[27] - Patton's Bulldog: The Life and Service of General Walton H. Walker by Wilson Allen Heefner
[28] - The Bitter Woods By John S. D. Eisenhower
[29]- Pacific Blitzkrieg: World War II in the Central Pacific By Sharon Tosi Lacey
[30] - Hell on wheels: the 2d Armored Division, Volume 2; Volume 67 by Donald Eugene Houston
[31] - Terrible Terry Allen: Combat General of World War II - The Life of an American Soldier By Gerald Astor
[32] - The Rhine Crossing: 9th US Army & 17th US Airborne By Andrew Rawson
[33] - 500 Great Military Leaders edited by Spencer C. Tucker
[34] - Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers Who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible... By John C. McManus
[35] - Eisenhower's Lieutenants by Russell F. Weigley, pp. 758-759
[36] - "Eyes of the Eighth": a story of the 7th Photographic Reconnaissance Group, 1942-1945 by Patricia Fussell Keen
[37] - Foibe Killings by Jesse Russell and Ronald Cohn
[38] - The Normandy Mulberry Harbours by William Jordan
History Press Limited, Apr 1, 2005 - Mulberry harbors - 20 pages
* * *
[i] Timeline for World War Three 1946
Book One - The Red Tide - Stalin Strikes First
May 2nd, 1895 - Sergo Peshkova is born
Aug 3rd, 1943 - Sergo attends a party where he meets Stalin and their unusual relationship begins
Aug 13th, 1943 - Sergo becomes an advisor to Joseph Stalin specializing in aerospace
Nov 24th, 1943 - Sergo is given full control of Soviet aerospace research and development.
Jan 4th, 1944 - Research on the German Wasserfal Ground to Air missile and the X4 air to air missile becomes a top priority under Sergo’s leadership using stolen materials from Peenemunde
Aug 1944 - Three USAAF Superfortress B-29 bombers fall into the possession of the USSR
Dec, 18, 1945 - 17 of the 22 members of an elite atomic bomb assembly team are killed in a series of seemingly accidental events during the holidays. 15 die in a bus crash. These deaths delay the American Atomic Weapons program for 6 months
May 1st, 1946 - May Day Parade in Berlin and Moscow
May 2nd, 1946 - World War Three begins with a surprise attack by the Red Army consisting of 60 divisions and over 7,000 combat aircraft.
May 11th - NATO is formed.
May 13th, 1946 - The surprise attack is a complete success with 13 out of 22 US, British and French divisions overrun.
July 3rd, 1946 - Denmark surrenders to the forces of the USSR.
July 13th, 1946 - France surrenders to the USSR.
July 13th, 1946 - The Soviet Agent known as Delmar (George Koval) assassinates hundreds of American nuclear scientists using the world’s most deadly substance, Polonium, at conferences in Oak Ridge, TN and Dayton, OH. This cripples the US nuclear program for another 12 months and possibly forever.
July 27th, 1946 - USAAF attempt to drop an atomic bomb on Leningrad. The NKVD and its stable of spies is instrumental in warning the Soviet Red Air Force VVS. With a combination of the new Wasserfal Ground to Air guided Missile and hundreds of fighters the raid is decimated and an atomic bomb is lost in the Baltic Sea.
July 28th, 1946 - The Red Army is stopped temporarily on the Pyrenees Line by a combination of US and Spanish divisions using the rugged terrain of this mountain range located on the border of France and Spain.
Aug 2nd, 1946 - Italy is abandoned by the NATO Allies and all forces are pulled back to Sardinia.
Aug, 15th, 1946 - The Soviet VVS demonstrates its newest aircraft by flying at great heights over the entire British Isles in an attempt to intimidate the British people. This demonstration proves that the entire British Isles can be attack from the air unlike the First Battle of Britain where the Luftwaffe was severely limited in range.
August 17th, 1946 - The Strategic Air Command is formed with Curtis LeMay named as commander.
August 20th, 1946 - The Soviet VVS continues a massive buildup of the Red Air Force on the Channel coast. It appears that a Second Battle of Britain is about to be fought.
[ii] Timeline for Book Two
Once again a few brave men would be asked to do the impossible over the skies of Great Britain. This time the enemy was not lead by a buffoon in the form of Herman Goring. The Red Air Force VVS was led by a master of strategy in the form of one Alexander Alexandrovich Novikov, the man who ruled the skies over Mother Russia, Manchuria, East Germany and now most of Europe.
Sept. 1946 - Throughout the month of September the Soviet VVS feints and simulated massive air attacks on the Isles of Great Britain.
Sept. 1st, 1946 - The US Strategic Air Command or SAC, is created with Curtis LeMay named Commander.
Sept. 15th, 1946 - From two different direction massive air raids consisting of 2056 Tu2s, Lag 7s, Yak 9DDs approach the southern and northeast coast of the British Isles. The RAF is unsure of the Soviet targets. The targets are the “bone yards” and maintenance facilities of the British. The unexpected choice of targets and the effectiveness of the raids leave the RAF with very few serviceable fighter aircraft and few repair facilities.
Sept. 14th, 1946 - Scandinavia falls to a massive airborne assault.
Sept. 25th - The Second Battle of Britain begins. The VVS suffers from none of the constraints that the Luftwaffe encountered.
Using external drop tanks, the VVS planes have the range to hit every target in the British Isles.
They outnumber the RAF by five to one.
The RAF has very few replacement aircraft.
The Soviet spy network is in full play. There is no lack of intelligence on the exact location of targets and the effects of their previous raids on those targets.
The Soviets have used captured US jammers to spoof the vaunted “proximity or VT fuse”. During the first critical raids the RAF airbases are virtually defenseless.
The effects are almost immediate with the RAF on the losing end of the battle.
Within weeks the VVS is roaming freely over the British Isles and ravaging the transportation systems and storage depots of the RAF. Britain is virtually defenseless from air attack.
Sept. 30th, 1946 - The Soviets publish, in Pravda, an article and picture of what appears to be an intact atomic bomb from the Leningrad raid. The crew and the Silverplate B-29 appear to be in the background. The inference is that the crew and bomb have defected to the Communist cause.
Oct. 2nd - Four atomic bombs are dropped on the oil production facilities of the USSR. The B-29s were based in Egypt with their fighter escorts flying from bases in Turkey. These four bombs are the last of the atomic bombs in existence.
Oct. 18th, 1946 - William Perl, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant have all defected to the USSR and bring with them unimaginable intelligence on American and British weapons systems.
Oct. 22nd, 1946 - The fast response by the VVS and the addition of the Stalin’s Fire SAMs start to deplete the B-29s of SAC.
The Soviets attention is diverted, and the Second Battle of Britain and the Battle for Iberia are severely curtailed. Stalin and the Stavka prepare for an invasion of Turkey, Iraq, the oil fields of Kuwait and the Levant. Their ultimate goal is to capture Egypt and Gibraltar.
[iii]
[iv] PIGEONS IN A PELICAN
This paper was presented at a meeting of the American Psychological Association at Cincinnati, Ohio, September, 1959 and was published in the American Psychologist in January, 1960.
B. F. SKINNER
Harvard University
This is the history of a crackpot idea, born on the wrong side of the tracks intellectually speaking, but eventually vindicated in a sort of middle class respectability. It is the story of a proposal to use living organisms to guide missiles—of a research program during World War II called "Project Pigeon" and a peace- time continuation at the Naval Research Laboratory called "ORCON," from the words "organic control." Both of these programs have now been decl
assified.
Man has always made use of the sensory capacities of animals, either because they are more acute than his own or more convenient. The watchdog probably hears better than his master and in any case listens while his master sleeps. As a detecting system the dog's ear comes supplied with an alarm (the dog need not be taught to announce the presence of an intruder), but special forms of reporting are sometimes set up. The tracking behavior of the bloodhound and the pointing of the hunting dog are usually modified to make them more useful. Training is sometimes quite explicit. It is said that sea gulls were used to detect sub- marines in the English Channel during World War I. The British sent their own submarines through the Channel releasing food to the surface. Gulls could see the submarines from the air and learned to follow them, whether they were British or German. A flock of gulls, spotted from the shore, took on special significance. In the seeing-eye dog the repertoire of artificial signaling responses is so elaborate that it has the conventional character of the verbal interchange between man and man.
The detecting and signaling systems of lower organisms have a special advantage when used with explosive devices which can be guided toward the objects they are to destroy, whether by land, sea, or air. Homing systems for guided missiles have now been developed which sense and signal the position of a target by responding to visible or invisible radiation, noise, radar reflections, and so on. These have not always been available, and in any case a living organism has certain advantages. It is almost certainly cheaper and more compact and, in particular, is especially good at responding to patterns and those classes of patterns called "concepts." The lower organism is not used because it is more sensitive than man—after all, the kamikaze did very well—but because it is readily expendable.
Project Pelican
The ethical question of our right to convert a lower creature into an unwitting hero is a peace- time luxury. There were bigger questions to be answered in the late thirties. A group of men had come into power who promised, and eventually accomplished, the greatest mass murder in history. In 1939 the city of Warsaw was laid waste in an unprovoked bombing, and the airplane emerged as a new and horrible instrument of war against which only the feeblest defenses were available. Project Pigeon was conceived against that back- ground. It began as a search for a homing device to be used in a surface-to-air guided missile as a defense against aircraft. As the balance between offensive and defensive weapons shifted, the direction was reversed, and the system was to be tested first in an air-to-ground missile called the "Pelican." Its name is a useful reminder of the state of the missile art in America at that time. It’s detecting and servomechanisms took up so much space that there was no room for explosives: hence the resemblance to the pelican "whose beak can hold more than its belly can." My title is perhaps now clear. Figure 1 shows the pigeons, jacketed for duty. Figure 2 shows the beak of the Pelican.
At the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1940 the capacity of the pigeon to steer toward a target was tested with a moving hoist. The pigeon, held in a jacket and harnessed to a block, was immobilized except for its neck and head. It could eat grain from a dish and operate a control system by moving its head in appropriate directions. Movement of the head operated the motors of the hoist. The bird could ascend by lifting its head, descend by lowering it, and travel from side to side by moving appropriately. The whole system, mounted on wheels, was pushed across a room to- ward a bull's-eye on the far wall. During the approach the pigeon raised or lowered itself and moved from side to side in such a way as to reach the wall in position to eat grain from the center of the bull's-eye. The pigeon learned to reach any target within reach of the hoist, no matter what the starting position and during fairly rapid approaches.
The experiment was shown to John T. Tate, a physicist, then Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota, who brought it to the attention of R. C. Tolman, one of a group of scientists engaged in early defense activities. The result was the first of a long series of rejections. The proposal "did not warrant further development at the time." The project was accordingly allowed to lapse. On December 7, 1941 the situation was suddenly restructured; and, on the following day, with the help of Keller Breland, then a graduate student at Minnesota, further work was planned. A simpler harnessing system could be used if the bomb were to rotate slowly during its descent, when the pigeon would need to steer in only one dimension: from side to side. We built an apparatus in which a harnessed pigeon was lowered toward a large revolving turntable across which a target was driven according to contacts made by the bird during its descent. It was not difficult to train a pigeon to "hit" small ship models during fairly rapid descents. We made a demonstration film showing hits on various kinds of targets, and two psychologists then engaged in the war effort in Washington, Charles Bray and Leonard Carmichael, undertook to look for government support. Tolman, then at the Office of Scientific Research and Development, again felt that the project did not warrant support, in part because the United States had at that time no missile capable of being guided toward a target. Commander (now Admiral) Luis de Florez, then in the Special Devices Section of the Navy, took a sympathetic view. He dismissed the objection that there was no available vehicle by suggesting that the pigeon be connected with an automatic pilot mounted in a small plane loaded with explosives. But he was unable to take on the project because of other commitments and because, as he explained, he had recently bet on one or two other equally long shots which had not come in.
The project lapsed again and would probably have been abandoned if it had not been for a young man whose last name I have ungratefully forgotten, but whose first name—Victor—we hailed as a propitious sign. His subsequent history led us to refer to him as Vanquished; and this, as it turned out, was a more reliable omen. Victor walked into the Department of Psychology at Minnesota one day in the summer of 1942 looking for an animal psychologist. He had a scheme for installing dogs in antisubmarine torpedoes. The dogs were to respond to faint acoustic signals from the submarine and to steer the torpedo toward its goal. He wanted a statement from an animal psychologist as to its feasibility. He was understandably surprised to learn of our work with pigeons but seized upon it eagerly, and citing it in support of his contention that dogs could be trained to steer torpedoes he went to a number of companies in Minneapolis. His project was rejected by everyone he approached; but one company, General Mills, Inc., asked for more information about our work with pigeons. We described the project and presented the available data to Arthur D. Hyde, Vice-President in Charge of Research. The company was not looking for new products, but Hyde thought that it might, as a public service, develop the pigeon system to the point at which a governmental agency could be persuaded to take over.
Breland and I moved into the top floor of a flour mill in Minneapolis and with the help of Norman Guttman, who had joined the project, set to work on further improvements. It had been difficult to induce the pigeon to respond to the small angular displacement of a distant target. It would start working dangerously late in the descent. Its natural pursuit behavior was not appropriate to the characteristics of a likely missile. A new system was therefore designed. An image of the target was projected on a translucent screen as in a camera obscura. The pigeon, held near the screen, was reinforced for pecking at the image on the screen. The guiding signal was to be picked up from the point of contact of screen and beak.
In an early arrangement the screen was a trans- lucent plastic plate forming the larger end of a truncated cone bearing a lens at the smaller end. The cone was mounted, lens down, in a gimbal bearing. An object within range threw its image on the translucent screen; and the pigeon, held vertically just above the plate, pecked the image. When a target was moved about within range of the lens, the cone continued to point to it. In another apparatus a translucent disk, free to tilt slightly on gimbal bearings, closed contacts operating motors which altered the position of a large field beneath the apparatus. Small cutouts of sh
ips and other objects were placed on the field. The field was constantly in motion, and a target would go out of range unless the pigeon continued to control it. With this apparatus we began to study the pigeon's reactions to various patterns and to develop sustained steady rates of responding through the use of appropriate schedules of reinforcement, the reinforcement being a few grains occasionally released onto the plate. By building up large extinction curves a target could be tracked continuously for a matter of minutes without reinforcement. We trained pigeons to follow a variety of land and sea targets, to neglect large patches in- tended to represent clouds or flak, to concentrate on one target while another was in view, and so on. We found that a pigeon could hold the missile on a particular street intersection in an aerial map of a city. The map which came most easily to hand was of a city which, in the interests of inter- national relations, need not be identified. Through appropriate schedules of reinforcement it was possible to maintain longer uninterrupted runs than could conceivably be required by a missile.
We also undertook a more serious study of the pigeon's behavior, with the help of W. K. Estes and Marion Breland who joined the project at this time. We ascertained optimal conditions of de- privation, investigated other kinds of deprivations, studied the effect of special reinforcements (for example, pigeons were said to find hemp seed particularly delectable), tested the effects of energizing drugs and increased oxygen pressures, and so on. We differentially reinforced the force of the pecking response and found that pigeons could be induced to peck so energetically that the base of the beak became inflamed. We investigated the effects of extremes of temperature, of changes in atmospheric pressure, of accelerations produced by an improvised centrifuge, of increased carbon di- oxide pressure, of increased and prolonged vibration, and of noises such as pistol shots. (The birds could, of course, have been deafened to eliminate auditory distractions, but we found it easy to maintain steady behavior in spite of intense noises and many other distracting conditions using the simple process of adaptation.) We investigated optimal conditions for the quick development of discriminations and began to study the pigeon's reactions to patterns, testing for induction from a test figure to the same figure inverted, to figures of different sizes and colors, and to figures against different grounds. A simple device using carbon paper to record the points at which a pigeon pecks a figure showed a promise which has never been properly exploited.
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