One of the reasons we went with the ‘Postcards from deployment…’ feature a couple of years ago was to bring an unvarnished look at deployments from a sailor’s POV that doesn’t always make it to the light of day, except in rare fora like the “Carrier” series late last year. Charles touches on something everyone…
Guest blogger Chuck Hill checks in with the first of two parts of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (12-13 November). We are less than a month out from the attack at Pearl Harbor and Allied forces are on the move – in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But so too are…
We live in an age marked by dwindling numbers of real pioneers and visionaries. Today we just lost another and we are all a bit poorer for it. – SJS From DoD News: Retired Navy Rear Adm. Wayne E. Meyer, regarded as the father of the Navy’s AEGIS Weapons System, passed away today. “I am…
CINCLAX checks in with a strategic summary of where the players stand at this point in the Solomons Campaign. As we will see here and in detail later ths week with the Battles of Santa Cruz and Guadalcanal I & II, this is still a very close run deal with either the Japanese or Allied…
Our erstwhile correspondent, AT1 Charles Berelmann, joins us from the Land of the Rising Sun 日本, specifically from the homeport of the US Seventh Fleet, our Forward Deployed Naval Forces in Japan. For one who was an East Coast sailor, as we’ll see, it certanly has come as a cultural revelation. One of my enduring…
One of the long-time fixtures of the annual Tailhook National Symposium (nee ‘Reunion’) was the Flag Officer panel. In this forum, the panel fielded frank and blunt questions from anyone in the audience – JGs and Ensigns included. The only requirements were to maintain a modicum of respect and for the assembled flags to provide…
Sixty-five years ago today, over the fields of France, 23 P-38s of the 474th Fighter Group engaged what could loosely be described as a gaggle of German Bf-109’s and FW-190’s in a frenetic, hard fought, swirling dogfight. Initially engaged in a fight were the odds were 2:1 against them, the 12 427th Fighter Squadron and…
With the previous article as prologue, we turn to the review of the work at hand – One Second After, by William R. Forstchen (forward by Newt Gingrich). The premise for One Second After lies in the devastating effects of an EMP attack carried out by employing a few nukes launched in an asymmetric strike. …
As Hurricane Bill sits off the coast today, dumping copious amounts of rain on the SJS homestead (such as it is at the moment), we pause to consider a community of aviators and scientists whose mission brings them face to face with The Beast, under conditions normally sane aviators strive to avoid. Today we take…
Embarked correspondent AT1 Charles Berlemann, joins us once again with a slice of the deployed life – today from, well, tomorrow… SJS, How are things in the past? We just crossed that imaginary line on the global and fell so far behind the west coast time that we actually jumped ahead to the 19th of…
