that was inevitable, coming between World War Two and the Vietnam War, as it did.
Wyoming's role in the Korean War is tied closely to the the decline in the Army's conventional war fighting abilities that followed World War Two. The largest war ever fought, World War Two was the largest conventional conflict of all time but it ended with the use of two nuclear weapons. Given that, the immediate assumption by the American military was that the age of conventional warfare had ended and that any future war, of any kind, would be a nuclear war. The Army was allowed to atrophy as a result. Between 1945, when World War Two ended, and 1950, when the Korean War started, the Army's training in conventional warfare dramatically declined.
An end to conventional warfare turned out to be a massively erroneous assumption, and the place we learned that was in Korea.
That the US would fight a war in Korea was something that, moreover, seemed an impossibility in 1945, when events took us there for the first time in the 20th Century. The US had actually fought in Korea once before, but in the 19th Century, oddly enough, when the Marine Corps landed briefly in Korean in an obscure punitive expedition. It was World War Two, however that brought the US back onto the Korean Peninsula, but only due to the end of the war.
Korea itself had been a Japanese possession since 1910, when the Japanese simply made a fact out of what had been the case following the Russo Japanese War. Korea had been more or less independent prior to that, but heavily influenced by its much more powerful neighbors. The Russo Japanese War effectively ended Korean independence in favor of the Japanese. The Japanese dominance was not a happy thing for the Koreans. Korea remained a Japanese possession up until after World War Two, when it was jointly occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, splitting the country in half. The US had no intention to remain there but the original concept of uniting the country in a democratic process fell apart, and the Soviets and the US left with the country divided. The US had weakly armed the South and failed to provide it with heavy weapons. The North, on the other hand, was heavily armed and trained by the Soviets, who left the North with the means, and likely the plan, on how to unite the peninsula by force. In 1950, North Korea invaded the South with a well equipped and well trained Army. They faced a poorly trained South Korean Army.
Soon after that they, quite frankly, faced a poorly trained American Army. The US hadn't really given much thought to South Korea after leaving it, but the fall of China, followed by the Berlin Blockade, followed by shocking early revelations about Soviet espionage inside the US, followed by the development of the Soviet bomb, suddenly refocused attention on a country that now seemed to be a dagger aimed at Japan. President Truman made the immediate decision to send the U.S. Army into South Korea to turn the North Koreans back.
That Army, however, wasn't the same Army the US had in 1945 after the defeat of Germany and Japan. After VJ Day the U.S. had rapidly demobilized. Moreover, convinced that all future wars would be nuclear in nature, the U.S. had let the Army deteriorate markedly. It was poorly trained and not all that well equipped in some ways.
The intervention in South Korea required the call up of numerous Army National Guard units, and Wyoming's 300th Armored Field Artillery was one of them. Deployed in February 1951, the unit made up of young recruits from northern Wyoming and World War Two veterans proved to be a very effective one. It achieved a fairly unique status in May 1951 at Soyang with the unit directly engaged advancing enemy infantry, a very rare event in modern combat and a risky one at any time. The unit came out of the Korean War with Presidential and Congressional Unit Citations in honor of its fine performance in the war. The individual Guardsmen of the 300th AFA largely came home after completing a combat tour, at a little over a year, but the called up unit remained in service throughout the war. Other Wyoming Army National Guard units were also called up in this time, but only the 300th AFA was sent to the Korean War.
The Air National Guard's 187th Fighter Bomber Squadron from Wyoming was called up. The new Air Guard saw combat service for the first time in the Korean War. Nine Wyoming F51 pilots were lost serving in the unit during the war.
Of course, many Wyomingites served in the war by volunteering for military service, or by being conscripted during the war. Like earlier wars, Wyomingites volunteered in high numbers.
Monday, November 18, 2024
Tuesday, November 18, 1924. Adding to the public domain.
When Presidents realized that adding to the public domain was a good thing.
In 1954 the Harney National Forest was added to the Black Hills, so it is no longer a separate administrative unit.
Brig. Gen. R.E. Noble, Librarian of Army Medical Library, 11/18/24
Dr. Noble was a career military physician.
Last edition:
Sunday, November 16, 1924. French evacuations, Imperial Russian dreams.
Monday, November 11, 2024
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Wednesday, November 5, 1924. Expelled from the Forbidden City.
The news of the election hit the papers.
The former Emperor of China, Puyi, was expelled from the Forbidden City by Gen. Feng Yuxiang who unilaterally revoked the Articles of Favourable Treatment of the Great Qing Emperor after His Abdication
Puyi lived a tragic life, having been born into the anachronism of the Chinese Empire at a time it was collapsing. He'd go on to be Emperor of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, a prisoner of the Soviet Union, a prisoner of the Red Chinese, and finally, a gardener. He died in 1967 at age 61.
President Coolidge made a Thanksgiving proclamation:
Last edition:
Tuesday, November 4, 1924. Ross and Coolidge win.
Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1924 Election, Blog Mirror, Calvin Coolidge, Nellie Tayloe Ross, Politics, Women, Wyoming
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Central World War Two Display, U.S. Armored Cars: National Museum of Military Vehicles Dubois Wyoming.
The U.S. M3 Scout Car was produced by White Motor Company from 1939 to 1944. The early version, the M3, was made in only limited numbers, but the successor M3A1 was fairly widely produced.
Envisioned as a cavalry vehicle, it really wasn't up to the task and therefore while produced, it was arguably obsolete from the onset.
The M8 was introduced in 1943 and picked up where the M3 left off, being a much more combat worthy vehicle. It remained in service into the 1950s in the US but had a long life in other countries, with some still being used.
The M20 Armored Utility Car was another US armored vehicle that came in and supplemented the M3.
Last edition:
Friday, November 1, 2024
Friday Farming. The vehicles that changed the West.
Oh, sure, there were snowplows that went out on the narrow two lane highways, but off the highways? Well, you better be pretty sure you could get back.
Now, my father only ever owned one 4x4 vehicle, and it was one he bought from me. But we didn't go up in the high country or into the foothills once winter started. That was out. You stuck to areas that were relatively near a county road or that were blown off, and probably down around 5,500 feet or less. Beyond that? Forget it.
And this was true for ranchers too. Some men stayed up in the high country, but they stayed there. . . all winter long. People often fed by horse drawn wagon (and in a few places, still do).
The Dodge Power Wagon changed that. And it was a creature of the Second World War.
Lex Anteinternet: World War Two U.S. Vehicle Livery: National Museum...:The father of the Dodge Power Wagon, the 1/2 ton truck, a fair number of examples of which can be found in the Rocky Mountain West in spite of the small number produced, was in addition to being too light, too top heavy.
With the Power Wagon, you could now get there in winter. Maybe not everywhere, but darned near everywhere, even up in the high country.
And that meant you didn't need to keep hired men up in the high country in line shacks all winter. For that matter, with a trailer, you could easily feed in a fraction of the time it had taken with a wagon. You probably didn't need hired men for that either, if you had them.
And while it would take awhile, really when NAPCO started converting Fords and Chevys into heavy duty 4x4s, it would also mean that sportsmen could get back there in the winter too.
Revolutionary.
Related threads:
Thursday, October 31, 2024
M7 Self Propelled Gun. US Armored Vehicle Central Display. National Museum of Military Vehicles.
M7 Self propelled gun. This 105 mm SP used a Sherman chassis.
Last edition:
Early Jeeps: National Museum of Military Vehicles Dubois Wyoming.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Monday, October 16, 1944. Fascist Hungary.
The German backed fascist coup in Hungary, designed to keep the country in the war, completed with the leader of the banned fascist Arrow Cross Party, Ferenc Szálasi, becoming prime minister of a "Government of National Unity" w hich was controlled by the Germans. Horthy was taken prisoner.
Horthy, who appears here a lot, died in Portugal in 1957 at age 88. Szálasi was executed in 1946 at age 49.
Who the crap could think that the fascist were going to win in late 1944?
T/5 Ray Tintera, Tampa, Fla., and Sgt. Elwood Johnson, Ogema, Wisc., check civilians at an outpost in Monschau, Germany. 16 October, 1944.g, Admiral Miklós Horthy was forced out of office and replaced by Ferenc Szálasi of the fascist Arrow Cross Party.
Registration slips of these two German frauleins are checked by T/4 Nick Kellen, Woodstock, Mich., as they pass through the outskirts of Monschen, Germany. Slips showed them to be Karolina Rader and Johanna Kirch. 16 October, 1944.
The Soviets launched the Gumbinnen Operation with the goal of penetrating the borders of East Prussia.
Albanian partisans liberated Vlorë.
Maj. Gen. Eurico Jaspar Dutra, (left), Brazilian Minister of War and Maj. Gen. Mascarenhas De Moraes, C.G. of the B.E.F., shown in hatches of a medium tank in which they took a ride during an inspecting tour at the IV Corps recently. Fifth Army, IV Corps area, Italy. 16 October, 1944.
The U.S. launched an offensive towards Bologna.
The 10th Indian Division crossed the Savio River.
A U.S. bombing raid on Salzburg destroyed the dome of the cathedral and most of the Mozart family home.
Troops of the 44th Division await truck transportation after unloading at a station in Northern France. They are on their way to the front. 16 October, 1944.
Pfc. Victor Henry, Pontotoc, Miss., fires his machine gun through a hole in a wall, at Germans in a barn 300 yards away, beyond Kohlscheid, Germany. He is flanked by two of his buddies. 16 October, 1944. Company K, 3rd Battalion, 119th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division.
Friday, October 11, 2024
Monday, September 30, 2024
Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024 and the destruction of reality.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Alexander Pope. An Essay on Criticism.
Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.
QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024.
Related threads:
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
In Memoriam, James Earl Jones.
One of the most monumental actors of the second half of the 20th Century, and one of the most memorable voices of all times, James Earl Jones died at age 93 yesterday.
A lot has been written about Jones over the past day, and so we won't go back into most of it. Born to actor Robert Earl Jones, whom he closely resembled in appearance and voice, and Ruth, he mostly grew up outside of the presence of his father who left the family shortly after he was born. He mostly grew up on the farm of his maternal grandparents in Michigan. After high school he started off towards a career in medicine but realized it wasn't for him and switched to drama, graduating from the University of Michigan in 1955. He participated in ROTC while a university student and had expected to deploy to the Korean War, but it ended shortly after he graduated. He attended Ranger school, something very difficult to graduate from and frankly making him an unusually large graduate of a program which tends to favor smaller men. While in the Army, he converted to Catholicism.
His first film appearance was in Dr. Strangelove in 1964. His last was in 2021 in Coming 2 America. He had various monumental roles in between, including famously being the voice of Darth Vader and Terrence Mann in Field of Dreams.
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