Odin & Aesop

The Germans launched “Operation Citadel” on July 5th, 1943.  They wanted to encircle and destroy Soviet forces in a salient centered on the city of Kursk.  The Soviets knew they were coming and had spent months preparing.  What followed was the greatest land battle in history.  About two million men with 6,000 tanks, 35,000 guns, and 5,000 aircraft fought into late August.  Despite horrific losses, the Soviets stood their ground.  Lloyd Clark tells the story in “The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk 1943”.

John G. Bourke won the Medal of Honor during the American Civil War.  He stayed in the army and graduated from West Point in 1869.  Between 1869 and 1883, Bourke served on the frontier with much of that time spent as an aide to General George Crook.  Bourke saw action in the Apache Wars and Great Sioux War.  He clashed with Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo.  Bourke was a keen observer and chronicled his varied experiences.  He published them in 1892 under the title of "On the Border With Crook."  This book is a raw, insightful, and fascinating firsthand account of life in America's Old West. 

The Korean peninsula was split into two countries after the Second World War.  The Soviet backed North and the U.S. backed South.  North Korea tried to unify the two by invading South Korea in June 1950.  Initially North Korea had great success.  It pushed South Korea's small military aside and rushed down the peninsula while the United States tried to get forces onto the peninsula.  The North Koreans were finally stopped around the port of Pusan at the very bottom of the Korean peninsula.  While fighting around Pusan was going on, the U.S. commander, General Douglas MacArthur, contemplated his next move.  Instead of using his growing force to reinforce Pusan, MacArthur chose to do something far more risky.  He would conduct an amphibious landing deep in the rear of the North Korean army, cut its logistics, and cause it to collapse.  The place he picked for this landing was the port of Inchon.  Robert D. Heinl, Jr. tells the story in "Victory at High Tide: The Inchon Seoul Campaign."

Japan captured and occupied China's sea ports at the onset of World War Two.  That lead to hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers building a road through Burma to get supplies to China.  That road got blocked when Burma fell to the Japanese.  Next, American engineers began building another road through hundreds of miles of steep jungle while pilots flew supplies into China over the Himalayas.  Meanwhile, American and British forces fought to keep the Japanese at bay in remote jungle battles.  All this took place while America's focus of effort was on defeating Germany first.  Donovan Webster tells the story in “The Burma Road.”

In 1899, the British went to war with the Boer Republics.  This was when the British Empire was close to its blazing zenith and unquestionably the ranking world power.  Any war against the somewhat backward Boers on a remote border of the empire in southern Africa would surely be quick and decisive.  It did not turn out that way.  As Rudyard Kipling put it, the Boers gave the British “no end of a lesson.”  Thomas Pakenham tells the story in “The Boer War.” 

The United States and Soviet Union stood on opposite sides of the Cold War.  Both tried to project strength and both possessed immense arsenals of nuclear weapons.  A fundamental problem for both superpowers was figuring out what the other side was doing.  What were they capable of?  What were they thinking?   The United States relied on its submarines to help answers those questions throughout the Cold War.  The missions these submarine crews went on were months long and involved great risks.  They were also carried out in absolute secrecy.  At least until now.  Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew tell the story in “Blind Man's Bluff.” 

The Japanese attacked the Philippines almost simultaneous with their December 7th, 1941 attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor.  Following Japanese air attacks, the Japanese 14th Army landed in the Philippines on December 8th.  By January 1942, the Japanese had U.S. and Filipino forces bottled up on the Bataan Peninsula.  Those U.S. and Filipino forces surrendered on May 8th.  It is arguably America's worst military defeat ever.  Among the roughly 12,000 Americans taken prisoner were four Navy doctors.  John Glusman tells their story in “Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945.”

NAZI scientists relied on heavy water to produce the right uranium isotope for an atomic weapon.  They produced most of their heavy water at a hydroelectric in occupied Norway called Vemork.  In February 1943, a small group of Norwegian commandos slipped into Vemork, blew it up, and made their escape.  This is after months of reconnaissance and preparation in the frozen wilderness.  Neal Bascomb tells the story in “The Winter Fortress.”  

In October 2001, the United States began aerial bombing of Afghanistan in response to the terrorist group Al Queda's attacks of September 11th.  Special Forces followed up by teaming with the Taliban's opponents – the Northern Alliance – and by late November / early December 2001 the Taliban had been driven from power.  That didn't mean the Taliban and Al Queda had gone away or given up.  They had moved and gone underground.  One of the places they went to was Afghanistan's Shahikot Valley.  In March 2002, the U.S. conducted Operation Anaconda to root them out.  It was the first large scale ground operation of the war.  Sean Naylor tells the story of what happened in Not a Good Day to Die.

William Manchester served in the Marine Corps during the Second World War.  He was wounded during the Battle of Okinawa.  After the war, Manchester established himself as a journalist in Baltimore, an adjunct professor at Wesleyan University, and an author.  In 1978, he returned to the Pacific and visited various places connected either with his service or the Pacific campaign.  That trip forms the basis of this book, “Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War.”

Bill Peters was commissioned in the Marine Corps via Officer Candidate School.  After completing the Basic School at Quantico, Virginia, he was assigned to Vietnam as a platoon commander in First Force Reconnaissance Company in 1969.  Peters conducted twenty-three long-range patrols in enemy-controlled territory, was wounded, and decorated for bravery. He tells the story in “First Force Recon Company: Sunrise at Midnight.”

The Algerian War of Independence lasted from 1954 to 1962.  It carried heavy costs for both sides.  Estimates vary but upwards of a million Muslim Algerians died; roughly a million Pied Noir (settlers of European descent) were driven into exile; and France was driven to the brink of civil war.  Alistair Horne tells the story in “A Savage War of Peace.” 

Siegfried Knappe served in the German Army from 1936 until 1949.  He was a member of the German General Staff.  Knappe was wounded multiple times and saw action in France as well as the Eastern and Italian fronts.  He ended the war in and out of Hitler's bunker during the Battle of Berlin before spending several years in Soviet captivity.  This book provides candid insight into the German Army from the inside out.      

The United States entered World War One on April 6th, 1917. Going to war in Europe meant the United States had to greatly expand its Army.  It had enlist, train, organize, equip, and deploy hundreds of thousands of young men.  One of the units that was part of this expansion was the 79th Infantry Division which was activated in August 1917.  Many of the soldiers in the 79th Infantry Division were draftees from Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia.  By the time they were deactivated less than two years later, 6,874 of their Division comrades had been killed or wounded.  Gene Fax tells the story of the 79th Infantry Division focusing on its involvement in the final yet bloody months of World War One's Western Front. 

Company E, 506th Regiment was part of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division.  It was formed in 1942 and comprised of young volunteers that were generally new to the army.  Company E received its baptism by fire in June 1944 when it jumped into NAZI occupied France.  It went on to jump into Holland as part of Operation Market-Garden; helped blunt the German advance by holding the town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge; and then drove across Germany to secure Hitler's final defeat.  During its advance across Europe, Company E sustained 150% casualties.  Stephen Ambrose tells Easy Company's story through the words of the men who served in it. 

Sierra Leone's civil war lasted from 1991 until 2002.  It was marked by exceptional levels of cruelty and suffering.  During this civil war the United Nations, neighboring West African states, and the United Kingdom launched military interventions into Sierra Leone.  The United Kingdom's intervention was called Operation Palliser.  In September 2000 eleven British soldiers participating in Operation Palliser were captured by a militia gang known as the West Side Boys.  When it became clear negotiating with the West Side Boys was proving futile, the British decided to take military action to free their soldiers.  William Fowler's “Operation Barras” tells the story of what happened.

On November 20th, 1953 thousands of French paratroopers dropped into a place called Dien Bien Phu.  Dien Bien Phu is a small valley in the northern part of Vietnam close to Laos.  The French plan was to establish a base at Dien Bien Phu, keep it resupplied by air, and then use it as a place to launch operations against the Viet Minh.  The French underestimated the scale of the force the Viet Minh would concentrate around Dien Bien Phu.  Before long, the French were besieged and doomed to defeat.  This battle ended French rule in Indochina.  Bernard Fall explains what happened at Dien Bien Phu and why in “Hell in a Very Small Place”.  

The First Allied Airborne Army launched an attack into the German occupied Netherlands on September 17, 1944.  Eventually over the 41,000 troops went in by parachute and glider.  The idea was for this huge airborne force to seize nine bridges stretched across 64 miles of the Netherlands.  Seizing these bridges would allow the British Army's XXX Corps to advance rapidly across the rivers and into Germany.  It was a bold plan that ultimately failed.  Cornelius Ryan explains why in “A Bridge Too Far”.  

On June 1942, Germany's Army Group South started an offensive called Case Blue or Plan Blue.  The idea was to sprint out off eastern Ukraine, across the Russian steppe, and into the Caucasus to capture the oil fields there.  As part of this big effort, the German Sixth Army attempted to capture the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River.  The Sixth Army reached Stalingrad in August.  The fighting was ferocious.  In November the Soviets launched offensives of their own north and south of Stalingrad.  Those two pincers linked up and trapped the Germans in a cauldron.  Fighting continued in Stalingrad but now winter was closing in.  Starvation and the cold exacted a toll as harsh as the Soviets.  Despite Hitler's attempts to resupply the Sixth Army by air and his exhortations to fight to the last, what was left of the German Sixth Army surrendered in late January 1943.  There was no way for Hitler and his propagandists to spin this crushing defeat.  Antony Beevor tells the story of history's largest land battle and arguably the turning point of World War Two in “Stalingrad.”

On June 27, 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked by a group of Arab and German terrorists.  They demanded the release of 53 terrorists and diverted the plane to Entebbe, Uganda.  On July 4th, Israeli commandos disguised as Ugandan soldiers flew over 2,000 miles, assaulted the airport, killed the terrorists, and rescued all but three of the hostages within an hour. The Israeli assault force suffered one fatality: its commander, Yoni Netanyahu (brother of Israel's current Prime Minister).  Saul David's “Operation Thunderbolt” is a definitive account of what happened.

By the end of 1914, World War One has stagnated into an industrial age nightmare.  The British and French sat opposite the Germans in trenches running through France from the coast to the Alps.  Things weren't much different in the East where the early Russian advance had been defeated.  The British looked for options.  What could they do to alter the situation?  They looked at the Dardanelles Straits.  This narrow waterway connects the Black Sea with the Aegean Sea.  The Turks had mined the strait and fortified its coastline but if the British could land troops and their ships could force through the strait, they could threaten the Turkish capital.  So that's what they tried to do.  The Australian author Les Carlyon tells the story of what happened in “Gallipoli”.

Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) was established in January 1964 to conduct unconventional warfare operations.  These included reconnoitering and disrupting North Vietnamese activities in Laos and Cambodia.  Given the sensitive nature of MACV-SOG's work, its missions were classified.  John Plaster served three years with MACV-SOG and tells the unit's story in “SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam.” 

Adolf Hitler ruled Germany from 1933 until he committed suicide in 1945.  Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953.  Between 1933 and 1945 these two brutal dictators oversaw the killing of 14 million noncombatants in the region comprised of the Baltic states, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine.  Timothy Snyder explains how and why the NAZI and Soviet regimes inflected such suffering in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

The Sherwood Rangers were a British tank regiment during the Second World War.  They served in North Africa where they fought in the battles of Alam El Hafa and Second El Alamein and helped drive Germany's Afrika Corps out of Tunisia.  Next, the Sherwood Rangers landed in Normandy on D-Day.  They lead the drive out of France, across Belgium, and into Germany.  It was a hard slog, and they paid a price.  The Sherwood Rangers tank crews suffered 148% casualties just in the European campaign.  James Holland tells their story at a personal level in this book. 

Argentina seized the Falkland Islands on April 2nd, 1982.  The British government deployed a naval task force on April 5th to take them back.  As the force steadily converged from 8,000 miles away, the rest of the world wondered if the two countries would really fight over the remote and sparsely populated islands.  They did.  By the time it was over in June, 3,336 people had been killed or wounded; sixteen ships sunk; and 134 aircraft were lost.  The Falklands campaign is considered by many as the first technologically modern war.  In some ways it is a microcosm of what major fleet actions could look like.  Martin Middlebrook's “Operation Corporate” gives us the details of what happened.

The Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, was created between North Vietnam and SouthVietnam in 1954. The DMZ was supposed to be a temporary buffer zone thatwould keep previously hostile forces away from each other. When the plannedunification of North Vietnam and South Vietnam stalled out, the DMZ stayed onwith an air of permanence. It was four to six miles wide and ran about 47 milesfrom the coast to the border with Laos. Don't believe the label though. The DMZwas anything but demilitarized. It's here in the DMZ that 3rd Battalion, 26thMarines got into the fight for its life in September 1967. In four days 3/26 lost 56killed and 290 wounded.

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck commanded Imperial German military forces throughout the East Africa campaign during World War One.  His mostly African army of about 14,000 attacked, checked, and evaded much larger Allied forces for over four years.  When the war ended, Lettow-Vorbeck surrendered and returned undefeated to a hero's welcome in Germany.  This book is how he remembers the experience.

By the middle of 1942 the United States had recovered from the shock of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the early defeats of Japan expanding into the Pacific.  Now it started parallel offensives north and south of the equator.  By the middle of 1944 the United States had retaken the Marianas Islands and was flowing over Japan's empire like “a conquering tide.”

Eight soldiers from the Britain's Special Air Service flew deep into northwestern Iraq on the night of January 22nd, 1991.  Their callsign was Bravo Two Zero.  Their mission was to destroy the SCUD missiles Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was using against Israel.  A young goat herder stumbled across the patrol after it was on the ground for less than a day.  With their cover blown and no way to call for help, the eight solders attempted to fight their way more than 100 miles across the desert to Syria.  Only one made it.  This book was written by Bravo Two Zero's patrol leader and tells the story of what happened.

In November 1965, roughly 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry flew by helicopter into Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley.  They were attacked by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers almost immediately.  Three days later, one of their sister battalions was unexpectedly attacked a short distance away. The U.S. lost 237 killed.  These two fights at landing zones X-Ray and Albany came on the front end of America's build up in Vietnam and were a portent of things to come.  The two authors of this book were there.  One, Hal Moore, commanded the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry and the other, Joe Galloway, was a war correspondent.

Ernst Junger was an infantry officer in the German army throughout World War One.  He served in the trenches for close to four years, was wounded fourteen times, and was the youngest recipient of Germany's highest award, Pour le Mérite.  Somehow, he lived.  Storm of Steel is his memoir.  It was first published in 1920.

After the United States invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein from power in spring 2003, the city of Fallujah became a hotbed of unrest.  In March 2004, four American contractors were brutally murdered and mutilated there.   President Bush ordered an attack to subdue the city.  This attack was called off early after it sparked a media and political firestorm.  With U.S. forces out of it, Fallujah became the red-hot epicenter of Iraq's Sunni insurgency and the U.S. recommitted to taking it through large-scale offensive action.  This operation, known as Phantom Fury, lasted from through November and December 2004.  It was America's bloodiest battle of the Iraq war.  Bing West tells the story in “No True Glory.”  We are joined in this episode by Mr. Pat Carroll who spent close to four years in Iraq working in or dealing with Fallujah

The German navy refitted the merchant ship Atlantis with weapons hidden in phony deckhouses and side structures.  Using its disguise as a freighter, the Atlantis stalked the ocean for over 600 days in 1940 and 1941.  She captured or sank 22 ships until cornered and sunk by the British.  Bernhard Rogge was the captain of the Atlantis throughout its service.  This is the story of what he and his crew did. 

John Paul Vann was a career Army officer.  He served in combat during the Korean War and was an advisor to the South Vietnamese Army's IV Corps fighting the Viet Cong for a year from 1962 to 1963.  Vann retired from the Army a few months after completed that assignment.  He returned to Vietnam in 1965.  First he worked as an official for the Agency for International Development.  Vann was then made the Deputy for Civil Operations and Rural Development Support for the Third Corps Tactical Zone in the twelve provinces north and west of Saigon.  In 1968 he was assigned to the same position for the Fourth Corps Tactical Zone in the provinces south of Saigon.  Vann died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam on June 16, 1972.  During his years in Vietnam, he developed some strong views about what the United States was doing versus what he thought it should be doing. 

Charles MacDonald was twenty-one yeas old when he assumed command of Company I 23rd Infantry in October 1944.  His company had been in combat sense D plus 1 and MacDonald had never been in combat.  MacDonald learns his job in a trial by fire that tests him in every imaginable way.  In the eight months he was in command he fought in Battle of the Bulge and lead his infantry company across Germany in the last months of the war.  This story of a young infantry company commander leading men is battle during World War 2 is one of the most brutally honest accounts of leadership and combat ever written. 

The Navy and Marine Corps attacked the Tarawa atoll on November 20th, 1943.  It was their first objective in the drive across the Central Pacific.  The island was defended by 2,600 Japanese troops and about 2,200 Japanese and Korean laborers.  They had spent nine months fortifying the atoll.  Most of the action took place on Betio.  Betio is the largest island in the atoll but it is only covered six tenths of a square mile big.  In 76 hours it took to seize Betio, 1,009 Sailors and Marines died, along with virtually the entire Japanese garrison.  It was a battle of utmost savagery and the reason Joseph Alexander used it for the title of this book. 

Imperial Japanese Navy pilots were an elite corps.  They lead the world in developing naval aviation between the First and Second World Wars.  Although their equipment was modern and tactics were cutting edge, their values and collective identity were based in something much older.  They were the modern incarnation of Japan's ancient warrior caste, the Samurai, and adhered to the warrior code of bushido.  Saburo Sakai was one of them.  He fought throughout the war, became a leading ace, and was one of the very few who survived to write his story.

The U.S. Army's Second Brigade of the Third Infantry Division was part of the force that invaded Iraq in March of 2003.  It raced out of Kuwait in Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles across open terrain, fighting a battle for which they'd trained. Mechanized infantry combined with the tank sledgehammer brushed aside any resistance losing more vehicles to maintenance than enemy action.  Things and the plan changed when the Second Brigade made it to Baghdad.  Instead of encircling the city of seven million people and trying to clear it block by block with dismounted infantry, the decision was made to make a rapier armored thrust into Baghdad, seize the centers of power, and cause Saddam Hussein's regime to collapse from within.  That is what the Second Brigade did and what is chronicled in David Zucchino's “Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad.”

In 1942 the British were fighting for control of the Atlantic Ocean.  If they lost this battle they would starve and be put out of the war.  German submarines were pushing the British to their limits and they could ill afford to have the German battleship Tirpitz sortie into the Atlantic and join the fight. To stop this from happening the British determined the best way to neutralize the Tirpitz was to destroy the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast that was large enough to accommodate the battleship should it take damage fighting on the open ocean. The Great Raid of All is the the story of how a small force of British sailors and commandos sailed under the noses of the Germans and destroyed the Normandie dry dock in Saint Nazaire.

The Marine Corps grew to 485,000 Marines during the Second World War.  This was twenty-five times larger than it was in 1939.  This greatly expanded Corps attacked and captured Japanese held islands across the Central Pacific from 1942 until the war ended in 1945.  Each island landing brought the United States closer to invading the Japanese home islands.  One Marine that participated in the Pacific campaign was Eugene B. Sledge.  He was a mortarman with Company K, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines.  “With the Old Breed” tells Sledge's story of fighting through the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa.

North Korea tried to unify the peninsula by invading South Korea in June 1950.  Initially the North Koreans had great success.  They quickly advanced south while the United States tried to get forces onto the peninsula to stop them.  This soon became a United Nations' mission, and the North Koreans were stopped right around the southern port of Pusan.  Then the United States landed in the rear of the North Koreans at the port of Inchon next to Seoul on South Korea's west coast.  The North Koreans started to collapse and the United Nations force pushed back up the Korean peninsula.  They pushed north of the 38th parallel into North Korea and headed towards the Chinese border on the Yalu river.  As the U.S. advanced during late October and November they got higher into the mountains and the weather got much colder.  While this was going on there was the question of what, if anything, the Chinese Communists were planning to do.  Would the Chinese go to war to keep U.S. forces away from their border? The U.S. commander General MacArthur didn't think so.  He was wrong.  The cold, desolate hillsides were crawling with over three hundred thousand tough and committed soldiers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army.  David Halberstam's “The Coldest Winter” tells the story of what happened when the Chinese sprung their trap.

James Nelson's “I Will Hold” tells the story of Clifton B. Cates.  Cates began serving in the Marine Corps in June 1917.  He deployed to France as part of the 6th Marine Regiment and participated in the Third Battle of Aisne, the Battle of Belleau Wood, and the Battle of Soissons.  Cates was awarded the Navy Cross, two Distinguished Service Crosses, the Star, and Purple Heart for his service during World War One.  He remained in the in Marine Corps and served during the Second World War where he lead the 1st Marine Regiment at Guadalcanal and then commanded the 4th Marine Division for the seizure of Tinian and Iwo Jima.  Cates went on to serve as the nineteenth Commandant of the Marine Corps.  He retired in 1954. 

In April 1968 large elements of the North Vietnamese Army's 320th Division crossed the Demilitarized Zone into South Vietnam.  They were advancing towards the 3rd Marine Division's command post and major logistics hub at Dong Ha when they were engaged by the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines.  Fighting raged in and around the village of Dai Do from April 30th until May 3rd.  This was some of the Vietnam War's most intense combat.  The United States suffered 233 dead and 821 wounded.  Keith Nolan's “Magnificent Bastards” tells the story. 

The Battle of Guadalcanal took place from August 1942 until February 1943.  Because Guadalcanal is an island, both the Japanese and the Americans relied on the sea to supply their forces and bring in reinforcements.    James D. Hornfischer's “Neptune's Inferno” tells the story of the fight to control the seas around Guadalcanal.  These sea battles cost roughly three times as many American lives as the fighting on the island and gave the American surface fleet a hard lesson in modern fleet-on-fleet action.

The Allies landed in Normandy as the sun came up on June 6th, 1944.  A couple of hours before about 13,100 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions jumped into the night inland of the Utah and Omaha beaches.  The 82nd's mission was to seize the town of Saint Marie Eglise and the causeways off Utah beach.  Ed Ruggero's “First Men In” tells the story of how they did it and what it cost. 

The U.S. entered the Second World War in December 1941 when the Japanese attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  In January 1942, the United States established the 8th Bomber Group.  By February 1942, the 8th Bomber Group had a detachment in England, its first combat units arrived in June, and it launched its first raid on July 4th, 1942 as the 8th Air Force.  The 8th Air Force was the centerpiece to the U.S.' precision daylight bombing campaign against Germany.  By the middle of 1944 it had over 200,000 people.  During World War Two the 8th Air Force conducted over 440,000 bomber sorties over Europe and dropped 697,000 tons of bombs.  All this came with a price.  47,483 members of the 8th Air Force were killed.  A very small cog in this big machine was B-17 co-pilot Bert Stiles.  He arrived in England in March 1944 and flew with the 91st Bomb Group.  He wrote “Serenade to the Big Bird” while doing it.

This is part 2 of 2 on Sean Naylor's “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command”.  In April 1980, the U.S. military tried to rescue 52 Americans captured when Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran.  The rescue attempt was called Operation Eagle Claw and it failed.  Eagle Claw involved helicopters flying from a Navy ship and fixed wing aircraft carrying the assault force and extra fuel flying from another country.  All the pieces converged in the middle of the Iranian desert at night in a place called Desert One.  One of the helicopters collided with one of the aircraft during ground refueling.  Eight Americans died and seven aircraft were either destroyed or captured.  Even though the individual pieces of the Eagle Claw plan may have been capable of performing their part, the mission fell apart when the pieces came together.  According to the author Sean Naylor the U.S. answer to was to have all its counter terrorist pieces from different parts of the military in one standing joint task force.  The U.S. formed this counter terrorist task force in December 1980 and called it the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).  JSOC went on to play a central role in the Global War on Terror. 

In April 1980, the U.S. military tried to rescue 52 Americans captured when Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran.  The rescue attempt was called Operation Eagle Claw and it failed.  Eagle Claw involved helicopters flying from a Navy ship and fixed wing aircraft carrying the assault force and extra fuel flying from another country.  All the pieces converged in the middle of the Iranian desert at night in a place called Desert One.  One of the helicopters collided with one of the aircraft during ground refueling.  Eight Americans died and seven aircraft were either destroyed or captured.  Even though the individual pieces of the Eagle Claw plan may have been capable of performing their part, the mission fell apart when the pieces came together.  According to the author Sean Naylor the U.S. answer to was to have all its counter terrorist pieces from different parts of the military in one standing joint task force.  The U.S. formed this counter terrorist task force in December 1980 and called it the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).  JSOC went on to play a central role in the Global War on Terror. 

The U.S. Navy started World War Two leaning towards the idea that its submarines were supposed to remain hidden and cautiously scout ahead of the surface fleet.  With the surface fleet destroyed at Pearl Harbor, that idea got turned around.  Instead a new generation of aggressive commanders rose up.  They roamed the vast Pacific on independent war patrols that lasted months.  By war's end the Japanese merchant fleet had lost close to nine million tons of shipping and was only 23% its pre-war size.  Over half of those losses came at the hands of U.S. submarines.  U.S. submarines also sank close to seven hundred Imperial Japanese Navy ships over five hundred tons.  William Ruhe's “War in the Boats” offers a first hand account of the submarine campaign in the Pacific.  We were privileged to be joined by Rear Admiral Scott Pappano for this episode. 

On the night of 30-31 March 1944, 795 Royal Air Force bombers attacked the city of Nuremberg.  95 of those bombers were shot down, ten more were written off as complete losses after landing, and 545 bomber crewmen were lost.  More aircrew were lost that night than the whole of the Battle of Britain.  It is the bloodiest day in Royal Air Force history. 

On September 11th, 2001 the terrorist group Al Qaeda hijacked four civilian airliners and used them to attack the United States.  Two planes were deliberately flown into and destroyed New York’s World Trade Center; another plane was flown into the Pentagon; and the fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.  It appears the fourth plane was headed to attack another target in Washington, DC but crashed early when the passengers tried to take back control.  These four attacks killed 2,977 people in addition to the nineteen hijackers.  That evening, President George W. Bush addressed the nation.  He said, “The search is underway for those who were behind these evil acts. I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.”  Nine days later in a speech to Congress, President Bush said, “The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as Al Qaeda”, as being responsible for the September 11th attacks.  He went on to name Osama Bin Laden as the leader of Al Qaeda and said, “Our was on terror begins with Al Qaeda.”  It took about ten years but the United States found Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.  On May 2nd, 2011 the United States military conducted a raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound and killed him.  One of the people who participated in that raid and witnessed Bin Laden’s death was a Navy SEAL whose pen name is Mark Owen.  Owen’s memoir “No Easy Day” tells the story of the decade he and his teammates spent fighting America’s War on Terror.