French MacLean, Author at The Fifth Field

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So far French MacLean has created 261 blog entries.

Losers Fight the Last War Late; Winners Fight the Next War Early

You may be wondering why the pundits in the media always seem to get it wrong predicting winners and losers in wars, or how long these wars will last. It’s because they only look at the rational factors in war, like how many aircraft each side has, the strength of their armies, levels of technology and so forth that can be measured. These “armchair admirals” and “barstool brigadiers” wouldn’t understand Clausewitz if the old boy came back from the dead and personally instructed them. Most probably never read Sun-Tzu, and Mao Zedong, and probably think that Ardant du Picq is a men’s cologne. But you can get a National War College education right here and right now.

Carl Clausewitz

“Dead Carl” Clausewitz, his nickname at the US Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), knew that wars are influenced by rational factors, and also by irrational and even arational factors. Irrational factors are emotional. Had Santa Anna not killed all the defenders at The Alamo, maybe the rest of Texas wouldn’t have gotten so mad that they unified and kicked his butt. After the Japanese did their sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, and compounded that later at the Bataan Death March, the U.S. became so driven by emotion that we ended up nuking them. So irrational emotions have to factor in, but what weight do you give them? Can you even measure them?

Arational factors can be all kinds of chance events, like aspects of the weather, or the sudden natural death of an enemy leader. You can predict general weather trends, but you never get the details completely correct. Typhoon Cobra in December 1944 in the Pacific killed 790 US sailors, sank three destroyers, and heavily damaged nine other US warships. In 1762, Frederick the Great of Prussia was about to get whipped by the Austrians and Russians, when Russian Empress Elizabeth suddenly died and her successor not only ended the war with Prussia, but also offered Frederick the use of a Russian corps for the remainder of his war against Austria! Predict that!

Grant (left) and Lee (right)

Then there is the nature versus the character and conduct of war. The nature – that wars are bloody and governed by rational, irrational and arational factors – is constant. But weapons, tactics and strategies are always changing. Those that anticipate these changes have a better chance of winning, hence “Losers Fight the Last War Late; Winners Fight the Next War Early.” Bobby Lee fought the Civil War the way Napoleon would have fifty years before – concentrating on out-maneuvering the Union Army and being tactically superior in every battle.

That worked — until Abe Lincoln brought Sam Grant and his sidekick Uncle Billy Sherman on board to “fight the next war early”; ironclads replaced sailing warships, railroads allowed for rapid troop movement, arms-producing factories in the North became more important than horse-raising farms in the South, and the new battlefield lethality meant that through attrition Grant might indeed lose more men than Lee, but he and “War is Hell” Sherman would not only bleed the South dry in the process, but also conduct a scorched-earth campaign through Georgia destroying the South’s ability to produce weapons.

Finally, pundits often fail to understand the Law of Unintended Consequences – those results of an action that aren’t anticipated. Sometimes unintended consequences can be avoided by more rigorous analysis; others are truly random or unpredictable.

Take the British Royal Navy before World War I when battleships and battlecruisers were king. Battleship admirals insisted that gun crews on these ships concentrate on shooting faster than their potential rivals, the Germans. Fast gun crews were rewarded; slow-pokes were punished.

So wise old Chief Petty Officers, many of whom had been in the Royal Navy over ten years, decided to cut a corner here and there to be faster. Shells and highly-combustible cordite propellent were usually stored deep in a ship’s armored magazines and brought up to the turret on hoists through fireproof doors closed until the moment of transfer. These CPOs figured they could shave valuable seconds off their times by keeping those doors open. And then, another other old seadog thought if you stored the cordite inside the turret, you wouldn’t waste time hauling it up. So they did.

Jutland 1916

Then came the 1916 Battle of Jutland, and despite having twice as many ships, the British lost a whole bunch of them, when – after they had been hit in the turrets by enemy shells – the fires spread down to the magazine causing catastrophic explosions, in some cases killing everyone aboard. I wonder why that happened?

So the next time some retired old general, who commonly relied on smart majors and lieutenant colonels to conceive his battle plans (General Norm Schwarzkopf had four recent graduates of SAMS assigned to devise the winning battle plan — none higher than a colonel), or a Harvard geek, tells you what’s going to happen in a war, bet the “over” on the anticipated duration, and that it won’t likely unfold the way they prognosticate.

But SAMS graduates? Ever since Desert Storm they are called “Jedi Knights.”

Losers Fight the Last War Late; Winners Fight the Next War EarlyFrench MacLean2023-06-21T13:43:17-05:00

What Happened to the Moskva?

Talking heads and “experts” on television drive me crazy. Many have no true experience or subject matter expertise; they also demonstrate no system to assess accuracy of their conclusions. You can do better in assessing accuracy by assigning levels of certainty to it. The highest category of accuracy is one with a “100% certainty” to it. The sun comes up in the East is one of them, most events aren’t this certain. A little less certainty, but still a great deal, is “beyond a reasonable doubt” used in criminal trials. While I’ve never seen a judge assign a numerical value to that, it seems that “beyond a reasonable doubt” is in the 85% to 99% category of certainty. It does not mean there is no doubt, only that it is so small as to be unreasonable.

The lowest category of certainty is “more likely than not” to be accurate, the standard used in many civil trials, and for military Inspector General investigations. Think 51% or more certainty and it is “more likely than not” it occurred. On the other end, if you assess a 50% chance something happened, you’re flipping a coin; the further less than 50%, the more likely it is to be inaccurate.

Let’s apply that to the Russian cruiser Moskva, flagship of their Black Sea Fleet, that sank in the Black Sea off the coast of the Ukraine (at 45°10’43.39″N, 30°55’30.54″E.) on Thursday, April 14, 2022. Ukraine says it hit the Moskva with anti-ship cruise missiles which sparked a fire that detonated the ship’s ammunition. On the other side, Russia’s Defense Ministry says a fire of unknown origin detonated the ship’s stored ammunition; the resulting explosions left the Moskva with structural damage; and then the warship sank amid rough seas as it was being towed to a nearby port.

Is this the Moskva after the missile attack, burning and seriously damaged?

So the central question to analyze is this. Was it poor air defenses on the Moskva that allowed Ukrainian anti-ship missiles to hit, and cause a fire and/or explosion which was made fatal in scope by inefficient damage control? If so, we can rule out an accidental fire caused by lax safety procedures.

I am not a naval expert, but I know a lot of people who are, including some who served on U.S. destroyers and cruisers similar in some degree to the Moskva, others who were submariners who were trained to hunt ships like the Moskva, and even one who was actually on a Russian ship very similar to the Moskva. Here is an educated take.

Russian ship defense systems have major inadequacies. While they do have a varied number of anti-missile systems, and they do have a battle center in the ship to control these weapons, they have never achieved the degree of systems-integration that US Navy ships have in a fast-response system such as a Combat Information Center (CIC), which collates thousands of pieces of information, using really sophisticated tracking and info-processing, and determines the best solution to neutralize any threat at the most advantageous distance from the ship, with backups in case of a miss, and not allowing a threat to slip through because it had not been tracked.

Combat Information Center of the “Battlestar Galactica”. CIC on today’s US Navy ships put this one to shame

If the Ukrainians fired multiple missiles, maybe up to four or so, and used decoys or electronic warfare to confuse the Russian defenders, and given that these missiles fly really low (9 to 30 feet above the water), have a cross-section of about 16 inches (and a radar cross-section of even less with stealth “paint” when seen from the front), and all that makes it really hard to detect and then hit them, given Russian inadequacies in this area, it is “more likely than not” that at least one missile struck the Moskva.

If so, now the Russians have problems. The warhead weighs 350 pounds; add in some of the fuel left in the 1900-pound missile and you are going to get “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a large explosion occurred per missile strike. Both accounts conclude “100% certainty” a number of volatile and flammable explosives were nearby such as anti-ship missiles below. But a lot of warships in history have had explosions or large fires and have not sunk.

Nearby sources for more fire and secondary explosions (Vulkan missiles, with their 750-pound warheads, in their firing containers; unless the missiles were armed with nuclear warheads!)

Except the Russians have major problems in damage control. US Navy ships have many watertight compartments to limit the spread of toxic gases, fire and flooding in case of accident or attack. Officers touring the Moskva saw no such extensive compartmentalization. There were few watertight hatches between compartments. Unless watertight hatches later were installed, it is “beyond a reasonable doubt”, probably approaching “100% certainty”, that the Moskva did not have adequate watertight integrity.

But it gets worse. On many warships, painted areas on which sailors walk have special grip surfaces to prevent slipping. That’s an added expense and Russian ships like the Moskva substituted tar for special “rough” paint. Tar is highly flammable, and is easily tracked to other areas of the ship, so instead of trying to limit the spread of flame damage, it is “more likely than not” that cutting corners on Russian ship design made their warships even more susceptible to spreading fire damage.

Moskva heavily damaged; note two sprays of water; one pointing left is to put out fires; one pointing right toward the rear is getting water off , so the ship does not take on too much and capsize

However, a ship is only as good as its crew. The Russian navy, and its ships, are run by commissioned officers. They have very few non-commissioned officers (like petty officers). US warship skippers swear by the professionalism, bravery and common sense of the corps of non-commissioned officers. What if you didn’t have many on a ship? Could just the officers have saved the ship, racing around and conducting necessary damage control? What about the junior enlisted men?

Well, the crew size should have been about 510. Because of a lack of non-commissioned officers, about 20% of the crew are officers, so about 100. The enlisted sailors are conscripts, not volunteers. How many who want to be there is unknowable. What is known is that their military service is 12 months. It is “more likely than not” that the majority of the enlisted men can only accomplish basic damage control tasks, because 12 months is not enough time to get trained up and develop experience. It is at least “more likely than not” that the 100 officers — assuming none had been killed in the attack and none were strap-hanger staff officers just along for the ride to get “combat time” and not part of the team — would have been an insufficient strength to save the ship.

Finally there is the bravery factor. Every American Navy veteran I have ever met says that from the first day in service they have drilled into them, “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” the dying words of Commander James Lawrence during the War of 1812. It takes a ton of bravery to run toward raging fires on a badly-damaged warship. I do not know the Russian translation of “Don’t Give Up the Ship.” But I do know that if a great number of conscripts on the Moskva did not want to be there, they may have known the translation, but it is “more likely than not” they wouldn’t have followed its meaning, because 12 months is not enough time to overcome a fear of fire.

Access to classified information would increase our certainty one way of the other, but using good, old-fashioned logic and observation, and you can reach a better solution than a talking head – or an “expert” with an agenda.

The Moskva — in all her Motherland Glory

What Happened to the Moskva?French MacLean2022-05-12T12:34:54-05:00

If You Are…You Need a Gun

The “typical” gun owner is often characterized by non-gun-owners as a right-wing, red-neck, beer-guzzling, low-IQ Neanderthal who is just itchin’ to unleash his trigger finger. But times have changed, and now a whole lot of those non-gun-owners – who used to be dismissive of guns — truly need a firearm, whether you are a Pabst or an Armand de Brignac Brut kind of person.

Because now, it might be a matter of life or death. Recently in Decatur, Illinois, a teen was arrested for allegedly breaking into his 60-year-old neighbor’s home and trying to kill him because that neighbor is gay. So if you identify as LGBTQ…you need a gun for protection. LGBTQ people are nearly four times more likely than non-LGBTQ people to be victims of violent crime. You may never actually have to shoot in self-defense, but then again, why take a chance?

If you identify as a woman…you need a gun for protection. 19.3 million women in the U.S. have been stalked in their lifetime. 1 in 4 have been victims of severe physical violence (e.g. beating, burning, strangling) by an intimate partner in their lifetime. 1 in 7 have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime to the point in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed. 1 in 5 have been raped in their lifetime. You may never actually have to shoot in self-defense, but then again, why take a chance?

Smith & Wesson Model 19

If you live in a rough neighborhood… you need a gun for protection. In 2021, 701 men and 90 women were murdered in the Windy City. 640 were black, 29 were white, 105 were Hispanic, and the major determinant was where they lived. The City of Chicago is installing 426 “Bleeding Control Kits” in 269 buildings across the city. Officials say the kits could help save lives in an emergency such as falls and penetrating injuries. Let’s get real; the kits are there to treat gunshot wounds, a tacit admission that the powers that be cannot prevent you from being shot; they have retreated to a position where they “hope” that you will not die from a gunshot wound.

If you live in a rich, safe neighborhood…you need a gun for protection. 875 South Bundy Drive, Brentwood, Los Angeles; case closed.

If you know one or more males in your neighborhood who have violent tempers… you need a gun for protection. Almost half of all male killers are younger than 25. Less than one-third of male killers rely on firearms as their weapon of choice. That means that two-thirds of male murderers use some other means of killing – not firearms. You can defeat that attempt with a firearm. Why take a chance?

If you identify as male…you need a gun for protection. Almost 80% of all murder victims in the U.S. are male. You may never actually have to shoot in self-defense, but then again, why take a chance?

If you are an Asian-American…you need a gun for protection. Hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent in the U.S. have skyrocketed, especially in large urban areas, where the legal gun ownership process can be especially onerous. Determining motivation of a criminal – who is never apprehended – is almost impossible: did the perpetrator rob and kill a Chinese-American store owner because of race or because of the cash register? You may never actually have to shoot in self-defense, but then again, why take a chance?

If the proponents of gun control ever get their way, it will not be the rich political elites who are murdered; they talk a good game, but live in gated communities, in exclusive neighborhoods, and either have personal security details, or flaunt the law and have their own firearms on the sly. By denying the means to defend everyone else, the anti-2nd Amendment mob expose themselves as homophobes, anti-woman, racists of all stripes, and whatever fancy term applies to setting up elderly people living alone to be victimized.

A society, country and culture can be measured, in part, by how well it protects the most vulnerable among them, whether they are unborn babies, children, or people who look different, think differently, believe differently or come from different backgrounds. The right to life; the right to self-defense; are inherent rights of every human being. No government can legitimately deny you that right.

But they try to. So if you own a firearm, great. Make sure you keep it secured. And help everyone you know learn how to shoot and how to legally obtain a firearm. Because: man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, Hispanic, Asian-American, atheist, religious, young adult or senior citizen …you need a gun for protection.

If You Are…You Need a GunFrench MacLean2023-10-08T14:36:28-05:00

The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. It is the greatest historical mystery in my lifetime; I was eleven years old when it occurred. Who did it? Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine, married to a Russian woman, and who had lived in Russia for a couple of years? Fidel Castro‘s men? As payback for the Bay of Pigs invasion? The Mafia? They had helped him get elected in 1960, but now his brother, Bobby Kennedy, the US Attorney General, was making life hard on the Cosa Nostra. Jack had fired Allen Dulles, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after the Bay of Pigs. Maybe rogue CIA agents had a hand in the President’s death? Or perhaps the crafty J. Edgar Hoover, longtime boss of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) played a role? Reportedly Kennedy was going to ease Hoover out of the top FBI job.

Starting in 1963, and continuing to this day, it has become fashionable to disparage everyone who takes an alternative view about an historical event by calling them “A Conspiracy Nut,” or words to that effect. But always remember, just because something is a conspiracy theory doesn’t mean it didn’t actually happen.

If you are one of those that believe everything a network talking head, reading off a teleprompter, tells you, or you blow with the winds of popular thought, or who couldn’t follow a line of florescent dots on the floor leading to the bathroom even if you had rampant diarrhea, you need to know that generally if you can reason, think logically, and can connect dots to solve difficult puzzles, you will generally do better in life than if you are unable, or worse unwilling, to do so.

Because that often translates into being a pawn for those who will take advantage of you. I hope that I have some small ability to “connect the dots” to find out what really happened in history, especially involving significant mysteries. And to show you that you can connect dots as well, and not be anyone’s pawn.

Part of that stems from serving in the Army, during which I was lucky enough to carry out a tour as an Inspector General for the United States Army Europe – often investigating situations that involved complex facts and human behavior, which often follows patterns of great repetition. I also have been flat lucky enough to run into evidence and documents that for whatever reason should have been in the public domain, but were not – the most significant of I was able to turn into a book, The Fifth Field: The Story of the 96 American Soldiers Sentenced to Death and Executed in Europe and North Africa in World War II. If you have followed this website even briefly, you know this work deals with how 96 American soldiers in Europe and North Africa were tried by American General Courts-Martial, convicted by military juries, sentenced to death, executed and buried in an obscure, secret plot at an American military cemetery in France.

While after the book was published, the court-martial records were transferred from a closet to the National Archives, it still appears that one needs a special permission to actually visit the section at the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial outside Seringes-et-Nesles, France. If you visited there, and were given permission to see the special field where these men are buried, please email me with that information, and I shall include that.

My discovery, however, of what really happened in those significant events pales in comparison to The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, by Roger Stone. Now, let us address the obvious: if you do not like Roger Stone, you may use that bias to disbelieve anything and everything he writes or says. That would be unfortunate for you.

I believe that Stone would never claim to be a professional author, even though he has written six other books, writing has not been his life’s primary work; to make sure he obtained the correct flow, sequencing, level of support documentation and so forth, he enlisted Mike Colapietro, who not only is an excellent writer, but also had practical law enforcement, serving in the Office of the Chief of Staff at the Broward Sheriff’s Office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Meanwhile Stone, the consummate political insider, talked to numerous government officials during his career beginning in 1972. Fascinated by the assassination – as were a lot of people our age (Roger is 70; I am 71 and np, I have never communicated with him) since about 1972, he would always ask guys about it, as he did favors for them, including some really high guys. One “suggested” he not put anything in writing until the 50th anniversary, 2013, when all the folks talking would be dead by then!!!

Stone and Colapietro began this story with a time-tested truism for a murder investigator’s first question, cui bono (who benefits)? In most cases, that may come to be a life insurance policy with the killer is the beneficiary, or killing a spouse to avoid alimony payments, or the killing of a witness by a defendant in another criminal case so that person cannot testify against the perpetrator.

Stone and Colapietro then expanded that to: who had the most to gain from Kennedy’s death at this moment in 1963?

Then they asked themselves: who had the most to lose by a second John F. Kennedy presidential term beginning in 1965? The answers soon became obvious, and maybe you already know the following:

Vice-President Lyndon Johnson wanted to become President, hopefully running in 1968 after John Kennedy’s second term in office. However, Johnson became convinced that Kennedy was planning to dump him from the ticket prior to the election in 1964. Even worse, law enforcement was closing in on Johnson for several instances of graft and bribery – charges that might go public and lead to an indictment before the end of 1963. After Johnson assumed the Presidency, the charges went away. Cui bono?
President Kennedy had informed the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, that he would face mandatory retirement from that position in 1965. Hoover joined the Justice Department in 1917 and was named director of the Department’s Bureau of Investigation in 1924, which later became the FBI. Hoover wanted to remain in the job, but was not supported in that request by his immediate boss, Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney General and the President’s younger brother. Vice-President Johnson supported Hoover as FBI chief, and Hoover remained in that position until 1972. Cui bono?
The Mafia provided valuable support at the request to Joe Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s father, especially in West Virginia and Illinois, in the 1960 election of Kennedy. However, after assuming office, not only did President Kennedy not turn a blind eye toward Mafia activities, he appointed his younger brother Robert as U.S. Attorney General. Bobby was an existential enemy of the Mafia. In 1962 alone, Robert Kennedy touted the fact that prosecutions for racketeering by his Organized Crime Section in the Justice Department rose by 300 percent above 1961 and convictions of organized criminals grew by 350 percent. Kennedy left the Attorney General position just ten months after his brother was killed. Cui bono?

Using that as a guidepost, the authors concluded that in the end, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson leveraged his personal connections in Texas; and from nationwide organized crime (the Mafia,) and from the federal government – specifically the FBI and the CIA – to form a conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. And he used his influence to personally select the subsequent Warren Commission that would cover up the participants in that crime.

But you don’t have to just take my word for it. Here are some other comments. Because far too many people pre-judge a person’s opinion based on political leanings, race, creed, religion or other characteristic, I have omitted names and used only titles.

“A consummate political insider, Roger Stone views the JFK assassination through the prism of a murder investigator’s first question, cui bono (who benefits)? Stone’s shocking answer is that the primary suspect has been hiding in plain sight for 50 years: LBJ. A riveting account.” – Former U.S. Attorney

“Any serious student of politics or history should read Roger Stone’s stunning new book The Man Who Killed Kennedy.” – Judge

“Roger Stone nails LBJ for JFK murder!” – Journalist, Filmmaker

“Stone’s book will change American history forever!” – Historian

Do yourself a favor that will change your viewpoint, because the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 fundamentally changed this country, and not for the better. Read The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.

The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJFrench MacLean2024-07-04T09:59:29-05:00

Kudos for The Fifth Field

U.S. Supreme Court

Kudos for The Fifth Field are still coming in and are reaffirming that this book will not only shed a light on one of the last great mysteries of World War II, but might also serve as a focal point for a much-needed national discussion on the future of the death penalty. The author has received wonderful letters from FOUR United States Supreme Court Justices, the deans of Harvard Law, Columbia Law and Stanford Law Schools, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army. One of the Supreme Court Justices noted, “I was not familiar with the events recounted in the book.” One of the deans wrote, “It will reward serious reading,” while another dean added, “I look forward …to learning more about the soldiers you have so tirelessly researched and bring to life their stories.” On the military side, one General Officer wrote, “This will be very thought provoking,” while a second General Officer opined, “Your demonstrated commitment to the individual lives of Soldiers and the military justice system is truly commendable.”

Perhaps the most poignant comment was made by the child of one of the men who did not come home from the war — one of the 96 described in The Fifth Field. The descendant, now in old age, said, “God bless you, Colonel; for 65 years, no one would tell me where my father is buried.”

Kudos for The Fifth FieldFrench MacLean2021-12-31T21:23:08-06:00

Tom Ward

Tom Ward and the author

Thomas J. Ward, 96, of New Cumberland, passed away on Sunday, December 19, 2021 in his residence with his loving family at his side. He was retired from the New Cumberland Army Depot, and was formerly a Foreman with Miller & Norford Construction Contractors, Lemoyne. Tom attended Christian Life Assembly, Camp Hill; was a member of the Order of the Purple Heart; and a master craftsman working with wood, stone and small engines. Anyone who needed anything fixed would bring it to Tom. He was born in Lemoyne, the son of the late John C. and Edith (Grey) Ward. He was also preceded in death by a daughter and a son, Jonette Ward and Jeffrey Martin and siblings, Elva, Romaine, Vance, Tennis, Robert, Margaret, Richard and Preston. Tom is survived by his loving wife of more than 43 years, Winifred (Shuff) Ward; children, Thomas J. Ward, Jr. of Coudersport, Barbara Fontaine of Athol, ID, John Ward of Camp Hill, Christine McGee of Harrisburg and Karen Martin of Mechanicsburg; grandchildren, Allen, Thomas, Tony, John, Lainie, Cameron, Jeremy, Joshua, Heather and Taylor; thirteen great grandchildren; and two great-great grandchildren. Funeral services were held on Monday, December 27, 2021 in Parthemore Funeral Home & Cremation Services, New Cumberland.

Born on June 9, 1925 at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Tom enlisted on September 2, 1943 and was assigned to Company I, 23rd Infantry Regiment in the Second U.S. Infantry Division. An Infantry sergeant, Tom was decorated with four Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star, the Combat Infantryman Badge and numerous campaign awards, having served in Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland and Ardennes-Alsace. After his fourth wound, he departed the 2nd Infantry Division in 1945 and reported to the Loire Disciplinary Training Center, where he served as the supply sergeant.

Loire Disciplinary Training Center. Sergeant Tom Ward on left

At Le Mans, Tom was John Woods, the U.S. Army hangman in Europe, closest friend, often going downtown in the evening for a beer together, although they never discussed at the pubs what happened inside the center. He recalled that the day before each execution, Woods would walk to the supply room to get the rope and black hood that would be used in the upcoming event; a new rope was used for each hanging, although Woods would use each black hood several times. He also recalled that many of the executions occurred just before noon, when many of the men in the stockade – not involved in the execution – were standing in line outside the mess hall for lunch, and when the trap door opened, the motion was so violent and unique that the loud noise could be heard throughout the DTC and this distinctive sound spoiled many a man’s appetite. Later, Master Sergeant Woods even asked Tom to be his assistant hangman, but the quiet sergeant from Pennsylvania had seen enough death and declined.

Without his help, American Hangman could not have been written. But in addition to his historical knowledge, Tom was one of the most decent human beings I have ever known. A tough soldier, he unleashed hell on a German defensive position after one of his men had been killed in the ongoing combat. And later, Tom once knocked out a fellow American sergeant with one punch for calling him a REMF. But Tom also had compassion for everyone he met in life who had things harder than he did. During the war, Thomas Ward broke regulations and gave army blankets to refugees he met on his supply runs from Le Mans to Le Havre during the cold winter of 1944-45, and seventy years after the war ended, he was still hopeful that they had survived and went on to have a happy life.

Congratulations Sergeant Ward. Yours was a life well-lived.

Tom WardFrench MacLean2023-06-20T14:16:37-05:00

Is Dr. Anthony Fauci Really a Dr. Josef Mengele?

Josef Mengele

A new book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., says that Dr. Anthony Fauci is America’s Joseph Mengele for what he did to poor orphan minority kids in the 1980s, specifically that Dr. Fauci tested harsh chemotherapy drugs on orphan children in order to determine their potential for AIDS treatments; that he got control of foster homes in 7 states that served as sources for the youngsters; that these children were denied guardians and any kind of legal protector; that most of the children did not have HIV/AIDS, they were just used as guinea pigs to see if they could survive the harsh drug regimen; and that as a result, at least 85 children died as part of these experiments.

The selection ramp at Auschwitz. The column on the left will head directly to the gas chambers. The column on the right will enter the camp and be worked to death. Mengele is the officer in the right-center. He is looking for twins.

I do not know how true these allegations are, but I do know who Dr. Josef Mengele was and you should know about him also or this comparison means nothing.

Josef Mengele, also known as the “Angel of Death,” was a German Waffen-SS captain and physician during World War II. For decades after the war, and continuing today in some circles, the fable has remained alive that the SS personnel who served in the concentration camps were somehow different from their honorable brethren, who fought at the frontline in the Waffen-SS, in units. Thus, those in the combat units have earned a pass from some historians, who believed the former Waffen-SS General Paul Hausser story Soldaten wie andere auch (Soldiers Like Any Other.)

But Hausser was incorrect. As The Camp Men demonstrates with irrefutable proof from the official SS personnel file for each officer, almost half of the concentration camp officers also served in Waffen-SS combat divisions. Mengele served in the 5th Waffen-SS Division in Russia.

But the real shocker is how many physicians, like Mengele, in Germany supported the Nazi Party. More than 38,000 doctors, nearly half of all the physicians in Germany, joined the Nazi Party. None were forced to join; they saw it as an opportunity to advance their careers. At least 316 doctors served in the concentration camps, as well as at least 57 dentists.

Before the war, Mengele had received doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and began a career as a researcher. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. In early 1943, assigned to the Auschwitz concentration camp, he saw the opportunity to conduct genetic research on human subjects. His experiments focused primarily on twins, with no regard for their health or safety; many died. Mengele later served at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. But don’t take it from me; here are a few quotes from The Angel of Death:

“It would not be humanitarian to send a child to the ovens without permitting the mother to be there to witness the child’s death.” The ovens here refer to the crematoria at Auschwitz, where the dead were burned.

“I don’t have anything to hide. Terrible things happened at Auschwitz, and I did my best to help. One could not do everything. There were terrible disasters there. I could only save so many. I never killed anyone or hurt anyone.”

“Scientists have always been able to study twins after they have been born together. But only in the Third Reich can Science examine twins who have died together.”

SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele; Mengele served in the 5th Waffen-SS Division Wiking, winning the Iron Cross 1st Class, before transferring to Auschwitz and subsequently Gross-Rosen.

Josef Mengele drowned in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming off the coast of Bertioga, Brazil and was buried under the false name of Wolfgang Gerhard. Dozens of Nazi doctors did not escape justice and were hanged after the war for Crimes Against Humanity. You can read about some of them in American Hangman.

Maybe Anthony Fauci had nothing to do with the orphans and AIDS experiments on children at all; if so, Mr. Kennedy owes him an immense apology. Maybe Dr. Fauci did play a role, but believed that their suffering, and the death of many of them, would do a greater good for mankind as a whole. But as the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, Germany showed after the war, their are limits to medical experimentation covered in Crimes Against Humanity. And if the allegations in Kennedy’s book are accurate, in my opinion those experiments were clearly in in violation of that category.

If you have any actual information about the New York experiments, you can stand up for these kids — who could not stand up for themselves. If you are reluctant to contact Children’s Health Defense at 1227 North Peachtree Pkwy, Suite 202 in Peachtree City, GA 30269 at 202-618-2477, contact this website and I’ll forward your evidence.

Is Dr. Anthony Fauci Really a Dr. Josef Mengele?French MacLean2022-02-16T18:27:21-06:00

Versatility – A Jack for All Trades

Glock 40 MOS 10mm

You’ve heard the phrase: “A Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” However, in the world of firearms, versatility – the quality of being useful for or easily adapted to various tasks, styles, and fields of endeavor – often means that a single weapon can be a Master for All Situations.

It may not be a function of caliber, nor the capacity of the magazine, or the optic on top. It is a function of ammunition. And there are two weapons that stand head and shoulders above most others in this respect – the shotgun and the 10mm pistol.

The ubiquitous shotgun; it has been around for over 400 years and is often called a scattergun, or historically as a fowling piece. Calibers have been many; for this discussion we will stick with the always-popular 12 gauge and what a variety of ammunition we have!

Birdshot is probably the most common type of 12-gauge shotgun load, comes in at least 12 sizes, and allows hunters to target small to medium game (or skeet and trap shooters to hit clay “birds.”) For birdshot, the larger the number, the smaller the pellet (size 8 has more, but smaller diameters of pellets than a size 6, for example.)

But wait! Many 12 gauge shotguns now come with the ability to fire three chamber sizes – 2.75-inch, 3-inch and 3.5-inch. The longer the size, the more pellets there are inside, plus the velocity is often higher which extends the range a bit. Then there is BB shot that comes in at least 3 sizes, used for larger birds like ducks and geese.

Leaving the search for aerial targets and going to the ground gets us into buckshot and there are five rounds in that (#4 buck, #1 buck, 0 buck, 00 buck and 000 buck.) For example, #00 buckshot throws eight or nine balls (some magnum loads contain 12-15 balls!), #1 buckshot holds 16 and #4 buckshot has 24 to 27 balls. Then there are the “tweeners” like T-shot that I put in the category of hunting large waterfowl like geese.

Finally are the slugs that are used for deer, and really any other large game; some hunting guides even opine that a 12-gauge slug is the best antidote for an attacking bear. Almost every 12 gauge round can kill a man; there are tragic hunting accidents every year involving even very small size birdshot rounds. For the intentional dispatching of an armed criminal trying to kill you, buckshot is probably the best way to go. The versatility comes in when analyzing the environment of the shot. Inside the home or outside? Is the attacker on foot on in a motor vehicle? Behind a barrier? What is the expected distance between you and your would-be killer? More than one assailant? There will be an optimum-size shotgun round for every situation. That is what gives it the ultimate in versatility.

But you know that already. The second weapon with immense versatility is the 10mm pistol – which you may not be familiar with – and it also centers on the large variety of ammunition available for it. MidwayUSA lists sixty-six 10mm rounds (unfortunately most have to be back-ordered, but that’s a different issue.) By my count, 10mm rounds range in weight from 100 grains to 220 grains, which is close to a .380 auto round weight on the small end, to a .44 Magnum on the large end.

10mm rounds come in various bullet shapes, each with a different purpose in mind: hard-cast-flat-nose and lead-round-nose for large game hunting; jacketed-hollow-point, full-metal-jacket, “fluted”; bonded-jacketed-hollow-point; and fragmenting-hollow-point; full-metal-jacket-flat-nose.

Just a few 10mm options

But it is velocity that provides even more versatility. Muzzle velocities range from about 1030 feet-per-second to 1875 feet-per-second. There is one type of round, an RBCD Performance Plus out of San Antonio, that advertises a 10mm 77 grain total-fragmenting-soft-point that comes out of the muzzle at 2420 feet-per-second, but I can’t find any for sale, which might be a good thing.

What versatility does velocity provide you? Well, in potentially crowded urban areas, in a self-defense situation where you don’t want your bullet going through your erstwhile killer – and subsequently killing an innocent person, you can do your homework and pick the round type and velocity to ensure it doesn’t “over-penetrate.” In rural areas, you can use heavier and faster rounds, because you are not concerned with bystanders, but are concerned about dangerous four-legged animals, as well as two-legged ones.

I wish I had figured out the versatility of a 10mm years ago. I have been firing a 12-gauge shotgun for four decades and a 10mm (with 18 different ammunition types and speeds) for just four weeks. But who says an old dog can’t learn new tricks?

Versatility – A Jack for All TradesFrench MacLean2023-10-08T14:50:18-05:00

Bonnie and Clyde

Lately I have been reading a lot about the days of Bonnie and Clyde, and what we can learn from back then.

The country was a mess. This “Public Enemy Era” spanned from 1931 through 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression that crushed the economy, and the Dust Bowl – a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the agricultural output of the American and Canadian prairies – that caused mass hunger. 10,000 banks went out of business, taking $3 billion of depositor’s life savings with them, leaving account holders penniless. With 80% unemployment in some areas, those unfortunates would remain destitute, unless they took matters into their own hands, and some turned to crime.

Today, rampant government spending is out of control, leading to increasing inflation that steals buying power. We have some wealthy people, but as I travel around the U.S. – my latest trek a 1,081-mile drive from Decatur, Illinois to Worcester, Massachusetts, I’ve seen a lot of help-wanted signs; undocumented illegal aliens working for far less than minimum wage; obscenely-high gas prices; rental cars that have over 40,000 miles on them and are in constant need of maintenance yet sometimes costing $100 a day; and infrastructure problems (read bad roads, run-down bridges) that will remain poor, because these big spending programs always end up targeting pet projects of the rich and voting constituencies of the lazy.

For the first two years – 1931-1933 – it was a stupid era. Prohibition in the United States, beginning in 1920 and ending in 1933, was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. While some people regarded the attack on alcohol as a noble cause, an overwhelming number did not, and Prohibition single-handedly caused tens of millions of Americans to view the law as lacking any moral obligation to follow it; they became felons overnight and they felt no remorse at doing so. This disregard for law and order became a cancer in society; one day citizens refused to follow Prohibition; the next they began to support organized crime to provide the illegal goods they wanted.

Today’s version of Prohibition aims at stripping Americans of their right to bear arms, another stupid idea. Were it to get close to happening, tens of millions of us – maybe more – will become felons overnight, because we will not comply, and organized crime will start a shipping tsunami of firearms into the country, just like it did booze.

Bonnie and Clyde

For the first years of Bonnie and Clyde, most regular folks hated the police and were on the side of the renegades, even though they were a far cry from modern day Robin Hoods portrayed in movies. It was only after several murders of police, including one trooper on his first day of the job and another scheduled to be married in three weeks before he was cut down by Clyde in cold blood – the bride-to-be wore her wedding dress to her fiancée’s funeral – that attitudes toward the police changed.

Today, police are equally disrespected – mostly in big cities from Portland to Atlanta. I’d like to think that Champaign Police Department Officer Chris Oberheim didn’t die in vain, and it seems like many folks in central Illinois know that too, but this country is in a whole lot of trouble right now with its negative view of the “thin blue line”. What doesn’t help is when senior FBI personnel start helping one political party against another, though. That convinces many people that the law is unfairly enforced; today citizens may just mistrust high-level leaders of the FBI. Tomorrow that mistrust, which often evolves to not cooperating with career FBI agents, can lead to the bureau being ineffective. Lots of folks knew where Bonnie and Clyde were hiding out and operating, yet the stayed quiet.

There’s another takeaway from Bonnie and Clyde. In our era of concealed carry and the ubiquitous Glock-this and Glock-that, maybe we put too much emphasis on pistolcraft – not that we shouldn’t be proficient with these weapons. But Clyde Barrow didn’t terrorize people with a pistol; he did it with Browning Automatic Rifles, BARs, whose .30-06 rounds would go through one side of a car and out the other, killing anyone in between. And when the law finally did catch-up with Bonnie and Clyde one morning on a Louisiana dusty dirt road, what put finis to the two marauders were a couple of Remington Model 8s, a BAR, a Colt Monitor, and some Remington Model 11 semi-automatic 12-gauge “riot guns”.

Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (played by Kevin Costner in the excellent movie The Highway Men), who led the posse that nailed Bonnie and Clyde, was a big believer in the old phrase, “A handgun is for fighting your way to a long gun you shouldn’t have left behind.” While he was an excellent shot with a .45 Colt and a .44 Special, mostly it was a long gun that got Frank’s bacon out of the fire. We might want to consider that today. And the FBI may want to consider the public’s perception of them.

Bonnie and ClydeFrench MacLean2023-10-08T14:47:35-05:00

The Battle of Algiers

Movie poster for The Battle of Algiers

What if I were to tell you that a movie, with a budget of only $800,000 made in 1966, was so profound that it significantly influenced revolutionaries throughout the world like Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Fidel Castro, the Black Panthers (as a training manual for violent uprising,) the Provisional Irish Republic Army, and the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front to such an extent that the 120-minute film was banned in France for five years, that the Israeli government banned the film until 1975 for fear that the emerging Palestine Liberation Organization would use it as an inspiration for attacks on Israelis, but on the other hand, the movie was even screened at the Pentagon by the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict in 2003/2004 with respect to the insurgency in Iraq?

Director Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is a guidebook for how to build a secret organization (in this case the Algerian independence movement, National Liberation Front, Front de Libération Nationale, FLN) as the most lethal means of striking civilian targets, which often leads to a successful revolution. Pontecorvo greatly details the methods of indoctrination in these groups – techniques that if most Chicago street gangs do not acknowledge where they learned them, they should be sued for plagiarism.

Scene from The Battle of Algiers

The classic film is based on events that actually took place during the 1954-1962 Algerian struggle for independence from France. The action follows a small group of FLN rebels, and their charismatic leader, Ali La Pointe, who use all means at their disposal to induce the French to leave their country. A petty criminal serving a two-year prison sentence in Algeria in 1954, Ali was recruited in the infamous Barberousse prison (US prisons are also hotbeds for terrorist recruitment) by FLN militants, and became one of the FLN’s most trusted lieutenants in Algiers, the capital of Algeria – until French security forces killed him there on October 8, 1957 in the Casbah.

The FLN, created in March 1954, merged numerous, separate opposing factions of the nationalist movement so as to better wage war against French colonial presence in Algeria. A modern comparison would be if some overarching anarchist group in the U.S. formed and was able to subsequently unify: Antifa, Communist Party USA, Earth Liberation Front, La Raza, Youth Liberation Front, and so forth. Add in American cells of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas, Hezbollah – all anti-American with a bloody history. And what if they also united with basic criminal street gangs, super gangs like Los Zetas, Aryan Brotherhood, and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), and elements of Central and South American drug cartels?

You might say, “That couldn’t happen here,” but the FLN started small, initially with just twenty-two members, and an “exterior delegation” in Cairo, Egypt to solicit foreign support, including funding (there were George Soros’ back then too.) They divided Algeria into five zones and placed a colonel in charge of each. Their primary mission was to provide “ideological awareness” backed by violence, so for each Algerian killed by the security forces, a French citizen would be killed by the FLN. The FLN organized as a cell-based pyramid structure, so a member only knew a maximum number of three other insurgents. Thus, if an insurgent were captured and tortured, he could only give up a few fellow terrorists. You’ll also see in the movie that the FLN followed the motto of “snitches get stitches.”

Through the use of terror, the FLN was able to persuade regular, non-violent Algerians, that not only were they NOT French, but that France had to renege on its core values. Sound familiar? Today’s anti-American anarchists stress hyphenated-Americans instead of American unity. They spit on American core values such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and trample American history at every turn – attempting to stifle freedom of speech that defends American values. Disagree with the mob and Facebook, Twitter or other social-disease media platforms ban you. The Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del never had it so good.

The novel, The Centurions, written in 1960 by Jean Larteguy, presents much of the same subject. The story, centering on some French Legionnaires, begins with the fall of the French fortress Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, and subsequently leads to Algeria. It’s central theme is: how is war waged in a new global order, when the “age of heroics is over.” I first read this book at West Point for a Revolutionary Warfare elective, and if you like to curl up with a good read, here’s one.

You can get both the movie and the book online. Organize a Watch Party! You can – and should – see this movie because America’s enemies, both foreign and domestic, almost certainly already have.

The Battle of AlgiersFrench MacLean2022-09-12T07:30:54-05:00