Monthly Archives: October 2021

Warbirds Over the Beach Airshow 7 (final Great War pictures)

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In early October I spent the weekend in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This seventh post on the air show include some more Great War airplane pictures that I took and a few other pictures taken by others. It will be my last post of Great War airplanes for now.

This is a replica of SE-5a. One of the better allied fighters in the war (5205 built). It usually had one cowling mounted machinegun and one Lewis gun mounted on the upper wing.

Picture from Military Aviation Museum.

There are videos of it taxiing here: https://aerodynamicmedia.com/taxi-tests-underway-for-military-aviation-museums-new-s-e-5a-video/

I forget what this plane is. Anyone recognize it?

This is an Albatros DVa. The Germans spell ‘Albatross’ with one ‘s.’

Nice period piece:

This is a 7/8th scale replica of a Spad XIII. I am truly mystified why someone would build a 7/8th’s scale replica. This is actually a flying model. See this link: https://militaryaviationmuseum.org/aircraft/wwi-aircraft/

Photo taken by a friend

Warbirds Over the Beach Airshow 6 (Fokkers)

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In early October I spent the weekend in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This sixth post on the air show include some more Great War airplane pictures that I took, and a few other pictures.

Fokker became famous during the Great War. In addition to inventing the first working synchronized machinegun, he also built a few nice planes. The first famous one was the Fokker Eindecker (E.I, E.II, E.III and two gunned E.IV, etc.), which was basically a French Morane Saulnier G with a metal frame and a Oberursel U.I. 9-cylinder rotary engine with 100 horsepower. This was a license built copy of the French Gnome Delta. The Morane Saulner G also used a Gnome engine (80 horsepower version). Below is a picture of replica of a Fokker E.III:

Fokker E.III at the airport in Jaroměř, Pterodactyl Flight, Radka Máchová, 2016 – photo taken by “Portwyn” (from Wikipedia)

The next famous Fokker, and arguably the most famous, is the Fokker DR.1 triplane. All Great War airshows seem to have one of these. This show had two. It was the plane that Baron Manfred von Richthofen (“The Bloody Red Baron”) scored his last 17 kills with and was shot down in.

Picture taken by friend.

Picture taken by friend.

Picture from the Military Aviation Museum.

And then there was the Fokker VII. There were two copies in the museum, but none flying that weekend.

Note: As indicated in the side markings, this Fokker DVII was built by Albatross. Below is a Fokker built by Fokker.

And then there was the Fokker D.VIII, back to using a single wing after using three and then two.

Picture taken by friend.

Picture from the Military Aviation Museum.

Picture taken by friend.

Picture from the Military Aviation Museum.

Anthony Fokker was Dutch, not German. After the war he moved back to Holland and then to America. He passed away in New York City in 1939 at the age of 49. This was one of his famous post-Great War planes:

The Southern Cross in 1943 (from Wikipedia)

This plane made the first ever trans-Pacific flight from mainland United States (Oakland, CA) to Brisbane, Australia in 1928. It was a distance of 7,250 miles (11,670 kilometers). It did stop at Hawaii and Fiji along the way. The crew was two Australian pilots and two Americans, a navigator and a radio operator.

 

Warbirds Over the Beach Airshow 5 (Halberstadt CL IV)

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In early October I spent the weekend in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This fifth post on the air show include some more Great War airplane pictures that I took, and a few other pictures. 

This is a Halberstadt CL IV. This was a late war plane introduced in 1918. Mercedes 6-cylinder water-cooled in-line piston engine of 160 horsepower. Some 700 were ordered. Two forward firing fixed machineguns (LMG 08/15 “Spandau”), one ring mounted machinegun (Parabellum MG 14) for the observer.

This version is a replica and it does differ from the original in a number of areas.

Of interest is the rear mounted machinegun on an circular ring mount. This was something the Germans were doing but the allies were not. This does appear to be a precise recreation of the ring mount.

The exterior radiators do not appear to be “standard issue.” Probably a modern addition. Below is a picture of a CL IV in the National Museum of the United States Air Force.

Source: From Wikipedia.

I do not think the high back seat is “original issue.”

And the cockpit. The windscreen is a modern addition. These airplanes did not have such a windscreen. Not sure how much of this cockpit is authentic.

A look from above with another museum piece. Note that ring mount is fundamentally different.

Source: Wikipedia taken by Eric Salard.
Plane is at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

So this version in Virginia Beach does not appear to be a perfect reproduction, but it does fly.

Source: From Youtube

Halberstadt CL.IV Takeoff – YouTube

And a Great War era picture:

Source: https://www.militaer-wissen.de/halberstadt-cl-iv/?lang=en

For comparison, I have added a picture of the machinegun mount of a Sopwith 1 1/2 Stutter to the post on that plane.

Warbirds Over the Beach Airshow 4 (Nieuport 17)

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In early October I spent the weekend in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This fourth post on the air show include some more Great War airplane pictures that I took, and a few other pictures. 

Cockpit picture of a Nieuport 17, one of the most common of the French fighters (some 3,600 built). Now, I don’t know how authentic the cockpit is. They may have added some gauges for the sake of modern pilots, as this is a flying model. The sign that says “experimental” is not original issue. I gather it is there to meet an FAA requirement.

The plane was missing a gun. So, here is a period drawing of such:

The Alkan-Hamy synchonization gear installed in a Nieuport 17 (source: Wikipedia)

They also often just carried a Lewis gun on the top wing (or both)

Early Nieuport 17 in July 1916 with a Lewis gun and a cône de penetration (Source: Wikipedia)

Warbirds Over the Beach Airshow 3 (Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter)

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In early October I spent the weekend in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This third post on the air show includes some more of the pictures I took, and a few other more “professional” pictures.


This is a flying model of the Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter. I have already posted this picture. The Sopwith 1 1/2 stutter did its first flight in December 1915 and was introduced to combat in April 1916. It was the first British aircraft to enter service with a forward firing synchronized machine gun that fired through the propeller. It was also the first airplane to have air brakes (the Wikipedia article on air brakes only started discussing their history in 1931). It had a 130 horsepower French built Clerget 9B 9-cylinder air-cooled rotary piston engine. I gather 1,280 were built in England and 4,500 were license-built in France by 11 different companies. 

This picture below taken by a friend of the same plane at the same time. Not sure why his picture looks brighter and better than mine. We were both using Apple I-phones. But then, I am really not that patient enough to be a good photographer. 

They also had one in the museum  

This is the observers compartment. Note the control stick. I gather this is a field improvisation, but was done during the Great War.

This is link is worth looking at, showing how one is constructed, fully documented in pictures: https://www.kipaero.com/aero-documentation/sopwith-construction/

This is their picture of the air brake:

Picture from KipAero

A useful discussion of Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter airbrakes: http://www.theaerodrome.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-33348.html

And here is a picture of the plane during the Great War. Note the machinegun mount.

Vickers-build Sopwith 1-1/2 Strutter A8747 of the 43 Squadron RFC. Source: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/416020084322288272/

Warbirds Over the Beach Airshow 2 (Bleriot XI)

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Spent the week before down in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This second post on the air show includes some more of the pictures I took, although they are far from “professional”

In their museum is a Bleriot XI. It did not fly. This airplane may have been the second most significant airplane in history, after the various Wright Flyers. It was primarily designed by Raymond Saulnier. It relied upon the Wright brothers “wing warping” for lateral control, vice using ailerons. Over a thousand were manufactured between 1909 and 1914.

Louis Bleriot flew this plane over the English channel in 1909. It was also used by Adolphe Pegoud for his various inverted flight and loop demonstrations in 1913. The first British pilots to conduct loops also used this plane.

You are able to get up close and personal with the planes.

Raymond Saulnier designed the very similar looking Morane-Saulnier, which Roland Garros flew across the Mediterranean from southern France to Tunis. The Morane-Saulnier was pretty much just copied to create the Fokker Eindecker that started the Fokker Scourge of 1915-1916. 

Morane Saulnier G (from Wikipedia)

Fokker E III Eindecker – 1916 (from Wikipedia)

 

Nicholas Krawciw (MG, USA), 1935-2021

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MGEN Nicholas S. H. Krawciw, USA (uncovered)

I just found out this weekend that Nicholas Stephen Hordij Krawciw passed away on 29 September at Ft. Belvoir. He was 85 years old.

Nick Krawciw replaced Trevor Dupuy as the head of The Dupuy Institute in 1995 after the untimely death of Trevor Dupuy. He continued as head until 2005, when I was promoted to President and he continued as the Chairman of the Board. He continued in that role until 2015, when the Institute was transferred to me.

Nick Krawciw had a long and distinguished career in the army and a life that looked like it came out of a Hollywood movie.

He was born it Lvov, then part of Poland on 28 November 1935. His father was a Ukrainian journalist and writer. When the Soviet Union occupied that part of Poland in 1939, his father had to leave to avoid arrest (other relatives had been arrested and executed by the Soviet Union on an earlier trip to Russia). Nick Krawciw and his family followed shortly thereafter, except they were intercepted by Soviet patrols while crossing the Sian River, and Nick Krawciw, at the age of five, first came under machinegun fire.  

He then spent most of World War II in Germany. They were in Berlin when their kitchen was destroyed by an allied bomb. So his mother applied for them to be farm laborers and the entire family moved to a family farm in southern Germany.

That area of Germany was then occupied in 1945 by the U. S. Army, but not before Nick Krawciw had come under artillery bombardment from them. His family, thanks to connections in the United States, then migrated to United States in 1949. He grew up in Philadelphia.

At his initiative, he went to a military high school in New Jersey, accruing a debt to pay for it, and then went to West Point, graduating second in his class in 1959.

He then served two tours in Vietnam and ended up as the senior U.N. peacekeeping forces representative in Middle East during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. He was the commanding general of the 3rd Infantry Division from 1987-1989.

He choose to retire from the army in 1990 because of health issues. He then started working with the DOD on Ukrainian issues and became a vice-president at The Dupuy Institute in 1995. He took over running the Institute after Trevor Dupuy passed away.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Krawciw

West Point Warriors (Chapter 9 is about Nick): West Point Warriors

West Point: Nicholas S. Krawciw 1959

Article from 2014: Retired Ukraine military expert speaks on homeland

I did work for and with Nick Krawciw for over twenty years. It is hard to select from a long list of superlatives those which I would use to describe him. He displayed the finest traditions and standards of a U.S. Army officer and was a caring, loving family man.  All who worked with him and knew him held him in the highest regard.

Warbirds Over the Beach Airshow 1

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Spent this last week down in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. Also visited their museum. Took a few pictures, although far from “professional”

Here are some of the Great War planes lined up behind the hangers. These are all flying models:

The first plane is the Curtis Flyer, 1911. This is a reproduction. It did fly this weekend, lifting off from the airfield, but not too high, and then landing back down.

Next is the Fokker D VIII. It was the most developed and advanced Fokker of the war, with a few less wings then the more famous Fokker Triplane. It definitely flew with more power and gusto then the rest of the planes.

And then there are the Fokker DR1 of Fokker Triplanes, made famous by the 
Bloody Red Baron. They had two flying models.

And then there was the Sopwith Triplane. Note the minor design differences, in particular the “fourth wing” between the wheels of the Fokkers. 

Finally, among the flying aircraft was a Sopwith 1/2 strutter two-seat aircraft. No Sopwith Camel though.

And finally, the three Fokkers.

Beyond Lanchester

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The publication of the book Beyond Lanchester last year had escaped me. See Beyond Lanchester: Stochastic Granular Attrition Combat Processes

His blurb on the book:

F.W. Lanchester famously reduced the mutual erosion of attrition warfare to simple mathematical form, resulting in his famous “Square Law,” and also the “Linear Law.” Followers have sought to fit real-world data to Lanchester’s equations, and/or to elaborate them in order to capture more aspects of reality. In Beyond Lanchester, Brian McCue–author of the similarly quantitative U-Boats In The Bay Of Biscay–focusses on a neglected shortcoming of Lanchester’s work: its determinism. He shows that the mathematics of the Square Law contain instability, so that the end-state it predicts is actually one of the least likely outcomes. This mathematical truth is connected to the real world via examples drawn from United States Marine Corps exercises, Lanchester’s original Trafalgar example, predator-prey experiments done by the early ecologist G.F. Gause, and, of course the war against German U-boats

This is an in-depth discussion of the subject of the use Lanchester equations by Dr. Brian McCue, previously of CNA (Center for Naval Analysis) and OTA (Congressional Office of Technology Assistance). We have also posted and written before about Lanchester (see War by Numbers). Some of our old blog posts on Lanchester are here:

Lanchester equations have been weighed…. | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

TDI Friday Read: The Lanchester Equations | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

The Lanchester Equations and Historical Warfare | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)


The book is 121 pages. The Table of Contents for Brian McCue’s book includes:

Introduction

Lanchester’s Theory

A New Look At Lanchester

Trafalgar

Subsuface Combat in a Test Tube

Weaknesses of the Deterministic, Continuous-Variable Approach

A Probabilistic, Event-Driven Revision of Gause’s Work

Theory and Experiment

Implications for Military Operations Research

Applying Hughes’s “Salvo Equations” to Engagements between U-Boats and Convoy Escorts

Wartime Analysis

Using Simulated Annealing to Solve a Problem of “Ecological” inference

Results

Back to Attrition: The Salvo Equations

Results: Fitting HESSE to the North Atlantic Data

Goodness-Of-Fit

Final Thoughts

 

Anyhow, having just discovered it, I have not read it yet. Brian McCue is an old friend of mine and previously published U-Boats in the Bay of Biscay. See: U-Boats in the Bay of Biscay: An Essay in Operations Analysis


 

Summation of Afghanistan Chapter

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Afghan police in training, near Jalalabad, 15 August 2010 (photo by friend of William A. Lawrence II).

This is a summation of the 13 posts drawn (copied) from Chapter 21: Relating a Force Ratio Model to Afghanistan (pages 253-273) of America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam:


So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 2 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 3 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

From that post:

At the time of that briefing, we had 110,790 troops there. The Dupuy Institute estimated insurgent strength between 15,000 and 25,000, with us leaning towards the higher figure. So if the insurgency was a regional or factional insurgency, then even at a force ratio of 4.43 to 1 (assuming 25,000 insurgents), we had an 84 percent chance of winning. Yet, it did not appear that we were winning. [bolding added for this post]”

So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 4 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 5 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

From that post: 

The problem is if the insurgency is broadly based, then those surge forces needed to stay in place for the next ten years, with the expected continued losses and expenses. [bolding added for this post]

Dueling Surges | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 7 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 8 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 9 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 10 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 11 | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? (part 12) – Political Will | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? (part 13) – Conclusions | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

From that post:

If history is a guide, then this government will be replaced one way or the other several years after we withdraw. What will replace it is hard to determine, but will probably include a return to some extent of the Taliban, or perhaps with them leading the new government. It is also distinctly possible that the country will return back into civil war. None of this fulfills our objectives.

This was written in early 2015.