Fullbore Friday

If you look around in certain corners of the world, you can find little things that make you give a double-take. 

For instance, why is there a statue of an American General in a WWI uniform in the same park as a monument to the Soviet Red Army?

Have you ever heard of Major General Harry Hill Bandholtz, USA?

Probably not. What did he do that would warrant such a statue in such a location?

On August 11, 1919, General Bandholtz arrived in Budapest as one of four generals (English, French, Italian, American) to become the Inter-Allied Control Commission for Hungary, primarily to supervise the disengagement of Romanian troops from Hungary.

He became famous when, on the night of October 5, 1919, as President of the Day of the Commission, mainly through bluff, armed only with a riding crop, he prevented a group of Romanian soldiers from removing Transylvanian treasures from the National Museum.

The statue was erected in 1936, and stood throughout World War II with the inscription, in English,

“I simply carried out the instructions of my Government, as I understood them, as an officer and a gentleman of the United States Army.

In the late 1940s the statue was removed “for repair.” It lay in a statue boneyard until the 1980s, at which time it was placed in the garden of the U.S. Ambassador’s residence, at the request of then-Ambassador Salgo. It was re-placed in Szabadság tér at its original location in July 1989, just a few days before the visit of President Bush.

Is there any better quote for an officer to be remembered by?

For you history buffs of the labor troubles of the 1920s or pre-WWI counterinsurgency efforts in The Philippines, he had a noteworthy record with interesting peers...but for the Hungarians ... fullbore.

Eastern European NATO vs. Russia - the Numbers

As we saw with the rapid fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, history can change on a dime with little warning.

Russia's latest row with Ukraine is a good reason to tilt the prism we look at thing through and ponder a few items.

No one knows the Russians better than the Eastern Europeans who were once part of the Soviet Block.

When they rapidly moved away from Communism and joined NATO, they rightfully had a unique challenge in building sustainable economies and representative governments in line with the Western European standard +/-.

They all minimized what, under the protection of NATO and the supine wreckage of Russia to the east, was a lower priority - military spending.

The end of the 2nd decade of the 21st Century is not the 1990s and the last few years have seen a return to historical norms - the Russian bear looming to the east.

Of note, to a nation, all the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Republics now in NATO have significantly increased military spending since 2014 when it was at its lowest. They skimped too much in the face of a growing Russia and are playing catch-up as best they can. Is it fast enough? TBD.

Hopefully, apart from internal realization of their shortcomings and pressure from the alliance partners, investment in defense in Eastern Europe will continue. Russians respect power more than anything, and a strong Eastern Front of NATO is best for all. 

I also hope there is something else driving this; a realization that NATO is not a guarantee. Many are now taking seriously what I have been warning my European friends for two decades; the USA is one election away from leaving Europe to its own devices (see the Norwegian series, Occupied - it ain't just me who sees this, and it pre-dates Trump).

What are those nations on the front lines against Russia doing for their own security? What alone, or in some collective, what can they put against the power of Russia?  

People and nations will show you what they think is important based on what they spend their money one. 

Last night I put a few numbers together.

There is so much potential here even without any help further west. Their population is not quite Russia, but it is their economic power that is the key.

Of course the weakest part of this is their lack of unified command - something they have in NATO - but with perhaps the Visegrad as the anchor - why not have some military structure in place like most of Western European NATO have with the EU military structure? Not a counter to NATO, but a backup - just like in hushed voices, some on the EU military staff will tell you. 

It would be a staff in being, waiting for a reason to scale up.

First things first though. The great advantage Eastern European NATO has against the Russians - especially Poland and the Czech Republic, is the strength of their GDP/person. They have strong economies. If they are smart, even small increases in military spending can buy quality kit and training - quickly closing the gap with Russia.

A strong Eastern Europe, economically, militarily and rule of law, would be the best guarantor of containing Russia. A promising side effect, by example and close ties, a rising Eastern Europe will help their neighbors, Ukraine and Moldova, start to improve as well. 

Eastern Europe does not have to think that Germany, France, Britain, or the USA are the only things keeping Russia away - if they invest and think - they can do most of it all themselves.

With strong backing to the west, even more. Remember, Eastern Europe has no threat from the west while Russia has much to concern her to her east. If Russia wanted to move west, she could not bring her full force to that effort.

Eastern Europe however can put their full force facing east.

Ponder 3-4 moves ahead of where we are at the close of 2018. 

Fullbore Friday

In 2009 we lost a lion of the Cold War. 

 It is amazing, especially in NYC, who could be just around the corner.

Of all the things I spent my time on there, wouldn't it have been great to have audited a class of his, or at least asked him if I could buy him a cup of coffee?

Major General Béla Király, PhD - Hungarian Army and Member of the Hungarian Parliament.

Well done on a life well lived. From the NYT's Obit;

Gen. Bela K. Kiraly, the commander in chief of the revolutionary forces in the Hungarian uprising of 1956, who for more than half a century was considered a folk hero in Hungary, and who returned there in 1989 to serve in its post-Communist government, died Saturday in Budapest. He was 97.

story at Brooklyn College, where he taught from 1964 to 1982. Before returning to Hungary, he lived for many years in Highland Lakes, N.J.

A former major general in the Hungarian Army, General Kiraly was the senior military leader of Hungary’s short-lived revolt against Soviet forces in the autumn of 1956. As commander in chief of the Hungarian National Guard and the leader of the Budapest garrison, he commanded a force of 26,000 insurgents and 30,000 Hungarian Army troops who had joined them.

When the uprising began on Oct. 23, General Kiraly was weak, ill and exhausted; he had just been released after spending five years in prison, four of them on death row, on manufactured charges of espionage. After the uprising was put down violently by the Soviets less than two weeks later, he fled to the United States.
...
Bela Kalman Kiraly was born on April 14, 1912, in Kaposvar, in southwest Hungary. After graduating from the state military academy in Budapest, he served as an army officer in World War II. In later years, General Kiraly said in interviews that he had tried to join the Russian side in the war rather than serve with Hungary’s fascist forces, but was unable to do so.

During the war, Mr. Kiraly commanded a battalion of 400 Jewish slave laborers at the Ukrainian front. Disobeying orders from his superiors, as The Jerusalem Post wrote in 1993, he “put the 400 men under his command into Hungarian uniforms and treated them humanely.” For his actions, he was honored in 1993 as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial authority in Jerusalem.

Captured by the Russians in 1944, Mr. Kiraly was sent to Siberia. He and two dozen of his men managed to escape from the train carrying them there and walked over the Carpathian Mountains back to Hungary. Mr. Kiraly was made a general in 1950 and appointed leader of the military academy in Budapest.

In 1951, General Kiraly was arrested on charges of subversion, sedition and spying for the United States. (The charges are now widely believed to have been concocted by Hungary’s Stalinist leaders.) He was given a death sentence, later commuted to life at hard labor. In October 1956, General Kiraly was among the prisoners paroled by the Hungarian government in a futile effort to appease mounting popular unrest.

When the uprising started, General Kiraly was in a Budapest hospital. “I was skin and bones coming out of five years of imprisonment,” Agence France-Presse quoted him as saying in 2006. “I was far from being healed, so I had to slip out of the hospital because the doctors would not let me go.”

At the request of Imre Nagy, a liberal Communist who was Hungary’s prime minister from 1953 to 1955 — and who was returned to office at the start of the uprising — General Kiraly organized the loose confederation of students, workers and other insurgents into a well-oiled fighting force.

“In 24 hours, I created a professional military staff,” the general said in the Agence France-Presse interview.

But it was no match for the hundreds of Soviet tanks that rolled into Budapest on Nov. 4. Pursued by two tank divisions, General Kiraly and a small band of resistance fighters headed for Austria. As they approached the border, the general ordered his men to blow up a nearby ammunition dump. With the Soviet tanks enveloped in the resulting cloud of smoke, General Kiraly and his men slipped through the border fence.

General Kiraly made his way to the United States, where he remained for the next 33 years. In 1958, Mr. Nagy and other leaders of the uprising were executed by Hungary’s post-revolutionary government. Had General Kiraly returned, he would most likely have met the same fate.

There is a lot more, please read it all.

Men like are the ones that make you ask; "What have I really done with the life that I have been given?"

I used to be a regular at a small restaurant that was owned by a husband and wife team. He was an officer in the Hungarian Air Force and escaped after the fall. He told me almost all of the other officers in his unit were executed immediately after capture; he kept running, made it to Austria then the USA. He still proudly kept a picture of himself in uniform with him.

A proud people. I hope this century is better to the Hungarians than the last.

First posted in 2009.

Fullbore Friday

When you read modern fiction that takes place in some quasi-Medieval world - things such as Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones - you sometimes wonder how the authors had the imagination for some of the battle scenes. Then as you read real history, now and then it hits you - these authors did not have to make up much of anything. They just paraphrased what actually happened in our world.

When reading about the discovery of the tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent's in Hungary I came across the account of the account of Siege of Szigetvár in 1566, and a Croatian Count in service to the Kingdom of Hungary, Nikola Šubić Zrinski.

There is the Count, in his isolated fortress city with ~2,300 of his men facing an army almost 150,000 led by a man almost a legend.

What do you do?

Szigetvár was divided into three sections divided by water: the old town, the new town and the castle—each of which was linked to the next by bridges and to the land by causeways. Although it was not built on particularly high ground the inner castle, which occupied much of the area of today's castle, was not directly accessible to the attackers. This was because two other baileys had to be taken and secured before a final assault on the inner castle could be launched.

When the Sultan appeared before the Fortress he saw the walls hung with red cloth, as though for a festive reception, and a single great cannon thundered once to greet the mighty warrior monarch. The siege began on 6 August when Suleiman ordered a general assault on the ramparts, although the attack was successfully repulsed. Despite being undermanned, and greatly outnumbered, the defenders were sent no reinforcements from Vienna by the imperial army.

After over a month of exhausting and bloody struggle the few remaining defenders retreated into the old town for their last stand. The Sultan tried to entice Zrinski to surrender, ultimately offering him leadership of Croatia under Ottoman influence, Count Zrinski did not reply and continued to fight.

The fall of the castle appeared inevitable but the Ottoman high command hesitated. On 6 September Suleiman died in his tent and his death was kept secret at great effort with only the Sultan's innermost circle knowing of his demise. This was because the Ottomans feared that their soldiers would give up the battle if they knew that their leader died, so his death was kept secret for 48 days. A courier was dispatched from the camp with a message for Suleiman's successor, Selim. The courier may not even have known the content of the message he delivered to distant Asia Minor within a mere eight days.

Final battle
The final battle began on 7 September, the day after Suleiman's demise. By this time, the fortress walls had been reduced to rubble by mining with explosives and wood fueled fires at the corners of the walls. In the morning an all-out attack began with fusillades from small arms, "Greek fire", and a concentrated cannonade.[Note 7] Soon the castle, the last stronghold within Szigetvár, was set ablaze and cinders fell into the apartments of the count.

The Ottoman army swarmed through the city, drumming and yelling. Zrinski prepared for a last charge addressing his troops:

...Let us go out from this burning place into the open and stand up to our enemies. Who dies – he will be with God. Who dies not – his name will be honoured. I will go first, and what I do, you do. And God is my witness – I will never leave you, my brothers and knights!...

Zrinski did not allow the final assault to break into the castle. As the Turks were pressing forwards along a narrow bridge the defenders suddenly flung open the gate and fired a large mortar loaded with broken iron, killing 600 attackers. Zrinski then ordered a charge and led his remaining 600 troops out of the castle. He received two musket wounds in his chest and was killed shortly afterwards by an arrow to the head. Some of his force retired into the castle.

The Turks took the castle and most of the defenders were slain. A few of the captured defenders were spared by Janissaries who had admired their courage, with only seven defenders managing to escape through the Ottoman lines. Zrinski's corpse was beheaded and his head taken to the new Sultan while his body received an honourable burial by a Turk who had been his prisoner, and well treated by him.

Powder magazine explosion
Before leading the final sortie by the castle garrison, Zrinski ordered a fuse be lit to the powder magazine. After cutting down the last of the defenders the besiegers poured into the fortress. The Ottoman Army entered the remains of Szigetvár and fell into the booby trap; thousands perished in the blast when the castle's magazine exploded.

The Vizier Ibrahim's life was saved by one of Zrinski's household who warned him of the trap when the Vizier and his troops searched for treasure and interrogated the survivors. While inquiring about treasure the prisoner replied that it had been long expended, but that 3,000 lbs of powder were under their feet to which a slow match had been attached. The Vizier and his mounted officers had just enough time to escape but 3,000 Turks perished in the explosion.

Because of this heroic stand by the Croatians and Hungarians, the Ottomans did not continue their march on Vienna. That gave the West another century to get ready, and to win (with a lot of help from the Poles). People wonder why modern Hungarians build walls to keep out hundreds of thousands of military aged muslim men? National hobby.

They knew their mission. They stopped the Ottomans. Fullbore.

National Security Welfare Queens Ask for More Benefits

The audacity of the entitled and spoiled.

There are two NATO nations who, in living memory, were not only under Russian (Soviet) occupation, but they were invaded by the same Soviets even while they were ostensively allied with them. These nations are Hungary and Czech Republic.

One would think that since they threw off the Communist yoke, joined the club of democratic Western nations and even NATO, that this memory would have them focused on a robust defense. Sadly no.

NATO sets a goal of defense expenditures at 2% of GDP for members. Only the USA, GRC, GBR, EST, and POL meet that minimum.

Of the 27 nation NATO members, CZE and HUN ranked 21st (1.04%) and 22nd (1.01%). Almost the very bottom. In the great alliance effort in AFG, neither nation contributed more than a token force, caveat laden and ineffective.

Amazing, but here they go again - demanding others do what they won't do themselves;

The leaders of the Czech Republic and Hungary say a "joint European army" is needed to bolster security in the EU.

They were speaking ahead of talks in Warsaw with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. They dislike her welcome for Muslim migrants from outside the EU.

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban said "we must give priority to security, so let's start setting up a joint European army".

I am not sure what is going on - but sometimes nations behave like children poorly raised by irresponsible parents.

No one owes you a living folks. If you want help from others, at least show an effort you are doing all you can with what you have available. Look at plucky Estonia. Want goodies? See that EST kid? Be like that kid. Everyone in the neighborhood wants to help that kid. You?

Spoiled brat behavior will most likely get spoiled brat results.

Also remember; if people didn't at their core like you, they wouldn't try to give you good advice.

Fullbore Friday

This has been, as they say, one of those weeks - as you may have noticed by the rather light CDRSalamander postings.

As Friday quickly came upon us, I was a bit of a loss as to what to post as my mind is way too focused on family and paying gig things.

Then I did my quick review of the latest news. In the ongoing cavalcade of national humiliation that is becoming the trademark of the last few years of the Obama Presidency, as a reward to normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba for a farthing, they seem to be joining Russia in Syria. Why not? They owe Russia and there is no downside to spitting on the USA as we beg to be humiliated in our self-imposed gimp-box.

The source, speaking under the condition of anonymity, confirmed intelligence reports claiming two Russian planes landed at the Damascus airport and unloaded Cuban troops. Additionally, the reports state that Gen. Leopoldo Cintra Frias — the head of Cuba’s Armed Forces — and his personal detail recently visited and counseled his forces on how to combat with U.S. backed rebels.

Trying to feel a little better, there is this news from one nation in the EU who is at least trying to do something to preserve their unique culture;

Hungary's fence on its border with Croatia is finished and the army and police are capable of sealing off the border once a decision to do so is made, a top government official said on Thursday.

Hungary has seen more than 378,000 migrants pass through its territory so far this year, Janos Lazar, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's chief of staff, told journalists. He said by the end of the year the number of migrants reaching Hungary's borders could reach 600,000 to 700,000.

There are no technical obstacles to sealing the border with Croatia and it depends on the Brussels meetings and talks in next few days what decision Hungary will make, Lazar said.

I'm not a big fan of Orban, but on this point he is spot on.

Hungary. Yes ... I know; let's do what FbF is designed to do - and let's dig in to the archives back to a 2009 FbF, slightly modified.

Six years ago, we lost a lion of the Cold War. 

It is amazing, especially in NYC, who could be just around the corner. Sadly, we often find ou too late.

Of all the things I spent my time on when visiting that place, wouldn't it have been great to have audited a class of his, or at least asked him if I could buy him a cup of coffee?

Major General Béla Király, PhD - Hungarian Army and Member of the Hungarian Parliament.

Well done on a life well lived. From the NYT's Obit;

Gen. Bela K. Kiraly, the commander in chief of the revolutionary forces in the Hungarian uprising of 1956, who for more than half a century was considered a folk hero in Hungary, and who returned there in 1989 to serve in its post-Communist government, died Saturday in Budapest. He was 97.

At his death, General Kiraly was emeritus professor of history at Brooklyn College, where he taught from 1964 to 1982. Before returning to Hungary, he lived for many years in Highland Lakes, N.J.

A former major general in the Hungarian Army, General Kiraly was the senior military leader of Hungary’s short-lived revolt against Soviet forces in the autumn of 1956. As commander in chief of the Hungarian National Guard and the leader of the Budapest garrison, he commanded a force of 26,000 insurgents and 30,000 Hungarian Army troops who had joined them.

When the uprising began on Oct. 23, General Kiraly was weak, ill and exhausted; he had just been released after spending five years in prison, four of them on death row, on manufactured charges of espionage. After the uprising was put down violently by the Soviets less than two weeks later, he fled to the United States.
...
Bela Kalman Kiraly was born on April 14, 1912, in Kaposvar, in southwest Hungary. After graduating from the state military academy in Budapest, he served as an army officer in World War II. In later years, General Kiraly said in interviews that he had tried to join the Russian side in the war rather than serve with Hungary’s fascist forces, but was unable to do so.

During the war, Mr. Kiraly commanded a battalion of 400 Jewish slave laborers at the Ukrainian front. Disobeying orders from his superiors, as The Jerusalem Post wrote in 1993, he “put the 400 men under his command into Hungarian uniforms and treated them humanely.” For his actions, he was honored in 1993 as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial authority in Jerusalem.

Captured by the Russians in 1944, Mr. Kiraly was sent to Siberia. He and two dozen of his men managed to escape from the train carrying them there and walked over the Carpathian Mountains back to Hungary. Mr. Kiraly was made a general in 1950 and appointed leader of the military academy in Budapest.

In 1951, General Kiraly was arrested on charges of subversion, sedition and spying for the United States. (The charges are now widely believed to have been concocted by Hungary’s Stalinist leaders.) He was given a death sentence, later commuted to life at hard labor. In October 1956, General Kiraly was among the prisoners paroled by the Hungarian government in a futile effort to appease mounting popular unrest.

When the uprising started, General Kiraly was in a Budapest hospital. “I was skin and bones coming out of five years of imprisonment,” Agence France-Presse quoted him as saying in 2006. “I was far from being healed, so I had to slip out of the hospital because the doctors would not let me go.”

At the request of Imre Nagy, a liberal Communist who was Hungary’s prime minister from 1953 to 1955 — and who was returned to office at the start of the uprising — General Kiraly organized the loose confederation of students, workers and other insurgents into a well-oiled fighting force.

“In 24 hours, I created a professional military staff,” the general said in the Agence France-Presse interview.

But it was no match for the hundreds of Soviet tanks that rolled into Budapest on Nov. 4. Pursued by two tank divisions, General Kiraly and a small band of resistance fighters headed for Austria. As they approached the border, the general ordered his men to blow up a nearby ammunition dump. With the Soviet tanks enveloped in the resulting cloud of smoke, General Kiraly and his men slipped through the border fence.

General Kiraly made his way to the United States, where he remained for the next 33 years. In 1958, Mr. Nagy and other leaders of the uprising were executed by Hungary’s post-revolutionary government. Had General Kiraly returned, he would most likely have met the same fate.

There is a lot more, please read it all.

It is men like this that make you ask; "What have I really done with the life that I have been given?"

I used to be a regular at a small restaurant that was owned by a husband and wife team. He was an officer in the Hungarian Air Force and escaped after the fall. He told me almost all of the other officers in his unit were executed immediately after capture; he kept running, made it to Austria then the USA. He still proudly kept a picture of himself in uniform with him.

A proud people. As I said, I hope this century is better to the Hungarians than the last. 

At least they are trying.

The Waves Have Already Started

Throughout the undeveloped and the fail-to-launch world, there are teaming masses driven by war and economics to look for some part of the world where they can escape the dysfunction and violence from where they came.

They are taking advantage of modern transportation and porous borders to move at a scale and speed no one is prepared to deal with. Lacking the desire, ability, or ethos to stand where they are and change their home nations, they are instead hitting the trail, the rail, the open ocean, and even the aircraft to come to the only places on this planet that function and will take them in - the West and its global outposts, most notably, Western Europe and the primary Anglosphere (CANUKUS+AUS/NZD).

There are problems with this in the 21st Century, there are no more open spaces. There are no longer small diverse groups coming in manageable numbers to a nation where in a generation they can be absorbed in the vast underpopulated frontier, earn their own living by the fruits of their own labor, and assimilate in to the culture.

No, this is new. The migrants are coming in waves 100,000 strong, month by month to already crowded nations under economic stress and beset with welfare state largess.

These nations do not demand new arrivals assimilate, and in a large measure, the new arrivals don't want to. With modern communication and entertainment a satellite dish away, they don't have to break from the home language and culture they are bringing and keeping is the same culture of violence, sectarianism, corruption and dependence that caused the source country's dysfunction in the first place.

Their foreign and often hostile culture, if not checked to manageable numbers and smart policies, will overwhelm their target nations and inside half a century. Those nations as well will fail as their civil society fractures and loses its ability to function as designed for a nation and culture that no longer exists.

A few decades ago there was a SCIFI futurist novel, the title escapes me, where one of the pivotal points was a memorial on a beach in Australia where thousands of refugees died - more to the point, killed.

Forgot the reason, but it was an opening for to author to describe a new age of migration. Especially in Europe, and to a lesser effect and different context here, we are reaching that point outlined in the book. A point where a densely populated economically failed and violent world rushes, like drowning people all trying to get in the last remaining lifeboat, to the few places that work, and will force those working parts of the world to do what was in living memory unthinkable - kill to save their nations from being destroyed by charity.

Greece appealed to its European Union partners on Tuesday to come up with a comprehensive strategy to deal with a growing migrant crisis as new data showed 21,000 refugees landed on Greek shores last week alone.

That number is almost half Greece's overall refugee intake in 2014 and brings total arrivals this year to 160,000, even as it struggles with a debt crisis that has forced it to accept a third international bailout.
...
A spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR in Geneva said Greece needed to show "much more leadership" in dealing with the crisis.

But Greek officials said they needed better coordination within the European Union. "This problem cannot be solved by imposing stringent legal processes in Greece, and, certainly, not by overturning the boats," said government spokeswoman Olga Gerovassili.

Nor could it be addressed by building fences, she said.

This is madness. What does the UN propose that the already bankrupt Greece do? Why Greece? Why not Turkey? Why not Iran. Of course we know why - those are not Western nations.

The West, you see, it must be ... well ...

"The situation is already volatile and we have started seeing increased tensions with the local authorities and between different refugee groups," said Kirk Day, the aid agency's emergency field director on the island.
...
The Greek state eventually charted a passenger ship to house and process migrants in an attempt to ease conditions onshore, where many are living in tents, some in shelters made from cardboard boxes.

Gerovassili said more reception centers were required.

"We must have new reception facilities ... We cannot continue to see these tragic images of children, people living under such circumstances."

This will not end well. The migration wave will not slow down any time soon. Growing anarchy, extremism, economic stagnation, and demographics will keep the pressure building.

Western nations are at the point where they must enforce firm policies now, or they will be forced to implement the harshest remedies later - that is, of course, if there is a desire to keep those nations together as founded.

The time for easy solutions is past. The last generation or two threw that opportunity away. Doing nothing is not an option because, eventually, this migration will shift to invasion in the mind of a plurality of each nation's citizens. When that happens, if good political leaders do not act, the people will turn to whatever leader promises actions. That rarely is the better outcome.

No nation is required to commit suicide, and leaders who desire to fundamentally transform their nations should not expect for their population to allow that change to be done against the will of the people - if indeed the people ever decide their national culture is worth defending anymore.

Some nations are already going Honeybadger and are taking the steps they need to.

Earlier this month construction began on a 175 km (110 mile) razor wire border fence in Hungary to deter migrants, ...

History if far from over - and is far from teaching the copybook headings with a ruler to the knuckles.