RichTO90

Thank you. I am finishing the editing of Spearheading the Breakout, which is a pretty detailed history of the 90th Infantry Division from 6 June to 31 August 1944 and, incidentally, my Dad's experience as a AAA Battery Officer attached to the division. It is scheduled for Stackpole's fall 2026 release. After that I will finish up my Tank Destroyer History, using the bits I had to excise out of American Thunder plus some additional bits.

Sorry, not interested in getting into a time-waster over war stories, I have a deadline on editing my next book. So short and sweet, the number of "50,000" U.S. Army deserters in the black market in Paris was estimated by Charles Glass in the Deserters in 2013...based on zero evidence. The actual estimate of all deserters in Europe was by the SHAEF Provost Marshal in November 1944, which was 18,000 American and 6,000 British. That was probably a slight over estimate. Another measure is the number of cases handled by the U.S. Army CI Division of the PM. From June 1944 to April 1945, agents in Paris handled a total of 7,912 cases of which 3,098 or nearly 40 percent, involved misappropriation of U.S. supplies - black market activity. Or you can look at the total number of cases of desertion prosecuted from 14 April 1943 to 31 October 1945 by the ETOUSA Judge Advocate General, which cover all of the ETOUSA, so both Britain and on the Continent. A grand total of 3,876 officers or enlisted men were charged with desertion and 1,852 with AWOL with intent to avoid hazardous duty. Another 5,478 were charged with AWOL violations of the 61st Article of War and another 936 with AWOL violations of the 28th, 58th, or 75th AoW. So about 12,000 desertions and extended AWOL resulting in violations of the AoW brought to the attention of the JAG. Of course, the greatest number of AWOL were adjudicated at the unit level and never reached the JAG...but then they were AWOL, not deserters, and generally were absent for a few days and were charged and adjudicated under AoW 104. The numbers simply do not add up, unless you assume that around 38.000 deserters were simply treated as forgiven and forgotten after 31 October 1945...when the majority of the Army was already back in the States being discharged.

The idea that there were "50,000 deserters" supposedly running the black market in France is an absurdity, perpetuated over and over again. There is simply no evidence for it. The notion actually stems from a bad reading of the Provost Marshal's reports and some rather imaginative memoir writing by various authors postwar.

The B-36B, the first production variant, had a combat radius of 3,740 miles. It's range was 8,175 miles. As of 31 December 1948 the 7th Bomb Group at Carswell AFB had 36 B's as well as 19 A's with the first of those delivered on 26 June 1948. BTW, sad times, Joe Baugher, who's incredible database of USAAF and USAF aircraft data I have used for about 20 years passed away on 12 November 2023 at the age of 82. I had suspected as much because his website was getting wonky. Luckily it has been preserved and is available at https://www.crouze.com/baugher/

😅

Guy gets "hammered" on Cherry Herring? What an idiot.

Yep, Short was promoted beyond his capability. All ethic Japanese were discharged, in Hawaii and the few in the Armed Forces on the mainland. What was going on on the west coast was different because the Hawaiian Islands were islands., they had no where to go. In essence, the islands were an internment center. He was Hawaiian-Japanese. David Akui, Company G, 298th Infantry. His mixed ancestry allowed him to stay in service in the Pacific until the end of the war.

Not exactly. "Ringleaders" were held on the island and some were evacuated to the mainland. The "hands" were mostly the Varsity Victory Volunteers, mostly composed of former ROTC students at the University of Hawaii who were expelled from the program. About 169 of them formed the VVV as a labor unit. The ethnic Japanese in the 298th and 299th Infantry were discharged three days after Pearl Harbor, not many months later. There were at least 1,432 of them separate from the VVV. Note that native Hawaiians made up 767 of the NG strength, which was only 1,709 when mobilized in 1940: Hawaiian (767), Portuguese (320), Chinese (238), Caucasians (208), Puerto Ricans (86), Filipinos (53), Koreans (53) and Japanese (37). So about 1,400 Nisei were drafted or volunteered and were assigned to the 298th and 299th between October 1940 and December 1941. On 4 June 1942, the Nisei NG were evacuated to the mainland and eventually were used to organize the 100th Infantry. The 442d Infantry RCT was organized from 2,686 Hawaiian Nisei and another 1,500 recruited from the mainland, along with the VVV.

Only the 100th Infantry Battalion were all Hawaiian Nisei. They were culled from the Hawaii National Guard and later formed a separate battalion. Headquarters guards for a while for the Seventh and Fifth Army, then used to replace one of the battalions of the 34th Infantry Division lost in Tunisia during FRUEHLINGSWIND. They later joined the 442d as a replacement for the 1st Battalion, which had been depleted providing replacements for the 100th Battalion. The 442d was raised from mainland and Hawaiian Nisei.

Oh, that was the previous transition fuckup, stemming from the one before that. 😁 It is actually SOP for all government websites, designed to block nefarious use by...anyone? Seriously, yes, the original website shakeup was over a year ago, when the Home page was jiggered. That is fairly normal and the broken links usually get corrected within a week or so. But you could still access the landing page for the series and collections and all the hyperlinks were still intact so you could go to directly to them. Then they changed to this page https://history.army.mil/Research/Series-and-Collections/ and broke all the links. That happened after 20 January 2025. Believe me, I used to access that page on almost a daily basis for various purposes in my writing.

The 93d Infantry Division was never committed as a division. The 25th Infantry was used as labor on Guadalcanal and then was attached to the Americal on Bougainville where it engaged in some operations. The 368th Infantry was used as labor on the Russell Islands and later the Philippines, where one battalion moped up Jolo. The 369th shuttled from island to island as a labor unit until sent to New Guinea for mopping up. From 11 January 1944 until the end of the war the division incurred just 12 KIA, 121 WIA, and 5 DOW.

More like it was goobered up in a hunt for DEI or some such bullshit. All the goobering is post 20 January 2025 and 100 days in it has yet to be fixed.

Actually, I think what happened is that the Division lived up to expectations. It was expected to fail, so little or no effort went into preventing or mitigating failure. 1. Black officers were expected to be substandard? Remove them entirely and substitute white officers. 2. Black's were expected to be less educated and "moody"? Reduce training expectations and treat them like children rather than soldiers. The lack of thinking led to some insane policies. Like all Army divisions in January 1944, the 92d had organized and trained a Counter-Intelligence Corps Detachment. However, on arrival in the MTO, the Division Detachment was disbanded at the request of AFHQ because black CIC agents were "unsuitable for service in the theater" since they “could not be inconspicuous in civilian groups to perform refugee control, interrogations of civilians, or to complete other counterintelligence duties.” Not, of course, that that was the way the CIC Detachments actually worked, but what the fuck, on top of that AFHQ refused to supply a white CIC Detachment because apparently that would be demeaning for white soldiers. Instead, AFHQ sent a request to the War Department for a new CIC Detachmnent, to which the War Department too refused to supply a white detachment and bizarrely told the AFHQ to organize one from division elements already in Italy! Instead, AFHQ eventually formed a detachment from other elements in Italy suitable for service with a black unit...they turned to Hispanic officers, since it was believed they "knew how to work with Negroes". The Deatchment was organized and led by 1st Lieutenant Ramon ArrizabalagaJr., from Nevada, with a staff of Mexican-American and Puerto Rican officers and men.

Ned Almond was promoted beyond his capability. Worse, he was a Virginian who firmly believed every stereotype of the "American Negro" was true. The Division had most of its few black officers transferred out before deployment (two of its FA Battalions, the 599th and 600th were all-black, officers and enlisted, that was "fixed" before deployment). It was committed piecemeal to combat with little thought or planning and the initial commitment of the 370th Infantry was botched, so blame was placed on the inexperienced men rather than the ppplanning. So the immediate decision - backed by Almond - was to break up the division and use it as parts, usually in the shittiest possible way. Never mind though, Almond managed to survive, mostly by sucking MacArthur's choad, which enabled him to fuck up at even a higher echelon when he was given command of the X Corps in Korea. Sorry, I may have exceeded my meds...

Employment of Negro Troops is one of the "special studies" in the Green Book series. Although written postwar after the Army was desegregated it suffers badly from various ongoing assumptions carried over from the segregated Army as well as the early experience with black troops in the Korean War. What makes it worse was that it was written and published after the ORO study Utilization of Negro Manpower in the Army, which definitively concluded "racial segregation limits the effectiveness of the army", "integration enhances the effectiveness of the army", and that army-wide integration was feasible. The majority of black troops utilized by the Army were by the Army Service Forces and most of that was in the Quartermaster Corps as "Service" (i.e. labor) troops and by the Corps of Engineers as Engineer General Service Regiments and Battalions (also primarily hand-labor troops). Only about 5% of all combat units were "colored". No all black ground units (there were a few that had an entire complement of black officers and EM) were sent overseas, although eventually a few units came close to that. Two black Infantry Divisions were organized and were deployed, one to Europe and one to the Pacific. The one sent to Italy was poorly served by being put under the command of an officer who had zero respect or faith in his own division. The results were predictable. The other division in the Pacific was used as laborers. One black Cavalry Division was organized, utilizing most of the prewar black Regular Army Cavalry personnel. It was disbanded in the Mediterranean and all its units converted to QM and Engineer service units. Eleven black Tank Destroyer Battalions were constituted, activated, and organized, but only two went overseas, one SP and one towed, both had distinguished records. The others were all eventually inactivated and disbanded with personnel going to service units. One black FA Group and nine FA battalions served in Europe with distinction, while eight other FA battalions were disbanded and converted to service units. Two of four black Tank Battalions served in the ETOUSA, also with distinction, the others never left the States. And so on. Puerto Rican manpower was also utilized in segregated units, which is curious because all of the CONUS units drafted Hispanic personnel on an integrated basis. One PR QM Service Battalion HQ and four Service Companies served in Europe, but no PR combat units did. Those stayed as garrisons in PR.