SPITFIRE DOWN

I thought I'd start the Independence Day weekend posts with this unique story about an American soldier-of-fortune caught up in the odd politics of war - S.L.

An attempt to recover a Spitfire from a peat bog in Donegal, Ireland reveals the peculiar story of men - both Allied and German - who spent much of World War II in internment camps in Dublin.


From BBC News: The WWII camp where Allies and Germans mixed


NORTHERN IRELAND 1941: A routine Sunday afternoon sortie, one of Britain's Spitfire fighters runs into difficulties.

Returning to base after flying "top-cover" for maritime convoys off the coast of Donegal, the Rolls Royce Merlin engine overheats and fails.

The pilot yells into his radio "I'm going over the side", slides back the bubble canopy, releases his seat straps and launches himself into the air.

The Spitfire is one of the most vaunted examples of British engineering's history. The greatest ever single-seat, piston-engined fighter, it had played a vital role during the Battle of Britain the year before.

Its design was so advanced that it served on the front line from the first to the last day of the war. Bailing out was no easy task.

The air flow hit this particular pilot like a freight train and tore off his boots. Luckily he was able to deploy his parachute and landed in a peat bog. His aircraft smashed into the bog half a mile away.

It sounds like a typical wartime accident but it was anything but. It was the beginning of one of the strangest incidents of WWII.

133 Squadron RAF was one of the famous Eagle Squadrons - American volunteers serving with the RAF during World War II.


The pilot was 23-year-old Roland "Bud" Wolfe, an RAF officer from 133 "Eagle" Squadron, a unit composed entirely of Americans.

Bud was from Nebraska, one of a number of Americans who had volunteered to take up Britain's cause. Since the US was not yet at war with Germany when the men volunteered, the American government stripped Wolfe and others of their citizenship. These pilots were a mix of idealists and thrill seekers.

Nowadays we would call them "adrenalin junkies" - S.L.


When Wolfe was found by the authorities he realised his, already unusual, situation was much more complicated than he had guessed. He had crashed over the border.

South of the border from (British) Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland was neutral; it had been decided that all servicemen of any belligerent nation that ended up on Irish soil through navigational error, shipwreck or other accident would be interned for the duration of the war.

Wolfe found himself heading not back to his airbase, RAF Eglinton, now City of Derry Airport, in Northern Ireland just 13 miles away, but to Curragh Camp, County Kildare, 175 miles to the south.

Bud Wolfe was very keen to get back into action





Here, a huddle of corrugated iron huts housed 40 other RAF pilots and crewmen who had accidentally come down in neutral territory. They were effectively prisoners of war.

It was an odd existence. The guards had blank rounds in their rifles, visitors were permitted (one officer shipped his wife over), and the internees were allowed to come and go. Fishing excursions, fox hunting, golf and trips to the pub in the town of Naas helped pass the time.

But what was really odd was the proximity of the Germans.

It was not just the British and their allies who got lost above and around Ireland. German sailors from destroyed U-boats and Luftwaffe aircrew also found themselves interned. The juxtaposition of the two sides made for surreal drama.

CURRAGH INTERNMENT CAMP:

• 140 Germans, mainly Luftwaffe and U-boat crew
• 100 Allied servicemen from Poland, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and sole American Bud Wolfe
• There were also 400 IRA internees in the camp

Sport was a notable feature. In one football match the Germans beat the British 8-3. There were also boxing contests.

It appears that the rivalry on the pitch followed the teams into the pub afterwards as well. They would drink at different bars, and the British once complained vigorously when the Luftwaffe internees turned up to a dance they had organised.

Anything further from front-line service is hard to imagine.

It may seem to us like a welcome chance to sit out the war with honour intact, plenty of distractions and no danger, but for Wolfe it was an unacceptable interruption to his flying activities.

On 13 December 1941 he walked straight out of camp and after a meal in a hotel, which he did not pay for, he headed into nearby Dublin and caught the train the next day to Belfast. Within hours he was back at RAF Eglinton where he had taken off two weeks earlier in his defective Spitfire.

He could not have expected what was to happen next. The British government decided that, in this dark hour, it would be unwise to upset a neutral nation.

The decision was made to send Wolfe back to The Curragh and internment. Back in the camp, Wolfe made the best of it, joining the fox-hunting with relish.

He did try to escape again but this time he was caught. Finally in 1943, with the US in the war, and the tide slowly turning, The Curragh was closed and the internees returned. Wolfe joined the US Army Air Force and served once again on the front line.

The famous British Supermarine Spitfire single-seat fighter plane used by RAF and many Allied countries during WWII; its thin, elliptical wing allowed a higher top speed than similar fighters.


So great was his love of flying that he also served in Korea and even Vietnam. He eventually died in 1994.

Bud Wolfe's epic story did not end with his death; thanks to the highly unusual nature of the Irish peat bog where his Spitfire crashed, a team of archaeologists is attempting to dig up his aircraft.

Dan Snow is following the attempt to recover Bud Wolfe's Spitfire in County Donegal and will be posting updates via the Twitter account @DigWW2.

Today's Bird HERE


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PROFESSIONALS WANTED

Although not new by any means, the privatization of the military was foreseen as early as 1993 by futurists Alvin and Heide Toffler in their book WAR & ANTI-WAR:




The idea is nothing new - no army in history has ever marched one step without private enterprise providing everything from boots and uniforms to meals, weaponry, tires, spare parts and maintenance - in an earlier era horseshoes - and of course the horses themselves and the feed they ate.



Berlin, 1961, height of the Cold War.


The Toffler's book was timely because it coincided with the immediate end of the post-Cold War Era; hallmarked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union two years later. The First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein - a long-time client of the Soviet Union - was viewed by many historians as an epilogue of the Cold War.



Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989.


At that point in history it was immediately evident that there was no longer a requirement for a huge standing military; the Communist Block had imploded and the commonly-held belief was that a kind of World Peace would ensue.


The need for a standing military along the lines of World War II armies was over; the United States had long since dispensed with the draft and had gone with a conscription-free, all-volunteer professional army. To streamline operations, to enhance the flexibility this new army requires, many functions have been contracted out. While the Army still has cooks and mechanics, most overseas messhalls are staffed by locally hired civilians, and military motor pools include qualified technicians representing commercial suppliers such as Land Rover.

I joined the US Army in 1983. Infantry, Airborne, 11 Charlie. Our squad leaders and platoon sergeants were professionals, and they told us horror stories of serving amongst draftees of the Vietnam era; drugs, rampant crime within the ranks, disciplinary problems in garrison AND in combat.




We listened and learned; whatever the Army threw at us, we were willing to deal with, because we wanted to be there. What we DIDN'T want; was to be with people who didn't want to be there. We were professionals.




Everywhere I served overseas, our operations were enhanced by civilian contractors. They ran the mess halls, fixed our radios, issued boots and uniforms, and in very extraordinary circumstances served in a paramilitary role, providing us with security details, training resources and even sources of intelligence. Of these activities there is nothing unethical, illegal, unorthodox or new in any way.


It is my professional opinion that it is better - and CHEAPER - to hire civilian contractors to perform service functions - to include personal security details - than to add these "garrison" duties to troops who should be out on patrol, taking the fight to the enemy.



Byron Cousin, an instructor of battlefield forensics, briefs students of his class. Cousin spent 18 years with the 82d Airborne Division, where he retired in 2006 as a first sergeant. On this day, his students were 82d Paratroopers.

Consider; a uniformed soldier has to be recruited, uniformed, armed & equipped, fed, paid, kept healthy, trained, paid, housed, educated (and his FAMILY has to be housed, fed, medically taken care of & educated) and then paid retirement for X # of years. A contractor just has to be paid, point blank & simple.

Since I retired from active duty I have provided goods and consulting services to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and to various state and local law enforcement agencies. At this time I am a professional security consultant. There is nothing unethical, irregular, or illegal in any of these activities. I provide a service, and a perspective, that an active duty soldier simply could not perform. I am paid well for what I do, and this is exactly what I am worth - less than, if anything.

To anyone out there who suggests the United States should revert to involuntary conscription, populate the Army with unwilling draftees who don't want to be there, and tie up the military performing chores outside of the military role or mission, I ask: what are the details of your honorable military service?

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