Persistent Myths XIV: The Korean War Edition

 The Korean War, we were poorly armed with antiquated stuff, edition.

 " U.S. Marines wounded at Kari San Mountain are evacuated via helicopter and flown to hospital in near areas for treatment. Navy Corpsmen prepare three wounded Marines for evacuation. May 23, 1951. N.H. McMasters. (Navy)"  Oddly, for  war in which people so routinely claim everyone was using supposedly antiquated stuff, the Korean War has come to be strongly associated with helicopter medivac.  If this was World War Two, which ended just a few years prior, these wounded troops would be hours and hours from any help, and could hope, if they were lucky, for a Jeep ride to a field station, not a helicopter ride to, in this case, a hospital ship.

"We were poorly armed with hand me down World War Two weapons".

I'm so tired of hearing this absolutely absurd myth being repeated, including (dare I say it?) by Korean War veterans that, yes, I'm going into a rant.

One of the persistent myths about the Korean War that's repeated in books and on television shows, and which has become so accepted as accurate that its repeated by veterans as well (and has long been, I heard it from a civics teacher in junior high who was a Korean War veteran) is that when the US sent troops in Korean to fight in the Korean War, they were poorly armed as they were all "armed with World War Two weapons."  I heard this most recently on the tail end of This Week recently when it was repeated by some veteran of the war in their Veterans Day interviews, which focused on the Korean War.

World War Two ended in 1945.

The Korean War started in 1950.

Most (but not all by any means) of the weapons were World War Two weapons. D'uh!  The prior massive war had only been over five years!  It would be been completely absurd if most of the weapons the US had in Korea weren't World War Two weapons.

4.2 mortar crew, 31st Heavy Mortar Co., west of Chorwon, Korea. February 7, 1953. Sgt. Guy A. Kassal.

And those weapons were amongst the absolute best in the world at the time. They were far, far from obsolete.  Quite a few were creations that arose in that war and were nearly new.

The assertion that they were antiquated and obsolete is, frankly (dare I say it) stupid.

 41st Royal British Marines plant demolition charges along railroad tracks of enemy supply line which they demolished during araid, 8 miles south of Songjin, Korea. April 10, 1951. They are carrying U.S. M1 Garands and wearing U.S. M1947 field jackets.

Let's run through those "obsolete" weapons, shall we.

 The M1 Garand.  It was the best battle rifle in the world from the point of its adoption and at least up through the Korean War.  It likely retained that status until the FAL, G3 and M14 became common in the late 1950s and it remains in use in some places even today.  It was far better than anything the Chinese or North Koreans were equipped with.

The basic rifle was the M1 Garand. The Garand is widely regarded as the best rifle of the Second World War.  In its basic model (models actually) it remained in use as the regular issue rifle for U.S ground troops well into the late 1950s at which time the M14, which is a modified, improved, Garand quite frankly, started to replace it. The M14, for reasons we've already discussed never succeeded in doing that fully, and in the Guard and Reserve the M1 remained in use all the way into the mid 1970s before being replaced by the M16A1. Having said that, nothing has managed to completely replace the M14 either, so a direct evolution of the Garand remains in use to this very day in the US military.

Why did the Garand serve so long?  Well, compared to other US longarm its service life wasn't all that long, but it lasted a long time in relative terms as it was such a good rifle.  It was not obsolete in the 1950s by any means.  Indeed, at that time it was probably the best battle rifle in the world.  It was so good that it had replaced the rifles used by many nations around the globe immediately after World War Two and it equipped most of the armies that fought for the United Nations in South Korea as their principal weapon and equipped all of them to some extent.

And, worth noting, most of the North Korean and most of the Chinese troops who served in the Korean War were armed with Mosin Nagants, a bolt action that had been in service since the 1890s.

Hmph.

The sniper variant of the M1, by the way, last saw combat service in US  hands in the 1990s. That's right, the 90s.  M1s keep on keeping on in the hands of guerrillas in the Philippines to this very day, along with some M14s.

In the 1950-54 time frame, US troops were carrying the best military longarm in the world.  The only serving longarm at that time which perhaps could claim to contest that title would have been the AK47, which was just entering Soviet service at that time.  The archetype of the assault rifle, plenty of experienced soldiers will tell you even now that they'd rather carry the M1 than the AK47.  The Garand did see action against the AK in the Vietnam War in the hands of the ARVN and there didn't seem to be a lot of complaints about it being inferior to the AK at that time.

Marines holding Chinese prisoners in Korea.   These Marines are armed with M1 or M2 carbines.  Only the post war rebuilt carbines, or the M2 carbines, can take a bayonet like the carbine on the left is sporting.

U.S. soldiers who didn't carry M1 Garands carried M1 or M2 Carbines.  I do feel that those weapons are far from great, but the M2 was a new variant of the M1 and neither was regarded as being obsolete in any fashion.  The M2 would serve into the Vietnam War in large numbers in US hands and in ARVN hands.  I don't like it, but it wasn't regarded as obsolete in any fashion.  If it wasn't good, it wasn't very good when it entered US service at the start of World War Two.

 Marine firing a M1911 in 2006.  Contrary to the official caption, this is not the version of the M1911 adopted by the Marines for close combat and manufactured by Colt, but rather an example of a Springfield Armory manufactured conventional M1911A1 production pistol purchased by the Marine Corps prior to that to replace older stocks of M1911A1s.  Obsolete?  Not hardly.  Lance Corporal Kamran Sadaghiani - U.S. Marine Corps Photo ID: 200681822756.

The Carbine entered service as an alternative to the handgun for guys who didn't need to carry a rifle for one reason or another.  It never replaced the official service pistol however, and that pistol in the Korean War was the M1911A1.  The M1911 entered service in 1911.  Whenever people talk about "World War Two hand downs" they don't mean the M1911, which is universally regarded as a great pistol, maybe the greatest military pistol of all time.  It's so good that subsequent efforts to replace it fully, which started in the 1980s after the supplies of World War Two manufactured M1911s was growing long in the tooth, have failed. The M1911 is still in service, in a special role, with that special role being the Marine Corps close combat pistol.  The M1911 practically dominates the civilian large pistol market today and is hardly regarded as obsolete by anyone who is knowledgeable on the topic.

 BAR man of the U.S. Army engaged Chinese troops with a BAR while shielded by a M4A3E8 Sherman tank.  Like most examples of BARs in combat in the 1940s and 1950s, this BAR has the bipod removed.

So let's turn to the US machineguns of the period  then and take a look at them.

The US had not adopted a general purpose machine gun by 1950 and would not until the late 1950s, when it adopted the M60.  During the Korean War the light machine gun role, or squad section machinegun if you prefer, was filled by the Browning Automatic Rifle, the medium role by the M1919, and the heavy machine gun role by the M2HB.  The M2HB has proven to be so perfect in design that its still the heavy machine gun, with subsequent efforts to replace it proving to be a failure.

 Captured German MG 42 in Normandy, 1944.  Yes, this weapon was better than the BAR and probably the M1919 Browning.  But no nation had developed a weapon like this other than the Germans by the start of the Korean War. The first nation that would do so, Switzerland, didn't introduce one until 1951 and its basically a copy of the MG42, a task made easier, arguably, for the Swiss by the fact that the Swiss were highly familiar with German automatic weapons designs.  France would introduce a GPMG in 1952. The US and the UK would not follow suit until the late 1950s.

A GPMG, a gun that filled the role of the squad and light machinegun, like the German MG42 would have been a better solution to the remaining machine gun roles than the M1919 and the BAR but no nation outside of Germany had fielded a GPMG by 1950. The Communist opponents were fielding (big shocker here) World War Two vintage Soviet light machineguns and the giant Soviet PM1910 which had been in service, complete with wheeled carriage, since 1910.  The British were still using the Vickers.  The US M1919 was actually a more modern gun than about anything else being used in the real world, save for MG42s which had been used by the recently defeated Germans.  The BAR was not a good light machine gun in the squad role (it was a great automatic rifle however), but it had acquired cult status in the US forces by that time, and was particularly so regarded by the Marines, who clung to it as late as the Vietnam War.  If it wasn't good in that role, it is true that it had never been, but US troops didn't seem to realize that for some reason, probably as they tended to use it in its intended role of automatic rifle, which did mean that the US basically lacked a squad support machinegun.

 U.S. soldier firing a M1919 in Korean in 1953.  Yes, it isn't as modern as the MG42 was, but it was better than anything anyone else in the world was using at the time the war started.  Note the backpack this soldier is equipped with, which is a post World War Two design.

If any real criticism of US machineguns can be made in regards to the obsolescence or just quality, therefore, it comes in at the squad level. And a World War Two solution to that problem, the M1919A6, which really wasn't a very good weapon in terms of a solution.

The M1919A6 came about specifically because the United States lacked a GPMG and because the BAR wasn't a great light machinegun even if it was a really good automatic rifle.  The thought was to make a GPMG variant of a gun that was really good, that being the M1919, but putting a stock and bipod on it.

 Infantrymen using the M1919A6 in Korea.  This was a stop gap or adapted version of the M1919 into a GPMG role and it really wasn't all that good.

If that idea sounds suspect, it's one that actually had been done before, and by the Germans.  The Germans had made a ground "light" version of the Maxim macheingun during World War One.  Indeed, that weapon has a stock that looks practically identical to the one used on the M1919A6, and its really hard not to conclude that the designers of the M1916A6 simply copied it entirely from the earlier German design.  Anyhow, you really can't make a tripod mounted light machinegun into a stocked light machinegun and it just wasn't all that much.

So, you might ask, why not just come up with a GPMG, darn it?

Well, I've answered some of that already.  It took every nation but the Germans into at least the early 1950s to do that.  In the case of the US and UK, moreover, a lot of work was going on at the time to come up with a new cartridge that would be used in a future NATO adoption and, it was thought, might result in NATO standard weapons.  As it would happen, that would take until 1953 to accomplish and that's not really surprising as the US had distinctly different ideas about what that cartridge should be, as it wanted to be basically equivalent to the .30-06 it was already using.  If it seems odd that France would be the first nation to field a GPMG outside of the Germans, well the French never adopted the NATO round and they rushed ahead with their own new design in part because they were deep into a series of colonial wars and had immediate arms requirements that had to contemplate reviving their domestic arms industry.

Anyhow, it can't really be said that the US light and heavy machineguns were in any way obsolete.  Two of them were great weapons, the third, the BAR, was not so much but it was something that was well liked in the field and given where things were headed, ti wouldn't have been possible to replace it prior to 1950, and it in fact proved impossible to replace it until the 1960s in the regular forces, with it hanging on in the reserves all the way into the 1970s.

Submachineguns are, quite frankly, not a terribly significant weapon in the context of the U.S. military, contrary to the way they are portrayed in film.  they really reached the zenith of their use by the US during World War Two and only then because they received combat use that was outside of their officially sanctioned role. Some of that continued on into the Vietnam War, but in an ever diminishing way for a variety of reasons, one simply being that the wars following World War Two were smaller wars and the Army was able to keep better tabs on the Table of Organizational Equipment (TOE) for various units.

During the Korean War the US was in fact still using two submachineguns that it had used during World War Two. Everyone at the time was still using submachineguns they had made during World War Two.  New submachineguns would come on after the war, but it wasn't really until the mid 1950s that there were any developments in the submachinegun that were even worth noting.

 U.S. Marine Sgt. John Wisbur Bartlett Sr. fires a M1 Thompson submachine gun on Okinawa in 1945. The Marine next him carries a Browning Automatic Rifle.

During the Korean War, the US was still using the two variant of the Thompson Sub Machinegun. The Thompson, the famous Tommy Gun, was such a good close combat submachinegun that it fit into he category of weapons that just refused to go away for that particular role, which is a role that hte United States didn't want a submachinegun for.  The Thompson continued to fall into this role as late as the Vietnam War, by which time the US really really didn't want a submachinegun in this role, but it kept falling into it anyway.  Even today, if you had to go into combat armed with a submachinegun, the Thompson would be a really good choice.

The US, however, never officially used submachineguns in that role and actually only officially issued them as emergency weapons for vehicle crewmen.  The basic thought is that if you have to flee your tank, it's a screaming emergency, and maybe a submachinegun gives you a fighting chance of doing that.  That's the only real role the US wanted submachineguns for.  As the Thompson is a big gun, and expensive to make, the US introduced the M3 "Grease Gun" during World War Two to fill that role.

US soldier guarding German POWs in France in 1944, armed with a M3 submachinegun.

Cheap to make and very compact, the M3 filled that role all the way into the 21st Century, ti was so good at it.  It doesn't (I think) today, but only as there haven't been any made since World War Two and the old ones likely finally were sufficiently banged around so as there to be a need to field something else.  Like the Thompson, however, some examples of it always ended up getting actual field close combat use by soldiers who acquired them in one fashion or another.  While the M3 gets little love in print for some reason, truth be known its pretty good in its role and about as good as any other submachinegun made along the lines of the German MP38, which introduced the stamped steel/wire stock type of submachine gun.

The Chinese and North Koreans, on the other hand, did use a lot of combat machineguns, unlike the United States.That wasn't a strength of their TOE but rather a weakness in their training, as they followed the Soviet mass conscript model which emphasized low, or no, training.  A submachinegun is an easy weapon to issue to soldiers whom you don't really want to bother training much as its easy to use, if not usually terribly effective. The submachinegun nearly universally used by the communist forces in the Korean War was the PPSh.

All of the variants of the PPSh are great submachine guns. There can be no doubt of that. Were they better than the US ones?  No, they weren't.  They were probably roughly equal in some ways.  Chances are they really weren't quite as good as the Thompson and were somewhat better, as a combat weapon, than the M3, but the real difference is that the communists issued huge quantities of submachine guns while the US issued rifles.   The US doctrine was much more solid.

 Unusual photograph of US Marines fighting in Seoul.  I'm uncertain of what sort of section this is, but two of the Marines are carrying M1 or M2 Carbines (probably M2s), one of which has a bayonet affixed to it.  The Marine in the background is carrying a M1 Garand. Another has another Carbine.  The Marine taking aim is carrying a belt of M1919 machinegun ammunition and is also equipped with a M1911A1 pistol with the holster partially cut away.  My guess is that this is a machinegun section as they aren't equipped like regular riflemen.

So, in terms of small arms, obsolete?  Not hardly.

 M2HB in current use.  This gun could have been made all the way back to World War Two.  Most of them in US use today were made then, and they aren't obsolete. They've outlasted the guns that were supposed to try to replace them.

Indeed, with at least three of these weapons, the M1 Garand, the M1911 and the M2HB, you can make cases that efforts to replace them later would have been better left untried, although I think that argument would clearly fail as to the M1 Garand.  It wouldn't be incorrect as to the M1911 and the M2HB. Efforts to replace the M2HB have been a total failure.  Efforts to replace the M1911 with popguns have resulted in various popguns, but none which are actually better than the M1911 which won't go away.

Okay, so that must be true of heavy arms, right?

Nope.

It's often noted that the Korean War was an artilleryman's war and the U.S. artillery in the Korean War was fully modern.  Some of the guns in use during the Korean War would not be fully replaced in the US inventory until the 1990s and many of the same models introduced by the United States during World War Two remain in use around the globe.  Artillery advances very slowly and frankly any single model of artillery piece in use in the Korean War would be fully useful today in the US inventory except the trailed 8in gun, which was replaced by a self propelled gun in the late 1950s and ultimately by rockets in the 2000s.  Advances have allowed for subsequent designs to be fielded which are better, but some of those designs were not fielded until much later.

 105 mm howitzer in action in Korea.

The US went into World War Two with the 75mm field piece being the primary U.S. Army gun but, while they remained in use throughout the war, by the war's end the 105mm field gun had come to dominate.  Following World War Two the 105 became the basic U.S. gun, augmented by 155mm guns.  This remains the case today.  The M101 105 mm howitzer that was developed by the United States during World War Two, from a carriage that was used for the 75mm pack gun that dated to prior to the war, remained in use in the U.S. Army up until the 1980s when it was replaced by a newer model.  It was far from obsolete during the Korean War.

The 155 gun, the M114 came into service before World War Two and continued on uninterrupted until the late 1960s, when a replacement was designed.  The replacement wouldn't fully replace it until the 1980s, however.  Here too, the M114 was far from obsolete during the Korean War.

 US self propelled howitzer firing in Korea. This is a really heavy howitzer and it appears to be a an 8in, although it might be a somewhat lighter gun.  The carriage isn't fully visible but it would have been one of the carriages based on the chassis of the M4 Sherman.

The US also fielded some very heavy field guns during the Korean War, and the war would be their last.  The reason for that is that super heavy guns became more common following the war once good self propelled chassis were developed for them. They were hugely resource intensive in their trailed form. But during the Korean War they were used and remained as fully modern as they had been during World War Two.

Munitions wise, our artillery projectiles and fuses (something armchair historians don't get into much) were leagues superior and vastly more technologically advanced than anyone elses on the planet. The Soviet stuff used by our opponents relied upon the blaze away and hope to hit something approach.   US artillery is super deadly, and it was at that time.  When it became an artilleryman's war, it became one that had one team in the major leagues, the US, and another that was playing t-ball.

And in terms of direct fire artillery, the US in fact was fielding weapons so new that they had not been used by the US during World War Two, or perhaps had been used very little.

During the Second World War the Soviets and the Germans both deployed large numbers of direct fire artillery pieces in the form of anti tank guns.  The US and the UK came to look upon that as rather obsolescent and during the course of the war began to put quite a few of the same glass of guns, which were really large in at least the US's case, on tracked or half tracked vehicles.  By the time of the Korean War that was passing from our practice as we rocketed, literally, ahead. During the Korean War we fielded the latest in shoulder fired rocket weapons, bazookas (our idea, not the Soviets nor the Germans) and we introduced in large numbers recoiless rifles.

 Recoiless rifle being fired in Korea, BAR in foreground.

Recoiless rifles wouldn't really last all that long in U.S. service but they did have their day in the Korean War and worked really well. They had seen next to no use in World War Two.  They were practically brand new. Hardly a hand me down.

The late 1950s would see new carriages come in for self propelled artillery, but here to that's hardly much of a big deal. The new carriages that came in after the Korean War were a lot more modern, but they would not have been ready in the early 1950s and no credible historian can maintain that gun motor carriages in use dating back to the late World War Two period hampered our efforts in Korea.  Indeed, those same gun motor carriages continued to be used by other nations for decades after the Korean War.

So it must be tanks. That's it, right?  Our tanks were ancient antiquarians and were bad.  Right.

Well, before you think a silly thing like that, watch this:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?433629-2/design-history-m4-sherman-tank-world-war-ii

Okay, now here's the one area where I will credit, somewhat, those who complain about US equipment in Korea.

But before I go into that, note that in this discussion, and I don't think there's a military expert in the world who will disagree with anything I've said so far, I went through every other ground system before I came to one where criticism can be made.

Okay, what about US armor in Korea.

 M4A3(76)W HVSS Sherman being used a a field piece during the Korean War.

Well, most of that armor was, no matter what a person thinks of it or no matter what is claimed, the M4 Sherman   And the story is that it was obsolete compared to the Soviet T-34.  I think I agree with that, but as anyone listening to the podcast above will have to note, this story isn't nearly as clear as it might seem.  Perhaps it wasn't obsolete, so much as obsolescent.

But the thing there is that the Sherman was never as good, in my view (there are those who will contest this) as the T-34, even though the T-34 was slightly older.  Be that as it may, the design environment for the T-34 was considerably different than it was for the M4, so that isn't really a viable criticism of the M4, in and of itself.  And in Korea, given the model of Sherman in use, the story isn't really what it might seem.

The T-34, based on the American Christie system of tanks, was designed for the Russian environment.  It was made to be made in the Soviet Union, shipped by rail, and deployed (at least initially) in the Soviet Union.  The M4 was designed to be produced in the United States, shipped by ship to anywhere in the world, and then be used and repaired far from its place of manufacture.  In its own way, the M4 was a masterpiece.  It was much more reliable and nearly as good as the common German tanks and even it it wasn't as good of combat weapon as the Tigers and Panthers, it worked almost all the time, which the Tigers and Panthers usually did not.

The T-34 worked almost all the time as well and it was good enough that it was about as good as the Tiger and Panther (when they were working), which says a lot for it. The T-34 is the best of the common tanks of World War Two.

But if the M4 was obsolete in 1950, frankly so was the T-34/85, the last and best version of the T-34. Was the T-34/85 better than any common version of the M4.  Yes.  But was the M4 hideous, not.

Indeed, during the Korean War only late model Shermans with high velocity 76mm guns were used, and frankly their combat record against the T-34 was better than the T-34s against it.  Some features of the T-34 were better, but only very marginally so, and some features of the Sherman were better.   All in all, whether it be attributed to equipment or crews or both, the Sherman more than gave an good account of itself in the Korean War, and if results are all that should be considered, and indeed in real combat perhaps that''s what should be considered, it did better better than the T-34.

Well, at any rate, enter the M26 and the M46.

 Marine Corps M26 Pershing in action in Korea.

By the end of World War Two the US had produced, and just started to field, the M26, a new heavy tank that would become a new main battle tank and the father of all American tanks up until the M1 Abrams.  The M26 was a better tank than the best of the German tanks and it was a better tank than the T-34. It should have been, as it was an entire generation newer.  It was massively superior to the Communist tanks used in Korea.

 Marines take cover behind a M26 Pershing.  The Marine on the left has picked up a Mosin Nagant rifles as a souvenir.  The tanks target can be seen smoking in the distance.

The M26 however has few fans, which is largely because it was mechanically unreliable.  It was frankly probably not needed in Europe when it was introduced late war, but it was the first of what would become a new generation of American tanks, so the US is lucky it was produced.  In the Korean War it has a fan base that noted that it was impervious to about anything.  It served only briefly, however, as its mechanical unreliability caused them to be with drawn in favor of M4A3E8 Shermans and the M46 Patton.

Marine Corps M46 Patton in Korea.

The M46 was a much improved M26 and had a good record in Korea.  It grossly outmatched the T-34/85, showing that in a very short span of time, indeed already by the end of World War Two, the common American tank could in fact go toe to toe with the T-34/85 and the new American heavy/medium tanks were far better than it.

The only US tank that did really poorly during the Korean War was the M24 Chafee, which is not a surprise, and it may be the one piece of equipment where the "World War Two hand me downs" is actually somewhat true.  But only somewhat.

Grossly outmatched M24 Chafee light tank waiting for a T-34/85 assault early in the Korean War.

Light tanks aren't supposed to engage other tanks in combat.  They're really a scouting vehicle and in the US Army they came on as the sort of the slow motion reluctant replacement for armored cars that hadn't worked out when Jeeps hadn't worked out in a role that had last really worked out for the horse.  Early US light tanks of World War Two were way too light to engage another tank in combat, but in Operation Torch, commenced just eleven months after Pearl Harbor, they were pressed into that role as there was nothing else to really do it until sufficient numbers of M4 Shermans were available.   They were bad at that role.

As the war went on, they proved to light in general, as every light tank is always too light. The M3 came on to address that, then ultimately the M24 Chafee, named for the late cavalry officer who had been a vehicle proponent.

The M24 had been all well and good for late World War Two but following the war the US went to replace it with a heavier light tank.  It had adopted the replacement, the M41 Walker Bulldog, in 1949, but that was too close to the war for production to have started.  The design requirement for the tank had just been put out in 1946, shortly after the M24 had been adopted, so it's hardly anyone's fault that it wasn't readily available in 1950 for Korea.  It did see use in Korea, however.

 M41s in use by the ARVN in Vietnam.

The fault, if it could be put that way, for the M24 being the only tank available at first was that the Army had not placed M4s or M26s in Japan. But that's understandable.  There was very low need for armor in post World War Two Japan, at first. The only threat to Japan was the Soviet Union and it was logically presumed that if the Soviets attempted to launch a seaborne invasion of Japan, it would be pretty obvious, and pretty obvious that it would result in nuclear war.  Nobody thought the US was going to go to war to defend South Korea until the US in fact went to war to defend South Korea. So the M24s were hastily thrown into action against T-34/85s, just like M2s had been against Panzer IIIs and IVs, with much the same results.

But the M24 was the exception that proved the rule.  By and large all of the armor the US fielded in the Korean War was fully contemporary at worst or the very best in the world at best.  Soviet tanks like the T-55 didn't yet exist.  Tanks like the M46 were a full generation ahead of the T-34/85. The M26 was heavier than any tank that the communist deployed except for a couple of IS 2s that were basically armored curiosities in context.  American armor in the war wasn't made up of "hand me downs" at all.

In 1954 the military did an after action survey of tank combat that took place during the Korean War and found that there were 119 such engagements, almost all very early in the war. The US took out 97 T-34/85s for sure, and likely took out another 18.  Of such tank action, the M4A3E8 was involved in 50s percent of the actions. The military found that the M4A3E8 was perfectly capable of destroying the T-34, keeping in mind that this version of the M4 was firing new 76 HVAP rounds that were not available during World War Two, but that the T34/85 was also capable of destroying the M4. So they proved to be an even match.  M26s were involved in 32% of the tank engagements and M46s another 10%.  The 90mm rounds fired by the M26s and the M46s were so stout that they'd go completely through the front glaces of the T34/85 and end up in the back of the tank, a devastating shot.  T34/85s were largely unable to do anything to the Pershing and Patton's however.

Well, we've covered all the significant ground weapons, so we'll move to the air. But before we do, we'll take on non weapons.  Maybe when vets and others complaint about World War Two "hand downs" they mean uniforms, or maybe trucks, or maybe other equipment, right?

Well, if so, they're off the mark. 

 Classic photograph of the early Korean War, infantryman in grief over a friend who has just been killed.  While analyzing this for uniforms might seem odd, this photograph provides a really good example of Korean War uniforms.  The infantrymen are wearing all cotton uniforms, all of which are post World War Two issue and design. The soldier in grief is wearing field pants of a pattern that had just been adopted (probably over a second pair of cotton "fatigue" pants. The field pants are based on the World War Two paratrooper pattern. These soldiers are equipped with World War Two vintage M1943 combat boots, which would be phased out quickly during World War Two in U.S. service, but which set a pattern worn by many armies throughout the remainder of the 20th Century.

During World War Two the United States bought millions of sets of combat uniforms. Given that, we would suppose that millions of those sets remained on hand and were issued during the Korean War.  But if we imagined that, we'd be frankly in error.  The reasons are a little complicated, but they also strongly counter the "hand me down" myth.

The US Army, followed by the Marine Corps, actually began to strongly experiment with uniforms just prior to the US entering the war.  After World War One, in the 1920s, the Army and Marines revamped the service uniform to make it appear more modern, but actually made it less serviceable than it had been during the Great War, reflecting some odd cultural trend that was going on at the time.  They were both aware of that by the 1930s and in the second half of the 1930s both services began to strongly experiment with highly practical additions to field uniforms.  This resulted in the series of uniforms that were worn during the Second World War and, in fact, the service never really stopped experimenting with new and better uniforms during the war.  By the war's end, the US had more or less determined that its paratrooper series of uniforms were the best that it had developed.  Indeed, by the end of the war the US had started issuing one of the items developed for paratroopers, the M1943field jacket, to everyone, reflecting that it had determined that the paratrooper line of uniforms was the best it had developed for all but the hottest climates and that all soldiers were best served by being attired like paratroopers were.  At the same time it made the same determination about the M1943 combat boots, which were not a paratrooper item but which it started to issue to paratroopers.  The uniforms weren't made 100% universal but they were headed that way.

 General Douglas MacArthur inspecting troops in Korea who are equipped with early cold weather gear. The Army would dramatically improve cold weather gear during the war.  The unit being inspected is remarkable as it appears to be all black even though the Army had been integrated just shortly before the Korean War.  The impact of Truman's order integrating the services would fully take place during the war.

You'd think, therefore, that following the war the Army would have simply standardized with the patters it had on hand. But it didn't.  It actually continued the developments and came out, in the period between World War Two and the Korean War, with a new set of uniforms reflecting what it thought were the best developments during World War Two.  Impressed with the serviceability of cotton uniforms during the war, for the first time a cotton field uniform became year around issue, replacing the wool uniform that had been worn year around as the base layer in Europe and the winter uniform in most other places.  The Army hadn't been happy with the color of the M1943 uniform after it faded, and therefore replaced the M1943 field jacket with the M1947 field jacket, which was a darker color that didn't fade to the whitish color the M1943 did.  The paratrooper style field pants were brought over to general issue for "field pants" at the same time.  The M1943 combat boot, which had been an improvement over the shorter boots requiring leggings, were replaced with a new combat boot using the Munson Last and superficially resembling paratrooper boots.  The U.S. Army may look somewhat like the Army of World War Two, but frankly the resemblance is largely superficial as the uniform was in fact a new one. This doesn't mean that it was perfectly suited for the cold Korean climate, it wasn't. But the service did adapt rapidly to the extreme cold of Korea even if it didn't have fully suitable winter uniforms at first.

The field gear of the Korean War was also largely of new patterns, replacing the old style ones that the Army had gone into World War Two with which dated back prior to World War One.  I'm not savvy enough on these to really comment on them, but the large voluminous packs that American soldiers are associated with really came in at this time, rather than earlier.

One item that crossed categories from clothing to field equipment was body armor.   The US first issued "flak jackets" to ground personnel during the Korean War.  It has done so every since.

"Flak jackets", or armored vests, existed during World War Two, but they were issued only to air crewmen.  Given their weight, it's doubtful that the World War Two type could have been issued to anyone else. But by the Korean War they could be, and they were.  They've been issued ever since.  Their introduction was revolutionary in that it meant that the service was attempting to protect more than just the head from combat projectiles on a wide scale for the first time in history.  Hardly a World War Two "hand me down" approach.

Finally, let's talk vehicles.

 Jeep with POW on hood.  Is it a World War Two Jeep or a post war Jeep?  Only a real expert can tell.

The US had developed a great series of vehicles during World War Two and, as I've claimed here before, it was the 6x6 truck that was the greatest single battle implement of the war, hands down.  And there were a host of other vehicles that were absolutely great that the US manufactured during the war.  Given this, we'd think that the US would have sat on its hands and just kept using what it had on hand, and it partially did use what it had on hand.

But here too, the US wasn't content with the situation.  In part it couldn't be as it had sold and distributed a lot of vehicles post war, but in part it was because it wasn't really content with the World War Two vehicles and the fact that there were various versions of the same thing.  By 1949 the US had a new 6x6 truck designed to replace all of the World War Two variants and while that model had just been adopted, it would be put in production during the war. The basic model of new 6x6 truck served all the way into the 21st Century. 

 World War Two GMC trucks in Korea, 1950.

Many people regard the Jeep as the archetypal American military vehicle, but even here the World War Two model had been modified and adopted as a new model by 1949.  The M38 went into service that year and started replacing the World War Two Jeeps, although it so strongly physically resembled it that only a person really familiar with Jeeps can tell the difference at a glance.  Unhappy with that, the Army introduced yet another model in 1952, the M38A1, which is the Jeep that became the iconic CJ5 in civilian usage.

 South Korean Army in retreat, 1950.  They're moving a 75mm gun with a World War Two Dodge truck. The South Korean Army had been equipped as a light army lacking armor or heavy weapons prior to the war.  It still retained horse cavalry early in the Korean War.

In 4x4 Dodge trucks the Army left World War Two with a fantastic series of vehicles that had entered service just prior to the war.  During the Korean War it introduced the very best version of that series of Power Wagon military trucks that dated back to the 1930s.  The M37 was such a good truck that it was ultimately done in, decades later, by the expensive of manufacturing it, but was only fully replaced by the equally expensive series of Hummer trucks that came in.

So, when people talk about the ground war and "World War Two hand me downs" they're frankly wrong.

Way off the mark, in fact.

So what about the air?  We haven't covered that.

 Navy Skyraiders engage a ground target in Korea. The Skyradier was such a good plane that, while it was really a late World War Two design, it'd serve all the way through the Vietnam War and its arguably at least as good as any ground combat aircraft today, the A10 excepted.

Well, we hardly need to.

At least in regards to the air war the changes between 1945 and 1950 are so evident that the myth makers haven't really tried to make this claim stick, except to occasionally note that there were piston engined aircraft still in use.  And there were.  P-51 Mustangs and Corsairs were still in use.  They practically had to be as the process of coming up with a workable jet fighter had only just barely been accomplished, but that it was accomplished was quite a technological feat.

The United States Army Air Corps had been working, as had every air force in the world, on developing jet aircraft since the early 1940s.  Indeed, every air force had managed to come up with something, almost, by the wars end. The Germans certainly had, with the ME262. The British had with its Meteor.  The Japanese fielded a prototype by the wars end, bearing a superficial resemblance to the ME262. And the US had adopted the P59, making a handful of the jet fighter during the war.

 

P80 (F80).

The P59 in fact reflected the progress of fighter aircraft during the war, or at least American fighter aircraft, as the technology was advancing so fast that enter generations of aircraft became obsolete nearly overnight.  The P59, a jet, didn't have superior performance in any sense when compared to the P51, let alone late war fighters like the Typhoon.  Indeed, its performance wasn't as good.  The first really serviceable US jet fighter was the P80, which was introduced but not used in World War Two.  It was still around for the Korean War but it had already been made obsolete by the F-84 and then the F-86.

All weather F85Ds during the Korean War, in Japan.  Photo by my father.

The F-86 is the unquestioned champion of the skies of the Korean War. The Mig15, used by Red pilots, was a very good plane, but it wasn't the plane the F-86 was.

 

Mig 15s.  Good, but not good enough.

And we haven't touched the other USAF aircraft and really don't need to. Some were WWII vintage, others not. They were all the best there was in the role in which they were used.

And one area, in the air, which impacted the ground, really can't be questioned in terms of technology.

The helicopter.

 

Sikorsky H-19s over Japan during the Korean War.

Helicopters existed during World War Two, but they were clearly in their infancy.   They came on strong between the wars however and they were a life saver, literally, during the Korean War.  Medivac helicopters made a life and death difference to thousands of servicemen during the war. And the use of of helicopters wasn't limited to that role alone.  Nothing like it existed in actual use during World War Two or any prior war.

So why the absurd myth?

I don't really know.  It has no basis in fact whatsoever, which doesn't keep it from being repeated again and again. But it's far from true.

But I think I might have an inkling of what the source is, but just an inkling.

 World War Two U.S. propaganda poster depicting a Soviet sniper.  It turned out that this guy was not, in fact, our friend and while he was fighting evil, to be sure, and was our ally as well, he wasn't exactly fighting for freedom.

One thing I recall hearing from a Korean War veteran who made this claim is that "when I got home, I was surprised by how modern the Army was".  He likely was. And likely a lot of other guys who served in 1950-51 were as well.  The observation was real, but the conclusion drawn from it off the mark.

The observation itself may sound odd. What could that really mean?  Well, what they meant is that when they got back to the US after their tour of a little over a year in Korea, the Army the found back home was a modern professional one.  It seemed to them that the Army had been holding out on them.  It wasn't.  Indeed, that army was using the same equipment that they were using in Korea.

What was different is that the Cold War army, that large, conscripted, and well trained Army that we used in most of the Cold War came into being while they were gone.  They drew the wrong conclusion from that.

Following World War Two the U.S. reverted to its traditional military posture. While that posture is often criticized, up until that point it had largely served the country well. And what that posture was, was a small Army (very small) and a large professional Navy.  The country reasoned, and correctly, that we were unlikely to be attacked by a land force at any one time and, if we got into a war requiring a major ground commitment, we likely had time to built that army up, using as its core the small professional army and the state militias.  Up to, and through, World War Two, that's how we did things.

Following the Second World War we naturally enough stood down. There was no plan to maintain a large standing army, let alone a conscripted one, and there was no understanding that the Soviet Union was going to be an enemy.  There was no history of conscription into the national army at all during peacetime, save for the emergency 1940 example.

Now, somewhat differently from after every prior war, a new service, the Air Force, received a lot of the treatment that the Navy traditionally did, along with the Navy, as it was readily grasped that developments during World War Two had meant that air power could extend American power, and hence defense, well beyond our borders.  So the Air Force and the Navy received preferential treatment, and rightly so, right after the war.  The Army, as we have seen, wasn't neglected, but what exactly the Army would do in a future war wasn't really well grasped. The Army assumed that all future wars would be nuclear and that the US was not likely to get into small wars. The Marine Corps, on the other hand, made the polar opposite assumption.

And part of what the Army did, or rather the military, was to continue to imagine the reserves in the old pre World War Two fashion.  They old  Guard units were brought back in on the pre war pattern, close to the Army, but locally trained.  Newly recruited Guardsmen, like those before World War Two, were unit trained. They didn't attend basic training in the Army or serve in the Army in basic and Advanced Training.  The Korean War was to change that.

Starting in 1948 things really began to change for the Army as the Cold War suddenly became a real and present emergency. The draft was brought back in and the size of the Army expanded.  But that Army was only two years old when the Korean War broke out.

And when it broke out the Army had to rely on the call up of a large amount of the National Guard and to deploy units that were immediately nearby, like those in Japan, which lacked the proper equipment to fight a war against a Red Army trained armored opponent.  Neither of these forces did poorly by any means, but they didn't quite resemble the Army that the same soldiers would find being trained when they returned to the US a little over a year later.

Which had nothing to do with the equipment.  Nor even with "World War Two hand me downs".  It had everything to do with a miscalculated defense posture in 1945-1950 and the resumption of a pre World War Two mobilization/defense needs posture.  It was a hand me down of sorts, but not in terms of equipment.

The equipment was excellent.

Lex Anteinternet: MUGABE FALLS! ZIMBABWEAN ARMY STAGES COUP. Or maybe it sort of kind of does.

Lex Anteinternet: MUGABE FALLS! ZIMBABWEAN ARMY STAGES COUP: The Zimbabwean Army deposed Robert Mugabe, a horrible human being and one of the worst leaders in Sub Saharan Africa. Mugabe epitomize...

Like a scene out of Monty Python.

Oh, I was always hoping for too much. Zimbabwe is barely a real country to start with, and with no real democratic history or even a history of a national government to look back up.  It's not like, say Romania, which prior to its long Marxist nightmare was a series of governments, not all of which were very admirable by any means, but they were real anyhow.

Or maybe that's a bad example. . . or a good one in this context in that it would serve as a bad example.  One of those Romanian governments was pretty fascistic.  And during World War Two Romania went berserk in regards to its Jewish population.  Not very admirable, to say the least.

But, whatever the case may be, when the Communist fell in Romania, they fell.  Not like what we have going on in Zimbabwe where the Marxist geriatric is hanging on refusing to leave like the Black Knight in Monty Python while the Army refuses to push him.  And I probably shouldn't have supposed they would. Today's Zimbabwean army is really the heir to one of the two communist guerilla armies of the Bush War period, not a real national army, in spite of the attempt to make it one, that we might wish for.  The army pushing out Mugabe would be asking for too much, even though they're attempting to do so.  They're according him way too much respect.

Which isn't to say that I want more blood spilled in an already bloody land. But I'd be for trying Mugabe for his crimes against his nation.   He richly deserve the judgment in fact that history will ultimately give him.

But instead his hold on his nation lingers on even in a deposed state, as his cold "comrades" negotiate for him to gracefully leave.

A trip on Air Koryo anyone?

Best Posts of the Week of November 11, 2017

The Best posts of the week of November 11, 2017.

The Introverts Lament. "I'd like you to meet. . . "

Persistent Myths XIV: The Korean War Edition

Farm To Fork Wyoming, The Story of Compost, Part 2

Farm To Fork Wyoming - The Story of Compost, Part 1

Farm To Fork Wyoming - Restoration Farming in Cody

Farm To Fork Wyoming - Beekeeping

Farm To Fork Wyoming - Grass Fed Beef

School Lunch - Farm To Fork Wyoming

Farm To Fork Wyoming - Food Freedom Part 2

Farm To Fork Wyoming - Food Freedom Part 1

November 16, 1917: All the Distressing News. US Back in Mexico, in Combat in Europe, flag shaming in Lander, and Temptation in Philadelphia

The Laramie Boomerang correctly noted that the United States had crossed back into Mexico, but just right across the border.  This was something that the US would end up doing in a worried fashion for years, showing that while the Punitive Expedition might be over, armed intervention, to a degree, in Mexico, was not.

At the same time, the press was really overemphasizing US combat action in Europe. The US wouldn't really be fighting much for weeks and weeks.

And the on again, off again, hope that the Japanese would commit to ground action was back on again.

Meanwhile, in Lander, things were getting really ugly.  "German sympathizers" were being made to kiss the flag.

That probably didn't boost their loyalty any.

Villas expanding plans were also being noted. And, also, The Temptation Rag, a film, was being reported on, on the front page, something that takes a true scandal to occur now.

Camp Devens, Ayer, Massachusetts. November 16, 1917.

MUGABE FALLS! ZIMBABWEAN ARMY STAGES COUP

The Zimbabwean Army deposed Robert Mugabe, a horrible human being and one of the worst leaders in Sub Saharan Africa.

Mugabe epitomized the "one man, one vote, once" Africa that followed the fall of colonialism, except that he was much worse than that. Coming to power on the strength of his faction and suppressing all others, his government was corrupt and ruined the economy of what had been a once prosperous nation.

That it took the Zimbabwean Army this long really says something about the level of his control.

May he be remembered for the horror he was and may he live long enough (he's in his 90s) to see the success of his rivals and repent of his horrible deeds.

November 15, 2017. Siberian rumors and Border battles.

Residents of Cheyenne were reading today about a rumored, and totally false, revival of the fortunes of Czar Nicolas II.  The Czar, they read, was crowned Czar. . . again. . . . in Siberia.

Not so much.

Russia was descending into complete chaos however. That was real enough.

And so was Villa's revival right on the border with Texas.  His troops had in fact taken Ojinaga. 

Having gone from desperate in March 2015, to pursued the rest of 2015 and 2016, he was back in top form and contesting for control of northern Mexico, to American consternation and concern, once again.  And now while we had a major war on our hands.

Evolution of the Jeep 4x4 Utility Vehicle | Donut Media

Back in the headlines. The Wyoming Tribune for November 14, 1917

Pancho Villa's forces were back in the headlines. . . with combat right on the US border. 

A battle significant enough that it was not only pushing the Carranzaistas out of a disputed town. . . it pushed World War One and the Russian Revolution aside a bit as well.

Not that both didn't also show up.  Include a hopeful headline that the Bolsheviks were going down in defeat.

The Introverts Lament. "I'd like you to meet. . . "

 "Lonesome" Charley Reynolds, one of the 7th Cavalry's well known scouts, and one who lost his life at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  The son of a physician and sufficiently well educated that he was in college at the time the Civil War broke out (he left college as a result), Reynolds took up occupations which allowed him to lead a solitary life, such as being a hunter and a scout.  He was famous for keeping the details of his personal life, and indeed his entire interior life, to himself.  I get it, even if most historians don't seem to.  He was just an introvert.

"Oh no."

That statement, and that reply, are things I often hear, and then think to myself.

The reason is that I'm highly introverted.

It sounds odd, and many people who know me would be surprised by that statement.  For one thing I'm a lawyer and lawyers, even though it turns out a very high percentage of them are in fact introverts, are not associated with that.  Indeed, we're associated with the opposite.

Additionally, even highly introverted people such as myself can be "on" in context.  So, at work, I'm engaged and dealing with people.  I have problem addressing juries, clients, etc. etc., in context. I've served on councils and boards, and I often find that I'm the one speaking.  So, naturally enough, people assume that I must be extroverted.  How can you address a crowd of strangers on delicate topics and be introverted?

Well, you sure can.

One of the hallmarks of introverted people is that we really don't do well in social settings that have no discernible immediate purpose and are made up of people we don't know. Give us a setting and a purpose, and we'll more than rise to the speaking occasion, and likely take over it as well.

But give us no other discernible purpose other than to be with a lot of people we don't know and we'll calm up in personal agony.

Another character trait is that we need down time, in a major way.

That catches people off guard as we're often perfectly free to ramble on, as I so often don here, in person with people we know.  But that doesn't mean that we enjoy doing the same with people we don't.  Indeed, while that's apparently relaxing to other people, it's hugely distressing to us.

This in turn is a real problem for introverts in the modern American world.  We don't "network" well. We don't network at all.  There's nothing that sounds fun to me at all about being in a room full of people mingling with people I don't know.  I don't enjoy talking about myself ("so. . what do you do") and I don't enjoy offering opinions on political or social matters to strangers out of context.  While I could address a group on nearly any topic, if I'd been giving a reason or task to do that, I don't do that with people I don't know very well, in person.

I often am on the periphery, for example, of discussions on social issues, political issues or religious issues, or even scientific issues, out of a context and in which I'm with people I know, but not well.  I can listen to such conversations and be well aware that I know vastly more than the people who are talking, even debating, and that I could in fact crush one side, or even both, in a debate, if I entered it. But as I didn't go to debate, and just ended up the silent third partner in those discussions, I stay that way.  I don't say anything.  And if invited to, I'll usually say something that basically is neutral and leads me out of the discussion if possible.  It's not that I'm chicken about debating, I do it all the time, it's just that mentally, that's now where I was at the moment.  Just this past weekend I experienced when a debate or discussion arose between a rancher and a rancher/Protestant minister on references to Jesus in the Koran.  I know a lot more about that topic than either of them did.  I found that I needed to go to the kitchen to get myself some lunch rather than enter the debate. . .

Being an introvert also places me in the position of turning stuff down, which often strikes people as odd or rude.  For example, when invited to certain things in a business context, my instinct is to flee.  Dinners, sporting events, plays, whatever.  My first instinct is to bolt.

This can cause us to be mistakenly regarded as rude even as people who know us in workplace settings, where we're "on", think we're the life of the party.  It's all in context.  For example, I will not engage in small talk with people on airplanes or trains.  I won't.  Occasionally I'll have somebody try, but when I'm in that setting, I'm usually reading a book.  I like reading books and its one of the few chances I have to actually concentrate, uninterrupted, on a book. And as conversation on planes or trains is always the ultimate in small talk, and as I find that sort of talk absolute torture, I'm not going to do it, even if I'm capable of doing it.  Nonetheless, occasionally you'll get seated next to some extrovert who really really wants to just talk. I'm sure they think that the introvert, i.e., me, is rude.

Likewise, occasionally in restaurants somewhere when I'm traveling the same thing will happen.  "Would you mind sitting at the bar?"  The answer of course is no, as you want seated.  Next to you some happy traveler will soon attempt to strike up a conversation.  "Reading a book?".  "Yep". "Good book?"  Oh no. . .

And sort of related to this is the attendance declination.  As readers here can tell, I'm a fairly serious Catholic.  I tend towards being a fairly isolated or small group one as well.  So, occasionally I'll get a query like; "Why don't you join us for the out of town men's retreat this weekend in . . . ."  No way.  I don't know those guys and I don't like being locked up with a lot of folks I don't know.  There's a reason that I think the Desert Fathers are really cool where others like big communities of people.  Indeed, I'm so introverted that I've declined being a "greeter".  Greeters are people who are stationed at the entrances of churches as extroverts strongly believe that everyone entering a church needs to be greeted.  I try to avoid greeters if I don't personally know them as the "welcome!" and smile just appear to be invitations to me to get into a conversation that I don't want to get into on my way into church.  Being a greeter would have been a nightmare to me and I honestly simply told the person that.  She was likely surprised (and perhaps didn't believe me, maybe) as I'm a lector, and to extroverts that would seem inconsistent.  It doesn't to introverts.

Apparently all of this is highly common for introverts, and the explanation apparently is that we're wired to be really "on" in these situation in away most people aren't. While other people are decompressing by chatting, we're basically physically in the same place a lion is when its about to spring on a gazelle.  But nobody wants to be in that spot all the time. While others are engaged in light chatting, we're engaged in listening to every sentence, every pause in every sentence, and everything going on, analyzing it all in rapid succession.  When other are sad when the party ends, we're glad, its such a relief.

An interesting aspect of this is that people who know and are friends with introverts will often try to bring them "out of their shell", and according to some this is a good thing.  Left to ourselves, we'd tend to isolate ourselves, which we are told is not a good thing.  Who knows.

It's hard to tell, but as low as 16%, or as many as 50% of the population is introverted in varying degrees.  That means, of course, from 50% to 74% of the population is extroverted.  I have no ability to really tell where things really fall, but my guess is that well over half the population is extroverted.  Indeed, while I certainly know other introverts, amongst those I immediately deal with, I think only me, one person I know and work with, and some of the immediate members of my family are introverts.

I know that some members of my immediate family are.  That leads me to suspect its a genetic trait.  My father, who was an absolute genius, and who also dealt with members of the public all day long, was very introverted.  Probably few people outside of the immediate family knew that however as, like me, during the day, he was on and had to be.  My son is pretty clearly an introvert, but not as bad as I am.

Well, bad is the wrong word really.  It is just one of those things that is.  And probably for a reason.  Nature probably wanted a certain percentage of people to click on in an intense way most of the time, and that's how most of my interior life is.  I tend to be thinking all the time.  I don't like engaging in small talk as none of it is small to me.  If people complain about a problem my mind turns to solving it, and that's how most introverts are.  But by the same token you can't solve all the problems with a lot of background information going on, so we tend to crave that silent room. And, by the same token, being in a world where all problems must be solved, and apparently you must solve them as why else would people bring them to you, means that you would like a little alone time, and sometimes that means you are happy enough just sitting there saying nothing at all.

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago: Wanted: Recruits for an Army of Kitchen Soldiers!

A Hundred Years Ago:  Wanted: Recruits for an Army of Kitchen Soldiers!

State Income Taxes. ..

can apparently be deducted from your Federal Income Tax.

At least that's my understanding.  My state doesn't have a state income tax and I'm not an accountant, so I really don't know.

However, that's my understanding. And, given that, as long as that is the case (and the current GOP Tax bill proposes to eliminate that), aren't we kind of being schmucks for not having a state income tax at some point?  It's not like the taxpayers actually save money, it's deductible. So you pay the same amount, we just pay it to the Federal government.

Unless I'm missing something.

Which I may very sell be.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 13, 1917. The USS Wyoming becomes the flagship

Today In Wyoming's History: November 13:

1917.   The USS Wyoming becomes  Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman's, Commander Battleship Division 9, flagship. Attribution:  On This Day.

Main Street looking south, Camp Dodge, Des Moines, Iowa. November 12, 1917.

Camp Grant, Rockford, Illinois. November 12, 1917.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Augustine By The Sea Catholic Church, Honolulu, Hawaii.

Churches of the West: St. Augustine By The Sea Catholic Church, Honolulu, Hawaii

This is St. Augustine By The Sea Catholic Church just off of Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii.  The church dates its history back to 1845, but it's obviously been rebuilt several times, with the modern church's origin going back to 1910, with additions since then.  The current structure appears very modern, and I don't know of the date of its construction.

Did the Vietnam War wreck the country?

A theme of the recent Burns and Novik documentary on the Vietnam War was that rifts had developed in the country during the war and they've never been healed. That is, the war split the country between left and right, and the country's never come back together again.

It's an appealing thesis.  But is it true, and if it is, what does that mean?

Let's start with the common image of things.

The sort of general common background to this story is the belief that prior to the Vietnam War, American society was united and existed in sort of an Ozzy and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, state. This society, we're told, had a common set of conservative societal values.  Along came the Vietnam War and put that all under stress and fractured the country into a liberal and conservative camps that have diametrically opposed views on everything and are now further apart than ever.

 The Cleavers in Leave It To Beaver. . . the way that American society of the 1950s, and earlier, has sort of been imagined. The show ran from 1957 to 1963, so it was set as much in the early 60s as the 50s, but then the early 1950s are in the "50s", as imagined, and the early 1950s, aren't.  How realistic was this portrayal anyhow?  Chances are, not very, other than that they were a nuclear family.

Is that right?

Well, in order to analyze the central thesis of that, that the war drug a certain demographic (largely white, largely well educated) to the left, where it's kept on sliding to the left, and left another group on the right, which is going further to the right, I guess we'd have to look at the right and the left before that to make certain its true.

And we'd have to even figure out where to start to do that, and that wouldn't be easy, as it turns out.

We'll start therefore in the early 20th Century. We could start earlier (you could arguably start before the Civil War quite easily), or you could start later, perhaps in the 1920s or 1930s. But this is a good compromise point to start.

And the reason that its a good compromise point to start.

The early 20th Century was a time of considerable political and social turmoil. The Progressive Movement, a political movement that sought to address economic and social ills and to spread the vote to women, who mostly didn't have it, was in full swing.  Liberal in the context of its time, it was for a stronger Federal government to protect the rights of the average man against ever increasing corporations and against the abuses of local governments.  Varying widely in the scope of its views, it ranged from moderately Progressive to fully radical, sometimes during the political life of a single individual.  Probably the best example of Progressivism is Theodore Roosevelt, who went into his Vice Presidency and Presidency as a fairly pronounced Progressive, and who finished up his political career as a fairly radical Progressive. The success of the Progressive movement is perhaps also symbolized by the fact that Roosevelt's last campaign, the three way race in which he went down in final defeat, saw Woodrow Wilson, another Progressive, elected.

 Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette.  He'd more than given Bernie Sanders a run for his money on being a socialist. . . he was a real socialist.

Roosevelt and Wilson were not the only left of center politicians in that race by any means.  The Socialist Party was on the rise and a serious political party at the time.  Part of the rallying cry for Progressives, to Conservatives, was that if the Progressives weren't elected and didn't address the nation's ills then the Socialist would succeed and their medicine would be much more radial.  And while that vision was extreme, in reality Socialism of that time was as radical as it would ever be.

Socialism up to the mid 1920s at least was a global movement and it had more than a toehold in the United States.  It was a major force in Europe.  Communism was also a rising force in Europe, and getting a little toehold in Europe, and because it was a younger and less developed type of Socialism the distinction between the two, which would later become enormous, was not terribly clear at the time.  Parties in Europe, like the Social Democratic Party in Germany, weren't Communist but they were so close (prior to coming to power in 1918) that it was hard to make the distinction between Communism and Socialism.  And here's where we begin to get into really radical, but fairly widespread, movements that well predate the Vietnam War.

The Socialist movements of the World War One era were extreme in every sense, and also had a fairly large following amongst European working classes and a not inappreciable one amongst American working classes. Believing in the collectivization of labor, they also at their core held a lot of radical social beliefs that would sound familiar in certain circles of the far left today.  In Communist circles they were opposed to marriage and were open to "free love", but radically opposed (outside of what would soon be the USSR) to having children. They were open practitioners of abortion.  For a lot of their more radical views in this area, and so that I don't have to list them, I'd cite to Whitaker Chamber's life, but it's also worth noting that just about any significant Soviet spy ring of the 20s, 30s, and 40s exhibits a fair amount of conduct that's right out of a sexual sewer.  All this existed at a time at which there were genuine problems in the work force and real social inequality, particularly for African Americans.

 Whitaker Chambers, who came from a middle class background but had an extremely troubled childhood and early life, turning in course to Communism.  His biography on his life as a Communist, and his path out of it, including his efforts to expose it, is one of the greatest biographies ever written.  Witness details much of the truly radical nature of the Communist movement in the west, including its depraved nature.

World War One killed the Old Order in Europe leaving nothing to replace it and hugely radical movements came up in the wake of the collapse of the Ancien Régime.  The more powerful the forces of the old order had been, and the less democratic they had been, the more radical the movements that flowed in their wake were.  Communism took over in Russia and the USSR was born.  Communism made a run at the states that bordered the new USSR, resulting in war and civil war.  Civil war was fought in German streets where the contesting forces increasingly gave rise to a big swing in the right and the left.  Socialism in Italy gave way to a nationalistic socialist political force known as Fascism.  The same impulses gave rise to extreme right wing parties in Germany just as the Communist forces were rising and after a while, in the early 1930s, Communist and Nazis would battle in German streets.  Communist and Socialist elements in Spain sought to terminate the democratic fragile republic there and the Army rose up, allied with Spanish Fascists, in that country in a bitter civil war in the 1930s.  Never every European country had some sort of extreme right wing and extreme left wing political movements, all of which rejected notions of democracy, traditional religious views, and many traditional social views.  The time was as radical as any which have ever existed.

That, of course, was partially sorted out during World War Two which saw Fascism first defeated and then completely discredited it as the hateful product of its rule was exposed wherever it had been.  That left, of course, the Communist in place where they were.  The full horrors of Communism, every bit as lethal, and more, as Fascism would take decades to be really fully revealed and the whole horror of it all would not become fully evident until the 1990s by which time it was expiring.

In the 1930s that horror was not evident and hardcore leftism was therefore not fully discredited.  In the United States the Depression saw hardcore leftists come into the Federal Government in some numbers but more than that saw a large element of Federal experimentation in government in an effort to address the ills of that economic disaster.  This was followed by World War Two which required a really big government.

And this takes us into the era where we started out.

After the Second World War, we're told, Americans craved to return to normal.  And not doubt after the Depression they did.  But that view of normalcy may not be what we think it was.  Prior to the Cold War really ramping up there were quite a few Americans who retained fairly left wing political views on some things, products of the Depression, accepted left wing politics during it, and World War Two.  For example, at that time, a large percentage of Americans were actually favorably disposed towards the evolution of the United Nations towards being a truly world government of a type.  Truman was flirting, albeit unsuccessfully, with national healthcare, something the British brought in right after World War Two.  Communism wasn't seen as a real global threat up until 1947 or 1948.  While the United States was more rural then as compared to now, gun control was widely viewed favorably and according to older polls all the way through the 1950s and 1960s there was widespread support for banning handguns (and, it should be noted, there were considerably more violent deaths of all types then, as opposed to now).

But that doesn't mean that the nation was otherwise socially radical. The nation was coming around to completing the work commenced in 1860-65 in that making sure that blacks had full civil rights, but otherwise people held conservative social views.  Divorce was much rarer then than now.  Unconventional sexual behaviors were not looked upon favorably or even legal.

The idea however of a united country in favor of military intervention around the world is misconstrued and in fact much about immediate post war international history is misunderstood due to a very successful immediate revisionist effort on the part of the Democratic Party. At first, after World War Two, that was not the view of most Americans or really of either political party.  The GOP had been isolationist before World War Two and it still was following World War Two, although it had been anti Communist in both eras. The Democratic Party figured that the war had been won and the world was now in a liberal political state of bliss and wasn't too interested in any foreign involvement.  That all ended when China fell and Berlin was blockaded.  The shock of those events sent both parties on the same course in regards to international affairs.  At the same time the exposure of the penetration of Soviet agents into American government during the Roosevelt Administration was basically shouted down and buried by the Democratic Party which was embarrassed by it.

This takes us to the 1950s.  What we find is that the United States, in the 1950s, was internationalist in outlook, strongly anti Communist, and had expressed generally conservative social views while as the same time it was struggling to the bring blacks fully into society.  It's really the 1950s, not the 1960s that saw the real strong rise of the Civil Rights movement, but that would complete, at least for that phase, in the early 1960s.

Which we are now up to.

A lot of Americans hold a view of the early 1960s which is basically that expressed in the film American Graffiti, which is of course set in the early 1960s.  In that film all of the really significant people are, of course, teenagers or those immediately dealing with teenagers. Those young teens are out for a single evening driving around aimlessly in sort of a motorized courting ritual reminiscent of that which was once common in Mexican towns amongst young men and women of marriageable age in the public plaza on special days or Saturday market days.  And frankly there's quite a bit of truth to that (and I need to add that film to my reviewed Movies In History list).  The country, in the 1950s, was rich, much richer than it had ever been before, strong, relatively socially conservative, and faced with only one real rival, the Soviet Union.  

And then came the Vietnam War.

Well, not just the Vietnam War.  Quite a few other things arrived just about the same time the war did, and some other things arrived a little bit earlier and were really making an impact about the time the Vietnam War started to.

For one thing, for the first time ever, university became sort of an expectation of the middle class. That was a byproduct of World War Two.

The United States went into World War Two in the back stages of the Great Depression.  Like the United Kingdom, the expectation in the US is that once the war ended, the Depression would return.  That expectation proved to be wrong, and the world didn't slide into a global depression following the Second World War, in part because of the war itself an din part because the Depression had been so long, but those western nations that could plan around that expectation did so. That's why the United Kingdom introduced its national healthcare system and that's why the United States introduced the GI Bill.

The GI Bill allowed thousands of Americans to attend college who came from demographics that had no prior expectation of doing so.  That ended the era in which most college attendees in the US were white Protestants and opened up college and university enormously.  It also brought Federal money into education for the first time.  That meant, on the faculty level, that for the first time the paying customer was, in some ways, the public trough and in others a wider cross section of American public.  By extension it meant that, for private schools, the need to pay attention class distinctions, even if in a radical subversive way, were lessened and for public schools, the need to pay attention to local industries was reduced. And as any college degree meant employment at that time, the students' long term employeabiltiy didn't merit much attention as it was virtually guaranteed.

Hence, by the 1960s, a large, second and first generation student body that had much less attachment to the economically elite than ever before, and which was also much more certain of economic success, no matter what, than ever before.

They also had less connection with the demographics that produced them.  

The GI Bill not only flooded the colleges with new students and government money, it mean that there were now a lot of students who had been born into ethnicities for which college was previously nearly out of the question, in college.  First Catholics, and then blacks, started entering college for the first time in large numbers, followed by other formerly blue collar ethnicities.  As this occurred some of those ethnicities started to redefine themselves as white collar middle class ethnicities.  Irish Americans are a good example as during this period they exited what had been called the "Catholic Ghetto" and sought to redefine themselves as middle class Americans.  North of the border in Catholic Quebec the same thing was occurring on a large scale.  If the 1968 Chicago Police Riot has been portrayed as father against son, there's a real element of truth to that as Chicago was, to a large extent, as series of blue collar ghettos and the protestors of the 1968 Democratic Convention were largely the college educated sons and daughters of blue collar workers.

All that would have created enough turmoil but added into that there were peculiar social changes that were also afoot, some of which would have been quite disruptive in their own right and others which contributed to the mix. Two of these involved women.

The big change involving women is well known, but grossly misunderstood. By the 1950s (not the 1960s, as so often claimed) women's roles in the office and at home were changing.

This is usually claimed to be a byproduct of World War Two, but it isn't.  It was rather the result of the onset of really effective domestic machinery in the home, a process that had been going on since the early 20th Century but which had been retarded by the Great Depression.  Greatly improved domestic machinery that would have come onto the market fairly rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s instead simply bust onto the market in the 1950s.  This meant that much of the necessary heavy labor performed by women in the house was no longer as labor intensive. For the first time, many women and even girls could seriously consider entering the workplace and not really have to make a choice between a domestic life or that of the "spinster" life.

The same machinery, washing machines, massively improved kitchen stoves, dryers, etc., also meant that younger women could actually leave the household as they were not required for domestic labor. That was a huge change in and of itself.  And it also meant that young men were free to live on their own without the close support of their families or living in boarding houses, all of which had been true before and all of which were due to the daily amount of domestic labor just to stay alive.  Young men had expanded personal freedom in an age in which there were still a lot of good jobs that didn't require a college degree, even if many were receiving them.  Young women were really free to opt for work for the first time. So were married women.

It is really with married women, we should note, that the change was the most revolutionary, although it was generally across the board.  Many younger women who entered the work force actually did so only temporarily at the time.  But the change was setting in fairly quickly, even if the fact that it was a change was clear to everyone.  Using television as a mirror, by 1970 television had gone from the Cleaver family as a subject to the office life of Mary Tyler Moore.

The cast of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which included several women characters, only one of whom was a homemaker.

Mary Tyler Moore (in the 1970s television sitcoms were sometimes simply named after the actual names of the principal actor) was centered on the life of a young female single professional.  The casting of Moore, who had previously been casts in roles based on her physical appearance in no small part, was both brilliant and intentional.  Moore was the new young working woman of the age, surrounded in part by accepting men and in part not.  Betty White was portrayed as an older somewhat radical woman worker, perhaps the first female character cast that way and definitely contrary to her later roles.  While using television as a reflection of the times is dangerous, the huge success of the show does demonstrate the extent to which it reflected a contemporary world that was just recently changed.  That it was recently changed is evident just from watching it, as so much of the old world remained as a point of reference.

As noted, that would have been disruptive in and of itself, but added to that a combined pharmaceutical discovery and the ooze that Hugh Hefner released operated in concert with a lot of young men and women no longer living at home to start what would ultimately become a disastrous social change that reflected itself differently in different demographics.  As has been addressed here before, including quite recently, Hefner managed to exploit an already existing market that had been expanded by World War Two by making it male mainstream. In essence he portrayed the girl next store as dumb, heavy chested, and available.  In 1953 when the magazine hit the girl next door was in fact largely unavailable and her reputation would have been ruined had she been, but the male expectation was created.  By 1963 however she was living outside of the home in increasing numbers and the birth control pill came out.

Hormonal birth control pills created a revolution in human behavior in the western world that had real negative impacts.  Had the same pharmaceuticals come out only today, chances are high that they would not be allowed by the FDA as the physical dangers of them are so well known.  At the time, however, that they'd have an impact on behavior to the extent that they would was not anticipated by many (it was by some), nor was it the case that it was known that pressure would develop, and fairly rapidly, for female behavior to be libertine in response.  Certainly not all of it was, but in some sectors it increasingly became so over time and ultimately arrived upon a very widespread social expectation.  

Now, it should be noted, there's been retreats and adjustments to much of this, so a person can't assume that this is all a straight line in any fashion.  But what we're doing is simply setting the stage to ask the question that Burns and Novik posed, and then assumed an answer for.

So, by the late 1960s we have the general conditions described above. And then along came the Vietnam War.

The war did put a section of young people, and some not so young people, out on the streets protesting against the war.  And as all of these things hit at one time, there was a section or two of the American population that really formed its ideas about the world at that time.  Those sections were largely white (which most Americans were, and are).  One section was located in increasingly large cities and the other on their peripheries and outside of the cities.  One section was well educated and, over time, increasingly came to have very small families, if any families at all, and had a fair amount of surplus cash and highly liberal views. The other section had more traditional family structure, although decreased from earlier times, and suffered from economic up and downs extensively.

Now, there was a lot of crossing over from one to the other. And both sections had their roots quite clearly in earlier times.  But the times did change them as well.  Prior to the 1970s real political radicalism in the United States depended upon a radicalized and Unionized working class. That simply ceased to be the case after the 1970s, and indeed unions died themselves.  The concept of social change and justice being based on the lives of the common man ended, as instead it came to be centered in the social views of a fairly rarefied section of the wealthy white urban class that had previously made up what were termed WASPs.  And that's where we are today.

And, indeed, I've noted how that reflects today in our current politics.

But is that the fault of the Vietnam War?

Well, at least partially.  The war did create a rift that seems to have grown bigger over the years, if we take in a lot of years at a time. But it can't be said that it wouldn't have occurred anyhow.  Perhaps the desire of a white upper middle class student body to avoid serving in the war got us to the rift, or maybe it only accelerated it.  If it created it, Richard Nixon's behavior in expanding the war late in its unpopularity and then in trying to cover up the break in of the  Watergate Hotel didn't help it much.  Rampant inflation in the 1970s didn't help much either.

But where this plays out, and how much of the current social viewpoint disparity is directly related is another question entirely.  Technological innovation and advancement, changes in the global economy and the like have all played a role and, from the long view, maybe a greater role than something like the Vietnam War.  

And I suspect that much of this turmoils is reaching a high tide point, and will start to recede.  It always seems to over a long period of time, but that it takes a long time is often missed.  Even with all of the current truly odd developments, many of which are deeply opposed to human's actual nature on one hand, and deeply politically regressive on the other, the overall culture of the nations, struggled for as it is, remains there.

So, while Burns and Novik can Quixotically hope that their documentary starts to heal the political and social rift of the country, chances are that something will slowly change all that anyhow, even if it doesn't completely heal any rift, as some rifts have always been there.

Ugg.

I could tell when I went to bed that something was going on.  My throat was swollen up and hurt.  I hoped I'd just sleep whatever it was away.

But then I didn't plan on waking up every hour or so all night long.

I'd planned on working today.  Sometimes a cold is a forced day off.

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