Command Posts

Salute: The Real Old Breed—Elmo “Pop” Haney

Thurman Miller — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:23:15 +0000

Some men go to war only because they're ordered to under penalty of imprisonment, others because their love of country outranks their sense of self-preservation.

During my time in the Marine Corps, I came to know a few who were born soldiers, who thrived on the sense of order and family the Corps provided. Sergeant Elmo "Pop" Haney was one such man.

If he'd not been real, Haney would have made an irresistible fictional character. As is, he has been featured in several books about Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu, as well as HBO's The Pacific miniseries. He was a Fifth Marine veteran who’d served in France—and at the infamous Belleau Wood—and kept returning for more. After World War I, he was discharged from the Marines and reportedly tried teaching school and selling vacuum cleaners back in Arkansas—both occupations I have difficulty picturing him in—before reenlisting in his old outfit.

I first got to know him during our division's training in Cuba in 1940.

Salute: COL Frank Goettge and the “Lost Patrol”

Thurman Miller — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:11:16 +0000

Soldiers leave a part of themselves behind on every battlefield. That's the cost of making war—and not just in its physical toll, the pain in a phantom limb or the diseases that may lie dormant for years before rising up to take their silent, fatal opportunity. Nor is it the inevitable loss of innocence that comes from killing a man for the first time.

No, larger forces are at work here; and on this Memorial Day I have only to close my eyes and I'm there once more, in the hellish heat of the South Pacific, leaving behind my youth, my closest friends, my health, and, when I think of Frank Goettge, something more, something that took me many years to comprehend.

“The Great Goettge” was a rising star, a legendary football hero and Marine Corps Intelligence officer with assignments ranging from China to Haiti to the White House. I've always thought he could have been president one day—except for one fateful day, on Guadalcanal.

Living Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Philip F. Napoli — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:12:15 +0000

The idea of a living memorial has been around since at least World War I, and the purpose behind such memorials is to do or produce something useful.

Such an undertaking is not new for Anthony Wallace. Raised in the Cornerstone Baptist Church as a leader, made a noncommissioned officer in the Army, and ordained a church deacon at age twenty- two, Wallace has always been a teacher. He took on this role from virtually the moment he returned to the United States. After being released from the hospital, he recalls:

I sat down and wrote a letter. This is in the summer of 1970. I wrote to President Nixon and told him who I was. I gave him my name, my rank, and I said that I was in Vietnam at such and such a time, point A to point B, and wounded on this day. In other words, trying to give them enough credence to know that, hey, you know, I’m no phony. This is the truth . . . that there were three other people who were in the bunker [and were killed]. And I was able to give two names. Pepe’s name— I didn’t know his full name. They could not find anything on Pepe. President Nixon, the White House, wrote a letter back and said, “Your request has been referred to the Department of the Army.”

I wanted the name and address of the next of kin. I get Thurman Wolfe, and I get William Di Santis; I get their next of kin. I sat down and wrote a letter to the families and told them who I was and that I was with their sons. Wolfe’s parents or mother— they were from Robeline , Louisiana. I had pictures of Wolfe, a couple of pictures just like this, and I sent them. And the neighbors advised her don’t write [back] to him, he’s probably looking at trying to get your insurance money. So she wrote me and said please don’t write back.

One day, I get a letter from Aurora, Illinois, and I open the letter and it said, “I prayed to God for somebody like you. You did not put your telephone number in your letter. When you get this letter, you call me, even if you have to call collect.” That was Bill DiSantis’s mother. And I called her as soon as I finished reading the letter, and she said to me again, “I prayed to God for somebody like you.”

Earth Afire

Orson Scott Card — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:21:54 +0000

One hundred years before Ender's Game, the aliens arrived on Earth with fire and death. This is the story of the First Formic War.

Victor Delgado beat the alien ship to Earth, but just barely. Not soon enough to convince skeptical governments that there was a threat. They didn’t believe that until space stations and ships and colonies went up in sudden flame.

And when that happened, only Mazer Rackham and the Mobile Operations Police could move fast enough to meet the threat.

Fans of Ender's Game will thrill to Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston's Earth Afire.

The Highest Scoring Female Air Ace of All Time: Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak

Bill Yenne — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:40:58 +0000

Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak disappeared in the skies over Ukraine in 1943 at the age of twenty-one, thought to have been ambushed and shot down.

Using recently uncovered information, diaries, and operational histories, author Bill Yenne reveals the colorful story of the twenty-one-year-old woman with a lily painted on her airplane, who earned the nickname "The White Rose of Stalingrad" from her German opponents, and who became an ace, a folk heroine, and eventually a martyr in the struggle to turn the tide of the war.

Prologue to D-Day

Rick Atkinson — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:01:15 +0000

A killing frost struck England in the middle of May 1944, stunting the plum trees and the berry crops. Stranger still was a persistent drought. Hotels posted admonitions above their bathtubs: “The Eighth Army crossed the desert on a pint a day. Three inches only, please.” British newspapers reported that even the king kept “quite clean with one bath a week in a tub filled only to a line which he had painted on it.” Gale winds from the north grounded most Allied bombers flying from East Anglia and the Midlands, although occasional fleets of Flying Fortresses still could be seen sweeping toward the Continent, their contrails spreading like ostrich plumes.

Nearly five years of war had left British cities as “bedraggled, unkempt and neglected as rotten teeth,” according to an American visitor, who found that “people referred to ‘before the war’ as if it were a place, not a time.” The country was steeped in heavy smells, of old smoke and cheap coal and fatigue. Wildflowers took root in bombed-out lots from Birmingham to Plymouth—sow-whistle, Oxford ragwort, and rosebay willow herb, a tall flower with purple petals that seemed partial to catastrophe. Less bucolic were the millions of rats swarming through three thousand miles of London sewers; exterminators scattered sixty tons of sausage poisoned with zinc phosphate, and stale bread dipped in barium carbonate.

American Warrior, Back in the Fight, The Guns at Last Light, Time to Kill, The Military Quotation Book

CommandPosts — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:29:39 +0000

Command Posts is pleased to announce the May 2013 giveaway.

Click here to enter.

American Warrior: The True Story of a Legendary Ranger by Gary O'Neal, with David Fisher (hardcover, read an excerpt)

Back in the Fight: The Explosive Memoir of a Special Operator Who Never Gave Up by Joseph Kapacziewski, with Charles Sasser (hardcover, read an excerpt)

The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 by Rick Atkinson (hardcover)

Time to Kill: A Sniper Novel by Jack Coughlin, with Donald A. Davis (hardcover, read an excerpt)

The Military Quotation Book, Revised for the 21st Century: More Than 1,100 of the Best Quotations About War, Leadership, Courage, and Victory by James Charlton (hardcover)

VE Day Dawns: May 8, 1945

Martin Gilbert — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:23:25 +0000

At one minute past midnight on Tuesday, May 8, VE-Day, so long awaited, began.

While Churchill worked on the final text of his victory statement, Stalin made one last effort to postpone the announcement of the Allied victory until May 9, Pravda's May 7 report about atrocities at Auschwitz was being circulated, and the eyes of the world turned toward the Pacific, where the fight against the Japanese continued.

The Battle of the Coral Sea, May 1942: The First Carrier Battle

Mark Stille — Mon, 06 May 2013 13:19:33 +0000

The Battle of the Coral Sea was among the most important of the Pacific War.

It is the first battle in which enemy fleets never came within sight of one another. Instead, aircraft launched from carrier decks were sent out to attack the enemy with bombs and torpedoes.

In May of 1942, the Japanese fleet moved on Port Moresby, the last Allied base between Australia and Japan. Forced to respond, the Americans sent two aircraft carriers to protect the base.

In the ensuing battle, one American carrier was destroyed and the other severely damaged. However, the Japanese also lost a carrier and decided to withdraw.

Although bloody, it proved to be an important strategic victory for the Allies as the Japanese were forced to attempt future attacks on Port Moresby over land—and it had a major impact on the most decisive naval clash in the Pacific War, the battle of Madway, fought less than a month later.

Portrait of a Ranger as a Young LRRP Warrior in Vietnam

Gary O'Neal — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:40:48 +0000

There were no other units in Vietnam like the LRRPs. In fact, you probably had to go back to the American Revolution and the Civil War to find small units fighting a guerrilla war in enemy territory. The big problem was that when we went into Vietnam we were not prepared to fight a guerrilla war. We were still training troops to fight big, static battles like in World War II and Korea. I believe that if we’d turned the combat responsibility over early to Special Forces–type units and kept the big army out of the fight, the outcome might have been completely different. A big if.

There were some people who figured out right away that to fight this enemy we needed to put small, highly mobile reaction forces on the ground. After the Herd first got there in 1965 Commanding General Ellis W. Williamson realized “small units could get out and get information much better than large search-and-destroy type operations.” He called them Delta Teams.