September 9: A block of ice in Kyiv

"After the initial invasion [of Ukraine in 2022], a military operation that uses music, painting, and sculpture for "cognitive defense" put a life-sized iron heart in downtown Kyiv. The heart was cut out of a rusting steel plate and encased in a block of ice. Since it was winter, the ice would not melt on its own; only human hands could do that. People gathered around and put their hands on it for as long as they could stand and, person by person, day by day, the Ukrainian people melted the block of ice. I'm not a military man, but I would say that any country capable of thinking like that will be a tough country to defeat." -- Sebastian Junger on Substack

Read my earlier musings

The Marshall Plan saved Europe

It all began with Greece. At Yalta, in the now wartorn Crimean Peninsula, President Roosevelt and (reluctantly) Prime Minister Churchill promised Comrade Stalin a free rein in Eastern Europe, condemning millions of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Bulgarians to two generations of Soviet slavery. Southern Europe, however, was still up for grabs when the war ended, and it was the British Army keeping a Communists insurgency from taking over. Britain however was broke. Luckily for the Greeks, and for Western Europe, Harry Truman was a very different man than Roosevelt. In 1947 he promulgated a Truman Doctrine that put southern Europe in the American sphere of interest, to be followed by a Marshall Plan to finance European recovery. Read about it in the Warbird's Book Club.

Ed Overend recalls his year with the AVG

When he came back to the US in the summer of 1942, it seems that Ed Overend worked for a while at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach or Santa Monica CA as a test pilot. While there, the company magazine interviewed him about his year with the AVG. Read it here.

And the useful idiots still celebrate Chinese communism

For more than thirty years now, I've had a Google search looking for references to the Flying Tigers, and hardly a month goes by that it doesn't pop up a mention of how the American Volunteer Group and their descendants love the China and the CCP. It's all bullfeathers, of course. For more, see the Annals of the Flying Tigers.

See my review in the Warbird's Book Club.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford. Support Ukraine by contributing to Razom (a tax-deductible US-based charity). Or its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

And welcome to the Warbird's Forum!

Here are a thousand or so files about the the planes, pilots, and warfighters of the past hundred years, grouped under these headings: