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Hunter VS Eric. You Decide

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By Eric Trump:

I am keenly aware of how fortunate I was to be born the son of one of the wealthiest and most well known businessmen in America. I am also the first to admit that things are different when you grow up as a Trump.

Anyone who has paid attention to the news, especially since my father announced his run for the White House, knows the media has attacked every member of my family viciously and given us anything but kind treatment. The adult “children” in our family are certainly not off limits. We did after all fight alongside our father in his quest to win the presidency. We stood on that stage and campaigned across the nation, and are certainly willing to take the punches where they are warranted and deserved. The double standard, however, is nothing short of glaring.

It would be a waste of print to recount every smear, hit piece, and invasion of privacy my family has faced. But allow me to sum it up by highlighting an article published by Forbes and re-posted in virtually every major news outlet, attacking a charity that I started when I was 20 years old. In less than 10 years, I raised more than $20 million for terminally ill children at Saint Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I maintained just over a 9 percent cumulative expense ratio, one of the lowest expense ratios of any charity in the nation, and funded the construction of one of the most cutting edge intensive care units and surgery centers dedicated to children.

The Eric Trump Foundation intensive care unit treats some of the sickest children in the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and it gives their parents and families hope. Yet I was viciously chastised by the Democrats and the media who relentlessly tried to manufacture stories about me, my mission, and my intentions with the charity. At the same time, the Clinton Foundation controversy was in full swing, and the media knew that it could use me as their punching bag to distract from one of their own.

One might say it comes with the territory, and that is absolutely true. As a Trump, I am held to an incredibly high public standard and I have lived an exceptionally clean and honest life with that in mind. But can you imagine, if they were willing to try and destroy a “kid” who dedicated his life to pediatric cancer and philanthropy, what the media would say if I had secured a $50,000 a month job on the board of a Ukrainian company, with no discernable duties, in an industry I knew nothing about, in a country where I did not even speak the language? What if my father on live camera threatened to cut off military aid to that country unless the prosecutor investigating that company for corruption was fired?

To make the hypothetical picture sufficiently vivid, also imagine that I had previously been kicked out of the United States Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine or was given a contract potentially worth $1.5 billion by China weeks after traveling to Beijing with my father aboard Air Force Two. I worked hard to raise millions of dollars for dying children, yet crickets from the media and weekly parodies on Saturday Night Live.

For the record, I do not know exactly what Hunter Biden did or did not do in Ukraine, in China, in his personal life, or elsewhere. There are plenty of other controversies that measure below the dignity and character of this article to regurgitate. I do like to give people the benefit of the doubt, since that courtesy is so seldom bestowed upon me and my family.

One thing, however, is absolutely certain. If the situation were reversed, I would have been front page news in every newspaper, online publication, and cable news outlet for the rest of my life. Reporters would be camping outside of my door, my family would have been picked apart, my name would have been smeared in the news every single week, and my father arguably would not even be president of the United States today.

I do not always agree with Bill Maher, but the late night host was honest enough to admit that if my brother or I had done what Hunter Biden did, “it would be all Rachel Maddow was talking about.” I do not know what he learned while growing up as a Biden, but if what we know about his life indicates anything, it is that there are different rules if you are the son of a powerful Democratic politician. Money grows on trees, there are no rules, and the press will always cover for you if it benefits the political left.

To quote the great Marcus Aurelius from The Gladiator, “Your faults as a son are my failures as a father.” I owe all of my work ethic, character, integrity, and moral fiber to my father. Hunter Biden can say the same.

 

Postscript: My bride and I have a granddaughter, currently 34, who was diagnosed with Leukemia at age 6. By an act of God, she was referred to St Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, They took over her case and paid for everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, including treatment, transportation, lodging for her and her mother from Illinois to Tennessee on a consistent basis for years and years. She is now a dedicated marathon runner, lives a full life, is married, is still in remission, and has become a poster person for St. Jude’s

From someone who knows what you’ve done, THANK YOU!

To Hunter Biden, go to hell and take your POS father with you.

Originally posted 2019-10-16 10:01:42.

Current Events

Social Security Waste & Fraud

10 Comments

You really cannot make this stuff up.  This report claims that this problem was discovered ten years ago and still has not been fixed. I can’t even begin to estimate how much money was and is still being paid to dead people. Someone is getting the checks. I wonder if the SSA knows whether the checks are cashed or not; probably not, civil service folks don’t want to bother with that. This seems to me to be something that could be easily fixed. Obviously,Americans are not reporting to the SSA when someone dies. OMG

Elon Musk’s DOGE team has unearthed jaw-dropping irregularity from the U.S. Social Security database.

The numbers are truly mind-boggling: over 25 million Americans registered aged 100 and older, with some purportedly older than the U.S. Constitution itself.

Late Sunday night, Musk tweeted a staggering claim accompanied by a table of ages, suggesting that the Social Security Administration might be paying out benefits to “vampires.”

“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the ‘death’ field set to FALSE. Maybe Twilight is real, and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk quipped.

The table Musk provided shows:

  • Age 0-9: 38,825,456
  • Age 10-19: 44,326,480
  • Age 20-29: 47,995,478
  • Age 30-39: 52,106,915
  • Age 40-49: 47,626,581
  • Age 50-59: 45,740,805
  • Age 60-69: 46,381,281
  • Age 70-79: 33,404,412
  • Age 80-89: 15,165,127
  • Age 90-99: 6,054,154
  • Age 100-109: 4,734,407
  • Age 110-119: 3,627,007
  • Age 120-129: 3,472,849
  • Age 130-139: 3,936,311
  • Age 140-149: 3,542,044
  • Age 150-159: 1,345,083
  • Age 160-169: 121,807
  • Age 170-179: 6,087
  • Age 180-189: 695
  • Age 190-199: 448
  • Age 200-209: 879
  • Age 210-219: 866
  • Age 220-229: 1,039
  • Age 240-249: 1
  • Age 360-369: 1

This information released by Musk aligns with the audit conducted by the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General (SSA OIG) in 2015.

According to the 2023 report:

In 2015, we reported that SSA had not established controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies of age 112 or older and were likely deceased.

At the time, only 35 known living individuals worldwide were age 112 or older, however, SSA’s Numident included 6.5 million numberholders age 112 or older whose record did not contain death information.

Therefore, the numberholders’ information did not appear in the full DMF. We recommended SSA add death information to approximately 1.5 million Numident records where the numberholders’ death information appeared in SSA payment records.

We also recommended SSA determine whether it could efficiently correct the approximately 5 million remaining records. SSA agreed to explore the legal and technical feasibility, as well as the cost, to establish an automated process to update the millions of Numident records for individuals who appeared to be alive and age 112 or older, but ultimately decided not to update these records.

In response to our 2015 report, SSA considered multiple options, including adding presumed death information to these Numident records. SSA ultimately decided not to proceed because the “. . . options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create cost for the states and other data exchange partners.”

SSA also believed a regulation would be required to allow it to add death information to these records, and adding presumed death information to the Numident would increase the risk of inadvertent release of living individuals’ personal information in the DMF.

We note that, as of January 2023, the full DMF included death information on approximately 137 million deceased numberholders. Over 18 million missing death records represents more than 10 percent of the records in the full DMF.

Therefore, the death information SSA currently provides Federal benefit-paying agencies–and will begin providing to the Department of the Treasury’s Do Not Pay initiative in December 2023–to help prevent improper payments to deceased individuals, omit information for more than 1 of every 10 deceased numberholders.

As of 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that approximately 101,000 Americans are aged 100 and older, representing about 0.03% of the total U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center.

Individuals aged 110 and above are referred to as supercentenarians, a subgroup that is exceedingly rare. As of February 2025, the Gerontology Research Group reported that 136 Americans belong to this category.

Currently, the oldest living American is Naomi Whitehead, born on September 26, 1910, in Georgia, making her 114 years old. The longest-lived person in U.S. history is Sarah Knauss, who lived to be 119 years and 97 days, passing away on December 30, 1999.

For years, conservatives have sounded the alarm on government waste, fraud, and abuse—particularly within entitlement programs.

The Social Security Administration (SSA), riddled with inefficiencies, appears to have an entire army of ghost beneficiaries cashing in taxpayer-funded benefits.

Drive on Elon!!!!

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Fascism – Which party supports it?

8 Comments
An excellent article by a dear friend and brother Marine (retired). “HB”, goes by Mustang. I’m sure most of you know the term, but for those who do not, it is a title earned by an Officer of Marines who came up from the enlisted ranks. HB is a true Mustang in all respects!

September 30, 2019 — Bunkerville

By: Mustang

America’s political left continually refer to conservatives as “fascists.”  Is this true?  Hardly —and here’s why.  We must begin with an understanding of what fascism really means, who started it, and what was that person’s overlying political philosophy.

We know, for example, that the father of capitalism was Adam Smith (1723-1790), a Scottish philosopher and a key figure in the Scottish enlightenment.  And we know that the father of Marxism was Karl Marx (1818-1883).

Most people, however, do not know the name of the person who started “fascism.”  There is a reason we do not know that much about Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944): most academic historians, who identify with leftist politics, have worked overtime to erase Gentile from our memory.  But, in his own time, Gentile was one of the most influential philosophers.

Giovanni Gentile

Giovanni Gentile believed that there were two diametrically opposed forms of democracy.  The first was liberal democracy, which we Americans sometimes call “classical liberalism.”  This was what our founding fathers believed.

Gentile thought of this as individualistic, overly focused on human liberty and personal rights.  He thought of this, not as unalienable rights, but as socially selfish.  The other form, according to Gentile, was “true Democracy,” which occurs when individuals willingly subordinate themselves to the will of the state.

In a manner similar to Karl Marx, Gentile argued for a society that was formed much like a family, a condition in which all of us faced life’s challenges “together.”  We have witnessed this peculiar view in the statements, platforms, and policies of the Democratic Party.

In 1984, Governor Mario Cuomo argued that America is much like an extended family, where, through the government, people take care of each other.  Thirty years later, in 2012, Democrats argued that “government is the only thing we all belong to.”

Giovanni Gentile was a man of leftist politics.  He was a committed socialist, and in his mind, fascism was a form of socialism —and, indeed, the only workable form.  Whereas Marx sought to organize people based on class, Gentile wanted to arrange society based on class and national identity.  In other words, Gentile believed that fascists were socialists with a national identity; it distinguishes them from others, with similar beliefs, from other countries.

One may recall that the Nazis of Germany were “National Socialists.”  Gentile believed that all society should be organized to serve the public interests.  There was no room for private interests.  The administrative arm of society was, in Gentile’s view, the state.  To submit to the will of society was to acquiesce to the will of the state —not just in economic issues, but in all matters affecting society.  And, since everything in society is political, the people must empower the state to tell everyone how to think, and what to do.

The first national leader to convert Gentile’s philosophy into action was Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), the Italian dictator who controlled Italy from 1922 to 1943.  Mussolini once proclaimed, “All is in the state, and nothing human exists or has value outside the state.”  It was a statement that paraphrased the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile.

Americans today do not remember Gentile because leftist academics have successfully erased him from our memory.  What does remain, however, is his philosophy, which has been entirely adopted by the American political left.  Renamed, it is the philosophy of the Progressive Movement in the United States.

It does not require a political scholar to realize that Progressive politics, that is to say, the Democratic Party, has vastly expanded state control over the private sector.  We can see this in matters of economics, education, banking, and energy.

State directed capitalism is exactly what German and Italian governments implemented in the 1930’s.  Importantly, American leftists cannot acknowledge Gentile because in doing so, it would become the glue that binds American progressivism to fascism.

So let us now review: what do conservatives want?  They demand smaller government and expanded personal freedom.  They demand liberty.  The American political left wants to achieve the opposite: the resources of the individual and industry in the service of a centralized state, such as exists in Russia and China.

Were the American political left to acknowledge Giovanni Gentile, they would have to also acknowledge that fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology to the Democratic Party.

Are fascists part of the conservative right?  No.  They are clearly the spawn of the ideology and political philosophy of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, and a host of other un-American idiots like Peter Buttigieg, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

Thinking Americans should know world history … our country’s survival depends on this knowledge.  Fascist, thy name is Democrat.

Mustang also blogs at Fix Bayonets and Thoughts From Afar

 

Originally posted 2019-10-07 09:15:04.

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Impeachment Coup Analytics

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A very well written article by someone with a brain and knows how to use it, oh, and BTW, a Californian.

The Democrats have exhausted every other mechanism for destroying Trump—and they are running out of time before November 2020 election.

Victor Davis Hanson

– September 29th, 2019

Aside from the emotional issue that Democrats, Never-Trumpers, and celebrities loathe Donald Trump, recently Representative Al Green (D-Texas) reminded us why the Democrats are trying to impeach the president rather than just defeat him in the 2020 general election.

“To defeat him at the polls would do history a disservice, would do our nation a disservice,” Green said.  “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach the president, he will get re-elected.”

Translated, that means Green accepts either that Trump’s record is too formidable or that the agendas of his own party’s presidential candidates are too frightening for the American people to elect one of them. And that possibility is simply not permissible. Thus, impeachment is the only mechanism left to abort an eight-year Trump presidency—on a purely partisan vote to preclude an election, and thus contrary to the outlines of impeachment as set out by the Constitution.

Consider it another way: Why is it that the House is controlled by Democrats, yet its leadership is not pushing through any of the policy proposals voiced so openly on the Democratic primary stage?

Why aren’t progressive representatives introducing bills to pay reparations to African Americans, to legalize infanticide in some cases of late-term abortion, to offer free medical care to illegal aliens, to confiscate AR-15s, to extend Medicare for all, to impose a wealth tax and raise top rates to between 70 and 90 percent, to abolish student debt and ensure free college for all, or to grant blanket amnesty to those currently living in the country illegally?

Simple answer: none of those issues poll anywhere near 50 percent approval. And no Democratic candidate would expect to beat Trump as the emissary of such an agenda.

If the economy was in a recession, if we were embroiled in another Iraq-like or Vietnam-sort of war, and if Trump’s polls were below 40 percent, then the Democrats would just wait 13 months and defeat him at the polls.

But without a viable agenda and because they doubt they can stop Trump’s reelection bid, they feel they have no recourse but to impeach. If Trump were to be reelected, not a shred of Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” would be left, and the strict constructionist Supreme Court would haunt progressives for a quarter-century.

Why Impeachment Now?

The Democrats have exhausted every other mechanism for destroying Trump—and they are running out of time before November 2020 election.

Think of what we have witnessed since the 2016 election. Do we even remember charges that voting machines in the 2016 election were rigged, and the efforts to subvert Electoral College voting, or to invoke the Logan Act, the emoluments clause, and the 25th Amendment?

The “collusion” and “obstruction” fantasies of the Mueller investigation now seem like ancient history. So do the James Comey leaks, the palace coup of Andrew McCabe, the Trump tax records, the celebrity rhetoric about blowing up, shooting, stabbing, burning and variously killing off the president of the United States—along with the satellite frenzies of Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, Charlottesville, Jussie Smollett, the Covington Kids, and the Kavanaugh hearings.

What is left but to try the new “Ukraine collusion”—especially given three other considerations?

First, volatile and always changing polls appearing to favor impeachment roughly reflect Trump’s own popularity (or lack of same). Around 45-46 percent of Americans do not want him impeached and about the same or slightly more say they do.

Second, the hard left-wing of the party might not yet control all the Democrats, but it does not matter because they are clearly younger, more energized, and better organized. And they want something to show for all their social media and photo-op grandstanding, given their socialist agenda is mysteriously moribund.

Third, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is said to oppose impeachment on pragmatic grounds, but I am not sure that is right. It’s the equivalent of saying Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was opposed to the progressive character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh. Neither is or was true.

A better description would be that Pelosi and Feinstein simply go along with the perceived 51-plus percent surge of their party, and sit back gleefully watching the fireworks happen, willing to jump in or pull back depending on the atmospherics and polling. Impeachment, remember, will make the Kavanaugh hearings look like a seminar on etiquette, and so everything and anything can happen once dozens of unhinged leftists are unbound.

Be prepared for a half-dozen Christine Blasey Ford-type witnesses to pop up, and 20 or so unhinged Cory Booker-esque “I am Spartacus” performance acts, along with a whole slew of new Steele dossiers—all interspersed with breathless CNN bulletins announcing new fake news developments with “the walls are closing in” and “the end is near” prognostications. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is already reading fantasies to the House Intelligence Committee and passing them off as the text of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s new president. Only after he was called on such absurdities did he describe his performance as a parody.

Facts Won’t Matter that Much

The Left is hellbent on impeachment and the absence of a case won’t matter. They do not care if they will sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

In the coming days, after all, we will probably learn that the whistle blower’s “Schiff dossier” was prepared by ex-Lawfare-type lawyers in service to House Democrats, who just needed a vessel to pass off the hit as a genuine cry of the heart, rather than a scripted attack with all the Steele dossier/Mueller report/Comey memo fingerprints: classification obfuscations, footnotes to liberal media hit pieces, pseudo-scholarly references to court cases, and lawsuit-avoiding, preemptive disclaimers about not actually possessing firsthand knowledge of any of the evidence, prepped hearsay, supposition, and the subjunctive and optative mood composition.

In a sane world, the impeachers would worry their charges that Trump forced Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to investigate his possible 2020 Democratic opponent Joe Biden might boomerang. After all, Trump never actually cut off Ukrainian aid. Nor did he outline a quid pro quo deal. Essentially he is accused of unduly asking a foreign president to clamp down on corruption in his midst going back to 2016. So what? Especially if there is something more to the strange antics of Hunter Biden and CrowdStrike.

Biden’s problems are not such thought crimes, but are confirmed by his own boasting: that he used the clout of the United States to help his own family financially, by threatening to cut off U.S. aid unless a Ukrainian state prosecutor looking into his own son’s suspicious lobbying was fired within six hours. And in Biden’s own words, “Son of a bitch,” he was fired.

In contrast, Trump might have been all over the map in his call, but he kept the aid to Ukraine coming without demanding the scalp of any Ukrainian official. In some sense, Trump’s culpability boils down to one issue: progressives believe that in not-too-veiled a manner, he threatened a foreign government to start going after the Biden family without cause, whose patriarch Joe might be Trump’s 2020 election opponent.

The other half of the country believes that what is material is not Biden’s current transient electoral status (he is not now and may not be the Democratic nominee), but the fact that he was vice president of the United States when he used his office to threaten the loss of foreign aid to stop investigations of his son, who was using his father’s position to further his own profiteering.

Given that Trump denies any quid pro quo and his call supports that fact, while Biden, on the other hand, openly brags that he made threats which made the Ukrainian to cave (“in six hours”), one can draw one’s own conclusions.

For now, we await more documents—with caveats that the canny Ukrainians, for their own self-interest, will predicate their release of information on the likelihood of which party will win the 2020 election.

The Left hints it has lots of incriminating documents outlining a quid pro quo threat; conservatives suspect that Ukrainian and legal documents will show the prosecutor was neither unethical nor uninterested in Hunter Biden, but was fired precisely because he was not corrupt and very much concerned with Biden.

As far as precedent, there is a good recent example. Barack Obama got caught promising to consider cuts in Eastern-European-based missile defense if Vladimir Putin would give him some room during his reelection campaign.

Translated into Adam Schiff’s Mafiosi parody lingo: Putin would calm down on the international stage to make the U.S.-Russia “reset” look good, Obama would then get rid of Eastern-European missile defense, and Obama would get reelected in 2012.

And all three of those events transpired as planned—one can surmise whether any of the three would have happened without Obama compliance with Russian conditions. Remember, Obama’s quid pro quo was caught on a hot mic on the premise that what he said to Russian President Medvedev was never supposed to be heard. “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved,” Obama said. “But it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space . . . This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

Once that understanding was excused, and the media was mute about such collusion, can any notion of collusion as a crime still exist?

Conspiracy Theories

Finally, who are the winners in these impeachment psychodramas, both short-term and long-term?

Short-term, Trump may lose traction due to the media frenzy. He lost some of his ongoing momentum that had recently seen his polls steadily creeping up. He gave a fine speech at the United Nations and sounded presidential in his talks with foreign leaders—all overshadowed or now forgotten due to the impeachment psychodrama.

Trump’s critics have become emboldened, Left and Right. The Drudge Report has flip-flopped and is as anti-Trump as Vox or Slate. Many at National Review call for or anticipate impeachment without much regret. Likewise, some at Fox News—Shepard Smith, Andrew Napolitano, and Chris Wallace—are nonstop critics of Trump and hardly disguise their contempt.

The leftist media is on uppers, and completely ecstatic in moth-to-flame fashion, as if it were May 2017 again and Trump’s demise was a day away.

Because Joe Biden faces far more legal exposure than Trump, he is mentioned (if even to contextualize and exonerate him) in every news account of Ukraine. Whether or not Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or her erstwhile henchwoman, Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), was behind this gambit, does not matter. (Nothing much from either one had worked to slow down Biden in the last six months). Biden is simply not physically or mentally up to a year of cross-examination. And Hunter Biden is more unsteady than Joe and will thus be hard to locate.

We are starting to see the outlines of a progressive fantasy on the horizon: Biden will be sacrificed. The party will unite around Warren. The left-wing media narrative will be, “We took out one of our own, now it is your turn to depose Trump.” Chaos overload for two or three weeks might keep Trump’s polling low.

Long-term, however, Trump wins.

We still have a number of government audits coming from Michael Horowitz, John Durham, and John Huber—and the targets are not Trump. The Senate will not convict the president under any foreseeable circumstances. The full story of the whistleblower has not been told, but there are a lot of narratives to come about the sudden rules allowing hearsay, DNC involvement, and who knew far in advance about the complainant’s writ. Once the Democratic debates continue, the candidates’ screaming and hysterics return, and the impeachment hearings descend into a Kavanaugh-esque farce, the public will begin to get scared again by the Left’s shrieking Jacobins. Schiff’s “parody” is a small foretaste of what’s to come. Voters soon will surmise that the only thing between their 401k plans and socialism is Donald J. Trump.

Warren or her possible facsimile is a weaker candidate than even the enfeebled Biden. Her lack of viability will be of enormous advantage in NeverHillary-fashion to Trump. His fundraising, already ascendant, will hit the stratosphere. The idea that the new and old NeverTrumpers will be on the side of socialism will finally discredit them. Wall Street and Silicon Valley will keep trashing Trump, but privately write checks to stop Warren’s wealth tax that would be only the beginning of her Venezuelization of America.

So if Trump’s health holds out, if we don’t have a recession, if there is not an optional war, and Trump endures the next few weeks of 360-degree, 24/7 targeting, 2020 will be far more favorable than ever imaginable for him.

 

Originally posted 2019-10-06 09:31:20.

Recent Posts

THE LITTLE CAN THAT COULD

1 Comment

I read this piece of Trivia several years ago, and found it very interesting. I received this copy from one of my fellow Marines, who, BTW was one of my recruits back in the early 60’s. And I thought I’d share it with those who perhaps never heard the story. IT IS TRUE!! What I found interesting though was those same ignorant, highly educated, useless bureaucrats who existed back in that day, are still here! LOL That damn can is still in existence today. . . . . Amazing .

 

 

 

During World War II the United States exported more tons of petroleum products than of all other war material combined. The mainstay of the enormous oil-and gasoline transportation network that fed the war was the oceangoing tanker, supplemented on land by pipelines, railroad tank cars, and trucks. But for combat vehicles on the move, another link was crucial—smaller containers that could be carried and poured by hand and moved around a battle zone by trucks.

Hitler knew this. He perceived early on that the weakest link in his plans for blitzkrieg using his panzer divisions was fuel supply. He ordered his staff to design a fuel container that would minimize gasoline losses under combat conditions. As a result the German army had thousands of jerrycans, as they came to be called, stored and ready when hostilities began in 1939.

The jerrycan had been developed under the strictest secrecy, and its unique features were many. It was flat-sided and rectangular in shape, consisting of two halves welded together as in a typical automobile gasoline tank. It had three handles, enabling one man to carry two cans and pass one to another man in bucket-brigade fashion. Its capacity was approximately five U.S. gallons; its weight filled, forty-five pounds. Thanks to an air chamber at the top, it would float on water if dropped overboard or from a plane. Its short spout was secured with a snap closure that could be propped open for pouring, making unnecessary any funnel or opener. A gasket made the mouth leak proof. An air-breathing tube from the spout to the air space kept the pouring smooth. And most important, the can’s inside was lined with an impervious plastic material developed for the insides of steel beer barrels. This enabled the jerrycan to be used alternately for gasoline and water.

Early in the summer of 1939, this secret weapon began a roundabout odyssey into American hands. An American engineer named Paul Pleiss, finishing up a manufacturing job in Berlin, persuaded a German colleague to join him on a vacation trip overland to India. The two bought an automobile chassis and built a body for it. As they prepared to leave on their journey, they realized that they had no provision for emergency water. The German engineer knew of and had access to thousands of jerrycans stored at Tempelhof Airport. He simply took three and mounted them on the underside of the car.

The two drove across eleven national borders without incident and were halfway across India when Field Marshal Goering sent a plane to take the German engineer back home. Before departing, the engineer compounded his treason by giving Pleiss complete specifications for the jerrycan’s manufacture. Pleiss continued on alone to Calcutta. Then he put the car in storage and returned to Philadelphia.

Back in the United States, Pleiss told military officials about the container, but without a sample can he could stir no interest, even though the war was now well under way. The risk involved in having the cans removed from the car and shipped from Calcutta seemed too great, so he eventually had the complete vehicle sent to him, via Turkey and the Cape of Good Hope. It arrived in New York in the summer of 1940 with the three jerrycans intact. Pleiss immediately sent one of the cans to Washington. The War Department looked at it but unwisely decided that an updated version of their World War I container would be good enough. That was a cylindrical ten-gallon can with two screw closures. It required a wrench and a funnel for pouring.

That one jerrycan in the Army’s possession was later sent to Camp Holabird, in Maryland. There it was poorly redesigned; the only features retained were the size, shape, and handles. The welded circumferential joint was replaced with rolled seams around the bottom and one side. Both a wrench and a funnel were required for its use. And it now had no lining. As any petroleum engineer knows, it is unsafe to store gasoline in a container with rolled seams. This ersatz can did not win wide acceptance.

The British first encountered the jerrycan during the German invasion of Norway, in 1940, and gave it its English name (the Germans were, of course, the “Jerries”). Later that year Pleiss was in London and was asked by British officers if he knew anything about the can’s design and manufacture. He ordered the second of his three jerrycans flown to London. Steps were taken to manufacture exact duplicates of it.

Two years later the United States was still oblivious of the can. Then, in September 1942, two quality-control officers posted to American refineries in the Mideast ran smack into the problems being created by ignoring the jerrycan. I was one of those two. Passing through Cairo two weeks before the start of the Battle of El Alamein, we learned that the British wanted no part of a planned U.S. Navy can; as far as they were concerned, the only container worth having was the Jerrycan, even though their only supply was those captured in battle. The British were bitter; two years after the invasion of Norway there was still no evidence that their government had done anything about the jerrycan.

My colleague and I learned quickly about the jerrycan’s advantages and the Allied can’s costly disadvantages, and we sent a cable to naval officials in Washington stating that 40 percent of all the gasoline sent to Egypt was being lost through spillage and evaporation. We added that a detailed report would follow. The 40 percent figure was actually a guess intended to provoke alarm, but it worked. A cable came back immediately requesting confirmation.

We then arranged a visit to several fuel-handling depots at the rear of Montgomery’s army and found there that conditions were indeed appalling. Fuel arrived by rail from the sea in fifty-five-gallon steel drums with rolled seams and friction-sealed metallic mouths. The drums were handled violently by local laborers. Many leaked. The next link in the chain was the infamous five-gallon “petrol tin.” This was a square can of tin plate that had been used for decades to supply lamp kerosene. It was hardly useful for gasoline. In the hot desert sun, it tended to swell up, burst at the seams, and leak. Since a funnel was needed for pouring, spillage was also a problem.

Allied soldiers in Africa knew that the only gasoline container worth having was German. Similar tins were carried on Liberator bombers in flight. They leaked out perhaps a third of the fuel they carried. Because of this, General Wavell’s defeat of the Italians in North Africa in 1940 had come to naught. His planes and combat vehicles had literally run out of gas. Likewise in 1941, General Auchinleck’s victory over Rommel had withered away. In 1942 General Montgomery saw to it that he had enough supplies, including gasoline, to whip Rommel in spite of terrific wastage. And he was helped by captured jerrycans.

The British historian Desmond Young later confirmed the great importance of oil cans in the early African part of the war. “No one who did not serve in the desert,” he wrote, “can realize to what extent the difference between complete and partial success rested on the simplest item of our equipment—and the worst. Whoever sent our troops into desert warfare with the [five-gallon] petrol tin has much to answer for. General Auchinleck estimates that this ‘flimsy and ill constructed container’ led to the loss of thirty per cent of petrol between base and consumer. … The overall loss was almost incalculable. To calculate the tanks destroyed, the number of men who were killed or went into captivity because of shortage of petrol at some crucial moment, the ships and merchant seamen lost in carrying it, would be quite impossible.”

After my colleague and I made our report, a new five-gallon container under consideration in Washington was canceled. Meanwhile the British were finally gearing up for mass production. Two million British jerrycans were sent to North Africa in early 1943, and by early 1944 they were being manufactured in the Middle East. Since the British had such a head start, the Allies agreed to let them produce all the cans needed for the invasion of Europe. Millions were ready by D-day. By V-E day some twenty-one million Allied jerrycans had been scattered all over Europe. President Roosevelt observed in November 1944, “Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitz of 1940.”

In Washington little about the jerrycan appears in the official record. A military report says simply, “A sample of the jerry can was brought to the office of the Quartermaster General in the summer of 1940.”

Richard M. Daniel is a retired commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve and a chemical engineer.

Originally posted 2019-10-02 10:39:45.

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