U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence Worldwide Threat to Shipping (WTS) Report, 27 October - 24 November 2021

U.S. Navy Office of Naval I... by lawofsea

Sunday Ship History: Operation Market Time Vietnam 1965 - 1973

Operation Market Time, Gene Klebe; 1965

One of the interesting aspects of the Vietnam War was the substantial naval effort to stop the sea transport of arms and other material to enemy forces in South Vietnam. This effort include aircrat, naval and Coast Guard vessels. As set out in Operation Market Time it was largely successful in cutting off the supply from the sea.

The Navy established Operation Market Time (March 1965-1972) to prevent North Vietnamese ships from supplying enemy forces in South Vietnam by sea. The Coastal Surveillance Force (Task Force 115) used a system of three barriers to patrol the South Vietnamese coast. Patrol aircraft covered the outermost barrier to identify, photograph, and report suspicious vessels and U.S. Coast Guard cutters stopped and searched cargo vessels in the middle barrier forty miles off the coast. The South Vietnamese Navy, the Junk Force, and U.S. Navy Patrol Craft Fast (PCF( Swift boats cruised the coastal waters of the inner barriers. By 1968, these forces stopped virtually all seaborne infiltration from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. The blockade forced the North Vietnamese to rely on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville to transport supplies to the Viet Cong.

A longer history and analysis of Market Time can be found at the U.S. Navy History and Heritage Command here in a paper prepared by Judith C. Erdheim of the Center for Naval Analysis in 1975. That report follows below.

Operation Market Time by lawofsea

And a look at the U.S. Coast Guard involvement:

Update: Navy War College Review article "The U.S. Coast Guard in Vietnam: Achieving Success in a Difficult War" (1998)

Update2: A 1970 fight between Market Time wooden hulled U.S. Navy minesweeper USS Endurance (MSO-435) and a metal hulled NV trawler in the "Sea Battle off the Cua Co Chien River" as depicted by Richard DeRosset as used in part as the cover illustration for David Bruhn's Wooden Ships and Iron Men: The U.S. Navy's Ocean Minesweepers, 1953–1994:

Saturday Is Old Radio Day: "The Spy on Kilocycles" from The Cavalcade of America (1945) with Henry Fonda

Friday Film: "Flight Safety - After the Cut" (1945)

Thanksgiving

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

While our kids are spread from coast to coast and in between, we have one of ours and his family on their way down to share dinner with us. My daughter-in-law's brother and his wife will join us, too.

No one deployed.

 

All adults and grandchildren healthy.

 

We have so very much for which to be thankful.

U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence Worldwide Threat to Shipping (WTS) Report, 20 October - 17 November 2021

U.S. Navy Office of Naval I... by lawofsea

On Midrats 21 November 2021: Episode 609 - The Fat Leonard Podcast with Tom Wright

If you thought you missed a live Midrats podcast on 21 November 2021 - you are absolutely correct. Due to our guest being in Singapore, we had to record the episode and post it later. So, if you go here you will find Episode 609, which is about the man on the right, Leonard Glenn Frances and, well, corruption.

If you are even remotely connected to the US Navy you have directly or indirectly been impacted by the "Fat Leonard" scandal.

A husbanding agent who used every tool in a very old book - greed, sex, power, influence, and envy - managed to have have naval officers and high ranking law enforcement officers become party to his drive for wealth and influence.

One of the best places to find the details of the scandal and to hear from Leonard Glenn Frances himself, is in "The Fat Leonard Podcast."

Our guest today will be the podcast's creator, Tom Wright, the coauthor of Billion Dollar Whale and the cofounder of Project Brazen, a journalism-focused production studio.

Tom worked for the Wall Street Journal for over twenty years. He’s a Pulitzer finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including the Gerald Loeb award for international reporting. In 2020, Stanford University honored Tom with its Shorenstein award in recognition of his services to journalism in Asia.

Sunday Ship History - The American Frigate "Alliance" Mutiny of 1779

Interesting bit of U.S. Naval past from James Fenimore Cooper's History of the Navy of the United States of America (1853):

The year 1779 opens with the departure of the Alliance, 32, for France. It has already been stated that the command of this ship had been given to a Captain Landais, who was said to be a French officer of gallantry and merit. Unfortunately the prejudices of the seamen did not answer to the complaisance of the Marine Committee in this respect, and it was found difficult to obtain a crew willing to enlist under a French captain. When General Lafayette reached Boston near the close of 1778, in order to embark in the Alliance, it was found that the frigate was not yet manned. Desirous of rendering themselves useful to their illustrious guest, the government of Massachusetts offered to complete the ship's complement by impressment, an expedient that had been adopted on more than one occasion during the war ; but the just-minded and benevolent Lafayette would not consent to the measure. Anxious to sail, however, for he was entrusted with important interests, recourse was had to a plan to man the ship, which, if less objectionable on the score of principle, was scarcely less so in every other point of view.

The Somerset 64, had been wrecked on the coast of New England, and part of her crew had found their way to Boston. By accepting the proffered services of these men, those of some volunteers from among the prisoners, and those of a few French seamen that were also found in Boston after the departure of their fleet, a motley number was raised in sufficient time to enable the ship to sail on the 11th of January. With this incomplete and mixed crew, Lafayette trusted himself on the ocean, and the result was near justifying the worst forebodings that so ill-advised a measure could have suggested.

After a tempestuous passage, the Alliance got within two days' run of the English coast, when her officers and passengers, of the latter of whom there were many besides General Lafayette and his suite, received the startling information that a conspiracy existed among the English portion of the crew, some seventy or eighty men in all, to kill the officers, seize the vessel, and carry the frigate into England. With a view to encourage such acts of mutiny, the British Parliament had passed a law to reward all those crews that should run away with American ships ; and this temptation was too strong for men whose service, however voluntary it might be in appearances, was probably reluctant, and which had been compelled by circumstances, if not by direct coercion.

The plot, however, was betrayed, and by the spirited conduct of the officers and passengers, the ringleaders were arrested.

On reaching Brest, the mutineers were placed in a French gaol, and after some delay, were exchanged as prisoners of war, without any other punishment; the noble-minded Lafayette, in particular, feeling averse to treating foreigners as it would have been a duty to treat natives under similar circumstances.

More of interest on Alliance here

Saturday (and Sometimes Sunday) Is Old Radio Day - Fibber McGee & Molly "Thanksgiving" (1935)