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All About Guns Allies Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad

Another version of the Guns from Navarone, The 700 NE!


This just goes to show that there are a lot of men out there. Who are so crazy that they will shoot anything handed to them!

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Dear Grumpy Advice on Teaching in Today's Classroom Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Leadership of the highest kind

Happy Birthday to one of Americas Best but Forgotten POTUS James Polk!!

Image result for president polk birthday
Okay I know that he defended Slavery. But overall he is one of the towering Giants of the Oval office! Here is why.
He said that he would serve only one term.
Reduced tariff (Taxes)
Settle the Oregon Border with the British Empire
Conquered (Stole by Force of Arms) Over 1/2 of Mexico territory
Then Kept his word and retired & died soon after. Not bad huh? Grumpy

In 1824, Polk married Sarah Childress (1803-91), a well-educated Tennessean and devout Presbyterian from a wealthy family.
The couple never had children, and Sarah Polk became her husband’s close adviser throughout his political career. As first lady, she was a charming and popular hostess, although she banned hard liquor from the White House and eschewed dancing, the theater and horse races.

The Tennessee Politician

In 1825, Tennessee voters elected James Polk to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he would serve seven terms and act as speaker of the House from 1935 to 1939.
In Congress, Polk was a protégé of America’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), a fellow Democrat and Tennessean who was in the White House from 1829 to 1837. Polk favored states’ rights and supported Jackson’s plan to dismantle the Bank of the United States and replace it with a decentralized government banking system.
Polk later earned the nickname “Young Hickory,” a reference to his mentor Jackson, who was dubbed “Old Hickory” for his toughness.
Polk left Congress in 1839 to become governor of Tennessee. He ran for reelection in 1841 and lost; another run for the governorship in 1843 also ended in defeat

The Dark Horse Candidate

In 1844, James Polk unexpectedly became the Democrats’ nominee for president. He emerged as a compromise candidate after the more likely choice, former president Martin Van Buren (1782-1862), who had lost his reelection bid in 1840, failed to secure the party’s nomination.
Polk thus became America’s first dark horse presidential candidate. George Dallas (1792-1864), a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, was chosen as Polk’s running mate.
In the general election, Polk ran against U.S. Senator Henry Clay (1777-1852), a Kentuckian and a founder of the Whig Party. The Whigs used the campaign slogan “Who is James K. Polk?”–an allusion to the fact that Polk was not well known outside the world of politics.
However, Polk’s expansionist platform favoring the annexation of Texas appealed to voters. He narrowly won the presidency with 49.5 percent of the popular vote and an electoral margin of 170-105.

James Polk as President

At age 49, James Polk was younger than any previous president when he entered the White House.
A workaholic, America’s new chief executive set an ambitious agenda with four major goals: cut tariffs, reestablish an independent U.S. Treasury, secure the Oregon Territory and acquire the territories of California and New Mexico from Mexico.
Polk eventually achieved all his goals. He was a champion of manifest destiny–the belief that the United States was fated to expand across the North American continent–and by the end of his four years in office, the nation extended, for the first time, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
In 1845, the United States completed its annexation of Texas, which became the 28th state on December 29. This move led to a breakdown in diplomatic relations with Mexico (from which Texas had revolted in 1836).
After the United States sent troops to a disputed border region around the Rio Grande River, the Mexican-American War (1846-48) broke out.
The United States won the two-year battle, and as a result, Mexico relinquished its claims to Texas. It also recognized the Rio Grande as America’s southern border and, in exchange for $15 million, ceded the land that makes up all or parts of present-day California, ArizonaColoradoNevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
(Despite the U.S. victory, the war proved controversial and reignited the slavery extension debate that would ultimately result in the American Civil Warin the 1860s.)
With the Oregon Treaty of 1846, Polk managed another significant land acquisition–this time without going to war–when his administration diplomatically settled a border dispute with the British and gained full control of the present-day states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, as well as parts of Montana and Wyoming.
On the domestic front, Polk reduced tariffs in an effort to stimulate trade and created an independent U.S. Treasury. (Federal funds had previously been deposited in private or state banks.)
Also during this time, the U.S. Naval Academy, Smithsonian Institution and Department of Interior were each established, and in addition to Texas, two more states–Iowa (1846) and Wisconsin (1848)–joined the Union.

James Polk: Later Years

James Polk kept his campaign promise to serve just one term and did not seek reelection in 1848. He was succeeded by Zachary Taylor (1784-1850), a military leader who earned acclaim during the Mexican-American War and ran for the presidency on the Whig ticket.
Polk left the White House in March 1849 and returned to his home, Polk Place, in Nashville. The stress of the presidency had left him in poor health, and he died that summer, on June 15, at age 53. He was buried at Polk Place. In 1893, his remains, along with those of his wife, who outlived him by more than 40 years, were moved to the Tennessee Capitol in Nashville

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Dear Grumpy Advice on Teaching in Today's Classroom Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Interesting stuff Leadership of the highest kind

The Man Who Saved Korea BY THOMAS FLEMING

The Man Who Saved Korea

Matthew B. Ridgway, who brought a beaten Eighth Army back from disaster in 1951, was a thinking—and fighting—man’s soldier.

IF YOU ASKED A GROUP OF AVERAGE AMERICANS to name the greatest American general of the twentieth century, most would nominate Dwight Eisenhower, the master politician who organized the Allied invasion of Europe, or Douglas MacArthur, a leader in both world wars, or George C. Marshall, the architect of victory in World War II. John J.
Pershing and George S. Patton would also get a fair number of votes. But if you ask professional soldiers that question, a surprising number of them will reply: “Ridgeway.”
When they pass this judgment, they are not thinking of the general who excelled as a division commander and an army corps commander in World War II.
Many other men distinguished themselves in those roles. The soldiers are remembering the general who rallied a beaten Eighth Army from the brink of defeat in Korea in 1951.
THE SON OF A WEST POINTER who retired as a colonel of the artillery, Matthew Bunker Ridgeway graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1917.
Even there, although his scholastic record was mediocre, he was thinking about how to become a general. One trait he decided to cultivate was an ability to remember names. By his first-class year, he was able to identify the entire 750-man student body.
To his dismay, instead of being sent into combat in France, Ridgeway was ordered to teach Spanish at West Point, an assignment that he was certain meant the death knell of his military career.
(As it turned out, it was probably the first of many examples of Ridgway luck; like Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, he escaped the trench mentality that World War I experience inflicted on too many officers.)
Typically, he mastered the language, becoming one of a handful of officers who were fluent in the second tongue of the western hemisphere.
He stayed at West Point for six years in the course of which he became acquainted with its controversial young superintendent, Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, who was trying in vain to stop the academy from still preparing for the War of 1812.
In the 1920s and ’30s, Ridgeway’s skills as a writer and linguist brought him more staff assignments than he professed to want—troop leadership was the experience that counted on the promotion ladder.
But Ridgeway’s passion for excellence and commitment to the army attracted the attention of a number of people, notably that of a rising star in the generation ahead of him, George Marshall. Ridgeway served under Marshall in the 15th Infantry in China in the mid-1930s and was on his general staff in Washington when Pearl Harbor plunged the nation into World War II.
As the army expanded geometrically in the next year, Ridgeway acquired two stars and the command of the 82nd Division.
When Marshall decided to turn it into an airborne outfit, Ridgeway strapped on a parachute and jumped out of a plane for the first time in his life. Returning to his division, he cheerfully reported there was nothing to the transition to paratrooper.
He quieted a lot of apprehension in the division—although he privately admitted to a few friends that “nothing” was like jumping off the top of a moving freight train onto a hard roadbed.

Dropped into Sicily during the night of July 9, 1943, Ridgeway’s paratroopers survived a series of snafus. Navy gunners shot down twenty of their planes as they came over the Mediterranean from North Africa.
In the darkness their confused pilots scattered them all over the island. Nevertheless, they rescued the invasion by preventing the crack Hermann Göring panzer division from attacking the fragile beachhead and throwing the first invaders of Hitler’s Fortress Europe into the sea.
In this campaign, Ridgeway displayed many traits that became hallmarks of his generalship. He scored a rear-area command post.
Battalion and even company commanders never knew when they would find Ridgeway at their elbows, urging them forward, demanding to know why they were doing this and not that.
His close calls with small- and large-caliber enemy fire swiftly acquired legendary proportions. Even Patton, who was not shy about moving forward, ordered Ridgeway to stop trying to be the 82nd Division’s point man. Ridgeway pretty much ignored the order, calling it “a compliment.”
FROM PATTON, RIDGEWAY ACQUIRED ANOTHER COMMAND HABIT: the practice of stopping to tell lower ranks—military policemen, engineers building bridges—they were doing a good job. He noted the remarkable way this could energize an entire battalion, even a regiment.
At the same time, Ridgeway displayed a ruthless readiness to relieve any officer who did not meet his extremely high standards of battlefield performance. Celerity and aggressiveness were what he wanted. If an enemy force appeared on a unit’s front, he wanted an immediate deployment for flank attacks. He did not tolerate commanders who sat down and thought things over for an hour or two.

In the heat of battle, Ridgeway also revealed an unrivaled capacity to taunt the enemy. One of his favorite stunts was to stand in the middle of a road under heavy artillery fire and urinate to demonstrate his contempt for German accuracy. Aides and fellow generals repeatedly begged him to abandon this bravado. He ignored them.
Ridgeway’s experience as an airborne commander spurred the evolution of another trait that made him almost unique among American soldiers—a readiness to question, even to challenge, the policies of his superiors.
After the snafus of the Sicily drop, Eisenhower and other generals concluded that division-size airborne operations were impractical. Ridgeway fought ferociously to maintain the integrity of his division.
Winning that argument, he found himself paradoxically menaced by the widespread conclusion that airborne assault could solve problems with miraculous ease.
General Harold Alexander, the British commander of the Allied invasion of Italy, decided Ridgeway’s paratroopers were a God-given instrument for disrupting German defense plans. Alexander ordered the 82nd Airborne to jump north of Rome, seize the city, and hold it while the main army drove from their Salerno beachhead to link up with them.
Ridgeway was appalled. His men would have to fly without escort—Rome was beyond the range of Allied fighters—risking annihilation before they got to the target.
There were at least six elite German divisions near the city, ready and willing to maul the relatively small 82nd Airborne. An airborne division at this point in the war had only 8,000 men.
Their heaviest gun was a 75 pack howitzer, “a peashooter,” in Ridgeway’s words, against tanks. For food, ammunition, fuel, transportation, the Americans were depending on the Italians, who were planning to double-cross the Germans and abandon the war.

Ridgeway wangled an interview with General Alexander, who listened to his doubts and airily dismissed them. “Don’t give this another thought, Ridgeway. Contact will be made with your division in three days—five at the most,” he said.
 
RIDGEWAY WAS IN A QUANDARY. He could not disobey the direct orders of his superior without destroying his career. He told his division to get ready for the drop, but he refused to abandon his opposition, even though the plan had the enthusiastic backing of Dwight Eisenhower, who was conducting negotiations with the Italians from his headquarters in Algiers.
Eisenhower saw the paratroopers as a guarantee that the Americans could protect the Italians from German retribution.
Ridgeway discussed the dilemma with Brigadier General Maxwell Taylor, his artillery officer, who volunteered to go to Rome incognito and confer with the Italians on the ground.
Ridgeway took this offer to General Walter Bedell Smith, Alexander’s American chief of staff, along with more strenuous arguments against the operation.

Smith persuaded Alexander to approve Taylor’s mission. Taylor and an air corps officer traveled to Rome disguised as captured airrmen and met Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the acting prime minister, who was in charge of the negotiations.
Meanwhile, plans for the drop proceeded at a dozen airfields in Sicily. If Taylor found the Italians unable to keep their promises of support, he was to send a radio message with the code word innocuous in it.
In Rome, Taylor met Badoglio and was appalled by what he heard. The Germans were wise to the Italians’ scheme and had reinforced their divisions around Rome.
The 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division alone now had 24,000 men and 200 tanks—enough firepower to annihilate the 82nd Airborne twice over.
A frantic Taylor sent three separate messages over different channels to stop the operation, but word did not reach the 82nd until sixty-two planes loaded with paratroopers were on the runways warming their engines. Ridgeway sat down with his chief of staff, shared a bottle of whiskey, and wept with relief.
Looking back years later, Ridgeway declared that when the time came for him to meet his maker, his greatest source of pride would not be his accomplishments in battle but his decision to oppose the Rome drop. He also liked to point out that it took seven months for the Allied army to reach the Eternal City.
Repeatedly risking his career in this unprecedented fashion, Ridgeway was trying to forge a different kind of battle leadership. He had studied the appalling slaughters of World War I and was determined that they should never happen again.
He believed “the same dignity attaches to the mission given a single soldier as to the duties of the commanding general. . . . All lives are equal on the battlefield, and a dead rifleman is as great a loss in the sight of God as a dead general.”

IN THE NORMANDY INVASION, RIDGEWAY HAD NO DIFFICULTY accepting the 82nd’s task.
Once more, his men had to surmount a mismanaged airdrop in which paratroopers drowned at sea and in swamps and lost 60 percent of their equipment. Ridgeway found himself alone in a pitch-dark field. He consoled himself with the thought that “at least if no friends were visible, neither were any foes.”
Ten miles away, his second-in-command, James Gavin, took charge of most of the fighting for the next twenty-four hours.
The paratroopers captured only one of their assigned objectives, but it was a crucial one, the town of Sainte-Mére-Eglise, which blocked German armor from attacking Utah beach. Ridgway was given a third star and command of the XVIII Airborne Corps.
By this time he inspired passionate loyalty in the men around him. Often it came out in odd ways. One day he was visiting a wounded staff officer in an aid station. A paratrooper on the stretcher next to him said, “Still sticking your neck out, huh, General?” Ridgeway never forgot the remark.
For him it represented the affection one combat soldier feels for another.

Less well known than his D-Day accomplishments was Ridgeway’s role in the Battle of the Bulge.
When the Germans smashed into the Ardennes in late December 1944, routing American divisions along a 75-mile front, Ridgeway’s airborne corps again became a fire brigade. The “battling bastards of Bastogne”—the 101st Airborne led by Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe—got most of the publicity for foiling the German lunge toward Antwerp.
But many historians credit Ridgeway’s defense of the key road junction of Saint-Vith as a far more significant contribution to the victory.
Ridgeway acquired a visual trademark, a hand grenade attached to his paratrooper’s shoulder harness on one side and a first-aid kit, often mistaken for another grenade, on the other strap.
He insisted both were for practical use, not for picturesque effect like Patton’s pearl-handled pistols. In his jeep he also carried an old .30-06 Springfield rifle, loaded with armor-piercing cartridges.
On foot one day deep in the Ardennes forest, trying to find a battalion CP, he was carrying the gun when he heard a “tremendous clatter.” Through the trees he saw what looked like a light tank with a large swastika on its side.
He fired five quick shots at the Nazi symbol and crawled away on his belly through the snow. The vehicle turned out to be a self-propelled gun. Inside it, paratroopers who responded to the shots found five dead Germans.
THIS WAS THE MAN—now at the Pentagon, as deputy chief of staff for administration and training—whom the army chose to rescue the situation in Korea when the Chinese swarmed over the Yalu River in early December 1950 and sent EUSAK (the Eighth U.S. Army in Korea) reeling in headlong retreat.
Capping the disarray was the death of the field commander, stumpy Major General Walton (“Johnnie”) Walker, in a jeep accident. Ridgeway’s first stop was Tokyo, where he was briefed by the supreme commander, Douglas MacArthur.
After listening to a pessimistic summary of the situation, Ridgeway asked: “General, if I get over there and find the situation warrants it, do I have your permission to attack?”

“The Eighth Army is yours, Matt,” MacArthur responded. “Do what you think best.”
MacArthur was giving Ridgeway freedom—and responsibility—he had never given Walker. The reason was soon obvious: MacArthur was trying to distance himself from a looming disaster.
Morale in the Eighth Army had deteriorated alarmingly while they retreated before the oncoming Chinese. “Bugout fever” was endemic. Within hours of arriving to take command, Ridgeway abandoned his hopes for an immediate offensive. His first job was to restore this beaten army’s will to fight.
He went at it with incredible verve and energy. Strapping on his parachute harness with its hand grenade and first-aid kit, he toured the front for three days in an open jeep in bitter cold. “I held to the old-fashioned idea that it helped the spirits of the men to see the Old Man up there in the snow and sleet . . . sharing the same cold miserable existence they had to endure,” he said.
But Ridgeway admitted that until a kindhearted major dug up a pile-lined cap and warm gloves for him, he “damn near froze.
Everywhere he went, Ridgeway exercised his fabulous memory for faces. By this time he could recognize an estimated 5,000 men at a glance. He dazzled old sergeants and MPs on lonely roads by remembering not only their names but where they had met and what they had said to each other.

But this trick was not enough to revive EUSAK. Everywhere Ridgeway found the men unresponsive, reluctant to answer his questions, even to air their gripes.
The defeatism ran from privates through sergeants all the way up to the generals. He was particularly appalled by the atmosphere in the Eighth Army’s main command post in Taegu. There they were talking about withdrawing from Korea, frantically planning how to avoid a Dunkirk.
In his first 48 hours, Ridgeway had met with all his American corps and division commanders and all but one of the Republic of Korea division commanders.
He told them—as he had told the staffers in Taegu—that he had no plans whatsoever to evacuate Korea. He reiterated what he had told South Korean president Syngman Rhee in their meeting: “I’ve come to stay. ”
But words could not restore the nerve of many top commanders. Ridgeway’s reaction to this defeatism was drastic: He cabled the Pentagon that he wanted to relieve almost every division commander and artillery commander in EUSAK.
He also supplied his bosses with a list of younger fighting generals he wanted to replace the losers. This demand caused political palpitations in Washington, where MacArthur’s growing quarrel with President Harry Truman’s policy was becoming a nightmare.
Ridgeway eventually got rid of his losers—but not with one ferocious sweep. The ineffective generals were sent home singly over the next few months as part of a “rotation policy.”
Meanwhile, in a perhaps calculated bit of shock treatment, Ridgeway visited I Corps and asked the G-3 to brief him on their battle plans. The officer described plans to withdraw to “successive positions.”
“What are your attack plans?” Ridgeway growled. The officer floundered. “Sir—we are withdrawing.” There were no attack plans. “Colonel, you are relieved,” Ridgeway said.

That is how the Eighth Army heard the story. Actually, Ridgeway ordered the G-3’s commanding officer to relieve him—which probably intensified the shock effect on the corps.
Many officers felt, perhaps with some justice, that Ridgeway was brutally unfair to the G-3, who was only carrying out the corps commander’s orders. But Ridgeway obviously felt the crisis justified brutality.
As for the lower ranks, Ridgeway took immediate steps to satisfy some of their gripes. Warmer clothing was urgently demanded from the States.
Stationery to write letters home, and to wounded buddies, was shipped to the front lines—and steak and chicken were added to the menu, with a ferocious insistence that meals be served hot.
Regimental, division, and corps commanders were told in language Ridgeway admitted was “often impolite” that it was time to abandon creature comforts and slough off their timidity about getting off the roads and into the hills, where the enemy was holding the high ground.
Again and again Ridgeway repeated the ancient army slogan “Find them! Fix them! Fight them! Finish them!”
As he shuttled across the front in a light plane or a helicopter, Ridgeway studied the terrain beneath him. He was convinced a massive Communist offense was imminent. He not only wanted to contain it, he wanted to inflict maximum punishment on the enemy.
He knew that for the time being he would have to give some ground, but he wanted the price to be high. South of the Han River, he assigned Brigadier General Garrison Davidson, a talented engineer, to take charge of several thousand Korean laborers and create a “deep defensive zone” with a trench system, barbed wire, and artillery positions.
RIDGEWAY ALSO PREACHED DEFENSE IN DEPTH to his division and regimental commanders in the lines they were holding north of the Han.
Although they lacked the manpower to halt the Chinese night attacks, he said that by buttoning up tight, unit by unit, at night and counterattacking strongly with armor and infantry teams during the day, the U.N. army could inflict severe punishment on anyone who had come through the gaps in their line.
At the same time, Ridgeway ordered that no unit be abandoned if cut off. It was to be “fought for” and rescued unless a “major commander” after “personal appraisal” Ridgeway-style—from the front lines—decided its relief would cost as many or more men.
Finally, in this race against the looming Chinese offensive, Ridgeway tried to fill another void in the spirit of his men. He knew they were asking each other, “What the hell are we doing here in this God-forgotten spot?” One night he sat down at his desk in his room in Seoul and tried to answer that question.
His first reasons were soldierly: They had orders to fight from the president of the United States, and they were defending the freedom of South Korea.
But the real issues were deeper—”whether the power of Western civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism; whether the rule of men who shoot their prisoners, enslave their citizens and deride the dignity of man, shall displace the rule of those to whom the individual and his individual rights are sacred.”
In that context, Ridgeway wrote, “the sacrifices we have made, and those we shall yet support, are not offered vicariously for others but in our own direct defense.”

On New Year’s Eve, the Chinese and North Koreans attacked with all-out fury. The Eighth Army, Ridgeway wrote, “were killing them by the thousands,” but they kept coming.
They smashed huge holes in the center of Ridgeway’s battle line, where ROK divisions broke and ran. Ridgeway was not surprised—having met their generals, he knew most had little more than a company commander’s experience or expertise. Few armies in existence had taken a worse beating than the ROKs in the first six months of the war.
By January 2 it was evident that the Eighth Arrny would have to move south of the Han River and abandon Seoul. As he left his headquarters, Ridgeway pulled from his musette bag a pair of striped flannel pajama pants “split beyond repair in the upper posterior region.” He tacked them to the wall, the worn-out seat flapping. Above them, in block letters, he left a message:
TO THE COMMANDING GENERAL
CHINESE COMMUNIST FORCES
WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF
THE COMMANDING GENERAL
EIGHTH ARMY
The story swept through the ranks with predictable effect.

The Eighth Army fell back fifteen miles south of the Han to the defensive line prepared by General Davidson and his Korean laborers. They retreated, in Ridgeway’s words, “as a fighting army, not as a running mob.”
They brought with them all their equipment and, most important, their pride. They settled into the elaborate defenses and waited for the Chinese to try again.
The battered Communists chose to regroup. Ridgeway decided it was time to come off the floor with some Sunday punches of his own.
He set up his advanced command post on a bare bluff at Yoju, about one-third of the way across the peninsula, equidistant from the I Corps and X Corps headquarters.
For the first few weeks, he operated with possibly the smallest staff of any American commander of a major army.
Although EUSAK’s force of 350,000 men was in fact the largest field army ever led by an American general, Ridgeway’s staff consisted of just six people: two aides, one orderly, a driver for his jeep, and a driver and radio operator for the radio jeep that followed him everywhere.
He lived in two tents, placed end-to-end to create a sort of two-room apartment and heated by a small gasoline stove. Isolated from the social and military formalities of the main CP at Taegu, Ridgeway had time for “uninterrupted concentration” on his counteroffensive.
Nearby was a crudely leveled airstrip from which he took off repeatedly to study the terrain in front of him. He combined this personal reconnaissance with intensive study of relief maps provided by the Army Map priceless asset.”
Soon his incredible memory had absorbed the terrain of the entire front, and “every road, every cart track, every hill, every stream, every ridge in that area . . we hoped to control . . . became as familiar to me as . my own backyard,” he later wrote. When he ordered an advance into a sector, he knew exactly what it might involve for his infantrymen.

ON JANUARY 25, WITH A THUNDEROUS ERUPTION OF MASSED ARTILLERY, the Eighth Army went over to the attack in Operation Thunderbolt.
The goal was the Han River, which would make the enemy’s grip on Seoul untenable. The offensive was a series of carefully planned advances to designated “phase lines,” beyond each of which no one advanced until every assigned unit reached it.
Again and again Ridgeway stressed the importance of having good coordination, inflicting maximum punishment, and keeping major units intact. He called it “good footwork combined with firepower.” The men in the lines called it “the meat grinder.”
To jaundiced observers in the press, the army’s performance was miraculous. Rene Cutforth of the BBC wrote: “Exactly how and why the new army was transformed…from a mob of dispirited boobs…to a tough resilient force is still a matter for speculation and debate.”
A Time correspondent came closest to explaining it: “The boys aren’t up there fighting for democracy now. They’re fighting because the platoon leader is leading them and the platoon leader is fighting because of the command, and so on right up to the top.”
By February 10 the Eighth Army had its left flank anchored on the Han and had captured Inchon and Seoul’s Kimpo Airfield. After fighting off a ferocious Chinese counterattack on Lincoln’s birthday, Ridgeway launched offensives from his center and right flank with equal success.
In one of these, paratroopers were used to trap a large number of Chinese between them and an armored column. Ridgeway was sorely tempted to jump with them, but he realized it would be “a damn fool thing” for an army commander to do. Instead, he landed on a road in his light plane about a half hour after the paratroopers hit the ground.
M-1s were barking all around him. At one point a dead Chinese came rolling down a hill and dangled from a bank above Ridgeway’s head.
His pilot, an ex-infantryman, grabbed a carbine out of the plane and joined the shooting. Ridgeway stood in the road, feeling “that lifting of the spirits, that sudden quickening of the breath and the sudden sharpening of all the senses that comes to a man in the midst of battle.”
None of his exploits in Korea better demonstrates why he was able to communicate a fierce appetite for combat to his men.

Still another incident dramatized Ridgeway’s instinctive sympathy for the lowliest private in his ranks.
In early March he was on a hillside watching a battalion of the 1st Marine Division moving up for an attack. In the line was a gaunt boy with a heavy radio on his back. He kept stumbling over an untied shoelace. “Hey, how about one of you sonsabitches tying my shoe?” he howled to his buddies. Ridgeway slid down the snowy bank, landed at his feet, and tied the laces.
Fifty-four days after Ridgeway took command, the Eighth Army had driven the Communists across the 38th parallel, the line dividing North and South Korea, inflicting enormous losses with every mile they advanced.
The reeling enemy began surrendering by the hundreds. Seoul was recaptured on March 14, a symbolic defeat of tremendous proportions to the Communists’ political ambitions.
Ridgeway was now “supremely confident” his men could take “any objective” assigned to them. “The American flag never flew over a prouder, tougher, more spirited and more competent fighting force than was the Eighth Army as it drove north beyond the parallel,” he declared.
But he agreed with President Truman’s decision to stop at the parallel and seek a negotiated truce.
In Tokyo his immediate superior General Douglas MacArthur, did not agree and let his opinion resound through the media. On April 11 Ridgeway was at the front in a snowstorm supervising final plans for an attack on the Chinese stronghold of Chörwön, when a correspondent said, “Well, General, I guess congratulations are in order.”
That was how he learned that Truman had fired MacArthur and given Ridgeway his job as supreme commander in the Far East and as America’s proconsul in Japan.
Ridgeway was replaced as Eighth Army commander by Lieutenant General James Van Fleet, who continued Ridgeway’s policy of using coordinated firepower, rolling with Communist counter punches, inflicting maximum casualties.
Peace talks and occasionally bitter fighting dragged on for another twenty-eight months, but there was never any doubt that EUSAK was in Korea to stay.
Ridgeway and Van Fleet built the ROK Army into a formidable force during these months. They also successfully integrated black and white troops in EUSAK.

Later, Ridgeway tried to combine his “profound respect” for Douglas MacArthur and his conviction that President Truman had done the right thing in relieving him.
Ridgeway maintained that MacArthur had every right to make his views heard in Washington, but not to disagree publicly with the president’s decision to fight a limited war in Korea.
Ridgeway, with his deep concern for the individual soldier, accepted the concept of limited war fought for sharply defined goals as the only sensible doctrine in the nuclear age.
After leaving the Far East, Ridgeway would go on to become head of NATO in Europe and chairrnan of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Eisenhower.
Ironically, at the end of his career he would find himself in a MacArthuresque position. Secretary of Defense Charles E. (“Engine Charlie”) Wilson had persuaded Ike to slash the defense budget—with 76 percent of the cuts falling on the army.
Wilson latched on to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s foreign policy, which relied on the threat of massive nuclear retaliation to intimidate the Communists. Wilson thought he could get more bang for the buck by giving almost half the funds in the budget to the air force.
Ridgeway refused to go along with Eisenhower. In testimony before Congress, he strongly disagreed with the administration’s policy.
He insisted it was important that the United States be able to fight limited wars, without nuclear weapons. He said massive retaliation was “repugnant to the ideals of a Christian nation” and incompatible with the basic aim of the United States, “a just and durable peace.”
 

EISENHOWER WAS INFURIATED, BUT RIDGEWAY STOOD HIS GROUND—and in fact proceeded to take yet another stand that angered top members of the administration. In early 1954 the French army was on the brink of collapse in Vietnam. Secretary of State Dulles and a number of other influential voices wanted the United States to intervene to rescue the situation.
Alarmed, Ridgeway sent a team of army experts to Vietnam to assess the situation. They came back with grim information.
Vietnam, they reported, was not a promising place to fight a modern war. It had almost nothing a modern army needed—good highways, port facilities, airfields, railways. Everything would have to be built from scratch.
Moreover, the native population was politically unreliable, and the jungle terrain was made to order for guerrilla warfare. The experts estimated that to win the war the United States would have to commit more troops than it had sent to Korea.
Ridgeway sent the report up through channels to Eisenhower. A few days later he was told to have one of his staff give a logistic briefing on Vietnam to the president. Ridgeway gave it himself.
Eisenhower listened impassively and asked only a few questions, but it was clear to Ridgeway that he understood the full implications. With minimum fanfare, the president ruled against intervention.
For reasons that still puzzle historians, no one in the Kennedy administration ever displayed the slightest interest in the Ridgeway report—not even Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, who as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs in 1950–51 knew and admired what Ridgeway had achieved in Korea.
As Ridgeway left office, Rusk wrote him a fulsome letter telling him he had “saved your country from the humiliation of defeat through the loss of morale in high places.”

The report on Vietnam was almost the last act of Ridgeway’s long career as an American soldier. Determined to find a team player, Eisenhower did not invite him to spend a second term as chief of staff, as was customary. Nor was he offered another job elsewhere.
Although Ridgeway officially retired, his departure was clearly understood by Washington insiders as that rarest of things in the U.S. Army, a resignation in protest.
After leaving the army in 1955, Ridgeway became chairman and chief executive officer of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, in Pittsburgh. He retired from this post in 1960 and has continued to live in a suburb of Pittsburgh. At this writing he is 97. [Editor’s note: Ridgeway died at age 98 on July 26, 1993.]
When Ridgeway was leaving Japan to become commander of NATO, he told James Michener, “I cannot subscribe to the idea that civilian thought per se is any more valid than military thought.”
Without abandoning his traditional obedience to his civilian superiors, Ridgeway insisted on his right to be a thinking man’s soldier—the same soldier who talked back to his military superiors when he thought their plans were likely to lead to the “needless sacrifice of priceless lives.”
David Halberstam is among those who believe that Ridgeway’s refusal to go along with intervention in Vietnam was his finest hour. Halberstam called him the “one hero” of his book on our involvement in Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest.
But for the student of military history, the Ridgeway of Korea towers higher. His achievement proved the doctrine of limited war can work, provided those fighting it are led by someone who knows how to ignite their pride and confidence as soldiers. Ridgeway’s revival of the Eighth Army is the stuff of legends, a paradigm of American generalship.
Omar Bradley put it best: “His brilliant, driving uncompromising leadership [turned] the tide of battle like no other general’s in our military history.”
Not long after Ridgeway’s arrival in Korea, one of the lower ranks summed up EUSAK’s new spirit with a wisecrack: “From now on there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a Ridgeway.” MHQ

THOMAS FLEMING is a historian, novelist, and contributing editor of MHQ. He is at present working on a novel about the German resistance to Hitler.

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Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad

Another Bad Ass to read about!

Sgt. Phillip Zupp
Sgt (Later F/O) Phillip Zupp in “Black Murray”

  • Flying Officer Phillip Zupp M.I.D

Phillip Zupp was born in 1925 in the fertile Darling Downs region of Queensland, Australia. In a rural community reeling from drought and the Great Depression, he never imagined he’d have the opportunity to fly. Nevertheless, on leaving school at 14 he spent his first pay cheque on a copy of Every Boy’s Fighting Planes and enlisted in the Air Training Corps, a cadet body.

Enlisting on the stroke of 18, he served in World War II with the Australian Army’s 2/10 Commando Squadron in Wewak, New Guinea. Upon cessation of hostilities in 1945, the bulk of his unit was shipped to Hiroshima, Japan, as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF). On returning to Australia in 1947, he spent a year as a civilian cutting sugar-cane before re-enlisting in the Royal Australian Air Force as a mechanic in 1948. He began to spend his Air Force wages on flying lessons.

With the outbreak of the Korean War and Australia’s commitment to the United Nations Forces, the RAAF was busily training pilots. On the recommendation of a senior officer at Wagga Wagga, Zupp was selected for No. 4 Pilots Course at Point Cook, Victoria, graduating in February 1951.

His “Korean Experience” began in November 1951 when he converted onto the Gloster Meteor at Iwakuni, Japan. Six days later he flew his first operational mission as a member of 77 Squadron, a “scramble” in A77-368. With about 400 hours total experience under his belt and only a dozen on type, he later reflected that “…it was pretty much on-the-job training and the longer you lasted, the greater your chance of survival.” His log-book for the next seven months is littered with entries relating to the ground attack role 77 Squadron fulfilled. There are references to numerous occasions in his 201 missions when his aircraft was holed or landed with minimum fuel, as well as the various targets the squadron had attacked. Inconspicuously glued in between a couple of pages is his Citation, “Mentioned in Despatches”. It makes special mention of a mission on 6 February, 1952, when his canopy was shattered by ground fire and, wounded, he flew A77-15 back to base at Kimpo. His log-book reveals that he flew again the next day. In retrospect, this seems a little premature as he had shrapnel and perspex surgically removed from his face in 1990.

Extracting details from Phil Zupp about his combat days was never an easy task. He was a quiet man who believed “that was then and this is now”. With the exception of his American decoration – the Air Medal – his medals remained unmounted in their brown paper boxes until his latter years. In fact, certain medals have only surfaced recently as a result of research since his passing. This is indicative of the modesty he always exhibited, not a lack of pride in his military service.

A newspaper article about Sgt. Zupp written on his return gives some insight into his perceptions of Korea. He speaks of the cold, the pile of rubble that was previously Seoul and the multiple currencies that were in use. Particularly telling is that when asked if he thought 200 missions were “too many missions for one flyer” on a tour of duty, he replied, “[The pilots] would probably growl if they weren’t kept busy”.

Subsequent to his RAAF career, Zupp remained in aviation for his working life. From international operations with QANTAS, to instructing, cloud-seeding and Aerial Ambulance duties. He always felt being paid to fly was a privilege he never dreamt of as a country boy in Queensland.

Phillip Zupp passed away on 31 July, 1991, after a short battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife Edith, his children Pamela, Adrian and Owen and a number of grandchildren. Appropriately, his headstone bears the RAAF crest and the quote “Into the wild blue yonder”.

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Good News for a change! Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Leadership of the highest kind Well I thought it was funny!

Wow! Theo Sparks has some real Brass ones to post this one!

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Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Leadership of the highest kind Soldiering The Green Machine This great Nation & Its People War

Examples of Major Winters' Leadership – What an Army Line Officer should be like


Now I had been very lucky in my time in Mr Reagan’s Army. As I had for the most part had some pretty good Leadership. But this guy if half the stuff about him is true. Was leagues ahead of them.
It just goes to show, that when the shit hits the fan. Usually Folks like him show up and lead the way.
RIP Sir, as you really earned your pay! Grumpy

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Gun Info for Rookies Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Well I thought it was funny!

Some proven Gunfighter Advice (Yeah, I know too soon!)

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Anti Civil Rights ideas & "Friends" Born again Cynic! Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad War

Africa wins again!

Land Reform and Farm Murders in South Africa: The Untold Story of the Boers and the ANC

The Untold Story of South African Land Reform and Farm Murders
South African farm murders have long been a niche cause on the Internet, and the country has made headlines again due to a South African government plan to seize the land of white farmers under the guise of “South African land reform.”
News of these farm murders and land seizures have gained steam with the release of Lauren Southern’s documentary Farmlands. And United States President Donald Trump has brought even more attention to the plight of Afrikaners with his tweet that he would be looking into the South African land and farm seizure.
Most people don’t know much about the history of South Africa beyond the simplistic propaganda of the 1980s – white South Africans bad, ANC good. The history and current situation of South Africa, however, is much more complex.

Defining Terms: Who Are the Key Players?

Before going any further, terms should be defined and the key players identified:

  • ANC: The African National Congress, the leading party in South Africa since the end of apartheid.
  • Afrikaners: Dutch-, German- and French Huguenot-descended white South Africans who primarily speak a language called Afrikaans.
  • Bantu: A group of black South Africans including the Xhosa (of which Nelson Mandela was a member) who originally lived in the northeast of the country.
  • Boers: A subset of Afrikaners who still lead a rural and agricultural existence.
  • Democratic Alliance: Currently the second-largest party in the South African parliament, the Democratic Alliance is a broad-based centrist party that is comparatively economically liberal for South Africa. It enjoys broad, multiracial support, though it is most popular among all racial minorities – white, Coloured and Indian. Its black supporters are often derided as “clever blacks” by ANC supporters.
  • EFF: The Economic Freedom Fighters, a far-left political party in South Africa that has pushed the South African government to seize land from white farmers. Sometimes derisively called “Everything for Free,” the EFF is the third-largest party in South Africa, but is poised to become the second.
  • Khoisan: A popular name for the original inhabitants of most of the territory now known as South Africa. This is not an ethnic designation, but a linguistic one. These are who the Dutch settlers first encountered.

A Brief History of South Africa: From Early Settlement to the Boer War

To understand the current situation in South Africa, it is important to first understand the country before, during and after apartheid.
South Africa’s modern history begins with the Dutch East India Company, which established trading posts for sailors along the coast. Dutchmen soon started settling the area, with little, if any, conflict with the native Khoisan population. Dutch settlers, however, quickly came into conflict with the Dutch East India Company’s authoritarian rule.
Freedom-seeking Dutch settlers moved north starting in the 17th Century. In 1852, Boers founded the South African Republic (known as the “Transvaal Republic”) and then the Orange Free State in 1854.
These are called “Boer Republics” and they, in turn, came into conflict with both southward-expanding Bantu tribes (most notably the Zulu, who were in the process of conquering other nearby Bantu tribes) and the British Empire.
White South Africans” are typically treated as a monolith, but there are two main, distinct groups: The Afrikaans-speaking Afrikaners and the English-speaking British. Indeed, there were intense hostilities between these two groups, especially after the Second Boer War when the Boer Republics were reforged as British colonies.
Telling the Afrikaners to “go home” is a nonsensical statement. They are not Dutch. They do not hold Dutch passports, nor would they at any point have been welcomed back by the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
In many regions of South Africa, the Afrikaners have been around longer than the Bantus and have a stronger claim on the land, having purchased it from Khoisans. On the other hand, traditionally Bantu land was conquered from other Bantu tribes or taken by the Bantus from the Khoisans.

A Brief History of South Africa: The Boer Wars

The Untold Story of South African Land Reform and Farm Murders
“The Boer Wars” refers to two wars between the Boer Republics and the British Empire, but mostly the second one. The first was a rout for the Boers and left the British Empire with egg on their face. They would not be embarrassed a second time.
The first concentration camps were built for Boers. Not just any Boers, but primarily the wives and children of Boer Commandos (irregular guerilla troops) fighting the British Empire. The strategy was simple: Lock up their women and children, and they will lose their will to fight.
It worked. Adding insult to injury, the most publicized photo of the concentration camps, a picture of seven-year-old Lizzie van Zyl nearly starved to death, was touted in the British press as evidence of parental neglect by the Boers. There was great international outcry against the British during the Boer War, but it never amounted to much.
Boer Republics were reconstituted as British colonies. In 1910, three British colonies were unified as the Union of South Africa. After World War I, South West Africa, today known as Namibia, was administered effectively as a fifth province of South Africa, but for obscure reasons never integrated.
South Rhodesia voted on membership, nearly joining, but the argument that it would become “the Ulster of Africa” proved too powerful. The history of South Africa is largely that of a rebellious and unhappy British Dominion until 1948.

A Brief History of South Africa: Enter Apartheid

The Untold Story of South African Land Reform and Farm Murders“Apartheid” is an Afrikaans word meaning “separateness.” It was a series of laws drafted beginning in 1948, after the success of the Afrikaner-heavy National Party in the national elections.
There was a split in the party between those who favored apartheid as it happened versus those who favored complete separation, including parallel governance. The former won out in no small part due to a thirst for cheap black labor.
Most people know the basics of apartheid, but they are worth going over briefly here: South Africans were classified into one of four racial categories: white, black, Coloured (a non-pejorative term in South Africa, meaning roughly “mixed race”) and Asian or Indian. In 1949, mixed marriages were outlawed with cross-racial intercourse outlawed the following year. In 1953, amenities were segregated by law.
Increasingly, the blacks of South Africa were segregated into townships and Bantustans, the latter being nominally independent “homelands” for Africans. This meant that as foreign nationals, in the eyes of the Union of South Africa, they were required to carry documentation to work in South Africa and needed to leave after they were done.
Coloureds, who had the vote, were slowly disenfranchised. Indians and other Asians were never allowed to vote.
Between the end of World War II and the declaration of a republic in 1961, internal politics were dominated by the division between conservative republican Afrikaners and liberal monarchist British whites.
Apartheid enjoyed greater support among Afrikaners and less among British South Africans. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech increased support for apartheid among British South Africans because of a sense of abandonment by the homeland.
Many were upset at being forced by the British government to choose between South African and British citizenship and passports.
Still, none of this amounted to what the National Party hoped to achieve – a cohesive and united white South African identity. Support for apartheid was always tepid among British South Africans.
It is certainly true that notions of racial superiority were a prime motivator for apartheid, but there was another factor in play: Communism.
The Suppression of Communism Act was passed by the first apartheid government, banning any Communist organization. The Act took a broad view of what constituted “Communism.”
However, given the infiltration of mass movements, particularly in the developing world at the beginning of the Cold War, this is perhaps less cynical than it is commonly made out to be. The Act was used to suppress the African National Congress, something we will talk about in detail later.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that Afrikaner society is fundamentally and deeply conservative. Pornography and gambling were illegal in apartheid-era South Africa.
Most businesses could not open on Sundays. Abortion, homosexuality and reproductive education were tightly regulated.
There was no television until 1976, as this was believed to be immoral and a vehicle of Communism. English-language programming was seen as a threat to Afrikaans culture.

A Brief History of South Africa: The Rise of the ANC and Nelson Mandela

The Untold Story of South African Land Reform and Farm Murders
The Suppression of Communism Act was the instrument used to outlaw the African National Congress. While the ANC is typically thought of as a democratic-liberal organization, this is simply not true.
The ANC’s closest ally was the South African Communist Party. Indeed, Nelson Mandela, the face of anti-apartheid resistance, was not only a member of the SACP, he served on its Central Committee, something he denied for decades.
The SACP has never to this day contested its own candidates in South Africa, instead fielding their people on ANC slates.
What’s more, the SACP partnered with the ANC in forming Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the paramilitary wing of the anti-apartheid movement.
The average person on the street likely thinks that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned simply for being black or opposing apartheid.
In fact, he was imprisoned for a bombing campaign carried out by Umkhonto we Sizwe, of which he was the head. In fact, Nelson Mandela was convicted of 193 acts of terrorism.
He was offered his freedom multiple times on the simple condition that he condemn terrorist attacks against the apartheid regime. He refused every time.
The ANC was not the only organization in South Africa opposed to apartheid. Many white South Africans saw the system as unsustainable.
However, outside of South Africa, the situation was largely posed by the media as a question of “apartheid forever or the ANC.”
The ANC and its allies in the Communist Party and the trade union congress COSATU (known as the tripartite alliance) were not the only alternative to the ruling National Party and thus apartheid.
The Progressive Federal Party was the main parliamentary opposition to apartheid, which, as the name implies, was in favor of a federated South Africa. The New Republic Party was likewise in favor of power sharing and oriented toward reconciliation with the Commonwealth.
The New Republic Party and the Progressive Federal Party were also bitter enemies. The New Republic Party was a conservative party denounced as racists by the Progressive Federal Party.
The Progressive Federal Party was a liberal party derided by the NRP with the nickname “Packing for Perth,” due to the impression that their members were all emigrating to Australia.
Two-thirds of South African whites supported some sort of federalism or power sharing, but moderate elements never received any international support.
Nor was the ANC the sole representative of South African blacks. Zulu nationalists, currently represented by the Inkatha Freedom Party, were often bitter enemies of the ANC by the 1980s.
Many black South Africans served in the police force and other aspects of the government, leading to the rise of a barbaric form of retribution known as “necklacing.”
This is filling a tire with gasoline, hanging it around the neck of a suspected collaborator or political opponent, and lighting the tire on fire. Death can take several hours.
Winnie Mandela, then-wife of Nelson Mandela, declared that “With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.” This caused the ANC to create some distance between itself and her, but ultimately she was given further positions in the movement and the ANC government.

A Brief History of South Africa: The ANC in the Saddle

The Untold Story of South African Land Reform and Farm Murders
In 1994, the African National Congress took power in South Africa.
At this time, its paramilitary organization was integrated into the country’s regular defense forces. Convicted bomber Robert McBride, praised by no less than IRA terrorist Martin McGuinness, is the Executive Director of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate.
Touted as the “Rainbow Nation,” the fall of apartheid in South Africa was part of an overall feeling of optimism throughout the world surrounding the Fall of Communism.
However, not everything was roses in the new Republic of South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an attempt to lay bare the crimes of the apartheid regime.
The tribunal, which did not dispense with sentences, but merely sought to find the truth, has been criticized for not dispensing any justice. Neither former National Party government members nor ANC partisans were punished by the Commission.
The elephant in the room at all times was an overwhelming increase in the crime rate. The term “rape gate” entered popular parlance as South Africans installed panic room doors on their bedrooms.
Crime is the main reason for emigration from South Africa. The 2013 murder rate was seven times that of the United States, the 11th highest in the world. Between 2005 and 2015, over 200,000 South Africans were murdered – this in a country of about 50 million. There were over 17,000 murders in 2013 alone.
Compare this to just over 14,000 in the United States during the same year, despite the fact that South Africa’s population is approximately equivalent to two states – California and Texas.
This is only the official murder rate. Many suspect that the rate is higher, due to a disengagement from formal policing and a reliance upon private security firms.
Quality of public services has likewise deteriorated, with rolling blackouts being the norm in South Africa.
The ANC presides over what is potentially the largest welfare state in the world, according to economist Mike Schussler in 2010. Six percent (3.3 million South Africans) of the population pays 99 percent of the taxes, while 31 percent (16.4 million) receive social grants.
This means there are five South Africans receiving welfare for every one paying taxes. 71 percent of South African children live in houses where no adult is employed.
South Africa has a sweeping affirmative action quota program. Employee demographics must, under the South African Employment Equity Act, represent the racial demographics of South Africa as a whole.
This means that, for example, the national power company was pressured to fire a number of skilled white engineers, while the country was going through rolling blackouts. The country currently has a labor shortage of approximately 800,000 skilled workers.
The affirmative action program has not lead to a significant increase in the number of skilled black technical workers. In 1994, 15 percent of black South Africans held skilled technical positions.
In 2014, this percentage had increased to 18. Meanwhile, between 1992 and 1997, the number of skilled technical degrees dropped by 13 percent while the number of degrees in public administration and social services skyrocketed by 199 percent.
Finally, the specter of corruption has hung over the ANC regime. Scandals surrounding the ANC government have included bribery in arms deals, the abolition of a task force dedicated to organized crime and corruption, sexual misconduct including criminal charges, and using government and civil organizations to fight its political opponents, particularly those in the Democratic Alliance.

What Are the South African Farm Murders?

The Untold Story of South African Land Reform and Farm Murders
It is currently twice as dangerous to be a South African farmer than a South African police officer. The murder rate among South African farmers is three times that of the standard murder rate in South Africa, which is already one of the highest in the world.
The government claims the motives for the farm attacks are robbery. However, this does not pass muster. Farm attacks frequently include raping the female members of the household – including young children – while forcing the male members of the household to watch.
The victims are often then tortured to death in front of each other. Farmers claim police response to these attacks is sluggish at best and nonexistent at worse. The government stopped collecting statistics about farm murders in 2008.
What’s more, the attacks on white farmers in South Africa tend to have pitched levels of brutality about them. Without getting too lost in the weeds of the grizzly details, it’s worth mentioning some of the more grotesque attacks on farmers at least in passing:

  • In 2012, a 12-year-old boy was drowned in boiling water after watching both his parents murdered and his mother raped.
  • A 56-year-old grandmother was gang raped during a robbery netting approximately $2,000.
  • Five men sexually assaulted a woman in front of her 5-year-old son over the course of an hour and a half.
  • Over the course of six hours, a woman was tortured by having her skin cut off, raped and had her feet power drilled.
  • A 66-year-old man was beaten to death in front of his wife. She escaped being gang raped by saying that she had HIV.
  • Bedridden Alice Lotter, 76, and her daughter Helen, 57 were tortured to death over several hours, including by being stabbed in the genitals with a broken glass bottle. One had one of her breasts removed while still alive. “Kill the Boer” was painted on the wall in their blood.
  • Knowledge Mandlazi went on a killing spree in 2014, murdering five whites and stating that “My hate for white people made me rob and kill.” He held up his middle finger to surviving victims in the courtroom.

Another common form of attack is the land invasion. In one example, 100 men began squatting land. The farmer did the sensible thing and left. Who could blame him in the kind of environment described above?
Far from being a “white nationalist conspiracy theory,” farm attacks have been reported on and denounced by Human Rights Watch and former Australian Prime Minister Tony AbbotAfriforum, a wing of Christian trade union Solidarity, likewise reports on farm attacks regularly.

What Is Behind the South African Farm Attacks?

The Untold Story of South African Land Reform and Farm Murders
Anti-white racism is a popular current in mainstream South African politics. The song “Kill the Farmer, Kill the Boer” is still publicly sung, despite this being declared a hate crime.
The traditional means of protecting rural South Africans, the commando units, were disbanded in 2003, leaving many South African farmers with no protection.
Anti-white rhetoric in South Africa is very real and very mainstream. Here are a few examples:

Compare this with the woman sentenced to three years in prison for calling someone a “kaffir.” It’s not surprising that some South Africans have begun getting trained by Israeli commandos to protect themselves and their property.

What Are the Farm Seizures?

The Untold Story of South African Land Reform and Farm MurdersThe South African Constitution has recently been amended to allow for Soviet-style expropriations of farms without compensation. Zulu lands are specifically exempted.
This is a bit nonsensical for two reasons. Many white South Africans have been in South Africa longer than most Americans have been in America.
Second, the dominant black ethnic group, the Bantus, doesn’t have a strong claim to most of the land in South Africa – the Khoisans would, but they sold it to the Boers or had it conquered by the British.
This is as if the U.S. government started seizing land from white families in upstate New York traditionally belonging to the Iroquois and giving it out to the Cherokee.
Still, despite the fact that farm seizures are precisely the means by which Zimbabwe ended up in such a failed state, there seems to be no stopping farm seizures in South Africa.
Perhaps worst of all, there are rumors that South Africa’s banks intend to collect mortgage payments even after properties have been confiscated.
In the final analysis, the farm seizures in South Africa aren’t just about dispossessing an unpopular, market dominant racial minority – though that would be disturbing enough. It’s also a threat to South Africa’s incredibly fragile democracy.
The ANC is a dominant party with little chance of losing elections and thus, little reason to behave accountably. Add to this the lack of a broad-based middle class with a vested interest in strong property rights, and you have a recipe for kleptocracy and starvation.

Bibliography

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Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Soldiering Stand & Deliver The Green Machine This great Nation & Its People War

Another Stud got what he deserves!!

Shok Valley Medic to Receive Medal of HonorImage result for Army Staff Sgt. Ronald J. Shurer II



A former medic with the 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) who heroically fought his way up a mountain to render aid to his Special Forces teammates and their Afghan commando counterparts will receive the Medal of Honor.

Soldier poses with gun on armored vehicle.

Former Army Staff Sgt. Ronald J. Shurer II will receive the Medal of Honor at an Oct. 1, 2018, White House ceremony for going above and beyond the call of duty April 6, 2008, while assigned to Special Operations Task Force 33 in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. Photo courtesy of Ronald J. Shurer II

 
White House officials announced that former Army Staff Sgt. Ronald J. Shurer II went above and beyond the call of duty April 6, 2008, while assigned to Special Operations Task Force 33 in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. He will receive the highest military award for valor at a White House ceremony Oct. 1.
In April 2008, Shurer was assigned to support Special Forces operators working to take out high-value targets of the Hezeb Islami al Gulbadin in Shok Valley.
As the team navigated through the valley, a firefight quickly erupted, and a series of insurgent sniper fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and small arms and machine gun fire forced the unit into a defensive fighting position.
Around that time, Shurer received word that their forward assault element was also pinned down at another location, and the forward team had suffered multiple casualties.
With disregard for his safety, Shurer moved quickly through a hail of bullets toward the base of the mountain to reach the pinned-down forward element.
While on the move, Shurer stopped to treat a wounded teammate’s neck injury caused by shrapnel from a recent RPG blast.
Rendering Aid
After providing aid, Shurer spent the next hour fighting across several hundred meters and killing multiple insurgents.
Eventually, Shurer arrived to support the pinned down element and immediately rendered aid to four critically wounded U.S. units and 10 injured commandos until teammates arrived.
Soon after their arrival, Shurer and his team sergeant were shot at the same time. The medic ran 15 meters through a barrage of gunfire to help his sergeant.
Despite a bullet hitting his helmet and a gunshot wound to his arm, Shurer pulled his teammate to cover and rendered care.
Moments later, Shurer moved back through heavy gunfire to help sustain another teammate who had suffered a traumatic amputation of his right leg.
Keeping Enemy at Bay
For the next several hours, Shurer helped keep the large insurgent force at bay while simultaneously providing care to his wounded teammates. Shurer’s actions helped save the lives of all wounded casualties under his care.
Shurer also helped evacuate three critically wounded, teammates down a nearly vertical 60-foot cliff, all while avoiding rounds of enemy gunfire and falling debris caused by numerous airstrikes.
Further, Shurer found a run of nylon webbing and used it to lower casualties while he physically shielded them from falling debris.
Shurer’s Medal of Honor was upgraded from a Silver Star upon review
____________________________________Thank God, that we can still grow such MEN! Grumpy

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All About Guns Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Leadership of the highest kind Soldiering The Green Machine This great Nation & Its People War

One hell of a LT. !! 1LT Waverly Wray and His M1 Rifle: There Can Be Only One M1 by WILL DABBS

The M1 rifle was used in all theaters of combat during World War II. 1LT Waverly Wray, the airborne officer referenced at the beginning of this article, could be counted among the greatest warriors these United States could produce.

1LT Waverly Wray was born in 1919 and raised in the wooded hills around Batesville, Mississippi, perhaps a forty-five minute drive from where I sit typing these words. An expert woodsman steeped in fieldcraft from his youth, Wray was described by his commander, LTC Ben Vandervoort, thusly, “As experienced and skilled as an Infantry soldier can get and still be alive.” At 250 pounds Wray was an intimidating specimen, yet he was also a committed Christian man of character. He fastidiously eschewed profanity and sent half of his Army paycheck home each month to help build a church in his hometown.
Immediately after jumping into Normandy with the 82d Airborne, 1LT Wray set out on a one-man reconnaissance at the behest of his Battalion Commander. Wray’s mission was to assess the state of German forces planning a counterattack against the weakly held American positions outside Ste.-Mere-Eglise. Wray struck out armed with his M1 rifle, a Colt 1911A1 .45, half a dozen grenades, and a silver-plated .38 revolver tucked into his jump boot. Hearing German voices on the other side of a French hedgerow, Wray burst through the brush and shouted, “Hande Hoch!” Confronting him were eight German officers huddled around a radio.
For a pregnant moment, nobody moved. Then seven pairs of hands went up. The eighth German officer reached for his sidearm. 1LT Wray shot the man between the eyes with his M1.
A pair of German soldiers about 100 meters away opened up on Wray with MP40 submachine guns. 9mm bullets cut through his combat jacket and shot away one of his earlobes. All the while Wray methodically engaged each of the seven remaining Germans as they struggled to escape, reloading his M1 when it ran dry. Once he had killed all eight German officers he dropped into a nearby ditch, took careful aim, and killed the two distant Wehrmacht soldiers with the MP40’s.
Wray fought his way back to his company area to report what he had found, blood soaking his ventilated jump jacket. His first question was to ask where he could replenish his supply of grenades. When American forces eventually took the field where Wray had waged his one-man war against the leadership of the 1st Battalion, 158thGrenadier Regiment, they found all ten German soldiers dead with a single round each to the head. Wray had completely decapitated the enemy battalion’s leadership singlehandedly. Wray stopped what he was doing and saw to it that all ten German soldiers were properly buried. He had killed these men, and he felt a responsibility to bury them properly.
Waverly Wray survived the savage fighting in Normandy only to give his life for his country at Nijmegen, Holland, during Operation Market Garden later in the year. He has a granite marker in Shiloh Cemetery in Batesville, Mississippi, near the church he helped build. 1LT Wray was, by all accounts, an exceptionally good man who died six days before his twenty-fifth birthday. Wray died to ensure the blessings of liberty for further generations of Americans.

John Garand’s Rifle

Those who lived it have told me that there was only one M1 rifle and that it wasn’t called the Garand. The .30-06 rifle we call the Garand was the M1, the M1 Carbine was the Carbine, and the M1A1 Thompson was the Thompson. There was always only one M1.
John Cantius Garand was a Canadian-born gun designer who developed the M1 rifle in the early 1930’s. Those who knew him say that old John Cantius pronounced his name differently from the way we do. In his Canadian dialect, Garand rhymed with “Errand.”
Early versions of the M1 were gas trap designs based upon the flawed presumption that ported barrels would wear appreciably faster than the non-ported sort. This same misconception is what drove the Germans to attempt the ill-fated G41 gas trap rifle before settling on the much more reliable piston-driven G43 design. In short order, the M1 was standardized with the familiar gas piston action.

The M1 rifle soldiered on everywhere during World War II from European plains to fetid South Pacific jungles.

5.4 million of the rifles ultimately rolled out of four wartime factories. The M1 served with distinction in all services and in all theaters throughout World War II as well as the war in Korea. The weapon saw fairly widespread issue among ARVN forces early during the conflict in Vietnam as well. An M1 rifle cost the government about $85 during the Second World War. This equates out to around $1,200 today.

If properly maintained the M1 rifle offered a quantum advance in firepower over the bolt-action designs of the day.

Morphology

For all its justifiable accolades, the M1 was a flawed design. The thing weighs about ten pounds and remains exceptionally bulky, even by the standards of the day. The eight-round en-bloc clip is extremely difficult to fill by hand, and the gun is nearly 44 inches long. Ammunition typically came issued in these disposable spring steel clips. However, early in the war troops frequently had to fill their clips manually from ammo that was packed on single stack five-round Springfield clips, something that was all but impossible to do under pressure.
Despite its few warts, the M1 represented a quantum advance in firepower when compared to the bolt-action repeaters in common service at the time. Interestingly, there are anecdotal accounts of some old school soldiers trading their M1s for bolt-action 1903 Springfields early in the war in the Philippines out of distrust of the autoloading action. However, it did not take long for troops on both sides of the line to come to respect the prodigious firepower of the M1.

Practical Tactical

The M1 rifle was a big, heavy, bulky beast, but it was also reliable, accurate, and rugged. Generations of GIs came to adore the gun.

The M1 sports a unique manual of arms. The safety is a pivoting tab in the front of the trigger guard that soldiers on in modern Springfield Armory M1A rifles today. This design is comparably accessible with either hand. The rigid charging handle reciprocates with the bolt and can be manhandled or even kicked if the action gets gummy.
To put the gun into action you retract the bolt until it locks to the rear automatically. Place a loaded 8-round clip in place in the action and press it down with the thumb until it locks. The bolt will then snap shut of its own accord. One must be fairly quick to snatch the thumb out of the way lest it gets badly pinched. Troops of the day described the resulting painful injury as “M1 Thumb.”

The M1 rifle fed from an 8-round en bloc clip. This means the clip becomes part of the action when loaded into the rifle.

The M1 will fire eight rounds as fast as the trigger can be cycled. On the last round fired the action locks open and the empty clip ejects out the top making a distinctive metallic springing sound in the process. Much hay has been made that this sound might signal to the enemy that the weapon is dry. The World War II combat veterans with whom I have visited discounted this concern. They said this sound was typically lost in the bedlam of battle.

The safety on the M1 is a pivoting tab located in the front of the trigger guard. It is comparably accessible with either hand. The rigid charging handle reciprocates with the bolt.

Denouement

When I was a young buck you could get beautiful M1 rifles through the mail for $165 from the DCM delivered straight to your door. Alas, I didn’t have $165, and the paperwork requirements seemed unduly onerous. I did ultimately land a high-mileage DCM M1 some years later for a good bit more than that. My M1 sports a meticulously repaired crack to the upper handguard and the stigmata of hard use. I love the gun and would not trade it for a specimen that was new in the box. Like Waverly Wray and the other hard men who wielded these old guns to defeat tyranny around the globe, my M1 rifle has character.
A friend who landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, summed up an Infantryman’s relationship to his primary weapon better than I ever could. He once told me that for nearly a year some part of his anatomy was touching that rifle. Whether he was patrolling, sleeping, shaving, or crapping, he kept that M1 rifle close at hand no matter what.
The M1 is an innately accurate and imminently reliable battle arm. It is not unstoppable, nor does it shoot divinely straight. However, the design certainly earned the respect and legendary status it has gained over the decades. Big, fat, heavy, and mean, the M1 was a gun that quite literally saved the world.
Special thanks to www.worldwarsupply.com for the replica gear used to outfit our period paratrooper.

Technical Specifications

M-1 Garand Rifle
Caliber                            7.62 x 63 mm/.30-06 in
Weight                           9.5 lbs
System of Operation       Gas—Semiautomatic
Length                            43.6 in
Barrel Length                  24 in
Feed                               8 round en bloc steel clips
Sights                             Protected Front Blade and Adjustable Rear Aperture
____________________________________ Some more stuff I found out about this Stud of a man!
Picture of

*DISTINGUISHED SERVICE CROSS Citation:
The President of the United States takes pride in presenting the Distinguished Service Cross (Posthumously) to Waverly W. Wray (0-1030110), First Lieutenant (Infantry), U.S. Army, for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy while serving with Company D, 2d Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82d Airborne Division, in action against enemy forces on 7 June 1944, in France. While his platoon was engaged in a heavy fight with the enemy, First Lieutenant Wray, completely disregarding his own safety, crawled under devastating machine gun fire and although wounded, fought on until he had destroyed two enemy machine gun positions. Returning to his platoon he reorganized it and, securing a re-supply of ammunition, led it in a successful attack upon the enemy. Only after he had driven the enemy from his platoon sector did he accept first aid for his wounds. First Lieutenant Wray’s valiant leadership, personal bravery and zealous devotion to duty at the cost of his life, exemplify the highest traditions of the military forces of the United States and reflect great credit upon himself, the 82d Airborne Division, and the United States Army.
Headquarters, First U.S. Army, General Orders No. 51 (1944)
*SILVER STAR
Rank: 1st Lieutenant (Lieutenant)
Unit: Executive Officer Company D, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division “All-American”, U.S. Army
Details: Citation unavailable.
*PURPLE HEART
Rank: 1st Lieutenant (Lieutenant)
Unit: Executive Officer Company D, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division “All-American”, U.S. Army
RIDDER VIERDE KLASSE DER MILITAIRE WILLEMS ORDE (MWO.4)
Rank: 1st Lieutenant (Lieutenant)
Unit: Executive Officer Company D, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division “All-American”, U.S. Army
Awarded on: October 8th, 1945
Action: For having distinguished himself during the fighting by the 82nd Airborne Division in the area around Nijmegen between September 17th and October 4th 1944 by having performed outstanding deeds of courage, tact and loyalty and having repeatedly displayed outstanding devotion to duty and great perseverance and in all respects having set a praiseworthy example to all in those illustrious days during which he lost his life.
Details: Royal decree no.31 Awarded posthumously.