The Warbird's Forum

May 14: A dune-buggy ambulance for Ukraine

This squat, camouflaged ambulance was delivered the other day to the 28th Separate Brigade defending Kramatorsk in southeastern Ukraine, along with a Nissan Pathfinder pickup truck, gasoline-powered generators, and other supplies from one of my favorite charities, the Ukrainian Freedom Fund in Afton, Wyoming.

The Ukrainian army is massively outnumbered by the Russians, and that shit in the Kremlim doesn't care how many bodies he wastes to overrun the defenders. (The Ukrainians call the Russian soldiers "single-use" items, like the Shaheed suicide drones Putin got from Iran.) A wounded Ukrainian might wait days or even weeks before he can be safely evacuated, and the dune buggy can go where no other vehicle can.... Yes, its front wheels are larger than those in the rear, the better to climb over obstacles.

The Ukrainian president was kind enough to allow a cease for Putin's pathetic Victory Day celebration, which for the first time in 81 years was held without the marching troops, clanking tanks, and trucks loaded with nuclear missiles; spectators who dared present themselves in Red Square were treated to television images instead.

Living up to his despicable record, Putin repaid Ukraine with a barrage of missiles and drones yesterday, killing "at least" 14 civilians and wounding more than 80 in an assault that began at 11 a.m. and continued into last night, killing another civilian and wounding 36 more when a residential building collapsed in Kyiv.

For its part, Ukraine inflicted 1,130 Russian casualties yesterday, bringing Putin's losses since 2022 to 1,344,180 men killed, wounded, captured, or deserted. The casualties include nearly a third of the 15,000 North Korean troops sent to Russia to help defend the Kursk region from Ukraine's counter-offensive in August 2024. More recently, Russia has been recruiting Africans with promises of well-paying jobs, which turn out to be combat after four days of military training.

Read my earlier blog posts

Book of the Month

I was fascinated to see that some of the Jews murdered at Bondi Beach were immigrants from the Soviet Union. Very likely they were the children or grandchildren of people who'd been sent to the Gulag in Stalin's great expulsion of potential traitors from eastern Poland, meaning that they'd been exposed however briefly to Western influences, including the German invaders of September 1939. That's the story told in The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II by Daniela Gerson. (The sub-title rather echoes that of my account of how I came to meet my 1955 heartthrob Basia Deszberg.)

See the full review in the Warbird's Book Club or the Annals of Poland.

No, that wasn't the AR-15 in Vietnam

Several years ago, the former commander of the Special Forces camp at Boun Beng in the Highlands of Vietnam wrote a lengthy article about what went wrong with the adoption of the M-16, a military version of Colt's AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that in the 1960s was being marketed to US law enforcement agencies. Oddly, I never linked to it, so I doubt that many people ever came across it. That was a terrible oversight, which I now remedy: please have a look at No, that wasn't an AR-15! by Captain Crews McCullogh (1931-2021).

Why the US keeps hankering for Greenland

My short book Remembering Bluie West One tells how the US took over the west coast of Greenland in the Second World War and continued its semi-occupation during the Cold War as well. At the same time, Germany did its best to maintain a weather station on Greenland's east coast, the better to forecast European weather over the next few days. Now I find that Hitler's government apparently had an even more ambitious plan for "Bluie's" east: scrape out a runway on the ice, stock it with avgas delivered by submarine, fly a Heinkel He-177 Greif strategic bomber to Greenland and refuel it for a perhaps one-way bombing raid on New York City. But there are no such worries now, right?

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford. Support Ukraine by contributing to Razom (a tax-deductible US-based charity). Or its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

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Here are a thousand or so files about the the planes, pilots, and warfighters of the past hundred years, grouped under these headings: