#operation anvil

[carbone14]

Parachutage de troupes américaines entre Nice et Marseille derrière la tête de pont du débarquement de Provence – Août 1944

[unclesamsmisguidedclub]

Tattered Flag Project

Everyone has seen American flags flying from various places that look like they’ve been through a shredder…but are still flying. The Tattered Flag Project has been touring parts of the country encouraging businesses to remove the old flags and replace them with new ones. The project also raises the awareness of the local community that these flags represent our veterans and first responders as…

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[carbone14]

Des éléments de la 45e Division d'infanterie américaine en mouvement pendant l'opération Dragoon – Provence – France – Août 1944

©US Army Signal Corps

[carbone14]

2 GI's en route pour Sainte-Maxime – Débarquement de Provence (Opération Dragoon) – Var – France - Août 1944

[autodidact-adventures]

World War II (Part 74): The Teheran Conference

 Roosevelt, Churchill & Stalin met together for the first time in Teheran, the capital of Iran.  The conference was codenamed “Eureka”.  Its purpose was to resolve issues of strategy for the last part of the war.  Roosevelt also hoped to get a close relationship with Stalin, so they could later work out a post-war political settlement.

Before Teheran, Churchill & Roosevelt went to Cairo, to hold a conference with Chiang Kaishek, the Chinese Nationalist leader.  This was from November 23rd-26th, and codenamed “Sextant”.  Stalin had been invited, but refused, as the USSR was not yet at war with Japan.  The western leaders re-affirmed their support for China, and the Cairo Declaration at the end of it stated that the Allies would confiscate all of Japan’s overseas territories, return Chinese territory to China, and create an independent Korea.

In Teheran, Churchill stayed at the British embassy, but Roosevelt stayed at the Soviet Embassy, on the pretext that there was a threat to his security.  The conference followed this pattern, with Roosevelt working on connecting with Stalin, and Churchill being sidelined.

Stalin wanted a second front in France, and Roosevelt & his advisers preferred that strategy.  Churchill, on the other hand, wanted a Mediterranean focus, to strike on Germany’s “soft underbelly” which was even more exposed by Italy’s surrender.  These arguments took up the first two days.

On Day 2, Roosevelt promised a second front for May 1944, and Churchill was forced to agree, even though he thought the risks great.  They also promised a diversionary attack on southern France (Operation Anvil), even though Churchill didn’t feel it was of much value.  The Soviets promised a strong offensive at the same time as the second front.  Stalin also promised that the USSR would declare war on Japan after Germany was defeated.

On the evening of the 30th, Churchill’s birthday was celebrated with a dinner at the British Embassy.  Stalin taunted the other two about their hostility towards the Soviet Union, but as he got (unusually for him) drunk throughout the evening, the tension he had created was overcome.

From December 3rd-7th, Churchill & Roosevelt returned to Cairo to complete the Cairo Conference.  Roosevelt announced his decision to place Eisenhower in charge of the invasion of France.  After the conference was finished, Churchill went to Morocco to convalesce, as he hadn’t been well.

[guatepolitics]

Awesome New Yorker article on the (Re)militarization & the Folly of Drug Wars

an excerpt:

Braun, who oversaw the creation of the [Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team] program, in 2004, told me that Special Operations Command had asked the D.E.A. for help building criminal cases against Afghan drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban. “They were running into heroin refineries and large caches of drugs,” Braun said. “They needed seasoned agents with the criminal investigator’s mind-set.” ...

The D.E.A. asked Congress to fund two additional fastsquads, for the Western Hemisphere. Braun said that “ungoverned spaces,” described as “possible terrorist havens” by the 9/11 Commission Report, deserved special attention, likening these regions to the “Star Wars” cantina scene. Terrorists and narco-traffickers “are frequenting the same shady bars, the same seedy hotels and the same sweaty brothels,” he told a congressional subcommittee, in 2012. “They are most assuredly talking business and sharing lessons learned.”

The Honduras mission was part of a larger program called Operation Anvil. Honduras was not a war zone, so fast worked under the State Department, using Huey helicopters instead of swifter Black Hawks. In Honduras, fast could not call in U.S. military forces to fight alongside it, as in Afghanistan. But in some ways Anvil was familiar, the latest in a long line of overseas counter-narcotics operations with names like Blast Furnace, Ghost Zone, Snowcap, and Zorro. In addition to using helicopters to spirit agents to remote locations and seize drugs in transit, the U.S. has tried paying coca farmers to switch crops, spraying herbicides out of helicopters, raiding jungle laboratories, stopping and searching small fishing boats, forcing down aircraft, tapping phones, hiring informants, and extraditing drug lords. Anvil, like many of its predecessors, combined the legal framework of a police action with the hardware and the rhetoric of war. Honduras is often referred to as “downrange”; drug traffickers are “the enemy”; the Mosquito Coast is a “battlespace.” In a broad sense, fast was nothing new. What is remarkable is how many times the U.S. has tried such militarized counter-narcotics programs and how long it has been apparent how little they amount to.

Whole article is available (no paywall for the moment) here.