Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/November 2012/Articles


 * Frank Berryman (Hawkeye7) : Lieutenant General Sir Frank Horton Berryman (1894–1981) was an Australian Army officer who served as a general during the Second World War. During the First World War he served as an officer on the Western Front with the field artillery. After the war, he spent nearly twenty years as a major. Berryman joined the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF) on 4 April 1940 with the rank of full colonel, and became the senior staff officer of the 6th Division. He was responsible for the staff work for the attacks on Bardia and Tobruk. In January 1941, Berryman became Commander, Royal Artillery, 7th Division, and was promoted to brigadier. During the Syria-Lebanon campaign, he commanded "Berry Force". He returned to Australia in 1942, becoming Major General, General Staff, of the First Army. Later that year, he became Deputy Chief of the General Staff under the Commander in Chief, General Sir Thomas Blamey, who brought him up to Port Moresby to simultaneously act as chief of staff of New Guinea Force. Berryman was intimately involved with the planning and execution of the Salamaua-Lae campaign and the Huon Peninsula campaign. In November 1943, he became acting commander of II Corps, which he led in the Battle of Sio. In the final part of the war, he was Blamey's representative at General of the Army Douglas MacArthur's headquarters and the Australian Army representative at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. After the war, Berryman commanded Eastern Command. He hoped to become Chief of the General Staff but was passed over as he was seen as a "Blamey man" by Prime Minister Ben Chifley. Berryman subsequently retired and oversaw the Royal Tour of Queen Elizabeth II in 1954. He was Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Agricultural Society of New South Wales from 1954 to 1961.


 * La Coupole (Prioryman) : La Coupole is a Second World War bunker complex in the Pas-de-Calais départment of northern France, about 5 km from Saint-Omer. It was built by the forces of Nazi Germany between 1943 and 1944 to serve as a launch base for V-2 rockets directed against London and southern England. Constructed in the side of a disused chalk quarry, the most prominent feature of the complex is an immense concrete dome. It was built above a network of tunnels housing storage areas, launch facilities and crew quarters. The facility was designed to store a large stockpile of V-2s, warheads and fuel and was intended to launch V-2s on an industrial scale. However, after repeated heavy bombing by Allied forces during Operation Crossbow, the Germans were unable to complete the construction works and the complex never entered service. It was captured by the Allies in September 1944, partially demolished on the orders of Winston Churchill to prevent its reuse as a military base, and then abandoned. In 1997 it opened to the public for the first time, as a museum.


 * Manuel Marques de Sousa, Count of Porto Alegre (Lecen) : Manuel Marques de Sousa, Count of Porto Alegre (1804–1875) was an army officer, politician, abolitionist and monarchist of the Empire of Brazil. Born into a wealthy family of military background, Porto Alegre joined the army as a child in 1817. His military initiation occurred in the conquest of the Eastern Bank, which was annexed and became the southernmost Brazilian province of Cisplatina in 1821. For most of the 1820s, he was embroiled in the Brazilian effort to keep Cisplatina as part of its territory. A few years later, in 1835, his native province of Rio Grande do Sul was engulfed in a secessionist rebellion, the War of the Ragamuffins. The conflict lasted for almost ten years, and the Count was leading military engagements for most of that time. In 1852, he led a Brazilian division during the Platine War in an invasion of the Argentine Confederation that overthrew its dictator. In the postwar years, Porto Alegre turned his attention to politics, retiring from his military career as a lieutenant general. He was an affiliate of the Liberal Party at the national level and was elected to the legislature of Rio Grande do Sul. He also founded the Progressive-Liberal Party. Porto Alegre later entered the lower house of the Brazilian parliament and was briefly Minister of War. When the Paraguayan War erupted in 1864, he returned to active duty and was one of the main Brazilian commanders during the conflict. Porto Alegre resumed his political career after the war and became an active advocate for the abolition of slavery and a patron in the fields of literature and science. Some historians consider him to be among Brazil's greatest military figures.


 * USS Lexington (CV-2) (Sturmvogel 66) : USS Lexington (CV-2), nicknamed "Lady Lex",was an early aircraft carrier built for the United States Navy. She was the lead ship of the Lexington-class aircraft carrier, though her only sister ship, USS Saratoga (CV-3), was commissioned a month earlier. Originally designed as a battlecruiser, she was converted into one of the Navy's first aircraft carriers during construction to comply with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which essentially terminated all new battleship and battlecruiser construction. The ship entered service in 1928 and was assigned to the Pacific Fleet for her entire career. Lexington and Saratoga were used to develop and refine carrier tactics in a series of annual exercises before World War II. On more than one occasion these included successfully staged surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The ship's turbo-electric propulsion system allowed her to supplement the electrical supply of Tacoma, Washington, during a drought in late 1929 to early 1930. She also delivered medical personnel and relief supplies to Managua, Nicaragua, after an earthquake in 1931. Lexington was at sea when the Pacific War began on 7 December 1941, ferrying fighter aircraft to Midway Island. Her mission was cancelled and she returned to Pearl Harbor. Lexington rendezvoused with Yorktown in the Coral Sea in early May. A few days later the Japanese began Operation MO, the invasion of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and the two American carriers attempted to stop the invasion forces. They sank the light aircraft carrier JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Shōhō on 7 May during the Battle of the Coral Sea, but did not encounter the main Japanese force of the carriers JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Shōkaku and JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Zuikaku until the next day. Aircraft from Lexington and Yorktown succeeded in badly damaging Shōkaku, but the Japanese aircraft crippled Lexington. Vapors from leaking aviation gasoline tanks sparked a series of explosions and fires that could not be controlled, and the carrier had to be scuttled by an American destroyer during the evening of 8 May to prevent her capture.


 * We Can Do It! (Binksternet) : "We Can Do It!" is an American wartime propaganda poster produced by J. Howard Miller in 1943 for Westinghouse Electric as an inspirational image to boost worker morale. The poster is generally thought to be based on a black-and-white wire service photograph taken of a Michigan factory worker named Geraldine Hoff. The poster was seen very little during World War II. It was rediscovered in the early 1980s and widely reproduced in many forms, often called "We Can Do It!" but also called "Rosie the Riveter" after the iconic figure of a strong female war production worker. The "We Can Do It!" image was used to promote feminism and other political issues beginning in the 1980s. The poster is one of the ten most-requested images at the National Archives and Records Administration. After its rediscovery, observers often assumed that the image was always used as a call to inspire women workers to join the war effort. However, during the war the image was strictly internal to Westinghouse, displayed only during February 1943, and was not for recruitment but to exhort already-hired women to work harder. Feminists and others have seized upon the uplifting attitude and apparent message to remake the image into many different forms, including self empowerment, campaign promotion, advertising, and parodies.


 * 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian) (Peacemaker67) : The 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian) was a Waffen-SS mountain infantry formation used to conduct operations against Yugoslav Partisans in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) from March to December 1944. Named Handschar, after a local fighting knife or sword carried by Turkish policemen during the Ottoman period, it was one of thirty-eight divisions fielded by the Waffen SS during World War II and the first SS division to be formed entirely of non-Germanic peoples. The division was composed of Bosnian Muslims with some Catholic Croat soldiers and mostly German and Yugoslav Volksdeutsche officers and non-commissioned officers. The division took an oath of allegiance to both Adolf Hitler and the leader of the NDH, Ante Pavelić. It initially operated within a designated "security zone" in north-eastern Bosnia between the Sava, Bosna, Drina and Spreča rivers, administratively part of the Posavina and Usora-Soli counties. It fought briefly in the Syrmia region north of the Sava, prior to crossing into north-eastern Bosnia and in adjacent areas of Bosnia. In late 1944, parts of the division were transferred briefly to the Zagreb area, after which the non-German members began to desert in large numbers. Over the winter of 1944–1945, the division was sent to the Baranja region where it fought against the Red Army and Bulgarians throughout southern Hungary, falling back via a series of defensive lines until they were inside the Reich frontier. Most of the remaining Bosnian Muslims left at this point and attempted to return to Bosnia. The rest retreated further west, hoping to surrender to the Western Allies. Most of the remaining members became prisoners of the British Army. Thirty-eight officers were extradited by the Yugoslavian authorities to face criminal charges, and ten were executed.


 * Douglas MacArthur's escape from the Philippines (Hawkeye7) : The escape of Douglas MacArthur from the Philippines began on 11 March 1942, during World War II, when he left Corregidor Island in PT boats. After travelling for two days through stormy seas patrolled by Japanese warships, he reached Mindanao. From there, MacArthur and his party flew to Australia, ultimately arriving in Melbourne on 21 March. This was the occasion of his famous speech in which he declared, "I came through and I shall return." Douglas MacArthur was a well-known and experienced officer with a distinguished record in World War I, who had retired from the United States Army in 1937 and had become a defense advisor to the Philippine government. He was recalled to active duty with the United States Army in July 1941, a few months before the outbreak of the Pacific War between the United States and the Empire of Japan. By March 1942, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines had compelled MacArthur to withdraw his forces on Luzon to Bataan, while his headquarters and his family moved to Corregidor Island. The doomed defense of Bataan captured the imagination of the American public, and MacArthur became a living symbol of Allied resistance to the Japanese. Fearing that Corregidor would fall, and MacArthur would be taken prisoner, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to go to Australia. A submarine was made available, but MacArthur elected to break through the Japanese blockade in PT boats. He set out after sunset on 11 March, and after two days of being bounced about in rough seas, and nearly being spotted by a Japanese warship, he reached Cagayan on Mindanao. From there, MacArthur and his party flew to Australia from Del Monte Field in a pair of Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses. The staff he brought with him, who became known as the "Bataan Gang", would become the nucleus of his General Headquarters (GHQ) Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA).


 * Dudley Clarke (ErrantX) : Brigadier Dudley Wrangel Clarke, CB, CBE (1899–1974) was an officer in the British Army, known as a pioneer of military deception operations during the Second World War. His ideas for combining fictional orders of battle, visual deception and double agents helped define Allied deception strategy during the war, for which he has been referred to as "the greatest British deceiver of WW2". He was instrumental in the founding of three famous military units, namely the British Commandos, the Special Air Service and the US Rangers. Born in Johannesburg during the Second Boer War and brought up in London, Clarke became enamoured with the style and substance of the armed forces. During the First World War he joined the Royal Artillery as an officer, but was unable to fight in France due to an age limit. He transferred to the newly formed Royal Flying Corps and spent the rest of the war learning to fly, first in Reading and then Egypt. After the war, Clarke returned to the Royal Artillery and led a varied career in the Middle East. While on leave in 1922 he fed misinformation to Turkish rebels during the Chanak Crisis, the first example of the kind of work that would later define his career. In 1936, Clarke was posted, where he helped organise the British response to the Arab uprising in Palestine. In 1940, Clarke returned to the Middle East and was placed in charge of strategic deception. As cover for this secret role he was also tasked with setting up a regional presence for MI9, a British escape and evasion department. The following year he established 'A' Force. Clarke pursue intelligence contacts outside of Cairo, in Turkey and Lisbon, both for deception and MI9 escape-and-evasion activities. In late 1941 his ideas for military deception came to the attention of Allied high command, who called Clarke to London and suggested he set up a department in the capital. Clarke declined and returned to Lisbon. Shortly afterwards, while in Madrid, he was arrested wearing women's clothing, in circumstances that remain unclear.  The Madrid incident marked the end of Clarke's field work and he returned to Cairo and 'A' Force.  Clarke implemented Operation Cascade, a grand order of battle deception which added a large number of fictional units to the Allied formations. These units were reused in 'A' Forces tactical deceptions to help establish their existence, a success as the Axis believed in all of the units by the end of the war. Clarke spent the remainder of the war organising deception in North Africa and southern Europe. After the war ended Clarke spent a couple of years writing up the history of 'A' Force before retiring in 1947. He lived the remainder of his life in relative obscurity (records of wartime deception were kept classified until the 1970s). As well as pursuing a literary career that produced two histories and a thriller, he worked for the Conservative Party and was a director of Securicor. He died in London in 1974.


 * Isidor Isaac Rabi (Hawkeye7): Isidor Isaac Rabi (1898–1988) was a Galician-born American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance imaging. He was also involved in the development of the cavity magnetron, which is used in microwave radar and microwave ovens. Born into a traditional Jewish family in Rymanów, Galicia, in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, Rabi came to the United States as a baby and was raised in New York's Lower East Side. He entered Cornell University as an electrical engineering student in 1916, but soon switched to chemistry. Later, he became interested in physics. He continued his studies at Columbia University, where he was awarded his doctorate for a thesis on the magnetic susceptibility of certain crystals. In 1927, he headed for Europe, where he met and worked with many of the finest physicists of the time. In 1929 Rabi returned to the United States, where Columbia offered him a faculty position. In collaboration with Gregory Breit, he developed the Breit-Rabi equation and predicted that the Stern-Gerlach experiment could be modified to confirm the properties of the atomic nucleus. He developed techniques for using nuclear magnetic resonance to discern the magnetic moment and nuclear spin of atoms. This work led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944. Nuclear magnetic resonance became an important tool for nuclear physics and chemistry. The subsequent development of magnetic resonance imaging from it has made it important to medicine as well. During World War II he worked on radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory and on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he served on the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission, and was chairman from 1952 to 1956. He also served on the Science Advisory Committee (SAC) of the Office of Defense Mobilization, and was Science Advisor to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was involved with the establishment of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1946, and later, as United States delegate to UNESCO, with the creation of CERN in 1952. When Columbia created the rank of University Professor in 1964, Rabi was the first to receive such a chair. A special chair was named after him in 1985. He retired from teaching in 1967 but remained active in the department and held the title of University Professor Emeritus and Special Lecturer until his death in 1988.


 * John Adair (Acdixon) : John Adair (1757–1840) was an American pioneer, soldier and statesman. He was the eighth Governor of Kentucky and represented the state in both the U.S. House and Senate. A native of South Carolina, Adair enlisted in the state militia and served in the Revolutionary War, where he was held captive by the British for a period of time. Following the war, he was elected as a delegate to South Carolina's convention to ratify the United States Constitution. Adair moved to Kentucky in 1786 and participated in the Northwest Indian War, including a skirmish with the Miami chief Little Turtle near Fort St. Clair in 1792. Popular for his service in two wars, Adair entered politics in 1792. After Kentucky's separation from Virginia, he was elected to a total of eight terms in the state House of Representatives between 1793 and 1803. He served as Speaker of the Kentucky House in 1802 and 1803, and was a delegate to the state's second constitutional convention in 1799. Adair took part in the War of 1812, and subsequently defended Kentucky's soldiers against Andrew Jackson's charges that they showed cowardice at the Battle of New Orleans. In 1820, he was elected governor on a platform of financial relief for Kentuckians hit hard by the Panic of 1819. Following his term as governor, Adair served one undistinguished term in the United States House of Representatives, but did not run for re-election. He died May 19, 1840, at his farm in Harrodsburg. He is the namesake of Adair County, Kentucky, Adair County, Missouri, Adair County, Iowa, and the cities of Adairville, Kentucky and Adair, Iowa.


 * McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II in Australian service (Nick-D) : The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) operated 24 McDonnell Douglas F-4E Phantom II fighter aircraft between 1970 and 1973. The Phantoms were leased from the United States Air Force (USAF) in 1970 as an interim measure due to delays in the delivery of the RAAF's 24 General Dynamics F-111C aircraft. One of the Phantoms was destroyed in a flying accident, and the surviving aircraft were returned to the USAF in October 1972 and June 1973. The F-4C variant of the Phantom II was among the aircraft which was evaluated by the RAAF in 1963 as part of the project to replace its English Electric Canberra bombers. However, this aircraft was judged to not meet the Air Force's requirements, and the F-111 was eventually selected. When the F-111 project was delayed in the late 1960s due to long-running technical faults with the aircraft, the RAAF determined that the F-4E variant of the Phantom would be the best alternative. As a result of continued problems with the F-111s, the Australian and United States Governments negotiated an agreement in 1970 whereby the RAAF leased 24 F-4Es and their support equipment from the USAF. The RAAF's F-4Es entered service in September 1970, and proved to be highly successful. They were used in the air-to-ground role in order to prepare the RAAF's aircrew to operate the sophisticated F-111s, and played an important role in improving the force's professional standards. One of the Phantoms was destroyed in a flying accident in June 1971, and another was repaired by the RAAF after it sustained heavy damage during a crash landing. The RAAF sought to retain the Phantoms after the F-111s entered service, but a proposal to purchase the aircraft was rejected by the Government.


 * Operation Barras (HJ Mitchell) : Operation Barras was a British Army operation in Sierra Leone on 10 September 2000. The operation aimed to release five British soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment who had been held by a militia group known as the "West Side Boys". The British Army negotiated the release of six of the eleven men on the patrol, but were not able to gain the freedom of their Sierra Leone Army liaison officer and the other men. Fearing that the soldiers would be killed or moved to a location from which it would be more difficult to extract them, the British government authorised an assault on the West Side Boys' base, to take place at dawn the following day, 10 September. The ground operation was conducted by D Squadron, 22 Regiment Special Air Service—who assaulted Gberi Bana in a bid to extract the Royal Irish—and elements of 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment (1 PARA), based around A Company, who launched a diversionary assault on Magbeni. The operation freed the five soldiers as well as twenty-one Sierra Leonean civilians who had been held prisoner by the West Side Boys. At least twenty-five West Side Boys were killed in the assault, as was one British soldier, while eighteen West Side Boys—including the gang's leader, Foday Kallay—were taken prisoner and later transferred to the custody of the Sierra Leone Police. Many West Side Boys fled the area during the assault, and over 300 surrendered to UNAMSIL forces within a fortnight.


 * South West Pacific Area (command) (Hawkeye7) : South West Pacific Area (SWPA) was the name given to the Allied supreme military command in the South West Pacific Theatre of World War II. It was one of four major Allied commands in the Pacific War. SWPA included the Philippines, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies (excluding Sumatra), East Timor, Australia, the Territories of Papua and New Guinea, and the western part of the Solomon Islands. It primarily consisted of United States and Australian forces, although Dutch, Filipino, British and other Allied forces also served in the SWPA. General Douglas MacArthur was appointed as the Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area, on its creation on 18 April 1942. He created five subordinate commands: Allied Land Forces, Allied Air Forces, Allied Naval Forces, United States Army Forces in Australia (USAFIA), and the United States Army Forces in the Philippines. The last command disappeared when Corregidor surrendered on 6 May 1942. USAFIA became the United States Army Services of Supply, Southwest Pacific Area (USASOS SWPA). In 1943, United States Army Forces in the Far East was reformed and assumed responsibility for administration, leaving USASOS as a purely logistical agency. Both were swept away in a reorganisation in 1945. The other three commands, Allied Land Forces, Allied Air Forces and Allied Naval Forces, remained until SWPA was abolished on 2 September 1945.


 * Sudirman (Crisco 1492) : General of the Army Raden Soedirman (Perfected Spelling: Sudirman; 1916–1950) was a high-ranking Indonesian military officer during the Indonesian National Revolution. The first commander-in-chief of the Indonesian Armed Forces, he continues to be highly respected in Indonesia. Born in Purbalingga, Dutch East Indies, to a commoner and his wife, Sudirman was adopted by his uncle, a noble. After the Japanese occupied the Indies in 1942, Sudirman continued to teach. In 1944, he joined the Japanese-sponsored Defenders of the Homeland as a battalion commander in Banyumas. In this position he put down a rebellion by his fellow soldiers, but was later interned in Bogor. After Indonesia proclaimed its independence on 17 August 1945, Sudirman led a break-out from the detention centre, then went to Jakarta to meet President Sukarno. He was tasked with overseeing the surrender of Japanese soldiers in Banyumas, which he did after establishing a local division of the People's Safety Body. His command was made part of the Fifth Division on 20 October by interim commander-in-chief Oerip Soemohardjo, with Sudirman in charge of the division. On 12 November 1945, at an election to decide the military's commander-in-chief in Yogyakarta, Sudirman was chosen over Oerip in a close vote. While waiting to be confirmed, Sudirman ordered an assault on British and Dutch forces stationed in Ambarawa. The ensuing battle and British withdrawal strengthened Sudirman's popular support, and he was ultimately confirmed on 18 December. During the following three years Sudirman saw negotiations with the returning Dutch colonial forces fail, first after the Linggadjati Agreement – which Sudirman participated in drafting – and then the Renville Agreement – which led to Indonesia granting land taken during Operation Product to the Dutch forces and the withdrawal of 35,000 Indonesian troops. He was also faced with internal dissent, including a 1948 coup d'état attempt. On 19 December 1948 the Dutch launched Operation Kraai, an attempt to capture Yogyakarta. While the political leadership took shelter at the sultan's palace, Sudirman, a small group of soldiers, and his personal doctor went south and began a seven-month guerrilla campaign. Initially followed by Dutch forces, Sudirman escaped and made his headquarters at Sobo, near Mount Lawu, where he was able to command military activities in Java; this included a show of force in Yogyakarta on 1 March 1949, led by Lieutenant Colonel Suharto. When the Dutch began withdrawing, in July 1949 Sudirman was called back to Yogyakarta. Although he wanted to continue fighting the Dutch troops, he was forbidden by Sukarno. Sudirman had a relapse of tuberculosis; this led to him retiring to Magelang. He died slightly more than a month after the Dutch recognised Indonesia's independence. He is buried at Semaki Heroes' Cemetery in Yogyakarta.