bruce's blog

The April 1942 air attack on Japan, launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet and led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, was the most daring operation yet undertaken by the United States in the young Pacific War. Though conceived as a diversion that would also boost American and allied morale, the raid generated strategic benefits that far outweighed its limited goals.

The Battle of Pork Chop Hill comprises a pair of related Korean War infantry battles during the spring and summer of 1953. These were fought while the U.S. and the Communist Chinese and Koreans negotiated an armistice. In the U.S., they were controversial because of the many soldiers killed for terrain of no strategic or tactical value.

The Bataan Death March was the forcible transfer, by the Imperial Japanese Army, of 76,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war after the three-month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of prisoners.  The 128 km (80 mi) march was characterized by wide-ranging physical abuse and murder, and resulted in very high fatalities inflicted upon prisoners and civilians alike by the Japanese Army, and was later judged by an Allied military commission to be a Japanese war crime. 

We at Special Operations Group are pleased to announce the new Marine Gunnery Sgt. Carlos N. Hathcock II Patch.

No Marine sniper was more effective than Hathcock at killing North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. The number 93 reflects his confirmed kills, but his actual total is believed to be well over 100. As a testament to his effectiveness, North Vietnam once put a bounty of $30,000 on his head.

The Iraq War, or the War in Iraq (also referred to as the Occupation of Iraq, the Second Gulf War, or Operation Iraqi Freedom by the United States military), was a conflict that occurred in Iraq from March 20, 2003 to December 18, 2011, though sectarian violence continues since and caused hundreds of fatalities.  Prior to the war, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom claimed that Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed a threat to their security and that of their coalition/regional allies.  

UN partisan operations in Korea began more by chance than from planning. During the retreat in Nov-Dec 1950, thousands of anti-Communist North Korean citizens were left behind to fend for themselves. Facing almost certain death at the hands of the communist invaders, these people fought their way to North Korea's west coast and sailed to offshore islands where they prepared to fight a last ditch battle. The US 8th army eventually learned that friendly North Koreans still held the offshore islands. In January, the Guerilla Section, Eighth Army G-3 Miscellaneous, came into being.

Operation Rolling Thunder was the title of a gradual and sustained US 2nd Air Division (later Seventh Air Force), US Navy, and Republic of Vietnam Air Force (VNAF) aerial bombardment campaign conducted against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) from 2 March 1965 until 1 November 1968, during the Vietnam War.

On February 19, 1945, as part of their island-hopping strategy to defeat Japan, the United States invaded Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima was originally not a target, but the relatively quick fall of the Philippines left the Americans with a longer-than-expected lull prior to the planned invasion of Okinawa. Iwo Jima is located half-way between Japan and the Mariana Islands, where American long-range bombers were based, and was used by the Japanese as an early warning station, radioing warnings of incoming American bombers to the Japanese homeland.

Operation Homecoming was a series of diplomatic negotiations that in January 1973 made possible the return of 591 American prisoners of war held by North Vietnam.  On Feb. 12, 1973, three C-141 transports flew to Hanoi, North Vietnam, and one C-9A aircraft was sent to Saigon, South Vietnam to pick up released prisoners of war.  The first flight of 40 U.S. prisoners of war left Hanoi in a C-141A, later known as the "Hanoi Taxi" and now in a museum.

After the mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks and the world's most wanted man, had been killed in a US operation in north-western Pakistan. Special Operations Group www.norbay.com wanted to commemorate this event.  So we made a patch.  We copyrighted the patch and we are the only authorized dealer.