[Federalist] Politics is the domain of the president, not the oath-bearing members of the uniformed services.
There is a cancer in America’s military ranks, and it must be expunged before it’s too late. That cancer lies in uniformed service members’ widespread rejection of the uniquely American concept of civilian control of the military and disregard for the absolute necessity that America’s military officers remain apolitical in the face of the constitutional will of the electorate.
Recent events reveal this cancer, and they include the relief for cause of Navy Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield after she reportedly refused to hang photos of President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on her headquarters’ customary "Chain of Command" board and reportedly told her subordinates in a town hall that she would "wait [the Trump administration] out" the next four years. They also include the relief for cause of Col. Sussanah Meyers, commander of the U.S. Space Force’s base in Greenland, after she openly questioned (to all of her subordinates via email) Vice President J.D. Vance’s official pronouncements regarding the United States, Greenland, and Denmark.
Since Trump’s inauguration, numerous other senior generals and admirals have been relieved by President Trump for various publicly unspecified reasons, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown; Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti; Adm. Linda Lee Fagan, the commandant of the Coast Guard; and Air Force Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command. Each of these four-star firings is publicly shrouded in a certain degree of mystery, but rumors abound that so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) played a part in one way or another.
Admittedly, a president firing his senior generals is not a new thing. Barack Obama fired his senior general in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stan McChrystal, after a Rolling Stone article revealed derisive comments by McChrystal and his staff regarding Obama’s leadership. Harry S. Truman fired one of America’s most famous and revered military leaders, Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur, after MacArthur repeatedly disobeyed Truman’s orders regarding the Korean War. And Abraham Lincoln famously had no problem firing his senior Army generals in the heat of the Civil War. What made these firings so noteworthy, however, is that they were rare exceptions that proved the rule of America’s senior generals and admirals wholly respecting civilian control of the military.
What we see now is not Obama and McChrystal, Truman and MacArthur, or Lincoln and his failed generals. The widespread nature of the current problem looks and feels like something completely new in the American experience and appears to be pervasive across the force.
I am a retired U.S. Army colonel. My service record runs a typical gamut for an old colonel, with tours in tactical units (including service in Afghanistan and Iraq) interspersed with service at high-level military headquarters in and around Washington, D.C. Nowadays, I run an account on X with a little more than 200,000 followers. I offer commentary on political and social issues, with a particular emphasis on the military. As a result, I have many military followers, including some still on active duty. I offer active-duty service members a conduit to anonymously share disturbing military trends.
Since Trump’s inauguration, I have been flooded with reports of insubordination in the ranks toward Trump and Hegseth. Those reports range from fairly senior officers in the Pentagon showing open disrespect around the E-Ring coffee maker, all the way down to junior enlisted disrespecting their president and secretary of defense in the ship’s galley or the chow hall.
As one active-duty Army officer recently described to me regarding the experiences of a female Army officer colleague:
Women across the unit are coming to [her] asking about what happens to them. It’s in their minds that SECDEF is going to pull them from combat arms and reclass them. Zero evidence of that but doesn’t stop the rumor mill anyway. Those rumors are playing the telephone game across all soldiers, men and women alike. So they are all on this "f*** Trump f*** Hegseth" train.
For over 235 years, the idea of a civilian commander-in-chief has been a sacred premise guiding our military, enlisted and officer alike. I grew up around the Army, joined as a young man, served for 22 years, and have kept my finger on the pulse of the defense establishment since I retired from active duty. I can honestly say that never once in that time was I ever made aware of the political leanings of any officer superior to me.
Rarely would I even hear political thoughts from my peers or subordinates. In fact, I recall that early in my career, senior officers advised me not to vote in elections, as such an act might suggest I was a political partisan. The duty to remain apolitical was simply that important to officers of that bygone age. We saw ourselves as a sort of band of violent monks, bound by sacred oaths.
To me, that bygone commitment was never more evident than when Bill Clinton became president. During Clinton’s 1992 campaign, it came out that as a young man he had avoided the draft, in part because he "loath[ed]" the military. Vietnam was still a raw wound in the minds of many senior officers and senior enlisted, yet despite Clinton being arguably the most anti-military president in U.S. history, he was respected as the duly elected commander-in-chief, and signs of "resistance" in the uniformed ranks were impossible to detect. We honored our oaths.
Somewhere along the way, something changed. I believe that change has taken place within the senior ranks and, by way of example, has spread throughout the force. We must once again make senior officers loyal to their oath, and the rest of the force will follow.
I have heard from some anti-Trump officers that it is acceptable for them to challenge Trump and be "disloyal" to him on political matters because while the enlisted oath of office includes the phrase "that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States," no such words regarding the president appear in the officer oath of office. This idea is highly disturbing.
It suggests that officers are not bound to follow the lawful orders of the president if they disagree politically. Not only is this contrary to the sacred officer tradition of being apolitical, but it is also contrary to the part of the officers’ oath that requires officers to "support and defend the Constitution" (after all, the president’s military role arises in the Constitution). Finally, it is contrary to the actual commission of all U.S. military officers, which states in part: "And this officer is to observe and follow such orders and directions from time to time as may be given by the President of the United States of America."
The trends we are seeing feel dangerously close to an embrace of 1970s South American-style military juntas. Think about Gen. Mark Milley telling China he would warn them about U.S. military activity. Think about Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman using his position on the National Security Council as a springboard for impeaching a president because he did not like the way that president was lawfully discharging his duties. These are not the marks of healthy civilian control of the military. They are instead marks of a military approaching the rationalization of a coup.
I have heard numerous theories as to how we got here, ranging from "Obama purged all the good generals" to "Gen Z are too narcissistic for selfless sacrifice," but I attribute the breakdown quite directly to DEI policies and practices. I do not mean that the advancement of officers for DEI reasons is the cause. Rather, the inculcation of DEI policies as a core ethos of military service has been monstrously destructive. Our military has always been driven by core values, such as, "Don’t give up the ship," "Duty, Honor, Country," and "Always Faithful." Traditionally, those values have been apolitical and solely revolved around the military’s fundamental mission of defeating America’s battlefield enemies.
Somewhere in these early years of the 21st century, however, DEI also became a central ethos. One need only read the policy pronouncements of the likes of C.Q. Brown and Lisa Franchetti to see that they embraced so-called diversity for diversity’s sake and that DEI policies became a core ethos of America’s military — a new "warrior ethos" grounded not in warfighting but in a purely political and public policy doctrine.
So on the one hand you have a president elected to purge the political doctrine of DEI from America’s government, and on the other hand you have a generation of senior generals and admirals who mistakenly view DEI as an apolitical military ethos, every bit as essential to the military’s lineage and traditions as Audie Murphy, the Medal of Honor, and the USS Constitution. Thus, when Donald Trump seeks to exercise his constitutional powers to purge a purely political doctrine, the generals and admirals mistakenly see this as an effort to purge a fundamental, essential, and apolitical military ethos. This gives them license to feel justified in "resisting" the lawful orders of their commander-in-chief and engaging in insubordination as they falsely imagine they are protecting a core competency of our nation’s defense.
Fortunately, fixing this problem is not that hard. It merely requires some extreme intestinal fortitude by Trump, Hegseth, and the military department secretaries in the face of a media determined to discredit their every move. The solution lies in two parts: education and example-setting.
Education will involve reinvigorated training, in every service and at every level, regarding the military’s duty of loyalty to elected civilian leaders and their lawful orders. A standard curriculum must be developed in the Department of Defense regarding those constitutional duties, and that curriculum must be taught in great detail at every level and in every professional development course, from basic training for every recruit up to the "charm school" for new generals and admirals.
Example-setting will mean more of what we have already seen: the relief for cause of senior officers for insubordinate behavior. But that’s not enough. Vice Adm. Chatfield and Col. Meyers will no doubt soon be on MSNBC regaling us all with tales of the illegality of the Trump administration. Trump and Hegseth must take a more drastic approach, and the answer to that approach lies in Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which reads as follows:
Contempt toward officials: Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
This is the tool by which senior insubordinate officers must be made an example. While I doubt any generals or admirals will soon be breaking rocks at Leavenworth, the mere act of initiating a few well-publicized courts martial will drive home the message: Politics is the domain of the president, not the oath-bearing members of the uniformed services.
Good order and discipline must be restored. There is a cancer in the ranks of America’s military, and it must be expunged before it’s too late.
#2
You hold a commission. Your promotions are predicated upon "special trust and confidence". If it is a lawful order, you are bound to carry it out. You resign or retire if you find you can not morally support the chain of command. Period.
You wonder why the commies were out to strike 'Duty, Honor, County'. You have your answer.
[PJMedia] A young Englishman named Jason Savage was looking for something in his life, and so he converted to Islam in 2012. That’s not surprising in today’s Britannia, where the far-left Church of England teaches only shadows and vestiges of Christianity, and Islam is essentially the only alternative to the materialistic secularism that has led so many to find life empty and pointless. In a very real sense, however, Savage’s conversion to Islam is when his troubles began. Now he is facing life in prison, although in the UK that is likely to mean that he will spend only sixteen years behind bars. Savage’s story is similar to that of a great many converts to Islam who become jihadis, but this time there’s a twist.
The UK’s Press Association reported Friday that Savage was "found guilty in January of plotting to stab an Islamic holy man who was an outspoken critic of terrorism, after jurors were shown footage of him filming a reconnaissance ’mission’ near a mosque and Islamic bookstore." On Friday, he went to prison "after a judge said messages he had sent showed that he believed he would die while committing a terrorist attack."
And so here we have yet another convert to Islam who somehow got the crazy idea that his new, peaceful religion commanded him to commit violence against those outside the fold. Unlike other convert jihadis, however, Savage didn’t primarily target non-Moslems; instead, he decided to murder a holy man whose view of Islam differed from his own, specifically on the question of the permissibility of Islamic jihad terrorism: "video footage released by West Midlands Police after Savage was convicted showed him filming reconnaissance near a mosque in Wright Street, Small Heath, Birmingham, in March last year."
Savage is caught on the video talking about how he would escape the area after committing his act of jihad. He says: "That seems like the best way to get away — the police will probably come from that way." The Press Association adds that along with "charting different routes into the mosque, Savage, who had adapted the handle of a knife found at his home, was heard to say: ’Just needs the means now. Ask Allah to give man the means, bro.’"
Savage was planning to attack a Moslemholy man, as well as a "bookstore and mosque in the Small Heath area," because the targeted imam’s "approach to the Salafi movement was ’entirely at odds’ with his own." The unnamed imam, as well as his mosque, publishing house, and retail store, "advocated a strand of Salafism that stresses the importance of non-involvement in social or political activism." The imam whom Savage wanted to send to Allah was "an ’outspoken critic’ of Islamist terrorism, arguing that it was entirely incompatible with the true essence of Islam."
Why don’t we see more genuine Islamic reformers? The answer lies in Jason Savage’s choice of targets. There are smooth deceivers by the bucketload, but genuine reformers are exceedingly thin on the ground. One reason is that even to assert that Islam needs reforming after Allah has "perfected" it (Qur’an 5:3) makes one a heretic or apostate, and thus deserving of the death penalty . As it is fundamental to the Islamic religion to "strike terror in the enemies of Allah" (Qur’an 8:60), many jihadis would regard a holy man who spoke out against terrorism as a heretic or apostate. And so Jason Savage decided to murder a holy man of his acquaintance who did just that.
Savage also intended to carry out the Qur’an’s command to "kill the polytheists wherever you find them" (9:5), with polytheists being pretty much anyone who isn’t a Moslem. He "had taken screenshots of the West Midlands Police headquarters, cop shoppes in Perry Barr and Stechford and various military locations in Birmingham, and told the undercover officer he was putting his neck on a ’chopping block.’" Nevertheless, he was clearly willing to take the risk.
In prison, Savage has shown himself to be a deeply committed jihad terrorist: "prosecutor Peter Ratliff said Savage had in the past set fire to furniture in his cell and posted social media messages saying he was delighted to hear prison staff had been ’stabbed up’ after what he claimed was a plot against Moslem inmates." But don’t be concerned: he’s really the victim. Savage, it seems, "has also been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder following childhood trauma, the court was told." Oh, well, then! Set him free at once!
Seriously, though, what is it about converts to Islam? To write the stories of all the converts to Islam who have turned to terrorism would make for a good-sized book, and yet it remains an iron dogma of American public discourse that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Every religion has its hard boys, we’re told again and again, and yet there are literally hundreds and possibly many more converts to Islam who have joined terror groups, while there are vanishingly few, if any, converts to Christianity or other religions who have done so.
Authorities remain resolutely indifferent to this phenomenon, and not a single law enforcement or intelligence agency anywhere in the world is studying why so many converts to Islam end up in terror groups. To look into this and try to devise ways to prevent it would apparently be "Islamophobic." Yet this only ensures that ever more new Moslems will find their way into terrorism, as Jason Savage can attest.
[TheSun] Russia’s chilling doomsday radio station ‘The Buzzer’ wakes up & sends four cryptic messages in just 24 hours. Some believe it would automatically trigger a military response in the event of an attack on Russia
MYSTERY has deepened over Russia's doomsday radio station called "The Buzzer" after the Soviet-era relic sent out four cryptic signals in just 24 hours.
Known to be used by the KGB during the height of the Cold War, Radio station UVB-76 has been continuously buzzing since the late '70s to allegedly exchange secret military messages.
On April 15, the doomsday radio signalled four words: Neptune, Thymus, Foxcloak, and Nootabu, according to Telegram channel UVB-76 logs, which constantly monitors its activity.
The radio signal buzzed the cryptic messages within 24 hours, understood to be a rare occasion.
While one knows what these eerie signals indicate, speculations are that they are linked to secret military operations or even nuclear protocols.
UVB-76 transmits on the frequency 4625 kHz and is characterised by an eerie sound that buzzes 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The shortwave station usually emits nothing but a static buzz — until something huge like a nuclear attack is about to happen, it is said.
In February, the radio station sent out 25 messages within 24 hours.
Some of the words broadcast were Synopsis, Boulevard, Coarsening, B*******, Optoshum, Elecbase, Shtatognome Commissar and Volkokran, according to Russian state media.
Many believe it is a military communication tool - possibly used to communicate with remote stations or to activate certain military units.
Some even believe it is part of a "dead man's switch" system, which would automatically trigger a military response in the event of an attack on Russia.
Professor David Stupples, a senior researcher in electronic warfare, first heard about the mysterious Russian radio frequency in the 1990s.
He explained to The Sun that the UVB-76 is a high-frequency band, known as HF, and is available to listen to across the entire Russian territory, from its Indochina end all the way to its European cities.
The advantage, the expert says, is that such a signal can be transmitted and heard without satellites or the internet.
This makes it easy for Putin and his spies to send military intelligence quite literally “under the radar”.
Professor Stupples said: "What that means is that the signal never leaves the atmosphere.
"It just bounces along what is called the ionosphere. It would cover basically the whole of Russia."
And in the event of a nuclear war where most communication would be wiped out, Putin’s high-frequency signal could still operate "as normal", he said.
The reason behind the continuous broadcast is simple, the researcher said.
If they stopped broadcasting and the 4625 kHz frequency became free to use, anyone could "snatch" the signal from the Russians.
"The only way that you can make certain that the band is available is to keep broadcasting on it," Professor Stupples explained.
“So what Russia is doing is reserving this frequency.
“My own speculation is that they are reserving this channel for emergencies.
"Either because of a worldwide conflict using nasty weapons or in case other things go wrong, like they’ve lost all their satellite communications."
#3
"Odd transmission from Buzzer," sez source,
"To Ma Russia's whole nuclear force
Sent by senior official
(or brain artificial)
Who'd recently read 'correct horse.'"
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM] On the night of April 15-16, 1945, the sky to the east of the German capital was illuminated by the light of 140 anti-aircraft searchlights. Then the roar of 20,000 artillery guns and Katyusha rockets fell on the Germans' first line of defense. This was the beginning of the Berlin Offensive Operation - victorious for the Red Army and fatal for the Third Reich.
Earlier, in February–March, the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front under the command of Georgy Zhukov and the 1st Ukrainian Front, commanded by Ivan Konev, carried out several successful operations in the area from mountainous Silesia to the Baltic Sea. Thus, during the Vistula–Oder Operation, our armies in less than a month, with heavy fighting, advanced from the outskirts of Warsaw to the Prussian city of Küstrin, from where no more than 60 kilometers remained to Berlin.
By that time, Anglo-American troops had crossed the Rhine and surrounded a large German group in the Ruhr, which opened the way to the Elbe. There was no doubt that the attack on Berlin would soon begin from the west or the east. But it was not clear which of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, the Soviet Union or the Western Allies, would send troops there first.
"THE REAL AIM OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ARMIES"
On 1 April 1945, Winston Churchill wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, saying:" I believe that politically we should push as far east as possible in Germany and that if Berlin were within our reach we should certainly take it." The British and American General Staffs must coordinate their armies "before any commitment to the Russians is made," the Prime Minister insisted.
After the war, in his memoirs, Churchill bluntly recalled his plans from the spring of 1945: together with the Americans, “to immediately create a new front against its (Soviet Russia’s) rapid advance.”
“The main and real goal of the Anglo-American armies is Berlin; the liberation of Czechoslovakia and the entry of American troops into Prague are of the utmost importance,” Churchill reconstructed his plans.
In his memoirs, Zhukov cites the phrase of the commander of American forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, at a meeting of the Allied headquarters on April 7: “If, after the capture of Leipzig, it turns out that it is possible to advance to Berlin without major losses, I want to do it.”
For his part, Joseph Stalin was clearly afraid of a separate conspiracy between the Nazi elite and the Anglo-Americans. He believed that the Nazis were amassing forces against us, exposing the Western Front. Thus, Zhukov cites details of one of the meetings with the Supreme Commander before the start of the Berlin operation:
"Silently extending his hand, he (Stalin), as always, as if continuing a recently interrupted conversation, said: - The German front in the West has finally collapsed, and, apparently, the Nazis do not want to take measures to stop the advance of the allied forces. Meanwhile, in all the most important directions against us, they are strengthening their groups."
Given Soviet internal history, it was quite reasonable for the Nazis to be more afraid of them than of the Allies.
Further, “having lit his pipe, the Supreme continued: “I think that a serious fight is coming… ”
All expected the next war of the free world vs. totalitarianism to be the Allies against the Soviet Union, et al, and so it was. It just turned out to be a cold war instead of a hot one, because America got nuclear bombs first.
ZHUKOV OR KONEV?
During another meeting with the commanders of the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts, Stalin read out intelligence data (the Anglo-Americans were preparing to attack Berlin) and asked the military leaders a leading question about who would actually take it. "Of course we will, Comrade Stalin," Konev replied. Zhukov then repeated the same thing.
The Supreme Commander took a large operational map and drew a dividing line between the fronts, stopping at the town of Luben, several dozen kilometers from Berlin.
The marshals, competing with each other, got the hint: they needed to begin the operation quickly, with the honor of the winner going to the one who managed to break through to the city first. However, the troops of Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front were in a more advantageous position, so Konev and his 1st Ukrainian Front had no choice but to assist their bureaucratic rival and focus on other tasks, including reaching the Elbe.
The honorable but extremely difficult task of taking Berlin fell to Zhukov.
"I'VE NEVER HAD TO TAKE CITIES LIKE THIS BEFORE"
The enemy was indeed able to concentrate very serious forces on the eastern approaches to the capital of the "thousand-year Reich". Zhukov noted: as a result of the operation, it turned out that the fascists had deployed against us no less than a million "bayonets" (this is without counting the 200-thousand garrison that was being formed in Berlin itself), about 1.5 thousand tanks and assault guns, 10.4 thousand artillery pieces and mortars, more than three thousand combat aircraft.
Yes, for the first time in the war years we had an overwhelming, not just significant, superiority over the enemy. In aviation - 2.5 times, in tanks and artillery - four times. The offensive involved 2.5 million soldiers and officers, 6,300 tanks, 7,500 aircraft. In addition, our military already knew the upcoming battlefield well: our reconnaissance aircraft took 15 thousand photographs, on the basis of which they created a detailed map
But the 1st Belorussian was facing the toughest urban battles of the entire war. It had to break through three lines of defense and minefields (in some areas the density reached 2 thousand mines per square kilometer).
"During the war, we had never had to take such large, heavily fortified cities as Berlin. Its total area was almost 900 square kilometers. The metro and widely developed underground structures gave the enemy troops the opportunity to carry out a wide covert maneuver," Zhukov explained. The Nazis equipped the city with at least 400 pillboxes and bunkers and erected barricades on the streets. Residential and industrial areas, highways and bridges were transformed into a huge fortified area.
It was also necessary to take into account that 2.5 million residents remained in the city. There was no talk of evacuation - the authorities forbade them to leave the city, believing that the people should perish together with the leaders of the Reich. Gauleiter and imperial leader of the defense of Berlin Joseph Goebbels explained the refusal to evacuate civilians from the city by saying that he "did not intend to plunge the capital into panic."
One should also not forget about Goebbels' main specialty - propaganda. Thanks to it, the garrison and the city's population, in fact, did not have a defeatist mood.
On the one hand, Goebbels’ department kept repeating about the “war crimes” that the “Bolsheviks” allegedly committed in occupied East Prussia, Eastern Pomerania, Silesia, Austria and other lands of the Reich.
On the other hand, the Germans were called upon to fanatical (Goebbels' favorite word) resistance. The last radio speech of the Reich Minister of Propaganda on April 21 is indicative: "The walls of our city must be broken and stopped by the Mongolian hordes! Our defense will become a beacon for the selfless struggle of the entire nation!.. With fanatical determination we will not allow our capital to fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks!"
As Ivan Konev recalled, during the battles on the approaches to Berlin and in the city itself, German soldiers surrendered only when they had no other choice. “The same should be said about the officers. But their fighting spirit had already died out. All that remained was a gloomy, hopeless determination to fight until the order to capitulate was received,” noted the military leader who commanded the 1st Ukrainian Front.
LESSONS FROM MOSCOW
Hitler's main mouthpiece, Goebbels, brought the military and civilians to a hopeless determination to die rather than surrender to the "Asian hordes." And he himself was inspired by the example of Moscow in the fall of 1941. In the multi-volume diaries of the Minister of Propaganda, there remains a note from March 1, 1945 about a conversation with the traitor under his patronage, Andrei Vlasov:
"Vlasov describes the situation in Moscow that arose as a result of the threat of encirclement in the late autumn of 1941. The entire Soviet leadership had already lost its head; only Stalin continued to persist, although he was already very exhausted. The situation was approximately the same as we are experiencing at the present time. And we have a leader who demands resistance at any cost and who again and again incites everyone else to this cause."
It should be noted that our military leaders also drew parallels with the defense of Moscow from September 1941 to April 1942 from a military-strategic point of view.
“I have returned more than once to the greatest battle near Moscow, when powerful enemy hordes, concentrated on the approaches to the capital, dealt powerful blows to the defending Soviet troops,” wrote Zhukov. “ I wanted to take into account the experience of this difficult battle in detail, in order to use all the best for the upcoming operation.”
"CHRISTMAS TREE" ON "FAUSTNIKS"
The first chord of the operation was the assault by Zhukov's troops on the last obstacle on the way to the city - the Seelow Heights. It began on April 16. The fighting was fierce, and the advance of the Soviet troops was complicated by the landscape - there are many rivers, lakes and forests around Berlin. Three days later, this line was broken, and on April 25, the encirclement ring around the city was closed.
The first street battles confirmed that the Germans were not going to surrender without a fight. Windows and doors were filled with concrete, buildings were turned into strongholds with machine guns and Faustpatrones.
“The Faustpatrone is one of those means that can create in people who are not physically prepared and not trained for war a sense of psychological confidence that, having become soldiers only yesterday, they can actually do something today,” recalled Marshal Konev.
The old men of the Volkssturm and the boys of the Hitler Youth were not to be underestimated.
“The Faust soldiers, as a rule, fought to the end and at this last stage showed significantly greater resilience than the seasoned German soldiers, who were broken by defeats and many years of fatigue,” the marshal pointed out.
Here is the testimony of a direct participant in the battles, who went from the outskirts to the center of Berlin.
"Tanks were burning from Faustpatrones. When a shell hit a vehicle, small red-hot fragments hit the crew. Our guys, when they found this weapon, actively used it: they put it on their shoulder, took aim and pulled the trigger. This big blank flew right to the target," recalled Colonel Lev Yasnopolsky.
In order to suppress the enemy's resistance, our heavy and super-heavy artillery of 203 and 305 mm calibers hit the firing point, and then tanks moved in a "herringbone" pattern on different sides of the streets, destroying barricades and suppressing the remnants of resistance. Only after that did the infantry advance.
Unlike the storming of Vienna, there was no goal to preserve the architecture – Berlin had already been destroyed by British and American air raids.
The Red Army treated ordinary Berliners, first intimidated by propaganda and then by battles, humanely. The story of Sergeant Nikolai Masalov is widely known: under machine gun fire, he carried a three-year-old German girl out of a destroyed house. Based on this story, sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich developed a design for a 40-ton statue installed in Berlin's Treptower Park.
"THIS IS COLONEL ZINCHENKO SPEAKING! I AM IN THE REICHSTAG!"
The first ten days of fighting showed that, despite stubborn resistance, the position of the Wehrmacht and the SS troops was hopeless. This was understood by all officers who retained common sense, but the inhabitants of the Führerbunker clearly did not understand.
The story of artillery general Helmut Weidling is indicative. On April 23, he was to be shot as a traitor on a false denunciation. Weidling reached the bunker, waited for an audience with Hitler, and convinced the Fuhrer of his innocence. As a sign of trust, Hitler appointed the general commander of the defense of Berlin. Leaving the Fuhrer's office, Weidling uttered the famous phrase: "I would prefer to be shot."
After almost two weeks of fighting, on April 30, Soviet units approached the Reichstag building, which had long since lost its real political significance, but remained a symbol of German power, and in April 1945 became a serious "fortification" of the enemy. The Reichstag was defended by 1,000 people, including SS men, anti-aircraft gunners, and naval school cadets.
In essence, Hitler's "new Europe" fought its last battle here. The SS men from the Danish-Norwegian "Nordland" division, the French from the SS "Charlemagne" division, Latvian and Estonian legionnaires and even Spanish "volunteers" were driven out of the Reichstag. The building was crammed with machine gun crews and artillery pieces.
A recording of a conversation with the commander of the 756th rifle regiment of the 1st Belorussian Front, Fyodor Zinchenko, who was one of the first to break through to the besieged building, has been preserved:
"I appoint you, Comrade Zinchenko, as commandant of the Reichstag. You will receive written confirmation later. I set the task: clear the Reichstag of the enemy, immediately install the Banner of the Military Council of the Army on its dome and organize the protection of valuables located in the building. Convey the gratitude of Marshal Zhukov to all participants in the storming of the Reichstag.”
Mikhail Egorov and Meliton Kantaria were tasked with installing the Victory Banner, which had to be in a prominent place. It was impossible to climb the dome with a ladder under heavy fire, but Kantaria saw a pediment from which the banner would be clearly visible. "Come on, Misha, let's install it there," he suggested to Egorov. Later, the banner was moved to the dome, and on May 3, the famous photograph of it was published in the newspaper Pravda.
"TODAY IS OUR HOLIDAY"
On the same day, April 30, the Führer and Reich Chancellor Hitler committed suicide, having previously read out his political testament. He expelled the "traitors" Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, who had fled Berlin to negotiate with the Anglo-Americans, from the party, after which he appointed Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz (who remained in Flensburg in northern Germany) as Reich President, and Goebbels, who was in the Führerbunker, as Chancellor.
The latter, however, soon followed the example of the Reich leader and committed suicide along with his family. The last commandant of Berlin, General Weidling, breathed a sigh of relief after the Führer's death - and issued an order stating: "The Führer has committed suicide, leaving to the mercy of fate all who swore allegiance to him."
After the war he recalled:
"I gave the order to the units, those who could and wanted to, to break through, and the rest to lay down their arms. All the staff supported me, and on the night of May 2, I sent Colonel von Dufing as a parliamentarian to the Russians... The situation was such that after I had made my decision, I felt safe only with the Russians."
On May 1, a delegation headed by Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces General Hans Krebs arrived at the headquarters of the commander of the 8th Guards Army Vasily Chuikov. "Today is May Day, a great holiday for both of our nations," Krebs began. "Today is our holiday. And how things are going for you, it's hard to say," Chuikov answered bluntly.
Krebs reported Hitler's death, and when it was passed on to Stalin, he expressed regret that the Fuhrer could not be captured alive. The general also proposed a truce, while Moscow demanded complete capitulation. Zhukov promised that "nothing but ruins" would remain of Berlin if the Germans did not fulfill their main demand. At 10:40 a.m., heavy artillery fire was opened on the government quarter that remained in Nazi hands.
At about 1 a.m. on May 2, Wehrmacht officers with white flags were spotted on the Potsdam Bridge, and at 6 a.m. Weidling finally ordered his troops to surrender. Soviet tanks drove around the city with loudspeakers broadcasting their commander's appeal to the Nazis. Groups of German soldiers and officers with their hands raised emerged from the ruins and basements. By three o'clock in the afternoon, the city was silent.
In the first "peaceful" hours and days, new tasks had to be urgently solved. "The possibility of epidemics in Berlin posed an exceptional threat to the troops and the population. The weather was hot, and corpses were lying around everywhere - in every house, basement, attic," recalled one of the commanders of the military rear, General Nikolai Antipenko (from September - the commander of the rear in our group of troops in Germany). "Many destroyed and contaminated reservoirs and springs, mass diseases among Soviet and foreign citizens liberated from concentration camps, spoiled food in warehouses, stores, etc."
There were many to bury: the Soviet troops lost 80 thousand soldiers irretrievably during the operation, Germany lost 380 thousand. About half a million Germans were captured.
Although the act of final capitulation was signed six days later, and German units were still holding the line near Prague, the fall of Berlin meant the long-awaited end of the war. The capture of the German capital by Soviet units also became an important factor in world politics: it gave the USSR a powerful argument in negotiations on the formation of a post-war world order.
[RedState] White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller is exactly who conservatives have always thought he was—the right guy for the job when it comes to deporting criminal aliens from our country. All the right people hate him. The bureaucracy. The media. The Democrats. The deep state. I believe those on the far left would spit on his grave, a reality I’m sure he revels in. Is Miller Trump’s greatest asset? You could make the argument that no one is more effective.
For true conservatives who have always wanted to see a secure southern border and mass deportations, he’s a dream come true. I’m frankly grateful he’s finally getting some time in the spotlight. Regardless of if you love or hate him, you have to respect his ability to get things done for the president.
To be clear, I’ve never met Miller. While I worked at DHS, we never directly crossed paths. What I’m stating comes strictly from being in the staunch conservative world for a very long time—I can tell you, behind the scenes, he’s been methodically working towards this moment. You may ask yourself, how do you know that? My answer is simple: Look at the results we are getting. Yes, Trump is leading the effort, and I give him all the credit. Since the moment he came down that escalator at Trump Tower, he’s made immigration a major issue. But, what we’re doing, in the way we’re doing it, does not happen without Stephen Miller. He has a steel spinal cord. He can dish it out and take it. He can embarrass the media at a moment's notice.
[Jamestown.org] PLA Perceptions of and Reactions to U.S. Military Activities in Low Earth Orbit
Executive Summary:
Space industry experts within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have observed and drawn lessons from the United States’s use of space as a warfighting domain since the 1990s. These experts tend to characterize the deployment of proliferated low earth orbit (pLEO) constellations, such as the privately-owned Starlink constellation, as an application of the Department of Defense’s resilient space concept.
The PLA views Starlink as challenging its core operational concept of multi-domain precision warfare due to the decentralized nature of pLEO constellations. It attributes many unconfirmed, hyperbolic capabilities to Starlink, which contributes to the belief that Starlink is creating a strategic imbalance between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in space.
The PRC has begun developing its own comparable megaconstellation, Project SatNet, which PLA analysts see as enabling similar capabilities to Starlink and which they also envision as countering Starlink.
Posted by: Vortigern Speaking for Boskone4685 ||
04/16/2025 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[11123 views]
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#1
A ballon is sort of a super low orbit sat.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
04/16/2025 8:25 Comments ||
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#2
Consider Starlink's 7000 sats as a survivable re-entry orbital mass with a secondary communication function.
[IsraelTimes] Military and nuclear experts say any US-Israeli attacks on Iranian atomic sites would be risky and would only set program back a few years, unless their real aim is regime change.
They said the same thing about Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s, but neither has restarted the work. They’ve also been saying the same thing for years about attacks on Iran’s program, but Iran was supposed to be able to shoot nukes at Israel years ago, and they somehow have not yet got to the finish line. Israel’s short to medium term goal is not to be eradicated. Permanently solving the problem is the stretch goal.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
There is a cancer in America’s military ranks, and it must be expunged before it’s too late. That cancer lies in uniformed service members’ widespread rejection of the uniquely American concept of civilian control of the military and disregard for the absolute necessity that America’s military officers remain apolitical in the face of the constitutional will of the electorate.
