THE WARBIRD'S FORUM

March 1: God bless the troops

American air crews especially, but sailors and soldiers too, are putting their lives and limbs at risk today and the days to come. The same is true of Israeli troops and civilians. War never proceeds without awful costs. But this war, prosecuted now by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, was in fact launched by the Ayatollahs in Tehran 47 years ago, and has humiliated American presidents from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden -- Barack Obama most egregiously, when he paid $1.7 billion to the Ayatollahs in actual dollar bills, euros, and other foreign banknotes, all crated up and flown to Tehran. Good for Messrs Trump and Netanyahu! I trust that Messrs Putin and Xi take the lesson. Comical though he often seems, this American President is no clown.

War Is Beautiful

James Neugass's journal of his months as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War didn't find a publisher in the 1940s. One reason for that, I suspect, was its title, which some say was a motto of Spain's rebel general and future dictator, Francisco Franco. Jim Neugass, of course, favored the other side, the embattled and Communist-supported Spanish Republic, as one of 2,800 Americans who joined what we now remember as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. War Is Beautiful is presented as the diary he kept during his months in Spain, from the heady days of 1937 to the Great Retreats of 1938.

In fact, it's the book he wrote upon his return and shopped around in the 1940s, before he died from a heart attack in 1949. Weirdly, the typescript was discovered in a secondhand bookstore in Vermont in the year 2000, a quarter-century after Franco's death and his replacement by a parliamentary democracy, and even after Communists (though not dictators) were evicted from the Kremlin. It's a wondeful book. Read more about it in the Warbird's Book Club.

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.

And welcome to the Warbird's Forum!

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