To All
Good Sunday Morning June 18 2023.
Happy Father's Day to all
Regards,
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On This Day in Naval and Marine Corps History
June 18
1812 The United States declares war on Great Britain for impressment of Sailors and interference with commerce.
1814 The sloop of war Wasp, commanded by Johnston Blakely, captures and scuttles the British merchant brig Pallas in the eastern Atlantic.
1875 The side-wheel steamer, USS Saranac, wrecks in Seymour Narrows, off Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
1944 - USS Bullhead (SS 332) sinks Japanese auxiliary sailing vessel (No. 58) Sakura Maru in Sunda Strait, off Merak. Also on this date, USS Dentuda (SS 335) sinks Japanese guardboats Reiko Maru and Heiwa Maru in East China Sea west of Tokara Gunto.
1957 Adm. Arleigh A. Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, approves the ship characteristics of the Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine.
1983 USS Florida (SSGN 728) is commissioned at Electric Boat Division, Groton, Conn. The Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, is the first submarine to be named after the 27th state, but the sixth vessel in the Navy.
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Today in World History June 18
0362 Emperor Julian issues an edict banning Christians from teaching in Syria.
1155 German-born Frederick I, Barbarossa, is crowned emperor of Rome.
1579 Sir Francis Drake claims San Francisco Bay for England.
1667 The Dutch fleet sails up the Thames River and threatens London.
1775 The British take Bunker Hill outside of Boston, after a costly battle.
1778 British troops evacuate Philadelphia.
1799 Napoleon Bonaparte incorporates Italy into his empire.
1812 The War of 1812 begins when the United States declares war against Great Britain.
1815 At the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte is defeated by an international army under the Duke of Wellington.
1848 Austrian General Alfred Windisch-Gratz crushes a Czech uprising in Prague.
1854 The Red Turban revolt breaks out in Guangdong, China.
1856 The Republican Party opens its first national convention in Philadelphia.
1861 President Abraham Lincoln witnesses Dr. Thaddeus Lowe demonstrate the use of a hot-air balloon.
1863 On the way to Gettysburg, Union and Confederate forces skirmish at Point of Rocks, Maryland.
1863 After repeated acts of insubordination, General Ulysses S. Grant relieves General John McClernand during the Siege of Vicksburg.
1864 At Petersburg, Union General Ulysses S. Grant realizes the town can no longer be taken by assault and settles into a siege.
1872 George M. Hoover begins selling whiskey in Dodge City, Kansas--a town which had previously been "dry."
1873 Susan B. Anthony is fined $100 for attempting to vote for president.
1876 General George Crook's command is attacked and bested on the Rosebud River by 1,500 Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Crazy Horse.
1912 The German Zeppelin SZ 111 burns in its hangar in Friedrichshafen.
1913 U.S. Marines set sail from San Diego to protect American interests in Mexico.
1917 The Russian Duma meets in secret session in Petrograd and votes for an immediate Russian offensive against the German Army.
1918 Allied forces on the Western Front begin their largest counterattack yet against the German army.
1924 The Fascist militia marches into Rome.
1926 Spain threatens to quit the League of Nations if Germany is allowed to join.
1928 Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane.
1930 The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill becomes law, placing the highest tariff on imports to the United States.
1931 British authorities in China arrest Indochinese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh.
1932 The U.S. Senate defeats the Bonus Bill as 10,000 veterans mass around the Capitol.
1936 Mobster Charles 'Lucky' Luciano is found guilty on 62 counts of compulsory prostitution.
1940 The Soviet Union occupies Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
1942 The U.S. Navy commissions its first black officer, Harvard University medical student Bernard Whitfield Robinson.
1942 Yank a weekly magazine for the U.S. armed services, begins publication.
1944 French troops land on the island of Elba in the Mediterranean.
1944 The U.S. First Army breaks through the German lines on the Cotentin Peninsula and cuts off the German-held port of Cherbourg.
1945 Organized Japanese resistance ends on the island of Mindanao.
1950 Surgeon Richard Lawler performs the first kidney transplant operation in Chicago.
1951 General Vo Nguyen Giap ends his Red River Campaign against the French in Indochina.
1953 Soviet tanks fight thousands of Berlin workers rioting against the East German government.
1953 South Korean President Syngman Rhee releases Korean non-repatriate POWs against the will of the United Nations.
1959 A Federal Court annuls the Arkansas law allowing school closings to prevent integration.
1963 The U.S. Supreme Court bans the required reading of the Lord's prayer and Bible in public schools.
1965 27 B-52s hit Viet Cong outposts, but lose two planes in South Vietnam.
1966 Samuel Nabrit becomes the first African American to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission.
1970 North Vietnamese troops cut the last operating rail line in Cambodia.
1972 Five men are arrested for burglarizing Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.
1979 President Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev sign the Salt II pact to limit nuclear arms.
1983 Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space.
1994 Millions of Americans watch former football player O.J. Simpson--facing murder charges--drive his Ford Bronco through Los Angeles, followed by police.
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ROLLING THUNDER REMEMBERED Thanks to the Bear … Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)…
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post
Skip… For The List for Sunday, 18 June 2023… Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)…
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post for 18 June 1968… George Herring: "Dissent in wartime is as American as apple pie."… especially when the war is undeclared and endless (i.e., no exit strategy), something neocons ignore as they monger-on…
This following work accounts for every fixed wing loss of the Vietnam War and you can use it to read more about the losses in The Bear's Daily account. Even better it allows you to add your updated information to the work to update for history…skip Vietnam Air Losses Access Chris Hobson and Dave Lovelady's work at: https://www.VietnamAirLosses.com.
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Many Fathers did not return
Thanks to Dutch
from 7 years ago - thanks to THE Bear -
Happy Fathers Day – 19 June 2016 – Part I
June 19, 2016Mighty Thunder
THEY WERE OUR FATHERS – 19 JUNE 2016
Mighty Thunder is proud to post this documentary trailer from the studios of WRSE, sponsored by Pensacola State College and the following article from the Pensacola Gulf Breeze on the occasion of Father's Day 2016. RTR and Mighty Thunder are beholden to contributor Bruce Herman for providing this moving tribute to the Fathers who left their families to fight and perish during the Vietnam War, and the amazing children they left behind.
RTR and Mighty Thunder congratulate WRSE, Pensacola State College, and especially Jill Hubbs for providing a world class film on a subject near and dear to our hearts and purpose for taking up space on the Internet — to remember those who, we the living, left behind in Southeast Asia in a war fought 50 years ago….
Some 20,000 American boys and girls lost their fathers during the Vietnam War. In a new documentary film produced by WSRE, several of these Gold Star children, now adult men and women, share their stories which serve as powerful testimonies about the true cost of war. WSRE will premiere "They Were Our Fathers" with a special Father's Day broadcast at 7 p.m. on June 19.
The Gold Star designation is given to family members who have lost loved ones in United States military service during wartime. Every five years on Father's Day, members of Sons and Daughters in Touch, a group formed in 1990 to locate, unite and support Gold Star children who lost their fathers serving in the Vietnam War, gather at the nation's capital to honor their parents, reflect on their common grief and support one another, like no one else can.
Under the direction of Executive Producer Jill Hubbs, a WSRE production crew traveled to Washington, D.C. last June to document the gathering and record personal accounts.
The film is narrated in first person by Hubbs, whose father became missing in action during his second tour of duty in Vietnam on March 17, 1968. U.S. Navy Cdr. Donald Richard Hubbs was commanding officer of the VS-23 Black Cats and was stationed aboard the USS Yorktown in the Gulf of Tonkin when his S-2E Tracker reconnaissance aircraft disappeared off the North Vietnam coast.
U.S Navy Cdr. Donald Richard Hubbs with his wife Bereth and daughter Jill. Jill Hobbs is the executive producer of "They Were Our Fathers."
"Each of these sons and daughters has a unique story to tell. We are bonded together by tragedy, but also joined together in patriotism, honor and respect for the fathers we loved and lost," said Hubbs.
During Memorial Day weekend, Hubbs attended the retirement celebration for Jan Scruggs, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Vice President Joe Biden was a guest at that event.
Hubbs also accepted an invitation from the President of the United States to join him with a group of Gold Star children for breakfast at the White House on Memorial Day, where she presented President Barack Obama a copy of the documentary.
"They Were Our Fathers" was edited by James Roy. Ted King was director of photography. To learn more about the film, visit WSRE
WSRE Documentaries | They Were Our Fathers
Over 20,000 American boys and girls lost their fathers during the Vietnam War.
WSRE Documentaries | They Were Our Fathers | WSRE PBS
WSRE Documentaries | They Were Our Fathers
Over 20,000 American boys and girls lost their fathers during the Vietnam War.
Happy Fathers Day – 19 June – Part II
June 19, 2016Mighty Thunder
HAPPY FATHERS DAY – 19 JUNE – PART II
Local Documentarian Explores the Legacy and Cost of the Vietnam War By C. S. Satterwhite
Walking up to Wall South at Admiral Mason Park, the smallest statue is of a little child with a sad look upon her face.
This "Homecoming" monument recognizes military families, especially the children, and is "Presented by the Children of America's Twentieth Century Heroes."
For many military children, however, there was no homecoming. For thousands from the Vietnam War in particular, there was no return of their fathers.
Jill Hubbs was one of the children whose father never returned.
Nearly fifty years after the military listed her father as Missing in Action, Hubbs is now on her own mission—to share the stories of the grown children who lost their fathers during the Vietnam War and to document an organization founded by those children.
Hubbs produced and directed the documentary "They Were Our Fathers" for WSRE public television as a means to tell her story and ones like it. Hubbs' film aims to show "the true cost of war" on families, with a special focus on the Vietnam War's Gold Star Children—the gold star is the designation for a military family member who was killed in action.
While this is not Hubbs' first documentary, it is by far her most personal.
"My dad was a navy pilot who trained here in Pensacola," she said of her father, Commander Donald Hubbs.
Cmdr. Hubbs was a career military man on his second tour of duty in Vietnam and was the commanding officer of VS-23, the famed "Black Cat" squadron based on the USS Yorktown in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Hubbs' last memory of her father was with her family, seeing him off for what would be his second deployment to Vietnam. After proudly showing the family his quarters aboard the Yorktown, they were leaving when she remembered a cake they brought for him was still in the car. Hubbs ran to back and brought the cake to her father and gave him one last hug goodbye.
"Be good, and take care of your mother," he said as they parted.
Those would be his last words spoken to his daughter.
Missing in Action
On March 17, 1968, Cmdr. Hubbs and his crew "went on a mission and their plane disappeared off the radar" near the coast of Vietnam.
"To this day, we're not really sure what happened to him or his men," said his daughter.
Hubbs was 10 years old at the time and was attending a Lutheran parochial school when the pastor came to get her and took her home. At first, she didn't know the reason and thought something happened to her mother.
"I got [to the house] and there were a zillion cars in my driveway," said Hubbs. She described her home as being filled with Navy officers and defense officials relaying what they knew, which was little.
"The plane is missing, but they're looking for him," said her mother.
When Hubbs went back to school, her classmates understood little of what occurred and said less.
"They knew something happened, but the kids didn't really talk about it," said Hubbs.
Before her father's disappearance, the war was more of an abstract concept, which merged with constant demands of a naval officer and his family.
"I didn't really understand the war at the time. I wasn't aware of Vietnam." Her father deployed from time to time, but this was different. The Yorktown returned, but her father did not.
Without any more knowledge of the events surrounding her father's disappearance, or even a body to bury, "we felt lost," said Hubbs.
The Navy opened a case file after Cmdr. Hubbs and his crew disappeared, but news was sparse.
"Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into years," said Hubbs.
Adding to the uncertainty of her situation was the unpopularity of the war, which left the Hubbs family feeling isolated.
"It was hard to accept the situation," said Hubbs. "And it was hard to explain."
The Hubbs family remained in the Yorktown's homeport of San Diego, California, for some time, but eventually moved back to her mother's hometown of Pensacola.
"We were pulling up roots, and I felt that he wouldn't be able to find us," said Hubbs. "It was hard for me to process."
Although her father didn't came walking through her door, his daughter never stopped looking. Eventually, her search for answers brought her to Vietnam.
Searching in Vietnam
After possible sightings of her father were reported in the late 1980s, including a photograph, Hubbs made arrangements with U.S. and Vietnamese officials to look for her father in Vietnam.
"It wasn't just like finding a needle in a haystack," said Hubbs. "It's more like an archeological dig. I didn't understand the conditions [of the terrain] until I went over there."
The closest Hubbs came to finding her father was a previously unknown Vietnamese graves registration listing for her father as having died in the Quang Binh Province of Vietnam.
Though she was unsuccessful in finding concrete information regarding her father, her trip to Vietnam proved eye opening in other ways.
In Vietnam, Hubbs had an official guide and translator to help with her search.
"He took us out to his house to have a meal and introduce me to his family," said Hubbs.
The United States still hadn't normalized relations with its former enemy, and Hubbs was concerned about being an American citizen in Vietnam. "I didn't know how they'd receive me."
Her guide's father was in the house, but he didn't speak English. He was a veteran of the war and fought on the opposite side of Hubbs' father.
While she was in his house, she noticed an oil painting of an anti-aircraft gun hanging on the wall.
Being in this Vietnamese man's house, knowing her guide's father might have played a role in shooting aviators down during the war, her first thought was about her father. "What would my dad say?"
The old man noticed her looking at the picture and said to her in Vietnamese that her father was sent by his government to fight in the war just as he was sent by his government to fight in the war.
"Men don't start wars," said the Vietnamese veteran, "governments do."
Later, Hubbs met a Vietnamese woman who suffered the loss of two of her adult children in the "American War," as it's called in Vietnam.
"She lost one son, and she had another son who was missing. Before I went over [to Vietnam], it had never occurred to me that they had such loss, too."
After learning this about the Vietnamese mother's children, Hubbs showed her a picture of her father in his military uniform.
"I had this picture of my dad," said Hubbs. The Vietnamese mother had a Buddhist shrine for her two lost children. She then took the picture of Hubbs' father and placed it between her two sons.
"Then she started saying something," said Hubbs. "I didn't know what she was saying, but I knew she was praying."
"I found the people [of Vietnam] very forgiving. I found no hostility from the people, and all I found [of my father] was a graves registration with my dad's name."
With resignation in her voice, Hubbs said, "I will probably never know exactly what happened to my dad."
Sons and Daughters in Touch
In her grief and loss, Hubbs was not alone.
Roughly 20,000 American children lost their fathers during the Vietnam War, but until the 1990 founding of an organization named Sons and Daughters in Touch (SDIT), few of these people knew each other.
"The very first time I knew of others was when I read this Parade magazine article," said Hubbs.
The 1990 Parade article featured SDIT and their work to bring together the sons and daughters of those killed in the war.
One of the people featured in "They Were Our Fathers," is Tony Cordero.
Cordero's father was an Air Force navigator on a B-57 when it was lost over Vietnam on Father's Day in 1965. Four years later, Cordero buried his father at Arlington National Cemetery. Cordero was only eight years old and would grow up with a similar sense of loss as Hubbs.
When Cordero turned 30—the same age as his father when he died in Vietnam— he wondered how he could get in touch with other Gold Star Children from the Vietnam War. Looking for answers, Cordero contacted an organization called Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and spoke with a volunteer named Wanda Ruffin.
Ruffin was the wife of Naval Aviator Lt. Cmdr. James Ruffin whose F-4 Phantom was shot down over Vietnam in 1966. He was killed in action and left behind a wife and a newborn baby girl.
So when Cordero asked if Ruffin knew of any sons or daughters who shared his experience, she knew of one in particular—her daughter Wendy.
"[Wendy] never knew anyone, outside of relatives, who knew her dad or shared her experience at all," said Ruffin in the documentary. "It was very difficult. She grew up very beautifully and did well in school and did just fine, but I knew there was a big hole there."
After Cordero and Ruffin met, Cordero soon established SDIT to meet the needs of other grown children of veterans whose names were etched on the Vietnam Wall.
As the organization grew, it began meeting at the Vietnam Wall in Washington for what became a Father's Day tradition. The adult children of those killed during the war found many similarities.
Almost immediately, this group bonded as family, despite differences in gender, ethnicity, service, and rank. "The stories about growing up were so similar," said Hubbs. "No matter who told the story, there were so many things I identified with."
Longtime SDIT member Denise Reed lost her father, Harold Reed, in Vietnam when she was a young girl. "I remember the day he left [for Vietnam], and I remember the chaplain coming to tell my mother that he was killed on the Fourth of July," said Reed.
"You can't help but wonder how different my life would've been if my father had come back home," said Reed.
Most grew up in a unique isolation with a deep sense of loss, and many of their parents never remarried. Bearing the cost of the Vietnam War long after many Americans relegated the conflict to history books or a bad dream, the nightmare these families lived through was ultimately their bond.
"It's a family that no one really wants to belong to," said Hubbs. Or as an article on the SDIT website reads, "the 'Gold Star' designation is un-chosen and unending," thus making this Gold Star network that much more important to the community it serves.
"This is a group of people that you can always express yourself to," said Reed.
"Express your anger, your disappointment, and express what your family went through… and what you're still going through because of it."
Why the Movie Matters
"They Were Our Fathers" sheds light upon SDIT and the unique effects of war on the children of those killed. While their war was Vietnam, the group offers its experience to a new generation of Gold Star families.
"Unfortunately, there's a new generation of children who've lost their fathers, and now mothers," said Hubbs. She described one scene in particular as heartbreaking, seeing a large group of these young Gold Star children converge upon the Vietnam Wall to join with their older counterparts and leave roses in shared sympathy.
"It's tragic for it to happen again. It was hard to bear," said Hubbs.
"I looked at them, and that was us."
Hubbs said that she wanted to make this film for a number of reasons, but first because no one has yet documented the SDIT experience.
She also wanted to make this film as a tribute to her father and "to honor our dads."
"It's a legacy to our dads. It's awareness that there's a cost to war," Hubbs said.
Since the film's completion, interest in Hubbs' documentary has grown exponentially. Over one hundred PBS affiliates have expressed a desire to show Hubbs' film, most in connection with an upcoming Ken Burns documentary series on the Vietnam War.
Besides PBS broadcasts, Hubbs recently presented President Obama with a personal copy of the film. The Reagan and Nixon presidential libraries also contacted Hubbs for potential screenings.
Although Hubbs is happy with the interest her film garnered, her greatest hope is to connect other sons and daughters who may not know of the organization. She also wants to reach out to the latest generation of Gold Star families so they know they're not alone.
"The one thing that bonds us is that it was our dads [who died in Vietnam], and this is a piece of our heart that can't be replaced," said Hubbs.
"It's a story that needs to be told."
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Thanks to Ted
The War of 1812 : All it wants is a little respect Time to recognize lasting consequences of a 'weird little episode'?
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By Patrick HrubyThe Washington Times
The Revolutionary War has its own national holiday. World War II has spawned countless books and movies. The Civil War boasts costumed re-enactors and a signature chess set.
And the War of 1812? It has re-enactors, too. The country can't get enough of them. The country of Canada, that is. "The demand for them right now is so great that it's actually driving up the price," said John Stagg, a University of Virginia history professor and author of "The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent." "They may even have to resort to the desperate tactic of importing a few from the United States.
"The situation is different in Canada. They take the war very seriously in a way that Americans don't."
Currently enjoying its bicentennial — What, you haven't pre-ordered the Postal Service's forthcoming commemorative stamp? — the War of 1812 occupies a musty, forgotten junk drawer in America's collective cultural consciousness, stuffed somewhere between the liberation of Grenada and the time Will Smith punched that extraterrestrial fighter pilot in the face.
No memorial on the Mall.
No memorial, buy-one, get-one-free mattress sales.
The only war in the history of the United States referred to by its year.
The only war in the history of the United States in which — yes, really — Canada won.
A three-year, continent-spanning conflict against the British Empire that gave us Dolley Madison (the heroic first lady, not the snack cakes), the Capitol rotunda (built after a humiliating defeat, but still), the Kentucky Rifle (overrated, according to historians), the 1959 song "The Battle of New Orleans" (less accurate than a Kentucky Rifle, according to historians) and the "Star-Spangled Banner" (ironically sung to the tune of an old English drinking song — whatever), and yet is lucky to receive more than a few throwaway paragraphs in the average American history textbook.
"I think it's more like two sentences," said Stephen Budiansky, author of "Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815."
"The War of 1812 has gotten no respect over the years."
Dissed and dismissed
Don Hickey concurs. The nation's pre-eminent War of 1812 historian, he began a lifelong love affair with the topic as a University of Illinois student in the late 1960s, writing his senior honors thesis on New England's opposition to the conflict.
(Fun fact: Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island refused to lend their state militias to the federal war effort, and a number of New England congressmen who voted for the war were subsequently booted from office. In other words, the War of 1812 was unpopular before it even started.) "It turned out to be a real academic backwater, along with the entire early national period," said Mr. Hickey, a history professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and the author of "The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition.""It was tough to find a university job."
Most schools at the time, Mr. Hickey said, carried Revolutionary War and Civil War experts on staff, and perhaps an Andrew Jackson scholar as well.
However, few academics paid the War of 1812 much mind. No less a historian than Richard Hofstadter best summed up the prevailing sentiment by describing the conflict as "ludicrous and unnecessary," the climax of an "age of slack and derivative culture, of fumbling and small-minded statecraft" and "terrible parochial wrangling."
"War of 1812 historians are in a bit of a ghetto," Mr. Stagg said. "When Theodore Roosevelt wrote a history of the war, he wrote a naval history. He basically said he wasn't going to study the land campaigns because they were so ludicrous."
For nearly a decade, Congress has entertained the notion of creating an official War of 1812 bicentennial commission; time and again, the same body of lawmakers that regularly honors things like craft beer and the University of Texas swimming and diving team has said thanks, but no thanks.
Don't imagine their constituents care: A recent poll by a Canadian research firm found that 36 percent of Americans could not name a significant outcome to the war.
"There's an American tendency to think the war was some sort of joke, pathetic and not significant," Mr. Stagg said. "There are a lot of memorials to the War of 1812, but they're all local, not national."
What about the District's memorial to James Madison, president and commander in chief during the war?
"It's inside the Library of Congress," Mr. Stagg said. "A lot of people don't even know it's there. And, of course, it talks about [Madison] as a bookish man learning to write the Constitution. It doesn't talk about the War of 1812."
Win, lose, draw?
Why the antipathy? Start with the nature of the conflict. Fed up with British bullying and conscripting of American sailors and a Royal Navy-imposed embargo of trade with France — an offshoot of Europe's Napoleonic Wars — Congress voted to declare war on Britain in June of 1812.
The vote itself was bitterly divided, and came a few days after the British had decided to lift their embargo, the whole reason for the war in the first place.
"The causes of the war don't resonate with modern readers," Mr. Hickey said. "Nobody today goes to war over maritime rights."
The American battle plan was simple — and in retrospect, bizarre: conquer British-controlled Canada, then press for nautical concessions. The United States enjoyed a 15-1 population advantage over its northern neighbor. Brimming with confidence, Thomas Jefferson predicted that victory was a "mere matter of marching."
Oops.
Poorly trained and badly led, the American army was not greeted as liberators. It was embarrassed. By Canada. In epic, Homeric struggles like the Battle of Beaver Creek. (Never heard of it? That's because you're not Canadian.) Case in point: In the Battle of Detroit, General William Hull was tricked into surrendering his 2,000-militiamen force to a smaller group of British Canadians and Native Americans without firing a single shot, thereby losing the entire Michigan territory.
"I would put that in my personal top 10 most humiliating defeats for the American Army," Mr. Budiansky said. "There was a lot of truly incompetent generalship and institutional problems handicapping the army. Terrible logistics. No overall command structure. Militias refusing to serve outside U.S. territory."
Following a failed invasion of Canada from New York, feuding American generals Peter Buell Porter and Alexander Smyth actually engaged in a duel — of which historian John R. Elting later quipped, "unfortunately, both missed."
Perhaps America's most memorable defeat came in August of 1814, when 4,000 Royal Marines marched into Washington and set the nation's capital ablaze, famously forcing Dolley Madison to save George Washington's portrait from a burning White House.
Perfect pyrotechnic fodder for a Michael Bay movie, right?
"It wasn't the entire city in flames," Mr. Budiansky said. "The British thought in the classic mold of superpowers dealing with much smaller adversaries that all they needed to do was stage a show of force. So they only burned public buildings — the White House, the Capitol, the State and Treasury departments. Some of the most serious damage was to the Navy Yard."
Those dastardly Redcoats!
"Actually, the Navy Yard was set on fire by evacuating Americans to keep supplies and almost-completed warships from falling into British hands," Mr. Budiansky said.
Ineffective on land, America's military proved surprisingly adept at sea, frustrating and humiliating the much larger Royal Navy. Ultimately, the two sides reached a peace accord in which neither nation made concessions and territorial boundaries returned to their pre-war state.
Though the accord was signed Christmas Eve of 1814, word of the peace treaty didn't reach the United States until after the Battle of New Orleans in early 1815 — an Andrew Jackson-led rout of the British that stands as America's greatest victory in the war.
"The conventional wisdom is that the war ended in a draw, because it was a draw on the battlefield," Mr. Hickey said. "But if you look at policy objectives, the United States didn't force the British to make maritime concessions, while the British achieved their objective of keeping Canada.
"One of the [anti-war] Federalists predicted that America would spend $180 million, have 30,000 casualties and not achieve its objectives. We actually spent $158 million, lost about 20,000 people and didn't achieve our objectives. I would call it ill-advised."
No matter. Over time, Mr. Hickey says, Americans became happy with the War of 1812 because they thought they won. Canadians were happier because they knew they won.
And the British? Happiest of all — because they forgot the whole thing.
"The British were preoccupied with Napoleon, and the Canadians can live with the fact that they owe their survival to the Americans messing up monumentally," Mr. Stagg said. "For the Americans, the war was rather embarrassing."
Shifting attitudes?
Not always. In the years following the war, books, plays and paintings celebrated the conflict, seen by Americans as both an honorable stand against British harassment and a consolidation of the Revolutionary War's gains.
American naval captains — the successful ones, anyway — even became household names.
"If you were a boy in the 1820s, this is what you grew up with," Mr. Budiansky said. "There were ceramic plates of naval heroes like Stephen Decatur and Isaac Hull."
Mr. Budiansky laughed.
"Many of those plates were made in England. They were never one to shy away from cashing in on a potential market."
Battlefield glories — real and imagined — also influenced politics. According to Mr. Stagg, the war helped propel both Mr. Jackson and William Henry Harrison to the presidency, the latter man running on a slogan, "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," that referred to an 1811 battle in the Indiana territory that presaged the War of 1812.
In Kentucky alone, Mr. Stagg said, the war produced three governors, three lieutenant governors and four United States senators — not to mention future Vice President Richard Johnson.
"It was common to use your war record as part of your claim to office," Mr. Stagg said. "Johnson supposedly killed Shawnee leader Tecumseh in 1813. He never claimed that himself, but someone did, and he never denied it. He dined out politically on that for the rest of his career."
The trauma and scale of the subsequent Civil War changed attitudes, transforming the War of 1812 into a historical afterthought. However, an ongoing bicentennial has dragged the conflict at least partially back into public consciousness.
New York lawmakers have appropriated money for commemorative events. The Canadian government is spending an estimated $30 million on the same. As part of a larger, $12 million-plus public relations push, the U.S. Navy is parading the USS Constitution and other ships through Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans and Norfolk.
In Maryland — where cars have War of 1812 license plates and Gov. Martin O'Malley has participated in re-enactments — the state is holding a three-year celebration, which kicked off with a June ceremony at Baltimore's Fort McHenry that featured recorded messages from President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
"I must admit, when I visited the White House earlier this year, I was a bit embarrassed that my ancestors had managed to burn the place down 200 years ago," Mr. Cameron joked during his message.
Beyond "The Star-Spangled Banner" — composed by Francis Scott Key during the Battle of Baltimore — the War of 1812 resulted in Jacksonian democracy, a long-term Anglo-American alliance, the birth of Canadian national identity, America's emergence as a naval power and a crushing defeat of Native Americans that paved the way for Manifest Destiny.
It's time, Mr. Stagg believes, the much-maligned conflict got a little more respect.
"Because it seemed to have no clear, decisive winner, people assume it has no decisive consequences," he said. "I think that bit is wrong. It shaped the remainder of 19th-century American history. We should look at is as such, rather than saying it's this weird little episode we can't explain or understand."
© Copyright 2012 The Washington Times, LLC.
comment:
The United States won the War of 1812. In the early 19th century the British were claiming the entire West Coast of North America, including Alta California and Baja California.
In order to press these claims, they needed to prevent the U.S. from expanding westwards into the Louisiana Purchase. The British planned to gain control of the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes to New Orleans.
The British were defeated on the Great Lakes and at the Battle of New Orleans.
Some historians try to make the case that the U.S. was attempting to seize Canadian territory, and thus, as no Canadian land was lost to the U.S., it was a Canadian victory.
However, the U.S. never made any claims on any part of Canada. The issue was the westward expansion of the United States into territory which had been considered to be Spanish and French colonies. After the War of 1812, the U.S. expanded westward to the Pacific.
Sincerely,
John Lepant Brighton CO
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This Day in U S Military History…….June 18
1944 – On Saipan, elements of the US 5th Amphibious Corps continue to make progress. The 4th Marine Division reaches the west side of the island at Magicienne Bay. This advance divides the Japanese garrison. Elements of the 27th Division capture Aslito airfield. Japanese air strikes sink 1 American destroyer and 2 tankers as well as damaging the escort carrier Fanshaw Bay. Most of the American air and naval support has withdrawn to meet the approaching Japanese fleet.
1945 – On instructions from Emperor Hirohito, Prime Minister Suzuki tells the Japanese Supreme Council that it is the intention of Hirohito to seek peace with the Allies as soon as possible.
1945 – On Okinawa, the remnants of the Japanese 32nd Army continue to offer determined resistance to attacks of the US 3rd Amphibious Corps and the US 24th Corps. Lt. General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commanding US 10th Army, is killed by Japanese artillery fire while he is on a visit to the front line, inspecting troops of the US 8th Marine Division. He is temporarily replaced by General Geiger, commanding the US 3rd Amphibious Corps. ( Buckner Bay on the east side of the Island is named for him) The battle for Okinawa is in its 78th of 82 days and the fighting remains brutal.
1945 – On Luzon, elements of the US 37th Division, supported by an armored column, advance in the Caygayan valley, capturing Ilagan airfield and crossing the Ilagan River. On Mindanao, organized Japanese resistance comes to an end. Forces of the Japanese 35th Army have been cut off and dependent on roots and tree bark for food for some time now. Nonetheless, some small units of Japanese continue to resist.
1945 – Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower received a tumultuous welcome in Washington, where he addressed a joint session of Congress. Eisenhower went on to meet Pres. Harry Truman and the 2 men established a warm relationship that later soured. In 2001 Steve Neal authored "Harry and Ike: The Relationship That Remade the Postwar World."
1953 – U.S. Air Force Captains Lonnie R. Moore and Ralph S. Parr ( Parr was a WWII ace and also flew iin Vietnam) of the 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing became the 33rd and 34th aces of the war. Their F-86s were named "Billie/Margie" and "Barb/Vent De Mort.
1965 – For the first time, 28 B-52s fly-bomb a Viet Cong concentration in a heavily forested area of Binh Duong Province northwest of Saigon. Such flights, under the aegis of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), became known as Operation Arc Light. The B-52s that took part in the Arc Light missions had been deployed to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam and more bombers were later deployed to bases in Okinawa and U-Tapao, Thailand. In addition to supporting ground tactical operations, B-52s were used to interdict enemy supply lines in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and later to strike targets in North Vietnam. Releasing their bombs from 30,000 feet, the B-52s could neither be seen nor heard from the ground as they inflicted awesome damage. B-52s were instrumental in breaking up enemy concentrations besieging Khe Sanh in 1968 and An Loc in 1972. Between June 1965 and August 1973, 126,615 B-52 sorties were flown over Southeast Asia. During those operations, the Air Force lost 29 B-52s: 17 from hostile fire over North Vietnam and 12 from operational causes.
Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day
CLARK, JAMES G.
Rank and organization: Private, Company F, 88th Pennsylvania Infantry. Place and date: At Petersburg, Va., 18 June 1864. Entered service at: ——. Birth: Germantown, Pa. Date of issue: 30 April 1892. Citation: Distinguished bravery in action; was severely wounded.
LEONARD, EDWIN
Rank and organization: Sergeant, Company I, 37th Massachusetts Infantry. Place and date: Near Petersburg, Va., 18 June 1864. Entered service at: Agawan, Mass. Birth: Agawan, Mass. Date of issue: 16 August 1894. Citation: Voluntarily exposed himself to the fire of a Union brigade to stop their firing on the Union skirmish line.
LUDWIG, CARL
Rank and organization: Private, 34th New York Battery. Place and date: At Petersburg, Va., 18 June 1864. Entered service at: ——. Birth: France. Date of issue: 30 July 1896. Citation: As gunner of his piece, inflicted singly a great loss upon the enemy and distinguished himself in the removal of the piece while under a heavy fire.
MOSTOLLER, JOHN W.
Rank and organization: Private, Company B, 54th Pennsylvania Infantry. Place and date: At Lynchburg, Va., 18 June 1864. Entered service at: ——. Birth: Somerset County, Pa. Date of issue: 27 December 1894. Citation: Voluntarily led a charge on a Confederate battery (the officers of the company being disabled) and compelled its hasty removal.
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Thanks to Ted
The War of 1812 : All it wants is a little respect Time to recognize lasting consequences of a 'weird little episode'?
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By Patrick HrubyThe Washington Times
The Revolutionary War has its own national holiday. World War II has spawned countless books and movies. The Civil War boasts costumed re-enactors and a signature chess set.
And the War of 1812? It has re-enactors, too. The country can't get enough of them. The country of Canada, that is. "The demand for them right now is so great that it's actually driving up the price," said John Stagg, a University of Virginia history professor and author of "The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent." "They may even have to resort to the desperate tactic of importing a few from the United States.
"The situation is different in Canada. They take the war very seriously in a way that Americans don't."
Currently enjoying its bicentennial — What, you haven't pre-ordered the Postal Service's forthcoming commemorative stamp? — the War of 1812 occupies a musty, forgotten junk drawer in America's collective cultural consciousness, stuffed somewhere between the liberation of Grenada and the time Will Smith punched that extraterrestrial fighter pilot in the face.
No memorial on the Mall.
No memorial, buy-one, get-one-free mattress sales.
The only war in the history of the United States referred to by its year.
The only war in the history of the United States in which — yes, really — Canada won.
A three-year, continent-spanning conflict against the British Empire that gave us Dolley Madison (the heroic first lady, not the snack cakes), the Capitol rotunda (built after a humiliating defeat, but still), the Kentucky Rifle (overrated, according to historians), the 1959 song "The Battle of New Orleans" (less accurate than a Kentucky Rifle, according to historians) and the "Star-Spangled Banner" (ironically sung to the tune of an old English drinking song — whatever), and yet is lucky to receive more than a few throwaway paragraphs in the average American history textbook.
"I think it's more like two sentences," said Stephen Budiansky, author of "Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815."
"The War of 1812 has gotten no respect over the years."
Dissed and dismissed
Don Hickey concurs. The nation's pre-eminent War of 1812 historian, he began a lifelong love affair with the topic as a University of Illinois student in the late 1960s, writing his senior honors thesis on New England's opposition to the conflict.
(Fun fact: Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island refused to lend their state militias to the federal war effort, and a number of New England congressmen who voted for the war were subsequently booted from office. In other words, the War of 1812 was unpopular before it even started.) "It turned out to be a real academic backwater, along with the entire early national period," said Mr. Hickey, a history professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and the author of "The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition.""It was tough to find a university job."
Most schools at the time, Mr. Hickey said, carried Revolutionary War and Civil War experts on staff, and perhaps an Andrew Jackson scholar as well.
However, few academics paid the War of 1812 much mind. No less a historian than Richard Hofstadter best summed up the prevailing sentiment by describing the conflict as "ludicrous and unnecessary," the climax of an "age of slack and derivative culture, of fumbling and small-minded statecraft" and "terrible parochial wrangling."
"War of 1812 historians are in a bit of a ghetto," Mr. Stagg said. "When Theodore Roosevelt wrote a history of the war, he wrote a naval history. He basically said he wasn't going to study the land campaigns because they were so ludicrous."
For nearly a decade, Congress has entertained the notion of creating an official War of 1812 bicentennial commission; time and again, the same body of lawmakers that regularly honors things like craft beer and the University of Texas swimming and diving team has said thanks, but no thanks.
Don't imagine their constituents care: A recent poll by a Canadian research firm found that 36 percent of Americans could not name a significant outcome to the war.
"There's an American tendency to think the war was some sort of joke, pathetic and not significant," Mr. Stagg said. "There are a lot of memorials to the War of 1812, but they're all local, not national."
What about the District's memorial to James Madison, president and commander in chief during the war?
"It's inside the Library of Congress," Mr. Stagg said. "A lot of people don't even know it's there. And, of course, it talks about [Madison] as a bookish man learning to write the Constitution. It doesn't talk about the War of 1812."
Win, lose, draw?
Why the antipathy? Start with the nature of the conflict. Fed up with British bullying and conscripting of American sailors and a Royal Navy-imposed embargo of trade with France — an offshoot of Europe's Napoleonic Wars — Congress voted to declare war on Britain in June of 1812.
The vote itself was bitterly divided, and came a few days after the British had decided to lift their embargo, the whole reason for the war in the first place.
"The causes of the war don't resonate with modern readers," Mr. Hickey said. "Nobody today goes to war over maritime rights."
The American battle plan was simple — and in retrospect, bizarre: conquer British-controlled Canada, then press for nautical concessions. The United States enjoyed a 15-1 population advantage over its northern neighbor. Brimming with confidence, Thomas Jefferson predicted that victory was a "mere matter of marching."
Oops.
Poorly trained and badly led, the American army was not greeted as liberators. It was embarrassed. By Canada. In epic, Homeric struggles like the Battle of Beaver Creek. (Never heard of it? That's because you're not Canadian.) Case in point: In the Battle of Detroit, General William Hull was tricked into surrendering his 2,000-militiamen force to a smaller group of British Canadians and Native Americans without firing a single shot, thereby losing the entire Michigan territory.
"I would put that in my personal top 10 most humiliating defeats for the American Army," Mr. Budiansky said. "There was a lot of truly incompetent generalship and institutional problems handicapping the army. Terrible logistics. No overall command structure. Militias refusing to serve outside U.S. territory."
Following a failed invasion of Canada from New York, feuding American generals Peter Buell Porter and Alexander Smyth actually engaged in a duel — of which historian John R. Elting later quipped, "unfortunately, both missed."
Perhaps America's most memorable defeat came in August of 1814, when 4,000 Royal Marines marched into Washington and set the nation's capital ablaze, famously forcing Dolley Madison to save George Washington's portrait from a burning White House.
Perfect pyrotechnic fodder for a Michael Bay movie, right?
"It wasn't the entire city in flames," Mr. Budiansky said. "The British thought in the classic mold of superpowers dealing with much smaller adversaries that all they needed to do was stage a show of force. So they only burned public buildings — the White House, the Capitol, the State and Treasury departments. Some of the most serious damage was to the Navy Yard."
Those dastardly Redcoats!
"Actually, the Navy Yard was set on fire by evacuating Americans to keep supplies and almost-completed warships from falling into British hands," Mr. Budiansky said.
Ineffective on land, America's military proved surprisingly adept at sea, frustrating and humiliating the much larger Royal Navy. Ultimately, the two sides reached a peace accord in which neither nation made concessions and territorial boundaries returned to their pre-war state.
Though the accord was signed Christmas Eve of 1814, word of the peace treaty didn't reach the United States until after the Battle of New Orleans in early 1815 — an Andrew Jackson-led rout of the British that stands as America's greatest victory in the war.
"The conventional wisdom is that the war ended in a draw, because it was a draw on the battlefield," Mr. Hickey said. "But if you look at policy objectives, the United States didn't force the British to make maritime concessions, while the British achieved their objective of keeping Canada.
"One of the [anti-war] Federalists predicted that America would spend $180 million, have 30,000 casualties and not achieve its objectives. We actually spent $158 million, lost about 20,000 people and didn't achieve our objectives. I would call it ill-advised."
No matter. Over time, Mr. Hickey says, Americans became happy with the War of 1812 because they thought they won. Canadians were happier because they knew they won.
And the British? Happiest of all — because they forgot the whole thing.
"The British were preoccupied with Napoleon, and the Canadians can live with the fact that they owe their survival to the Americans messing up monumentally," Mr. Stagg said. "For the Americans, the war was rather embarrassing."
Shifting attitudes?
Not always. In the years following the war, books, plays and paintings celebrated the conflict, seen by Americans as both an honorable stand against British harassment and a consolidation of the Revolutionary War's gains.
American naval captains — the successful ones, anyway — even became household names.
"If you were a boy in the 1820s, this is what you grew up with," Mr. Budiansky said. "There were ceramic plates of naval heroes like Stephen Decatur and Isaac Hull."
Mr. Budiansky laughed.
"Many of those plates were made in England. They were never one to shy away from cashing in on a potential market."
Battlefield glories — real and imagined — also influenced politics. According to Mr. Stagg, the war helped propel both Mr. Jackson and William Henry Harrison to the presidency, the latter man running on a slogan, "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," that referred to an 1811 battle in the Indiana territory that presaged the War of 1812.
In Kentucky alone, Mr. Stagg said, the war produced three governors, three lieutenant governors and four United States senators — not to mention future Vice President Richard Johnson.
"It was common to use your war record as part of your claim to office," Mr. Stagg said. "Johnson supposedly killed Shawnee leader Tecumseh in 1813. He never claimed that himself, but someone did, and he never denied it. He dined out politically on that for the rest of his career."
The trauma and scale of the subsequent Civil War changed attitudes, transforming the War of 1812 into a historical afterthought. However, an ongoing bicentennial has dragged the conflict at least partially back into public consciousness.
New York lawmakers have appropriated money for commemorative events. The Canadian government is spending an estimated $30 million on the same. As part of a larger, $12 million-plus public relations push, the U.S. Navy is parading the USS Constitution and other ships through Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans and Norfolk.
In Maryland — where cars have War of 1812 license plates and Gov. Martin O'Malley has participated in re-enactments — the state is holding a three-year celebration, which kicked off with a June ceremony at Baltimore's Fort McHenry that featured recorded messages from President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
"I must admit, when I visited the White House earlier this year, I was a bit embarrassed that my ancestors had managed to burn the place down 200 years ago," Mr. Cameron joked during his message.
Beyond "The Star-Spangled Banner" — composed by Francis Scott Key during the Battle of Baltimore — the War of 1812 resulted in Jacksonian democracy, a long-term Anglo-American alliance, the birth of Canadian national identity, America's emergence as a naval power and a crushing defeat of Native Americans that paved the way for Manifest Destiny.
It's time, Mr. Stagg believes, the much-maligned conflict got a little more respect.
"Because it seemed to have no clear, decisive winner, people assume it has no decisive consequences," he said. "I think that bit is wrong. It shaped the remainder of 19th-century American history. We should look at is as such, rather than saying it's this weird little episode we can't explain or understand."
© Copyright 2012 The Washington Times, LLC.
comment:
The United States won the War of 1812. In the early 19th century the British were claiming the entire West Coast of North America, including Alta California and Baja California.
In order to press these claims, they needed to prevent the U.S. from expanding westwards into the Louisiana Purchase. The British planned to gain control of the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes to New Orleans.
The British were defeated on the Great Lakes and at the Battle of New Orleans.
Some historians try to make the case that the U.S. was attempting to seize Canadian territory, and thus, as no Canadian land was lost to the U.S., it was a Canadian victory.
However, the U.S. never made any claims on any part of Canada. The issue was the westward expansion of the United States into territory which had been considered to be Spanish and French colonies. After the War of 1812, the U.S. expanded westward to the Pacific.
Sincerely,
John Lepant Brighton CO
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AMERICAN AEROSPACE EVENTS for June 18
FIRSTS, LASTS, AND SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS FOR June 18 THANKS TO HAROLD "PHIL" MYERS CHIEF HISTORIAN AIR FORCE INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, AND RECONNAISSANCE AGENCY
18 June
1861: Thaddeus S. C. Lowe telegraphed the first message from a balloon to a ground station. In the White House, President Lincoln received Lowe's telegraphic report. (4)
1916: The Germans shot down H. Clyde Balsley of the Lafayette Escadrille near Verdun, France. Balsley was the first American aviator to be shot down in World War I. He survived. Hit in the pelvis, he made it through a crash landing and endured several operations, but never returned to the air. (4)
1934: Boeing initiated company-funded design work on the Model 299, the B-17 prototype. (20)
1957: SAC placed the KC-135 Stratotanker into service. (12)
1959: Six US Navy enlisted men began an 8-day experiment in a dummy spaceship at the Air Crew Equipment Laboratory, Naval Air Materiel Center, Philadelphia Naval Base. (18)
1962: The USAF's Aerospace Research Pilot School, the first for operational personnel, began a 7-month course at Edwards AFB with seven Air Force officers and one USN officer. (16) (24) A RAF crew launched the last combat training Thor missile, the 22d, at Vandenberg AFB. (6)
1963: A SAC crew launched the first Minuteman missile under simulated combat conditions. (12)
1964: General Dynamics delivered the first RB/WB-57F (a Canberra B-57 modified with extremely long wings) to the Air Weather Service for its aerial sampling mission. (18)
1965: The Titan III-C, the first liquid-fuel spacecraft lifted by solid-fuel rockets, completed its maiden flight. (12) The 1st Air Commando Squadron, 34th Tactical Group, Bien Hoa AB received the Presidential Unit Citation. This was the first unit so honored since the Korean War. FIRST ARC LIGHT MISSION. From Andersen AFB, the 320 BMW and 7 BMW dispatched 28 B-52Fs to hit a Viet Cong jungle stronghold near Saigon. This was the first use of B-52s in Vietnam, and the first time B-52s dropped bombs in combat. The operation used 30 KC-135s to provide refueling support. (1) (16) (18)
1966: The USAF finished a year of B-52 strikes against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. The bombers flew more than 350 conventional missions to drop more than 70,000 tons of bombs on selected targets. (16)
1968: In three years of Vietnam operations, SAC's B-52 accomplished more than 25,000 sorties to deliver more than 630,000 tons of conventional bombs. (16)
1974: At Edward666s AFB, Lt Col James G. Rider became the first USAF pilot to fly the YF-17. (3)
1981: The F-117A Nighthawk, the first stealth combat aircraft in the world, flew for the first time at the Tonopah Test Range, Nev. Hal Farley flew the aircraft. (21)
1983: KEY EVENT--FIRST US WOMAN IN SPACE. Dr. Salley K. Ride became the first US woman in space on the second Challenger and seventh Space Shuttle mission. On 24 June, the craft returned to earth. (3)
1996: The 35 FW at Misawa AB, Japan, once again became a "Wild Weasel" unit in a brief formal ceremony. The 35th began its training in the radar detection and suppression mission at George AFB, Calif., in July 1973 with F-105s, later F-4Cs and F-4Gs. In Operation DESERT STORM, the wing's 24 F-4Gs flew more than 1,180 combat sorties in the Arabian Gulf, suppressing enemy air defenses, with no losses incurred. The 35 FW activated at Misawa on 1 October 1994 to operate 36 F-16CJ aircraft. (AFNEWS)
1999: Two 159 FW (Louisiana ANG) F-15As deployed to NAS Keflavik, Iceland, for a NATO exercise intercepted Russian TU-95 Bear bombers in the Icelandic Military Air Defense Identification Zone in a long range probe not seen since the Cold War's end. Two more 159th Eagles, launched from Keflavick, escorted the bombers out of the area. (32)
2001: At McGuire AFB, SMSgt Jere Garvin, a 2 AREFS flight engineer, reached 10,000 flying hours. His 24-year career included flying time in C-130s, C-141s, the E-3 Sentry, and KC-10 Extender in over 2,400 sorties. On this date, Garvin was the only active-duty flight engineer to reach that milestone. (AFNEWS Article 0947, 13 July 2001)
2003: The USAF released a roadmap to retire 133 KC-135E Stratotankers and assign 100 KC-767A tankers to be leased. Under the plan, Fairchild AFB would become the first active-duty base to receive the new KC-767As in FY2006. By 2010, several Air Reserve Component units would also convert from E-model to R-model KC-135s to the KC-767A. (22) Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. AMC released Civil Reserve Air Fleet carriers from supporting this operation. From 8 February to 2 June 2003, the 11 CRAF carriers flew 1,625 missions to airlift 254,100 troops to the Middle East and other destinations. (22)
2005: TALISMAN SABER 2005. Through 21 June, six C-17 Globemaster IIIs from McChord AFB and Charleston AFB supported an international exercise. The participants included more than 6,000 Australian and 10,000 US service members from the USAF, Army, Navy, and Marines. The Globemaster IIIs flew from Elmendorf AFB on 18 June and flew 7,000-plus miles across the Pacific Ocean to northeastern Australia in one of the C-17's longest direct-delivery airdrops yet. Each C-17 received two air refuelings, the first near Alaska and the second near Hawaii. American and Australian armed forces practiced a "forced entry operation" in the exercise, and the C-17s airdropped troops and supplies at night. (22) .
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6495
To All
Good Sunday Morning June 18 2023.
Happy Father's Day to all
Regards,
skip
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On This Day in Naval and Marine Corps History
June 18
1812 The United States declares war on Great Britain for impressment of Sailors and interference with commerce.
1814 The sloop of war Wasp, commanded by Johnston Blakely, captures and scuttles the British merchant brig Pallas in the eastern Atlantic.
1875 The side-wheel steamer, USS Saranac, wrecks in Seymour Narrows, off Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
1944 - USS Bullhead (SS 332) sinks Japanese auxiliary sailing vessel (No. 58) Sakura Maru in Sunda Strait, off Merak. Also on this date, USS Dentuda (SS 335) sinks Japanese guardboats Reiko Maru and Heiwa Maru in East China Sea west of Tokara Gunto.
1957 Adm. Arleigh A. Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, approves the ship characteristics of the Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine.
1983 USS Florida (SSGN 728) is commissioned at Electric Boat Division, Groton, Conn. The Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, is the first submarine to be named after the 27th state, but the sixth vessel in the Navy.
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Today in World History June 18
0362 Emperor Julian issues an edict banning Christians from teaching in Syria.
1155 German-born Frederick I, Barbarossa, is crowned emperor of Rome.
1579 Sir Francis Drake claims San Francisco Bay for England.
1667 The Dutch fleet sails up the Thames River and threatens London.
1775 The British take Bunker Hill outside of Boston, after a costly battle.
1778 British troops evacuate Philadelphia.
1799 Napoleon Bonaparte incorporates Italy into his empire.
1812 The War of 1812 begins when the United States declares war against Great Britain.
1815 At the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte is defeated by an international army under the Duke of Wellington.
1848 Austrian General Alfred Windisch-Gratz crushes a Czech uprising in Prague.
1854 The Red Turban revolt breaks out in Guangdong, China.
1856 The Republican Party opens its first national convention in Philadelphia.
1861 President Abraham Lincoln witnesses Dr. Thaddeus Lowe demonstrate the use of a hot-air balloon.
1863 On the way to Gettysburg, Union and Confederate forces skirmish at Point of Rocks, Maryland.
1863 After repeated acts of insubordination, General Ulysses S. Grant relieves General John McClernand during the Siege of Vicksburg.
1864 At Petersburg, Union General Ulysses S. Grant realizes the town can no longer be taken by assault and settles into a siege.
1872 George M. Hoover begins selling whiskey in Dodge City, Kansas--a town which had previously been "dry."
1873 Susan B. Anthony is fined $100 for attempting to vote for president.
1876 General George Crook's command is attacked and bested on the Rosebud River by 1,500 Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Crazy Horse.
1912 The German Zeppelin SZ 111 burns in its hangar in Friedrichshafen.
1913 U.S. Marines set sail from San Diego to protect American interests in Mexico.
1917 The Russian Duma meets in secret session in Petrograd and votes for an immediate Russian offensive against the German Army.
1918 Allied forces on the Western Front begin their largest counterattack yet against the German army.
1924 The Fascist militia marches into Rome.
1926 Spain threatens to quit the League of Nations if Germany is allowed to join.
1928 Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane.
1930 The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill becomes law, placing the highest tariff on imports to the United States.
1931 British authorities in China arrest Indochinese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh.
1932 The U.S. Senate defeats the Bonus Bill as 10,000 veterans mass around the Capitol.
1936 Mobster Charles 'Lucky' Luciano is found guilty on 62 counts of compulsory prostitution.
1940 The Soviet Union occupies Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
1942 The U.S. Navy commissions its first black officer, Harvard University medical student Bernard Whitfield Robinson.
1942 Yank a weekly magazine for the U.S. armed services, begins publication.
1944 French troops land on the island of Elba in the Mediterranean.
1944 The U.S. First Army breaks through the German lines on the Cotentin Peninsula and cuts off the German-held port of Cherbourg.
1945 Organized Japanese resistance ends on the island of Mindanao.
1950 Surgeon Richard Lawler performs the first kidney transplant operation in Chicago.
1951 General Vo Nguyen Giap ends his Red River Campaign against the French in Indochina.
1953 Soviet tanks fight thousands of Berlin workers rioting against the East German government.
1953 South Korean President Syngman Rhee releases Korean non-repatriate POWs against the will of the United Nations.
1959 A Federal Court annuls the Arkansas law allowing school closings to prevent integration.
1963 The U.S. Supreme Court bans the required reading of the Lord's prayer and Bible in public schools.
1965 27 B-52s hit Viet Cong outposts, but lose two planes in South Vietnam.
1966 Samuel Nabrit becomes the first African American to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission.
1970 North Vietnamese troops cut the last operating rail line in Cambodia.
1972 Five men are arrested for burglarizing Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.
1979 President Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev sign the Salt II pact to limit nuclear arms.
1983 Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space.
1994 Millions of Americans watch former football player O.J. Simpson--facing murder charges--drive his Ford Bronco through Los Angeles, followed by police.
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ROLLING THUNDER REMEMBERED Thanks to the Bear … Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)…
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post
Skip… For The List for Sunday, 18 June 2023… Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)…
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post for 18 June 1968… George Herring: "Dissent in wartime is as American as apple pie."… especially when the war is undeclared and endless (i.e., no exit strategy), something neocons ignore as they monger-on…
This following work accounts for every fixed wing loss of the Vietnam War and you can use it to read more about the losses in The Bear's Daily account. Even better it allows you to add your updated information to the work to update for history…skip Vietnam Air Losses Access Chris Hobson and Dave Lovelady's work at: https://www.VietnamAirLosses.com.
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Many Fathers did not return
Thanks to Dutch
from 7 years ago - thanks to THE Bear -
Happy Fathers Day – 19 June 2016 – Part I
June 19, 2016Mighty Thunder
THEY WERE OUR FATHERS – 19 JUNE 2016
Mighty Thunder is proud to post this documentary trailer from the studios of WRSE, sponsored by Pensacola State College and the following article from the Pensacola Gulf Breeze on the occasion of Father's Day 2016. RTR and Mighty Thunder are beholden to contributor Bruce Herman for providing this moving tribute to the Fathers who left their families to fight and perish during the Vietnam War, and the amazing children they left behind.
RTR and Mighty Thunder congratulate WRSE, Pensacola State College, and especially Jill Hubbs for providing a world class film on a subject near and dear to our hearts and purpose for taking up space on the Internet — to remember those who, we the living, left behind in Southeast Asia in a war fought 50 years ago….
Some 20,000 American boys and girls lost their fathers during the Vietnam War. In a new documentary film produced by WSRE, several of these Gold Star children, now adult men and women, share their stories which serve as powerful testimonies about the true cost of war. WSRE will premiere "They Were Our Fathers" with a special Father's Day broadcast at 7 p.m. on June 19.
The Gold Star designation is given to family members who have lost loved ones in United States military service during wartime. Every five years on Father's Day, members of Sons and Daughters in Touch, a group formed in 1990 to locate, unite and support Gold Star children who lost their fathers serving in the Vietnam War, gather at the nation's capital to honor their parents, reflect on their common grief and support one another, like no one else can.
Under the direction of Executive Producer Jill Hubbs, a WSRE production crew traveled to Washington, D.C. last June to document the gathering and record personal accounts.
The film is narrated in first person by Hubbs, whose father became missing in action during his second tour of duty in Vietnam on March 17, 1968. U.S. Navy Cdr. Donald Richard Hubbs was commanding officer of the VS-23 Black Cats and was stationed aboard the USS Yorktown in the Gulf of Tonkin when his S-2E Tracker reconnaissance aircraft disappeared off the North Vietnam coast.
U.S Navy Cdr. Donald Richard Hubbs with his wife Bereth and daughter Jill. Jill Hobbs is the executive producer of "They Were Our Fathers."
"Each of these sons and daughters has a unique story to tell. We are bonded together by tragedy, but also joined together in patriotism, honor and respect for the fathers we loved and lost," said Hubbs.
During Memorial Day weekend, Hubbs attended the retirement celebration for Jan Scruggs, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Vice President Joe Biden was a guest at that event.
Hubbs also accepted an invitation from the President of the United States to join him with a group of Gold Star children for breakfast at the White House on Memorial Day, where she presented President Barack Obama a copy of the documentary.
"They Were Our Fathers" was edited by James Roy. Ted King was director of photography. To learn more about the film, visit WSRE
WSRE Documentaries | They Were Our Fathers
Over 20,000 American boys and girls lost their fathers during the Vietnam War.
WSRE Documentaries | They Were Our Fathers | WSRE PBS
WSRE Documentaries | They Were Our Fathers
Over 20,000 American boys and girls lost their fathers during the Vietnam War.
Happy Fathers Day – 19 June – Part II
June 19, 2016Mighty Thunder
HAPPY FATHERS DAY – 19 JUNE – PART II
Local Documentarian Explores the Legacy and Cost of the Vietnam War By C. S. Satterwhite
Walking up to Wall South at Admiral Mason Park, the smallest statue is of a little child with a sad look upon her face.
This "Homecoming" monument recognizes military families, especially the children, and is "Presented by the Children of America's Twentieth Century Heroes."
For many military children, however, there was no homecoming. For thousands from the Vietnam War in particular, there was no return of their fathers.
Jill Hubbs was one of the children whose father never returned.
Nearly fifty years after the military listed her father as Missing in Action, Hubbs is now on her own mission—to share the stories of the grown children who lost their fathers during the Vietnam War and to document an organization founded by those children.
Hubbs produced and directed the documentary "They Were Our Fathers" for WSRE public television as a means to tell her story and ones like it. Hubbs' film aims to show "the true cost of war" on families, with a special focus on the Vietnam War's Gold Star Children—the gold star is the designation for a military family member who was killed in action.
While this is not Hubbs' first documentary, it is by far her most personal.
"My dad was a navy pilot who trained here in Pensacola," she said of her father, Commander Donald Hubbs.
Cmdr. Hubbs was a career military man on his second tour of duty in Vietnam and was the commanding officer of VS-23, the famed "Black Cat" squadron based on the USS Yorktown in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Hubbs' last memory of her father was with her family, seeing him off for what would be his second deployment to Vietnam. After proudly showing the family his quarters aboard the Yorktown, they were leaving when she remembered a cake they brought for him was still in the car. Hubbs ran to back and brought the cake to her father and gave him one last hug goodbye.
"Be good, and take care of your mother," he said as they parted.
Those would be his last words spoken to his daughter.
Missing in Action
On March 17, 1968, Cmdr. Hubbs and his crew "went on a mission and their plane disappeared off the radar" near the coast of Vietnam.
"To this day, we're not really sure what happened to him or his men," said his daughter.
Hubbs was 10 years old at the time and was attending a Lutheran parochial school when the pastor came to get her and took her home. At first, she didn't know the reason and thought something happened to her mother.
"I got [to the house] and there were a zillion cars in my driveway," said Hubbs. She described her home as being filled with Navy officers and defense officials relaying what they knew, which was little.
"The plane is missing, but they're looking for him," said her mother.
When Hubbs went back to school, her classmates understood little of what occurred and said less.
"They knew something happened, but the kids didn't really talk about it," said Hubbs.
Before her father's disappearance, the war was more of an abstract concept, which merged with constant demands of a naval officer and his family.
"I didn't really understand the war at the time. I wasn't aware of Vietnam." Her father deployed from time to time, but this was different. The Yorktown returned, but her father did not.
Without any more knowledge of the events surrounding her father's disappearance, or even a body to bury, "we felt lost," said Hubbs.
The Navy opened a case file after Cmdr. Hubbs and his crew disappeared, but news was sparse.
"Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into years," said Hubbs.
Adding to the uncertainty of her situation was the unpopularity of the war, which left the Hubbs family feeling isolated.
"It was hard to accept the situation," said Hubbs. "And it was hard to explain."
The Hubbs family remained in the Yorktown's homeport of San Diego, California, for some time, but eventually moved back to her mother's hometown of Pensacola.
"We were pulling up roots, and I felt that he wouldn't be able to find us," said Hubbs. "It was hard for me to process."
Although her father didn't came walking through her door, his daughter never stopped looking. Eventually, her search for answers brought her to Vietnam.
Searching in Vietnam
After possible sightings of her father were reported in the late 1980s, including a photograph, Hubbs made arrangements with U.S. and Vietnamese officials to look for her father in Vietnam.
"It wasn't just like finding a needle in a haystack," said Hubbs. "It's more like an archeological dig. I didn't understand the conditions [of the terrain] until I went over there."
The closest Hubbs came to finding her father was a previously unknown Vietnamese graves registration listing for her father as having died in the Quang Binh Province of Vietnam.
Though she was unsuccessful in finding concrete information regarding her father, her trip to Vietnam proved eye opening in other ways.
In Vietnam, Hubbs had an official guide and translator to help with her search.
"He took us out to his house to have a meal and introduce me to his family," said Hubbs.
The United States still hadn't normalized relations with its former enemy, and Hubbs was concerned about being an American citizen in Vietnam. "I didn't know how they'd receive me."
Her guide's father was in the house, but he didn't speak English. He was a veteran of the war and fought on the opposite side of Hubbs' father.
While she was in his house, she noticed an oil painting of an anti-aircraft gun hanging on the wall.
Being in this Vietnamese man's house, knowing her guide's father might have played a role in shooting aviators down during the war, her first thought was about her father. "What would my dad say?"
The old man noticed her looking at the picture and said to her in Vietnamese that her father was sent by his government to fight in the war just as he was sent by his government to fight in the war.
"Men don't start wars," said the Vietnamese veteran, "governments do."
Later, Hubbs met a Vietnamese woman who suffered the loss of two of her adult children in the "American War," as it's called in Vietnam.
"She lost one son, and she had another son who was missing. Before I went over [to Vietnam], it had never occurred to me that they had such loss, too."
After learning this about the Vietnamese mother's children, Hubbs showed her a picture of her father in his military uniform.
"I had this picture of my dad," said Hubbs. The Vietnamese mother had a Buddhist shrine for her two lost children. She then took the picture of Hubbs' father and placed it between her two sons.
"Then she started saying something," said Hubbs. "I didn't know what she was saying, but I knew she was praying."
"I found the people [of Vietnam] very forgiving. I found no hostility from the people, and all I found [of my father] was a graves registration with my dad's name."
With resignation in her voice, Hubbs said, "I will probably never know exactly what happened to my dad."
Sons and Daughters in Touch
In her grief and loss, Hubbs was not alone.
Roughly 20,000 American children lost their fathers during the Vietnam War, but until the 1990 founding of an organization named Sons and Daughters in Touch (SDIT), few of these people knew each other.
"The very first time I knew of others was when I read this Parade magazine article," said Hubbs.
The 1990 Parade article featured SDIT and their work to bring together the sons and daughters of those killed in the war.
One of the people featured in "They Were Our Fathers," is Tony Cordero.
Cordero's father was an Air Force navigator on a B-57 when it was lost over Vietnam on Father's Day in 1965. Four years later, Cordero buried his father at Arlington National Cemetery. Cordero was only eight years old and would grow up with a similar sense of loss as Hubbs.
When Cordero turned 30—the same age as his father when he died in Vietnam— he wondered how he could get in touch with other Gold Star Children from the Vietnam War. Looking for answers, Cordero contacted an organization called Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and spoke with a volunteer named Wanda Ruffin.
Ruffin was the wife of Naval Aviator Lt. Cmdr. James Ruffin whose F-4 Phantom was shot down over Vietnam in 1966. He was killed in action and left behind a wife and a newborn baby girl.
So when Cordero asked if Ruffin knew of any sons or daughters who shared his experience, she knew of one in particular—her daughter Wendy.
"[Wendy] never knew anyone, outside of relatives, who knew her dad or shared her experience at all," said Ruffin in the documentary. "It was very difficult. She grew up very beautifully and did well in school and did just fine, but I knew there was a big hole there."
After Cordero and Ruffin met, Cordero soon established SDIT to meet the needs of other grown children of veterans whose names were etched on the Vietnam Wall.
As the organization grew, it began meeting at the Vietnam Wall in Washington for what became a Father's Day tradition. The adult children of those killed during the war found many similarities.
Almost immediately, this group bonded as family, despite differences in gender, ethnicity, service, and rank. "The stories about growing up were so similar," said Hubbs. "No matter who told the story, there were so many things I identified with."
Longtime SDIT member Denise Reed lost her father, Harold Reed, in Vietnam when she was a young girl. "I remember the day he left [for Vietnam], and I remember the chaplain coming to tell my mother that he was killed on the Fourth of July," said Reed.
"You can't help but wonder how different my life would've been if my father had come back home," said Reed.
Most grew up in a unique isolation with a deep sense of loss, and many of their parents never remarried. Bearing the cost of the Vietnam War long after many Americans relegated the conflict to history books or a bad dream, the nightmare these families lived through was ultimately their bond.
"It's a family that no one really wants to belong to," said Hubbs. Or as an article on the SDIT website reads, "the 'Gold Star' designation is un-chosen and unending," thus making this Gold Star network that much more important to the community it serves.
"This is a group of people that you can always express yourself to," said Reed.
"Express your anger, your disappointment, and express what your family went through… and what you're still going through because of it."
Why the Movie Matters
"They Were Our Fathers" sheds light upon SDIT and the unique effects of war on the children of those killed. While their war was Vietnam, the group offers its experience to a new generation of Gold Star families.
"Unfortunately, there's a new generation of children who've lost their fathers, and now mothers," said Hubbs. She described one scene in particular as heartbreaking, seeing a large group of these young Gold Star children converge upon the Vietnam Wall to join with their older counterparts and leave roses in shared sympathy.
"It's tragic for it to happen again. It was hard to bear," said Hubbs.
"I looked at them, and that was us."
Hubbs said that she wanted to make this film for a number of reasons, but first because no one has yet documented the SDIT experience.
She also wanted to make this film as a tribute to her father and "to honor our dads."
"It's a legacy to our dads. It's awareness that there's a cost to war," Hubbs said.
Since the film's completion, interest in Hubbs' documentary has grown exponentially. Over one hundred PBS affiliates have expressed a desire to show Hubbs' film, most in connection with an upcoming Ken Burns documentary series on the Vietnam War.
Besides PBS broadcasts, Hubbs recently presented President Obama with a personal copy of the film. The Reagan and Nixon presidential libraries also contacted Hubbs for potential screenings.
Although Hubbs is happy with the interest her film garnered, her greatest hope is to connect other sons and daughters who may not know of the organization. She also wants to reach out to the latest generation of Gold Star families so they know they're not alone.
"The one thing that bonds us is that it was our dads [who died in Vietnam], and this is a piece of our heart that can't be replaced," said Hubbs.
"It's a story that needs to be told."
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Thanks to Ted
The War of 1812 : All it wants is a little respect Time to recognize lasting consequences of a 'weird little episode'?
By Patrick HrubyThe Washington Times
The Revolutionary War has its own national holiday. World War II has spawned countless books and movies. The Civil War boasts costumed re-enactors and a signature chess set.
And the War of 1812? It has re-enactors, too. The country can't get enough of them. The country of Canada, that is. "The demand for them right now is so great that it's actually driving up the price," said John Stagg, a University of Virginia history professor and author of "The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent." "They may even have to resort to the desperate tactic of importing a few from the United States.
"The situation is different in Canada. They take the war very seriously in a way that Americans don't."
Currently enjoying its bicentennial — What, you haven't pre-ordered the Postal Service's forthcoming commemorative stamp? — the War of 1812 occupies a musty, forgotten junk drawer in America's collective cultural consciousness, stuffed somewhere between the liberation of Grenada and the time Will Smith punched that extraterrestrial fighter pilot in the face.
No memorial on the Mall.
No memorial, buy-one, get-one-free mattress sales.
The only war in the history of the United States referred to by its year.
The only war in the history of the United States in which — yes, really — Canada won.
A three-year, continent-spanning conflict against the British Empire that gave us Dolley Madison (the heroic first lady, not the snack cakes), the Capitol rotunda (built after a humiliating defeat, but still), the Kentucky Rifle (overrated, according to historians), the 1959 song "The Battle of New Orleans" (less accurate than a Kentucky Rifle, according to historians) and the "Star-Spangled Banner" (ironically sung to the tune of an old English drinking song — whatever), and yet is lucky to receive more than a few throwaway paragraphs in the average American history textbook.
"I think it's more like two sentences," said Stephen Budiansky, author of "Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815."
"The War of 1812 has gotten no respect over the years."
Dissed and dismissed
Don Hickey concurs. The nation's pre-eminent War of 1812 historian, he began a lifelong love affair with the topic as a University of Illinois student in the late 1960s, writing his senior honors thesis on New England's opposition to the conflict.
(Fun fact: Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island refused to lend their state militias to the federal war effort, and a number of New England congressmen who voted for the war were subsequently booted from office. In other words, the War of 1812 was unpopular before it even started.) "It turned out to be a real academic backwater, along with the entire early national period," said Mr. Hickey, a history professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and the author of "The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition.""It was tough to find a university job."
Most schools at the time, Mr. Hickey said, carried Revolutionary War and Civil War experts on staff, and perhaps an Andrew Jackson scholar as well.
However, few academics paid the War of 1812 much mind. No less a historian than Richard Hofstadter best summed up the prevailing sentiment by describing the conflict as "ludicrous and unnecessary," the climax of an "age of slack and derivative culture, of fumbling and small-minded statecraft" and "terrible parochial wrangling."
"War of 1812 historians are in a bit of a ghetto," Mr. Stagg said. "When Theodore Roosevelt wrote a history of the war, he wrote a naval history. He basically said he wasn't going to study the land campaigns because they were so ludicrous."
For nearly a decade, Congress has entertained the notion of creating an official War of 1812 bicentennial commission; time and again, the same body of lawmakers that regularly honors things like craft beer and the University of Texas swimming and diving team has said thanks, but no thanks.
Don't imagine their constituents care: A recent poll by a Canadian research firm found that 36 percent of Americans could not name a significant outcome to the war.
"There's an American tendency to think the war was some sort of joke, pathetic and not significant," Mr. Stagg said. "There are a lot of memorials to the War of 1812, but they're all local, not national."
What about the District's memorial to James Madison, president and commander in chief during the war?
"It's inside the Library of Congress," Mr. Stagg said. "A lot of people don't even know it's there. And, of course, it talks about [Madison] as a bookish man learning to write the Constitution. It doesn't talk about the War of 1812."
Win, lose, draw?
Why the antipathy? Start with the nature of the conflict. Fed up with British bullying and conscripting of American sailors and a Royal Navy-imposed embargo of trade with France — an offshoot of Europe's Napoleonic Wars — Congress voted to declare war on Britain in June of 1812.
The vote itself was bitterly divided, and came a few days after the British had decided to lift their embargo, the whole reason for the war in the first place.
"The causes of the war don't resonate with modern readers," Mr. Hickey said. "Nobody today goes to war over maritime rights."
The American battle plan was simple — and in retrospect, bizarre: conquer British-controlled Canada, then press for nautical concessions. The United States enjoyed a 15-1 population advantage over its northern neighbor. Brimming with confidence, Thomas Jefferson predicted that victory was a "mere matter of marching."
Oops.
Poorly trained and badly led, the American army was not greeted as liberators. It was embarrassed. By Canada. In epic, Homeric struggles like the Battle of Beaver Creek. (Never heard of it? That's because you're not Canadian.) Case in point: In the Battle of Detroit, General William Hull was tricked into surrendering his 2,000-militiamen force to a smaller group of British Canadians and Native Americans without firing a single shot, thereby losing the entire Michigan territory.
"I would put that in my personal top 10 most humiliating defeats for the American Army," Mr. Budiansky said. "There was a lot of truly incompetent generalship and institutional problems handicapping the army. Terrible logistics. No overall command structure. Militias refusing to serve outside U.S. territory."
Following a failed invasion of Canada from New York, feuding American generals Peter Buell Porter and Alexander Smyth actually engaged in a duel — of which historian John R. Elting later quipped, "unfortunately, both missed."
Perhaps America's most memorable defeat came in August of 1814, when 4,000 Royal Marines marched into Washington and set the nation's capital ablaze, famously forcing Dolley Madison to save George Washington's portrait from a burning White House.
Perfect pyrotechnic fodder for a Michael Bay movie, right?
"It wasn't the entire city in flames," Mr. Budiansky said. "The British thought in the classic mold of superpowers dealing with much smaller adversaries that all they needed to do was stage a show of force. So they only burned public buildings — the White House, the Capitol, the State and Treasury departments. Some of the most serious damage was to the Navy Yard."
Those dastardly Redcoats!
"Actually, the Navy Yard was set on fire by evacuating Americans to keep supplies and almost-completed warships from falling into British hands," Mr. Budiansky said.
Ineffective on land, America's military proved surprisingly adept at sea, frustrating and humiliating the much larger Royal Navy. Ultimately, the two sides reached a peace accord in which neither nation made concessions and territorial boundaries returned to their pre-war state.
Though the accord was signed Christmas Eve of 1814, word of the peace treaty didn't reach the United States until after the Battle of New Orleans in early 1815 — an Andrew Jackson-led rout of the British that stands as America's greatest victory in the war.
"The conventional wisdom is that the war ended in a draw, because it was a draw on the battlefield," Mr. Hickey said. "But if you look at policy objectives, the United States didn't force the British to make maritime concessions, while the British achieved their objective of keeping Canada.
"One of the [anti-war] Federalists predicted that America would spend $180 million, have 30,000 casualties and not achieve its objectives. We actually spent $158 million, lost about 20,000 people and didn't achieve our objectives. I would call it ill-advised."
No matter. Over time, Mr. Hickey says, Americans became happy with the War of 1812 because they thought they won. Canadians were happier because they knew they won.
And the British? Happiest of all — because they forgot the whole thing.
"The British were preoccupied with Napoleon, and the Canadians can live with the fact that they owe their survival to the Americans messing up monumentally," Mr. Stagg said. "For the Americans, the war was rather embarrassing."
Shifting attitudes?
Not always. In the years following the war, books, plays and paintings celebrated the conflict, seen by Americans as both an honorable stand against British harassment and a consolidation of the Revolutionary War's gains.
American naval captains — the successful ones, anyway — even became household names.
"If you were a boy in the 1820s, this is what you grew up with," Mr. Budiansky said. "There were ceramic plates of naval heroes like Stephen Decatur and Isaac Hull."
Mr. Budiansky laughed.
"Many of those plates were made in England. They were never one to shy away from cashing in on a potential market."
Battlefield glories — real and imagined — also influenced politics. According to Mr. Stagg, the war helped propel both Mr. Jackson and William Henry Harrison to the presidency, the latter man running on a slogan, "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," that referred to an 1811 battle in the Indiana territory that presaged the War of 1812.
In Kentucky alone, Mr. Stagg said, the war produced three governors, three lieutenant governors and four United States senators — not to mention future Vice President Richard Johnson.
"It was common to use your war record as part of your claim to office," Mr. Stagg said. "Johnson supposedly killed Shawnee leader Tecumseh in 1813. He never claimed that himself, but someone did, and he never denied it. He dined out politically on that for the rest of his career."
The trauma and scale of the subsequent Civil War changed attitudes, transforming the War of 1812 into a historical afterthought. However, an ongoing bicentennial has dragged the conflict at least partially back into public consciousness.
New York lawmakers have appropriated money for commemorative events. The Canadian government is spending an estimated $30 million on the same. As part of a larger, $12 million-plus public relations push, the U.S. Navy is parading the USS Constitution and other ships through Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans and Norfolk.
In Maryland — where cars have War of 1812 license plates and Gov. Martin O'Malley has participated in re-enactments — the state is holding a three-year celebration, which kicked off with a June ceremony at Baltimore's Fort McHenry that featured recorded messages from President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
"I must admit, when I visited the White House earlier this year, I was a bit embarrassed that my ancestors had managed to burn the place down 200 years ago," Mr. Cameron joked during his message.
Beyond "The Star-Spangled Banner" — composed by Francis Scott Key during the Battle of Baltimore — the War of 1812 resulted in Jacksonian democracy, a long-term Anglo-American alliance, the birth of Canadian national identity, America's emergence as a naval power and a crushing defeat of Native Americans that paved the way for Manifest Destiny.
It's time, Mr. Stagg believes, the much-maligned conflict got a little more respect.
"Because it seemed to have no clear, decisive winner, people assume it has no decisive consequences," he said. "I think that bit is wrong. It shaped the remainder of 19th-century American history. We should look at is as such, rather than saying it's this weird little episode we can't explain or understand."
© Copyright 2012 The Washington Times, LLC.
comment:
The United States won the War of 1812. In the early 19th century the British were claiming the entire West Coast of North America, including Alta California and Baja California.
In order to press these claims, they needed to prevent the U.S. from expanding westwards into the Louisiana Purchase. The British planned to gain control of the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes to New Orleans.
The British were defeated on the Great Lakes and at the Battle of New Orleans.
Some historians try to make the case that the U.S. was attempting to seize Canadian territory, and thus, as no Canadian land was lost to the U.S., it was a Canadian victory.
However, the U.S. never made any claims on any part of Canada. The issue was the westward expansion of the United States into territory which had been considered to be Spanish and French colonies. After the War of 1812, the U.S. expanded westward to the Pacific.
Sincerely,
John Lepant Brighton CO
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This Day in U S Military History…….June 18
1944 – On Saipan, elements of the US 5th Amphibious Corps continue to make progress. The 4th Marine Division reaches the west side of the island at Magicienne Bay. This advance divides the Japanese garrison. Elements of the 27th Division capture Aslito airfield. Japanese air strikes sink 1 American destroyer and 2 tankers as well as damaging the escort carrier Fanshaw Bay. Most of the American air and naval support has withdrawn to meet the approaching Japanese fleet.
1945 – On instructions from Emperor Hirohito, Prime Minister Suzuki tells the Japanese Supreme Council that it is the intention of Hirohito to seek peace with the Allies as soon as possible.
1945 – On Okinawa, the remnants of the Japanese 32nd Army continue to offer determined resistance to attacks of the US 3rd Amphibious Corps and the US 24th Corps. Lt. General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commanding US 10th Army, is killed by Japanese artillery fire while he is on a visit to the front line, inspecting troops of the US 8th Marine Division. He is temporarily replaced by General Geiger, commanding the US 3rd Amphibious Corps. ( Buckner Bay on the east side of the Island is named for him) The battle for Okinawa is in its 78th of 82 days and the fighting remains brutal.
1945 – On Luzon, elements of the US 37th Division, supported by an armored column, advance in the Caygayan valley, capturing Ilagan airfield and crossing the Ilagan River. On Mindanao, organized Japanese resistance comes to an end. Forces of the Japanese 35th Army have been cut off and dependent on roots and tree bark for food for some time now. Nonetheless, some small units of Japanese continue to resist.
1945 – Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower received a tumultuous welcome in Washington, where he addressed a joint session of Congress. Eisenhower went on to meet Pres. Harry Truman and the 2 men established a warm relationship that later soured. In 2001 Steve Neal authored "Harry and Ike: The Relationship That Remade the Postwar World."
1953 – U.S. Air Force Captains Lonnie R. Moore and Ralph S. Parr ( Parr was a WWII ace and also flew iin Vietnam) of the 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing became the 33rd and 34th aces of the war. Their F-86s were named "Billie/Margie" and "Barb/Vent De Mort.
1965 – For the first time, 28 B-52s fly-bomb a Viet Cong concentration in a heavily forested area of Binh Duong Province northwest of Saigon. Such flights, under the aegis of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), became known as Operation Arc Light. The B-52s that took part in the Arc Light missions had been deployed to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam and more bombers were later deployed to bases in Okinawa and U-Tapao, Thailand. In addition to supporting ground tactical operations, B-52s were used to interdict enemy supply lines in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and later to strike targets in North Vietnam. Releasing their bombs from 30,000 feet, the B-52s could neither be seen nor heard from the ground as they inflicted awesome damage. B-52s were instrumental in breaking up enemy concentrations besieging Khe Sanh in 1968 and An Loc in 1972. Between June 1965 and August 1973, 126,615 B-52 sorties were flown over Southeast Asia. During those operations, the Air Force lost 29 B-52s: 17 from hostile fire over North Vietnam and 12 from operational causes.
Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day
CLARK, JAMES G.
Rank and organization: Private, Company F, 88th Pennsylvania Infantry. Place and date: At Petersburg, Va., 18 June 1864. Entered service at: ——. Birth: Germantown, Pa. Date of issue: 30 April 1892. Citation: Distinguished bravery in action; was severely wounded.
LEONARD, EDWIN
Rank and organization: Sergeant, Company I, 37th Massachusetts Infantry. Place and date: Near Petersburg, Va., 18 June 1864. Entered service at: Agawan, Mass. Birth: Agawan, Mass. Date of issue: 16 August 1894. Citation: Voluntarily exposed himself to the fire of a Union brigade to stop their firing on the Union skirmish line.
LUDWIG, CARL
Rank and organization: Private, 34th New York Battery. Place and date: At Petersburg, Va., 18 June 1864. Entered service at: ——. Birth: France. Date of issue: 30 July 1896. Citation: As gunner of his piece, inflicted singly a great loss upon the enemy and distinguished himself in the removal of the piece while under a heavy fire.
MOSTOLLER, JOHN W.
Rank and organization: Private, Company B, 54th Pennsylvania Infantry. Place and date: At Lynchburg, Va., 18 June 1864. Entered service at: ——. Birth: Somerset County, Pa. Date of issue: 27 December 1894. Citation: Voluntarily led a charge on a Confederate battery (the officers of the company being disabled) and compelled its hasty removal.
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Thanks to Ted
The War of 1812 : All it wants is a little respect Time to recognize lasting consequences of a 'weird little episode'?
By Patrick HrubyThe Washington Times
The Revolutionary War has its own national holiday. World War II has spawned countless books and movies. The Civil War boasts costumed re-enactors and a signature chess set.
And the War of 1812? It has re-enactors, too. The country can't get enough of them. The country of Canada, that is. "The demand for them right now is so great that it's actually driving up the price," said John Stagg, a University of Virginia history professor and author of "The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent." "They may even have to resort to the desperate tactic of importing a few from the United States.
"The situation is different in Canada. They take the war very seriously in a way that Americans don't."
Currently enjoying its bicentennial — What, you haven't pre-ordered the Postal Service's forthcoming commemorative stamp? — the War of 1812 occupies a musty, forgotten junk drawer in America's collective cultural consciousness, stuffed somewhere between the liberation of Grenada and the time Will Smith punched that extraterrestrial fighter pilot in the face.
No memorial on the Mall.
No memorial, buy-one, get-one-free mattress sales.
The only war in the history of the United States referred to by its year.
The only war in the history of the United States in which — yes, really — Canada won.
A three-year, continent-spanning conflict against the British Empire that gave us Dolley Madison (the heroic first lady, not the snack cakes), the Capitol rotunda (built after a humiliating defeat, but still), the Kentucky Rifle (overrated, according to historians), the 1959 song "The Battle of New Orleans" (less accurate than a Kentucky Rifle, according to historians) and the "Star-Spangled Banner" (ironically sung to the tune of an old English drinking song — whatever), and yet is lucky to receive more than a few throwaway paragraphs in the average American history textbook.
"I think it's more like two sentences," said Stephen Budiansky, author of "Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815."
"The War of 1812 has gotten no respect over the years."
Dissed and dismissed
Don Hickey concurs. The nation's pre-eminent War of 1812 historian, he began a lifelong love affair with the topic as a University of Illinois student in the late 1960s, writing his senior honors thesis on New England's opposition to the conflict.
(Fun fact: Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island refused to lend their state militias to the federal war effort, and a number of New England congressmen who voted for the war were subsequently booted from office. In other words, the War of 1812 was unpopular before it even started.) "It turned out to be a real academic backwater, along with the entire early national period," said Mr. Hickey, a history professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and the author of "The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition.""It was tough to find a university job."
Most schools at the time, Mr. Hickey said, carried Revolutionary War and Civil War experts on staff, and perhaps an Andrew Jackson scholar as well.
However, few academics paid the War of 1812 much mind. No less a historian than Richard Hofstadter best summed up the prevailing sentiment by describing the conflict as "ludicrous and unnecessary," the climax of an "age of slack and derivative culture, of fumbling and small-minded statecraft" and "terrible parochial wrangling."
"War of 1812 historians are in a bit of a ghetto," Mr. Stagg said. "When Theodore Roosevelt wrote a history of the war, he wrote a naval history. He basically said he wasn't going to study the land campaigns because they were so ludicrous."
For nearly a decade, Congress has entertained the notion of creating an official War of 1812 bicentennial commission; time and again, the same body of lawmakers that regularly honors things like craft beer and the University of Texas swimming and diving team has said thanks, but no thanks.
Don't imagine their constituents care: A recent poll by a Canadian research firm found that 36 percent of Americans could not name a significant outcome to the war.
"There's an American tendency to think the war was some sort of joke, pathetic and not significant," Mr. Stagg said. "There are a lot of memorials to the War of 1812, but they're all local, not national."
What about the District's memorial to James Madison, president and commander in chief during the war?
"It's inside the Library of Congress," Mr. Stagg said. "A lot of people don't even know it's there. And, of course, it talks about [Madison] as a bookish man learning to write the Constitution. It doesn't talk about the War of 1812."
Win, lose, draw?
Why the antipathy? Start with the nature of the conflict. Fed up with British bullying and conscripting of American sailors and a Royal Navy-imposed embargo of trade with France — an offshoot of Europe's Napoleonic Wars — Congress voted to declare war on Britain in June of 1812.
The vote itself was bitterly divided, and came a few days after the British had decided to lift their embargo, the whole reason for the war in the first place.
"The causes of the war don't resonate with modern readers," Mr. Hickey said. "Nobody today goes to war over maritime rights."
The American battle plan was simple — and in retrospect, bizarre: conquer British-controlled Canada, then press for nautical concessions. The United States enjoyed a 15-1 population advantage over its northern neighbor. Brimming with confidence, Thomas Jefferson predicted that victory was a "mere matter of marching."
Oops.
Poorly trained and badly led, the American army was not greeted as liberators. It was embarrassed. By Canada. In epic, Homeric struggles like the Battle of Beaver Creek. (Never heard of it? That's because you're not Canadian.) Case in point: In the Battle of Detroit, General William Hull was tricked into surrendering his 2,000-militiamen force to a smaller group of British Canadians and Native Americans without firing a single shot, thereby losing the entire Michigan territory.
"I would put that in my personal top 10 most humiliating defeats for the American Army," Mr. Budiansky said. "There was a lot of truly incompetent generalship and institutional problems handicapping the army. Terrible logistics. No overall command structure. Militias refusing to serve outside U.S. territory."
Following a failed invasion of Canada from New York, feuding American generals Peter Buell Porter and Alexander Smyth actually engaged in a duel — of which historian John R. Elting later quipped, "unfortunately, both missed."
Perhaps America's most memorable defeat came in August of 1814, when 4,000 Royal Marines marched into Washington and set the nation's capital ablaze, famously forcing Dolley Madison to save George Washington's portrait from a burning White House.
Perfect pyrotechnic fodder for a Michael Bay movie, right?
"It wasn't the entire city in flames," Mr. Budiansky said. "The British thought in the classic mold of superpowers dealing with much smaller adversaries that all they needed to do was stage a show of force. So they only burned public buildings — the White House, the Capitol, the State and Treasury departments. Some of the most serious damage was to the Navy Yard."
Those dastardly Redcoats!
"Actually, the Navy Yard was set on fire by evacuating Americans to keep supplies and almost-completed warships from falling into British hands," Mr. Budiansky said.
Ineffective on land, America's military proved surprisingly adept at sea, frustrating and humiliating the much larger Royal Navy. Ultimately, the two sides reached a peace accord in which neither nation made concessions and territorial boundaries returned to their pre-war state.
Though the accord was signed Christmas Eve of 1814, word of the peace treaty didn't reach the United States until after the Battle of New Orleans in early 1815 — an Andrew Jackson-led rout of the British that stands as America's greatest victory in the war.
"The conventional wisdom is that the war ended in a draw, because it was a draw on the battlefield," Mr. Hickey said. "But if you look at policy objectives, the United States didn't force the British to make maritime concessions, while the British achieved their objective of keeping Canada.
"One of the [anti-war] Federalists predicted that America would spend $180 million, have 30,000 casualties and not achieve its objectives. We actually spent $158 million, lost about 20,000 people and didn't achieve our objectives. I would call it ill-advised."
No matter. Over time, Mr. Hickey says, Americans became happy with the War of 1812 because they thought they won. Canadians were happier because they knew they won.
And the British? Happiest of all — because they forgot the whole thing.
"The British were preoccupied with Napoleon, and the Canadians can live with the fact that they owe their survival to the Americans messing up monumentally," Mr. Stagg said. "For the Americans, the war was rather embarrassing."
Shifting attitudes?
Not always. In the years following the war, books, plays and paintings celebrated the conflict, seen by Americans as both an honorable stand against British harassment and a consolidation of the Revolutionary War's gains.
American naval captains — the successful ones, anyway — even became household names.
"If you were a boy in the 1820s, this is what you grew up with," Mr. Budiansky said. "There were ceramic plates of naval heroes like Stephen Decatur and Isaac Hull."
Mr. Budiansky laughed.
"Many of those plates were made in England. They were never one to shy away from cashing in on a potential market."
Battlefield glories — real and imagined — also influenced politics. According to Mr. Stagg, the war helped propel both Mr. Jackson and William Henry Harrison to the presidency, the latter man running on a slogan, "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," that referred to an 1811 battle in the Indiana territory that presaged the War of 1812.
In Kentucky alone, Mr. Stagg said, the war produced three governors, three lieutenant governors and four United States senators — not to mention future Vice President Richard Johnson.
"It was common to use your war record as part of your claim to office," Mr. Stagg said. "Johnson supposedly killed Shawnee leader Tecumseh in 1813. He never claimed that himself, but someone did, and he never denied it. He dined out politically on that for the rest of his career."
The trauma and scale of the subsequent Civil War changed attitudes, transforming the War of 1812 into a historical afterthought. However, an ongoing bicentennial has dragged the conflict at least partially back into public consciousness.
New York lawmakers have appropriated money for commemorative events. The Canadian government is spending an estimated $30 million on the same. As part of a larger, $12 million-plus public relations push, the U.S. Navy is parading the USS Constitution and other ships through Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans and Norfolk.
In Maryland — where cars have War of 1812 license plates and Gov. Martin O'Malley has participated in re-enactments — the state is holding a three-year celebration, which kicked off with a June ceremony at Baltimore's Fort McHenry that featured recorded messages from President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
"I must admit, when I visited the White House earlier this year, I was a bit embarrassed that my ancestors had managed to burn the place down 200 years ago," Mr. Cameron joked during his message.
Beyond "The Star-Spangled Banner" — composed by Francis Scott Key during the Battle of Baltimore — the War of 1812 resulted in Jacksonian democracy, a long-term Anglo-American alliance, the birth of Canadian national identity, America's emergence as a naval power and a crushing defeat of Native Americans that paved the way for Manifest Destiny.
It's time, Mr. Stagg believes, the much-maligned conflict got a little more respect.
"Because it seemed to have no clear, decisive winner, people assume it has no decisive consequences," he said. "I think that bit is wrong. It shaped the remainder of 19th-century American history. We should look at is as such, rather than saying it's this weird little episode we can't explain or understand."
© Copyright 2012 The Washington Times, LLC.
comment:
The United States won the War of 1812. In the early 19th century the British were claiming the entire West Coast of North America, including Alta California and Baja California.
In order to press these claims, they needed to prevent the U.S. from expanding westwards into the Louisiana Purchase. The British planned to gain control of the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes to New Orleans.
The British were defeated on the Great Lakes and at the Battle of New Orleans.
Some historians try to make the case that the U.S. was attempting to seize Canadian territory, and thus, as no Canadian land was lost to the U.S., it was a Canadian victory.
However, the U.S. never made any claims on any part of Canada. The issue was the westward expansion of the United States into territory which had been considered to be Spanish and French colonies. After the War of 1812, the U.S. expanded westward to the Pacific.
Sincerely,
John Lepant Brighton CO
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AMERICAN AEROSPACE EVENTS for June 18
FIRSTS, LASTS, AND SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS FOR June 18 THANKS TO HAROLD "PHIL" MYERS CHIEF HISTORIAN AIR FORCE INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, AND RECONNAISSANCE AGENCY
18 June
1861: Thaddeus S. C. Lowe telegraphed the first message from a balloon to a ground station. In the White House, President Lincoln received Lowe's telegraphic report. (4)
1916: The Germans shot down H. Clyde Balsley of the Lafayette Escadrille near Verdun, France. Balsley was the first American aviator to be shot down in World War I. He survived. Hit in the pelvis, he made it through a crash landing and endured several operations, but never returned to the air. (4)
1934: Boeing initiated company-funded design work on the Model 299, the B-17 prototype. (20)
1957: SAC placed the KC-135 Stratotanker into service. (12)
1959: Six US Navy enlisted men began an 8-day experiment in a dummy spaceship at the Air Crew Equipment Laboratory, Naval Air Materiel Center, Philadelphia Naval Base. (18)
1962: The USAF's Aerospace Research Pilot School, the first for operational personnel, began a 7-month course at Edwards AFB with seven Air Force officers and one USN officer. (16) (24) A RAF crew launched the last combat training Thor missile, the 22d, at Vandenberg AFB. (6)
1963: A SAC crew launched the first Minuteman missile under simulated combat conditions. (12)
1964: General Dynamics delivered the first RB/WB-57F (a Canberra B-57 modified with extremely long wings) to the Air Weather Service for its aerial sampling mission. (18)
1965: The Titan III-C, the first liquid-fuel spacecraft lifted by solid-fuel rockets, completed its maiden flight. (12) The 1st Air Commando Squadron, 34th Tactical Group, Bien Hoa AB received the Presidential Unit Citation. This was the first unit so honored since the Korean War. FIRST ARC LIGHT MISSION. From Andersen AFB, the 320 BMW and 7 BMW dispatched 28 B-52Fs to hit a Viet Cong jungle stronghold near Saigon. This was the first use of B-52s in Vietnam, and the first time B-52s dropped bombs in combat. The operation used 30 KC-135s to provide refueling support. (1) (16) (18)
1966: The USAF finished a year of B-52 strikes against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. The bombers flew more than 350 conventional missions to drop more than 70,000 tons of bombs on selected targets. (16)
1968: In three years of Vietnam operations, SAC's B-52 accomplished more than 25,000 sorties to deliver more than 630,000 tons of conventional bombs. (16)
1974: At Edward666s AFB, Lt Col James G. Rider became the first USAF pilot to fly the YF-17. (3)
1981: The F-117A Nighthawk, the first stealth combat aircraft in the world, flew for the first time at the Tonopah Test Range, Nev. Hal Farley flew the aircraft. (21)
1983: KEY EVENT--FIRST US WOMAN IN SPACE. Dr. Salley K. Ride became the first US woman in space on the second Challenger and seventh Space Shuttle mission. On 24 June, the craft returned to earth. (3)
1996: The 35 FW at Misawa AB, Japan, once again became a "Wild Weasel" unit in a brief formal ceremony. The 35th began its training in the radar detection and suppression mission at George AFB, Calif., in July 1973 with F-105s, later F-4Cs and F-4Gs. In Operation DESERT STORM, the wing's 24 F-4Gs flew more than 1,180 combat sorties in the Arabian Gulf, suppressing enemy air defenses, with no losses incurred. The 35 FW activated at Misawa on 1 October 1994 to operate 36 F-16CJ aircraft. (AFNEWS)
1999: Two 159 FW (Louisiana ANG) F-15As deployed to NAS Keflavik, Iceland, for a NATO exercise intercepted Russian TU-95 Bear bombers in the Icelandic Military Air Defense Identification Zone in a long range probe not seen since the Cold War's end. Two more 159th Eagles, launched from Keflavick, escorted the bombers out of the area. (32)
2001: At McGuire AFB, SMSgt Jere Garvin, a 2 AREFS flight engineer, reached 10,000 flying hours. His 24-year career included flying time in C-130s, C-141s, the E-3 Sentry, and KC-10 Extender in over 2,400 sorties. On this date, Garvin was the only active-duty flight engineer to reach that milestone. (AFNEWS Article 0947, 13 July 2001)
2003: The USAF released a roadmap to retire 133 KC-135E Stratotankers and assign 100 KC-767A tankers to be leased. Under the plan, Fairchild AFB would become the first active-duty base to receive the new KC-767As in FY2006. By 2010, several Air Reserve Component units would also convert from E-model to R-model KC-135s to the KC-767A. (22) Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. AMC released Civil Reserve Air Fleet carriers from supporting this operation. From 8 February to 2 June 2003, the 11 CRAF carriers flew 1,625 missions to airlift 254,100 troops to the Middle East and other destinations. (22)
2005: TALISMAN SABER 2005. Through 21 June, six C-17 Globemaster IIIs from McChord AFB and Charleston AFB supported an international exercise. The participants included more than 6,000 Australian and 10,000 US service members from the USAF, Army, Navy, and Marines. The Globemaster IIIs flew from Elmendorf AFB on 18 June and flew 7,000-plus miles across the Pacific Ocean to northeastern Australia in one of the C-17's longest direct-delivery airdrops yet. Each C-17 received two air refuelings, the first near Alaska and the second near Hawaii. American and Australian armed forces practiced a "forced entry operation" in the exercise, and the C-17s airdropped troops and supplies at night. (22) .
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