Gunner Quinn
Editor’s Introductory Note: This young man is prayerfully seeking a wife. He is offering an after-marriage gift of up to $50,000 to whoever introduces him to his bride with $18,000 after their marriage and another $16,000 to the individual who provided the introduction after the first two births of healthy children born to him and his wife, for a total potential gift of $50,000. For further details, see this link to his article posted on February 24th, 2025: My Quest For a Wife.
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(Continued from Part 2.)
There was another Golden Age that ended in a spectacular fashion almost bringing down the country for many years along with the economy. In this Golden Age of the Roaring Twenties, many believed that prosperity would be everlasting and ever-expanding: The President of the Pierce Arrow Motor Car Company Myron E. Forbes has been reputed to have said on January 12, 1928 that “…there will be no interruption of our permanent prosperity.” In less than two years, the “Great Depression” began in October 1929 and in less than a decade Pierce Arrow would be out of business. The Golden Age of the 1920s was followed by the “Dirty Thirties” of the Depression years which was a grimy age and only “ending” with the entrance of the United States into the Second World War.
I am trained in understanding situations. I understand my capabilities and do not bite off more than I can chew. I understand the capabilities of everyone who will be at our retreat. We are realistic people. In the event that this retreat and retreats around the country are ever activated in an emergency where the law and order has collapsed, supply lines are gone and not coming back from an underdetermined time which could realistically be decades. This is not the Second World War where supplies will flow in. The “issue was never in doubt” once the United States entered and mobilized and the Axis forces had very little possibility of being able to realistically strike the industrial capacity within the continental United States interrupting our factory output as the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) (later known as the USAF becoming an independent service branch after the war) did to Axis factories.
Factories in the United States which would ordinarily produce civilian household items such as sewing machines could also produce handguns. The Singer Sewing Machine company had the capability of producing .45 caliber pistols, but these were such high quality that the company’s mechanical abilities, while not being able to produce a hundred pistols a day as was originally contracted, eventually were used to build items where the company’s commitment to quality control and exceptional mechanical tolerances could produce fine instruments (If you have a true Singer .45, it is worth a lot.)
The war effort was total: I have also interviewed many people who lived during the war years. It was just how much blood we were willing to trade to get them to capitulate. The Axis powers were never going to win in the scenario they played. They never had a chance in the smallest ways such as the complexity of their equipment requiring extra manufacturing steps including less field reliability to the insanity of a multi-front war. It was physically impossible to defeat the wall of steel the Allies could throw at the Axis. Consider the story of the Sherman Tank of which roughly 50,000 were produced during the war and its biggest foe, the Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B known as the Royal Tiger or the Tiger II. I knew a Sherman tanker who defeated a Tiger II on the battlefield. A little over 500 of those Tigers were produced. General Heinz Guderian was a genius and pioneer in mobile armor warfare tactics, but even the most brilliant tactician cannot defeat with someone who can throw a 100-to-1 against you that is slightly inferior in some regards such as firepower and superior in terms of mobility and reliability.
Stalin is reputed to have said, “Quantity has a quality all of its own.” Given the number of T-34 tanks produced (over 57,000) and the 6 million PPSH-41 submachineguns versus a little over a million MP-40s gives credence that he believed it even if he did not say it. Stalin’s army also had “barrier troops” with NKVD commissars enforcing “no retreat” orders. You can have the most accurate rifle with the latest toys on it, but it is doubtful that you can win against a few people with Mosin Nagants that they purchased years ago for less than $100 who know how to use them as they will likely outflank you. Years ago, you could get a crate of six Mosin Nagant rifles for the price of one “pre-ban” rifle. Vasily Zaitsev was one of the most acclaimed snipers in the Second World War and did it with a Mosin Nagant. A “poor workman blames his tools,” but a true craftsman can make something great with the most modest of tools.
A Lesson from a Greatest Generation Survivalist
One of my lineal relatives was at the Battle of the Bulge including in the invasion of Normandy. To refresh your memory, the Battle of the Bulge was the last major offensive of the Axis powers on the Western Front in the Second World War. Everything after was nothing more than a delaying action until their unconditional surrender in April of 1945 to General Eisenhower (a Kansas farm boy and ancestral German spelled Eisenhauer whose ancestors immigrated in the 1740s).
An interesting lesson was that the Germans had a multi-part plan including heavy doses of deception that worked against many soldiers who blindly followed road signs, not using alternative means to verify information (GPS navigation was not available, but maps and compasses were available). The Germans turned signs around leading units into traps, dressed English-speaking soldiers in American MP uniforms to give wrong directions, and did anything including breaking the rules of civilized war in order to achieve their objective. The Malmedy massacre on December 17, 1944 is one example of how quickly things can go from bad to worse. Other POWs were murdered in this massacre, but I will briefly tell you of one such unit the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion where the majority of men were killed in a field near Malmedy, Belgium within two hours of surrendering. The 285th was quickly neutralized when their lead vehicle and last vehicle were knocked out by the SS and then they surrendered.
My lineal relative was in one of the frontline units who were under siege very closeby to Malmedy and had many times to rebuff the Germans offer of “honorable” surrender. The most famous reply to an offer of honorable surrender was when General McAuliffe at Bastogne replied with a message to the German high commander after receiving the verbose demand for an honorable surrender delivered the one-word reply of “Nuts” My lineal relative starting using captured small arms from German officers who no longer needed them. (An aside: After filing the proper paperwork for war trophies, he brought these back with him upon his return). I grew up hearing about these stories many times: it has shaped my character and prepper perspective.
Since this will be recorded for posterity and eventually disseminated through thousands of USB drives so these words will be carried forth, it should be noted that the Malmedy massacre was unofficially “answered” the following month at Chenogne, Belgium where roughly 80 surrendered Germans were massacred. Scholarship on the Second World War continues and it is often a very complex story in which now alternative narratives are becoming known. I have had the privilege of interviewing many members on both sides of this conflict, military and civilian. Most are now gone as this is being written in 2025 with their numbers reducing daily, so if you can find a combatant or a witness to history soon take some time and listen to their stories. My scholarship of this period extends even to a meeting with a Japanese fighter pilot who greatly informed my perspective on the culture of honor in this period. This meeting occurred providentially in one of my travels rather than anything intentional on my part.
There are a few lessons to unlock for preppers. You are not likely not part of a military unit that requires a command structure to function as a cohesive fighting force. Even if you “never surrender” you usually do not know if you are the main line of attack or the feint which will be sacrificed for the objective as it tends to be bad for morale going in knowing that you are being sacrificed. The one exception is a successful forlorn hope (usually these are “suicide missions,” but are undertaken anyway for honor, treasure, pardon, or promotion) one of which was when Publius Horatius Cocles (known to history as Horatius at the Bridge) who saved Rome from being sacked. Even a honorable surrender does not always work out as evidenced by many members of the 285th who were killed within two hours of surrender.
Another famous unit surrender was the Marines at Wake Island. The Marines won the battle of Wake Island and their commander surrendered subjecting them to the whims of the Japanese. They were tied up execution style for hours and were saved by the “gift” of the emperor in sparing their lives as surrender was not within Japanese military doctrine. As Imperial Japan signed, but did not ratify (and rarely followed) the Geneva Conventions, the level of atrocities on downed aircrews and surrendered troops is unfathomable to most Westerners. Those Marines could have easily become sword practice for Japanese (as what occurred often in the Bataan Death March among surrendered American soldiers) as the Japanese were incensed about being beaten almost 20 to 1 in the Battle of Wake Island.
After the failure of the campaign in France, Winston Churchill gave a rallying speech to Parliament: “We shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home…We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end…we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Churchill supposedly made a vow of “never surrender” also personally to his bodyguard Walter Thompson who carried his Colt 1911 .45 pistol as Churchill’s capture would have been the ultimate PR victory for Goebbels as he surely would have been executed. The largest surrender of English troops in history was at Singapore when they surrendered to a numerically inferior, out-gunned force running out of ammunition commanded by Japanese General Yamashita. They initially were ordered by Churchill to “fight to the last man,” but that was watered down to they could “cease resistance” given certain conditions.
There is something to be said about any people who will willingly die in a Banzai attack and believe surrender to be dishonorable. One of them is often worth ten of any force that considers surrender an option. When a man thinks defeat is an acceptable option, surrender is often his choice when he encounters difficulty. Quitters quit. It can be argued that the average Imperial Japanese infantryman was the pinnacle of absolute bravery among infantrymen in the Second World War as he required little, expected less, and his only concern was honor. Honorable mentions would be American citizen soldiers who volunteered for dangerous duties including jump school such as the Airborne units, worked behind the lines such as members of the OSS, and ball turret gunners among many others. Even Japanese civilian flag bearers on firefighting crews at this time would burn alive at the spot planted by them where the fire was not allowed to progress to avoid the dishonor caused by allowing the fire to spread.
Years and sometimes decades after the war ended in 1945, there were still infantryman in the jungles of the Philippines unbelieving that the Emperor would quit believing their commander’s last order to continue the fight and with the last official Japanese-born officer who continued “resistance” until being relieved in person by his direct superior in 1974. So many young people have been taught by left-leaning academics who have never spent any time in understanding the mind of an Imperial Japanese soldier or civilian that they believe that a United States invasion of the Japanese homeland would have been a cakewalk and that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “unnecessary” and “political” in nature instead of trying to achieve a military objective. Some people have said over a million Americans would have died in the invasion of the “home islands” and it could easily have been much higher had the Japanese given their usual full effort. If the Emperor had ordered it, most likely very few Japanese men or women would have survived the war as they would have used every available weapon including bamboo spears if could not find a way to “borrow” small arms from dead Americans.
There were no organized Imperial Japanese military surrenders of any units of significant size during the majority of the war (with the battle of Okinawa being a very minor exception as some units lost military effectiveness after their commanders died) and even many civilians on islands chose to jump off of cliffs to avoid dishonor. 99% of Japanese soldiers died on Iwo Jima in the main battle phase. The fight for the main islands would have been the greatest bloodletting in history. From a geographical determinist perspective, Japan was unable to expand territorially in the Second World War: now, Japan it is slowly demographically dying unable to replace its population, so instead of dying in war, it dies of old age as the Japanese birth rate is currently well under replacement rate.
As a general rule, every moment of a soldier’s life must be dedicated to defeat of the enemy. Anything less is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The Geneva Conventions even say that the Prisoner of War has a “duty to escape.” The concepts of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) have been taught since the Second World War. The first rule is always: do not get captured. Do not surrender. Some people will say that life will be preserved by surrendering, but sometimes it is a temporary reprieve with a coup de grace from a 9mm bullet from a MP-40 or Luger to those who were not killed by a MG-34 or MG-42 surrendering to desperate men instead of a warm plate of hasenpfeffer.
You must assume that you are dead until peace is declared. With that assumption and assurance, you can give yourself totally to the cause. Sometimes the mere threat of force is enough to cause the enemy to retreat as the elderly Gaius Popillius Laenas in 168 BC persuaded the invading Syrians to retreat, but most of the time it is not. A soldier’s body not only bears arms, but in his true state he is the weapon, the tip of the spear which must go forward into battle which will sometimes be broken. A soldier defending his homeland is often the most desperate and dedicated as his back is against the wall. You may someday be the “stay behind” providing cover of a strategic retreat protecting and evacuating the women and children. The purpose of this delaying action is to trade blood for time and every minute that you buy will mean that your loved ones will be able to escape almost five hundred more feet from danger given that the average woman runs about a mile in 11 minutes (when someone’s life is in danger, they tend to pick up the pace for short sprints).
You probably are saying that is fascinating history, but how is it applicable the average prepper? If you are a prepared individual and in some distant future when there is no more law and order with no one to call for help, you need to figure out what your red lines are and what are you willing to do. There is no dishonor in a strategic retreat. You are unlikely to receive any reinforcements and any casualties sustained will likely be your loved ones. Last stands are very heroic, but you are not at the Alamo in 1836 with Col. Davy Crockett, Col. Jim Bowie, and LTC William Barret Travis trying to hold the position until reinforcements arrived. They never did, but it did buy Texas critical time.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 4.)
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