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A lot of wars get left out of our history books because they left no changes in maps or the balance of power. However, some of these lesser-known wars lasted for hundred of years! There are also declared wars in which no one was killed, and, in the case of the Paraguayan War, hundreds of thousands killed for no apparent reason.
The President of Paraguay, Francisco Solano Lopez, was a huge admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte. He fancied himself a skilled tactician and excellent commander, but lacked one thing, a war. So to solve this problem, in 1864 he declared war on Paraguay’s three surrounding neighbors, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The outcome of the war? Paraguay was very nearly annihilated. It is estimated that 90% of its male population died during the war of disease, starvation, and battles with enemy armies. This was perhaps one of the most needless wars in history since Lopez had almost no reason to declare war on his more powerful neighbors.
Read about ten of these obscure and bizarre conflicts ay Listverse. Link -via The Daily What
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From Delta Force to The Empire Strikes Back, Danger Room skewers eight war films for their inaccuracy, political bias, poor strategy, or all-out cheesiness. Take Rambo III, for example, which did not age well. John Rambo goes to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen who are fighting the Soviets.
This is 1988, back when the exigencies of anticommunism rendered Afghan holy warriors the “good guys.” One of them even refers to the U.S. as “the free world,” bless his heart. Rambo’s Afghan guide recites a graveyard-of-empires aphorism about how invaders would pray, “May God deliver us from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghans.” Rambo translates: “You guys don’t take any shit.” Watching Rambo III in 2011 is awwwwwwwkward.
And not just because of Rambo’s muj-ness. The camp invasion is crazy. Watch the Soviet helicopters overrun their own base while Rambo turns one of the Russkies’ anti-aircraft guns against Ivan. Why do the Soviets have anti-aircraft guns when they’re not facing an airborne threat? Because it’s badass, that’s why! Later in the film, Rambo magically becomes an expert in flying Russian Mi-24 attack helicopters. Must be his faith in Allah.
Videos clips are included; some scenes may be NSFW. Link -via Metafilter
It’s one thing to be a hero who kills hundreds of enemy soldiers in battle, but to become a hero without even using a weapon -now that’s impressive. Cracked has a great list of heroes who fought the good fight without ever handling a gun. Take, for example, Bill Millin who played bagpipes at the battle of Normandy.
So, he ordered his piper, Bill Millin, to go ashore on one of the main landing points for the invasion of Normandy and wail on a set of bagpipes. Once on the beach, Millin calmly walked up and down at the water’s edge, playing while carnage exploded and people died all around him….Millin later talked to some of the Germans who had been captured to ask why they never shot him, and discovered it was because they thought he had gone mad.
The other four fighters are just as impressive.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces.
Before World War II, cartoons with war themes attempted to use humor or satire to sway public opinion. The spread of military newspapers and the inclusion of cartoons as a feature designed to boost morale changed all that.
UP FRONT
Arguably the most well-known of the World War II cartoonists, Bill Mauldin created the characters Willie and Joe, who were depicted as rank-and-file soldiers dealing with the realities of war without sugarcoating that some leaders, including General George S. Patton, would have preferred to see. Mauldin’s caricatures, which began in 1940 when he was an 18-year-old in the U.S. Army’s 45th Infantry Division, were initially published in the division’s newsletter and soon became hugely popular with the soldiers on the front lines. In 1943 Mauldin’s cartoon was picked up by Stars and Stripes and was then distributed domestically by United Features Syndicate as Up Front, thanks in part to the war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who helped bring the cartoons to the attention of the general public.
Bill Mauldin did not attempt to glorify the fighting in any manner; rather, he used wry humor to demonstrate the absurdities of war. For example, to make an exaggerated commentary on the practice of sending increasingly younger soldiers to the front lines, Mauldin showed Willie and Joe in a bunker, reading a notice handed to them by an adolescent dressed in a soldier’s uniform. One says to the other, “I guess it’s okay. The replacement center says he comes from a long line of infantrymen.”
SAD SACK
At the time that he was drafted in the U.S. Army in June 1941, George Baker was a struggling animator on the verge of losing his job with the Walt Disney Company in Los Angeles. Although the war in Europe had been raging for several years, the possibility of the United States entering the war seemed remote to many at the time. Baker and other soldiers went through the motions of their training with little sense of purpose, waiting for their one-year enlistment to be up so they could get on with their lives.
To break up the monotony of Army life, Baker began to create drawings on his own time, attempting to explain pictorially what life was like in the armed forces. After taking his drawings to several New York publishers and being rejected, a despondent Baker put his cartoons away and tried to forget about them. However, a few months later, the armed forces sponsored a cartoon contest for servicemen. Baker decided to enter one of his drawing into the contest -and won first prize. This caught the attention of the editor of the Army’s Yank magazine, Major Hartzell Spence, who secured Baker a position on the Yank’s staff. Baker worked for Yank for the duration of World War II, moving from one training camp to another as a salesman for the magazine while also being exposed to the many facets of Army life, which he then used for the basis of his cartoons.
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Chris Jeon is a 21-year-old college student from Los Angeles. On a whim, he decided to go on vacation by himself -to Libya.
“I just go and see what happens,” he said. “At spring break I told my friends a ‘sick’ vacation would be to come here and fight with the rebels.”
He spent $800 on a one-way ticket from L.A. to Cairo, then traveled by land across the border into Libya, where he has now been for nearly two weeks. His parents do not know he is here. He speaks no Arabic, and has been staying with fighters and families in the area.
“I haven’t spent a dollar in weeks,” he says, because the people of Libya have extended such hospitality.
Jeon plans to be back in L.A. before school starts later this month. Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Kristen Chick)
Have you ever been told that eating carrots will improve your eye sight? Then congratulations, you’ve just been fed propaganda from a very successful, but very silly British propaganda campaign.
During the Battle of Britain, the Germans started noticing that a bunch of their planes were getting shot down in instances where the British shouldn’t have seen them coming. It was almost like they had some sort of radio device that could detect the presence of incoming objects — actually, it was exactly that: Britain had perfected the radar and didn’t tell anyone about it. Obviously the Brits couldn’t let the Germans know they had access to this new technology…British papers published a story about a RAF pilot called John “Cat Eyes” Cunningham who had shot down 20 enemy planes thanks to his superhuman night vision, an ability he achieved by eating lots of carrots.
While carrots are good for your eyes, they can’t actually improve your eyesight and they certainly can’t give you night vision. Even so, many people still believe that munching them down like Bugs Bunny will help them get rid of their glasses all because of a propaganda campaign.
New York Times photojournalist Joao Silva was embedded with the U.S. military in Afghanistan when a land mine blew his legs off last year. Earlier this month, he made his first trip back to New York and gave a speech at the Bronx Documentary Center, in which he explained what happened.
I heard the mechanic click. I knew: this is not good. And I found myself lying face-down on the ground, engulfed in a cloud of dust, with the very clear knowledge that this has just happened and this is not good. I could see my legs were gone, and everybody around me was dazed. I was like, “Guys, I need help here.” And they turned around and saw me on the ground. They immediately sprang into action. I got dragged out of the kill zone, for safety reasons, to a patch of ground a few yards away.
Immediately, there were medics working on me. I picked up a camera, shot a few frames. The frames weren’t very good, quite frankly, but I was trying to record. I knew it wasn’t good, but I felt alive. Adrenaline kicked in. I was compos mentis; I was on top of things. So, I made some pictures. I dropped the camera, then I moved to Plan B, which was to pick up the satellite phone. I called my wife, Vivian, and told her, “My legs are gone, but I think I’m going to live.” Incidentally, I’m a father of two. I passed the telephone on to the correspondent so she could continue the conversation and keep Vivian calm.
Silva also talks about his recovery, the importance of photojournalism in dangerous places, and what he’s learned about the lingering effects of war. A gallery of his photographs accompany the article. Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Joao Silva for the New York Times)
The following is an article from the book History’s Lists from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
During America’s wars, they were considered entertainers more than harbingers of fear to U.S. troops. But sometimes media stars like Tokyo Rose and Hanoi Hannah broadcast strategic information that there’s no way the enemy should have known.
As radio propagandists transmitting from enemy capitals, their job was to undermine the morale of opposing troops in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Uncle John examines the careers of seven infamous enemy broadcasters of the 20th century.
1. TOKYO ROSE
Iva Toguri was born in Los Angeles in 1916 and graduated from UCLA with a zoology degree; she was visiting Japan when war broke out in 1941. She was hardly a household name in World War II -until the name given her by Allied forces in the Pacific made her an international celebrity.
Wartime Activities: Tokyo Rose played American music and used American slang during her 20-minute daily newscast on Radio Tokyo’s “The Zero Hour” while she predicted attacks, identified American ships and submarines, and even peppered her conversation with the names of prominent individuals. Listeners thought she was uncannily accurate, but she had little impact on the offensive juggernaut that first isolated and then defeated Japan.
Postwar: After the war, Toguri was arrested, convicted of treason, and imprisoned; she was released for good behavior in 1956 after serving six years. Upon moving to Chicago, where her family ran a store, she insisted she had always been a loyal American. She claimed that she was forced to make the broadcasts, and Allied POWs who worked with her confirmed her story years later, convincing president Gerald Ford to pardon her in 1977. In January 2006, she received the Edgar J. Herlihy Citizenship Award from the World War II Veterans Committee; she died in September of that year.
2. LORD HAW-HAW
The British gave the nickname “Lord Haw-Haw” to a collection of announcers on the English-language propaganda broadcasts from Hamburg, Germany, during World War II. But it was William Joyce, who claimed to be a British citizen, who came to symbolize Lord Haw-Haw as the chief Nazi sympathizer. Born in the United States and raised in England and Ireland, Joyce was a member of the British Union of Fascists and was about to be arrested when he fled to Germany in 1939.
Wartime activities: From 1939 to 1945, his radio broadcasts to England on the “Germany Calling” program were designed to undermine the morale of the English, Canadian, Australian, and American troops, as well as the citizens of the British Isles. Joyce reported Allied ship losses and planes shot down, and bragged about Nazi secret weapons with the goal of demoralizing the Allies.
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Flickr user Agan Harahap created a great series of images depicting heroes, villains and other pop icons Photoshopped into historical photographs. The result is a funny take on world history filled with icons we all recognize.
Link Via Mental Floss
Comments Off Have you ever noticed that middle school American history classes tend to rush through the War of 1812 in order to get through the Civil War before the school year ends? College Humor imagines what it would have been like if the participants understood the conflict just as well as we do.-via Buzzfeed
You’ve heard the saying, “Freedom isn’t free”? Apparently neither is a Purple Heart. Retired Sergeant Major Rob Dickerson was wounded by a rocket blast in Iraq in 2007. It took years of paperwork for the army to decide that Dickerson had, indeed, been wounded in war. His Purple Heart was delivered with a C.O.D. bill for $21. Dickerson was not pleased.
Dickerson says this is not about him, but other soldiers who may have the same thing happen to them. He says they should get better treatment from the United States Military, especially after laying their lives on the line while serving their country.
“I don’t want you to think I’m whining and complaining, because I’m not, I really don’t want this to happen to another soldier or any service member of the United States, it’s degrading,” Dickerson said.
Dickerson did get an apology and a money order for his out of pocket costs, but he says he couldn’t cash it, because it was made out to Roy Dirksen, not Rob Dickerson.
Traditionally, the Purple Heart is awarded in a ceremony. Link -via Fark
What is war good for? In Peru it may be good for starting an advanced civilization. Archeologists are studying this occurrence to see how war may have been a common factor in the rise of more advanced civilizations.
The Peru of the first millennium BCE was full of smaller groups, but it isn’t until the region endured centuries of war that two large, dominant societies emerged in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca: the Taraco along the Ramis River and the Pukara of the grassland pampas.
It was only a matter of time before filmmaker Freddie Wong tackled the subject of cats. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Freddie Wong video without a lot of gunfire. -via Laughing Squid
With so many boring days sitting around on the base, soldiers are known to relieve the boredom and stress of their jobs by goofing around. Environmental Graffiti has some great photos of these playful occurrences for your viewing pleasure.
The Dickin Medal is a British award given to animals who served faithfully in wartime. Buzzfeed listed the stories of one cat, several dogs and a surprising number of pigeons who were so honored. One of those pigeons was named G.I. Joe.
G.I. Joe was enlisted in the United States Army Pigeon Service and went on to save the lives of the villagers of Calvi Vecchia, Italy, as well as the British troops occupying it. This village was going to be bombarded by Allied forces, but he delivered the message just in time to prevent it. He was awarded the Dickin Medal for gallantry in November 1946.
Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division is a group of World War II heroes you might know from the book or the miniseries Band of Brothers. They fought at the D-Day Invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, and Operation Market Garden, and liberated concentration camps, yet they came home and went on with their lives. No one knew much about what they did until the book came out. But these men gained quite a bit of wisdom from their war experiences, tempered by age, which they gave us in their stories. The Art of Manliness took some of those quotes and made them into a series of awesome motivational posters. Link -via Gorilla Mask
What happens to all of our tanks, planes and ships when the war is over? It seems that a lot of them are left on the battlefield to rust and rot as seen in this interesting collection of photos. See the full gallery at the link.
Clara Kayser-Bril, Nicolas Kayser-Bril and Marion Kotlarski collaborated to create this innocuously named yet truly gruesome infographic called 100 years of world cuisine. The project aims to provide an image to the statistics of the deaths caused by wars:
Ten casualties. Ten million casualties. Our understanding of conflicts is often nothing more than a handful of digits, the more precise, the less meaningful. The anchor’s tone remains the same when talking about major wars or isolated outbursts of violence. The horror lays hidden beneath the rigidity of numbers. Figures give us knowledge, not meaning.
We wanted to put a picture on these digits. A shocking, gory picture, like the reality of war. We wanted to give context, like a scale on which we could visualize each conflict next to the others.
We’re not historians and our choices were, in part, left to our own judgement. It is obviously impossible to display all conflicts. It is also impossible to agree on when or where a conflict starts and ends. Focusing on the death toll should not take our minds away from those who survived through mutilation, exile or rape. This project remains artistic in scope and does not aim at scientificity. It sheds another light and, perhaps, restores meaning.
Link – via fastcodesign
During World War I soldiers relied on horses for transportation on the battlefield. The introduction of chemical warfare at this time meant horses had to be just as protected as their human counterparts so they were fitted with gas masks over their muzzles to prevent them from inhaling poison gases such as chlorine and phosgene.
Link – Via Archie McPhee
The art collective named Dorothy created a series of four “green army men” that reflect the reality of many veterans. The figures represent disability, homelessness, violence, and suicide. The art project, called “Casulaties of War,” is not for sale. Link -via Boing Boing
War- what is it good for? Well, if the Falkland Islands are any indication, it certainly helps penguins.
Rockhopper Penguin (Image credit: Flickr user Marcus Borg)
For several hundred years, human activity on the Falkland Islands -roughly 300 miles of the Argentine coast- threatened its penguins’ survival. But the trend started to reverse in 1982, when Argentina and Britain began duking it out for control of the Falklands. Turns out, a war, a few landmines, and some unstable diplomatic relations might have been just enough to get the penguins back on track.
The Falkland Islands are small. Collectively, the 200-plus islands that make up the Falklands are only about as big as Connecticut. But through the years, they’ve managed to inspire some Texas-sized international contention. Ever since Argentina gained independence from Spain in 1816, it’s been vying for control of the Falklands in one form or another. Some Argentines even claims possession of the region today, even though Queen Elizabeth’s face graces every piece of currency, the Union Jack appears on the official flag, and every other government in the world recognizes British rule over the Falklands. Despire the fact that Argentina famously lost its military bid for control of the islands back in 1982, national polls still show 80 percent of Argentines want their government to take back the Islas Malvinas, as they’re known in the Spanish-speaking nation.
King Penguins (Image credit: Flickr user andym8y)
So what is it the Argentines so jealously covet? Hard to say. The Falkland Islands aren’t home to much, other than about 3,000 humans, 700,000 sheep, and a few fishing installations. What they do have, however, is an enormous population of penguins from five different species -the Southern Rockhoppers, the Magellanic, the King, the Gentoo, andthe Macaroni. Their names derive from, respectively, the ability to hop on rocks, a celebrated circumnavigator, a British ruler, a religious slur, and a slang reference to flashy dressers. With those five species combined, the Falklands are home to to a penguin army more than 1 million strong. That’s pretty impressive, but it’s believed the number was closer to 10 million only 300 years ago.
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On April 12th, 1861, 150 years ago today, the first battle of the US Civil War was fought at Ft. Sumter, in Charleston, South Carolina. Southern states had been seceding from the union for months, but the US still maintained coastal forts.
During the four months leading up to Lincoln’s Inauguration, the seceding states, one after another, seized federal forts, arsenals, and customs houses within their borders.
There was little to oppose the breakaway forces, a caretaker and a guard or two comprising many of the garrisons. Most of the 16,000 or so regular Army soldiers had been posted to the western frontier to protect settlers against the perceived threat from American Indians.
On March 4, 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated, promising the seceding states that he would use force only “to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places” belonging to the federal government.
The stage was set for the inevitable showdown.
National Geographic takes a look back with a rundown of what actually happened on April 12th at Ft. Sumter, and how those actions sent the nation into four years of war and cost more than 600,000 men their lives. Link
(Image credit: Library of Congress)
A veteran of the Iraq War compares his readjustment to civilian life with that of the character Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s semi-autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut wrote of becoming “unstuck in time”, which is a launching point for the science fiction parts of the book, but Matt Gallagher says the feeling is real when you leap from one life to another.
I’ve walked by manholes in New York City streets and smelled the sludge river I walked along in north Baghdad in 2008. I’ve stopped dead in my tracks to watch a street hawker in Midtown, a large black man with a rolling laugh and a British accent, who looked just like my old scout platoon’s interpreter. And I’ve had every single slamming dumpster lid — every single damn one — rip off my fatalistic cloak and reveal me to be, still, a panicked young man desperate not to die because of an unseen I.E.D.
Despite these metaphysical dalliances with time travel the names on my black bracelet are, in fact, stuck in time. Or, more accurately, stuck in memory, where they’ll fade out and disappear like distant stars before becoming shadows of the men we served with and knew.
So it goes.
Link -via Metafilter
Depending on how much you follow the schedule of upcoming movie releases, you may or may not know that MGM was planning to release a remake of Red Dawn on November 24, 2010 (the picture above is from the set). I say “was” because the studio is facing such major financial difficulties that the release has been postponed and the movie may be shelved indefinitely. To make matters worse, the Chinese press got a hold of the leaked script, which was based around a Chinese invasion of America (as opposed to the Soviet invasion in the first movie), and the headlines are not pretty. A few notable newspapers covered the story saying things like, “U.S. reshoots Cold War movie to demonize China” and “American movie plants hostile seeds against China.”
In honor of a movie that may soon join the ranks of many other films that might have been, let’s enjoy some trivia about the original 1984 version of Red Dawn.
Image via g jewels [Flickr]
If you’re one of the many people who think the movie is a pathetic excuse to rally Americans against communists, then you may be surprised to know that the original story was much more intellectual and less action-oriented. Unlike the final version of Red Dawn, the original tale was more like Lord of the Flies, focusing on tensions between the group members and serving to illustrate the aggressive nature of mankind rather than the evils of communist Russia. The story, originally called Ten Soldiers, was also focused on kids who were in their early teens, rather than the older teens featured in the final version.
The cast and crew both had a lot of work ahead of them even before filming started. The actors, which included Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey and Charlie Sheen, were all required to go through an intensive eight-week military-styled boot camp to get them in shape and ready to fight.
Meanwhile, the production crews were tasked with creating realistic weapons and vehicles for the American and Communist forces to use in the film. One of the movies T-72 tanks turned out to be such a perfect replica that the CIA actually dispatched two officers to find out where the Russian tank had come from and what it was doing in LA.
What Happens In Vegas Stays In New Mexico
While the movie is set in Calumet, Colorado, it was filmed mostly in Las Vegas, New Mexico. A rundown Safeway grocery store was used as a sound stage and many scenes were filmed there. Many of the buildings seen in the movie are still standing, with the exception being a 107 year-old historical building that was used for the headquarters of the invaders in the movie. Although it managed to survive being bombed by Wolverines for the purpose of production, it didn’t survive severe thunderstorms in the summer of 2006 and was torn down shortly after.
If you ever thought there was nothing noteworthy about Red Dawn, you’re wrong. Not only did the movie represent the Charlie Sheen’s debut onto film, it also was the first PG-13 movie released in to theaters and the most violent film ever made at the time, according to Guinness. Technically The Flamingo Kid was the first movie to receive a PG-13 rating, but because its release was delayed five months, Red Dawn is largely credited with being the first PG-13 movie ever.
Many parent groups protested the movie, notably The National Coalition on Television Violence, which was shocked by the Guinness Record given to the movie. According to the record, the movie had 134 acts of violence per hour, over two every minute. The Coalition claimed that 1984 had the most violent blockbusters ever released in one summer, as Indiana Jones, Gremlins and Dreamscape also hit theaters that year.
Many critics claimed the film was a fantasyland for war hawks who wanted to use the movie as an excuse to go to war. While the Cold War ended shortly after the movie was released, critics were right in assuming that the military was inspired by the film. When a Hussein disappeared during the Iraq war, the Army set up Operation Red Dawn, and named the targets of the mission Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2. The captain who named the mission, Geoffrey McMurray, said it “was so fitting because it was a patriotic, pro-American movie.”
Politics on Neatorama are pretty divided and can be very heated, so I’m sure many of you have quite different opinions on the movie. So what do you guys think? Do you like Red Dawn? Are you hoping to see the sequel when (and if) it comes out?
Sources: Wikipedia, New York Times, IMDB, Slash Film
The bravest among the brave, some soldiers stand head and shoulders above the rest for war exploits that will make your jaw drop. For example, Audie Murphy’s actions in World War II that won him a Medal of Honor:
Murphy’s unit was down to 19 men out of 128. They couldn’t fight, they needed to rearm, and they needed somebody to hold the line. So Murphy stayed behind, shooting Germans until he ran out of ammo. Then, deciding he wasn’t done killing Germans, he jumped onto a burning tank and starting using its .50 caliber machine gun. He even killed an entire squad of Germans trying to sneak up on him. Oh, and he did this for almost an hour, while wounded in the leg. And then his men showed up, and Murphy led them on a forward action. Translation: after spending an hour in the freezing cold on a burning tank spraying Germans with machine gun fire, he decided that wasn’t enough and decided to get close and personal.
And he is just one of ten soldiers from all over the world listed as the most badass. Link -via Unique Daily
In the beginning, the German U-boats were hardly a threat to the world’s largest naval powers. Even after the U-l’s dreadful collision during its first test during a training exercise, the German engineers stayed hopeful. Germany now had a powerful weapon.
The Lusitania, carrying war supplies for the war effort, had already been warned prior to its maiden voyage. In fact, the German embassy posted a full page advertisement in the New York Times, warning Americans that German U-boats would be in the water and may attack due to the wartime cargo aboard the ship. Against warnings, the Lusitania sailed. On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat, killing close to 1200 people, 124 of which were Americans. Rumors serviced that blamed German U-boats for the second explosion, after the Lusitania was already sinking. Further investigations, however, proved that the explosion was due to the ammunition aboard Lusitania.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
On left: vintage can of South Pacific Export Lager; on right artist/sign-painter, Kaipel Ka next to to one of his painted wooden shields.
When one thinks of heraldry, images of the lion and the unicorn most often spring to mind. In Papua New Guinea, however, beer labels are featured on shields used as protection in battle. Fighting shields had not been used in 50 years but when war broke out between groups in the 1980′s there was a need for them once more. Artist Kaipel Ka uses beer advertising designs on shields he makes for various warring groups. The emblems act like the team colors of sporting groups.
Kaipel’s own explanation of his use of the SP design was that he had been asked by senior men to incorporate a representation of a beer bottle on the shield, to make the point that “it was beer alone which had precipitated this fighting”. (The war followed the breakdown of negotiations for compensation after an inebriated Senglap [clan] man had fallen from a Dange [clan]-owned vehicle.) Rather than including a picture of a beer bottle, Kaipel decided instead to make the point by using the SP design as a whole.
Comments Off You may have heard of the Japanese holdouts — soldiers of Imperial Japan that did not surrender at the end of World War II — but continued to hide in jungles through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Although their endurance was remarkable, they weren’t the only people to keep fighting long after they had lost wars. Let’s take a look at some of the men who were the last to surrender throughout military history.
Attun Paladin, sometimes referred to as Teruo Nakamura, was the last Japanese soldier to surrender in World War II.* He wasn’t ethnically Japanese, but a Taiwanese native who was conscripted into an auxiliary unit of the Imperial Japanese Army. In 1944, his unit was sent to the island of Morotai, Indonesia. When Japan surrendered the following year, Paladin and other stragglers hid in the jungle until 1954. After a dispute with them, he struck out on his own. Paladin built a hut, planted a garden, and did not see another human being for twenty years. An airplane pilot, however, did see Paladin from the sky and reported his presence to Indonesian authorities.
On 18 December 1974, a unit of Indonesian Army troops trained for this mission surrounded his hut and began singing the Kimigayo — the Japanese national anthem. Paladin did not resist arrest and returned with the soldiers to a military base. Now the hard question: Taiwan was no longer a Japanese colony, so to what country should he be repatriated? Paladin clearly identified with Japan, but had never been to Japan itself and was certainly not ethnically Japanese. After some brief debate in Japan about what it meant to be truly Japanese, he was repatriated to Taiwan on 8 January 1975 to greet a son he had never met and a wife who had remarried twenty years previously. Bitter and confused, Paladin died of lung cancer five years later.
The CSS Shenandoah was a British-built merchant steamship converted into a commerce raider by the Confederacy during the American Civil War. It set sail late in 1864 from the Maderia Islands under Lt. Cdr. James Iredell Waddell. It captured or sunk dozens of US merchant vessels in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Sea of Japan, Okhotsk Sea, and Bering Sea. Waddell’s primary objective was to greatly damange the US North Pacific whaling fleet, and he was largely successful. The Shenandoah was welcomed in Australia, where it was repaired in dry dock and reprovisioned. Waddell needed additional crewmen, but could not legally recruit them in Australia, so he enlisted the 42 men that had stowed away and discovered by him immediately after leaving Australian waters.
By June 1865, Waddell received word from men on a captured ship that the Confederacy had surrendered. Disbelieving the report, he carried on his attacks on American shipping in the Pacific. That August, he encountered a British captain who confirmed the devastating news. Waddell accepted the report as true and decided to sail back to Britain. He hauled down the Confederate ensign, ignored all further encounters with US merchant vessels, and anchored the Shenandoah in the Mersey River. Waddell, after a journey of 58,000 miles and 38 captured vessels, distributed the prize money and released the crew. The American Civil War was now well and truly over.
When World War I broke out in 1914, the northeastern part of New Guinea was a German colony. But Germany lacked the naval forces in the Pacific necessary to protect its territories in that region, and they rapidly fell into Allied hands. Captain Hermann Dentzer, an army surveyor assigned to German New Guinea at the time, decided against surrendering to the large Australian forces occupying the colony. He and the small force under his command sojourned out into the Saruwaged Mountains of the Huon Peninsula, exploring the area, raiding the Australians, and perhaps becoming the first outsider to see the central high grasslands of the island.
The Australians never caught him, and it was only after learning of the 11 November 1918 armistice that Dentzer decided to surrender. In January of 1919, he put on his well-preserved dress uniform and, raising the flag of the German Empire, marched his force into an Australian base. When he returned to Germany, Dentzer was hailed as a national hero. His book about his adventures, Four Years Among the Cannibals, was a bestseller. You can read a German-language version of that book here.
Svalbard is a frozen archipelago in the Arctic Ocean north of Norway, and under the sovereignty of that nation. Although Germany conquered Norway in April 1940, it was unable to immediately take Svalbard, which had an abundance of coal and was in a strategically useful location for gathering weather data. Moreover, after Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, the islands gained even greater significance as they lay over the convoy routes to the beleaguered Soviet Union. So, that summer, British, Canadian, and Norwegian troops occupied the islands to keep them from German control. However, the winters there are so harsh that the Allied troops left for the winter.
When they returned in the Spring of 1942, they found that the Germans had set up several weather monitoring stations around the archipelago. The Allies drove them out after suffering heavy casualties. Two German battleships raided Svalbard the following the year, devastating the settlements, including setting on fire one mine that continued to burn until the 1960s.
The Germans demonstrated little interest in the islands until 1944, when they set up a single station at Nordaustlandet under the command of Wilhelm Dege. Trapped by the ice, it remained in service after the official surrender of German forces from 7-9 May, 1945. At that point, Dege, recognizing that all nations need sound weather information, began broadcasting his data openly instead of encoded. It was not until four months later, in September, that Norwegian forces arrived at the station in a converted fishing vessel to accept the surrender of Dege and his ten soldiers. War North of 80: The Last German Arctic Weather Station of World War II is his memoir of the mission.
Baron Ungern von Sternberg — “The Bloody Baron” — was the last Tsarist general active in the Russian Civil War. Born in Graz, Austria, he came from an Estonian German family that had served the Tsars for 200 years. Von Sternberg spoke six languages and worked in various military assignments throughout the vast Russian Empire, starting in the Russo-Japanese War when he developed a fascination with East Asia. During the chaos of the Russian Revolution in 1917, he was in Central Asia. Von Sternberg developed a mysticism that synthesized Christianity and Mongolian Buddhism. He envisioned that a new order would come over Russia from the East — and that he would lead it.
In October 1920, as the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold over western Russia, von Sternberg led his cobbled army of Buriat, Mongolian, and White Russian forces into Mongolia. He captured Ulan Bator and declared himself, in the name of the Buddha, the successor of Genghis Khan. Many of the inhabitants viewed him as a god, and von Sternberg agreed. He surrounded himself with shamans who fed his growing megalomania and took the Mongolian name “Great Star Mountain”. Von Sternberg was brutal to his enemies, who were variously fed to wolves, torn apart by horses, or burned at the stake.
This was too much for the few remaining White leaders in eastern Russia, and von Sternberg became increasingly isolated. Financial support from the Japanese, who hoped to use von Sternberg to divide and weaken Russia, was not enough to keep him in power. After a year in power and the growing advance of Red forces across the east, von Sternberg was betrayed by his own lieutenants and handed over to the Bolsheviks. When, at the beginning of an interrogation, he was addressed as “Ungern”, he corrected the interrogator’s over-familiarity by bellowing out “Baron Ungern von Sternberg!” He was later executed at Nowo-Nicolajevsk.
*Internet rumor identifies a Captain Fumio Nakahira as the last Japanese holdout. He is said to have surrendered on Mindoro Island in 1980, but I have been unable to confirm this tale with what I would call reliable sources.
Images: Valca.cz, Wikimedia Commons, University of Texas
You know them, you love them, but you might not know the complete background stories of your favorite science fiction authors, actors, and producers. John Farrier looked deep and saw that many of them were actual heroes, serving their countries in time of war. You know about Kurt Vonnegut’s war experience, as he wrote about it in Slaughterhouse Five, but others never mentioned their military stints. Find out about five of them at NeatoGeek. Link
Wired has a roundup of eleven of the strangest military programs you can imagine. Man made northern lights? Psychics? Nuclear weapons launched from a backpack? They’re all here, including the plan to use bats in warfare.
Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.
According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The bats eventually had a successful test, although the bats themselves wouldn’t consider it so. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Furryscaly)
