May 1: A Jew-hater in the state of Maine

No Jews have had their throats cut at Kennebunkport, but it's probably just a matter of time. Maine's Democratic governor has dropped her bid for the US Senate nomination, so the coast is clear for the Man With the Nazi Tattoo to become the nominee. Indeed, Chuck Schumer -- himself a Jew! -- has pledged millions of dollars to support the Jew-hater in the November contest against the decent and moderate Susan Collins. I plan to send her a thousand dollars and I hope some of you will do the same.

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: