Memorial Day Tribute from Steeljaw Scribe on Vimeo.
Pausing for a moment to acknowledge this signatory event in VAW history before returning to the discussion on the Maritime Strategy later today… -SJS 1967: VAW-11 (West coast) and VAW-12 (East coast) constitute the two largest squadrons in the Navy with some 200 officers and 800 enlisted each. Each squadrom supports 4 plane E-1B Tracer…
KIDO BUTAI First Carrier Striking Force VADM Nagumo Chuichi Chief of Staff: RADM Kusaka Ryunosuke Carrier Division 1 – VADM Nagumo Akagi (flagship) – Captain Aoki Taijiro, commanding 18 x A6M2 carrier fighters (aka Zero) 18 x D3A1 carrier bombers (aka Val) 18 x B5N2 carrier attack aircraft (aka Kate) 6 x A6M2 fighters (6th…
A quick history lesson. A quarter of a century ago, the US (and NATO) were engaged in an unprecedented nuclear arms build-up in Europe that was initiated with the deployment of the SS-20 Sabre (NATO)/RT-21M Pioneer (Russia) IRBM in 1976. Unlike the much older SS-4 and SS-5 IRBMs, employed in 1959 and 1961,…
Forty-nine years ago – within one day of each other, one astronaut headed for orbit as America’s first to circle the Earth and a future astronaut opened a series of record attempts in the McDonell F4H Phantom: Images Courtesy Rex Features & NASA 20 Feb 1962: Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn. USMC, in Mercury spacecraft…
14 Dec –Installation of the Pilot Landing Aid Television system (PLAT) was completed on Coral Sea, the first carrier to have the system installed for operational use. Designed to provide a video tape of every landing, the system was useful for instructional purposes and in the analysis of landing accidents making it a valuable tool…
Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth. – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Book II Tucked away in the mountains of east-central North Korea, roughly 32 nm from the launch pad at Tae po-dong (or Musudan-ri) and 12 nm from the site of…
