7 December 1941

I remember 7 December 1941 vividly–“A dastardly attack…” We were shaken, afraid for our future, and gloom suffused throughout the populace. We knew that the war with the Empire of Japan was en route–just not where or when they would strike,
The attack and sinking of our gunboat “USS Panay” in the Yangtze in December 1937 was the Japanese initial gambit. (See my page on Amazon Kindle for details.)
It’s inconceivable that Marshall Admiral Isioroku Yamamoto, IJN, would fail to target our massive petroleum farm and comprehensive ship repair facilities at Pearl Harbor—critically important strategic targets.
Also is the conundrum that he targeted our obsolete battleships (some from World War I) instead of our modern aircraft carriers at sea close by Pearl Harbor.
I’ve produced a forty-minute video titled “Origins of the Japanese Pacific War 1940s.” Send me an email (sheltoncomm@suddenlink.net) to make arrangements for viewing. I spent a small fortune producing this video, accordingly, a modest fee applies.

My Roman á Clef, The Panay Incident, Now Available on Amazon Kindle

It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon on 12 December 1937. The American gunboat USS Panay plows the slow-moving waters of the Yangtze off Nanking. The Panay patrols China’s rivers to protect American interests in the chaos that engulfs the Middle Kingdom. Today, the Imperial Japanese Kwantung army has fought to the gates of Nanking.

The Japanese bomb explodes dead center atop the Panay’s wheelhouse. Fire, shrapnel, and wood splinters rip into the commanding officer, the OOD, and all others on watch. The second bomb smashes into the quarterdeck. The Japanese aircraft press their assault. Forty-five minutes later, the Panay’s bow dips under the Yangtze’s surface and slowly settles on the riverbed.

Though seriously wounded, Chief Radioman Mathew Marne survives and earns the Navy Cross for his exceptional heroism under fire. As known only by a few, Chief Marne is a naval intelligence agent.

Marne relays details of his now unclassified, special-intelligence assignments across the Far East in the  maw of Japanese aggression before and during World War II; his clandestine activities ashore, his actions in several Pacific sea-battles; his love for a Chinese woman and for a Navy nurse with an attitude.

Note: I was a nipper of eight when the Japanese attacked and sank the USS Panay. I remember the incident well. We saw newsreel images of the attack, read newspaper articles, and discussed among the family and friends if the attack on the Panay was the start of, what we all knew was offing, the opening gambit of the Pacific War with Imperial Japan.

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Read The Panay Incident.

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Book Review – The Women Who Flew for Hitler

Rating – Five Stars

Mulley has penned a dynamite narrative. A page-turner par excellence. It’s superbly written and an easy and engrossing read. She pens an incisive narrative of political Germany post-Treaty-of-Versailles. She couches her narrative in the biographiesof female test pilots Hanna Reitschand Melitta (nee Schiller) von Stauffenberg. Mulley guides us through the inter-war years: the Weimar Republic, the rise of the National Socialist Party (Adolph Hitler, HeinrichHimmler, Herman Goering, et al.), World War II, collapse of the Third Reich, and beyond

We are introduced to Hanna Reitsch, glider champion, test pilot extraordinaire, avid defender of the Fatherland, National Socialism adherent, and friend and confidant of  Nazi leadership including Adolph Hitler.

Melitta (nee Schiller) von Stauffenberg was the daughter of a Jewish father, devoted to and protector of her extended family, a PhD aeronautical engineer, consummate test pilot, ardent defender of the Fatherland, and, sub rosa, an anti-Nazi.

Suffused throughout the narrative are key elements of the womens’ aviation accomplishments, political beliefs, support of the Third Reich, and important associates and friends (especially Reitsch’s). I’ll not review the details to keep this review from becoming a substantial spoiler.

Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg

Nonetheless, do you recognize the family name “von Stauffenberg”? Graf Schenk Claus von Stauffenberg is, perhaps, the most important character in this narrative. Claus was the brother of Melitta’s husband Alexander (Alex).

Operation Valkyrie. On 20 July 1944 Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg entered Hitler’s bunker, dubbed “The Wolf’s Lair,” deep in the forest of East Prussia. Claus placed his bomb-loaded briefcase under the oak table and next to Adolph Hitler. He left the room to answer a conspirator’s telephone call.  The explosion killed four, but amazingly only wounded Hitler superficially. There’s more to this story in Mulley’s book.

Point: The book has no map, a critical gaffe. I recommend that you use a map of pre-war Germany to follow coherently the numerous locations mentioned—essential to fully appreciate the scope of the narrative.

FIN

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Book Review – Steve Canyon, Volume 8, 1961 to 1962

Rating – Two Stars

I opened this eighth volume of my boyhood icon counting on reading thrilling tales of mysterious dames in exotic locales entrapping Colonel Steve Canyon in nefarious schemes, and having their way with him; of Steve exposing malevolent secret agents, deposing corrupt tyrants, and rescuing ravishing princesses from the Soviet’s eeevil KGB. Gadzooks! It was not to be.

In volume eight, I stumbled into eight bland tales of minimal interest, of no import, and more appropriate reading (and viewing) for teenage females. I classify four of his stories as soap operas set in the USA. In one of these, the lead is his brat cousin Poteet Canyon—Steve is absent completely from this yarn. The remaining four stories are insipid “adventure” tales whose bland narratives challenge no one. One story has a hint of the exotic. Set in the Himalaya region of China, Steve’s ol’ nemesis, Madam Lynx, captures him. He escapes, in an unbelievable scenario. Lynx fades into an unknown end—to reappear in another story, I reckon.

Nonetheless, Caniff’s drawings, on the whole, reflect his consummate artistic skills in the “Terry and the Pirate” strips of yesteryear. I much enjoyed viewing some of his frames and marveled at his realistic composition and attention to fine detail.

FIN

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Book Review – Triumph at Imphal-Kohima: How the Indian Army Finally Stopped the Japanese Juggernaut

Rating – Two Stars

Callahan reports on the little known yet profoundly important British India/Japan campaign in 1944. The Imperial Japanese Army launched an invasion of India’s eastern frontier. Streaming out of occupied Burma, the former British crown colony, they achieved initial success and threatened the capture of the key Indian city of Imphal in Manipur State. The Fourteenth Indian Army, under the command of British Lieutenant General William Slim, crushed the invading Japanese and began the conquest of Burma. This Indian Army was composed of revitalized Indian divisions, Gurkha Rifles battalions, and British elements.

Of note is the several-hundred-word account of the Bengal radical Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army, allied with the Japanese.

Unfortunately, Callahan’s account is inept. His narrative is far too detailed for the lay reader, and it’s too befuddling for the military cognoscenti. His failure to include large- and small-scale maps that depict the geography and military movements is an egregious blunder that negates, in large measure, the value of this book. His narrative lacks chronological coherence—the narrative wanders back and forth in time and we do not get a clear understanding of what is happening with who, where, and why. It is repetitive to a crippling fault. It is seriously overwritten—there’s far too much detail that’s irrelevant to the primary story and beclouds the essential points.

The author’s failure to split frequently his text into paragraphs hinders comprehension. Some paragraphs are a page long and others longer. And, frequently, Army element numbers (XIV, for example) suffuse through the pages to an inordinate extent, to the point that they become noise in our reading process. Well-planned tables would have helped clarify this printed din. Images of the key persons would augur well for engendering reader empathy.

I wonder why the editor at the University of Kansas Press did not exercise more control over this narrative. It had the potential to be a much-needed and valuable account of this crucial battle that threatened the East India Company Raj.

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Book Review – Unbroken

Rating – Five Stars

Unbroken is an intensely gripping book. I read page after page after page until my roiling mind demanded that I quit. I could not. Unbroken is a dismaying book. I wanted to toss it into the trash to relieve my emotional distress. I could not. My empathy was too intense.

I continued reading and reading about the horrifying images Hillenbrand penned of the dehumanizing tortures and starvation diets the Japanese guards inflicted on our Allied prisoners of war during World War II. (The war in the Pacific raged from 7 December 1941 to 2 September 1945.)

Her storytelling skills engender intense and disturbing emotions. Perhaps I should note that I am a retired naval intelligence officer and one of my specialties was Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE). I had some experience in Operation Homecoming in early 1970—the repatriation of our prisoners of war from the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam.

Hillenbrand’s gripping narrative of Louis Zamperini (1917 to 2014) is adroitly compelling. Zamperini was a distance runner who ran the 5,000 meter race in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He finished 8^th. As the Pacific War loomed, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and became a bombardier in a Consolidated B24 Liberator squadron. In a search and rescue operation in May 1943, his B24 crashed into the ocean.

Zamperini, Russel Allen Philip, the pilot, and Francis McNamara, waist gunner, survived and drifted in the Pacific in lashed-together rafts for 47 days. I’ll not detail their struggle for survival in this review—suffice to say, their schemes to garner food and portable water were exceptionally innovative. On the 33^rdday, McNamara died. After 47 days, Zamperini and Philip were gaunt and covered with saltwater sores. Their raft drifted onto a small island in the Marshall Islands and Japanese naval personnel captured them. The pair had drifted about 2,000 nautical miles.

I’ll not detail more of Hillenbrand’s narrative. It’s up to you, dear reader. In summary, I do not recommend this book for the “weak of heart.”

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Review – The Romanov Ransom

Two Stars

Clive Cussler wrote an excellent book once. Unfortunately, The Romanov Ransom is not it. This pseudo-roman à clef tome is tedious, formulaic, and outlandish. The plot is so absurdly improbable that it negates any semblance of believability. It fails to engender empathy.

Briefly: in 1918, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark), the mother of Czar Nicholas II, assembles a cache of jewels to ransom her son, the Empress Alexandra, and their five children from the Bolsheviks’ captivity. Unfortunately, the cache is stolen and disappears. Around midnight on 18 July 1918, the Bolsheviks execute the royal family and their retainers—regicide. The plot focuses on the searchers competing to find the missing cache.

I’ve read six or seven Cussler books, and with minor modifications all have the same basic plot. The brave, indefatigable, and infinitely resourceful protagonist pursues, through locations worldwide, outwits, and defeats the eeevil antagonist—in this tome, it’s resurgent Nazis and an unscrupulous international jewel thief. Supporting the protagonist is the loyal, capable, and archetypal sidekick. In The Romanov Ransom, the sidekick is the protagonist’s wife—a dead shot killing the bad guys a bunch. Buttressing the good guy, back at headquarters (or wherever), are folks with in-depth knowledge of what’s needed or access to electronic or mechanical devices that advance the protagonist’s agenda. (In the Cussler books I’ve read, I’ve not found a lead female protagonist.)

Other factors that degrade the credibility of the narrative are that the good guy has a passport that lets him and his cadre travel wherever they want, unencumbered; he has unlimited fiscal resources; can pass weapons of most any caliber through airport screenings, and has associates who always have just the skill needed at the moment. (“Sam invited Sergei, who happened to be fluent in Polish, to come along with them.”) Also, no matter the dire life-or-death situation in which our good guy and his sidekick and/or associates are enmeshed, a deus ex machina, at the last instant, resolves the danger.

What’s unfortunate is that Cussler posits an intriguing plot that could have been developed into a compelling narrative.

FIN

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Review – The Siege of Tsingtau

Four Stars

The Siege of Tsingtau is a professional read. Stephenson threads the narrative with insightful analysis and precise detail that oftentimes are primarily apt for the military historian. Nonetheless, he develops with absolute clarity this little known, yet critically important, battle of World War One with long-range repercussions on the Pacific War of the 1940s.

In the early twentieth century, the Empire of Japan had no pressing quarrel with Imperial Germany. As World War One erupted in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, the quasi-military government of the Land of the Rising Sun seized a golden opportunity and on 14 August 1914 declared war on Deutschland. Japan’s goals were twofold: to counter Germany’s imperialist expansion in the Orient and to capture Germany’s vast central-Pacific empire stretching some 2,300 nautical miles across the ocean. Included were the Caroline Islands, Marshalls, Marianas, Pelews, Maloelap, and others—an area that encompassed all of Micronesia.

Within 86 days, the Imperial Japanese Army had captured Imperial Germany’s Oriental possessions and Pacific Ocean colonies, including the leased German Kiautschou Protectorate on China’s Shantung peninsula and its port city Tsingtau. The Japanese conducted their siege campaign thoroughly, professionally, and, most importantly, effectively. In fairness, the German defenders were naval infantry personnel who were outnumbered in personnel and overwhelmed in equipment and training.

The German East Asiatic Naval Squadron, which consisted of two armored cruisers, the SMS Scharnhorst and the SMS Gneisenau, and four light cruisers, escaped the Japanese naval blockade and steamed toward Germany’s colonies in Micronesia. An Imperial Japanese Navy task force, led by the battle cruiser IJN Shikshim, pursued the escaping German squadron with the ostensible goal of destroying it, thus ensuring safe passage for Allied commerce in the central Pacific.

However, when the Imperial Japanese Navy reached Germany’s Pacific Ocean possessions in the central and southern Pacific, they abandoned the pursuit and let the German squadron sail eastward towards Frederikshavn, their home port.

Japan’s victory secured and expanded its existing political and economic position in the Orient. More importantly, Japan took possession of German Micronesia and established a “Bamboo Curtain” that flanked any line of communication across the central Pacific and prevented passage through the area, all in violation of Japan’s League of Nations mandate. Shortly, the Japanese Imperial Navy began the fortification of key islands, the preliminary phase of their planned Pacific War with the Occidental colonial powers. Such bases included Saipan in the Marianas, Truk, Ponape and the Palau Islands in the Carolines, and Kwajalein, Wotje, and Jaluit in the Marshall—names all too familiar to our Greatest Generation.

FIN

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Review – The Russia Hoax

Jarrett pens a comprehensive review of the Deep State’s inordinate fraud on our Constitution—perhaps the greatest attack on our constitutional republic in the history of our country. He writes in clear and empathetic style. His narrative evolves in a coherent and logical progression that details the conspirators’ skullduggery in an “ABC” type of progression. He cites exactly who violated the relevant federal statute and why and how it was violated. Unfortunately, as of 30 September 2018—the date I’m preparing the review—none of the  miscreants have been indicted even though the documentation of evidence is ponderous.

A cabal of high-ranking government officials in the Barack Obama administration, from the Department of Justice, intelligence community, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and others formed a shadow government—a camorra. Their goals were to insure that the Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, won the 2016 presidential election. Should the Republican candidate win, “God forbid,”  their self-generated insurance policy would form a shadow government with Obama holdovers during the interregnum and into the incoming administration in order to engage in a illegal campaign to have Trump impeached and, failing that, to destroy his presidency—a coup d’état, as it were.

 Leaders of the Deep State and fellow conspirators are

• Barack Obama, ex-President
• Hillary Clinton, ex-Secretary of State and presidential candidate
• John Brennan, ex-national security advisor
• Eric Holder, ex-Attorney General, serving from 2009 to 2015
• Loretta Lynch, ex-Attorney General, serving from 2015 to 2016
• Sally Yates, ex-Attorney General, serving from 10JAN16 to 20JAN16
• Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General
• James Comey, ex-Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Andrew McCabe, ex-Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Peter Paul Strzok, ex-Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Lisa Page, ex-legal counsel to Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
• James Baker, ex-chief lawyer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Robert Mueller, special counsel

Ancillary Actors

• Mike Kortan, ex-Assistant Director for Public Affairs, Federal Bureau of Investigation
• David Laufman, ex-Chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section
• Andres Weismann, deputy special counsel
• Unnamed others

Their first task was to shield Hillary Clinton from a federal indictment, prosecution, and almost sure conviction for her egregious violation of the espionage law—extremely carelessness in handling of Sensitive Compartment Intelligence, and other federal malfeasances. If such were the case, it would ensure the Republican candidate Donald Trump’s victory. At the time, Clinton had a commanding lead in the polls and was a sure winner. Accordingly, these illegal and untoward deeds would remain secret.

There are far too many details to expose in this book review. Nonetheless, following are some of Jarrett’s key comments.

• “New York Times, Cash Flowed to the Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” p. 74.
• “Roughly $25 million poured into the Clinton Foundation,” p. 74.
• “Mueller, Comey, Rosenstein, and Weissman ignored potential crimes involving Russia and (Hillary) Clinton,” p. 81.
• “…Clinton could and should be prosecuted for racketeering,” p. 79.
• “… the Clinton foundation was built on greed and the lust for power and wealth—not charity,” p. 85.
• “… Officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice—their motives corrupt and animated by antipathy for Trump. They were determined to tip the scales of justice and in the process, undermine the (2016) electoral democracy.”
• “It appears there was coordination between the White House (Obama’s), CIA, and FBI at the outset of the (Mueller’s special counsel) investigation.”
• “(The cabal’s) dossier (on President Trump) was salacious and unverified,” p. 156.
  • This dossier was paid for by the Hilton Campaign and the Democrat National Party and developed by a former MI6 agent who detested Trump.
• “Under the law, the content (of a document) dictates its classification, not the markings,” p. 248.
• “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had a conflict of interest so acute that no sincere debate could be waged on whether he should have stepped down,” p. 274.

As the days pass, more and more details of the camorra’s illegal activities are exposed. This attack to undermine our democracy is unparalleled in the history of our republic.

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Review – Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy

Five Stars

Pirro pens a dynamite exposé of the Deep State’s cabal to insure that the consummate liar (New York Times) and inveterate racketeer Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential election. With Clinton as the president, their chicanery would fade and their mischief would continue as normal. To the Deep State’s horror, the outsider Donald J. Trump topped Hillary decisively.

Donald J. Trump, this self-made billionaire, is dedicated to making “America great again” and to draining the swamp of the career politicians and entrenched bureaucrats that suffuse throughout government and whose primary task is to enrich themselves and insure their continued membership in the “good ol’ boys/gals gang.”

There’s no fiction in Pirro’s pithy essay. “Just the facts, Ma’am,” as Joe Friday was wont to say (TV show Dragnet, 1951–59). Judge Pirro was an accomplished prosecutor and a no-nonsense judge in Westchester County, New York. Accordingly, she understands full well and supports assiduously the equal application of law, and she holds as a primary tenet of the law that Madam Justice is blind. Nowadays, she is a commentator on Fox News.

The Deep State includes a host of Poohbah miscreants from former President Barack HusseinObama’s administration. They were leaders in the intelligence community, Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of State: for instance, James Clapper, chairman of the National Security Council; John Brennan, Director of the CIA; James Comey, Director of the FBI; Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General; Sally Yates, former Deputy Attorney General; Loretta Lynch, Attorney General; and Christopher Steel, former British MI6 agent, to name a few.

On Trump’s presidential victory, the Deep State clique, now in extremis, had to engender an alternate scheme. Now they had to unseat our duly elected president to deflect scrutiny from their chicanery to rig the election—lest their malfeasance be exposed and their next ensembles be yellow jumpsuits. In concert with an eagerly accomplice media to spread their agitprop, they waged an intensive, illegal campaign focused on a Kremlin-based, gossip-filled dossier about President Trump’s failings and his extramarital, sexual proclivities. A faction consisting of Comey, Rosenstein, and others committed perjury on presentation of this nonsense dossier to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court(FISA) to obtain a warrant to surveil Donald Trump and his campaign, and to justify Rosenstein’s appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate the president for the alleged crime of collusion with the Russians to rig the election in his favor.

Their unlawful campaign consisted of abuse of power, obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy, and violations of the Espionage Acts. In effect, the Deep State staged a coup d’état. It failed. And now, notwithstanding their continued futile resistance, the details of their corruption are unfolding day by day.

I’ll not go into the details of Pirro’s exposé of this Deep State conspiracy. I do not want to spoil your reading pleasure with “giveaways.” Her narrative is comprehensive, straightforward, and cogent. For those who believe in our constitution, the equal application of justice, and the rule of law, Judge Pirro’s book is a must-read.

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