Tag Archives: history

Operation Tracer

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Do you know what immurement is? Its a form of execution that has been seen sporadically up to the twentieth century. Succinctly, you seal someone up in a confined space and leave them to die. The stories I’ve read usually involve castles that have a condemned person thrown into a room and then the exits/entrances to the room are walled up. The person is left in the dark to die of thirst and hunger. I believe there are a couple tales in classic literature (Poe?) about someone being ‘walled up’ or ‘walled in’, in a similar manner.

But..those were unwilling participants. Could you imagine a circumstance under which you’d pick a half dozen men to volunteer to willingly be entombed in a concrete bunker…sealed in….with several years worth of supplies and the instructions that they remain sealed in until their jobs were done? Such is…Operation Tracer.

NATO had Gladio, the Nazis had Werewolf, and apparently the Brits has operation Tracer…a plan for some ‘stay behinds’ to, well, stay behind and monitor ship movements from the tactical advantage Gibraltar offered.

Turned out the plan was never activated because the Axis never took over Gibraltar. The secret bunker was sealed up and glossed over and disappeared from history and into legend. Until some spelunkers investigating rumours re-discovered it.

The concept is fascinating, of course. But what I’m more curious about is what you put on the shopping list when you’re pitting six guys into a sealed box for,at least, a year. This exercise is actually not much different than planning for a space mission or a submarine tour, I suppose. But, nonetheless, I find it fascinating and thought I would share.

We joke about bunkers around here, but it’s interesting to note that some people not only planned to make a hidden bunker but actually planned to be entombed within it like some sort of military Houdini-esque escape trick.

“There’s a little nip in the air today…”

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Yeah, I bet that’s what they said eighty years ago.

The attack on Pearl Harbor had no parallel in US history until 9/11. Both events, on the surface, came out of nowhere and both reshaped the world afterwards. To me the biggest lesson learned is to not get into the mindset that ‘it cant happen’. It’s all happened before and it’ll all happen again. In just one morning, the entire trajectory of the world changes for decades to come. It can actually happen that fast. Mind-boggling when you think about it.

 

Erbswurst case scenario

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There has always been a need for compact forms of food that you could stuff in a pack for times when you were cut off from resupply and had to make do with only what you had on you, or what you could find locally. The Germans apparently approached this with erbswurst…a compressed ration of pea meal and other things that, when dissolved in a canteen cup full of hot water, allowed the user to make a soup. Personally, it seems rather unappealing to me but I suppose if your stuck in Stalingrad watching your comrades eat dead horses, it might not seem too bad.

Today, of course, we have MRE’s, freezedrieds, and even simple off-the-shelf soup products that are leaps and bounds ahead of the technology that brought us erbswurst. But… it’s an interesting concept. If a person had access to on of those consumer-grade freeze driers you could make some pretty impressive fare. Here are a couple videos on the subject:

It’s not too hard to imagine the plethora of items found in a modern supermarket that might lend themselves to this sort of thing. The trick is to keep the main principles as the fore: compactness, longevity, and nutrition.

This was actually addressed in a product that came out of WW2 …MPF…a fascinating product with a fascinating backstory: A nalgene bottle full of that stuff would probably duplicate (or exceed) the nutritional value of erbswurst and be a tad more versatile. That MPF, by the way, can be replicated at home.

For running out the door on your way to the boogaloo, a bag of a few days worth of freeze drieds takes virtually no weight and very little space. The more hidebound might go with a few tins of meat and that sort of thing. But wandering around a supermarket sometime, with a careful eye, might reveal some interesting choices for the ‘iron rations’ to keep in your gear. But…the Germans did it first, apparently.

Friday of Color

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Ok, so we’re in the post-Thanksgiving stage now. Now is the run-up to Christmas and then…the new year of 2021.

Media says that folks are staying home for the most part and that any Friday of Color of serious quantity is being done online. Works for me. I love online shopping. You youngsters may not remember it, but in the dark days before Al Gore invented the internet, if you wanted to shop through the mail you had to get a catalog. And the only way you even knew that there was a company you wanted a catalog from was to see their ad in a magazine or something. Then you’d send them a letter asking for a catalog, wait for them to receive the letter, they sent you a catalog, you waited to receive the catalog, you ordered from the catalog by sending them your order in the mail, wait for them to receive it, they ship it to you, wait for it to arrive, and then…finally…you got your cool survivalist geegaw. And then you’d find out it’s the wrong size/color/yield and have to send it back and the whole process would start over. Broadly, it could be a month from when you saw the company’s ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune to when you actually got your goodies.

Nowadays, I can literally….literally…have a plate and plate carrier on my doorstep in three days or less with one-click of my mouse. You kids have no idea how spoiled you are in terms of amazing choices and accessibility to quality survival gear. No idea.

I can be sitting at my desk watching YouTube and someone says “Hey, I bought a [Item] and have been testing it. Its awesome, you should get one!” and I can have one on order in less than a minute. How utterly amazing is that? There are people on this planet who have to walk five miles with a bucket on their head to get drinking water and I can order up a hundred pounds of ammo to be delivered to my door and I don’t even have to get out of my chair. I love this country!

Of course, there’s a drawback to all this – it’s easy…really, really easy…to spend money quickly and carelessly. I won’t say I have never had buyers remorse, but I’m much better at resource management than I used to be. Still..sometimes it’s an enormous relief when I go to order something and find hat I can’t because it’s out of stock.

So…while you’re doing your FOC shopping today think back to those dark days of survivalism where you actually had to slap a stamp on an envelope to order up your LL Baston underbarrel Mossberg 500 mount for your AR15. You kids have it so easy today.

“We’re all gonna buy.” No lie, this was an Actual Thing back in the ’80’s.

Mary Mallon

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All this talk about asymptomatic people carrying a virus without knowing it and infecting others brings to mind the story of … Mary Mallon.

No doubt the more astute medical types will recognize the name, but for the rest of us she was better known as Typhoid Mary.

TL,DR version: In the early 20th century a functionally illiterate Irish woman wound up being a carrier for typhoid fever. Mind you, she seemed pretty healthy and had no reason to think she was sick..but wherever she went and worked as a cook…people got sick and died.

Eventually, in some pioneering medical investigatory process, the NYC health people figured out that Mar was making other people sick. The record is a little unclear if they tried to explain it to her but it isn’t hard to imagine that someone with her lack of education might not grasp the idea of being a carrier. All she knew was that the one marketable skill she had was being taken away from her. So, she nodded her head, said she’d stop cooking, and went right on cooking for more families who mysteriously got sick.

Eventually the health department locked her up, quite against Mary’s will, and she wound up spending the rest of her life on North Brother Island.

If you’d like to read the more detailed version, and follow some of the legal wranglings that locked her up, try this and this.

In a time where many people chafe at the notion of .gov forcing restrictions upon them in the name of the ‘public health’ it’s interesting to see how far some municipalities went.

Cue the music………

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Well, first thing you gotta do is set the mood. So….theme music.

And now, the backstory.

You youngun’s might not remember, but back in the day when you wanted a .223 ‘assault rifle’ you pretty much had two choices – a genuine Colt AR-15 or, if you were on a budget, a Ruger Mini-14. Now, back then you could get your Mini-14 in a couple special flavors. Most notably, the ‘GB’ model. The GB, it is said, stood for ‘government bayonet’ in that it was the ‘government’ (military/police) model and featured a bayonet mount.

Mini-14 GB model.

There was also a model of GB that featured a rather interesting folding stock. You can see it in pretty much any episode of the A-Team.

The movie was actually pretty good.

Unlike the TV show, where they dumped a couple mags every episode and never hit anybody.

The folding stock was…interesting. Like all folding stocks it was , at best, merely adequate as a stock but the cool factor was off the charts.

When the ‘Assault Weapons’ ban of 1994 rolled around, Bill Ruger, the guy in charge at Ruger, famously opined that no honest man needs more than ten rounds in his gun.

In addition to not being willing to sell mags holding more than 10 rounds to anyone except Only Ones, Billy Ruger also pulled the folding stock Mini-14 from ‘civilian’ sales. Fortunately, Bill Ruger died before the Assault Weapons ban sunsetted in 2004 and at that point the company was now making smart decisions that didn’t alienate its core customer base. Thus, not only were magazines flowing freely again, Ruger even introduced guns that would have probably never come out if Bill Ruger was still breathing.

But…the folding stock fo the Mini-14 was absent.

To the best of my knowledge, Ruger never reintroduced the folding stock for the Mini-14. I suppose they might have done some for contract sales to an agency somewhere but these days the odds of some agency saying “No, no…lets skip the AR-pattern guns and instead buy a more expensive gun with 1940’s ergonomics, a proprietary magazine, and a history of questionable accuracy” seem mighty slim.

But nature, and the free market, abhor a vacuum. And so some enterprising outfit not only is bringing back the folder, but Ruger, according to the article, even gave them their moulds to do it. Read about it here.

I picked up a couple Mini-14’s last year, including a GB model. And while the Mini-14 is, basically, a range toy for me I still desperately want one of these stocks to slap on it for no real practical reason except…dammit…it’s cool.

So, the folks who are supposed to be developing it still don’t have it on their website but SHOT show is this month and I expect it to be introduced there and then available for pre-order. But…I will get one, yes.

And, of course, everyone who thinks that they are being clever will post some sort of comment about ‘a plan comes together’ or ‘pity the fool’. Yeah..not actually clever.

 

Article – The Deadliest Marksman’s Cold, Brave Stand

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The war was nearly over on March 6, 1940. The enemy, propagandized as an unstoppable fighting machine, was indeed overwhelming the army of the country they’d invaded. Six days later, the aggressors would finally force an armistice, and soon grab control of much of the land they’d coveted. It had taken longer than the two weeks they’d anticipated, but conditions were harsh, the defenders far more resolute than expected. For more than three months, battlefields roared with motoring tanks, gunfire and artillery explosions, obliterating the natural beauty of the countryside. Through it all, one warrior emerged as perhaps the finest killer in military history, on a mission to serve his besieged nation by picking off foreign attackers — many, many of them — one by one with a sniper rifle.

I sincerely doubt there is anyone here reading this blog who doesn’t know the story of the Finnish version of Hathcock. But, it’s a good article, since many are written from the perspective of gun boffins and military buffs…this one, it seems, is written more objectively.

For those of you out there with Mosin’s sitting in the closet, there’s a few sentences about a drill where 16 shots at 500 feet on a target in one minute is mentioned. Possible? Not possible? Grassy-knoll level of expertise required? You decide.

Good article, worth the read.

Article – ‘Here We Go. The Chaos Is Starting’: An Oral History of Y2K

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Twenty years ago, we were all pretty sure the world was going to end on January 1, 2000—or, if not the world, then at least civilization.

It had something to do with how most computer programs used the last two digits to represent a four-digit year, and when the clock rolled over at the end of 1999, every computer would think it was 1900. When that happened, ATMs would stop working, the electrical grid would shut down, planes would fall out of the skies, and newborn babies would get hundred-year-old birth certificates.

Ah, the nostalgia. There really were people who drained their 401k’s and bought cinder block houses in the middle of the desert to ride it all out. If you were a journalist of any stripe back then, you were finding the most freaked out people you could find and putting them on camera to talk about the ‘extremes’ that they were going through to prepare.

Good times, good times. That was twenty years ago this Tuesday. My how time flies. The most interesting thing to come out of it all? John Titor. Well, that and some really interesting garage sales for the next few years. That Y2k legacy of garage sales still rears its head once in a while.

Pearl Harbor Day

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A quiet Sunday morning…you’re listening to the radio, maybe getting ready for church, and you woke up in a world where your biggest worry was the oil leak in your car. And by the end of that same day the nation is marching to war and no one’s lives are untouched. Imagine what that must have been like…you woke up to orange juice and eggs and went to bed with a global war. The lesson there is that your whole life can change in just a moment. So..we prepare.

Link – Prehistoric Preppers: A Look Back at Pre-Y2K Survival Gear and Conventional Wisdom

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Last month I mentioned that this year is the twenty-year anniversary of the Great Y2K Scare. I happen to be bopping around the interwebs and came across this dated-but-still-interesting piece about how things have changed preparedness-wise since then.

As a child in the 1980s who came of age in the 1990s. I lived through an odd era of the gun culture. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, a lot of survivalists and those preparing for WWIII suddenly had less to worry about…until President Clinton was elected and the threat that Y2K posed became a thing.

Thinking back on such a time, I now laugh at a lot of the ideas and beliefs that ran rampant in certain segments of the population. But exist they did.

I like how “…will get you killed.” is the punchline to every disagreed upon evaluation of a piece of gear…”that [AK/Baofong/Sleeping bag/knife/gas can] will get you killed”. That’s pretty much darn near becoming a trope.

The bit about the lack of AR ubiquity has a bit of truth to it. Back then it was pretty much an AR or AK world with the occasional Mini-14 or HK thrown in just to keep the diversity thing going. But if you had an AR it wasn’t nearly the exercise in ballistic Lego that it is now. Maybe you changed the sling around and found a carry-handle-mounted scope. Other than that, it was a stock A2 or CAR. So, yeah, that changed.

I wonder sometimes whatever happened to those people I saw on the news with the desert scrubland retreats that they bought and cavernous basements of 5-gallon buckets. Did they follow through and keep the lifestyle? Or did they pack it all up, ship it to Goodwill, and move on to a different cause célèbre?

I will say, my thinking has shifted a tiny bit since then. While it’s strongly about being prepared, there is a larger note of resiliency. I’ve come to realize, maybe a bit late, that the small End Of The Worlds will happen far more frequently and often than the big End Of The Worlds. Those small EOTW’s look like job layoffs, house fires, illnesses, car problems, etc, etc. And while five-gallon buckets of wheat will come in handy in Mad Max-ville, they aren’t going to do much to get a transmission repaired next week. So…smart spending, smart saving, smart lifestyle….and underneath all of that, the constant and steady incremental activity of getting things more prepared, more resilient, and more resistant to ‘problems’.

Anyway, its an interesting little article and, for those of us old enough to remember, a fun little poke at an interesting time in our shared collective survivalist past.