Volckmann's Guerillas(and others)

[Mil-tech Bard]

I have an interesting story WRT Volckmann.

It turns out that the Marines ruined any real institutional US Army support of their Philippines campaign narrative histories about the superiority of USMC Close air Support -- particularly during the merging of the Departments of War & Navy formation of the Department of Defense -- when Marine historians went out of their way to mortally offend many of MacArthur's command as well as the Filipino people.

Gen Russel Volckmann was the leader of the largest and most effective Filipino resistance movement on Luzon. And his people used USMC close
air support forward observers more than any other.

You would have expected Volckmann to be a fierce partisan for USMC style CAS after WW2.

I ran into a 1950's RAND study of air support of Guerilla movements with Gen Russel Volckmann as a round table participant. You would have expected him to lay out what the Marines did for him.

_Not_ _a_ _Single_ _Word_.

See:

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pu ... RM3655.pdf

The USMC P.R. at the time (1945) and official histories published in the 1960's made fun of a 5th Air Force support air party (SAP) in a DUKW following the 1st Cavalry Division Feb 1945 dash to Manila. At one point they referred to a Filipino attached to the units as a _House Boy._

It turns out that Filipino in question was a liaison from Volckmann's United States Forces in the Philippines, North Luzon (USFIP, N.L.) movement.

There are a lot of inter-service political reasons that USMC Force Recon didn't get integrated into SOCOM until the late 1990's Early 2000's.

Marine institutional bad blood with Volckmann was a big reason regards how it got started.