97 years ago today, nineteen Allied divisions went over the top in an all out assault on the Somme. When the sun set at the end of the day, 20,000 men lay dead. Another nearly 60,000 were wounded, many stranded in no-man’s land.
Stretcher bearers dared the machine gun fire to bring the fallen back to safety and medical aid, earning two of the nine Victoria Crosses awarded that day. Wounded were recovered for the next seven (!) days from this day’s assault, and then found that there were only 10,000 hospital beds for the 60,000 wounded.
The 1st Newfoundland Regiment had to leave the safety of the trenches 200 yards behind their own front lines, because the closer trenches were choked with dead. The German machine guns mowed them down: the Regiment suffered 90% casualties in minutes. Newfoundland may never have recovered from the loss of so many of its sons.
It was said that day that Lions were led by Donkeys. The ghosts of those lions are seen in this astonishing video from the battle. You see one soldier shot just as he goes over the top. His body slides back into the trench.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
The Somme was perhaps the most stark example of the futility of the Great War. By the end of the battle, a million men were dead or wounded. For this cost, the Allies pushed the front lines six miles towards Germany, a cost of 31 men per foot gained.
This was the day that Europe committed suicide. It’s been a long, slow motion self-immolation, but that is now fair complete. Sic transit Gloria Mundi.
On November 4, 1965, some Vietnamese came across a very strange object that looked as if it had been dropped from the sky. Was it a bomb? Well, it had tail fins and a nose like a bomb. But it was white, and shaped like – a toilet?
It was a toilet in fact. It had been dropped by a VA-25 A-1 Skyraider on a mission to the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam. It had come from Dixie Station, an aircraft carrier base in the South China Sea. The plane’s pilot was CDR Clarence ‘Bill’ Stoddard.
As Stoddard approached his target, he began preparations for attack. He read the ordnance (list of weapons the aircraft carried) to Forward Air Control. At the end of the list, he read ‘and one codenamed Operation Sani-flush.’ What was Stoddard talking about?
US Navy Photo
The story of the toilet drop was told by Captain Clint Johnson, the pilot of another VA-25 A-1 Skyraider. The toilet was a damaged one that was going to be thrown overboard anyway.
But some plane captains decided to rescue it, dress it up to look like a bomb, and drop it in commemoration of the 6 million pounds of ordnance that had been dropped by the U.S. Air Force.
The Air Control team said it made a whistling sound as it came down, and that it had almost struck the plane as it came off. A film was made of the drop using a video camera mounted on the wing.
Just as the toilet was being shot off, Johnson said,’ we got a 1MC message from the bridge, “What the hell was on 572’s right wing?”
There were a lot of jokes with air intelligence about germ warfare. I wish that we had saved the movie film.’
When the Vietnam War began the Douglas A-1 Skyraider, which had been introduced into the U.S. Air Force in 1946, was still being used.
It was a medium attack aircraft based on an aircraft carrier. There were plans to replace the Skyraider with the A-6A Intruder jet-engine attack aircraft.
Nevertheless, Skyraiders participated in the naval attack on North Vietnam on 5th August 1964, as part of Operation Pierce Arrow. They struck enemy fuel depots at Vinh, where one Skyraider was damaged, and another was lost.
By 1973, all U.S. Skyraiders had been transferred to the South Vietnamese Air Force. The A-6A Intruder replaced it as America’s principal medium attack aircraft.
