RUSSIA, CHINA, AND UKRAINE

 This month I’m pleased to have a guest contributor who knows his subject intimately.  Dr. Richard P. Hallion is the historian emeritus of the U.S. Air Force and remains a Pentagon advisor on air and space issues.  He’s not only a long-longtime colleague, but a valued friend.

 

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Even allowing for the Kyiv source and the over claiming characteristic of both sides, Russian vehicle/equipment losses have been shocking and substantial, reflecting many failures in the post-Soviet military.

 

These include in particular: failure to create an Air Force that can seize control of the air in the face of pervasive and layered, redundant missile defenses; failing to train recruits to become self-reliant and team-focused soldiers; the absence of a disciplined and effective Western-style NCO corps; the lack of well-trained and well-exercised field and company-grade officer cadres; failure to appreciate how revolutionary and innovative technologies are changing traditional war, particularly the growth of very small, smart, and lethal semi-autonomous air-delivered munitions; failure to appreciate how integrating in real time distributed sensor plus intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems--from hand-held cell phones to drones of varying size and complexity, and many others of varying sorts--an close both the sensor-to-shooter and shooter-to-target loops; and failure to build reliable and robust logistical combat chains that are not limited to linear road and rail based travel.

 

The variety and diversity of types and variants lost offers a tremendous opportunity for intel exploitation and development of counters. The compromise of Russian battlefield command, control, communications and intelligence systems is a very serious development. The recovery of a recent-generation jamming pod off a Super Flanker—if true—is a particularly serious loss, and signals that other Post-Soviet electronic warfare avionics systems/capabilities may now be laid bare for Western analysis.  Jamming and deception pods in particular have a tactical (and even strategic) significance that extends far beyond common appreciation of their value.

 

Now a historical observation: this is all, once again, very reminiscent of what happened to Russia when it went to war against Finland in 1939-1940, when the Finns captured vast quantities of Soviet equipment that they then turned to their own use. 

 

Still, Finland had to reach a settlement in 1940 when Stalin overwhelmed the defensive Mannerheim Line because of the vast disparity of bodies and artillery that Voroshilov’s  Red Army possessed over Marshal Carl Mannerheim’s defending Finns (and today Ukraine may still find itself having to accept some territorial losses today for the same reasons).

 

But as Russia soon found, its Pyrrhic victory had given it little more than (as one Soviet officer remarked) “enough land to bury our dead.”

 

And the implications about Russian combat performance then—as now—went far far beyond mere numbers and types of equipment lost, and the compromise and exploitation of that equipment.

 

At the time of the Winter War, Russia and Germany (which traditionally detested each other) were linked by a non-aggression treaty signed in August 1939 with secret protocols covering each nation. These included turning a blind eye to the other’s aggressions, and even providing for a mutual dismembering of Poland, whose existence as an independent state both Hitler and Stalin considered an affront to their regimes. 

 

For awhile Germany scrupulously honored the pact. But when Russia’s military proved so woefully incompetent against Finland (which like Ukraine today had been expected to fold in days or no more than a few weeks), Hitler and his generals (itching for expansionist war) were greatly encouraged to abandon the pact and plan instead for an invasion of Russia. That invasion, Operation Barbarossa, came in June 1941, and came very close to destroying the Soviet regime, leading to the death of millions.

 

Today, Russia and China are linked in a similar pact, which (like the 1939 Nazi-Sovist Non-Aggression Pact) likely has secret clauses covering aggression by both parties against bordering states—think Russia vs the Baltic states and Ukraine, and China vs Taiwan. 

 

But traditionally China and Russia have detested each other. Today China is in the same position as Nazi Germany in 1939-40. It has a robust and aggressive leader (Xi) and a large, modernized military with generals who speak intemperately of regional war and are again itching to fight.

 

Recall that in the 1960s China and Russia fought a series of bitter border clashes along the Usurri River region, reflecting the Sino-Soviet split that lasted through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. China remembers both these and, looking to the more distant past, has not forgotten how Russia muscled it over the last two centuries to get control of territory including much of Siberia. 

 

As China witnesses Russia performing so abysmally in the Ukraine, might not Xi and his generals see an emerging opportunity to regain via diplomatic muscling or coercion under threat its lost Asian territories?

 

Both sides are of course, atomic powers but previous Sino-Soviet history suggests that such considerations do not per se automatically act to curb such coercion, particularly given the woeful state of the Russian economy and its growing domestic discontents.

 

And what of the Central Asian cockpit (Chechnya, Georgia, and the “-stans”) that have centuries of ethnic, religious, and nationalist enmity towards Russia? As Russia shows its growing weakness, might not these always-restless peoples seek to exert their own historic claims?

 

Bottom line: the geo-strategic stakes for Russia in this conflict are far broader than just Moscow’s relationship with the NATO alliance and its European neighbors, or Putin’s own personal future…Indeed, Putin’s ill-considered aggression has created a risk for the entire Russian state on all its borders. 

 

While this poses its own set of challenges and dangers, requiring very careful handling, it also affords the West and other coalitions (such as the ASEAN nations) an interesting range of their own influence and coercive actions to keep the resurgent Russian bear chained and in its cage.

AUGUST 1945: THE MONTH THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

Reprinted courtesy of American Thinker.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/august_1945_an_eventful_month_in_world_history.html

Some historians describe both world wars as one prolonged conflict, beginning in Europe in August 1914 and ending in the Pacific in August 1945.  The interim from 1918 to 1939 featured many and varied clashes, including those in Poland, Armenia, Spain and China to name a few. Key interim players included Japan and Russia.

Certainly the apocalyptic end of World War II has been described by eminent historians over the last seven decades.  But in searching for my next book, I applied what I grandiosely call “negative market analysis.”  What has not been covered, or not in recent years with current scholarship?  That was how I conceived Whirlwind (Simon and Schuster, 2010) because there had never been a dedicated study of all air operations over Japan.

It was also how I decided upon When the Shooting Stopped.  There have been excellent studies of the global events of June 1944 (notably D-Day in France and U.S. conquest of the Marianas on the other side of the planet) but I found none devoted to August 1945, the month that shaped the world.

Events accelerated in the spring and summer of 1945.  Germany surrendered on May 8 but Russia already was shipping massive amounts of men and materiel eastward.  Moscow and Berlin had a non-aggression treaty that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin cancelled on August 9.  That night a three-pronged Russian assault into Japanese-held Manchuria opened the Far East end game, briefly overlapping Japan’s surrender to the Allies.

American forces began deploying from Europe and the continental United States anticipating the two-phase Operation Downfall, invasion of Japan’s home islands.  The first assault, on the southern island of Kyushu, was slated for early November.  The second, on the main island of Honshu, was due in March 1946.

Meanwhile, the atomic age had dawned in a 20-kiloton flash in the New Mexico desert on July 16.  The three-year Manhattan Project yielded awe-inspiring results, and Tokyo’s refusal of the Allies’ Potsdam declaration for unconditional surrender ensured that the atoms would be loosed.  U.S. B-29 Superfortresses from the Mariana Islands 1,500 miles south of Japan were prepared to conduct “special missions” beyond conventional bombing methods.  An A-bomb destroyed Hiroshima on August 6 and, lacking any reply from Tokyo, a second weapon leveled Nagasaki three days later.

Even then, Japan’s war cabinet remained evenly divided between surrender and continued war.  Finally, on August 15, Emperor Hirohito took the unprecedented step of personally intervening in government affairs.  His decision “to bear the unbearable” was met with fierce resistance in the palace guard but the plotters were quickly overcome.  In his announcement Hirohito credited the A-bombs with his decision, citing “a most cruel new weapon.”

For three decades a bitter feud was fought in an information vacuum with academics and others arguing whether the bombs were necessary.  The mantra “Tokyo was about to surrender” gained some public traction despite clear evidence to the contrary.  Then from the 1970s to the 1990s declassified intelligence documents showed that President Harry Truman and his advisers were reading Tokyo’s mail via decoded messages.  Hirohito’s intervention was the only way to break the logjam.

Speculation as to the cost of invading Japan continues today.  General Douglas MacArthur, the vainglorious Army supremo who would command Operation Downfall, discounted intelligence (understated, as it proved) showing the Japanese heavily reinforcing the Kyushu defenses.  His personal goal was leading the greatest military operation of all time.  But that summer the U.S. government ordered an additional half million Purple Heart medals for expected killed and wounded in Downfall--enough to last into the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s.

However, the U.S. Navy had second thoughts.  The Pacific Fleet’s Admiral Chester Nimitz knew all too well the cost of the three-month Okinawa campaign, especially facing Kamikazes that had sunk dozens of ships and damaged hundreds since the Philippines operation from October 1944.

            

Nimitz’s superior in Washington, Admiral Ernest King, shared reservations about Operation Downfall.  Neither admiral doubted it would succeed, but at what cost?

The only viable option was continuing blockade.  At some point Japan would face massive starvation—there were already food riots that spring—with consequences likely exceeding military conquest.  Aside from deaths in Japan itself, postwar analysis estimated more than 100,000 deaths on the Asian mainland, per month, almost entirely from war-related disease and starvation.  As it was, Japan inflicted at least 12 million deaths upon Asia-Pacific nations.

Meanwhile, the postwar world was taking shape.  Outgoing British Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined the phrase “iron curtain” that summer, anticipating Russia’s draconian policies in Eastern Europe.  Residents of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans and the Baltic states realized that they had exchanged Nazi tyranny for the Soviet variety.

Apart from China, the world was also reshaping itself in Asia.  The colonial era ended in India, Indonesia and Vietnam.  In fact, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh declared a provisional government the same day the surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay.  The war against French occupation lasted until 1954.  

At the same time India’s independence movement under Mahatma Ghandi bore fruit in 1947 while Indonesia fought a long internal war against Communist insurgents until 1949.  

Prior agreement between the U.S. and Russia divided Korea in the middle, at the 38^th parallel, setting the stage for a three-year war launched by Pyongyang in 1950.

Though Japan announced its surrender on the 15^th, Pacific time, those at the sharp end continued fighting, killing, and dying.  Earth’s time zones affected the process, as the last B-29 bombing mission took off the afternoon of the 14^th and was returning to its roosts after midnight.  But U.S. and British Pacific Fleet units in Japanese waters still conducted scheduled missions, resulting in several clashes.  Of six USS Yorktown fighters jumped by enemy aircraft, only two pilots survived.  Other dogfights lasted into the afternoon as some Japanese doubted the surrender announcement—and others chose to ignore it.

            

America’s final combat fatality—Sergeant Anthony Marchione--died on a photographic mission on August 18.  

The formal end of six years of combat occurred in barely a half-hour ceremony aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, September 2.  Among those I interviewed from the 1970s onward were General Jimmy Doolittle, who bombed Tokyo in 1942, and several Navy pilots who participated in “Operation Airshow.”  The overflight of Tokyo Bay made dramatic film footage but a squadron commander confided that the crowded sky beneath low clouds caused more fear than he experienced in combat.

In considering the next book, the August ’45 narrative appealed to me on different levels.  As a baby boomer, I grew up amid relatives and neighbors for whom “the war” was the central event of their lives.  Four decades afterward, a girlfriend and I appreciated the fact that we only met because our fathers survived the war.

The family aspect also entered into When the Shooting Stopped.  In September 1945 my mother was an Oregon rodeo princess who recalled the spirited adventures of some naval aviators who buzzed the arena, nearly blew over fishing boats, and generally had a fine old time violating almost every conceivable safety regulation.  The fliers attached themselves to the round-up court, and I mused on the rarity of writing about one’s parents in a history book.

Elsewhere, of course, the lid was off.  Joyous celebrations erupted around the world, most notably an estimated 2 million New Yorkers who jammed Times Square when Japan’s surrender was confirmed.  The iconic Life magazine photo of a sailor kissing a “nurse” (she was a dental technician) remains a vivid depiction of that ecstatic moment.

But not all celebrations were justifiable.  From Boston to San Francisco, days of riotous behavior broke out with violent clashes between servicemen and police.  Deaths, assaults, and vandalism often went unpunished—ill suiting the misty-eyed image of “the greatest generation.” But in the larger picture, the VJ Generation returned dozens of nations to their rightful owners, and was greatness itself.

From 1939 to 1945 Earth’s 100 or so nation-states lost perhaps 3 percent of their 2.3 billion humans to all war-related causes.  The specific numbers keep increasing (partly due to Soviet juggling) from an estimated 50 million in the 1990s to as high as 85 million today.  All losses to military action, including civilians, run between 50 and 60 million.

About 405,000 American families lost service members—at least two examples with four and five each--plus nearly 700,000 wounded or injured.  Thousands U.S. more civilians added to the toll in the Philippines, China, and elsewhere.

Today there are 195 nation-states with nearly 8 billion inhabitants.  They continue living with the benefits and downsides that characterized the Second World War seven decades ago.

JULY: THE FORGOTTEN MONTH OF 1945

My current book is When the Shooting Stopped: August 1945 from Bloomsbury-Osprey in Britain.  Near as I could tell, no single volume covered “the month that shaped the world.”

Inevitably each August produces another reprise of The Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, though by now it should be obvious there was no acceptable alternative to loosing the atoms.  The options were blockade or invasion, both certain to kill more people on both sides.  And that did not include the enormous toll in Asia—reckoned postwar at about 100,000 per month.  As it was, Japan’s aggression killed at least 17 million people in the Asia-Pacific realm, perhaps closer to 20 million.

For those desiring more analysis, consult the works of John Toland, Richard Frank, and Sir Max Hastings.

Which takes us back to July.

The main event was the Potsdam Conference where the Western Allies and Soviet Union decided the course of the Pacific War and the shape of the postwar world.  It was the same time when outgoing British Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined the enduring phrase “Iron Curtain.”

But from an operational perspective I’m drawn to the U.S. Navy air strikes on the main Japanese naval base at Kure, near Hiroshima.  Much of Tokyo’s inert fleet had laid up there for months, drawing repeated attacks by Pacific Fleet aircraft carriers from March onward.

It’s still argued whether the cost was worth the results.  I’ve had ample opportunity to examine the subject both in Whirlwind (Simon & Schuster 2010) and When the Shooting Stopped.  What follows is a compendium.

On March 19 more than 320 Fifth Fleet planes struck Kure, inflicting marginal damage.  The heavy defenses downed 25 planes in exchange for damage to nine ships.  

That same day Japanese pilots nearly destroyed the fleet carrier USS Franklin  (CV-13), killing 800 men and knocking her out of the war.  The definitive account is Joseph Springer’s Inferno (Zenith, 2007.)

Kure was back in the crosshairs three times in July.

A cogent assessment was offered by then-Lieutenant Commander William N. Leonard of Vice Admiral John McCain’s Task Force 38 staff.  “Some Neanderthals back at PacFleet Headquarters wanted continuation of a navy versus navy fight and we lost many good people to no good purpose.  With the Jap navy lying doggo, PacFleet began to assert itself more and more into the assignment of missions and objectives of the fast carriers.”  

Leonard’s attitude largely mirrored that of McCain, who considered the Kure strikes “a waste of time” but could only go so far.  Occasionally he argued with Third Fleet’s Admiral William F. Halsey, though seldom successfully. 

McCain opposed targeting shipping, preferring to strike airfields and aircraft factories.  However, his priorities also were skewed: Third Fleet knew the benefits of sinking Japanese coastal traffic such as Hokkaido’s rail ferries.  But whatever their service, airmen were magnetically pulled toward the enemy’s aviation industry, while steamers and merchantmen lacked the perceived glamor of aircraft factories.  

Without delving into tactics and targets, the Kure strikes offer a lesson in the morality of military leadership.  

Nobody would admit it—certainly not in writing—but at least some of the impetus for the July operations probably had more to do with service politics than winning the war.  Both the Navy and the Army Air Forces anticipated the inevitable  postwar Washington battle, determining whether there would be an independent air force.  Almost certainly the admirals wanted to run up the score, demonstrating naval aviation’s huge contribution to destroying the enemy fleet, and the fat pickings at Kure became irresistible: over 200,000 tons in major combatants.

In some ways, Kure represented the greatest flak trap in history.  The big harbor contained nothing that could seriously harm the Third Fleet, as the remnants of the Imperial Navy lacked sufficient fuel and crews to pose a major threat.  But geisha-like, Kure smiled (or smirked) behind her ornamental fan, crooked a fetching finger at King, Nimitz, and Halsey, and coyly invited them in.

They rushed to accept.

On July 24 the tailhookers left 57 planes in Kure Harbor and adjacent waters, drowning a battleship and cruiser in the shallow harbor and damaging a dozen lesser vessels.

Kure was part of the next day’s strike menu, though no warships were sunk.

 Results on the 28th were significantly better: totaling severe damage to three battleships, three cruisers, and three carriers plus lesser victims.  Some of the warships were effectively sunk, resting on the muddy bottom.

Overall, Halsey’s three days of strikes on Kure and environs proved costly: at least 126 aircraft with 102 fliers.  Eighteen of the losses occurred in “routine” operations over Shikoku. 

Whether the cost justified the Kure strikes remains questionable.  In his often self-serving memoir, Halsey enumerated four reasons for the strikes.  He opined that America’s national honor and morale required total destruction of the Japanese Navy; that such destruction was necessary to prevent interdiction of future convoys to Russia; that Tokyo might use its remaining fleet for negotiating leverage as Germany had done in 1919; and ultimately that he had orders.  He concluded, “If the other reasons had been invalid, that one alone would have been enough for me.”  

Halsey’s arguments remain transparently unconvincing.  In the first place, American morale in no way turned on destruction of the rusting remnants of the Imperial Navy.  The greatest morale involved was “Bull” Halsey’s.  The huge majority of Americans merely wished the war over, and the main seagoing phase had ended in October 1944.

Secondly, the U.S. Navy could easily dominate the North Pacific in the vastly unlikely event that a Japanese force escaped its mine-choked harbors to deploy more than 1,000 miles from home. Furthermore, absent requests from Moscow, no such requirement pertained.   

Halsey’s third point was even more absurd.  The Allies’ pre-existing demand of unconditional surrender automatically scuttled any naval bargaining that Tokyo might have attempted in such nonexistent proceedings.

The fourth point would seem the strongest, as King and Nimitz had decreed an end to the “defueled doggo fleet.”  But by July 1945 Halsey surely felt bulletproof.  He had escaped all accountability (if not major blame) for the Leyte Gulf debacle and failing to avoid a ship-killing typhoon in December.  

The defenders of his position were five-star guardians: Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz, who allowed sentiment to trump objectivity, and the decidedly unsentimental Ernest King, chief of naval operations in Washington, who refused to hand the Air Force a political victory.  But the fact remained that between Leyte Gulf in October 1944 and “Halsey’s hurricane” in December the Third Fleet commander was widely considered directly or indirectly responsible for the unnecessary loss of seven ships and some 1,450 sailors and aircrew.

Had Halsey declined to expend scores of fliers and over 100 aircraft in a needless exercise, his chances of being replaced approached absolute zero.  But rather than take counsel of the Task Force 38 staff, The Bull was eager to comply with orders that gratified his vanity at the expense of at least 83 young men who died attacking impotent, immobile ships.  

Halsey’s seeming indifference to casualties drew sharp criticism from subordinates.  One aviator spoke for many when he noted, “Halsey is going wild on publicity and we are all fed (up) to the teeth listening to all the crap he is putting out….Halsey is a big disappointment to me as he is to most of us.”  

In this 77th anniversary year we might remember that the WW II generation often was ill served by its leaders.