THE WARBIRD'S FORUM
New & improved for February
The young man on the left--slightly pixilated, I'm afraid,
but I had to enlarge the image from a group photo--is 1st Lt Robert
Klemann, posing in front of his B-25 bomber on July 1943. His story is
a remarkable one. For twenty-odd years I've been collecting information
about the 2nd American Volunteer Group, a bomber force recruited in the
fall of 1941. (Here's more about the 2nd AVG,
and here's a roster of its personnel, or such
of them as I've been able to dig up.) At long last,
out of the blue, and just as I was giving up hope of actually
corresponding with one of them, Bob Klemann emailed me. For the first
time, I'm able to ask questions of a veteran of this short-lived bomber
group. Read his story here.
Osprey has just released the Brewster
Buffalo volume in its colorful 'aircraft of the aces' series.
Brewster F2A Buffalo Aces of World War 2
can be ordered from Amazon.com in the United States
and also of course in Britain,
where Osprey is based. The author is the Finnish historian Kari Stenman,
in collaboration with RAF officer and researcher Andrew Thomas. I'll
have more to say about this when I've had a chance to look it over.
Of course the Finnish Brewster, BW-372, is featured in the text
and photographs. As it happens, the war diary of the Brewster
squadron--LLv 22--has gone online in Finland. Click
here for the account of BW-372's last flight.
In theory, I'm finished with War in the Modern World, at least the variety taught at King's College London. (We read a lot of Colin Gray in the course of our studies, and I read more when researching the thought of John Boyd.) I submitted my dissertation at the end of November: I've published it also in digital form for the Kindle e-book reader, if you have such a thing, and even if you don't: Let the Americans Live in the Village: How would John Boyd have dealt with Osama bin Laden? I've also posted a portion of it here. The takeaway, as the children say: People not equipment win wars! Also, and perhaps more important for the war in Afghanistan: If it works, it's obsolete! There's a lot more, of course, but you'll have to read the whole thing to get that.
This is a remarkably
fine book, in which the Anglo-American war scholar Colin Gray
takes an educated guess at what future warfare will be like.
'It is a rule in strategy,' he writes in one of his piquant declarations,
'one derived empirically from the evidence of two and a half millenia,
that anything of great strategic importance to one belligerent,
for that reason has to be worth attacking by others.' He happens to
be speaking of space, and in particular the American communications
satellites in earth orbit, but as China's recent hacking of American
business sites has demonstrated, the warning is equally true of cyberspace.
We depend on the internet more than most: ergo, the internet is a
particularly inviting target for China, Russia, Iran, North Korea,
Al Qaeda, und so weiter. Eminently worth a read.
Click
here to find it on Amazon.
Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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