It Looked Good on Paper

by Bill Fawcett

  Additionally, the area just outside the harbor mouth had been declared off limits to submerged submarines—any American sub traveling there would do so on the surface. At least one destroyer constantly patrolled outside of the harbor, and she was authorized to fire upon any submerged sub discovered in that off-limits zone. Additionally, patrol planes, such as twin-engine PBYs, flew over the area and, like the ships, carried live depth charges, and were authorized to use them against any potential targets.

  As it turned out, a pair of minesweepers emerged from the harbor at about 0345, and observers aboard one, the Condor, spotted something that they suspected was a submarine. The patrolling destroyer, the USS Ward, raced to the scene and opened fire with her deck gun and depth charges. The submarine was spotted at or just below the surface, and a direct hit was reported. Even before dawn fully brightened the sky, word of the hostile encounter began, oh so gradually, to filter its way up through the channels of the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet command.

  The Ward ended up having a very busy morning, spotting and attacking several other suspicious targets. Observers aboard the supply ship Antares also reported submarine sightings, and a second destroyer, the USS Monaghan, steamed out of the harbor to join in the hunt. She, too, depth bombed submarine targets. A number of these attacks resulted in oil slicks and even some debris, strongly suggesting that the sailors were attacking more than phantom targets.

  Of course, no one made the connection between the underwater infiltration and the potential for a massive air attack winging down on the island from the aircraft carriers located nearly 200 miles to the north. By the time the seriousness of the attacks became clear, bombs and torpedoes were raining down on the port from the skies.

  It has been the conventional viewpoint of history that the IJN midget submarine attacks at Pearl Harbor were a complete failure. None of the little craft returned to rendezvous with the mother ship. Only one of the ten crewmen survived, and his ship had been sunk without getting off a torpedo; he was captured without a fight, dazed and half-drowned after he washed up on an Oahu beach. Furthermore, the viewpoint of the naval aviators appeared to have been vindicated—the submarines were discovered before the surprise attack, and only American complacency and lack of imagination served to prevent a general alarm being raised throughout the Pacific Fleet.

  There was an attempt in Japan to portray the submariners as heroes, and even a claim that it had been a midget sub, not air attack, that destroyed the battleship Arizona. The claim was patently false, and served only to irritate the fliers who knew that they had blown up the great ship. After the war, both American and Japanese historians concluded that the midget subs had been a misguided and unsuccessful effort.

  This conclusion remained essentially unchallenged until 1999. At that time, five U.S. naval officers employed modern digital photo analysis to examine a photograph of the harbor taken by a Japanese pilot at the height of the attack. The officers found conclusive indications that one midget submarine was in fact within the harbor, and that it fired both of its torpedoes. They further concluded that one of these torpedoes struck the USS West Virginia, and the other hit the USS Oklahoma—two of the eight battleships that were damaged or destroyed during the attack.

  Sometimes, an idea which looks good on paper, but seems bad in execution, can turn out not to be such a terrible plan after all.

  “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

  —Voltaire

  A Very Low-tech Firebomb Campaign

  Douglas Niles and Donald Niles, Sr.

  World War II got off to a slam-bang start for the Japanese. With the empire’s army bogged down in an unwinnable war in China, the Imperial Japanese Navy took the bull by the horns. Beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor that destroyed the United States Navy’s battleship fleet, the IJN swept to victory after victory—for about six months. The Battle of Midway changed all that: the Japanese aircraft carrier fleet was destroyed, and the inexorable might of the (mightily aroused) American military machine began its relentless advance toward the home islands.

  Even before Midway, however, American air power inflicted a grievous propaganda blow against Japan, when General James Doolittle led sixteen B-25 bombers from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet. Flying alone or in pairs over Tokyo and a few other cities, the bombers dropped four five-hundred-pound bombs each—a pittance by comparison to the loads carried by heavy four-engine bombers—on selected targets. Damage and casualties were negligible, and many of the planes and crewmen were lost on the mission. But to the proud Japanese military, the effrontery of this raid was intolerable. As early as 1942, they began to search for ways in which the air war could be returned against the American population.

  Meanwhile, in the latter half of 1942 and throughout 1943, the war continued to go badly for Japan. Combining the pressure of naval superiority, the ability to land large armies at positions of their choice, and a steadily growing strength of air power, the Americans closed in on Japan. Submarines cut the island nation off from the resources in its far-flung empire, ambitiously termed the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” By 1944, bombers based in China were making sporadic, and costly, raids against the home islands.

  To combat this wave of modern warfare, the Japanese concocted one of the strangest strategic weapons to appear during the twentieth century. Constructed out of four plies of paper, filled with hydrogen, and carrying something like fifty pounds of explosives, they were balloons. Launched from the northernmost home island, Honshu, the balloons were sent aloft into the newly discovered jet stream, where they were intended to be carried across the Pacific Ocean in about four days. After that time, a fuse was set to ignite the explosives. It was hoped that the resulting blasts would ignite huge forest fires in the vast woodlands of the Pacific Northwest.

  Nicknamed Fugu, after the deadly Pacific puffer fish, the balloons were launched beginning in autumn of 1944. The first inkling the Americans had of the plan came when the crew of a coast guard patrol boat pulled a mass of gummed paper, attached to something that looked like a bicycle wheel, from the ocean waters off the coast of California. They began to appear with increasing frequency over the winter and spring of 1944–45.

  There is no record that a Fugu ever actually started a forest fire. The deadliest encounter with the bizarre weapon occurred in May 1945, when an Oregon woman accompanied by five children discovered one of the devices on a hillside during a Sunday afternoon picnic. The resulting explosion killed all six of them, and horrified dozens of onlookers.

  The War Department immediately clamped a veil of secrecy over the balloon bombs, successfully preventing any widespread panic. At the same time, the military began posting observers and anti-aircraft guns along the coast. There was some fear that the explosive balloons presaged a more sinister attack, possibly including a biological agent designed to create some kind of plague. By the end of the war, some 17,000 military personnel were engaged in the effort to detect and destroy the approaching balloon bombs.

  Eventually, about 9,000 Fugu were launched into the jet stream. It is not known how many of them survived the ocean crossing, but estimates suggest that as many as 1,000 made it to North America. American records indicate that only about 30 of them were intercepted and shot down. About 100 were discovered on the ground before the end of the war. Since then, some 150 more have been found, scattered in sites from as far north as the Yukon Territory to as far south as Mexico.

  Nobody knows how many of them are still out there, in the deserts, mountains, and forests of the American West. One can only hope that the fuses and explosives are less deadly now than they were during the war, sixty years ago, in which they floated so gently and futilely toward battle.

  “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

  —Albert Einstein

  Nuclear Nonsense

  Bill Fawcett

  Wi
th two nuclear blasts marking the end of World War II, anything atomic had great appeal to the military. Since the Navy and Air Force had bombers and so were nuclear armed, the Army was constantly looking for suitable atomic weapons for their own armory.

  The M-65 Atomic Howitzer

  This gigantic 280mm gun was nicknamed “Atomic Anne.” In 1951, it was capable of firing an atomic shell up to seven miles. What it was not capable of doing was moving. The gigantic weapon required an equally large carriage—in this case one that weighed in at eighty-eight tons. Moving the M-65 was difficult and slow. To move it off a road, you had to bulldoze a new road. Setup took a long time and firing, still longer. Larger even than most railroad guns in World War II, this howitzer was just too huge. If you placed it close enough to hit a serious target, then it was likely to be overrun by the enemy. Eventually the army agreed, and the entire career of the M-65 consisted of one test firing.

  Project Pluto

  Not to be outdone in creating new and amazing atomic weapons, the Air Force in 1957 began to develop a mach 3 nuclear missile using a fission engine that, in theory, could travel all the way around the world to hit one target. Powered by an atomic engine, the Pluto could stay aloft flying for months carrying a number of hydrogen bombs. The amazing reactor also turned out to be an amazing problem. It was not so bad that the reactor tended to leak. What was worse was that the exhaust of the rocket was filled with radioactive particles. Just flying around guarding a country would do it more harm in the long run than the Pluto’s bombs might do to the enemy. Only after significant expense did good sense prevail and Project Pluto was cancelled.

  The Davy Crockett

  In a way, from its very conception, the Davy Crockett Nuclear Bazooka was a classic military joke. The weapon was designed to fire a nuclear warhead a distance of 400 to 600 meters. The joke came because the blast of the atomic warhead had a lethal radius of about 350 meters, or just over 1100 feet. It was quite possible to fire this weapon correctly and actually still be in the blast zone of the warhead. And yet, this weapon was actually put into production in 1962 and almost 400 were issued to troops. A desperation—read suicide—move, the weapon was only useful if you were going to be overrun, as was the fear in 1962, by hordes of Russian tanks crossing into Europe. Fortunately none were ever used.

  The highly secret weapons system did have one real distinction: it was a movie star. While still being classified top secret, some Davy Crocketts were deployed to Okinawa and, somehow, one Crockett, firing a standard warhead, appeared in a Godzilla movie. This was perhaps the only time it was fired in battle—well, sort of a battle….

  “Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?”

  —Solomon Short, a cartoon character created by R. Crumb

  The Holy Grail of Firearms

  Paul A. Thomsen

  The M-1 Rifle was a marvel of early twentieth century weapons technology. Developed by Canadian-born John Garand and adopted by the United States Army in 1936, the rifle weighed eleven pounds, held an eight-round clip, could withstand an awful lot of punishment, and, by the end of the Second World War, had become an American infantryman’s preferred weapon for dealing death at a distance.

  Shortly after the Korean War, the army leadership realized they would need a replacement for the M-1. But the procurement board didn’t want just any weapon. They wanted another Holy Grail of weapons technology, and designed review guidelines and test parameters that would ensure their new perfect weapon would be a boon to every future fighting man of the United States military. They believed they had found their perfect weapon in the Springfield M-14 rifle.

  As World War II veterans later attested, the M-1 was sturdy, reliable, offered semi-automatic firing, an ejectable “en bloc” clip, and, in a trained set of hands, a highly accurate kill zone to within 460 meters. With other nations fielding small arms with larger clips and the advent of submachine, the M-1 underwent periodic minor modifications (including a fully automatic firing capability) to keep pace with new demands. But, even with the changes, the rifle could not keep up with modern military advances. After Korea, the search for a replacement began in earnest.

  During the early Cold War, the army largely took a liking to the M-14, believing it the most likely successor to the M-1. But the model did not please everyone. Improvements had to be made before they would officially authorize the weapon for mass production. What followed was a long process designed to find the perfect fighting weapon.

  With the Russians widely fielding the AK-47 Kalashnikov, many in the army advocated their new weapon’s “spray and pray” form of fire, but a few more traditional military thinkers favored a continued emphasis on marksmanship. Many remembered the controversy which had erupted in the late 1920s and 1930s over the redesigned ammunition capability of the M-1 from a .276 caliber round to a .30-06 caliber round to meet budgetary restrictions in support of the army’s stockpiled World War I ammunition. Budgetary allocations and underutilized stockpiles aside, most studies of World War II combat units showed that the average wartime soldier was reportedly reluctant to open fire on an enemy, but once the firing had begun, the soldier’s training and instincts took over, propelling him to retain an aggressive posture. The Pig and Goat Boards (named for their preferred choice of animal test targets) argued the point tirelessly until an outside element, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) weapons protocols essentially made the decision for them.

  The M-14 would carry standard NATO ammunition.

  Next, they discussed weight and fire capabilities. Ironically, much as they loved the M-1, everyone agreed the rifle had been way too heavy. Hence, any successor to the M-1 needed to weigh no more than seven pounds. Unlike the original M-1 design, their new weapon had to be capable of selective semiautomatic and automatic fire from day one. After nearly a decade and a half of testing, evaluating, changed parameters, retooling, and more testing, the army set its eyes on another Springfield Armory model, the M-14 rifle, as the ideal future small arms weapon. Like its predecessor, it was sturdy and reliable, but it was also lighter than the M-1.

  There was, however, one drawback. By demanding a lighter weapon, the army had made room for a new flaw. While debate over the type of ammunition had been settled by agreements with NATO (the ammunition adhered to the new NATO-compliant 7.62 round), soldiers repeatedly struggled to hold the experimental M-14s on their targets when firing at full-auto. It was like trying to restrain a large starving wild animal looking at a herd of plump slow-moving prey; it could, indeed, bring down any one of the herd, the question remained which one and how many passersby it would also kill in the process. That problem was eventually solved by the addition of a pistol grip near the trigger and a second retractable grip further up the barrel, which allowed the soldier to hold the weapon on target more easily.

  The debate and retooling of the M-14 over the weapon’s finer points continued to rage several years longer, but by 1961, it looked like the army had finally succeeded in crafting the perfect successor to the M-1…that is, until Washington politics got into the mix.

  Appointed Secretary of Defense by President John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara had been tasked with reining in military expenditure. Since taking office, his no-nonsense, curt business style had not won him many friends in the Pentagon and, when his office reevaluated the now fifteen-year-long M-14 development project, many in the army liked him even less. In their pursuit of a new ideal weapon, the military had expended way too much time for the defense secretary’s liking. Instead of rubber-stamping the project for rapid production and wide dispersal to American soldiers throughout the world, McNamara effectively killed the project when he chose a less well-tested and developed weapon, the AR-10 by ArmaLite. Originally rejected by the army in the late 1950s, the ArmaLite rifle had been shopped around to Asian mark
eters (who preferred lighter-framed weapons) and had been picked up by Air Force General Curtis LeMay for his small number of sentries and pilots when the AR-10 caught McNamara’s eye. It was light, capable of full-automatic fire, and best of all, it was cheap.

  In one fell swoop, political expediency trumped experience in choosing the successor to the M-1. But there would be dire ramifications in the defense secretary’s last-minute choice. While new recruits at home were being trained with the AR-10, renamed the M-16, the soldiers using the weapon in combat were already discovering its deadly flaws. By 1962 veteran soldiers touring Vietnam complained that their newly issued M-16s often jammed in combat situations. Inspectors sent to investigate the problem found corroded rifles and heavily pitted barrels caused by exposure to the tropical climate and poor weapons maintenance. Worse, the lubricant bought to maintain the weapon’s theater functionality was substandard. Worse still, in looking back over the history of the weapon, it was discovered that the M-16 had performed comparably to its field tests with the M-14, that it exceeded the M-14 in its ability to spray a target, but that it had never been designed to function in a jungle environment.