Jeff Mixon

Community Organizer Submariner Emeritus Personal Protection Specialist.
My Tweets do not represent my employers past, future or present. RT ≠ Endorsement

[🇺🇸𝗢𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿⚓️ @USN_Submariner]

Dear @SECNAV ,
thank you for Barb, Tang, Wahoo, & Silversides 🇺🇸
WWII American submariners endured a casualty rate of roughly 22%, suffering the US Armed Forces highest percentage of losses. Despite comprising less than 2% of the US Navy, American submariners were responsible for destroying 55% of all Japanese tonnage.
"We shall never forget that it was our submarines that held the lines against the enemy while our fleets replaced losses and repaired wounds." -ADM Nimitz

Respectfully, I think they deserve more fish names.

[Jeff Mixon @BottomGun673]

@RealCynicalFox Agreed!

[Jeff Mixon @BottomGun673]

@USN_Submariner What is it about airplanes and this thirst for power? Back during the planning stages of the airborne, leadership in the Army Air Corps wanted exclusive control over any parachute troops. Here's the punchline, they even referred to them as "Air Marines."

[🇺🇸SassySouthernPatriot🇺🇸 @SassySouthern2U]

Roy Cooper won’t debate Michael Whatley.

He sends cease-and-desist letters when reporters ask if he’s fit to finish a six-year term.

And now WXII says they’ve been waiting over seven weeks for a one-on-one interview… and the campaign still won’t make him available.

Bless his heart.

Nothing says “I have nothing to hide” like dodging debates, ghosting local media, and lawyering up over basic questions.

Roy is hiding something!

#Ncpol

https://t.co/MAng57FcEd

[🇺🇸𝗢𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿⚓️ @USN_Submariner]

👻 The Galloping Ghost of the China Coast
🏴‍☠️ in 1945 CDR Eugene Lucky Fluckey took USS Barb (SS-220) through shallow, uncharted, mined, and rock-obstructed waters into Namkwan Harbor. Barb let loose 10 torpedoes, 8 landing hits that sank 3 Japanese ships & seriously damaged 3 others.
She then raced on the surface back out through those same waters at 21 knots, narrowly escaping & earning the nickname "The Galloping Ghost of the China Coast".
For this, Barb received the Presidential Unit Citation & CDR Fluckey received the Medal of Honor.
🖼️ by Ted Wilbur, USN (Ret)

[Jeff Mixon @BottomGun673]

@USN_Submariner

[🇺🇸SassySouthernPatriot🇺🇸 @SassySouthern2U]

Roy!!!!

What are you hiding?

Sending cease and desist letters when asked about your health..

Not debating Whatley….

I have lots of questions!

It’s the hands for me! 👀

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Yezhov – The Butcher.

His old boss once said he had never met a more ideal worker: "Give him a task and you don't need to check on him – he'll get it done. He has only one shortcoming: he doesn't know when to stop."

Nikolai Yezhov was a small man, barely five feet tall, a former factory worker with little schooling who rose through the Party as a diligent, obedient bureaucrat. He was exactly the man the system needed.

A small and vicious man – in power, he drank heavily and liked to go down to the prisons to watch interrogations – sometimes joining the beatings himself. When his wife had an affair with the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, Yezhov had their hotel room bugged and listened to the recordings. He watched his own bedroom just as he watched over the whole country.

His philosophy fit in one sentence: better that ten innocent people suffer than one spy escape. English law had said the opposite for centuries: better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent suffer. That one reversal is the whole difference between a civilization and a terror.

In 1936, Stalin put him at the head of the NKVD. The old boss who had praised him was shot in the terror that followed.

The West calls it the Great Purge. Russians remember it as the Yezhovshchina – "the Yezhov times." But it was not a frenzy. It was a plan.

An order of July 1937 gave every region a quota: so many to be shot – the "first category" – and so many to be sent to the camps – the "second category." Local chiefs competed to fulfill the plan and asked Moscow to raise their limits. Moscow usually agreed.

Torture was authorized from the top. Then came the national operations – Germans, Latvians, Finns, and above all Poles. Order 00485, signed by Yezhov, hunted an organization that did not exist. The verdicts came in albums, a few lines per person. In Moscow, two signatures sealed them – Yezhov's and the prosecutor Vyshinsky's – hundreds of death sentences at a sitting.

The wives of the condemned went to the camps. Their children went to orphanages.

Propaganda posters showed him crushing a many-headed snake in a spiked glove. His name means "hedgehog," and "hedgehog gloves" is the Russian idiom for an iron grip.

In two years, around seven hundred thousand people were shot.

Then the machine needed a culprit. In 1938, Beria arrived as his deputy, and by November Yezhov was out. In April 1939 he was arrested, tortured with the methods he had perfected, and made to confess to being a spy. At his secret trial, he asked that Stalin be told he would die with his name on his lips. He was shot in February 1940.

Then he was erased – from the photographs, from the records, from the story. The terror kept his name, Yezhovshchina, so that it would not carry the Master's.

His adopted daughter was sent to an orphanage, like the children of his victims.

The machine is never satisfied. It always needs the next name on the list – and, when the time comes, the name of the man who made the lists.

Next: Beria.

[Matt Mercer @mattmercer]

If it's October, you can count on @RoyCooperNC to get his State Fair Shirt out of the closet and pretend to care about people for a few hours.

#NCPOL #NCSEN

[Jeff Mixon @BottomGun673]

@PeteKaliner When's it going to release his latest physical?

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

TO THE GREAT PEOPLE OF NORTH CAROLINA, GET OUT AND VOTE FOR:

– Michael Whatley for U.S. Senate
– Laurie Buckhout for U.S. Congress (NC-01)
– Greg Murphy for U.S. Congress (NC-03)
– Virginia Foxx for U.S. Congress (NC-05)
– Addison McDowell for U.S. Congress (NC-06)
– David Rouzer for U.S. Congress (NC-07)
– Mark Harris for U.S. Congress (NC-08)
– Richard Hudson for U.S. Congress (NC-09)
– Pat Harrigan for U.S. Congress (NC-10)
– Jennifer Balkcom for U.S. Congress (NC-11)
– Brad Knott for U.S. Congress (NC-13)
– Tim Moore for U.S. Congress (NC-14)

These Great Patriots have my Complete and Total Endorsement — They will never let you down! President DONALD J. TRUMP
https://t.co/L6UUx3adQr

[Jeff Mixon @BottomGun673]

Communism at its finest.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In December 1958 the Polish embassy in Beijing refused to let the sparrow killers onto its grounds, so the Chinese surrounded it with drummers and kept the drums going for two days until every bird sheltering in the garden had dropped dead from the air, and the diplomats cleared them up with shovels.

That is how thorough it was. The campaign had been running since the spring. Every village, school and factory was turned out with gongs, pans and firecrackers to keep the sparrows flying until their hearts gave out. Nests were torn from eaves, eggs smashed, chicks killed, and children went through the fields with slingshots and were paid by the bird. The dead came in by the basket, strung on wires, piled on carts, and the totals went up the chain as a harvest. Something close to two billion sparrows in two years. The embassy garden was the last place in the capital with birdsong in it, and the drums got that too.

A zoologist called Zhu Xi had told them before it started that a king had tried this and lost. Frederick the Great of Prussia had put a bounty on sparrows in the 1740s to save his grain and his cherries, and the sparrows went, and the caterpillars they had been eating stripped his orchards to the stalk, and the king cancelled the bounty and paid to have sparrows brought back from neighbouring states and let loose. The whole episode was in the library. The ministry had a figure for what a sparrow ate and no figure for what it did, and a man with the second figure was told to sit down.

The locusts arrived on schedule. Then the grain borers. A sparrow takes a few grains from a field in autumn and feeds its chicks nothing but insects all spring, and with the sparrows gone the insects had the rice and the wheat to themselves. The counties with the most sparrows to lose saw their grain fall the furthest, and the rice and wheat that had been holding the country up went down together.

That was 1959, and the state took its grain quota anyway, on the harvest that had been reported. What was left in the villages was not enough, and the famine that followed over the next three years is the largest in human history: tens of millions dead, the estimates running from fifteen million to forty-five, whole counties in Anhui and Sichuan where the living could not bury the dead. The sparrows were one cause among several and the economists who have gone back to the county records put the bird's share at something over two million people, with another four hundred thousand never born. Two million, from a campaign against a thing that weighs an ounce.

By 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng, who had been cutting open dead sparrows and counting the insects in their stomachs, got the bird struck off the list and bed bugs put in its place. There were almost no sparrows left in China to pardon. So the government did what Prussia had done two centuries before: it bought a quarter of a million sparrows from the Soviet Union and shipped them east in crates, to be released into a country that had drummed every one of their relatives out of the sky.

The animal that does the invisible job is always the one on the ledger as a cost. Take the sheep off a chalk down and the orchids are under scrub in twenty years. Fence the cattle off a Welsh hill and the bracken takes it. Empty a savannah of its herds and the grass goes to fire. All of it written down, all of it in the library, all of it available to the next committee with a figure for what a cow eats.

Beijing paid Moscow for the birds in hard currency. The men who had said so in 1958 were still not allowed to say so in 1960.

[🇺🇸𝗢𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿⚓️ @USN_Submariner]

OTD in 1958: Admiral Rickover thrilled that Fleet Admiral Earl Mountbatten, First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty, is trying out his prototype nuclear reactor for Triton (SSRN-586), the world's largest submarine at that time.

[Jeff Mixon @BottomGun673]

Save the Nagua!

[🇺🇸𝗢𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿⚓️ @USN_Submariner]

Ranking up there with nuclear propulsion and satellite navigation, the discovery that the skin of the elusive Nauga was so perfectly suited for life at sea continues to impact every aspect of US naval operations.

[Jeff Mixon @BottomGun673]

@Shaftan I busted out laughing when I saw this.

[Jeff Mixon @BottomGun673]

@SGTWipper1Each I would say yes. Senator Phil Gramm used to talk about either pulling the wagon or riding in it as a metaphor for citizenship. And honestly, we've got too many people riding in the wagon these days.

[Harry Cole @MrHarryCole]

Devastating @WSJ piece

The welfare state is crushing Britain

Some seven million people—more than 10% of the population—now claim at least one or more sickness or disability benefits.

https://t.co/0KmWAp6G9T

[Jeff Mixon @BottomGun673]

@USN_Submariner Great work you've done here. I have never seen the battle flag until now. Imagine how much more shipping he could have put on the seafloor in the last two years.

[🇺🇸𝗢𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿⚓️ @USN_Submariner]

Submarine Sunday - The Loss of Wahoo & the Famous Battle Flag
OTD in 1943: USS Wahoo (SS-238), with LCDR Dudley “Mush” Morton in command, was fatally struck while exiting La Pérouse Strait & was lost with all hands. At that point in the war, Wahoo had sunk more ships than any other US Navy submarine.
During her first 2 war patrols, Wahoo sank 3 vessels under LCDR Marvin G. Kennedy. He was criticized as being overly cautious & he was removed for a lack of aggression. That cleared the way for his XO, Mush Morton, to take command & turn Wahoo into a legend.
After Morton took command of the Gato-class submarine just prior to her 3rd war patrol, he gave the following speech: "Wahoo is expendable. We will take every reasonable precaution, but our mission is to sink enemy shipping. If anyone doesn't want to go along under these conditions, just see the yeoman. Nothing will ever be said about your remaining in Brisbane." Every single crew member went on that patrol. Morton launched a daring day-time penetration of Wewak harbor on that patrol, sinking a Japanese transport & an entire 4-ship convoy, famously returning to base with a broom.
During Wahoo's famous 1943 4th war patrol, Mush Morton took her into the shallow waters of the northern Yellow Sea where they devastated Japanese shipping. This was one of the most aggressive & successful patrols of the early war (they counted 8-vessels sunk but later confirmed at 9) & Wahoo again returned flying a broom.
For her 5th war patrol between April & May 1943, Wahoo patrolled the frigid Kuril Islands under extremely poor weather conditions, but was able to sink 3 enemy ships, including a heavily armed seaplane tender. After completing this patrol, Wahoo returned to Mare Island for an overhaul where Morton personally designed & sewed the famous Indian head battle flag. He also made a stencil for painting the 19-feather design onto shirts.
During Wahoo's August 1943 6th war patrol, Morton breached the heavily-defended Sea of Japan, but the effort was ruined by defective Mark 14 torpedoes. After the boat returned empty-handed, Morton's absolute fury over the failed attacks pushed Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood to bypass the Bureau of Ordnance & conduct his own live-fire tests which led to the redesign that fixed the weapons for the fleet.
For the fateful 7th war patrol during the Fall of 1943, Wahoo returned to the Sea of Japan & successfully sank 4 merchant ships before her loss on October 11, 1943 in the La Pérouse Straight where she remains on eternal patrol. The final 4 feathers were never added to Morton's battle flag design.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The Royal Navy switched its sailors from cotton to polyester two years before the Falklands, and the sea put the two fabrics to the test on the afternoon of 4 May 1982.

HMS Sheffield was hit by an Exocet 70 miles off the islands. The warhead did not go off. It did not need to: the rocket fuel did, and the ship filled with fire and black smoke in seconds. Twenty men died. Many more came out of her with burns, and the burns had a feature the surgeons at Ajax Bay and the Uganda had not been trained for.

The shirts had melted. The new working rig was polyester, lighter and cheaper and quicker to dry than the old cotton, and in a flash fire it did what polyester does at 250 degrees, which is turn to liquid and bond to whatever it is touching. Men were brought off with their uniform fused into their skin, and the first job in the burns tent was peeling plastic out of flesh. Nylon socks did the same thing to feet. Anti-flash hoods and gloves, the white cotton gear every sailor still wears at action stations, had saved the faces and hands they covered and left a line where the plastic began.

The lesson was learned at the Sir Galahad too, at Bluff Cove a month later, where the Welsh Guards were caught below decks and the burns ward at Ajax Bay found the same thing.

Afterwards the Navy went back to natural fibres. Cotton action working dress, cotton socks, the wool jumper that had never left. The US Navy took the same lesson from the Falklands and again from the USS Stark in 1987 and banned polyester and Corfam shoes aboard ship. Then, in 2012, it issued a new blue camouflage working uniform, tested it, and had to announce to its own sailors that it would burn robustly and melt into a sticky molten material. The uniform was nylon and cotton. It had been in service for four years.

Every navy that has ever had a fire has arrived at the same answer and then forgotten it as soon as the accountants came back.

Natural fibre does not melt. A sheep's wool will not catch at a temperature a ship fire reaches, and when it chars it stops. Cotton burns, but it burns off, it does not become part of you.

The shirt that went into a man's skin on the Sheffield is the same fabric as the school polo shirt, the fleece, the gym top, the sofa cover and the sheet on the bed.

The Navy had to be shown it once.

You are wearing it now.