With: Winston Churchill, Prime Minister

Family members and a few close friends were enjoying a brief and quiet birthday celebration with Winston Churchill, who turned sixty-seven years old on November 30, 1941.

Churchill was generally attentive and pleasant during private events, but on this day his thoughts were elsewhere.

Normally occupied with all things Hitler, Churchill’s mind was in the Pacific, and specifically with the Japanese, and what the latest military intelligence information meant for the British.

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McGinnis yelled again: “The grenade is in the truck!”

Then Newland could hear it ricocheting around the turret, a heavy metallic drum.

McGinnis tried to grab it so he could toss it back out before it blew, but he missed. He stood as if he were going to leap out of the top of the Humvee, but instead he dropped down from his fighting position into the truck.

Newland thought McGinnis was trying to escape the grenade. But he wasn’t. McGinnis had realized that his teammates hadn’t spotted it, and so he was chasing it.

Newland couldn’t move quickly enough to get out of the truck with its combat-locked doors, and none of the guys quite understood what was going on because McGinnis hadn’t dived out.

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Halsey guided Task Force 2 out of Pearl Harbor on November 28, taking every precaution to make it appear as if he were leaving on another training exercise.

At 7:00 A.M. on December 4, with his force 200 miles from Wake Island, Halsey launched the twelve Marine fighters, then turned his ships toward Pearl Harbor.

If all went well, he would enter the channel at 7:30 A.M. on Sunday, December 7.

Inclement weather proved an affable ally for Halsey, as it prevented him from being berthed inside Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attack started.

Halsey’s ships steamed safely at sea while Japanese aircraft dropped their bombs on slumbering ships.

Halsey could do little about the weather, however. When heavy seas and brisk winds delayed the refueling of his destroyers and retarded the force’s progress, he alerted Pearl Harbor that he would not arrive until the night of December 7. [More...]

Command Posts ran its first Pearl Harbor feature in December of last year.

As we head into the 70th anniversary of the attack, Command Posts will combine last year's feature with new posts, for an ongoing "Reading and Viewing List."

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CP Note: The November 25, 2001 revolt at Qala-i-Jangi played a key role in the decision to build a remote holding site for specific operatives. This piece discusses the decision on where to build that facility.  

On December 11, 2001, in what appears to have been a case of conscious indirection, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld told journalists that the administration was still mulling the decision about where to hold detainees. Afghanistan, U.S. shipboard, the detainees’ countries of origin, and locations in the United States were all under consideration.

In fact, by early December, Guantánamo had emerged as the administration’s clear first choice.

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The November 25 prisoner revolt at Qala-i-Jangi near Mazar-i-Sharif in the north shocked coalition authorities into recognizing that the old traditional ways of Afghanistan would not work in this new campaign.

In the words of a Special Forces captain present, [it was] “a full-scale battle.”

CIA officer Mike Spann was the first to die when the detainees attacked, thus tragically becoming the first American killed in the fighting in Afghanistan.

After several days of intense fighting the butcher’s bill was tallied: Several hundred enemy fighters had been killed and scores more wounded, a few holdouts surrendered, and many Northern Alliance soldiers had died or were wounded.

The Qala-i-Jangi fight was a catalyst, in some measure, for two immediate U.S. reactions: First, it was painfully apparent that captured enemy combatants would have to be handled more professionally. Interrogation was obviously impossible under such circumstances and information was sorely needed on the movements of high-value al-Qaeda targets and possible future terror attacks. This could not be done successfully in-country to the extent necessary. Nor was it realistic to expect that surrendered fighters would remain quiescent, cooperative prisoners. Secondly, the leadership realized that slapdash prisoner handling like at Qala-i-Jangi was unacceptable: It led to unnecessary casualties on both sides. [More...]

Norman Rockwell's "Freedom from Want" is a go-to for the traditional Thanksgiving scene.

These images are a view of the traditional Thanksgiving scene for servicemembers worldwide.

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On the opening day of the Clint Eastwood-directed biopic about J. Edgar Hoover, I raced to the matinee, something I have not done since Mr. Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns were a must-see staple of the Saturday afternoons of my youth. I’m in final edits on a non-fiction book featuring Hoover and couldn’t deny the Eastwood-Hoover combination.

Hoover’s uniquely bizarre and lengthy career as the nation’s top cop presented Eastwood and writer Dustin Lance Black with tremendous challenges.

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About a year after North Vietnam released what it claimed to be the last 566 American prisoners held in the North, the former POWs were asked to complete a survey of "returned prisoners of war." In one part of the survey, they were asked how certain events affected their morale while in prison.

Two events aided morale most: the Son Tay POW raid in 1970 and the bombing of Hanoi in 1972.

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It had been a beautiful Texas morning. A glamorous couple emerged from their plane at Love Field. They drove through Dallas surrounded by a motorcade, the chrome on their limousine gleaming in the midday sun. Two flags fluttered from the hood.

The president and the first lady waved and smiled at the crowds as the limousine turned into Dealey Plaza and down Elm Street.

Suddenly, the president seemed to grip his throat and lean forward.

His wife turned to him.

Then came the awful shot, that horrific, unforgettable moment.

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November 21, 1970: The POWs heard the helicopters, missiles and high flyers. There hadn’t been any bombings north of the 19th parallel since President Johnson ordered the halt—and even before that, they’d taken place during the day.

The Raiders, made up of a select team of Green Berets and U.S. Air Force Special Operations forces, were on their way to rescue POWs at Son Tay prison. They had 30 minutes to get in and out. Intel had indicated there were about 60-70 POWs. Different portions of the rescue had been practiced 170 times—including every imaginable contingency plan. The one scenario they hadn’t planned for hit everyone involved as Bud Sydnor called “Rollback,” without a single POW found and/or returning home with them.

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In May 1970, a small group of intelligence officials at the Air Force’s 1127th Field Activities Group at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, concluded from reconnaissance photographs and other fragmentary information that there was a prisoner of war camp near the North Vietnamese town of Son Tay.

They were equally convinced that this camp’s POWs were trying to communicate with U.S. reconnaissance aircraft by the way they arranged their laundry and how they marked the ground surface inside their compound.

The prisoners were sending signals.

This startling discovery was brought to the attention of Brig. Gen. James R. Allen, Deputy Director for Plans and Policy in the Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations, who was in a position to follow up on it.

He was delighted to learn about this find and turned to his favorite covert operations planner, Col. Norman H. Frisbie, with instructions to isolate himself in a secure place and come up with a quick assessment of our military capability to execute such a mission.

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