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Post by kungfuzu on Mar 10, 2020 9:18:37 GMT -8
This period was called the "Emergency" in Malaya. I knew a fair number of people who lived through this period, so I think I might find the film very interesting. I suppose the situation might have been at its worst during 1952.
Although, the first period of the Emergency ended in 1960, it was not until the late 1980s/early 1990s that the final leaders of the MCA (Malayan Communist Party) finally gave it up officially.
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
Posts: 11,047
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Post by Brad Nelson on Mar 10, 2020 9:23:59 GMT -8
Maybe I'll trudge on and report back. Reviews suggest that this film doesn't at all delve into the politics of it or why the natives are restless. That leaves it a little thin for my taste.
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Post by kungfuzu on Mar 10, 2020 10:15:40 GMT -8
This is the period after WWII during which there was a strong commie push to take over Asia. The commies used an "anti-Colonialism" meme as a rallying point.
The Dutch lost their colonies in the Dutch East Indies in around 1947-48 and Ho Chi Min and his compadres were actively at it to throw the French out of Indochina.
The English were the only ones who successfully rolled back a communist insurgency in S.E. Asia, although the commies were only a small part of the situation in Indonesia. The commies in Indonesia were mainly Chinese and the Bumis (indigenous peoples) disliked the Chinese for a number of reasons.
And we should not forget the Korean War.
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Post by kungfuzu on Mar 10, 2020 10:25:23 GMT -8
This is the man who defeated the commies in the Malayan Emergency.
Americans tried to learn from his experience and apply his principles in Vietnam. They didn't have his success.
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Post by timothylane on Mar 10, 2020 11:03:27 GMT -8
One advantage the Communists had in Vietnam was sanctuaries all over the region, and reinforcements as needed from the north. In Malaya they had to rely on their own population and lacked safe sanctuary (no doubt Sukarno would have been happy to supply it, but he was across the strait from Malaya). Another is that Westmoreland and Abrams probably weren't as ruthless as Templer.
Or maybe they would have been if they could have persuaded the various South Vietnamese leaders to go along with it. That also wasn't much of a problem for Templer, though Malaya was forming a government to take over in time. My first knowledge of events there was a photograph of the Prime Minister of Malaya, who had been assassinated by the Communists. (That's more than I knew of the Mau-Mau in Kenya, or for that matter the Indochinese and Algerian struggles, until later.)
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Post by artraveler on Mar 10, 2020 13:53:05 GMT -8
It was British commandos who taught American Green Berets how to fight a guerrilla war in the jungle in Vietnam in the late 50s and early 60s, by 65 we were the ones giving lessons via the Phoenix program. Later in the war 68/69? Bill Colby had taken over CORDS and began trimming Phoenix back. By the mid 70s, when I was there my day job was vetting Vietnamese for settlement in the US. Some of those we approved were sent to Arkansas Fort Chaffee. One of those families granddaughters recently ran for Attorney General. It is very shocking to hear a deep Arkansas accent coming from a 90 lb Vietnamese woman. It truly is a small world.
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Post by kungfuzu on Mar 10, 2020 14:42:40 GMT -8
I knew a guy who was a Captain in Army Intelligence. He would be about 76-77 now. He had been involved with the Phoenix program and even in the late 1980s/early 1990s he would not visit Vietnam. He felt it wasn't worth the risk.
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Post by artraveler on Mar 10, 2020 15:32:20 GMT -8
I was agency, attached to 1st Marine Division in Nang in 70 and 71. Most of the intelligence officers in Nam were, at the very least, familiar with the program. Very few Americans were directly involved with the targeted killings of Viet Cong and NVA. However, in the early 70s agents of the PRC decided to target American officers, civilian and military, who worked in CI. My partner and I were the targets of an assignation attempt in Da Nang. We won he lost.
Intelligence work in the 70s was not the technological marvel it is today. I think we have exchanged the accuracy of electronic intelligence for the common sense of human intelligence. We know more about the what, when, and where but we know less about the why. At best, it is a trade off, at worst--well lots of glass and sand that glows in the dark for thousands of years.
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Post by timothylane on Mar 10, 2020 17:10:06 GMT -8
That was after my father's time (he was killed May 18, 1966), though the facility he was working on may still have been named Port Lane at that time. I think my brother served in there sometime around then, but I have no idea of the details.
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Post by artraveler on Mar 10, 2020 18:35:48 GMT -8
My older brother was there, Air Force, in 64/65. He was a thud driver. He, as a young captain, drove super sabers in Korea. He was very anti-communist and affirmed that Russian and Chinese pilots were flying missions against the US in Korea and Vietnam, something DoD denies to this day. I have no doubt he was correct. He boarded his last flight in 2005.
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Post by kungfuzu on Mar 10, 2020 18:47:49 GMT -8
I seem to recall seeing some program about Korean War dogfights, with an emphasis on the F-86 and MiG15. As I remember, the program included some interviews with old Russians who had flown missions against the Americans in the war.
I don't know whether or not the Chinese flew missions against Americans in Vietnam, (I would bet they did) but I know they were on the ground fighting together with and advising the Vietnamese. I met a couple of such types in the early 1980s in Singapore when they were giving technical advice to a local smelter in Singapore.
I hope he had a good run.
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Post by artraveler on Mar 10, 2020 19:27:54 GMT -8
He boarded his last flight in 2005.
He did born in Indiana and passed in San Antonio at 73. The Air Force was good to him. He was a mustang enlisted, OCS and retired as a LC, pilot, and squadron commander.
I have met several old pilots from Nam and Korea all say they flew against PRC and Soviet pilots. We even have some from GW I and II who, in private, assert the same thing. My son has related to me that the IAF has engaged Iranian and Russians over Syria.
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Post by timothylane on Mar 10, 2020 19:40:02 GMT -8
I understand the MiG-15 was theoretically superior to the F-86. But the American pilots compiled a great record shooting them down despite this. Some of the enemy pilots even deserted with their planes, induced by a large financial reward. Mark Clark in his Cold War and Korean War memoir mentioned a cartoon of a Communist pilot with some very ominous photos in his tent -- American cars or other luxuries or whatever. Two senior officers were passing by, and one said, "Don't worry, he's been grounded." Clark speculated that something of the sort might indeed be happening -- and that the sort of pilots who were grounded out of a fear that they would desert might also be the most skilled pilots.
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Post by kungfuzu on Mar 11, 2020 7:30:45 GMT -8
I believe the MiG-15 was a "not-very-good" jet until the Brits sold the Soviets a jet engine made in the West. Believe it or not, this was approved by the government at the time. (the Labour Party government under Attlee). Once the Soviets had that engine, they did a bit of reverse engineering, like they had done earlier with the B-29, and they had a good jet.
To give an idea of how backward the Chinese Air Force was when I lived in Hong Kong, I was offered MiG-17s and MiG-19s in the in the mid 1980s. The idea was to scrap them, but I declined.
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Post by timothylane on Mar 11, 2020 9:16:17 GMT -8
That's odd, because I understood that Attlee was an anti-Communist. Many socialists were, at least partly because they were competing for the same voters. Then, too, many knew who would be among the very first victims of a Communist purge. But I guess this had its limits, and of course Stalin was still an "ally" for a while even though Britain was helping Greece fight a Communist insurgency supported by Stalin. (They had to pull out due to lack of resources, at which point the US took up the cudgels, and eventually the Stalinists were defeated, as also happened to the Huks in the Philippines.)
Incidentally, the P-51 apparently wasn't a very good fighter until they stuck the Rolls Royce Merlin engine in it. Then it became perhaps the best piston-engined fighter ever (and certainly better than anything produced in any significant quantity).
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Post by kungfuzu on Mar 11, 2020 10:05:27 GMT -8
I went to the Wikipedia site and found this:
My memory was somewhat faulty. It was worse than I recalled. The fucking Brits sold a manufacturing license to the Soviets and gave them blueprints.
Note Stalin's comment.
The West is still full of traitors who hate their history and culture and are willing to sell out the rest of us. Think of Bill Clinton and Loral's sale of missile-guidance technology to Red China.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 18, 2020 22:06:35 GMT -8
Here are a couple of instances where the Military-Industrial part of the Deep State have screwed up badly and wasted enormous amounts of time and money on turkeys.
and
Given the trillions of dollars spent on the military and intelligence operations of this country and Trump's desire to pull the US military out of many areas of the world, and his push for accountability, can anyone wonder why the Deep State wants him out. Of course there are a number of other reasons as well, but the latest actions by generals and the Sec. of Defense show how much he scares them.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 19, 2020 6:17:52 GMT -8
Another gross error is the determination of the military brass to get rid of the A-10 when they have no plane of comparable ability to support ground combat. But the Air Force brass know little and care less about ground combat, so that doesn't matter to them.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 19, 2020 7:19:07 GMT -8
he Littoral ships were intended to fill a perceived gap between the blue water navy, a function they could not perform and the class will be retired or assigned other tasks.
The F-35 however, is a much better platform and as the bugs are worked out should be an important addition to the arsenal. The inability of the F-35 to fulfill a ground support role is a concern that is being addressed and even if the stars in the AF don't like it the A-10 Warthog will continue to fill that role.
One of the problems with military procurement is that congress must approve and the way to sell congress is multi-function and multi-mission weapon systems. The sad reality of military procurement is the ratio of bang for buck. No one, congress, president, or the stars in the puzzle palace ask the grunts.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 19, 2020 7:26:32 GMT -8
I gather that multifunction is what went wrong with the F-111 (TFX). Of course, politicized contracting by Lyndon the Bane (with the not-so-able assistance of McNamara and his whizzes) didn't help.
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