The Foundations of Our World
As the New York Times remembers Hiroshima, try this quiz. Name the two greatest losses of civilian life in the Pacific war. Hint. In both cases the civilian casualties were greater than Hiroshima’s. In one case the event took place on American soil.
Casualties
Hiroshima 70,000–80,000
Battle of Manila 100,000
Nanjing 300,000
Manila
Hiroshima
The US Ambassador to Japan and the Secretary General of the United Nations will attend the memorial at Hiroshima. Things have always been more modest in what was once America’s Pearl of the Orient. No memorial or stone was erected to the civilian loss in the greatest urban battle of the Pacific War. Finally in 1995 a modest shrine was built in the old city of Intramuros. On it were inscribed these words:
This memorial is dedicated to all those innocent victims of war, many of whom went nameless and unknown to a common grave, or even never knew a grave at all, their bodies having been consumed by fire or crushed to dust beneath the rubble of ruins.
Let this monument be the gravestone for each and every one of the over 100,000 men, women, children and infants killed in Manila during its battle of liberation, February 3 – March 3, 1945. We have not forgotten them, nor shall we ever forget.
May they rest in peace as part now of the sacred ground of this city: the Manila of our affections.
Hiroshima, Manila and Nanjing are tragic in their own ways. But one tragedy that continues even to this day is the selective memory in the capitals of nations who the inhabitants of Manila and Nanjing once called their Allies. Bravery and sacrifice is fine; but politics is finer. Hiroshima is remembered not only because of the suffering and loss that took place there but because it renews an ongoing narrative, and those Japanese dead can still march in its cause. Manila and Nanjing, which hold the graves of nearly 400,000 people who once fought on the side of the democracies, are forgotten. But that is no matter. After the first death, there is no other.
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No Ball Game Today
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Scorch the Earth
Those killed at Hiroshima, and later Nagasaki, were killed in spite of their
being non-combatants.
Most of those killed in Manila and the vast majority of the slain in Nanjing
were killed because they were non-combatants. Wherever the Japanese went, the slaughter started after resistance ceased.
When the Americans carried the day, the killing stopped as soon as the victory was won.
We.ve nothing to apologize for.
Given enough time and opportunity the masters of the narrative will eventually succeed in making the Pacific War all about American aggression. But even those who wish to advance that story must understand that this meme can only be pushed at the price of obliterating the memory of victims of Imperial Japan. For some, the “truth” is a means to end. Rod Radosh notes that Howard Zinn was instructed to lie about his Communist Party membership because it was the Party Line to deny that they were under the instructions of the Party Line.
So if the narrative of the Pacific War doesn’t fit neatly into the preferred storyline, well then it will be made to. And so it will be adjusted. Radosh notes that Zinn eventually left the Party because he found a more effective platform for his radicalism. He became an historian.
We commemorate long ago battlefields for two reasons: we either wish to guard its memory from the Lie or we wish to establish one ourselves. The dead have not given their last full measure of devotion until they have been enlisted in some current cause. The challenge to all men of good will is to remember them for themselves. They are all past caring now, though we are not. The holy thing they left in our hands has no power to harm them any longer, however we pervert it. Our blasphemies are accounted only on our heads.
Let them rest in peace. It is enough for us to take their gift and enlarge upon it; and if possible bequeath it. That is why it was given us. For sacrifice of that magnitude no thanks is necessary because none will suffice.
Thanks.
If the big zero wants to “remember” or apologize for Hiroshima then the Japanese should apologize for the Pear Harbor attack, the Nanking massacre, and the Bataan Death March.
The Japanese started it. We finished it.
In the big picture, the Big Zero just wants to besmirch the World War II generation and America as a whole.
While I enjoyed reading the NYT article ( I can be enticed there, as long as it is free), and while the author’s bile was a bit bitter to take (What’s HE so pissed off about, it doesn’t sound like he was around at the time), I particularly enjoyed this bit of puffery he quoted:
Let me see, now: if nuclear deterrence to discourage rogue states from developing and/or using nuclear weapons is no longer effective, then what deterrence will be? Strongly worded memo’s? Our elite force of nuclear-proof soldiers? The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?
Funny, no one mentions just what form that new deterrence might take. In the case of NK and Iran, we have tried lots of different things, excepting the last two of my list (both of which do not exist), and these previous efforts have not worked in any meaningful way whatsoever.
One of the reasons that nuclear deterrence is losing it’s effectiveness is because of the continual breast beating of the empathic crowd, who attempt to vilify and demonize our nation, with lots of support from the left, our nation which simply responded to attack and had the audacity to win the war instead of losing.
And sob-sister pantywaists like Obama regularly let the world know that nuclear deterrence is not an option in only slightly less that certain terms – gee, I wonder why the strategy is losing it’s effectiveness.
Getting ‘rid’ of nuclear weapons in the real world would have the same effect that the elimination of weapons in the hands of citizens has always had – it will only enable new tyrannies.
“But one tragedy that continues even to this day is the selective memory in the capitals of nations who the inhabitants of Manila and Nanjing once called their Allies.”
I read John Toland’s The Rising Sun in early 70′s which was one of the first steps on the road to forgetfulness. It tried to tell the WWII in the Pacific from the Japanese perspective. I thought it was a pretty good book at the time but gave the after-the-disaster rationalizations of the Japanese a little too much credit — that the Co-prosperity Sphere might be something other than pure imperialism in action, for instance. Or the Japanese might get some credit because one commander decides to abandon Manila and fight in the mountains — while another “lesser commander” decides to fight in Manila using civilians as shields.
Meanwhile the US military is held to account for the act of an NCO somewhere — whether he actually did it or not.
While the West may forget, the Chinese never will. Nanjing was too important a place and time in chinese history. Ditto for the Pinoys on Manila.
Many in Asia just don’t understand the sheer suicidal tendency of the West… but we’re willing to take advantage of it for as long as we can.
Damn you Wretchard, you made me cry.
“For sacrifice of that magnitude no thanks is necessary because none will suffice.”
Thirteen words that I will never forget.
(though perhaps, no thanks are necessary??)
I always saw the annual Hiroshima day as a ritual of forgetting something about Japan.
Now it’s shading into remembering fiction.
Two anecdotes.
Recently once of my co-workers returned from a visit to Japan, where he spent a day at the peace memorial in Hiroshima. He told me that after his visit he, as an American, understood how it must feel for a German to visit Auschwitz. This young man is Jewish. I said, You might feel different if you were Chinese. He looked at me blankly, as if I had picked his pocket when he wasn’t looking and suddenly returned his wallet. He mumbled he never thought of that.
Another friend, Japanese, and I were coming home from dinner once night and we were discussing our families. I mentioned that my father was a marine and had spent some time stationed in Japan, on his off days, motorcycling around Ibaraki, or some such Prefecture, on his motorcycle.
My friend mentioned that his dad had been in the Japanese Air Force. I corrected him and said he must have meant the Self-Defense Force. He said No, his father was in the Air Force. He continued, adding mysteriously, his father was supposed to be a pilot in September. I asked him what year. Being Japanese, he did not answer that question directly, but said, “If you had not dropped the bomb, I would not exist.” His exact words. Although he didn’t say it, I knew what year and what kind of pilot his father was supposed to be. I imagine his father was about 16 or 17 at the time.
My Chinese, Malay, Korean, Singaporean, and Filipino friends have all related stories to me, things they heard from their grandparents about the Japanese occupation. The truth is out there. But it lies buried mostly in the memories of individuals now. And those memories are fading.
Yes, more truth to power, as they used to say.
http://battlingbastardsbataan.com/som.htm
Also buried in the hate America narrative is the point that the Japanese authorities told their own civilian population to seek death rather than be captured or surrender at Saipan and Okinawa, particularly encouraging suicide. The film is still out there of women throwing their children and themselves over the cliff at Saipan.
Even with the release of the war’s decoded diplomatic intercepts in 1995, the actions of the Japanese government are still portrayed as ‘victim’ rather than perpetrator of events leading up to the end.
I lived in Japan, and have been to Hiroshima a couple of times. I never encountered any bitterness or resentment as an American, though the Japanese are pretty reticent about their emotions. By and large, it seemed that WW2 is regarded as a terrible period where “mistakes were made, and terrible things happen in war”. The high school history textbooks I saw covered WW2 in a couple of pages, one of which was invariably a photo of a mushroom cloud. I suspect if we’d nuked other countries, this wouldn’t be a big deal… just another horror of modern warfare.
FWIW, they started it, we finished it. Japan got off easy, compared to what it would have been like if Operation Downfall had gone on.
“Most of those killed in Manila and the vast majority of the slain in Nanjing were killed because they were non-combatants. Wherever the Japanese went, the slaughter started after resistance ceased.”
I know this is nit picking but Nanjing and Manilla differ in that slaughter in Manilla was a result of the Japanese refusal to declare Manila an open city. The Allies had to fight their way across Manila.
No. 13 Davod,
As I understand the story, the Japanese did not declare Manila an open city (as the US had done in 1941) but it was not General Yamashita’s intention to fight for the city in any case. But the local IJN commander, Rear Admiral Iwabuchi (earlier commander of Battleship Kirishima when the US sent her to the bottom on 14 November 42 — think Wretchard blogged on that awhile back) — disobeyed his orders to withdraw (after blowing up the bridges) and decided to fight.
I have always wondered if the personal humilation attending the loss of Iwbuchi’s battleship affected the Admiral’s decision, and motivated him to fight to the death — basically to use Manila and its citizens as his pyre. Militarily, his stand was pointless (it did not cover Yamashita’s retreat) and could only have one outcome.
WRT to the Bataan Death March –
Obama comparison.
“For those of you who are just weary of the primary, and feeling kind of ground down or that it’s like a Bataan death march, I just want everybody to know that the future is bright,” Sen. Barack Obama told a group of fundraisers in New York on Thursday, according to a pool report.”
The same article contains this gem from Obama. Can you see the problem?
“I think people understand the notion of talking to our enemies,” Obama said. “If FDR can meet with Stalin and Nixon can meet with Mao and Kennedy can meet with Khrushchev and Reagan can meet with Gorbechav, then the notion that we can’t meet with some half-baked dictator is ridiculous.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/27/obama-compares-election-t_n_93784.html
#2 Wretchard: “Given enough time and opportunity the masters of the narrative will eventually succeed in making the Pacific War all about American aggression.”
Yes indeed. This is precisely the cultural revisionism that is poisoning us. Shades of Orwell. With this kind of reasoning one might even (gasp!) think that the religion of terrorism is a religion of peace. If it continues, a new Dark Ages will be upon us sooner than we think.
Wow…
You constantly expand my mind… I am humbled by the amount of knowledge I do not have.
thanks for opening up and sharing.
I think that in some ways everyone is missing the point. Dresden had similar casualty figures to the two nukes and Tokyo was greater; but what looking at pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tells us not about horror in the past, but the horror that might come in the future if we forget. To borrow Sagan’s metaphor, World War II once a second for the length of a lazy afternoon.
In my opinion, various trouble spots are stirring precisely because we have forgotten the horrors of WWII, culminating in those two horrors. Someone ought to arrange a reminder. Maybe a regular reminder. Maybe it ought to be a once-a-decade ritual.
Set up bleachers, and facilities for reporters and TV, and invite any and all world leaders who want to come – and then set off, at a safe distance, a hydrogen bomb.
The alternative? That djinn is out of the bottle and will never go back. Most of the work of doing something is knowing it can be done – and now all of humanity except perhaps a few isolated New Guinea tribesmen know that one of the things that can be done is to unleash the demonic fury that lurks in matter. And if we don’t remind ourselves, then sooner or later it will be unleashed again.
So we need to regularly remind everyone just how demonic that fury can be. Lest we forget.
Back in 1991 during the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a US TV reporter stationed in Japan said something very interesting.
He said that the Japanese did not seem to connect the actions of 7 Dec 1941 with those of 6 Aug 1945. To them, Pearl Harbor simply was an act of war, while Hiroshima was a great and terrible natural disaster. Pearl Harbor was Japan’s Desert Storm while Hiroshima was Japan’s Katrina, and like New Orleans, the condition of that city On The Day After was the fault of the American Federal Government, not local attitudes.
I suppose this is a version of what Bill Clinton later popularized as “compartmentalization.” It becomes much easier to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast if you look at each thing individually. If you looked at all 6 as an indicator of your mental state then you might reach unsettling conclusions.
We see a lot of this today. The CRA was not associated with the Housing Meltdown. Charlie Rangle’s attitudes are not associated with those of Maxine Waters, the Democratic Party in general, or their core constituency. Illegal immigration is not associated with failed Hispanic states. The internal combustion engine is today’s greatest threat to mankind but the government has to bail out GM and Chrysler.
Ya gotta hand it to the Left – they have brought Cognitive Dissonance to ever greater heights.
Like a certain issue about the rights of states to decide their future which then turned into a war of Northern Aggression then was glorified as a war “To make men free” history has a way being re-written according to the agenda of the writers.
The Make men free theme drowns out the draft riots by the unwilling men whose job it was to make men free while being enslaved, regimented and shipped off to war by the government that made the claim.
I pass along a comment made to me by a Chinese friend in Beijing. We were having an evening meal in a restaurant (Chinese) opposite another restaurant (Japanese). He looked across the street and said to me: “Charlie, if the USA wants to become very popular in China, drop another couple Big Ones on Japan. Only make them megaton yields…”
During our meal, he told me about life in China during Japanese occupation.
Not a Party Member himself, he was grateful to Mao for fighting the Japanese. I suspect that a lot of non-party members in China feel the same way.
You do not buy a Japanese car in China…even Buicks are to be preferred.
Davod #13:
“slaughter in Manilla was a result of the Japanese refusal to declare Manila an open city. The Allies had to fight their way across Manila.”
No. Wretchard should link back to the piece where he described his aunt throwing her children out the window of their apartment building in Manila to prevent the Japanese troops from killing them along with the rest of the people in the building when they ran down the hallways kicking in doors and bayoneting civilians. The slaughter in Manila was not the result of Friendly Fire Incidents. It mainly was not even civilians getting caught in the crossfire. It was just slaughter for slaughter’s sake.
I read a book about Ie Jima and the beheading of captured American pilots called “Flyboys”. The first part of the book is an attempt at developing a moral equivalence between the Allies and the Japanese. As I read it I noticed that the events he cited on the Jap side were the result of command and policy. Those cited on the Allied side were the result of individual action.
Author discusses the cultural roots of the Jap mindset that surrender was disgrace and anybody captured was beneath contempt. Linked to this attitude was the racist notion that Japan was the only civilized nation and the rest of the world was subhuman. I understand that the NoKors have that same idea as a central notion in their internal propaganda. Note that the islams also subscribe to the idea of the uniformly decadent and immoral West and the inhumanity of the infidel. These are the seeds of holocaust. So far those who sow those seeds have reaped the bad end of the harvest.
So far.
HEP-T: Like a certain issue about the rights of states to decide their future which then turned into a war of Northern Aggression then was glorified as a war “To make men free” history has a way being re-written according to the agenda of the writers.
When you call it the “War of Northern Aggression” you demonstrate the attitude of General Meade, who after Gettysburg issued a pep-talk/order that told the army to keep up the good work and “drive the invader from our soil.” When Lincoln heard about this he was pissed. He said, “Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.” Adherents of the Lost Cause use language painting the Union as a separate entity invading the South, rather than a nation simply putting down a revolt in an errant province, which is what it was.
My dad followed McCarther through New Guinnea and the Phillipines. He was in Baggio Luzon when the war ended.
These days US engagement in South Asia looks like this:
Tensions Rise As China Launches Show Of Force
August 5, 2010
China’s renewed military assertiveness comes after pointed comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi.
Clinton defended freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. She said the U.S. had a national interest in resolving claims on islands in the South China Sea, an area disputed by China, Taiwan Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines.
It is the first time the United States has become involved in regional territorial tensions, and China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi reacted with fury.
Shi Yinhong, director of the Center for American Studies at People’s University in Beijing, called Clinton’s comments an “ambush.”
“I don’t think Washington made any serious pre-consultation or even [gave any] information to China, then suddenly launched this in Hanoi,” Shi says. “I think that this strategic dispute is very unique and quite bad.”
China had already been angered by joint war games between South Korea and the U.S. in the Sea of Japan, off the east coast of South Korea.
“What you see with the very rapid rise of China as a great naval power is the fact that China can flex its muscles a little bit more,” says Ralf Emmers of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and the author of a book about geopolitics and maritime territorial disputes in East Asia.
“We don’t know to what extent China would use military force to impose its claims on the South China Sea. In fact, what we have seen since 1995 [is] a lot of restraint, a willingness to negotiate with various Southeast Asian countries and try come up with a code of conduct,” Emmers says.
‘Core National Interest’
No one knows how far China would go. In March, a senior Chinese official spoke for the first time of the South China Sea as a “core national interest,” a category which formerly only encompassed Taiwan and Tibet.
Beijing’s sovereignty claims over the South China Sea are not new, but it is clearly becoming more assertive. It has been exercising these claims by seizing Vietnamese fishing boats, detaining Vietnamese fishermen and pressuring western oil companies not to do business with Vietnam.
Now China’s increased assertiveness is scaring the same Southeast Asian neighbors that Beijing has been wooing assiduously with loans and investment.
“A lot of Asian countries seem to be willing to join the hedging game against China, like Vietnam and Indonesia — both want to have some military cooperation with the U.S.,” says Huang Jing, an expert in China and security issues of the National University of Singapore.
He says the latest developments could reflect a worrying trend.
“It seems to me that Chinese navy has outgrown China’s strategic thinking. The strategic thinkers are lagging behind the naval expansion, which could be very, very dangerous,” he says.
#20 certainly works hard on revising history.
The contract between the people and its government is in a document that begins “We the People…”. Article I, Section 8 of that document provides that Congress shall have the power “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States,” which they did by the Militia Act of 1792 which stipulates “That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia”. This was also the entire franchised electorate. Every member so defined were also those who had the vote (predating Heinlien’s service for franchise by a hundred and fifty years). The Militia Act of 1862 would extend that to “Persons of African Descent” to be quickly followed by the 15 Amendment. Full citizenship carried responsibilities. Even today that continues through in principle in Title X USC, Subtitle A, Part I, Chapter 13, para 311,(b)2. You’re already in. It’s not a ‘draft’, it’s the selective activation of the federal militia.
No. 24
“When you call it the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ you demonstrate the attitude of General Meade, who after Gettysburg issued a pep-talk/order that told the army to keep up the good work and ‘drive the invader from our soil’ When Lincoln heard about this he was pissed. He said, ‘Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.’ Adherents of the Lost Cause use language painting the Union as a separate entity invading the South, rather than a nation simply putting down a revolt in an errant province, which is what it was.”
Military resolution of that particular controversy was exactly what the war was about. However, as long as we live in a republic, it may be said that Lincoln’s side won militarily but the result of the war does not require that HEP-T, or others, agree with Lincoln’s view of that issue. As an aside, the attitude General Meade expressed in part sums-up why that general rose no higher.
14. El Jefe Maximo
I have always wondered if the personal humilation attending the loss of Iwbuchi’s battleship affected the Admiral’s decision, and motivated him to fight to the death — basically to use Manila and its citizens as his pyre. Militarily, his stand was pointless (it did not cover Yamashita’s retreat) and could only have one outcome.
Funny you should mention that, it seems exactly the path that Teh Won is on WRT America. He wants to commit ritual suicide, but doesn’t have the guts, so he’s angrily taking everyone else with him.
18. Fletcher Christian: “I think that in some ways everyone is missing the point. . . . looking at pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tells us not about horror in the past, but the horror that might come in the future if we forget.”
Yes. We need not apologize for n-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it’s also important to remember what a nuclear bomb (and God forbid a thermonuclear device) can do. Visiting the memorial museum at Hiroshima is horrifying. One should feel two responses: pity and fear.
Obama and friends are saturated in pity. The Japanese are pity-mongers also. I have little or no idea what Kenzabue Oe is trying to say in his NYT opinion piece, except that the Japanese are victims and the Americans are and have always been bullies. The Chinese won’t buy that, nor the Filipinos, and neither should Americans.
But fear is my main response to the Hiroshima experience, fear not only of the horror of nuclear devastation, but very reasonable fear of nations like Iran with nukes. What really bothers me about Obama is that he does not seem to feel this fear, as if catastrophe is something that happens to other, expendable people, such as citizens of the United States. There is exact correlation, in my mind, between his refusal to enforce border security, stopping thugs at the border, and his refusal to enforce action against nuclear thugs. Both issues are likely to explode upon us, but in very different ways, in the future.
I am just sorry the Japs did not hold out for the third bomb.
And this said from a person who has been to Japan and found the Japanese to be wonderful people to know and work with.
On one of my trips I was talking with a Japanese lady who said that there were still many people in Japan who hated America, When asked why she pointed to Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. I replied that their are many Americans who still hate the Japanese. She as stunned and asked why. Pearl Harbor, I replied.
She had absolutely no idea what I was talking about (not to mean she had not head of the subject).
I think the biggest lie put out by pseudo-historians is the implicit claim that the United States is the only empire of the past century. It is the selective decontextualization of events to fit a hostile narrative.
I think Barack Obama’s years in Java strongly affected him. Java was not only a conquered part of the Japanese Empire, but a region where Japanese troops were welcomed with open arms. The modern Indonesian government is descended from Japan’s puppet regime, and can be considered to be a successor state to the Japanese Empire. The awe with which Japan is regarded (but not the United States) in Java may explain Barack Obama’s full bow to the Japanese Emperor.
The Great Pacific War was a Japanese war of aggression. Yet, who actually won? If the end of the war were 1945, the United States was the clear winner and Japan was the clear loser. In 2010, Japan looks like the winner because a man from Java became the President of the United States and bowed down to the Japanese Emperor.
What does a Fifth Column do after the cause they fought against wins? What does a Fifth Column do once they are neither wanted nor needed by anybody? What does a Fifth Column do when the only people who use their services are their own worst enemies on an ideological level?
On an ideological level, I find it bizarre to see Marxists consistently aligning themselves with feudal lords, oriental despots, and self-styled aristocrats. However, Marxists rarely even analyze their own motivations. Once one realizes that Marxists rarely fail to align themselves with self-styled aristocrats because they are self-styled aristocrats themselves, their behavior starts to make sense.
As a rule, those who concern themselves with social justice are from the ruling class because a ruling class consistently seeks to ideologically justify its privilege. It is a mark, however, of a culturally alien ruling class when it trumpets its concern for social justice while being oblivious to just how alienated they are from those they rule.
The presidency of George W. Bush shows the limitations of cultural camouflage. His use of cultural camouflage was brilliant, but it elicited contempt from most of the ruling class while failing to camouflage political instincts at odds with the wishes of the electorate. The presidency of Barack Obama shows the limitations of exoticism. His use of exoticism was brilliant, but it increases the feelings of cultural alienation from much of the electorate while increasingly becoming a source of boredom for the ruling class. It is only a matter of time when the ruling class comes looking for a new toy.
The quest for authenticity is the hallmark of a phony.
I regard President Obama’s ideal of “collective redemption” to be an expression of a basic attitude that being American should be seen as a badge of shame. It is as if President Obama were using his presidency as an “Indian boarding school” to teach Americans to be as ashamed of our cultural heritage as President Obama is of his own.
I know this is nit picking but Nanjing and Manilla differ in that slaughter in Manilla was a result of the Japanese refusal to declare Manila an open city. The Allies had to fight their way across Manila.
Like RWE said: most of the civilian casualties were deliberate massacres by the Japanese. The sheer numbers dictate against them being primarily “collateral damage.”
Dad was a diplo and I first lived in Manila in ’47 (48?). I remember that the city still smelled like smoke to me.
He spent most of WW2 In Alaska with his Squadron moving to the PI in mid ’45. He was of the opinion that the problem with nuking Japan was we only had 2 nukes. More would have been better.
The Military lesson from WW2 was ‘death from the air’.
It is impossible to be accurate but there were several estimates from the ETO with higher death totals. IIRC, the sack of Berlin killed over 1 million civilians. I think that sounds high but by ’45 populations in Europe were so mobile that there is no way to tell how many civilians were in a destroyed city when it was destroyed. Dresden is a good example. IIRC it had a population of about 60K but the refugees could have bumped that up to 250 K with no problem.
Of course, after the bombers went back to base, most of them were dead. Dresden is the classic example of a ‘war crime’. It was destroyed mostly as a warning to the Soviets. The Soviets were not impressed. Over 1 million starved to death at St. Petersburg (Leningrad).
24. Teresita, here is a URL to the book by the POTUS before Lincoln (Buchanan) about the ‘Confederate war of rebellion’ (What the north called it during that time period). The first major agi-prop effort by a Democracy was post-bellum of that war. It ( the war) created so much angst in the North that the history had to be re-written to avoid political fallout.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text;jsessionid=29E17953A16FEB48E9F3DD72C719A189?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a2001.05.0244
The book was written during and just post war and published in the 1870′s, I think. It is a much more accurate picture of the ‘War of Rebellion’ then the propaganda effort by the Democratic Party(which supported the south and slavery) which was busy looting the south at the time.
Sort of like Bush ’43 writing on the Obomination administration in 2016. Which is not only possible, but likely. Especially if the Obomination creates a real civil war.
Buchanan points out that the South hated slavery almost as much as the North. Virginia actually voted for emancipation in ’59, IIRC. Left to their own resources, the South would have ended slavery on their own, BY VOTE before 1864.
There was no need for that war. It was created by a variety of outside interests all of whom saw money to be made. The Brits wanted it because Cotton from the South dominated the cotton market. The Brits needed cotton to keep their factories running. With the Confederacy keeping the price low, the Brits had no incentive to create their own supply of cotton. So after the war started, the price of cotton went up enough to make it economical to plant cotton in Egypt. Which is what happened.
Meanwhile, as President Buchanan points out “According to the witty and eccentric Virginian, Mr. Randolph, if the slave did not soon run away from the master, the master would run away from the slave.”
Machinery had made slavery unsupportable, economically. Slavery was toast, regardless of the war. If the South had won, Slavery would have still ended.
For more period reading ( IE: before the propaganda offensive) and if anyone is interested;
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Perseus%3Acollection%3Acwar
Informed Opinions are so much more fun.
I have been trying to figure out the outrage here. Yes – The United States was in full right to use all means to end the war with minimum US and Ally casualties – period. Even with that said, the idea that after 65 years the United States can’t join the ex-enemy and now friends for those 65 years in recognizing the horror that war brings is bizarre. I expect the event to be one of recognition to a city and country that happened to be the first and hopefully only one of two targets of nuclear horror.
W at post 2. Well said.
It made me cry to.
I must say we just lost one from our small town of Burnet. Today at 1:00 as his body makes it’s way from the airport to the funeral home we will line the streets to give our respects. It’s a said day.
Both Japanese and Chinese ( Red and Nationalist ) have stunningly warped OFFICIALLY sponsored histories with regard to the 20th Century.
In the case of the Japanese, the official school text ( uniform throughout the land ) gives it a paragraph. in three sentences, the war ‘just happened’ to her… and she suffered atomic attacks… the Emperor negotiated a successful end of the war.
Any Tokyo’ite would learn more from Tora, Tora, Tora.
When I was an Omiyage-san, my best account’s GM was an orphan survivor of the Tokyo fire-bombing. Naturally, he still was enraged at America. Strangely, his entire income revolved around Japanese tourism in Hawaii.
BTW, to my knowledge, every company sponsored trip to Oahu always includes a trip to the Arizona Memorial. Hence Japanese visitors normally out number Americans. ( The other Caucasians there are Canadians, Kiwis — even Germans. )
The other spot on every such trip is Punchbowl, which is the Arlington of the Pacific. The opening credits for Hawaii Five-O ( Classic ) shows it prominently.
I often quipped to my pals that all of this was so that they could rest easy: they got some, too.
——
WRT the two PHD Chemists — one from Shanghai, one from Taipei —
on December 7, 1991
with Bush 41 attending the 50th anniversary ceremonies,
and interrupting traffic all day all across the island,
and ALL of the broadcast media on special broadcast schedules,
and ALL of the print media ( all languages ) commemorating the day in ULTRA type,
were both completely stumped as to how America came to war with Japan!!!
It was a line of conversation I did not initiate, they did.
Mr. Shanghai was convinced that the CIA did it!
That’s pretty rich since it was formed in 1947.
(BTW, Mr. Shanghai was and must still be a non-official cover intelligence agent for the PRC. Really subtle he was.)
When I marched them to the door and our expansive view of Pearl Harbor — and the events visible with the naked eye — and then had the nerve to turn on the TV and radio and hand them the newspaper….
Well, it’s a shame-honor culture, and these PHD clowns had humiliated themselves in every way.
BTW, neither brainiac was aware that China and America were allied during WWII.
Which ought to fully demonstrate how historical awareness is very commonly completely absent from the wiz-kids.
These Asian fools belong on Jay Leno’s all stars.
——
Don’t get me started on the local boy who thought the American Civil War was fought circa 1920′s in Chicago!
“Informed Opinions are so much more fun.”
“Dresden is a good example. IIRC it had a population of about 60K but the refugees could have bumped that up to 250 K with no problem……It was destroyed mostly as a warning to the Soviets. The Soviets were not impressed…”
The Dresden death toll has been revised downwards to 25,000 (see Age link below). The Allies bombed bombed Dresden at the request of the Russians because Dresden was a communications hub (See Sparctacus link below).
While to me 25,000 seems low considering the type of bombing, I have for some time wondered if the very high death tolls reported in some German cities was not part of an attempt by the Russians to keep the West on the defensive.
“Dresden bombs toll revised – Up TO 25,000 people were killed in the controversial Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden during World War II, fewer than often estimated, an official commission concluded…
…After more than five years of research, the Dresden Historians’ Commission released its final report on the firestorm unleashed by British and US bombers from February 13 to 15, 1945, just three months before the end of the war in Europe…The figure of 25,000 matches conclusions reached by local authorities immediately after the war, in 1945 and 1946.The report also found the number of refugees fleeing the horrors of the Eastern Front who were killed in the bombing was lower than often presumed, and dismissed speculation many bodies were not recovered…”
http://www.theage.com.au/world/dresden-bombs-toll-revised-20100318-qias.html
The Spartacus web site contains this account by Air Marshall Harris:
“After the War Air Marshall Arthur Harris came under attack for the bombing raid on Dresden. In his autobiography he explained why he ordered the bombing of the city in February, 1945.
“In February of 1945,with the Russian army threatening the heart of Saxony, I was called upon to attack Dresden; this was considered a target of the first importance for the offensive on the Eastern front. Dresden had by this time become the main centre of communications for the defence of Germany on the southern half of the Eastern front and it was considered that a heavy air attack would disorganise these communications and also make Dresden useless as a controlling centre for the defence. It was also by far the largest city in Germany – the pre-war population was 630,000 – which had been left intact; it had never before been bombed. As a large centre of war industry it was also of the highest importance…
…I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself, and that if their judgment was right the same arguments must apply that I have set out in an earlier chapter in which I said what I think about the ethics of bombing as a whole.”
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWdresden.htm
Skip #35:
Also, no one every recalls how the South got their slaves. They bought them from the North, the people who built and sailed the ships. And the Northerners bought them from other Africans and Arabs. Molasses bought from the South made into rum by the North and then sold for gold which was used to buy the slaves was the way the trade went.
And Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the South, not the North, where there were some.
As you allude, the first anti-slave societies were in the South, not the North. The efforts of the terrorists of the day, the John Browns, made home-grown Southern efforts to get rid of slavery more difficult, not less.
Slavery was a terrible evil, but it was invented in Africa and brought to the USA by the people of the North.
Muffler #36:
If you really care, the outrage here is that the bombing of Hiroshima is not being considered in its proper historical context, in the light of Japanese aggression and brutality and what it reaped. If the purpose of the ceremonies was to send the message “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape” then that would be fine with us. I recall a statement by a B-29 pilot who was on the fire raids “I flew that great big beautiful bomber over that burning city, looked down into the flames and said ‘Who the hell did you think you were messing with?’” If the message of the US delegation was an expression of regret – and that pilot’s words as well, it would be fine.
The message actually being delivered is that responding to aggression by doing it better than the guy who started it is even more horrible. People will die because of this.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the greatest gift that one State has ever given to another.
When you hear someone from China complaining about the murderous Japanese, ask them, “Who killed more Chinese, the Japanese or Mao?”
Be prepared for immediate, violent, fisticuffs.
#35 skip_this_post, US Grant said the war was the best thing to happen to the South, even if they didn’t realize it at the time. He said they were “…burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated “poor white trash”. The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor, the non-slaveholders would have left the country and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them.”
“They bought them from the North, the people who built and sailed the ships.”
They bought them from who had them, who after 1808 were not Northerners sailing ships. They bought them from smugglers, the bought them for foreign vessels.
The United Stated along with Britain banned the international slave trade in 1808. Also, abolitionist sentiment in the North succeeded in passing legislation which would have led to the end of slavery in the North and which almost eliminated it by 1860.
The South abandoned the goal of emancipation set by the Founders, and implied by the 1808 and 3/5ths compromise–that bargain the South demanded in return for those states adopting the Constitution.
“Slavery was a terrible evil, but it was invented in Africa and brought to the USA by the people of the North.”
There was no North or South when slavery was begun, and North when it existed matured to reject it. The Southern traitors had to be shot and burned out until they gave their “peculiar institution”, and they chose that by their crimes.
“Buchanan points out that the South hated slavery almost as much as the North.”
Buchanan is from a different and I think false reality. Newspaper owners int he South who supported abolition were burned out, and by the time of the war I think they were none. Southern politicians called slverya positive good and kept on getting elected.
Actually no, Buchanan lies, and I suspect you are fine with that to repeat him as if any thinking or kowledgeable person could believe it.
The more you get into Dresden…
The more apparent it was that the entire reason for the attack came from Moscow.
It was a pivot point for the last surviving synthetic fuel supplies coming to the Eastern Front.
THAT’S why the Russians were so animated. The Soviet Armies were, by the end, at the extreme reach of their fuel delivery range. It was the whole rail gauge change choker going in reverse. Russia had very few rail lines back in action anywhere near the front. So, Studebaker trucks became evermore dedicated to humping fuel and the Soviet Air Force found themselves forced to restrain themselves.
( Operation Bagration with over 15,000 aircraft — ten months later at Berlin Russia was down to 6,000 aircraft with loses to German action dropping all along the way. She just couldn’t open up enough airstrips and fuel dumps to bring her airpower to bear.)
So you have the surprising situation whereby the Luftwaffe is able to continue to inflict nasty loses on exposed columns by just popping over the front line and back. A smothering air umbrella being not possible for the Soviets, the leakers were infuriating the Soviet command. ( Remember the Patton strafing sequence?)
Further, the Soviets — as are the Allies — VERY aware that OKH and OKW are scheming to get repositioned down into the Czech Republic and make a last stand. The who’s who of German elite formations is flowing south through Dresden to get there!
Since the Soviets figure to have Yalta borders — they want that shift stopped.
Once Kurt Vonnegut cut loose with Slaughterhouse-Five the First Directorate realized that they had a perfect opportunity for cultural/moral jujutsu upon the West and ran with it.
And ever since, Dresden has been spun.
BTW, once the first Pathfinder markers went down every Desdener was doing the out-of-town boogie. After Hamburg the citizens wireless spread the news: shelters become tombs when the RAF is on your head.
—
There is one interesting link between Hiroshima and Dresden: they were massively Catholic cities. Hiroshima had been Jesuit central for centuries. It was the portal to Christianity right up until that August.
Likewise, Dresden had a massive Catholic history and reputation.
Both cities presumed that their undisrupted normality lay in this religious connection with the Christian Powers.
The real tragedy is Aachen. Bradley & Co. could have taken the city with a jeep — like Prague later was. Had that happened the Western Front would have been fatally weakened and the Rhine might have reasonably been breached within days. Morale after Falaise was THAT low.
Bradley stopped because Monty convinced Ike to shift all Allied resources towards his dream concept: Market – Garden!
# 39 Davod,
Revisionist history in all it’s glory. Your New Age link has no basis in fact, they ignore anything that doesn’t fit their preconceptions. Body counts represent the ‘smoking gun’ theory of history. I’m more of a circumstantial evidence guy. We will never know for sure. The History of War isn’t like that.
Ditto for the rational behind the bombing. I don’t have Churchill’s memoirs at hand, but I believe he says Bomber Harris is lying. Bomber Harris WAS a famous liar, being caught numerous times. So it is no cause for surprise that he would lie to posterity as well as his boss and his subordinates. I do keep B.H. Liddell Hart(military), Weigley (political) and Calvocoressi & Wint ( economic) on hand, since they cover the landscape of WW2 pretty well.
I can look up the details if you want. It doesn’t matter that much since History is mostly political. The exceptions are when new data is found ( or created in some case). I expect the history of the Cold War won’t be settled until well after the current Russian dictatorship falls. Anyway, this isn’t the place to hold an agument that will never end.
I can’t even agree to disagree, since I don’t. I just think that your number is low, since there is no new evidence, just a reinterpretation of old evidence.
I’m always suspicious of those, since Historians have to eat also and changing history (or trying to) is a paycheck.
t/37; Capt. Jason Holbrook, Army SF –my kids –from Johnson City –played sports against Burnet –same age group –bet they know him.
What does a Fifth Column do after the cause they fought against wins? What does a Fifth Column do once they are neither wanted nor needed by anybody? What does a Fifth Column do when the only people who use their services are their own worst enemies on an ideological level?
On an ideological level, I find it bizarre to see Marxists consistently aligning themselves with feudal lords, oriental despots, and self-styled aristocrats. However, Marxists rarely even analyze their own motivations. Once one realizes that Marxists rarely fail to align themselves with self-styled aristocrats because they are self-styled aristocrats themselves, their behavior starts to make sense.
Underneath the outer veneer Marxists and Muslims are much the same. Don’t laugh. The unifying principle in both religions is that they give you license to do evil in the name of doing good.
The Jihadi is exhorted to kill, rape, rob and enslave the “other.”
The Marxist is exhorted to kill, rob, and enslave the “other.” The rape part is just a perk. Its not required.
And what brighter lure could there be to the dark side that dwells within us all other than the opportunity to give free reign to our basest desires all in the name of serving the powers of Righteousness? Especially when you reap tangible benefits from it like cash, status, or social approval.
Its a win-win situation for the morally challenged.
And what about their idea of how things should be run? In the Marxist model the dictatorship of the proletariat sits at the top of the pyramid and dictates to those on the lower levels how things WILL be. In the Muslim Caliphate model the Caliph (derived from the word Kallifa, meaning successor –of the prophet Mohammed of course) sits at the top of the pyramid and dictates to those on the lower levels how things WILL be.
As a thought exercise imagine North Korea giving up communism and all converting to Islam with Kim Jong-Ill as the king or caliph. At the same time imagine the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia renouncing Islam and setting up the current Royal Family as being the Central Committee of the new Marxist People’s Republic of Saudi Arabia. Would they have to change much of anything in the way either country is run? I doubt it.
In the 1960s I met a Japanese man, a marketing executive with a major US multinational.
He told us he had been trained to be a Kamikaze pilot and had survived only because the war ended.
He was, by the way, a delightful guy, had a great laugh and an “American” sense of humor.
IIRC I read that Hiroshima was the ‘Marine’ HQ, and John Hersey’s book ‘Hiroshima’ notes that the Second Army HQ (defense command for southern Japan) was there. It was a communications center as well. Hiroshima was a military target.
More importantly, the US average daily death toll was about 900, and according to historian Robert Newman the Japanese were killing 250K to 400K each month. Even after Hiroshima the were not willing to surrender. Nagasaki was necessary to persuade them to give up. Japan’s WW2 history was a sequence of war crimes. Read the Bataan Death March accounts to understand what Japan routinely did.
Truman was right to drop both bombs. Each revisionist calling Truman’s acts war crimes is hostis humani generis.
Even after Hiroshima they were not willing to surrender. Nagasaki was necessary to persuade them to give up.
And even then junior officers tried to stage a coup to prevent Hirohito from reading his radio surrender address.
Had there been no nuclear bombs, or had we “Obama’d out” and chosen not to use them, we likely would have had to enlist Soviet forces to help us conquer Japan. That would likely have resulted in a divided Japan, a la Korea, Vietnam, and Germany.
Alexis @ 32 asked:
“What does a Fifth Column do after the cause they fought against wins? What does a Fifth Column do once they are neither wanted nor needed by anybody? What does a Fifth Column do when the only people who use their services are their own worst enemies on an ideological level?”
The Fifth Column becomes mindless wind-up robots, wandering around in random circles while chanting pointless slogans in a futile attempt to fulfil their designer’s original objective. Think “Ronin Samurai” but exclude the sense of honor/duty and military competence.
davod @ 32 quoted:
“…I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war… ”
Two additional German cities that were needlessly destroyed near the end of WW-II were Breslau and Halberstadt.
Breslau’s mayor was a fanatic Nazi and ordered his own city destroyed rather than allow it to fall into enemy hands.
The mayor of Halberstadt was presented with a surrender ultimatum, i.e. surrender unconditionally or your city will be destroyed. The mayor heroically replied that the people of Halberstadt would fight to the last man. The mayor then (less heroically) jumped into his car and drove to the nearest safe city as his city was being destroyed.
I should add that Halberstadt (like Dresden) has since been restored and is worth touring (Halberstadt has some beautiful cathedrals).
#43 Teresita:
Thank you for that post about Grant. Interesting.
Also, Sherman instituted his own in-the-field reparations for freed slaves with his “40 Acres and a Mule” decree. Andrew Johnson rescinded that, one of his “misdemeanors” that led to his impeachment at the hand of “radical” Republicans.
“There was no North or South when slavery was begun, and North when it existed matured to reject it. The Southern traitors had to be shot and burned out until they gave their “peculiar institution”, and they chose that by their crimes.”
Propaganda. The North/South divide was created by England when they assigned spheres of influence when colonizing America.
Obviously, you have no desire to trade your dogma for facts;
http://geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography/a/masondixon.htm
{snipped}
“In 1632, King Charles I of England gave the first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, the colony of Maryland. Fifty years later, in 1682, King Charles II gave William Penn the territory to the north, which later became Pennsylvania. A year later, Charles II gave Penn land on the Delmarva Peninsula (the peninsula that includes the eastern portion of modern Maryland and all of Delaware).”
The divide between North and South was the Mason-Dixon line. Established in 1750 by an English court of law.
1750 comes before 1860, BTW.
AFAIK, the English used ‘north’ and ‘south’ America in their correspondence during the Revolutionary war.
Sir, you need to read some of the period literature. Then compare it to modern “History” (yes, sneer quotes). Almost everything you learned in school is propaganda. Propaganda eventually falls apart.
The north was industrialized, which makes classical slaves useless. In order to profit from a slave, you have to make him a wage slave (Proletariat). Once educated enough to work machinery, a classic slave no longer has to stay a slave. He has a choice. Because he has a skill to sell.
Read your Marx.
IN 1860 SLAVERY WAS NOT A CRIME. It was immoral, but morality is between you and your god. It is not a subject for the laws of man. Only religious fanatics think it is. And only their version of morality counts.
Whoopsie! I thought Typos was gone.
Skip
‘Your New Age link has no basis in fact, they ignore anything that doesn’t fit their preconceptions.”
Not New Age but The Age newspaper a mainstream Australian newspaper reporting on the findings of a Dresden commissioned report by historians. Revisionism or corrections. Why would the city of Dresden accept a coverup.
#24 Teresita
Actually what we in the South wanted was a divorce and going our separate ways. I think we would have eventually come around to abolition with a lot less trauma on all three sides. North, South, and Black.
But, as today, the Northern elites decided that they knew better for everyone involved and were willing to shed the blood of their brothers in order to prove it.
Secession is beginning to be discussed again. Let us all pray that it happens, if it happens, with less bloodshed this time.
Buddy @ 48.
There was quite a large turnout. It was 100 degrees but that didn’t seem to curtail the people lining up along the highway to pay resect. As we watched the plane land what little talk there was among folks diminished. It is a rather small airport but it took about 20 minutes before the casket was loaded into the waiting herse. As they trned onto the highway on the way to the cemetaary at Ft Hood many of the family members were crying of course but nodded to us as they passed indicating it was meaningful to see such an outpouring from the community. I hope that in some small measure we were able to convey our heartfelt symapathy and appreciation of the sacrifice. We must never forget.
From a personal POV, I am glad we dropped the bombs- My father, freshly drafted from an aircraft engine plant, 26 years old with a wife and three kids, was training for the invasion of Japan in the Phillipines when the war ended. Infantry. And my wifes father, back from smashing the last of Hitlers armies, was training in the Phillipines for the invasion. Infantry.
My wife and I were both born after the war.
Those who apologise for the use of nukes have obviously never thought about the human cost of subduing an island nation of fanatics with tanks,aircraft,flamethrowers, machine guns,rifles, bayonets–and nerve gas.
THe fact that some in the North were involved with the slave trade and that black Africans were heavily involved in slavery at the starting point is irrelevant when discussing the rightness or wrongness of slavery in the south. Lincoln holding off on the Emancipation Proclamation was a practical solution that allowed the North to win; had he done that sooner the border stated would have ended up in the COnfederacy. Game over.
At the same time, slavery was just one aspect, only arguably the biggest, of the states’ rights debates that led to the war. Something also generally forgotten, or never known, by many in today’s world.
And the point about African involvement in the slave trade is certainly valid in discussions about slavery being a black/white issue. Something generally ignored by the blacks of today.
TX Clasher: Actually what we in the South wanted was a divorce and going our separate ways. I think we would have eventually come around to abolition with a lot less trauma on all three sides. North, South, and Black.
Next time don’t fire shells at Old Glory. That’s treason.
Fort_Sumter_Flag_1861.jpg
59) raven,
“Those who apologise for the use of nukes have obviously never thought about the human cost of subduing an island nation ”
Or the likely tens of millions of Japanese suicides that would have resulted; for a preview look at what happened to the civilians on Okinawa.
#59. raven
Yes. I have nothing but contempt for moralistic hand-wringing Monday morning quarterbacks. You had to be there to understand. Whether you’re talking about the battle of Kadesh or WWII that’s the essential truth.
You never know when the snake is dead until you have cut off its head. Before that time the “dead” snake may jump up and bite you. Those who have been bitten by “dead” snakes know this well. And yet there are always idiots who bemoan the fact that we never tried to make the snake into a pet.
The Battle of the Bulge in WWII was a good example of this. We had beaten the Nazis into retreat–there was no way in Hell they would launch a major offensive against us. No way in Hell. But they did, and but for the grace of God things might have gone very, very differently.
When you are fighting a war you don’t want Hamlet for a general. Morality and war don’t mix well. It tends to make the war effort rotten, crippled, and rancid. It also tends to give the morality an incurable and smelly yeast infection. Jane Fonda comes to mind.
The Little Boy bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima had no graffiti on it (it was painted over just before being loaded on the B-29). However the Fat Man bomb that went to Nagasaki had lots of graffiti on its tail fin as can be seen in the following link:
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/images/FatManLarge.gif
It would be interesting to see some close ups where the graffiti was readable. I saw one close up and could only read “Second Kiss”. I suspect most of the graffiti was not suitable for family viewing.
How can we apologize for something our ancestors did anyway? The ones who fought the War and have living memory of the issues at stake are dying, 1,500 every day. Are we supposed to apologize for slavery? Are the grandchildren of the Nazis supposed to apologize to the Jews? How far back do we take this? Shall Queen Elizabeth apologize for burning Jehanne Darc at the stake? All of this is the result of the liberal mindset that elevates “feeling good” over facts. Being PC means always saying you’re sorry.
According to the narrative, the United States is a war criminal, having dropped an atomic bomb on a peaceful and unsuspecting Japan.
The facts do not matter it’s image that counts
The narrative sees that the country’s guilt mounts
We clap and we cheer when we see rubble bounce
We slew ‘til resistance was stilled
We started the war for the promise of gain
And suffered no loss while inflicting great pain
We dropped bombs from skies like the soft falling rain
We cared not the children we killed
We poisoned the earth with our nuclear bomb
And watched people die with the greatest aplomb
Our battlefields looked like a latter-day Somme
And we slaughtered as only we can
We built silver bombers to fly through the night
And burn down the cities while claiming to fight
In defense of freedom so we had the right
To murder a peaceful Japan
#61. Teresita
Next time don’t fire shells at Old Glory. That’s treason.
Yeah. If they only would have burned it instead as political protest it would have been “the highest form of patriotism.”
Or so some would say.
Who will mourn the deaths of informants exposed by Julian Assange?
Those who condemn “The American Empire” usually refuse to acknowledge the existence of any other empire.
The rats were devouring the house, but instead of examining the cat’s teeth and claws, they only concerned themselves to find out if it was a holy cat. If it was a pious cat, a moral cat, all right, never mind about the other capacities, they were of no consequence.
– Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
The first of the 13 Colonies to try to abolish slavery was Pennsylvania. The King
kept vetoing their legislation.
A nefarious organization called the Knights of the Golden Circle made its mindless
adherents in the South. Its organization, strategy and financing were Northern and European in orgin. Its purpose was to impose reconstruction on the south.
As a class, Southern abolitionists, typified by Lieutenant General A. P. Hill, were
opposed to involuntary servitude. As a class, Northern abolitionists were more interested in making slaveowners suffer than they were in any form of real emancipation.
Union General George McClellan was adamantly opposed to secession. He was also
adamantly in favor of slavery.
In 1865 two Generals met at Appamattox Courthouse. One owned slaves and had aquired them as an adult. The other had freed the slaves he and his wife had inherited.
Name the two Generals and tell which one was which.
Who was the first American General to officially create and command racially integrated combat units? What do he and Martin Luther King Jr have in common?
Which Union General openly encouraged former Johnny Rebs to enlist in the frontier
army under assumed names so they would not have to take the damnnasty oath?
Final question: Are “damn” and “yankee” really two different words?
t/61;
1) firing on Fort Sumter was at a prearranged time and duration –between Garrison commander and Confederate units ashore; result was
2) zero casualties. the firing was an honor prelude to a lowering the flag ceremony,
3) preparatory to abandoning the Charleston Harbor, Confederate State of South Carolina, real estate.
4) South Carolina had seceded, under several articles of the Constitution, IOW arguably legally, nearly five full months prior,
5) five months marked by no violence, by Charleston residents continuing to supply the Union soldiers’ needs, and by
6) two full all bells and whistles dog and pony excursions by SC and Charleston officials to DC, in order to call upon agents of the Lincoln govt in order to work out repatriation of the garrison, as well as payment for Federal improvements on the island fort.
7) Lincoln refused to meet with these delegations, despite their best and most civil attempts, nor was any agent bearing any authority allowed to meet with them.
7) When, after lo those months, after all the train tickets and other conveyances and safe passage on standing offer to the garrison, the War Dept in DC announced that a combat flotilla of the USN was being
9) dispatched to enter without notification nor request armed gunboats into Charleston Harbor in order to resupply the fort,
10) SC and city officials made several requests that this flotilla not sail into the sovereign waters of Charleston Harbor, from whence the city’s vital structures could be fired upon and set afire, that this not be done, as such a movement would have to be answered by any sovereign state so treated.
11) These 11th hour entreaties and pleas were ignored in all channels in which they were delivered.
12) The southern response to the silence was the message to the fort garrison (referred to in #1 above) and the arrangement following.
13) The next move was the launching of a union army across the river border and upon the road toward the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. The First Battle of Manassas, AKA the First Battle of Bull Run, fought on southern soil, followed.
***
sounds a little different than your #61 bumper sticker, don’t it?
:-0
Teresita #61: In freeing Jefferson Davis from custody, Chief Justice Samuel P. Chase
issued a decisis what might stare. In it he noted that the Congress had proclaimed
a state of rebellion in the Confederate States. That they could have chosen
to recognize the right of secession instead. It was their decision, not secession, that led to war. Therefore, Jefferson Davis had not levied war against the United States and could not be prosecuted for treason.
Therefore, the phrase “War of Northern Aggression” is not entirely without merit.
Throw in the machinations of the KGC and it becomes rather relevant.
PS: Not mentioned by Chase as it was irrelevant was the fact that it was illegal
for one state to join the Confederacy. Not to secede but to join the Confederacy.
What state was that and why was its membership in the Confederacy illegal?
What was its status prior to statehood? Hint: Its original flag was A Bonnie Blue
Flag That Bore A Single Star.
“THE YANKEE HORDE INVADES OUR LAND. TO ARMS! TO ARMS! TO ARMS IN DIXIE!
Buddy; Tumblebug:
Should the opportunity present itself, please convey my respects to the family of the
fallen.
We are fortunate today that casualties are few enough for us to honor our dead
individually. Let us hope and pray that our good fortune holds.
And remember: “The noblest fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal
body between the war’s desolation and tthose who he loves.”
#51 Jeff Morris
Japan’s WW2 history was a sequence of war crimes. Read the Bataan Death March accounts to understand what Japan routinely did.
And let’s not forget Unit 731, a covert biowarfare R&D unit of the IJA that developed cholera, bubonic plague, and smallpox bioweapons for use on Chinese civilians. “According to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000.”
The “human experiments” consisted of infecting elderly people, infants, and women as well as prisoners of war with various disease organisms and then vivisecting them to see what organs were affected by the diseases and to what extent. Unit 731 also tested flamethrowers and other weapons on living persons tied to stakes for the occasion.
More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731.
Like so many of the vitriolic lies of the Left, the anti-nuclear passion is intended to make us fear and detest anything connected to atomic power. Or, well, ANY power, come to think of it.
Of course, the traitors of the Left nagged and worried this theme from the end of World War II, while Uncle Joseph paid Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs and friends to steal every nuclear weapon blueprint and equation they could stuff into their skivvies. I’ve never heard a single Leftist bother to try explaining how it was OK for the USSR to have nuclear weapons, and nuclear powered submarines and nuclear powered electricity generating plants, but not OK for the rest of the world.
But all my life I’ve known crowds of liberal American teenagers who parrot the typical lies of the reflexive anti-nuclear movement. Not a one of them could tell you the difference between a proton and a crouton.
One New York City acquaintance revealed his “useful idiocy” when my visit with him in Manhattan coincided with a tedious day of anti-nuke demonstrations. In a remarkable display of dexterity and color audacity, the demonstrators had painted perplexing yellow footsteps and outlines of bodies on the sidewalks. When I asked WTF? my ex-friend told me it was to remember the Hiroshima victims who had been vaporized by the blast and left nothing but their shadows on a nearby wall.
I love this myth. It’s always trotted out to make people think how horrible a nuclear weapon must be, if it can vaporize a person yet leave a wall intact just a few feet away. Magic, evil, bad bad bad.
This is of course utter codswallop. Any blast that could vaporize an adult human would not leave anything intact anything less substantial than a foot-thick STEEL WALL if it were just a few feet from the human. Shadows of humans have been burned onto adjacent walls by much smaller munitions than nuclear weapons. The 80-pound illumination bomb developed by General George William Goddard, for instance, was capable of doing this, depending on the range. This was a flash device for illuminating large areas of territory for night aerial photography of entire cities.
My points are (1) sure, a nuclear blast can leave a burn shadow on a wall, but the fact that a body is no longer in the vicinity doesn’t mean it was vaporized; and (2)people will believe almost any damn thing they are told when they have NEVER been required to study the basics of science, math, biology, etc. and nor have they ever felt the need to personally check any facts with even 10 seconds of research.
Well, the lies have been working.
Well enough that when I lived in the SF Bay area, I found that the City of Berkeley had spent thousands of dollars for large brown signs neatly printed on sturdy aluminum, announcing that Berkeley was a “Nuclear-free City!”
I wonder if those chuckleheads ever think about where they get therapeutic and diagnostic radionuclides, or Cobalt/Cesium cancer therapy radiotherapy, or anti-static lens brushes for their fancy-pants cameras, smoke detectors… it’s a long list of benefits.
I need to learn a few more languages, cause I’ve run out of words to express my contempt for these people of low degree.
p.s. As is so often the case I am deep in debt to people who make so many amazingly provocative and instructive comments here, even though reading here always makes me increasingly aware of my growing iggerance.
71 Dave: Teresita #61: In freeing Jefferson Davis from custody, Chief Justice Samuel P. Chase issued a decisis what might stare. In it he noted that the Congress had proclaimed a state of rebellion in the Confederate States. That they could have chosen to recognize the right of secession instead. It was their decision, not secession, that led to war. Therefore, Jefferson Davis had not levied war against the United States and could not be prosecuted for treason.
Dern liberal activist judges do it every time.
Actually it was an amnesty program. President Johnson released a proclamation on December 25, 1868, issuing a pardon to all persons who had participated in the rebellion.
Reconstruction was underway and the government wasn’t interested in vengeance against a few leaders.
Link
http://www.west-point.org/users/usma2004/60701/
The Department of Defense announced the death of Capt. Jason E. Holbrook, 28, of Burnet, Texas who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. He died July 29 at Tsagay, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when insurgents attacked their military vehicle with an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Bragg, N.C. Killed with him was Staff Sgt. Kyle R. Warren, 28, of Manchester, N.H., also assigned to the 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Bragg, N.C.
Capt. Holbrook, was a Green Beret, Ranger and member of the Army Special Forces. He graduated from the Special Forces Qualification Course on April 16 and reported to 3rd Group on May 27. He had previously served in Iraq before deploying to Afghanistan. He was deployed in July as part of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan.
He has been awarded a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a Meritorious Service Medal.
He is survived by his wife and parents. [I deleted the names of his wife and parents, in respect of their privacy. - Mad Fiddler]
Funeral arrangements are pending.
“Secession is beginning to be discussed again. Let us all pray that it happens, if it happens, with less bloodshed this time.”
My greatest fear. In a civil war, BOTH sides lose.
My point in all this is that the War of secession was unnecessary. A waste, since emancipation was inevitable.
It would have been brought about by the vote if not economics.
They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words. This one is woth a million;
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/ralph/resource/22slaves.htm
It is a diagram of the slave ship Brooks. It describes slavery better then every word written wbout it. Slavery was a horror, one that more and more people Slave owners included) were coming to see as such.
The war was created by people that were unwilling to let politics take it’s natural course and saw the opportunity to advance the speed of change. Sort of what the 4th world is doing today…
Today we see the same sort of propaganda taking place. Politicians feed off it. Re-writing history is a major tool in their place settings.
That is why revisionist history is so dangerous and MUST be corrected whenever possible.
Right now we are seeing America’s enemies trying to revise the history of WW2 to make the USA the villain. It wasn’t. I’;m not saying the USA was the hero. I’m just pointing out America did what it did for many reasons and nobody that wasn’t there has the right to pass judgment. Examine history, yes. Revise it for a political point, NO.
“Secession” is not desirable, but if it becomes necessary, it can take many forms. One form has a lot of citizens doing the virtual equivalent of “going underground.” An “underground America” already exists, so the framework is there.
Also, open defiance by many states (it would have to be many to have critical mass) may not necessarily be fought vigorously by the feds. The feds may try a number of non-violent tactics (the most effective would be the witholding of federal funds), but the various “rebellious” states may wear them down. We already see the beginnings of these tests of wills from previous posts (Texas, Arizona, Virginia).
For what came afterwards it was probably best that the American civil War ended as it did. But a very good case can be made that States did indeed have a right to secede from the United States. In point of fact the state of Delaware (IIRC, it might not have been Delaware) made their entry into the “United States” contingent upon their right to withdraw from it should they choose to do so. No objection was made.
And as far as the notion that the American Civil War was essentially a war to end slavery one does have to wonder as to why there were slave states that were fighting on the side of the North. Ahh– we are not supposed to go there, we’re not even supposed to know that. To the extent that the old Narrative and the new Narrative agree it is forbidden to challenge it.
Slavery was on its way out. It was ceasing to make economic sense, which ultimately will drive any practice out.
But it was a severe problem for the North if the South was to secede. The South could sell their cotton and tobacco to the Europeans and buy manufactured goods which were of higher quality and lower cost than those produced in the North, bypassing the tariffs set up to protect Northern manufacturing interests. That would have cut the Northern States out of the economic loop. The North didn’t produce much of anything the Europeans wanted to buy, and without tariffs they didn’t produce much that the South would want to buy.
That was the key to the American Civil War, and all pretensions to morality be damned as the lies they are.
#21 Charlie – Mao did not fight the Japanese. In fact, he consistently ordered his unit commanders to avoid them and instead concentrate on weakening the nationalist troops who were doing all the heavy lifting. Even while China was being invaded he considered Chiang Kai-Shek to be Enemy Number 1. Some of his commanders ignored the orders and launched offensives against the Japanese, or cooperated with the Nationalists, but Mao always squelched it. He wanted to preserve his forces for the eventual showdown with Chiang.
After the war of course, with typical totalitarian revisionism, he invented the myth that the ChiComs fought vigorously against the invaders.
Since the present Chinese government derives its legitimacy from Mao, don’t expect a true account of the war to spread in China any time soon. All totalitarian states need to manipulate symbols to retain legitimacy. Lying about history is small potatoes to the people who’d send tanks in to slaughter their own children.
Thank you for remembering Manila.
At least, with the publication a few years ago of a book on the “Rape of Nanking”, there is a small awareness of that tragedy (although not of the millions of Chinese murdered there), few folks remember the massacres of Manila or the civilians killed here (or even that most of those who died on the “Bataan death march” were Pinoys).
Perkins #44:
For all the bombast that apparently continues to this day, the war of 1860-1865 was not fought because of slavery. By the way, by definition it was not a Civil War since it was not fought for control of the entire country.
The fact is that the South had soil and climate suitable to make agriculture the main industry, while much of the North did not. When the Industrial Revolution came along the North embraced it by necessity. As a result, the more populous North wanted strict tarrifs to discourage competition for manufactured goods from Europe while the South wanted free trade. The South decided to sever the relationship to protect their interests. The North had no use for slaves for its factories while the South did for its fields. The basis for the situation was geography, not basic beliefs. The North “matured” out of slavery when they no longer needed them.
It’s great to hear that none of the smugglers who carried slaves to the South after 1808 were from the North. But in view of the fact that the North’s ships carried them in the first place that begs the question of who they were. I guess space aliens are a possibility.
Ending slavery, especially as abruptly as was done in 1860-1865 required the destruction of Southern culture. But that was merely a side effect of the Federal Government asserting its primacy over the individual states. The war was not fought to end slavery any more than WWII was fought to free the concentration camps. Of course, some people are still quite upset over the Allies failing to give priority to stopping the Holocaust; a lawsuit to that effect was even filed in Federal court in the summer of 2001, asserting anti-Semitism as a factor in the US strategic bombing effort.
“For all the bombast that apparently continues to this day, the war of 1860-1865 was not fought because of slavery.”
Yep, the 13th Amendment was just a coincidence in time. And the 14th and 15th as well. After the Bill of Rights, the single major cluster of amendments before and since to a document that while amended, has been done rather selectively over the remaining intervals. And the Civil War didn’t start in South Carolina, it had already been in low intensity conflict for a while in Bleeding Kansas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas
Just join those in denial.
From Wikpedia: Re the Constitution of the Confederate State of America
Whereas the original constitution did not even use the word slavery, but “Person[s] held to Service or Labour” which included whites in indentured servitude, the confederate constitution addresses the legality of slavery directly and by name.
Continuing the US government’s prohibition of importation of slaves after the year 1808, which is in the Articles of the confederate constitution unlike the U.S. Constitution, the confederate constitution does make explicit the legal protection of owning slaves.
No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed [by Congress]
The constitution likewise prohibited the Confederate Congress from abolishing or limiting slavery in Confederate territories (unlike the United States, where, prior to the Dred Scott decision, Congress had prohibited slavery in some territories). This did not necessarily mean that individual states could not ban slavery. However, section 2 of Article IV specified that “citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired”.
A proposal to prohibit free states from joining the Confederate States of America was narrowly defeated, largely due to the efforts of moderates such as Alexander Stephens. Stephens believed that economics might persuade free states with strong economic ties to the South to join the Confederacy.
Glenn Beck on his TV show a few weeks ago mentioned that he had the opportunity to view the original document of the Confederate Constitution: he reported that the document intended to create a confederacy of slave states.
Other scholars have done research wherein it was found that the founders of the Confederacy were very much interested in creating a slavery empire that stretched into South America.
it’s easy from the vantage point of time to see the whole war in the documents produced by the Cavaliers, the Firebrands, the 30,000 or so planters who owned publishing, among the other elite nodals of the Confederacy.
There’s a whole nuther war in the letters home of the private soldiers and junior officers. There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of these, and the picture there formed is of an army formed up to keep invaders out of their communities, because the invaders were hostile, and gobbling up the food and despoiling the hard-wrought margins of survival for the 87% to 94% of middle class and working poor and flat poor white townsmen and farmers who had no slaves, and in the case of most Texans who went to help the folks who had helped them 14 years earlier, had never even seen one.
RWE @ 40: “Slavery was a terrible evil, but it was invented in Africa and brought to the USA by the people of the North.”
This is a little off topic — but let’s get ourselves straight on this: Slavery was the first form of “Sustainable” “Renewable” “Green” Energy.
Slavery is ancient. Protest songs from the 60s (“Set my people free”) are actually about the slavery of ancient Jews in ancient Egypt.
Slavery’s roots probably go back to the development of agriculture in Mesopotamia around 7,000 years ago. Farming is hard work. More fun to go raid the tribe next door, kill the warriors, and bring the demoralized remainder back to do the backbreaking labor.
Slavery lasted thousands of years. (Still around today in parts of Africa and the Arab world, but that can’t be discussed in Politically Correct circles). Then along came fossil-fueled industrialization around 200 years ago, and around the world slavery was left in the dust of economic progress.
Now the Political Class wants to end fossil fuels and return most of us to slavery. When ordinary people work to pay taxes to subsidize wealthy people’s electric cars and rooftop solar panels, we are already well on the way back to slavery.
“Green” “Renewable” Energy = Slavery!
An interesting exercise:
Go to the link below (Declaration of Causes of Secession). Click “Edit”, click “Find” and enter the word “slave.” Sure seemed to matter to the secession conventions in these states.
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
As always, I’m amazed by the knowledge, insight and skill brought to the Club by most of the commenters above. The ability to debate fundamentally opposed points with grace and wit, backed by quotes from various historical documents and sources, sets this group apart from almost all others I’ve seen on the Net.
Gentlemen (and ladies if any), my compliments.
Repost:
An interesting exercise:
Go to the following website. Clik on “Edit” and click on “Find”. Enter the word “slave” and hit enter. Notice how many times it is highlighted in these documents. Sure mattered to the people at these secession conventions.
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
You are not supposed to mention stuff like that. It conflicts with both the old and the new narratives.
Please report to room 101 of the nearest center of the Ministry of Truth to you no later than twelve noon this very day. Don’t make us have to come for you.
Resistance is futile, and very painful.
I recommend _Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945_ by Michihiko Hachiya. It’s an eyewitness account of the Hiroshima bombing and its immediate aftermath by a survivor who, along with other staff members, kept the remains of a hospital running. Dr. Hachiya lived until 1980. For a sample of the book: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/hiroshima.htm
Thank you for another great post, Wretchard. I will remember Manilla.
Due to the intervention of reactionary filth, comment #90 was not specified as to its intended target Buddy Larsen.
I would hate to get into trouble again by having unexpected victims pile up, and also I screwed up by directing them to the Ministry of Truth rather than the Ministry of Love.
Too much Victory Gin.
I blame it all on Bush.
RWE…
The real trade split occurred because of Europe.
Northern America produced the same crops as Europe — and like hell the European powers were going to permit their farmers to be displaced by lower cost American foods regardless of the price per pound. This still obtains today.
However, King Cotton is the perfect trade good. It stores very well. Its main customers are industrial mills — in Europe and New England. New England actually had the cost advantage: hydropower was even cheaper than Newcastle coal. However, England had market control — obviously so within her empire. Since America did not permit export tariffs, the cotton powers expanded full tilt to meet the European demand.
It was this ability to generate solid specie income that made the Plantation South the South of Hollywood and memory. In reality, most Southern Boys were land grant farmers too cash poor to trade. They were too far into the bush to worry about it anyway.
After the war, the plow reached the Mid-West and a ton of Northern European newbies showed up. At this point, European exports took off — especially to Germany. ( to include Poland within her empire )
Ironically, it was American grain that exploded the population of Germany. ( right along with her own agricultural explosion: Prussia, and Northern Flatlands ) As with the Soviet Union, American grain imports were price leaders and almost never considered suitable for the local breads. Instead they went every other way from feed to pasta.
The difference was TIME. The steamship led to packet-ships in the 1850′s. Twenty years later steamships could get the wheat and corn to European chickens before it turned into mold even from as far away as St. Louis.
The South never saw it coming: the ultimate death of slavery was inevitable due to the economics of steam-motive robots! Now Watt!
By comparison the English devils started planting cotton all over their empire.
————–
In almost all Civil War discourse there is little mention of the economic attitude by slave owner/operators towards the ultimate write-off. At some date, looming all too soon, their asset base was going to walk-off. At a stroke they would have a plantation that had no value. All of their notes and debts would fall like king-pins.
For such ‘capitalists’ ( they were slavers – human beings can never be regarded as investments, nor livestock ) they typically had no alternate investments of any kind that weren’t also just as dependent on enslavement.
Such individuals used their economic and political power to completely dominate the decisions of their states. They led the average small farmer by the nose with propaganda and bunkum to defend the slaver’s interests.
———-
It was noted at the time that Texas was not a suitable slave state. She was regarded as an open range cattle empire. (Slaves horsing around with their own mounts and tack – how’s that supposed to work?) However, the slavery crowd eyed Latin America and the Caribbean Islands as LBO candidates. With any luck even South America could be brought into a Cotton Cartel. ( If only they’d known of rubber profits!)
————
Even before the Civil War had run its course, it was obvious that Confederate slaves had been replaced by Egyptians, Indians and so on. You really can’t go back.
TC/92; message rec/ –Ministry of Love, ground floor of Ministry of Penicillin complex, will appear nine hours ago, as ordered.
52. Don Rodrigo then junior officers tried to stage a coup to prevent Hirohito from reading his radio surrender address. // Had they succeeded… Would we have invaded? Or pounded them from the air and sea until we could construct more atomic bombs? It’d have been more death and destruction, in any case.
73. PA Cat // I did not know about Unit 731. It is another example of actions so evil that they defy the comprehension of the sane.
Brother W, you are a master at this. I salute you.
Not only were the citizens of Manilla and Nanking deliberately murdered for no other reason than that they were not Japanese, and in far greater numbers than those who died in Hiroshima, their suffering was also far greater and more prolonged, both individually and as a group.
These died because of Japanese disdain for everything not Japanese, those in Hiroshima were collateral damage in a military operation.
Don’t fight the last Civil War again, fight the one at hand. A federal judge has just declared that traditional marriage is not only an instrument of oppression, but it’s un-constitutional. If that’s true, let’s sue the feds, those of us who are in traditional marriages, for leading us down the wrong path. Take them up on the their deal. Refuse to recognize your marriage before the state, both husband and wife.
Any government official wants to know your marital status? Tell him to stuff it. The IRS seeks rates one way or another? Let’s all say we were up for marriage as it has existed for thousands of years predating the US Constitution, but when the feds got involved with the definition it became unrecognizable. We’re not sure if we are married the same way we were before. That contract is shattered. You figure it out, feds. Meanwhile, let’s classify ourselves as confused, because one thing can be damn sure: Steve isn’t marrying Bill in my book. Ever. You want to enforce that then bring on the Nuptial Patrol. No element of local resources will be dedicated to one bit of this travesty. Send your own ministers, justices-o-the-peace and ship captains down here, because we ain’t marrying gays.
To expect us to take up this baton would be an undue burden, dontcha know. And we can’t have that, can we?
Manila 1945…
http://www.battlingbastardsbataan.com/som.htm
Typical Japanese behavior during WWII. They got EXACTLY what they deserved in the final months of the wars when we pounded their cities into ruins with high explosives, napalm and atomic bombs.
I agre with poster # 1. No apology ever from this American.
Hiroshima is just another excuse used by those who advocate tyranny and oppression to say that the United States, and liberal democracies in general, are evil.
If Hiroshima had never been bombed these leftists would simply find something else to shed crocodile tears over.
They lie about us because they are evil. They work to destroy freedom because they want to see the people of the world in chains. Never forget that they are our enemies. Never fail to treat them accordingly.
Jeff @ 95
We had more than two atomic bombs. Dr Edward Teller revealed that during a lecture I attended at Stanford in 1971.
The more terrible something is the more necessary to portray it as the cornerstone of peace. The Somme could only be explained as a necessary step in “the war to end all wars”. The Communist Atom Bomb spies stole the secret in the name of “World Peace”. World Peace is one of those McGuffins used by the architects of the narrative to establish such a surpassing good that all manner of evil can be committed in its name.
The Left has a particular need for eschatologies and must ultimately justify the lies, suffering and betrayal in terms of Progressive Goals because the earth must provide absolution for every abomination and stupidity that is in the meantime necessary to commit. It’s moral deficit spending that can only be sustained by belief in the big payoff. The Party can’t live with the idea of a sin it cannot get rid of. Somehow it’s sheer grandeur is going to make up for all those Ukranians, Cambodians, Cubans, Russians and whatnot who it condemned to misery. Communism is a closed system of human judges and self-accusation. Like any system waste disposal is a problem. All that blood needs a sump.
The monotheisms teach that ultimate defeat of evil is beyond our power, and consequently the gift of healing will never be wholly ours. But if we are neither angels nor devils the way lies open for us to aspire to small kindnesses. The monotheists can plant flowers, raise children, play tennis and laugh at foolish jokes because they do not need to save the world, nor can they condemn it. They do not need to make the road. They simply need to choose it.
Thus they can live without the supreme self-regard of the Left because it is all right to be broken; they cannot but be broken; since all the world is broken until the day of healing love. It gives them the curious power to live and to live without fury. To accept the sunrise and the sunset too. It gives them the ability to wander a world without needing to control or own it. And as for others, mutual forgiveness is easier among sinners than it is among supermen, especially among supermen who are convinced they can shrive themselves.
All the great historical McGuffins are homages to the enterprises of the elect who we are told one day shall build a tower to the heavens after which they shall draw up their ladder of bones.
Moniker @ 91.
Will have to check out the book you mention.
While attending a seminar at Stanford, a Japanese woman and her American husband joined our table in the crowded cafeteria.
My friend and I left to attend Dr. Edward Teller’s lecture. During the lecture he was agonizing over whether we should have provided a demonstration of the power of the bomb. (He said we had more than two.) At that point that same woman stood up and said, “I was in Hiroshima the day the bomb was dropped. You did the right thing!”
A very powerful statement I’ll never forget!
The Hanford process was to get America up to at least two bombs a month – IF the fat man worked.
There were additional bombs being assembled with, IIRC, one on the way.
IF Imperial Japan didn’t get the message, Truman promised a’ rain of ruin’- that was NOT just a Clintonian mouth bite!
Hanford really was running up towards one every other week.
After the Japanese surrendered, the converter piles went on low.
Only after the Reds established that they had successfully cloned our Fat Man did Truman demand the AEC rev-up to full capacity AND initiate the Savannah River Project – Pronto. ( For you accountants — a stunning amount of ‘Korean War’ expenditures are in fact Cold War Savannah River Plant launch expenditures.
For your amusement see NS Savannah, by Google pretty much named after the plant and the ship’s pioneering legacy from the 19th Century
Colin Powell:
[F]ar from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector. We have sent men and women from the armed forces of the United States to other parts of the world throughout the past century to put down oppression. We defeated Fascism. We defeated Communism. We saved Europe in World War I and World War II. We were willing to do it, glad to do it. We went to Korea. We went to Vietnam. All in the interest of preserving the rights of people.
And when all those conflicts were over, what did we do? Did we stay and conquer? Did we say, “Okay, we defeated Germany. Now Germany belongs to us? We defeated Japan, so Japan belongs to us”? No. What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No, the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are.
I hope, with worry, that that is the kind of nation we will remain.
Aristide…
Truman & Co tossed this around.
Ultimately, because of the Soviet surge, he properly reasoned that any demonstration’s time was passed.
Further, it is entirely possible to fake a nuke with enough conventional explosive.
We know that to be true because before Trinity we tested conventional explosives in the desert and achieved a mushroom cloud with only 1,000 tons of TNT!
In short, and as has been proven by Japanese reaction to the REAL THING, only the real thing clicked.
Thus a decision was easy to make.
Just for the record:
As an Omiyage-san:
Most of my employees were the sons of an abortive Baka bomber trainee.
I, myself, am the son of D-Day’s leading assault craft ( let’s not get into that ) and whose father was slated for the plains of Tokyo — were it not for Truman and Fat-Man.
Practically none of my late 1970′s employees would have existed without Fat Man — and certainly none of my customers would have been there.
BTW, I sold to the Emperor’s brother the USDA Choice that made the Tokyo airways circa January 1978 and set off the anti-Kobe beef USDA New York Steak Bomb.
There were many survivors.
w, if you wrote a post on Tanganyikan water tables, your comments section would soon produce two or three folks who studied under leading Tanganyikan water table experts, plus one or two up-to-date Tanganyikan hydrologists, and one person whose quadrupal great uncle thrice removed was the Portagee navigator on the expedition that discovered Tanganyika. And all authentic, too, if my sense are worth a ha’penny.
Buddy…
Pull the harpoon out WITHOUT further twisting.
LOL –but believe me, it was said without a dram o sarchasm, it was said straight up –tho i did worry a bit that proximity might give you just that wrong impression –which it did, and which i here deny –
–seriously, i’ve seen it over and over here –if the Charge of Taffy Three comes up, someomne will write in whose dad or grand dad was on the Samuel B. Roberts –it’s just amazing the deep coverage on very narrow subjects that happens on this blog –
As Doug might reveal…
I really did spend a quarter of a century in the islands.
And when I admit I met Obama and his Tutu…
That’s no joke.
HOWEVER…
Reality is even weirder than I have admitted.
Strange to say, upon meeting the Resident… I had a flash….
Thought he’d go into politics or Hollywood…
IF politics he’d face off against an old Vietnam-hero old-fart….
If you think that’s weird …
IT HAPPENED TO ME!
What did Hamlet say to Horatio?
“There are things….”
Yeah, ….
Sometimes I think W is pulling my chain.
He wants a brain dump, he does.
—-
The larger question is why am I God’s tool?
Too many examples to relate.
I’m but a pawn of Heaven.
The lowest ranking expendable.
That He let’s me into ANY insight.
Completely baffling to me.
——-
The events in my life strain ALL credulity.
well said,
a stout statement,
a stately passage,
facets all aglitter.
“That is why revisionist history is so dangerous and MUST be corrected whenever possible.”
And thank God posts 83 and 84 corrected YOUR revisionist history.
I can’t claim that my father was one of the famous Tin Can Sailors on the Roberts, but he helped deliver some of the troops that retook Manila. From his obituary last summer:
He managed civility when, late in his life, he met some of his Japanese Navy counterparts. But he had very powerful memories of what he saw on Luzon and then on Leyte (while the Zeilin was undergoing temporary repairs there). Troopships like the Zeilin were, along with aircraft carriers, the kamikaze pilots’ highest priorities, so even on its bridge he’d have been in continuous and urgent peril throughout the anticipated invasions of each of the Home Islands. My father credited his intact survival of the war to Truman’s decision to drop the Bombs, and I have scant patience for anyone who’s inclined to second-guess Truman’s decision.
One of the most powerful essays I have read on the subject of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was written by Paul Fussell, one of the many young men in 1945 scheduled to invade the home islands of Japan. He is the author of The Great War and Modern Memory. An actual gentleman and an actual scholar, so rare a combination these days, I was lucky enough to shake his hand and receive his autograph at a reading in Cambridge, MA several years ago.
Since we are on the subject, I thought I might pass along links to his essay, Thank God for the Atom Bomb, and to his book of essays by the same tile:
http://crossroads.alexanderpiela.com/files/Fussell_Thank_God_AB.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Thank-Atom-Bomb-Paul-Fussell/dp/0345361350
Pardon my apparent ignorance, but wasn’t Guam the only US Terriritory ever overrun by the Japanese?
What am I misunderstanding about “American Soil?”
Pardon my apparent ignorance, but wasn’t Guam the only US Terriritory ever overrun by the Japanese?
No, there was some of the Aleutian islands, there was Wake, and there was the entire Philippine archepelago.
As you allude, the first anti-slave societies were in the South, not the North.
Names and dates, please?
Until shown otherwise, I will give Pennsylvania Quakers the credit for being the first to publicly condemn and organize against the enslavement of Africans in the American colonies.
A small group of Germantown Quakers in 1688 declared slavery as being un-Christian. Slavery was legal in all the colonies but the critical mass of Quakers in Philadelphia made abolition a particularly zealously backed cause there, well before it took off in other locales.
Seventeen of the 24 members of what’s called the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which first met in April 1775 in Philadelphia, were Quakers.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3p249.html
Until someone else brings earlier dates & names to the table re: anti-slavery societies in the South pre-dating those in the North, I will have to disregard these claims as unsubstantiated.
**************
If you asked 10,000 soldiers fighting in the Civil War on both sides the question, “What are you fighting for?” you could well have gotten thousands of different answers. Forget the differences between Billy Yank and Johnny Reb for a moment. The differences among the Tennessee dirt farmer, the Charleston sailor, the Montgomery dry-goods clerk, the Savannah slaveholder’s son, and the professional soldier from Virginia Military Institute had to have been pretty vast. Which of them was consciously fighting to maintain “our peculiar institution” as his #1 priority? Which of them was fighting to maintain what he believed to be his state’s right to self-determination in government (consciously struggling with, or sub-consciously suppressing, the dissonance of his claim to self-determination with the status of the black slave)? Which of them just wanted to go with his buddies and get in on all the excitement?
Regardless of personal motivations, however, taking up arms in the Confederate armed forces was, in my opinion, de facto acting in support of maintaining the practice of slavery, whether the individual soldier/sailor was conscious of this or not. This is my opinion. I realize others will disagree. And this is, I think, the heart of both the conundrum of the Civil War and the debate over its origins, meaning and legacy.
On the one hand, much of the pro-Lincoln historical commentary, much of the educational emphasis in schools and certainly the emphasis in the post Civil Rights era, has been not just to frame the Civil War in terms of only that one issue, but, perhaps more to the point, to assume that all right-thinking people of that era would have naturally agreed with our perspective, and those who did not were evil-mongers and dolts.
There were all types in both armies — cowards, scholars, farmers, men of duty, men of ambition, men of destiny, drunkards, devoted husbands, unexpected heroes, rakes and card sharps, the quiet and humble, the impossibly brave, the painfully homesick, and the just plain mean-as-a-rattlesnake bastards.
The soldier and the cause. To what extent are they joined, and to what extent are they independent of each other?
Was it possible for a Confederate soldier to have been an honorable, pious and remarkably sympathetic person, whose efforts as a soldier were, in a moral sense, abetting a great evil? And was it possible for a Union soldier to have been, individually, a terrible cretin, whose efforts as a soldier were, in the cosmic sense, “on the side of the angels”? The answer to both questions is, of course. And we can find plenty of examples to go around, of both individual men of character and human beasts, in uniforms from both sides. This is not moral equivalancy of the causes, but the recognition of the individuality of the men involved.
So should the Confederate flag, or a flag containing some version thereof, be flown outside a government building in any Southern state? Does the flag represent: honorable ancestors who deserve remembrance and respect, a brave defense of home and the principles of self-government? Or does the flag represent: a way of life that enfolded in its bosom a terrible evil, a moral abomination, to which we say good riddance?
What if the answer to both questions is “Yes” … and not merely in a subjective sense, that of individual points of view, but in the objective, absolute sense? What if the cause of the Confederacy is both things at once? What if the cause of the Union also encompasses two clashing principles at once?
For the record, I greatly admire Lincoln but I also know he was (A) a politician, and therefore inconsistent, (B) not a proponent of the equality of whites and blacks in all respects, and (C) interested in saving the Union first and foremost rather than abolition per se (since he believed stopping expansion of slavery into new states, and preserving the Union as an integrated entity, would eventually lead to slavery withering on the vine in then-existing slave states) … so I do not jump on the hagiography bandwagon. But I will defend him from attempts to make him the great ogre of the era. Because he was right, absolutely and eternally right, about “the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.” And he recognized it as an offense before God, to whom the nation was ultimately accountable *as a nation* and not just as individuals … i.e. that the consequences of the offense would call down terrible punishment that would sweep in EVERYONE, not just the practitioners of the offense.
And he was right, absolutely and eternally right, about how the denial of fundamental liberty to individuals within our nation simply because of their color, the attitude of treating human beings as property, made a mockery of our Declaration:
“I hate [slavery] because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world — enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites — causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty — criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”
When you’re right, you’re right. And in this, Abraham Lincoln was right.
Which is not to say that he was absolutely and eternally right in how, as president, he conducted the war. Students of history can point to a lot of blunders and unnecessary compromises and tramplings.
What I find odd is the people who will defend Bobby Lee to the last ditch but have nothing but invective for Lincoln. Lee was personally opposed to slavery. But he also was responsible, probably more than any other individual in the Confederacy, for abetting the continued immiseration of black slaves in the Confederacy, and, indirectly, for ensuring the bloody and agonized ends of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of more soldiers than would have died had he remained in the U.S. army and not resigned his commission to fight for Virginia.
If you extend grace to Lee for his flaws and the blood on his hands, in light of his personal honor, I think you should extend that grace to Lincoln as well.
History is messy. I was born and grew up in the South, I love it (except for the damned heat) like any boy worth anything loves his mama, I think Southerners are viciously and unfairly maligned way too much of the time in the MSM, I personally have no problem with anyone wanting to fly a Confederate flag as a tribute to their ancestors and their state, and I think a barbeque in the shade, topped off with peach cobbler & pecan pie, is just about the best meal on earth.
And I also think the Civil War was, in a moral sense, a form of divine wrath poured out on this country; and in a historical-political sense, a tragic irony that the South mostly brought on itself.
To those who say, “It didn’t need to be fought,” I say, historically you may be right (MAY be), but cosmically and spiritually, you are oh so very wrong.
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting,
That would not let me sleep: methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it, let us know,
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will,–
I note that the ongoing debate regarding the American Civil War allows to participants to take principled stands of no consequence. The cause and effect, right and wrong, reason and motive can be debated online, endlessly without require the any physical effort (re-enacting not withstanding), or personal risk.
I humbly suggest that the well honed skills of reason and rhetoric displayed by both sides be redirected to the current challenges facing our nation. To wit, I propose a truce in the ongoing Civil War so that we may focus our energies on our true common enemy, Washington DC.
Respectfully, your humble servant and neighbor: V.
visitor @ 118:
You would be right *if* the issues of the Civil War were in no way relevant to what is going on today.
But in at least two respects — the issues of federalism (self-determination of the states, and weaker federal government), and that of whether sufficient national penance has been made for slavery — the Civil War debate could not be more current.
If you are referring to it as “the American Civil War” because you aren’t an American, then I would suggest that it’s because you are a foreigner that you don’t understand the visceral pull of that mother of all fights in the American subconscious.
What’s the old joke about the past not even being past?
The best thing I have read on the justification for the bombing was a rather short piece in one of the “What If” books. The author points out that it would have been very easy to destroy Japan’s internal transportation systems, the railway system having been a couple of lines that run through some very rough terrain, to sink its fishing fleet and coastal transports, and even to burn the rice paddies.
He argues convincingly that the alternative to the bomb was not an invasion but blockade and continued conventional bombing. Japan would have starved to death, a frog being boiled slowly. And To Death means really to death, as in racial, with a resultant population too small to sustain itself and recover. Perhaps someone should write an Alternate History novel about Japan being repopulated by American Neisi.
The odd thing about this is that it appears that today there are more than a few people who say they would have preferred that real genocide to the nuclear attacks.
Many times over the years I have heard the same story one generation removed from the war, sons of natives that endured in Korea, China, the Philippines. Often it was to say “my father could not speak of it”.
And, we hear a consistent story from eighty year old Japanese women, when we care to listen. They are grateful for the bomb, and are not shy in telling the story of the expectations made upon ten or fifteen year old girls in the invasion, from which they found themselves suddenly released.
71. Dave
You are ov course referring to Texas wich joined the United States by treaty while already an independent republic.
You did make a minor mistake of detail. the Chief Justice’s name was actually Salmon P. Chase.
Concerning the slavery issue. There is an unjustly ignored book by WaPo African Bureau Chief, Keith B, Richburg “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa” http://www.amazon.com/Out-America-Black-Confronts-Africa/dp/0465001882/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281199543&sr=1-2 In this book the author reflects on his good fortune that some ancestor was dragged into slavery, lest he have been born into an African country, perhaps to be hacked to pieces by panga knives. Who was the Beethoven of the Bantu?
By the way, folks, I have noticed a huge increase in the number of fraudulent e-mails with malicious code attached. Over the past couple of weeks I am getting one or two a day in my ISP’s virus filter, whereas before it might have been one every few months. I have been tracing these and many of them come from .ru URLs. I hope this means that the sources of funds for the crooks are drying up and they are getting more desperate, but they are certainly getting much more bold. And it would appear the servers in St. Petersburg, Russia that were the source of so many such attempts are back at it again (reference a previous Belmont Club post on the subject).
But in any case Beware!
I just finished They Fought Alone by John Keats, a 1963 book about the Filipino resistance to the Japanese after the American surrender. It didn’t take long for much of the rest of Asia to realize the Greater Asian Coprosperity Sphere was only going to be run for the greater prosperity of the Japanese. If Americans and Europeans colonialists could be patronizing the Japanese were full of often murderous contempt.
IN 1860 SLAVERY WAS NOT A CRIME.
Individual states had laws on the books regarding slavery. Hence the “free states” and “slave states” labels.
Pennsylvania’s Assembly passed laws restricting slaveholding. Slavery was not outright abolished and universally prohibited in the commonwealth, but it was circumscribed:
http://www.slavenorth.com/pennsylvania.htm
If you lived in Pennsylvania after 1780 and tried to own a slave outside the restrictions of the law, you most certainly would have been guilty of a crime.
It was immoral, but morality is between you and your god. It is not a subject for the laws of man. Only religious fanatics think it is. And only their version of morality counts.
Oh, “morality” is very much not just between me and God/”my god” but between me and my fellow human being if I have trespassed against him or her. In societies where adultery is not illegal, ask any cheated-on spouse if they believe that the immorality of their cheating spouse to be merely and exclusively a matter between the cheater and God.
Also … it’s tricky to use the technicality of “there’s no law against it” to defend, or to appear to defend, behavior.
In 1945, was there a law against genocide? There was not. Which was one of the less subtle defenses of Nazi crimes — what law did we break?
That there was no such law, and that the lack of such a law left civilized people at a legal disadvantage (from a post-conflict punishment standpoint) against barbarians, was the impetus behind the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
I somehow doubt that the victims of the Nazis had to wait until the UN convened in 1948 to recognize that a great injustice had been done, and that the immorality of the Nazis was very much a thing that was between them and the Nazis, not just between the Nazis and God.
Ditto Japanese atrocities.
And you don’t have to be a “religious fanatic” to think that law has a basis in morality. What OTHER basis is there?
74. Mad Fiddler,
I have always thought that instantaneous viporization by Nuke would be a far preferable end than gut-shot by a 7.62 mm or minie ball, or pierced by an arrow smeared with human waste, and left to die of infection. With instantaneous vaporization, the victim is gone before the neural pathways can transmit from the pain receptors to the brain. That, or being hacked to death by panga knives, a la Rwanda? Or some of the Communist class warfare methods?
God love us all because right now, his love and help is needed more than ever. If you don’t believe in God at least believe in your fellow Americans.
I would like to request that you open another tab or window and play this while you read my attempt to say something. Yes it is blatent propaganda, but please do it and bear with me while I say my peace.
http://www.bornagainamerican.org/
———
As you know I’ve been out on the streets trying to raise awareness of the mess that we and our Republic are in and the even more dangerous times ahead of us. Trying to get people to get out of their bubble and off their butt and vote, no matter how tired or disgusted or adverse to politics they are.
The physical part is hard on this old man but the psychological part is worse. I knew that our population had not been educated about America… but to the dismal degree that I have discovered, I had no inkling. It is a shock beyond words.
It is a hard, tiresome and disappointing chore I have chosen for myself. But I’m got to do it. I won’t be able to live with myself unless I do everything I can to rid our Republic of her enemies.
And make no mistake that I am not sure that elections will fix anything. I’m sure that even if the democrats were booted out of both houses that it would be a long and hard slog to get America anywhere near back to her roots, if possible at all.
But I have to make this effort so that if it comes down to the worse…I will have a clear conscience that I tried to do it another way. The right way.
And as I have taught both of my kids and have – and still – am teaching all of my grand kids, impossible things can be accomplished by those that believe and try with all of their hearts and every fiber of their being and that the real secret of success and winning is perseverance and faith.
Yes, I really believe that Belmont Club members need to concentrate more on the real world – the world outside of the internet, the world that begins at your doorstep. Your community, your county, your state. But if your doing all you can, our Republic thanks you as do I.
It’s hard and yes, can be dangerous out here where I am working the streets, but I’ve faced worse many times in my life.
And I and many others like me are calling for reinforcements. OUR enemy is through the gates closing on us on all sides and they are determined to win by ANY means.
Time is important. Saddle up.
Papa Ray
79. Tcobb,
Russian Serfdom was functionally equivalent to slavery. Though the debate continues among the moralist factions of Histo4ry Departments, in some ways, serfdom may have been worse. In 1861 Tsar Aleksander II abolished serfdom without a civil war, even if the system had some continuing difficulties from the Redemption Payment system. And though I admit to a very sketchy knowledge of South American history, I understand that during the same period, Brazil managed to end slavery without a civil war.
I believe a part of the American problem was, and still is, that certain moralists preach a morality they do not want to follow themselves. Free Blacks were widely unwelcome in the North. Remember that the KKK second incarnation was widely popular in parts of “The Land of Lincoln”, and one of the bitterest integration battles occured in South Boston under Judge Garrity’s reign.
workin’ on it, papa ray, workin’ on it. yes, must do more –but around here, in this meatspace, we’re fresh out of folk –for 50 miles in every direction –who need any persuasion of our national peril.
BW/117; that was magnificent, it reads as tho you’d just come from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, with its soaring rhetoric humbly admitting that neither of the combatants of that war can have known God’s purpose.
V/118, BW/119; nice exchange, both points made and both worth making.
Name the two greatest losses of civilian life in the Pacific war. Hint. In both cases the civilian casualties were greater than Hiroshima’s. In one case the event took place on American soil.
Wretchard – The parochialism of Americans has been lampooned since at least Mark Twain, and perhaps earlier. This is a big country in comparison to most others. So big, in fact, that you can find just about all the diversity (oh that word!) of terrain and people that you could want, right here within our borders. So it’s somewhat to be expected that Americans can get America-absorbed. Who needs the World Cup when you have Big Ten football?
Before the 20th century, Americans tended to be parochial because of the lack of mass media. Now I would say our parochialism is probably because of the presence of mass media. Or at least the old-style mass media, the kind that was producer-oriented and the consumers just had to shut up and take what was offered.
But the world is a big place, too. And as much as the world can sometimes be America-absorbed (like the Kenyan in the hinterlands of his country who still knew about LA Gear clothing), politics, as they say in Chicago, somehow always seems to revert to the local: if it’s west of Cicero, who cares?
One of the great touches of an overall great movie, “Hotel Rwanda,” is when Paul Rusesabagina is saying goodbye to some of the last refugees in the hotel, because his family has gotten visas to Belgium and he thinks he’s leaving Rwanda. One by one, he hugs a line of grateful people whose lives he has saved. His back is to us, so we don’t see his face. But on a magazine rack behind that line of Rwandans is a copy of Newsweek with a big, bold headshot of Bill Clinton on the cover. With the caption: MAN OF THE YEAR.
A terribly clever and insightful juxtaposition on the director’s part. In 1994, in human decency terms, in moral terms, the real “man of the year” was almost certainly Paul Rusesabagina. But he is “faceless” to us, while the POTUS is celebritized.
And so the movie’s composition is asking us: What’s wrong with this picture? And what does the “awareness chasm” between the West and the non-West, to a large extent media-driven, have to do with the seemingly routine occurrence of large-scale horrors in the non-West?
I don’t think it needs to be framed in an anti-colonial, Obama-esque blame-America frame (though that’s certainly how some do try to frame it).
But for God’s sake. 100,000 Filipinos are wiped off this earth in the most gruesome and evil fashion, and practically nobody but Filipinos remembers? WTF?
What you have with the poor souls of Manila being ignored is worse than just the “natural drift” of Western self-absorption. It is to no small extent the result of Western self-loathing.
“Unless the Americans or Brits do the crime, it doesn’t count.”
Clearly, the Filipinos’ mistake was in not being massacred by Yanks. THEN you guys would get the full-scale diplomatic apology tour every year, like clockwork, on the anniversary of the horribleness. And Americans would have paid for a large & conspicuous monument, with a museum and multi-media experience attached, not the modest thing that Filipinos have done for themselves.
**************
What I think it comes down to is whether a culture sees an individual, and that individual’s life, as precious or not. The value of the individual is, I think, the jewel in the crown of Western civilization. But we are losing that (or have lost that already).
In cultures where life is precious, it shows. In cultures where life is cheap, it also shows.
Tragically, if Western civilization falls, the worst effects long-term will probably be felt in the non-West. By the very same “little brown people” that those trying to bring about the fall of the West are purporting to champion. This is why the kabuki (forgive the expression) of American apologies to Japan does no one any good, and most especially the people most in need of that good. Because it guts the very thing, the only thing (humanly speaking) capable of getting them out of that horrible cycle of wars, massacres, and needlessly catastrophic natural disasters.
The individual is paramount. The individual is precious because he is made in the image of God. The individual, as a creation of God, has rights and dignity that shall not be violated:
“All men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
I would actually be okay with American diplomatic observations at Hiroshima *IF* the Japanese were sending their diplomats to China, the Philippines, Korea, Singapore, Burma and everywhere else they rubbed out humanity by the tens and hundreds of thousands. Because then, it would suggest it really was about the dead, or mostly about the dead.
But when double-standards and politicking are the rule by which remembrances get done, it is not in any sense about the dead but about who among the living wants to continue sticking it to whom.
122 @ Rurik:
In that book (“Out of America) Richburg actually says, “Thank God I was born in the USA!” after he has confronted his African ‘roots’.
A bunch of years ago, an effort was made to include the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo with the dropping of nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was quickly crushed because almost every country fire bombed other cities. America was the only one who used nukes. Richard has hit the head of the nail with this post. And I have not seen Stalingrad mentioned, devestation for both sides does not make for a neat arrow to point to.
Thanks for this moving post Wretchard.
Buddy #85
re: the Civil War; I quake when I have to disagree with you, my favorite commentator on the web, but here goes: there were plenty of northern boys who had not even seen a black person let alone not even owned a slave. I think you miss the point that the south was in the grip of an nihilistic idea that was particularly at odds with the US constitution. Probably neither side could boast pure-hearted super articulate upholders of freedom vs slavery but that was not the point. Many hundreds of thousands of their black fellow countrymen stood up on auction blocks semi-naked to naked while salesment poked their flesh and forced their mouths open and knew all the tricks about how to make black skin not show nicks and whip scars and disease and sores like cattle at a cattle show. That’s what the south wanted to continue and what the north did not. If you – the south – was going to be a part of the USA – and you were going to be a part of the USA – you had to forgo the auction blocks and everything that went with them. Nobody is claiming that southern boys weren’t loved by their moms and didn’t love them in return. Hell, southern men and northern men liked each other and they went to war. Of course southern boys wrote poignant letters home lived out the multitudinous details of their lives. That is not the point, unfortunately. They were in the grip of a nihilism that had to be stomped out.
Back to the nihilism that Wretchard writes about: check out the Japanese movie “Father of the Kamikaze”; it is not a perfect movie and there are irritating strains of Japanese self pity and unctuousness. However, it portrays Onishi the admiral in charge of recruiting young kamikaze pilots as a final strategy in the war. The movie tries to capture the mindset of the Japanese military from the re-taking of Manila on to the end of the war. It is horrifying. You’ve got the whole imperial and general staff, knowing all is lost yet paralyzed with fear of uttering the word ‘surrender’. As a result they end up grinding a corpse manufacture machine while bouncing the words honor, the emperor, courage, along with the old Japanese standbys ‘gambate’ (hang in there) and ‘shogunai’ (it can’t be helped) to each other and the destitute civilian population.
It is a study in nihilism and feeding the great heart of death. At one point during I think, June of 1945, Onishi pleads with the politicians to just sacrifice 20 million more people. Surely that would wear the Americans down and they would leave Japan alone. To stop now would be to betray the courage of those who had given their lives for the cause. Was Onishi insane? Probably, but he was in a position to keep the corpse machine going.
It is a strange movie but one of which you could say: a Japanese perspective on why Fat Boy was necessary.
The monotheisms teach that ultimate defeat of evil is beyond our power,…
Perhaps beyond our comprehension. For a popular recitation see:
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/The-Enemy-Within_1966-10-06-00-00-00
95. Jeff H. Morris
52. Don Rodrigo then junior officers tried to stage a coup to prevent Hirohito from reading his radio surrender address. // Had they succeeded… Would we have invaded? Or pounded them from the air and sea until we could construct more atomic bombs? It’d have been more death and destruction, in any case.
Someone else posted that we had more than two bombs in August, 1945. By November of that year there were going to be seven more bombs. The expectation was that Operation Olympic would require the nukeing of Kyushu to destroy the Japanese buildup on that southernmost major island. That would have been naive, since “Olympic” would have to deal with radiation. I speculated elsewhere that had we not succeded with the two boms, or chose not to use them at all, we’d find ourselves enlisting Soviet help for a second, northern front. So, another good reason for dropping the bombs, and their subsequent success, is it saved Japan from being divided, with one half becoming communist.
rurik @ 128: … and one of the bitterest integration battles occured in South Boston under Judge Garrity’s reign.
Please. That’s because the desegregation plan was particularly egregious, not because Boston was particularly bigoted. And maybe because Bostonians have a little more tradition of fight in them against injustice including judicial tyranny, than other jurisdictions.
“Pardon my apparent ignorance, but wasn’t Guam the only US Terriritory ever overrun by the Japanese?
No, there was some of the Aleutian islands, there was Wake, and there was the entire Philippine archepelago.”
Pardon me for mentioning it, but the Phillipines and Guam were never US territory in the first place, although Guam is a US colonial possession. The Philippines were and are an independent country. I don’t know about Wake and the Aleutians.
DAS #133:
There is a book, At War With The Wind that does the best job I have read of covering the Kamikaze attacks. By the way, Kamikaze was the American word for it; the Japanese did not call it that but referred to it as “Body Crashing.”
I was struck by what one pilot said, that “giving up his life would strike a blow to revenge 30 million people.” So they were looking for revenge when they started the war?
But no one ever seems to mention Gen Curtis Lemay’s plans, made without knowledge of the atomic bomb. He was going to bring over the 8th and 15th Air Forces and with their 5000 B-17′s and B-14′s based on islands nearer to Japan, combined with 1500 B-289′s they literally were going to leave no two bricks stuck together in the entire country, fly down their railroads dropping bombs every 100 ft, and so forth. Not one big Hiroshima but thousands of little ones that would be more deadly.
137. Fletcher Christian:
The U.S. retained sovereignty over the Phillipines from the time it wrested it from Spain (1898) until the end of WWII. It was a U.S. colonial posession for almost a half century.
Teresita @ 116:
The Aleutians were part of Alaska.
Wake, an “unincorporated commonwealth,”
and the Philippines, a commonwealth,
so, technically…
—
“The Northern Mariana Islands had become a Japanese protectorate before the war. It was the Chamorros from the Northern Marianas who were brought to Guam to serve as interpreters and in other capacities for the occupying Japanese force. The Guamanian Chamorros were treated as an occupied enemy by the Japanese military. After the war, this would cause resentment between the Guamanian Chamorros and the Chamorros of the Northern Marianas. Guam’s Chamorros believed their northern brethren should have been compassionate towards them, whereas having been occupied for over 30 years, the Northern Mariana Chamorros were loyal to Japan.
Guam’s Japanese occupation lasted for approximately thirty-one months. During this period, the indigenous people of Guam were subjected to forced labor, family separation, incarceration, execution, concentration camps and forced prostitution. Approximately one thousand people died during the occupation, according to Congressional Testimony in 2004. Mariana Island historians estimate that 10% of Guam’s some 20,000 population were killed by violence, most by the Imperial Army and Navy.[9]
The United States returned and fought the Battle of Guam on July 21, 1944, to recapture the island from Japanese military occupation. More than 18,000 Japanese were killed as only 485 surrendered. Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, who surrendered in January 1972, appears to have been the last confirmed Japanese holdout in Guam.[10] To this day, Guam remains the only U.S. soil with a sizable population to have been occupied by a foreign military power, since the War of 1812. The United States also captured and occupied the Northern Marianas.
Post war
After the war, the Guam Organic Act of 1950, established Guam as an unincorporated organized territory of the United States, provided for the structure of the island’s civilian government, and granted the people U.S. citizenship. However, to this day, U.S. citizens residing on Guam are not allowed to vote for president and their congressional representative is a non-voting member.[8]“
“And you don’t have to be a “religious fanatic” to think that law has a basis in morality. What OTHER basis is there?”
Power.
If you think about it, the law is raw, naked power. The guys with guns and badges are there because it is their job, not out of any morality. The guy they work for works for somebody. He/she/unsure in turn works for somebody else. At the top of the food chain (allusion, of course) is somebody is giving the order that sends minions over to surround your house.
They mostly give such orders because they can (see Waco, Tx.).
No, morality has very little to do with the Law. Law has NOTHING to do with morality. Justice might.
Anyone that confuses Law with Justice has had very little exposure to either.
As far as slavery being illegal in PA, what does that have to do with SC? Teaching a woman to read is illegal in parts of the Islamic crescent so by your logic it should be illegal in Wyoming?
I most humbly disagree, as do many fine ladies in Wyoming.
Slavery was not addressed (beyond the 3/5′s rule) in the Original Constitution because if it had there would have been no Constitution. It was a deal killer for the South. If the north had insisted, then the slave states would NOT have joined the United States. There would have been 2 nations created post revolution. So the South saw the North as violating an agreement struck almost a century before. The 10th Amendment is what created the USA. Without that, there would not have been any USA. States were seen as sovereign, with cooperation between them for certain, restricted purposes.
Please note that the 10 Amendment indirectly protected the right of any State to withdraw from the Union. That is because the rest of the Constitution didn’t give the federal government the right to prevent withdrawal.
Example. You go down to the local dealer and pick out a nice shiny new Hubmobile. It is just what you want, except for the color, which isn’t bad. So you agree to pay 500 per month for 48 months to buy the car. Long about month 24, Two guys show up and tell you things have changed and you now need to pay 750 per month. You don’t agree, so they break one of your legs. And raise it to 800 per month, for services rendered.
Would you like that? I thought not.
“If you – the south – was going to be a part of the USA – and you were going to be a part of the USA – you had to forgo the auction blocks and everything that went with them.”
We chose to not be part of the USA. At that time a LEGAL Choice. Then a 1/2 black President chose to send in the troops, or in some cases, not withdraw them. Look at a map of the battles in the War of Secession. They were mostly defensive battles, fought in the South to repel Union invaders.
Lee went to Gettysburgh for shoes. He got a battle instead.
You missed my point. Which was that the South was growing to believe that Slavery was just as horrible as the North claimed it was. Machinery and that growing realization would have ended slavery as soon or sooner then the war did.
As a point of fact, there are no slaves in the south picking cotton today. Yet there is more cotton produced and gotten to market then ever. The Economy my be limping along but cotton farmers are doing all right;
http://www.wikinvest.com/wikinvest/api.php?action=viewNews&aid=1624365&page=Futures%3ACotton_Futures&format=html&comments=0
It seems no matter how bad things get, folks need clothes. Imagine that!
Doing it without slaves, or at least slaves picking cotton. Only the NCAA has slaves any more and they call them Athletes instead (allusion notice). This modern version of slavery is widespread (nationwide according to ZZTop) and supported by the public AND the Law. Despite the NCAA routinely violating entire books full of law and bushel baskets of Constitutional rights.
You are a victim of revisionist history, history that has been written to support a political POV, not reality.
Sort of like what is being attempted today.If the Nuclear bombing of Japan in ’45 is allowed to be taken out of context NOW, some poor smuck will be doing in 2155 what I’m trying to do today. Change the propaganda of America being an evil nation that nuked all those poor little Japs because Truman was having a bad hair day to the reality of those nukes being the quickest and most human way of ending a war the Japs started.
Dear skip_this_post,
Yes of course! How could I be so blind and stupid? Everyone here agrees with you that the American south was so yielding to the idea of giving up slavery in 1860. Just a few more years, just a few more lashes and nudge nudge everything would have been hunky dory for blacks in the south. As proof just look at how sweetly southern whites treated southern blacks between 1865 and 1965.
Dangnabbit; gotta go. My sheets are ready down at the laundromat!
Yes, Das, we need more lectures about the evils of US racism.
The ironies in that regard abound. Here are the headline and an excerpt from an article from The Mail Online about an aspect of Michelle’s breathtaking extravagance not being mentioned in the US mainstream media.
[Excerpted headline & paragraph follow:]
Me and my heavies: Michelle Obama goes walkabout in Marbella after ‘racist’ Spaniards gaff
By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 3:21 PM on 5th August 2010
The Obama administration faced an embarrassing diplomatic blunder today after it was forced to pull a warning about racism in Spain – just as the First Lady arrived in the country for a summer holiday.
Soon after touching down in the Costa del Sol yesterday morning, Michelle Obama was pictured taking in the sights of Marbella with daughter Sasha, nine, surrounded by a throng of bodyguards.
Staff at the U.S. State Department removed the contentious advice to travellers, which included the phrase ‘racist prejudices could lead to the arrest of Afro-Americans who travel to Spain,’ from its website on Monday.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1300240/Michelle-Obama-goes-walkabout-Marbella-racist-Spaniards-gaff.html#ixzz0vxeY1hJr
This article has some great photos of the Luxury Hotel where our glorious and highly sensitive First Lady has booked 60 rooms for a five-day period.
Take a look at’em, folks.
It’s as much as any of us [expletive deleted] peasants will get to see of that 3/4 million dollars.
143. Das
Dear skip_this_post,
Yes of course! How could I be so blind and stupid? Everyone here agrees with you that the American south was so yielding to the idea of giving up slavery in 1860.
Beat me to it.
Sorry Skip, but you can’t accuse people of falling for “revisionist history” when you provide some of your own. One aspect of the latter pre-Civil War years was that the non-slave states were using what could be called a policy of “containment” to thwart the expansion of slavery. Slave owners and their allied business and societal interests were trying to expand the institution of slavery beyond the Deep South. One of the unintended consequences of the Mexican War was that it provided an impetus for slave states to expand the reach of the institution of slavery. The containment option was sabotaged by the Compromise of 1850, and then all bets were off.
The fact that many Southerners did not care for slavery didn’t translate into any great southern movement to abolish the practice. The powers-that-be in the South were primarily the slave owners and their attendant business and political allies. Slavery might have gone by the wayside by the end of the 19th century but for the war. Or not. Apparently some Virginians in remote (to the feds at the time) parts of that state were surreptitiously keeping black slaves until the turn of the century.
Also, what did you mean by a “1/2 black president” in the context of the Civil War?
Lee went north to force a settlement with barefoot troops.
What boots/shoes/rags they were wearing were falling off at the roadside.
Lincoln half-black? Let’s keep this serious, not vitriolic.
The key power players in the Confederacy were the enslavers.
It is irony compounded that Lee, Longstreet and Hill regarded slavery, and its maintenance their number one burden. All of them could see that without that issue, the Army of the Potomac would fade away for lack of replacements. Union losses due to desertion were some of the highest ever recorded in the modern era.
By comparison southern morale stayed solid even after Gettysburg!
However, mind-boggling inflation took hold in the South after Vicksburg and the ‘Anaconda’ fleet made Rhett Butler a big winner. He demanded solid money from the solid South.
Longstreet constantly argued that the war would be decided in the West. The distances involved favored calvary – and the South dominated that arm. Further, opportunities to constrict the northern economy abounded.
Lee would have none of it. His ambit was to protect Virginia — to hell with the West.
The South did some other dumb moves… like waste staggering labor at Atlanta swapping freight with slave labor at gauge-change junctions all over town.
( There were multiple railroads with multiple gauges!)
( The same idiocy was practiced on the German side of the Eastern Front — this time the slaves were Soviet Army prisoners. This logistical folly led directly to the impairment of Operation Blue and the loss of the entire campaign. )
This hub was the reason Sherman came to Atlanta, the pivot point for supplies coming up to the Army of Northern Virginia. Vicksburg cut the Mississippi River, Atlanta cut the South in half. Fighting after that point was as useless as the Germans carrying on after Falaise.
( Western troops did figure that one out: they were dropping their weapons all the way back to Germany. By September 2nd, Ploesti was lost to the Russians. By carrying on, the Nazis destroyed Germany, itself.)
Lee blew the whole War Campaign by ever going north. If he had played for time the voters would have given Lincoln his walking papers and Copperheaded McClellan would have given them peace. Lee could have easily held out for another eighteen months AND held Atlanta if he had backed Longsteet’s logic.
Going north caused draft riots, but… caused yet others to volunteer. There was a surge in rural Pennsylvania and New Yorker anti-Confederate sentiment after J.E.B. Stuart got them all stirred up. ( Lee was stunned at the time.)
Dear 144. Scythianeedle,
Boy, I’m just full of blunders today. Thanks for reminding me that the 1st lady’s vacation excess (just becasue she is black) act as a counterweight to the way blacks were treated in the south from 1865 to 1965.
Yikes, I’m outmatched intellectually; I’d better scoot…
Skip_this_post
You missed my point. Which was that the South was growing to believe that Slavery was just as horrible as the North claimed it was.
Yes, and William Lloyd Garrison just completed a highly successful speaking tour of the South in 1860.
The Civil War began a century and a half ago. Family members on both sides perished in the conflict. My mother told me that in the 1930s , having heard on and on about the Civil War from her parents’ and grandparents’ generations, she decided she wasn’t going to fight the Civil War again.
I will agree with you that nearly all the foot soldiers in the Confederate Army were fighting to defend their home territories, not to preserve slavery. Those who engineered secession did not have the same motivations as those who became foot soldiers. In any event, I have read extensively on the Civil War, and you are as likely to change my mind as I am to change yours: not very much.
136. Josh,
You’re welcome. Thank you for your moral instructions which illustrates so well the sort of smug morality to which I was referring. It seems never to have occurred to your morally superior classes, that some of the Southerners in some local venues might well have felt similarly about the perceived unreasonableness of some of the edicts handed down to them by Federal judges. Instead you seem to suggest a moral superiority of your proles to all other proles. It may be unfair to single out South Boston as the only example, when trouble occurred in Northern city after city when invited to implement the same sort of social measures they supported imposing on the South. But Judge Garrity is a useful personalization, much like Bull Connor, and the Brahmin class has always seemed to lead in meddling in the affairs of others.
Before you, or anyone else leaps to conclusions, I will clarify that I think court decisions striking down de jure segregation were proper. But when the courts went one step further, to mandate integration, that was the “bridge too far”. And the unintended, and perhaps, intended, consequences have disrupted society ever since.
Hmm, i used to hear m’y parents saying that thé “americans” were thé liberatueurs
I think that thé innocent victimes make thé collective memory of a nation, and that their fantoms Will haunt until réparation, that nô legend, nor policy will anihilate
Depends on thé Times political fashions that we hold for rightful thé death of a few & or many innocents… But thé fantoms have a eternal life
Dunno if my comment Will be edited, im on iPhone probationp
Note to Obama and his historically deficient State Department: here’s why Imperial Japan had to be defeated with all means at our disposal (and used by a true Democratic President with leadership and integrity, Harry S Truman). While watching these videos, imagine that the helpless victims are your family members, friends, and loved ones (WARNING–stomach churning):
Rape of Nanking Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoW2WYdOsvg
Rape of Nanking Part II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqH47MIpuoA&feature=channel
“Oh, but the Japanese were close to defeat when we dropped the atomic bombs.” Sorry guys, everyone wanted the war to end after years of bloody fighting. 100K killed in Manila alone while the Imperial Japanese military were “losing.” Dead is dead, whether it be by bullet, beheading, bayoneting, or nuclear attack on civilians or military personnel. It was either prolonging the evil militaristic Japanese regime or decisively ending it with an Allied victory and following it up with magnanimous American support afterwards. America and Japan are strong allies and great friends now, and Americans have a deep capacity to forgive, but we will never forget the evils we had to fight to ensure our very existence.
tioedong #81: Salamaat Po! Glad somebody from the PI joined in. When it comes to avoiding trouble, there are three reasons the Philippines will not. Location, location and location. All of us will just have to deal with that as best we may.
Bahala Na!
To the rest of you: Many Filipinos are suspicious of Koreans as they made up a large
portion of Japanese occupation forces. Yet they do not speak of Korean atrocities
but of Japanese ones. This is because Korea itself suffered 40 years of “co-prosperity” and the wanton misbehavior came from Tokyo, not Seoul.
wretchard #101: regarding your insight about not needing to save the world nor condemn it. You were again profound. In 1975, VN was overrun. While others gloated, I had heartbreak. Today, I do not understate the challenges we face but I am content with the overall course of human events to date. What I stand for has been validated and has a good fighting chance to continue. Those others? Looks like they have managed to drive themselves quite insane. That may be why we got the fighting chance.
bogie wheel #117: Sir, the correct form of address is “Marse Robert”. I am a devout Johnny Reb who refuses to go along with the DiLorenzo/Rockwell slander of
Abe Lincoln as tyrant. Once hostilities were joined, he had no choice but to
suppress Confederate support in the North. When Congress declared a state of rebellion and insurrection (they should NOT have done that but it was their choice to make) he certainly had the Constitutional authority to proceed. IMHO he proved himself quite adroit in the matter and his “depradations” ceased when hostilities did. Without him, I believe that there would have been nationwide reconstruction and I see no way we would be here today had that been the case.
Lincolns’ shortcomings? An almost Marx-like misinterpreatation of economics. And
a belief in a unitary form of governance that was supposed to be unchallengeable
unless some justified night of the long knives could supplant it. SF author Harry Turtledove has I think drawn the most accurate picture we have of this man who certainly deserves his place on Mt Rushmore.
visitor #118: Our lively discussion of The War Between The States—–its most accurate title—— illustrates the critical question as to what type of governance
we are capable of maintaining. Is Washington D. C. a mooring post for some common interests or is it there to break all eggs so we shall all be fried in the same omelet? The BC indicates that the egg-breakers may have an unusually difficult time.
NC Mountain Girl #124: If you will look in the back of “They Fought Alone” you will find the name of Clyde Childress. He lived in Tucson AZ until his passing in 2007. In the late 90s I had a deal of correspondence with him and was impressed with his sagacity. So was my Tucson talk show buddy who introduced me to him. Clyde thought the book tooted Fertig’s horn a little too much but was the first to concede that the Mindanao Resistance would have been lost without Wendell W. He paid me the compliment of praising the accuracy of my analysis of how and why the Japanese Army went from being “The Gallant Japanese” circa 1900 to “The Dirty Japs” by the 1930s.
Details of his story were very fascinating and when he went at the age of 90, an
online eulogy from Mindanao recalled his success in an engagement I had never heard of but which saved an entire town from “co-prosperity”. BTW: Clyde was good friends with the German Waldo Neveling who also lived in Tucson until his death in 1978.
rurik #122: Correct. Salmon is the actual name. I thought there was something “fishy” about my post.
rurik #125: Wisest words I ever saw about slavery: “Slavery was called the peculiar institution because it was contrary to American principles. However an examination of history shows that it was theose principles which were peculiar, not slavery.” (Thomas Sowell) Involuntary servitude has been so common that all human beings have ancestors who were slaves and ancestors who owned slaves. There is no escaping that fact. And all of us have ancestors who were fer it and ancestors who were agin it. And to this day, the generality of humans will ass u me that slave labor is profitable.
Now put this in your pipe and smoke it a while: After Sharpsburg have given the North something resembling a victory, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
A clever move on his part as it changed the war from being against secession—–which is a natural human right——to a great moral crusade against slavery, an utter necessity which can never be complete. That move is IMO the only thing that kept the Union Army going in the face of frightful casualties and which kept the homefront from deciding that the war was not worth it. Johnny Reb took even heavier casualties relative to the Southron population base AND got his homestead burned out as well. In order to own slaves? I doubt it.
Soooo: What would have happened if Lincoln had had a brainstorm and followed up his proclamation with a diplomatic offensive via the good offices of British and French diplomats. The USA would cease hostilities, lift the blockade and extend Diplomatic Recognition to the CSA PROVIDED the CSA amended its Constitution and abolished slavery within the year or less. What do YOU think would have happened?
Other commenters welcome here as well. (Hope Wretch doen’t cut us off.)
As far as slavery being illegal in PA, what does that have to do with SC?
The original statement was “In 1860 slavery was not a crime.” It did not specify a location and did not even restrict the claim to the United States. If the statement was supposed to cover only South Carolina or the slaveholding states, or to exclude states like Pennsylvania which did have laws on books against slavery, then the statement should have been worded as such.
My discussion of Pennsylvania responded to the statement as originally written.
But nice way to move the goalposts after the fact.
Power.
If you think about it, the law is raw, naked power. The guys with guns and badges are there because it is their job, not out of any morality. The guy they work for works for somebody. He/she/unsure in turn works for somebody else. At the top of the food chain (allusion, of course) is somebody is giving the order that sends minions over to surround your house.
So … every single law ever written is merely an expression of Group A sticking it to Group B, i.e. an exercise of raw, naked power. No law has ever been written because it was the expression of the proponent group or society’s belief that _____ was right or wrong.
And I would be interested to hear from the LEOs on the board if they do what they do “not out of any morality” but “because it is their job.” By this logic, they are indifferent to questions of morality and would still fine and/or arrest and jail citizens even if the “crimes” the citizens were guilty of were, for instance, (A) making statements critical of the government, (B) reading publications or blogs where statements critical of the government were written, (C) failing to hang a 16×20 picture of the POTUS in a prominent location in their business or office, and (D) breathing, there being laws on the books concerning any or all of these in this hypothetical society.
Never mind whether the laws have any moral basis or moral ends. The LEO enforces them only because “I’m just following orders” (per your construction, the guy above me says so, and the guy above him says so, etc.).
This is your view of law enforcement?
Jolly. If I were a cop I would be SO flattered.
Slavery was not addressed (beyond the 3/5’s rule) in the Original Constitution because if it had there would have been no Constitution. It was a deal killer for the South. If the north had insisted, then the slave states would NOT have joined the United States. There would have been 2 nations created post revolution. So the South saw the North as violating an agreement struck almost a century before. The 10th Amendment is what created the USA. Without that, there would not have been any USA. States were seen as sovereign, with cooperation between them for certain, restricted purposes.
In point of fact, there would have been no United States in the first place because the delegates of the Southern colonies in the Second Continental Congress would have voted against the resolution for independence if the abolition of slavery had been on the table. An anti-slavery clause in an early draft of the Declaration was struck for precisely that reason. The vote for independence had to be unanimous and slavery was THE divisive issue butting up against the Declaration’s proclamations of God-given individual rights in 1776, just as it was THE divisive issue in 1787 when the Constitution was written. In both instances, the Founders & Framers punted on the question of abolition, it being an irresolvable dispute at that time, and they having what they considered more urgent matters at hand.
But let’s not pretend that the South was somehow under the delusion that the North was okay with the existence of slavery, that the “agreement” that had been struck in both the Declaration and Constitution was the end of the abolition debate. The Founders and Framers knew, and early Americans knew, that these documents sidestepped the issue, not settled it. Successive generations of Americans were left to wrestle with it, and wrestle with it they did: the Missouri Compromise in 1820, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the emergence of the Free Soil Party in 1848 and the Republican Party in 1854.
FWIW I believe that a state has and should reserve the right to secede from the Union. Constitutions of the individual states may or may not legally support this. But as a matter of overall principle I think that membership in the United States should be a matter decided by the residents of each state.
I just think slavery was a rotten staff on which to fly the states’ rights flag. You cannot unhypocritically and virtuously assert a God-given right to liberty while denying someone else his. Which was Lincoln’s point in the quote I excerpted in 117. The existence of slavery anywhere in the United States morally compromised the United States’ dedication to the principles of the Declaration. The Southern states’ acts of secession were morally compromised, and fatally so, by their denial of liberty to the slaves in their midst.
And I reject claims that secession was not motivated to a huge degree by the slavery issue. “States’ rights” was a fig leaf IMO. The slaveholding political powers in the South were all for using the big hammer in Washington whenever they thought they could retain their institution that way. Cf. Dred Scott.
Henry Adams in 1882:
Between the slave power and states’ rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states’ rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas “by joint resolution” [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision —- all triumphs of the slave power —- did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states’ rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states’ rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.”
************************
You missed my point. Which was that the South was growing to believe that Slavery was just as horrible as the North claimed it was. Machinery and that growing realization would have ended slavery as soon or sooner then the war did.
I realize this statement was directed to another commenter, but I will address it.
The claim that anti-slavery sentiment in the South “would have ended slavery as soon or sooner than the war did” is nonsense.
Yes, eventually the technology of industrialization would have altered the agrarian economy in the South and ended the need for slave labor on the Southern plantations, just as technology and industrialization in the North had changed the North’s economy.
But this economic shift in the North took place over decades and decades.
To pretend that the South was on the very eve of de-slaving itself in 1861 is pipe-dreaming. If it were, you would have seen a decades-long sustained trend towards smaller farms, different crops and a critical mass of industry.
Of the 128,300 industrially based businesses in the United States in 1860, 110,274 were in states that would remain in the Union.
When economies shift as a result of natural course (as opposed to political fiat or catastrophe), they do so only when there is something to shift TO. The South had bupkiss to shift to in 1861. The Civil War was, in effect, the political fiat that ended the slavery component of the South’s economic base. Which was why the shift was so catastrophic for the South.
rurik @ 149: It may be unfair to single out South Boston …
It’s pretty much a non-sequitur, comes across as too defensive and you lose anyway, invites “Oh yeah, well then let’s just see who was more racist, South Boston 1974 or slave auctions 1845!” You really want to have that discussion?
The whole modern civil rights movement 1960-1980 (or through the present, as you like it), is so often abused these days. Anyone wishing to claim moral superiority and the right to instruct the population, or at least the atavistic dregs thereof, brings it up as an example. Including those in California debating the current gay marriage issues. Bah, humbug. Rather like the Nuremberg Trials, supposedly a lesson in how the enlightened handle evil. In retrospect, I believe they set a bad precedent. Wasn’t it Churchill who wanted them simply taken out and summarily shot instead? The danger is in setting morality as justification for war, murder, or any other kind of coercion, violence, or tyranny you care to name. The Democrats do this all day long, “we need to make X a federal crime” or else nobody will know that it’s bad, and if it’s bad we need to have federal prosecutors and the FBI crack down on it. Like putting ketchup on a steak. Bah humbug, I say. Let’s keep to the issue at hand here on BC, says I.
The liberal default — “Amerikka is always wrong, and by the way, me no like Boosh.”
An interesting read. But, as I recall, the original reference to the conflict of 1861-65 was to the fact that it was not initiated as a war against slavery. My interpretation is that slavery did lead to session, which was in all likelihood legal. But it was the session and resulting loss in most of the federal government’s revenue at the time (tarrifs on goods moving through southern ports)that led to the war. As noted the federal government took care to engineer an incident to excuse their invasion, but make no mistake, the reason wasn’t to “free all men” nor was it to preserve the union for the sake of union. . . it was money, the same think that motivated session in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, fighting a war for natural resources i.e. money makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than fighting one for ideology (think Vietnam, and Korea here). Logic is used to fight wars, which are generally founded on logic (albeit often twisted), but it takes emotions to sustain and later justify them.
The 300 lb gorilla in the room is that Bushido was a long standing, pseudo religious, barbarous philosophy who’s followers were taught that suicide in killing the enemy was the highest calling. . . sound familiar? Yet two well placed weapons (albeit after much sacrifice and damage inflected with conventional weapons) stopped the practice cold. Wars only end when one side is made aware that the price of continuing is too high, when will we decide to end islamofacism?
Skip: We chose to not be part of the USA. At that time a LEGAL Choice.
Sure, but firing on the Federal fort at Charleston was not only illegal, it was treason.
Then a 1/2 black President chose to send in the troops, or in some cases, not withdraw them.
There used to be another person here named Whiskey who thought skin color meant something.
Look at a map of the battles in the War of Secession. They were mostly defensive battles, fought in the South to repel Union invaders.
The South was doomed because they had established the precedent of going to war to settle all disputes between states rather than relying on the political process. Even if the Confederates won and went their own way, they would have soon split between established east and frontier west over the same issues that divide urban areas today from the rural part of the counties in which they lie. The instant a state like Tennessee found it couldn’t get its own way in Richmond they would secede. The entire South would divide and subdivide itself over the most arcane issue, leaving the old Union to pick up the pieces.
Lee went to Gettysburgh for shoes. He got a battle instead.
Lee went north to draw out the Army of the Potomac. Fresh from victories at Fredricksburg and Chancellorsville he was feeling invincible. A win at Gettysburg and Lee would have moved on to Harrisburg and even Philadelphia, and the pressure on Lincoln to negotiate an end to the war would have been unbearable.
Lincoln was ALWAYS obsessional about the Union being perpetual. Read his earlier analysis going as far back as 1837.
Lincoln always assumed that any split would:
Recreate the problems of Europe in perpetuity in this new land…
And defeat the Madisonian notion of keeping Europeans out of our hemisphere….
Unity to the limit of the Polkian frontier would necessarily make America strategically paramount and eventually, globally paramount. Such an occurrence would logically assure that no European despot/monarch/coalition would ever repeat the War of 1812-14 again.
As far back as the 1820′s well positioned British statesmen realized that America was now forever lost to the British Empire, and that the hand that you cannot bite must be kissed.
Hence all of the Polkian compromises in the Pacific Northwest. Polk raced to nail that frontier down under our flag because, he too, never wanted to fight the Empire.
Comes the Civil War — British support for the South is put to the ultimate test: will she sell and provision the most advanced battleship yet built (in her yards) to the CSA?
Ambassador Adams informs the Crown that if permitted then it means war with America instantly. ( Kiss Canada goodbye. ) The British had forgot about that option and just how impossible it would be for 1863 Canada to hold off Lincoln’s armies in the field. So, having taken the money, Britain held onto the warship. Davis was heartbroken. Inflation ramped up yet again. The last strategic hope for defeating the Anaconda Plan fizzled.
The Crown recognized that any further hostilities with a continental-island power would set the Empire up for antagonisms too toxic to imagine. America coupled to ANY serious European power would destroy England, forever.
The fuzz-heads who apologize for nuking Hiroshima are really apologizing for resorting to the use of any force, let alone the ultimate force, to settle things. And they retroject their pacifism backwards onto a completely different era. Only Rep. Jeanette Rankin voted against war in 1941, and she voted against war in 1917 too.
I’ve seen the proposition argued convincingly that if the north American “civil war” of 1861 had not been sparked then — if it had somehow been de-fused by vigorous diplomacy, concessions, or brutally effective suppression — all the underlying issues would have continued to fester and result in an even greater bloodletting by the mid-1880′s or so. That’s even if the South had been allowed to secede without military battles. The reasoning was that the two countries would inevitably continue to be rivals over the same issues that made them rivals within the Union.
Same as the European civil war: the first installment ended in 1918 without fully eradicating the proximate causes or emphatically crushing the losers, and even worse, imposed NEW conditions that aggravated all the tensions and animosities that had kept those cultural enmities going for centuries before.
… or so I’ve heard.
MF…
Now you’re thinking like Lincoln.
We’d either get real unified or totally factionalized — not stopping with mere fission.
JustAl @ 157: Wars only end when one side is made aware that the price of continuing is too high.
Even that may not be quite right – wars only end when one side is either entirely wiped out, or sees that they will be if they continue.
Oh sure, “little” wars might be waged and ended on a rational cost basis, but big wars I think may be more matters of life and death.
“Lee went north to draw out the Army of the Potomac.”
True. He went to Gettysburgh to get shoes.
“Sure, but firing on the Federal fort at Charleston was not only illegal, it was treason.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston,_South_Carolina_in_the_American_Civil_War
{snipped}
“On December 20, 1860, the South Carolina General Assembly made the state the first to ever secede from the Union.”
“On January 9, 1861, Citadel cadets fired the first shots of the Civil War when they opened fire on the Union ship Star of the West entering Charleston’s harbor.”
More propaganda. SC (South Carolina WAS NOT part of the United Sates when the ‘Star of the West’ was fired on. So there was no treason, just the defense of sovereign territory from an hostile ship.
See what I mean about how hard it is to uproot deep seated propaganda. That is why nonsense like Hiroshima was a war crime and an act of evil by evil men needs to be stopped NOW.
My absolutely favorite example is the Jews using the blood of babies of Non-Jews to make Matzo Balls. That is so stoooooopid it’s comical. Yet there are over 1 Billion people that believe it. Serious propaganda.
The United States Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1869), that while the union was “perpetual” and that secession ordinances were “absolutely null,” membership nevertheless could be revoked “through revolution, or through consent of the States.”
Please note the date. It is 4 years after the ‘War of Secession’ was ended. Part of the revision of history.
Slavery was evil. War is Evil. Using war to cure slavery was evil. Especially in the light of the alternatives. It was possible to get out of slavery alive. That is why some states had laws requiring freed slaves to leave the state. Death is permanent.
http://www.shmoop.com/civil-war/statistics.html
{snipped}
”
Total population of the eleven Confederate States in 1860: 9,101,090.
Total number of slaves in the eleven Confederate States in 1860: 3,653,870
Total population of the Union in 1860: 22,342,2312
Percentage of total American population killed in the Civil War: 2% Percentage of total American population killed in World War II: 0.3% Percentage of total American population killed in Iraq War: 0.001%
Total number of men killed during the Civil War: 618,0001″
Most American think that WW2 cost the most in American lives. The War of Secession death toll equals the total of ALL the other wars America has fought.
ALL avoidable. The propaganda effort post war was to cover up that fact. 2% of the US population died. More then that wounded. Was there anybody in America that didn’t know somebody that died or was wounded? I doubt it. The political fallout if the facts came to light would have been fatal for the politicians involved. So the facts were buried, twisted, smoothed over. The victors write history so they take care to make themselves pretty.
Blert, I believe Bill Whittle conveyed the idea in his blog Ejectejecteject.com a few years back, as a conjecture he’d come across among some historians.
Don’t know if Lincoln expressed any such idea but you can see the phenomenon at all scales of life… Well, among social critters. Seems its the phenomenon of “establishing a pecking order” on a grand scale. As a navy brat kid moving with family to new towns & schools, I was usually confronted by some schoolyard tough guy who would push and push and shove and punch until I got pissed off enough to fight’im. In those days (late fifties) school principals weren’t so chained by PC strictures, and several times at one school, the combat was not instantly stopped. The Principal told my parents he thought we were each doing a fair job of making our points to the other.
As happens so often, the tough guys that had challenged me came around later and we had a more or less friendly and generally respectful relationship. Not necessarily BFFs, but having found I wouldn’t cringe away from a fight, they didn’t continue to mess with me. I don’t know if that would have happened if the “teacher had stopped the fight” before the resident tough had determined he couldn’t pick on the new guy without paying a price.
Lincoln didn’t have the glaring example of WWII following on the heals of WWI, but there must be lots of examples throughout history of antagonists going to war repeatedly until one side at last completely trounces the other.
In the case of the USA, it’s really a lucky coincidence that the North could claim both a loftier moral posture AND bring its manufacturing superiority to the contest. Still, for several years, it was not entirely clear that courage and discipline were as abundant among its men as were brag and swagger.
My only regret about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is we did not get the bombs sooner to end the war that much faster. And we could have used it on the Nazis too.
We were fighting evil. The faster that victory was gained, the better.
“the South was growing to believe that Slavery was just as horrible as the North claimed it was”
That must be why the leaders of the Confederacy explicitly cited preservation of slavery as the reason for secession.
I was not alive in WWII. Obviously looking back is looking in hindsight. But had we had the bombs sooner we could have ended both theaters that much earlier. The Holocast, Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the Philippines, the island hopping campaigns would have not been needed. Millions of lives would have been saved. The Soviets likely would not have occupied Eastern Europe.
Oh well, if only…
159. blert
Great points, blert. Considering how the European powers carved up Africa in the 1880s, does anybody think they wouldn’t have cast a covetous eye in our direction if we had been reduced to a collection of warring states?
Come to think of it, that would also suit the modern anti-American internationalists like George Soros. That might explain why Obama seems to be doing everything in his power to incite a civil war.
Alexis:
re: 0bumler’s bow to the Japanese Emperor, Akihito:
The foundations are crumbling. Fast.
Joe…
If you really want to dig into it: the Los Alamos crowd built the bomb for Hitler, alone.
They dragged their feet once it became obvious that an atomic solution to Hitler was not going to arrive in time.
They were horrified when they discovered that ‘their’ bombs shifted to the Pacific Campaign. So they started dragging their feet.
( Was Truman or Stalin President?)
Paul Tibbets forced their hand by deploying the 509th to Tinian. The Composite Group was worn to a frazzle in Utah practicing ultra precision bombing — with a bomb that could never need it! ( That was brilliant operational cover. The troops thought they were going to be smart bombing bridges, and indeed early missions used their precision skills. The reality was that they were literally the cream of the cream of the cream of the USAAF. That also includes the ground crews. Even when they reached Tinian they were isolated. When the cameras rolled as the bomb was hoisted into the Enola Gay the crew was freaking out: Security violation! Having the base commander present should have told them something!)
But for that acceleration, ever more lives would have been lost because the Los Alamos crew was ashamed to kill anyone less evil than Hitler.
That must explain why they leaked, and leaked, and leaked to the Soviets. As time has gone by it is increasingly apparent that FDR permitted a rogues gallery of traitors and spies within our most secret war plants to benefit Stalin — the dictator who started the war.
Lest we forget, ALL of European diplomacy was orchestrated around the principle of CONTAINING the evil of Hitler. Stalin cynically let the bastard out of the bottle with the August 23rd Pact. Simply everyone who counted started mobilizing. Churchill had the fleet ready at sea entirely based upon it! Poland was on Red Alert. She just couldn’t counter the Luftwaffe — which made all other defense plans moot. Poland was crippled by a single Panzer Corps ( Guderian’s XIX)
http://ww2warstories.tripod.com/id3.htm
All other tanks were organized in the French/British manner. This was the last time that folly was permitted.
blert #171: For the last 20 years or so the charge is that we would never have used the bomb on white people in Germany. That is was done to incinerate non-whites only.
You should have heard what Brother Tibbets had to say about that.
Dave…
That agitprop couldn’t be more wrong if it tried.
It’s the First Directorate in action!
Re #168, Joe,
In his latest book, “The Dragons of Expectation,” Robert Conquest tells of a friend of his, a Jewish Russian, who told him that the best ending for WWII would have been for the Nazis to have destroyed the Communist USSR and then for the USA to have destroyed the Nazis by nuclear bombing. Conquest pointed out what seemed to him to be a relevant objection, from his friend’s point of view, at least. “But in that case you would be dead.”
“Yes, well there is that.” He did not seem too concerned about that prospect. Evidently the Russian felt that his own death would be a small price to pay for ridding the world of its two most loathesome tyrannies at one time.
I hail from the Scotch-Irish stock of Appalachia; my family’s been in Virginia since before there was a United States. My ancestors fought on both sides of the Civil War, and under General Lee mostly. Only one of my ancestors of the day owned any slaves, and he’s the one who didn’t fight. One came home with a musket ball in his leg from Gettysburg. Another survived Gettysburg but got captured only to perish in the Union prison at Point Lookout. One was MIA at the Battle of the Wilderness, and two were never heard from again after Antietam. It’s all scribbled in the margins of the family bible and handed down by word of mouth. None left any such magnificent letters such as Sully Ballou. In fact it’s doubtful any of them could write. These were dirt poor Appalachian hillbillies who led hardscrabble lives.
I can only guess why they traipsed around Virginia chasing Union armies in this doomed adventure. Fealty to that state was no doubt their overriding motivation. What caused the Civil War must have seemed as academic to them then as it seems to me now. The fact is swords got drawn and the time came to pick sides, and they sided with the home team.
What a crusher it fell out to be in the end. A high school history teacher who knew of all the old folks in my family and all the ties to the past that I have sent me on a project to document their stories of the Great Depression. They were barely aware it was going on, as it turned out. They said they’d already been in it since 1865, so it was nothing new to them.
Grandpa was prepared to disown any of his children if he caught them voting Republican. My how times changed. He passed away long before he could see the changes of the latter 20th century. Fewer and fewer have been voting Democrat by about Reagan. The Dems had left them out to dry. It was an unthinkable impossibility to have elected Republicans back in the Old South of my youth. Obama changed that for brief moment. Mudcat Saunders down in Roanoke had an angle going and helped get lotsa votes for Jim Webb and Obama among the backwater Virginia of today. But the bloom is off the rose. We may have to split up or move the borders of Virginia once again. Already lopped off West Virginia, and also carved out half of DC then took it back. Maybe we can rid ourselves of northern Virginia this time. Anything to keep the carpetbaggers at bay again!
19. RWE
Back in 1991 during the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a US TV reporter stationed in Japan said something very interesting.
Very interesting is colossal understatement!
He said that the Japanese did not seem to connect the actions of 7 Dec 1941 with those of 6 Aug 1945. To them, Pearl Harbor simply was an act of war, while Hiroshima was a great and terrible natural disaster. Pearl Harbor was Japan’s Desert Storm while Hiroshima was Japan’s Katrina, and Katrina, the condition of that city On The Day After was the fault of the American Federal Government, not local attitudes.
Very interesting indeed!
How did he or could you please explain the time travel thingy?
How did this reporter know in 1991 a hurricane would name “Katrina” would hit NOLA in 2005 and the condition of that city On The Day After!
Pretty obvious from here the scars from the American Civil War are still present, and solidified sentiments on all sides will colour any modern seccesionist movement by states fed up with the federal government. And from an outsider’s perspective, the odds are getting better by the day that this could happen.
I agree that even in the South, you could distinguish between the elites and the non-elites, those who had a clearer understanding of what and why they are fighting, and those who simply went for the sake of their homes and family. The damage inflicted on the South by the North is staggering, but could we consider it self-inflicted by the South’s staunch resistance?
An interesting point struck me hard – what if Lincoln proposed peace, on the condition of the South abolishing slavery Sure, they can go their own way, but at least the slavery issue was taken off the table – lives are saved, slavery is abolished, happy ever after. If abolishing slavery was the paramount objective, along with saving lives, wouldn’t this be the best solution?
Let’s be honest, if he and his advisors were halfway competent, this solution would have occurred to them. But he didn’t propose it. So perhaps it can be evinced that the unity of states, even if enforced at gunpoint, was the overriding priority.
The South also has to take its fair share of blame. Poor, non-elite Southerners should have stood as one and rejected the sacrifice of their lives and blood to prolong the power of the slave-owning elites. If slavery was on the outs in common perception, they should have hollered a loud ‘NO!’ to any idea of secession on these grounds. Let the slave owners suffer, not their problem. Did that happen?
In the end, tyranny by the pro-slaving elite or by the Federal government, was it really any different? The people of the South believed their ‘betters’ all too easily, and died for it. In fact, this could be said of soldiers on both sides.
It could also be boiled down to this question: was the rapid emancipation of slaves worth the cost in lives and the trampling of state rights? This is something no sane analyst would use Cost-Benefit Analysis for.
I attended the University of Georgia from 1980 to 83, picking up a Master’s. There were buildings owned by the university that had been slave-staffed cotton mills and textile plants. One building was a factory that had fired a work force of free whites in 1850 to replace them with slaves rented from their owners–the enterprise was very profitable, and was operating when the war ended. Nearby firms had done the same to copy them–some were owned by French investors, and had profitable war contracts with the Confederate and state government. They probably would have continued to prosper in an independent South: Real slavery in a 19th century factory is close enough to hell for me.
Hiroshima is remembered not only because of the suffering and loss that took place there but because it renews an ongoing narrative, and those Japanese dead can still march in its cause.
My grandmother sewed me a Confederate battle flag for my queen-sized bed, and bequeathed me a table which is a copy of the one on which General Lee signed his surrender at Appomattox. I own just about all of Douglas Southhall Freeman’s and Shelby Foote’s books, etc.
But the “dead that still march” for me are the ones who marched with bloody feet — Southerners and Northerners together — through the snow at Trenton and Valley Forge. I will join hands with any American, from any region. of any race, seeking to kill the Socialist beast rampaging through our country.
“That must be why the leaders of the Confederacy explicitly cited preservation of slavery as the reason for secession.”
It is dangerous to quote somebody without reading the quote first. Go back and read it again. Where do I say ‘Leaders of the Confederacy’? Please read the book by President James Buchanan that I URL’d somewhere above. It explains how the people of the states in secession felt. Virgina actually voted to end slavery in 1860. It was shot down with a clever political move BY your leaders of the Confederacy. Without that war, those ‘leaders’ would have suffered the same fate in 1862 that Democrats who vote for health care will suffer in 86 days.
Slavery was all about money. Most slave owners were in hock up to their eyebrows. They annually borrowed their operating funds from English banks. If it was a good crop that year, the banks got rich. If it was a bad crop, the cotton farmers got poor. Year after year for almost a century. Debt passed from Father to Son, just like the land, fixed structures and the livestock.
One of the attempts to avoid the war was a scheme to buy the slaves, and send them west as freemen. That would have worked, since the slave owners could have used the capital to mechanize their plantations. It didn’t work because the Northern factory owners wanted the freed slaves as cheap labor (wage slaves) for their factories. Plus those factory owners would have footed the bill. So it was shot down. The war cost the North about 10X what buying the slaves would have cost. That is just in money. It doesn’t include lives lost and property damage.
Factually, there is no way to know what would have happened if President Lincoln and his northern money men hadn’t been so set on war.
My Opinion is that if the North had let the South go their own way, within a generation the two sides would have reconciled. Mechanization would have ended slavery. Machines are cheaper over the long haul then slaves. More efficient too. Plantations with machines replacing slaves would have made a larger profit, which would have shown other the way forward.
It’s called the industrial revolution, if you want to Google it.
That wasn’t fast enough for the religious fanatics.
As far as Europeans meddling in our affairs, that started in the 16th century and continues today. Logistics today are better then they were in the past. The biggest reason why the British lost was they didn’t have the troops to put down the colonies, or the ships to get them here and keep them supplied.
In the 18th century it took a month for a fast ship to get from Britain to America. Longer for troop ships and cargo ships. So even if the English had ended their wars in Europe, they wouldn’t have won in America. The best they could have done was push the rebels farther back into the Continent.
No, by about 1900, the former slaves and their descendants would have had their own ‘state’ in what is now Washington/Oregon, sort of like what the Mormons did in Utah.
Eventually, the north and the south would have reunited. Without slavery as an issue, there were to many factors driving them together and nothing keeping them apart.
God, do any of you know your own history? First, the attack on Pearl Harbor was never intended to be a surprise attack with no warning. Unfortunately, on December 6, 1941, the Japanese Embassy staff had the day off for a Japanese national holiday. The entire secretarial staff was drunk or partying when the 14 part message from the Japanese government declaring war on the USA arrived. The ambassador and his aid, not trained in typing and decoding, did all the work themselves. After re-typing page after page to get rid of all typographical mistakes, and even then still missing a few, realized they were late for their 11:00 am meeting with Cordell Hull, and didn’t arrive at the State Department until 12:45 pm. At this point it took 25 more minutes to get in to Secretary Hull. When Hull did arrive, after hearing of the start of the attack on Pearl, then reading the 14 part message declaring war 15 minutes to late to do anything, he confronted the ambassador and his aid declaring treachery on the part of the Japanese Government. Unfortunately, for the Ambassador, he had no idea that his government had planned an attack on Pearl. If the Ambassador had arrived in time for his appointment, the US government would have had at least an hour to issue a war warning to all of their bases, which moved the bases alert status to active ship search with aircraft, Base CAP, harbors cleared, ships at general quarters, airfields on air attack warning, and communication and early warning moved to a war footing. By chance and ill planning, the Japanese went from carrying out a brilliant and stunning attack on a foreign military power, they instead ended up being declared war criminals.
As to the final invasion of Japan, the invasion was code named OPERATION DOWNFALL, to be complete within one year of the end of the war in Europe, and consisted of two major components.
* Olympic . November 1, 1945. Invasion of Southern Kyushu to provide a large base for naval and air forces within range of Tokyo.
* Coronet . March 1, 1946. Invasion of Central Honshu and Tokyo.
Between the two, the estimates in casualties added up to over one million men MIA, KIA, and wounded. This was without consideration of the Japanese attack plan which involved over 15,000 planes to kamikaze attack the invasion fleet. They also planned on military units intermixed with civilians armed with bamboo spears and bow and arrows to mass rush the beach heads to throw the invaders back into the water. It would have been a slaughter. The Japanese High Command gave conservative estimates of twenty million casualties and two million US casualties to repulse the invasion and with another forty million before they would be utterly defeated. These numbers shocked the Emperor into doing something that had almost never happened before in Japanese history, the Emperor decided to Rule instead of Reign. The Emperors usually served as the religious godhead to the Japanese people, the Emperor left the actual rule up to the Privy Council and the Prime Minister, but this time it was different. After seeing the massive casualties and realizing that the Japanese people could be wiped out as a people, he ordered the Privy Council to seek peace. He told them to contact the US government and seek a deal even if it meant that the Emperors position was ended. The first contacts to ending the war were going out as the first bomb landed on Hiroshima. To the deniers of Hiroshima not being a military target, you are wrong.
During World War II, Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance. It contained the 2nd Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. To quote a Japanese report, “Probably more than a thousand times since the beginning of the war did the Hiroshima citizens see off with cries of ‘Banzai’ the troops leaving from the harbor.”
The center of the city contained a number of reinforced concrete buildings as well as lighter structures. Outside the center, the area was congested by a dense collection of small wooden workshops set among Japanese houses; a few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city.
The houses were of wooden construction with tile roofs. Many of the industrial buildings also were of wood frame construction. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage.
The population only numbered 255,000 based on records from the numbers used for food vouchers to feed the city pre-bombing.
The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great war-time importance because of its many and varied industries, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The narrow long strip attacked was of particular importance because of its industries.
In contrast to many modern aspects of Nagasaki, the residences almost without exception were of flimsy, typical Japanese construction, consisting of wood or wood-frame buildings, with wood walls with or without plaster, and tile roofs. Many of the smaller industries and business establishments were also housed in wooden buildings or flimsily built masonry buildings.
Nagasaki had been permitted to grow for many years without conforming to any definite city zoning plan and therefore residences were constructed adjacent to factory buildings and to each other almost as close as it was possible to build them throughout the entire industrial valley.
Between the two cities, using the high end total of 365,000 total deaths and casualties from 1945 – 1995, this was a minuscule number compared to the estimated 21 – 22 Million casualties if operation Downfall had been carried out.
For those stating that it was the Russians declaring war that forced surrender, it wasn’t. It was the second bomb on Nagasaki that convinced the Japanese government to acquiesce to the Emperors wishes wholeheartedly. By this point, Truman had been informed of the Japanese desire to surrender without a need to protect the Emperors position, and he decided to accept the surrender but keep the Emperor in his position as a constitutional Monarchy. This recognition was also asked for by McCarthur, who knew as the soon to be Military Governor of Japan, he would need the Emperors position in place to make the transition easier to US rule. The surrender speech was announced on August 14, 1945 to the Japanese people, and even this involved controversy. Some of the generals wanted to grab the recording of the Emperor and force him to rescind his decision to surrender. The Emperors staff smuggled a recording out in some laundry and had it brought to the radio station for broadcast. As soon as the broadcast was heard by the mutinying generals, they gave up and surrendered. The Russians declared war on Japan August 8, 1945 two days after the first bomb. They invaded Manchuria hours after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945.
The Russians knew of the peace deal being made because of their own diplomat in Japan who was a Russian spy, Richard Sorge. They declared war to get in on the spoils with barely firing a shot to actually help the pacific war. A state of war still exists between the two, and Russia still holds the Kuril and Sakhalin islands to this day.
The US never needs to apologize for dropping the two bombs. To save 22,000,000 lives at the cost of 365,000, was not a decision that merits the claim of being immoral or wrong.
And so the hand-wringing, do-good, busy-bodies again resurrect the canard that the Japs would have just rolled over if we had asked them nicely. It’s the same BS that could get us all killed under our current regíme.
Had America been forced to invade Japan, my father would have been there and likely killed. It’s just too bad that the Bomb wasn’t ready to go before my uncle was killed inn the S. Pacific.
Weapons are made to be used.
So … All of the weak sisters can go pound sand.
~(Ä)~
“the USA would cease hostilities, lift the blockade and extend Diplomatic Recognition to the CSA PROVIDED the CSA amended its Constitution and abolished slavery within the year or less. What do YOU think would have happened?”
A guess on my part, is the chattel slave traders and owner’s definition of wealth could not have survived the sudden (one year) loss of income or property. Cotton and tobacco suck the very life out of the soil in which it is grown. Thus along with speculation on the maritime trade, for shipping the crop, land speculation was a major preoccupation among Southern gentlemen. Vast tracts of land were sought by the growers, demanded expansion into Texas, Mexico and points West of the original thirteen colonies,
Such an offer would have changed nothing for the industrial reprieve given the institution of slavery by Eli Whitney was still viable. The need to expand slavery was part and parcel of the CSA version of manifest destiny. For like the commodity that drove the need for land, the institution of slavery, still an efficient model for dealing with the labor intensive production, continued to suck the soul out of its practitioners.
Just as there is no field rotation in the crops of slaves, there is no artificial formula for fertilizing the tree of liberty. Slavery has no place among freemen, it enslaves the spirit of all it touches, master and servant alike. The United states, with or without a separation of South from North would become all free or would all become slave to the institution.
Dschoen #176:
I set a trap! I was just waiting for some complete and utter idiot to comment that I was describing a reporter talking about Katrina in 1991.
You are the winner!
Is it really your great natural stupidity that led to to make that comment or your great frustration at your inability to make thoughtful comments of the standard displayed in the Belmont Club?
Mark this date on your calendar. You can be sure I will.
The Wobbly Guy: It could also be boiled down to this question: was the rapid emancipation of slaves worth the cost in lives and the trampling of state rights? This is something no sane analyst would use Cost-Benefit Analysis for.
“If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” — Abraham Lincoln
God, do any of you know your own history? First, the attack on Pearl Harbor was never intended to be a surprise attack with no warning.
My. What’s with the attitude of superiority, O Exasperated One?
More than one commenter on BC has made the mistake of assuming that just because no one has mentioned X, that means either (1) everyone is ignorant of X, or (2) everyone is scared to comment about X. Universal ignorance or universal conspiracy of silence.
As I’ve said before, trying to read into what silence, or lack of comment on a particular item, means, is futile. There are as many reasons as there are other readers and commenters.
At any rate, anyone who has watched “Tora, Tora, Tora” or read Gordon Prange’s “At Dawn We Slept,” which I suspect encompasses a fair majority of Clubbers, knows about the FUBAR by the Japanese Embassy in D.C. failing to get the declaration of war to the Americans before the attack commenced.
But thank you for the details recap. It is a refresher for those who have not delved into that corner of history for a while.
By chance and ill planning, the Japanese went from carrying out a brilliant and stunning attack on a foreign military power, they instead ended up being declared war criminals.
The defendants at the Tokyo Trials were not there solely, or even predominantly, because of Pearl Harbor.
I don’t know enough about the minutiae of the specific charges to know which ones exactly centered around Pearl. But “Class A” war crimes was the category that would have covered the attack — conspiracy to start and wage war. Twenty-eight Japanese were charged with Class A crimes.
By contrast, 5,700 Japanese were charged with Class B and Class C war crimes. Class B was for committing crimes against humanity atrocities. Class C covered planning, ordering, authorizing or failing to prevent Class B transgressions.
I don’t know what the equivalant of Murphy’s Law is in Japanese, but when you are planning something on the order of Pearl Harbor, which was not an attack in the midst of ongoing hostilities, mind you, but an attack intended to commence hostilities against the U.S., and therefore “out of the blue,” it stands to reason that when you leave yourself a mere one-hour window between a delivery of declaration of war and the first bombs dropping, that you are dealing yourself an exceedingly dangerous hand of cards. The slightest delay in the delivery of the declaration would mean that your precision attack becomes, instead, sneak attack.
Your sentence would have been better written this way:
By chance and ill planning, the Japanese went from carrying out a brilliant and stunning attack on a foreign military power, to committing one of the biggest long-term military blunders in history, inasmuch as the unintended but de facto “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor made Americans livid against the Japanese and created a huge motivional and morale advantage on the side of the United States.
IOW the razor-thin timing was too clever by half. The Japanese got all the short-term military advantage that they would have gotten had the timing worked out, but their gamble lost them the long-term face-saving they could have resorted to by pointing out that the Americans had, at least, been warned, even if it was at the 11th-hour plus. The perceived untrustworthiness of Japanese words and gestures that resulted from Pearl Harbor was probably a bigger loss in the long run than the Japanese counted on.
Because, as it actually happened, America was not warned. Therefore it was a sneak attack. Not intentionally, but nicey-nice intentions don’t count when 2,896 people are blown up, burned to death, drowned, and shot to bits. The Japanese leadership gambled boldly on the timing and lost. They bear the full blame.
The US never needs to apologize for dropping the two bombs.
No disagreement with this. You are spot on.
Amazing that something that’s fairly well known has not been mentioned in this thread so far.
The Anti-nuke movement of the 60′s, 70′s, and the 80′s in Europe, and also to it’s echo chamber in the US, was a creation of the USSR as implemented by the KGB and it’s underlings, such as the East German Stasi. (who were also the financiers of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group) One of the key strategies in this movement was to paint America as “Evil!” because they were the only country that had used nukes in wartime.
The hope and the plan was always to get America, through guilt or whatever, to drastically cut down it’s arsenal and forswear any first use, thus allowing the USSR to lie about it’s own compliance and move into a position to totally dominate both Europe and the Middle East.
Everyone in both Europe and America who went along with this plan in any way was just a useful idiot for the KGB.
One more thing – the idea that Lee risked his entire army just to pick up a relative handful of leather goods in Pa. is moronic. (apologies to those who have espoused this view) People repeat that because a very small shoe factory is the only thing anyone could point to in Gettysburg that may have any value at all, but in fact that spot was never a specific target of Lee’s.
The goal of Lee’s operation that summer was Washington – it was always, and only, Washington. By 1863 the defenses between Richmond and Washington had grown so formidable on both sides that there was no chance of either side making a direct dash for the Capitol of the other. (Which is why it took Grant over a year even after he had achieved a huge superiority in men.) Lee’s grand strategic plan was to avoid all the defensive lines manned by the Army of the Potomac and sweep up into central Pennsylvania with the Army of Northern Virginia, with the hope that the Federals would think that he was about to threaten either Philadelphia or New York. (all combat troops were deployed, there were actually almost no defensive forces in the northern back areas at the time) Then, he counted on the Federals to react madly to the threat and ship troops back, at which time he could quickly change directions and quickly swoop down on Washington from the lightly fortified rear. With the Confederacy in charge of the Capitol, he hoped that a peace settlement along with foreign recognition would quickly follow.
That was the plan. Meade, General in command of the Army of the Potomac, knew Lee was out in backwoods Pennsylvania somewhere but he didn’t know where. So he sent out numerous cavalry scouting parties in many directions. On July 1st, one of Meade’s scouting units ran into some of Lee’s advance cavalry units near Gettysburg, which sat strategically on one of the back approaches to Washington. (maybe that one unit went there because of a rumor of supplies, but it certainly was NOT a directive of Lee’s.)
The early fighting was inconclusive – both field commanders sent word back urgently saying, “send reinforcements and we can win!” Over the next three days, Gettysburg became a nexus which sucked the entire strength of both great armies into it, even though neither commander had ever envisioned or even wished for a conflict there. Lee persisted because he knew that if he beat Meade, the road to Washington and the end of the war lay wide open. Meade persisted because he had finally found the enemy he had been searching for – and so the two armies settled into a slugfest in which they threw everything they had at each other, and Lee came up short.
In the opinion of many, Lee let his fighting spirit and his military pride get the better of his usually fine judgment. He just could not pass up such a grand fight when it was offered to him, even though he should have. You can’t escape the conclusion that deep down, Lee truly believed that he couldn’t lose, and he was dumbfounded by the result. Consider if he had followed Longstreet’s advice, and refused to attack Cemetary Ridge, instead keeping his army intact, flanking the defensive positions and marching straight for Washington. He may even have achieved his goal. But Lee saw that as the cowards way out and refused it.
And thus is history made.
180. Skip_this_post
Pre-Googling, an elderly cousin told me about her picking cotton by hand around 1920. It wasn’t just poor blacks who did it.
This source on mechanical cotton pickers shows that mechanization of cotton harvesting did not become a practicality until after World War 2.
By your prediction into alternate history, mechanization would not have ended slavery until after World War 2. Because that’s when mechanization of cotton harvesting actually occurred. As others have pointed out, slave labor was adaptable to factory work, so mechanization of farms would not necessarily have ended slavery.
You have never explained, if the South didn’t like slavery and slavery was on its way out, why the South was so eager to extend slavery into the Western territories and states. But that is “revisionist history,” I guess.
187. wws
The Anti-nuke movement of the 60’s, 70’s, and the 80’s in Europe, and also to it’s echo chamber in the US, was a creation of the USSR as implemented by the KGB and it’s underlings, such as the East German Stasi. (who were also the financiers of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group) One of the key strategies in this movement was to paint America as “Evil!” because they were the only country that had used nukes in wartime.
I am not going to deny Soviet string pulling, but to point out that many in the movement were sincere in their desire to do away with nuclear weapons, and were not doing so to advance the interests of the Soviet Union. I knew someone who spent a lot of time and energy in demonstrations against nuclear weapons. Her husband had visited Hiroshima several weeks after the surrender, in fulfillment of his military duties. Was there not a connection between what her husband saw at Hiroshima, and her being against nuclear weapons? [I didn't agree with her, but that's another story.] While she may have been a useful idiot, she was most definitely not a Comintern agent.
Wretchard,
There is still a lot of historical information being unearthed about that era. Information highly destructive of the “Japan as a nuclear victim, America as moral monster,” narrative in the form of the unearthed history of the Japanese chemical warfare program.
The bottom line up front is that Hiroshima was a center of chemical weapons production for the Japanese and the weapons produced there were used in Against Americans, Chinese and British troops.
This is from October 3,1998 edition of the The Okinawa Times, and posted at this link:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=713943&sid=62f6ef62b79ce31a7a6759bddde39ff4#p713943
An unexploded poisonous gas weapon of the Imperial Japanese Army was found in the remains of an underground Japanese Army hospital used during the land battle on Okinawa in WWII. Although there were no reports of victims of poisonous ordnance during the battle, the finding was testimony that the Japanese Army planned to use poison in defense of Okinawa against the U.S. invasion. The secret grim operation of poison gas use during WWII was excavated after a fifty-three year silence.
Isamu Kuniyoshi, 59, is a man who volunteers on his own to excavate the ruins of War shelters in order to show people the cruelty of war by exhibiting various uncovered articles. In middle of July, as he was looking for War remains in the ruins of Arakaki Army Hospital in Itoman City, he found a glass ball ten centimeters in diameter. The underground hospital was like a deep foxhole, two meters high and extending a hundred twenty meters in length. Kuniyoshi encountered the poisonous weapon, without any gas, about seventy meters from the entrance while digging in the dirt with a scoop.
The explosive was a grenade supposedly containing hydrogen cyanide, known as “chabin,” a teapot in Japanese named after its shape. The article was sent to Kanagawa University for chemical analysis and copper powder, a stabilizing material for cyanide, was found in the glass container. According to Professor Tadaomi Nishikubo, about eighty percent of the ingredients was copper powder which was intentionally put in the glass ball for some reason. Professor Keiichi Tsuneishi, who has studied poisonous gas weapons of the Imperial Japanese Army, commented “From the shape and the copper powder, we can say it is a chabin. It proves that poisonous gas weapons were assigned to Okinawa during the War.” The professor explained that it was the first discovery of chabin at a battle site in War history.
The Japanese Army secretariat worked on the research and development of poison gas weapons. A hydrogen cyanide grenade, the chabin, was used in anti-tank operations. A soldier would throw the grenade into the air vent of a tank. Because the soldier had to get as close as possible, the operation was considered a suicide attack. The British Army had recorded that chabin were used in the Burma Campaign and also in China. There had been no reports of poisonous gas being used in the Okinawa Campaign.
The Japanese Army had produced three hundred thirty thousand chabin in Hiroshima and Tokyo by the end of WWII.>/b> According to testimonies of those who worked in a chemical factory, chabin were secretly sent to China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Singapore. There was no record of poison gas on Okinawa.
Information on poison gas weaponry was hidden or abandoned in order to escape international accusation at the end of the War, but tracing the relationship between the Okinawa Campaign and poison gas has just been initiated by the event of Kuniyoshi’s excavation.
This is a technical evaluation of the Japanese hydrocyanic acid “chabin” weapon:
http://www.wlhoward.com/id534.htm
T. I. B.Vol. 4 No. 3
May – Jun 1999
Page 12
From our past:
A question was asked about a Japanese handgrenade. Gordon Rottman sent in this response:
The weapon in question is as follows (extracted from my WWII grenade book):
Model 1 Frangible Toxic Gas Hand Grenade (SEISAN SHURUDAN) Glass gas grenades were captured on Guadalcanal and in Burma early in the war. Its designation is unconfirmed and is believed to have actually been developed in the 1930s. They were also identified as “T.B. grenades” by Allied intelligence, but the meaning is unknown. These are the gas grenades once employed against British tanks in Burma near Imphal in 1942. They were filled with liquid hydrocyanic acid (AC), a blood gas derived from hydrogen cyanide. These grenades were initially reported as filled with 80 percent hydrogen cyanide (aka prussic acid). They were found stabilized with either powdered copper (Cu) or arsenic trichloride (AsCl3). Both types had metal crown caps. The copper-stabilized type had a rounded bottom with a cork plug and the other a flat bottom and a rubber plug under the caps. The copper-stabilized type was packed in a metal can and the second in a cylindrical cardboard container. Both types were further packed individually in larger cylindrical metal cans with a web carrying strap. The inner containers were double walled (sides, bottom, and lid) and filled with neutralizing agent-soaked sawdust. The arsenic trichloride-stabilized type were called the 172 B-K and 172 C-K by Allied intelligence after container markings, but these were almost certainly lot numbers rather than designations. (In early 1943, the US Military Intelligence Division reported a similar grenade being used by the Germans, but this turned out to be a mistake due to misidentification of Japanese grenades captured on Guadalcanal and returned to the States where they were mixed up.)
Weight: 1.2 lbs Diameter: 3.9 in
Construction: glass body, steel cap Filler: 12.2 oz liquid hydrocyanic acid with stabilizer
Fuze: none
Causality Radius: INA
Identification: clear glass body, yellowish (copper-stabilized) or greenish (arsenic trichloride-stabilized) liquid, light olive drab shipping can with brown band
Fig. 9-18
There was also a glass screening smoke grenade of similar design. Yes, it is in violation of the Hague Convention, but so was mistreatment of POWs. Gordon Rottman
I have tracked at least three instances of the Japanese using this weapon against the Anglo-Americans.
The British 7th Tank Regiment (Desert Rats) in Burma was close assaulted by Japanese infantry armed in with these “Chabin” gas weapons 1942.
American Army troops in Guadalcanal were hit with them on two separate occasions on 23 and 28 January 1943. Both incidences were described as “Desperate acts by individual soldiers” in the histories I researched.
Significant stocks of Japanese chemical weapons were captured in Leyte by American Army units and both the Japanese Army and Navy used chemical weapons against American forces in Luzon, despite official orders in the name of the Emperor not too.
The 1st Cavalry Division was hit several times by hand held and 75mm field gun fired chemical munitions in Manila in February 1945. It is not clear from the US 6th Army field reports I have read it it was Japanese Army or Navy ground troops who were the culprits.
Finally, Filipino Guerrilla’s reported to 6th Army in January – February 1945 that the Japanese garrison in Davao Mindanao had planted mustard gas land mines and tested the blood agent AC in Chabin hand grenades on dogs.
The American Army “Victor II” river campaign from Cebu to Davao Mindanao by General Eichelberger is much more easily explained by his need to avoid those mustard gas mine fields on the beaches and bridges of Davao.
judging by this Jamestown Foundation piece on Chinese military, they view their ultimate interest of having a blue water navy–ie one where their warships can ply the whole pacific unhindered — as being hindered by the surrounding archipelago of islands.
imho the pla and the cpc are rival bureaucracies in China and not complimentary bureaucracies.
It could be easily pointed out by any western diplomat to Beijing that the two closest allies to China in the east are Burma and North Korea.
Both countries are economic basket cases.
Curiously the very countries China’s PLA considers their enemies are very prosperous.
So is it better to be China’s great friend or China’s enemy?
my WAG is that administratively both Burma and North Korea issues –on all levels –are dealt with by the PLA–and not the CPC.
I don’t know this so I’m happy to be rebutted.
More stuff I’m happy to be rebutted on by knowlegdgable commentators.
That further, a similar administrative disconnect happened with Japan prior to WWII in military controlled regions of Korea and Manchuria. That is,the Japanese military ran these regions lock stock and barrel. That further, the Japanese military brought home the bacon.
The original Japanese co prosperity sphere was Korea and Manchuria. And it worked. That is, the Japanese were able to extract from these regions resources greater than their investment of military power. This brought power to the Japanese military. And enabled it to overcome rival civilian bureaucracies. And argue successfully for an extension of the model.
Again, I’m just postulating this. It would be better if someone had real data or historical insight.
But there are several points to be made here.
1.)it is unknown as to whether the PLA will follow the path of the Japanese military in the early 20th century. But they have similar expansive ambitions.
2.)The Japanese military experience early successes before WWII in their defeat of Russia, their acquisition of Korea in 1898 from China, and their siding with the allies during WWI.
3.) A prudent allied policy would be to ensure that PLA does not experience successes. That any successes that China has would be credited to their civilian bureaucracies.
4.)That further and finally, the legitimacy of China’s civilian bureaucracies would be enhanced–and the rivalry with the PLA extinguished– by the vote for their political leaders–so that power for the CPC does not ultimately rest on the guns of the PLA.
DAVOD: quote: “I think people understand the notion of talking to our enemies,” Obama said. “If FDR can meet with Stalin and Nixon can meet with Mao and Kennedy can meet with Khrushchev and Reagan can meet with Gorbechav, then the notion that we can’t meet with some half-baked dictator is ridiculous.” unquote
OMG…what a terrifying inability to think.
Quote: a new Dark Ages will be upon us …. Unquote
…I think it’s here…
Former enemies US, Vietnam now military mates
WWS, your analysis is largely correct, except that Lee did not have Philadelphia, New York, or Washington as strategic targets, he was only interested in destroying the Army of the Potomac. Threatening Philadelphia was a ploy to flush Meade out and get into the final scrap that Lee was looking for. JEB Stuart was blocked from getting straight back to Lee and had to go the long way around, which led to tales of his “joyriding” that made the papers, but the critical thing was it left Lee blind all the way through the second day of the battle, and by then, any information Stuart had was moot. Longstreet suggested a number of times that Lee maneuver around the Federal left and threaten Washington but Lee didn’t care about Washington because “those people” were right there in front of him, and Lee had already won a victory on the first day, driving them out of Gettysburg with 9,000 casualties. Fredricksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg day one made Lee 3-0 over the last half-year, and he thought one more push would wrap up the whole war. He still thought it, even after day two when there had been a lot of blood shed but no real change in the disposition of either side. But it was not to be, because rifles and canister artillery shot had shifted the advantage to the defense, the Federals had the stone wall, and as Longstreet said, “no 15,000 men ever arrayed for battle can take that position”.
188. wws
The goal of Lee’s operation that summer was Washington – it was always, and only, Washington.
…….
You’re likely right. But my own family lore has it that Lee was out to cut the Pennsylvania Railroad line that ran from pittsburg through Harrisburg and brought supplies from the West down to Washington.
More family lore has it that Jeb Stuart’s forward detachments got as far as Elliotsburg (on current rt 74 north of Carlyle) or just over Tuscarora Mountain to the south of my grandfather’s farm. A rider came over the mountain and rode into Mifflintown.(Which was across the Juniata river from the pennsylvania railroad.)The rider then telegraphed the news of Stuart’s troops to the governor in Harrisburg.
181. Eh2Zed
The Russians declared war on Japan August 8, 1945 two days after the first bomb. They invaded Manchuria hours after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945.
The Russians knew of the peace deal being made because of their own diplomat in Japan who was a Russian spy, Richard Sorge.
The claim that Richard Sorge informed the Russians of a peace deal in 1945 is not correct. While Richard Sorge was a Russian spy in Japan, the Japanese arrested him in October 1941 and hung him in November 1944.
[Given the trustworthiness of Wiki, I checked footnote #1 in the article, as it was Russian language. Dates corroborated.I had read a book on Sorge back in the 1980s.]
The US never needs to apologize for dropping the two bombs. To save 22,000,000 lives at the cost of 365,000, was not a decision that merits the claim of being immoral or wrong.
Spot on. From Louise Steinman’s book The Souvenir: A Daughter Discusses her Father’s War:
It stopped the war. ‘Nuff said.
164. Skip_this_post
Pittsburg called. They want their “h” back.
Lots of words here.
Here are words from one of my favorite books, one that my youngest grandson is reading right now. Which my older grandsons read when they were his age.
“Our Own Country – Its History and Achievements”
snip…
snip…
My other two grandsons who are now engaged in the long war against Islam have read this book and many many others about America. Why? Because I directed and asked them to. In fact I insisted. But after awhile they became enamored, fascinated and captivated by the history of our great Republic, our great American Adventure.
Their education about and of America from their public schooling was nothing more than a shame, a travesty and a crime. We must counter that and educate our children ourselves until such a time that our educators can be trained and trusted to teach the real story of our Republic. Our United States of America.
Make use of the internet and wonderful archives such as this:
Take care, take charge and saddle up.
Papa Ray
The oldest records and myths of ancient humans tell of cataclysmic upheavals of the earth. Shattered civilizations have been found in patterns that can only be explained as resulting from the explosion or collapse of a volcanic caldera, with the violence of that event propelled outward to overwhelm distant shorelines and their inhabitants. Historical records describe many thousands of quakes, eruptions, and tsunamis ranging from barely noticeable to devastating.
Through it all, humans have assumed the solidity and permanence of the landscape, and regarded the upheavals as divine punishment.
The brevity of our flickering lives in comparison to geologic time scales has not given us a long view.
In the last century, an accretion of observations and studies — earthquakes, volcanos, coinciding geometry and fossils of shorelines facing each other across separations of thousands of miles, and radioactive decay — provided enough “puzzle pieces” for scientists to assemble a coherent picture of how forces deep within the earth determine the behavior of the crust.
The Crust — where we go about our lives among the proud halls and towers that our longfathers builded, thinking “How Godlike and Powerful and Wise are We!”
Meanwhile, faults and fractures underlie our feet, while continents creep inexorably, carried by currents beyond our reckoning. If the two masses catch and hold, tension builds until the movement imposes strains beyond the strength of the rock. At those times when the rock gives, the sudden release sends shudders through our lives. The quakes are tolerable if the slide/catch/release cycle is a series of tiny increments. The real cataclysms come when the whole system clutches and holds allowing tremendous buildup of traction.
The extended calm we take so much for granted can last many lives of men, letting us think everything is fine. Then the release of the accumulated energy can end cultures.
All that seems to describe the countercurrents of the present voracious elitist/dependent freeloaders versus the productive.
rickl -
Da winnah!
Pittsburgh, PA is the only U.S. city with that suffix that contains an “h.” Short for “borough” or, in the spelling of General Forbes, a Scot, who came up with the name, “bourgh.”
Some dweebs on the U.S. Board of Geographic Names took the “h” away in 1891, but Pittsburgh got (took) it back in 1911. (Said dweebs were trying to make all city spellings across the U.S. uniform, regardless of local demographics & spelling origins. And their change regarding Pittsburgh was based on erroneous research. Yet another argument for keeping D.C. out of local matters.)
So just remember, it’s –
Harrisburg, PA
Gettysburg, PA
Greensburg, PA
St. Petersburg, FL
Vicksburg, MS
Gatlinburg, TN
Pittsburg, KS, IL, TX, CA
But it’s —
Pittsburgh, PA
Like Tigger — the only one!
T @ 196: Longstreet said, “no 15,000 men ever arrayed for battle can take that position”.
Oh fooey. Of course that was before PGM, but give those 15,000 men even cheap Russian RPGs (1000 yard range) and they could force it. Even in the day they could have attrited each other on an equal basis over a week, but no, they were in a hurry. Could 15,000 guys on foot charge across open ground and then uphill at sheltered cannon? Nope. But that’s not much of an insight. 15,000 swordsmen couldn’t do much better against a prepared phalanx of spearmen.
Yes the technology was just changing, and nobody knew exactly what the capabilities were of the different forces, not exactly, but it was a heck of an expensive way to find out. Though apparently the lessons didn’t take even fifty years later, viewing the horribly misconceived battles of WWI.
So maybe I shouldn’t be so appalled at the poor tactical ROE in Afghanistan, huh, at least it has many historical precedents on the slow learning and poor judgements of the military, at the expense of the front line troops.
202. bogie wheel
Interesting. I didn’t know all that. Is that how so many “boroughs” ended up being “boros”? (such as Murfreesboro, Teterboro, Hatboro, etc.)
Josh: Yes the technology was just changing, and nobody knew exactly what the capabilities were of the different forces, not exactly, but it was a heck of an expensive way to find out. Though apparently the lessons didn’t take even fifty years later, viewing the horribly misconceived battles of WWI.
There was a time early in the Industrial Age when the technology was just advanced enough to supply armies with rifles, barbed wire, and grenades, all things which redounded to the advantage of the defenders. Railroads were capable of supplying fresh troops and supplies, and the telegraph could relay orders instantly, but both of these were only on a fixed network that again reinforced fixed positions. So what started in the trenches in front of Petersburg carried through to the Western Front in Europe. The Maginot Line was the climax of this game plan. After that, railroads gave way to trucks, tanks capable of piercing any fortification were produced, aircraft could deliver troops and munitions deep behind enemy lines, and soldiers carrying radio sets on their backs allowed generals to instantly shape the battle without relying on lines that could be cut. The result was the advantage shifted over to the offense for the second half of the Industrial Revolution, and you got Blitzkrieg, from the fall of France in 1940 through the various Arab-Israeli wars, climaxing with Gulf One.
rickl -
Yes, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names flattened everything to one of two spellings:
“burgh” became “burg”
“borough” (or anything prounced like that) became “boro”
Curiously enough, the borough I live in officially has the “Borough” spelling because they were incorporated as a Township in 1788 and reincorporated as a Borough in 1956. So they escaped the enforced spelling change.
T @ 205: The result was the advantage shifted over to the offense for the second half of the Industrial Revolution, and you got Blitzkrieg, from the fall of France in 1940 through the various Arab-Israeli wars, climaxing with Gulf One.
Well, I dunno about that, maybe the blitzkieg was already obsolete by the end of WWII. After all, it wasn’t employed against Japan, was it? And now we have asymmetric war, and in a few years we’ll have all sorts of autonomous weapons from strategic bombers to robot cockroaches carrying a few grams of semtex.
181. Eh2Zed
God, do any of you know your own history? First, the attack on Pearl Harbor was never intended to be a surprise attack with no warning. Unfortunately, on December 6, 1941, the Japanese Embassy staff had the day off for a Japanese national holiday. The entire secretarial staff was drunk or partying when the 14 part message from the Japanese government declaring war on the USA arrived.
Actually, no. Didn’t know that. Thanks for bringing that up. I do not, however, “feel stupid” for not knowing it, because it isn’t general knowledge. Even though I work with history full-time, I am bound to miss details, as are others. It has always been generally assumed, even among the knowledgeable, that Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack, and it was, even if only for very different reasons than usually assumed.
Gulp. Dood. Are you implying that Manila was American soil?
70. buddy larsen
Lincoln’s Inaugural address delivered on April 4th, was the new president’s response to all those fine SC Gentlemen intent on dividing the Union. the bombardment–prearranged or not–, delivered from the 12th thru the 13th of April, was their reply.
The smaller question of whose island is it anyway, is the Mcgruff er McGuffin. That matter was decided once the larger issue was no longer at issue.
a balder dash ought to be a marathon and not a sprint
My father was scheduled to participate in the first wave of attacks on Japan. As you can imagine, therefore, I and my descendants are quite happy with the way things turned out, thank you.
You cannot be a burgher and live in Pittsburgh,
as burgh is Dutch and the burg German and the burgher is the resident of an English Borough.
Thus Erin go braugh, or “Ireland till doomsday” has not anything to do with revolution! Pittsburgh go bruin, however leaves a whole other taste on the tongue.
Em, Would ya be wantin some fries wi dat, mister?
a balder dash ought to be a marathon and not a sprint
Mr Fernandez,
I am no apologist for the Japanese, nor a revisionist of any sort. But respect for the truth compels me to mention that your list should include the USAAF’s firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945, which killed more than 100,000 Japanese civilians.
“I have always wondered if the personal humilation attending the loss of Iwbuchi’s battleship affected the Admiral’s decision, and motivated him to fight to the death — basically to use Manila and its citizens as his pyre. Militarily, his stand was pointless (it did not cover Yamashita’s retreat) and could only have one outcome.”
There was another strong factor in Iwabuchi’s refusal to leave the city of Manila behind. His troops were not Japanese Army troops, with a logistical ability to feed themselves by taking food with them into the mountains. Iwabuchi was in command because these troops were Japan’s “Special Naval Landing Forces” troops from the IJN. Their organization had no real logistical component, since they were supposed to rely on the Fleet for food and ammunition and all else, or on Army units they operated with. They were alone, and would have starved in the mountains Yamashita told them to retreat into. Iwabuchi’s men knew this, and he might have lost control of them if he had given the order.
This is illustrated by the lack of control he was able to exert when these troops ran wild *inside*Manila*, in the standard loot, rape and burn scenario that goes back to the old Ashigaru regiments of the pre-Tokugawa era troops of Oda Nobunaga, in the 16th century. Indeed, from 1905 onwards the Japanese ground forces in general talked more and more samurai courage, while acting more and more like peasant-raised ashigaru. Few in Asia like remembering this, because today most East Asian armies are raised from peasant families.
My Dad got lucky twice near the end of The War. Because he had landed with Patton at Casablanca he had enough points to take a trip back to The States and avoided being forced to accept a battlefield commission that would have put him in observation planes over Germany. When he and his 1st Sargent made it Home on Leave they expected to be sent to Japan, where they expected to die. The Bomb saved a lot of GIs who were “pretty well used up” fighting the Krauts in Europe.
whatdayameanitstoohot: Your #183: My guess is that there would have been two civil wars going. One in the North and one in the South. Pragmatists would have been amenable as they would see a way out of the jam. Ideologues would have gone berserk
over not getting their way and to hell with the consequences of their temper tantrums. The antics of Southern slavers are well known. Those of Northern hegemonists reside in the shadows but IMO were far more intractable.
Teresita dn wws: There can be some disagreement about where Marse Robert wanted to go after breaking Meade’s center. However, his purpose was to do unto Pennsylvania
(and/or Maryland/DC what Sherman later did unto Georgia.
Before his death, Stonewall Jackson had talked him into such an approach. This was the dawn of industrial warfare and one must go after the civilian infrastructure in
order to prevail. The heavy bombers of WWII were the means of getting around
the obstacles machine guns, etc had provided in WWI.
We are all very fortunate that General Lee did not suceed. His capabilities vis a vis Northern industrial output could have produced a psychological victory and caused the Yankee establishment to throw in the towel. However, the most he could have done in a physical sense was to throw a temporary glitch in their ability to
produce and fight. In contrast, when Sherman got through, there was no way the South could possibly support an Army in the field.
A Southern victory would have left Yankees feeling sold out. Rebs knew that they had done all they could do. Had that war ended with either side feeling they had been betrayed, the history we would have gotten would have been far, far worse that the history we have actually had.
Since it was fought to a finish, we are still here with gravel in our gut and spit in our eye. Good enough for me. He does work in mysterious ways, doesn’t he?
You cannot be a burgher and live in Pittsburgh,
as burgh is Dutch and the burg German and the burgher is the resident of an English Borough.
We solved that conundrum of what to call ourselves by coming up with a new word entirely: Yinzer.
As in, “Yinz ‘r gawn dahntahn?”
Some local wag also came up with a bumper sticker based on all those abbreviated locales … you know, the black and whites: CH, I, OBX ….
Ours is: N@
For those needing translations:
http://www.pittsburghese.com/
Em, Would ya be wantin some fries wi dat, mister?
Fries ON ‘at. Fries on salads, fries on sammiches ….
Obama would only be too happy to involve us in WWIII (or IV, depending on if you count the cold war with the USSR as III).
Look what WWII did for FDR, who created the Great Depression from a recession and failed to fix it: there is a four-chambered FDR memorial on the National Mall (one chamber for each of his terms) and a WWII memorial commemorating the 400,000 Americans who died.
Moral: the more Americans you kill as president, the bigger the memorial.
The more relevant video for Nanking is 3/7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyDm3Vzz8q0
This is fascinating history.
Boy, those grapes of wrath sure taste sour.
Pearl Harbor was most definitely inended to be a “surprise” attack. Having
a Declaration of War delivered to the US Secretary of State an hour or so before
the bombs started dropping was a legalistic ploy to keep it from being a “sneak” attack.
And had Secretary Hull actaully been notified on time, that would have changed nothing about the tactical success of the attack. The communications facilities of that era were entirely too primitive for any warning to have been delivered in time for full alerts to have been implemented.
In addition to which, The Secretary of State would have had to notify the Secretary
of War before anybody could have sent a message to the Army and he would have had to notify the Secretary of the Navy before any message could have been sent to Battleship Row. Department of War and DEpartment of Navy were separate entities in those days.
Finally, to be procedurally correct, Secretary of State would have had to notify the President first and get his authorization to notify the other two.
In short, the Japanese delay in delivering their message was tactically irrelevant.
One way to have avoided being caught with pants down at Pearl Harbor:
One Fighter Group consisteing of 3 Squadrons of 16 planes each plus a Hqs Squadron
with its own, smaller, complement of planes. Put two squadrons on Hawaii and
one on Midway. Set up a 24/7 patrol pattern that covers all quadrants of approach.
This will work like a champ provided the plane(s) have superior speed and range
over anything the Japs can launch off a carrier, can carry 310 gallon (instead of 155 gallon) drop tanks, have sufficient cameras mounted to take quick pictures of
the oncoming fleet and sufficient firepower to shoot their way through anything that might try to stop them from carrying the information home at 400 miles per hour.
Could have had such aircraft but had P40s instead. Somebody owed Kelly Johnson an apology.
We had captured the Japanese defense plans on Okinawa. They had plans to use “dirty bombs” radioactives on the landing beaches, so every soldier would be subjected to radiation. They had biological weapons, the main factory for which was located at an Army Group heaquarters…. In Hiroshima. One way of sterilzing biological agents is to pass it once through a nuclear fire. The Nagasaki bomb was dropped on Mitsubishi heavy industry factory that made torpedoes.
Complicated history ,the causes of Tojo and Johnny Reb, but what about now? The missionaries killed in Afghanistan were as fine of people as we produce. They were willing to trade buying beemers and mini-mansions to go to frightening Third World S**t-Holes to practice healing arts on ignorant wretched broken people.`I have met their kind in Africa and stood in awe in their presence. And they were murdered by sub human Islamic robots who don’t possess a shred of humanity. So what does the left do? Bend over for a memorial to the baby raper Mohammed at the site of a shot from Hell to our nation. God help us!
For those who need to know more,
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge,
Ghost Soldiers, I’ve forgotten…
Some Survived, by Manny Lawton.
(I didn’t take time to read all the comments above mine, so apologies if I repeat what someone already said.)
It seems to me that many make Hiroshima and Nagasaki a big deal simply because they fell to atomic weapons. Many people feel (I said “feel,” not think) that nukes are some specially evil kind of weapon whose use moves humanity into a whole new moral realm.
I disagree with this kind of feeling. Count the bodies and see which parts of WWII were worst, no matter how the people died.
Blert, I usually enjoy reading your insights but in 171 you have relied on the wrong sources.
You said@171: ”If you really want to dig into it: the Los Alamos crowd built the bomb for Hitler, alone. They dragged their feet once it became obvious that an atomic solution to Hitler was not going to arrive in time. They were horrified when they discovered that ‘their’ bombs shifted to the Pacific Campaign. So they started dragging their feet. … But for that [Tibbets] acceleration, ever more lives would have been lost because the Los Alamos crew was ashamed to kill anyone less evil than Hitler.”
Not a word of the above is true.
The facts are:
(1) the focus was on Germany was because it was feared that Germany was ahead in the race to a bomb:
(a) atomic physics had been born in Berlin and was perceived to be possibly better understood there than here, and
(b) German mechanical arts for uranium enrichment were recognized as considerably superior to American. (Germany led the world in centrifuge technology in the 1930s – the engineers in the Manhattan Project recognized that centrifuge technology would provide superior performance but it was considered to be beyond our capabilities – we selected the much less efficient gaseous diffusion process because we were confident we could make diffusion work. Not so with centrifuge.)
(2) by July, 1945, following the proof of the fat man design at Trinity on the 16th, the pacing of the a-bomb program was entirely in the hands of plutonium production engineers at Hanford. The engineers at Los Alamos were well ahead of Hanford in producing the non-nuclear parts of the fat man assembly unit. (An inventory in October 1945 counted 60 fat man units at Los Alamos, 80% awaiting plutonium cores.)
Now it is true that in 1944 a number of employees of the Met Lab in Chicago were fired as suspected spies following FBI investigations, and it is also true that in June 1945 a group of scientists from the Met Lab did submit a petition to President Truman with regard to use of the a-bomb against a civilian target. This petition had 59 signatures including those of Seaborg and Szilard (who had been the author of the letter which had been sent to FDR over Einstein’s signature years before). But by 1945, Met Lab’s contributions to the program were in the past – it had no role in weapons production.
Bottom line: There was no foot dragging, no delays. After the Trinity test proved the fat man design worked as intended, engineers drove the program – scientists could not have delayed it had they so desired, and except at the Met Lab, there is no evidence of such a desire.
Pickett was not supposed to hit the center of the union line by his lonesome. Jeb Stuart was supposed swing around the rear of the Union Line to hit the rear of the union center-and Stuart and Pickett were supposed to meet in the middle–or in the very least Stuart was susposed to create complete chaos behind the stone wall at the center of the Union line.
However, Stuart’s troops were tired after a long ride from Carlyle when they ran into Custer’s cavalry. Custer had a much smaller group of horse soldiers under his command. But he had two things going for him. He and his men were all fresh. As well, they had among the first consignments of repeating rifles in the war. They held off Stuart long enough for reinforcements to come and drive off Stuart’s cavalry.
So Pickett’s men marched to the stone wall alone.
228@Charles:
Plus Custer was courageous to the point of recklessness, always riding towards the sound of gunfire. It served him well, until one day it didn’t.
PS Why does this blog use PDT? I thought Wretchard was in Oz.
207. Josh
Well, I dunno about that, maybe the blitzkieg was already obsolete by the end of WWII. After all, it wasn’t employed against Japan, was it?
We did not use blitzkreig or any other kind of manuever warfare against the Japanese becuse this kind of fighting requires space in which to execute it. When attacking small islands and atolls you are pretty much stuck with “hey diddle, diddle, straight up the middle,” aka costly frontal assualts WW1 style.
Where manuever warfare was somewhat employed was in the island hopping campaigns through the south and central Pacific, hitting weaker points and bypassing then reducing strongpoints by attrition and strangling resupply, see Rabual, Truk, and several of the Philippine Islands.
216. Dave
whatdayameanitstoohot: Your #183: My guess is that there would have been two civil wars going. One in the North and one in the South.
Had the fine gentlemen of Charleston not fired upon Ft. Sumter, there is no telling what the result would be. Cooler heads may just yet have prevailed and a another round of compromise been served up instead of steel. But Mr. Lincoln was certain to lay the ground work for the eventual release of all chattel or at the very least begun a process to put an end to trade practices that broke apart families or fostered inhumane treatment. There is no doubt that any victory which cost the states their union would be hollow and bad precedent. The notions of self government, with common purpose, common legal ties and agreeable definitions allows the whole thing to work.
Pragmatists would have been amenable as they would see a way out of the jam. Ideologues would have gone berserk over not getting their way and to hell with the consequences of their temper tantrums. The antics of Southern slavers are well known. Those of Northern hegemonists reside in the shadows but IMO were far more intractable.
The driving force for much of the antislave movement was Quaker. The majority of the underground railroad was run by Quakers through Lancaster and through the northern reaches of the Shenandoah valley which can be traced to the outskirts of Harrisburg, PA. Following the coastal plain east puts you into the Quakers turf near Lancaster and Philadelphia, South Southeast from Harrisburg following the Susquehanna river brings you North of Baltimore to the the Chesapeake Bay. From what was the breadbasket of the south, and the stores of the Confederate Army you can tromp through the major source of nutrition for the Northern army and much of Mid Atlantic Urban America. You don’t even have to break a sweat walking it
But the Quakers were not ones to take up arms and Northern textile mills had no need for slaves. Only the cotton growers required cheap labor, to feed the mills, so there was little real economic incentive to take up arms against the institution. The reaction to John Brown even among antislavery folks was that he was misguide reactionary wild and insane. I don’t think a war would have started in the North, even between factions. I just don’t think they had the stomach for it without a lot more cause
A connected thought, To the date of Gettysburg most of the shooting in the war not in the west, happened in the Shenandoah valley. Lee was just taking the show to the northern equivalents.
227….
All of the ‘don’t use our bomb’ action occurred AFTER it was determined that Germany was hopelessly behind AND that the prospect of using it upon Germany faded from view. Nazi Germany was falling apart too fast.
My source is the Manhattan Project physicist who was the point man traveling with the American armies racing from one German research site after another.
He testified before Congress immediately after the war. Subsequently, he developed a stock speech for the Physics and Chemistry ‘rubber-chicken’ circuit. It as at his lecture that I heard the skinny on the extreme follies of the Heisenberg ‘team.
It was at this lecture I found out that the Germans didn’t even use neutron shim to provide linear performance over time…
That they had a TOTALLY screwed up ‘control rod’ scheme — i.e. none!’ These fools were so enamored with their equations that they made all of their design imperatives around keeping their equations clean. Hence, there was lots and lots of symmetry built into their test reactor. They never got to the point of a power on test. Had they done so, they would have flash killed everyone in proximity and lost all of their heavy water in a micro-second. ( Their design was too close to bomb physics and had a positive feed-back run-away character.( c.f. Chernobyl )
My Google technique being what it is, I can’t find/remember his name — unusual spelling.
Anyhow, If I can find the name I’ll post a refutation to every point you’ve made.
It was his intel, sent back to Los Alamos that got the boys to kick back and relax. The photos you may view from time to time inre Nazi atomic reactors were snapped by him. He was a one-man crew.
He was chosen explicitly for the mission because, in his words: he’d be no loss. He was smart enough to understand what he was looking at but too dumb to help the American effort.
BTW, the foot dragging occurred by endlessly demanding further and further testing and recalculations. There are other accounts, from yet others, mentioning the endless perfectionism that Oppenheimer began to pursue.
The same mindless perfectionism was ruining the morale of the 509th, too. Hence the self-initiated displacement to Tinian. Tibbets did it on his own authority. Arnold was delighted: the ball was now in the hands of the technicians.
BTW, another of the delay excuses was that the 509th is not ready, so we have more time to get this REALLY right!
Mechanized tactics WERE used in the Pacific Theater against the Japanese: By the Soviets in the final stroke in Manchuria and Korea. Japan utterly fell apart. She couldn’t stop the Russians in any way shape or form.
It remains one of the most lopsided military campaigns in history.
Instead of invading Okinawa America would have been well advised to invade costal China. The enemy would have been completely unprepared. The locals would not be hostile to us — quite the opposite. Our mobility advantage and the dominance of our mechanized troops would have been as overwhelming as the Soviets. Logistically, the IJA in the field would have been reduced to ruin in short order.
But the question is: Would the US aid Manila if needed, now? If China’s ambitions go beyond the Spratly Islands, what will our government do? What will we say if they plead noninterference? Already overburdened military commitments? Empty pockets?
Mel: Would the US aid Manila if needed, now? If China’s ambitions go beyond the Spratly Islands, what will our government do?
When a country says, “Yankee go home” that’s final. They can’t say, twenty years later, “Yankee come back.” Korea and Japan take note.
INRE ultra-centrifuges…
Warren K. Lewis is the MIT professor whose opinion determined the practicality and the method for ‘hex’ enrichment.
It was his top-secret calculations, as the nation’s foremost chemical engineer that established the Oak Ridge scheme.
Even while under construction the numbers were re-crunched ( Kenneth David Nichols ) and the process flow was adjusted. Calculations that would take but seconds on a MacBook took a massive team months. The scene looked like Lemmon’s job in “Apartment.”
Both the Americans and the Germans rejected the ultra-centrifuge out of hand. In their respective wartime economies the time-line to perfection for such — completely out of reach.
Germany went with heavy water because Norway was the established global producer for researchers already — and they occupied Norway. America went with gambits based upon silver or nickel grids/meshes and humongous power consumption — we’d just built the TVA and BPA.
That Nazi Germany didn’t see the graphite pile converter as a viable gambit must have been due to the neutron poisons found in European coals and their lack of natural gas. We were using massive amounts of Nat Gas to create tire black for our rubber industry. Shunting over some to create virtually pure carbon bricks was no problem.
The big cruncher was the high-tech alloy tubes needed by the graphite pile: that’s where Met Lab really came through.
Subsequently, W. Averell Harriman, Leftist and traitor, made sure that these very tubes and blocks were shipped to Stalin under the rubric of Lendlease Aid!
Somewhere out on the web, Russians have published this list of materials — at the very bottom of an immense list detailing just how much aid America gave the USSR. It’s a mind-boggling amount. We also gave Stalin the neutron shim — and quite certainly, the blue prints for Hanford style converters.
Oppenheimer’s crew is celebrated in Moscow. Their records show that they were getting the keys to the globe for no dollar cost at all.
Like my Chinese fools, noted above, they maintained a staggering innocence with regard to the monster that Stalinism was.
We still see that in colleges across the land even now: Hitler all bad — Uncle Joe: a workable strategic partner!
Mel…
Forget Manila… think Tokyo.
The PLA and PLAN think Japan a prize too small to satisfy. They want a deep blue navy and hemispheres to conquer. LIke Imperial Japan, the PLA wants to occupy at least half the globe — with America herself the primary target.
This is only reasonable. Until America is kicked to the curb no expansion will be permitted. So the problem is Batman — I mean America. Once she’s out of the way everything is possible, including her.
In short, America’s geo-political position requires that one go all-in with the first round of play. Until that time it is essential to lie and spin so that the useful IDIOTS actually buy into the whole Taiwan shtick.
In the meantime, it is well that the PLAN learn their craft from the very best. Everything else can be stolen or copied.
Davod,
Most of the civilians killed in Manila were killed deliberately by the Japanese, not as collateral damage from the Allied advance:
http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/W/a/War_Crimes.htm
“Taking advantage of darkness, we went out to kill the natives. It was hard for me to kill them because they seemed to be good people. The frightful cries of the women and children were horrible. I myself killed several persons.”
Fletcher,
I have heard a former Nevada Test Site manager talk about running above-ground tests decades ago. He mentioned that tactical nukes were always great fun, like setting off the mother of all fireworks. Not the strategic nukes: The way they lit up the sky for miles in all directions was just a little too scary to be much fun.
He was of the opinion that, every few years, someone should set up some bleachers on a remote island somewhere, require all the world’s leaders to take a seat, then set off a strategic nuke some marginally safe distance away. Just to sober them up a little.
Not confident this would work on Ahmadinejad, though.
Sure, island hopping was sort of blitzkrieg in bypassing strength and cutting supply. And no doubt Israel vs. Egypt in 1967 and 1974 were similar, and somewhat for the US in Iraq 1991 and to a lesser extent 2003. Easier in all cases with 100% air superiority, or I wonder if it would even begin. Plus modern antitank weapons in the hands of infantry, might make blitzkrieg impossible.
But we didn’t invade Japan in 1945 and blitzkrieg around, we had a better idea.
And we haven’t found anyone to blitzkrieg against in Afghanistan or even Pakistan. Why bother, when we could send in B-52s with iron bombs if we wanted to go that way?
Revisionism we will always have with us. And one of the most persistent swarms of revisionism is the Confederate apologists, who have been out in force in this thread.
Some of their lies have been refuted. However, I will link to http://civilwarcauses.org/ which has loads of documentation from the period showing definitely that the cause for secession was slavery. This is in the words of the secessionists themselves.
One set of claims that has not been refuted is that Robert E. Lee was opposed to slavery, and that he freed the slaves he inherited. Both are false. Lee, in one private letter to his wife, expressed a personal distaste for slavery – but as a bad influence on white slaveowners, not a crime against the slaves. He thought it was a worse evil for the owners.
Lee inherited slaves from his mother’s estate. Some he (and his brothers) sold for cash; others he kept for many years, and either rented out or used as servants. He may have freed them when they got too old to work; there is no record.
Lee inherited no slaves from his father-in-law, G. W. P. Custis, who freed all his slaves in his will. Custis left his plantations to Lee’s sons, and $10,000 each to Lee’s daughters. Lee, as executor, held the slaves for an additional five years (as permitted in the will), exploiting their labor to pay Custis’ debts and raise cash for the bequests to his daughters.
In other words, Lincoln summed up slavery as “You toil and work and earn bread – and I’ll eat it”, and Lee said “OK by me.”
Trent Telenko: Fascinating point about Hiroshima as chemical weapons factory. I had no idea.
Side point: the U.S. did not use “blitzkrieg” against the Japanese because there was no scope for it on dinky Pacific Islands; but the 1945 Soviet campaign in Manchuria was a classic blitzkrieg attack.
Re: #202
Wrong.
Edinburgh, Indiana
Re: #202
Wrong.
Also Newburgh, New York (named after Newburgh, Fife, Scotland); Newburgh, Maine; and Newburgh, Indiana.
Ah, those stubborn Scots immigrants.
With the war generation dying off in Japan, it seems that there is more open talk there of Japanese war guilt and war crimes. Just in the last couple of years, there have been several animes that touched on this, including one that focused exclusively on the evil of pre-war Japanese plotting in China and the collaboration between Japanese spy organizations and Japanese business conglomerates. It’s also become a fairly standard plot device, in thriller animes, to come across some cave or clearing full of vast quantities of human remains, all Japanese peasants killed during WWII in some experiment or forced labor project.
I just watched BAND OF BROTHERS again and I was quite struck by the scene where after the Germans pulled out, the folks in the Dutch town grabbed the women who had slept with the enemy and publicly shamed them.
They took them into the public square, partially stripped them, and shaved their heads.
I am thinking some day we may need to do something similar, if our country ever gets back on track.
RR/240; let me understand this -apologists (“who will *sigh* be always with us”) are apologists to offer a fact such as that by the evidence of his own word the southern private soldier, was by and large fighting because there was a very large army of inexhaustibly hungry, lethally destructive, dangerously hostile strangers coming toward him and his mother and sisters and wife and children and all their worldly subsistances, and he had to either fight it or run from it?
Apologists, because ‘protecting the women, fields, livestock’ stuff don’t count, isn’t ‘serious’, on account of there are surviving broadside polemics and political docs produced by the rebel legal community and political documenteers, that list the slavery issue and not an invasion that, when those secessh proclamations were being made, hadn’t even happened yet?
okee dokee, that’s definitely a defendable construct (tho i don’t think Lee ever said “okay by me” to the Lincoln quote; you might have added an ‘in effect’ before ‘said’).
But when you wrap up the war causes and tie a ribbon round the package like that, you’re automatically supplying answers to whatever begged questions pop up.
For example, if the southern resistance was all about slavery, then had there been a secession and a war invasion in the complete absence of slavery –say, over the serious and chronic tariff dispute (which-to-favor, agriculture or industrial?), then because the proposition is that the war was over slavery but this hypothetical tosses slavery out, there would have been no war, the union armies would have simply entered the various state capitals and escorted the rebels off the statehouse premises, all without southern resistance, without calls to arms, without a war?
Well maybe you’re right –but an awful much of evidence says you’re not, meaning that you may possibly in your own way be as much an apologist for your own point of view as you accuse others of being for what you assume is theirs.
Here’s a great little full-length-on-the-web memoir sort of stunningly credible and unpolitical, by a Tennessee reb private who fought the whole long four years, and throughout –unless this rough innocent was a master propagandist of very vast and subtle art –was just trying to get the union army to go on back home and leave him be.
Here’s Sam Watkins’ point of view on the war that was “only about slavery”.
Maybe it’s because slavery is in the secessh state documents, and because standing alone those are the only offical story, and because such splendiforously-worded official proclamations seldom have occasion to offer into evidence any such backwoods-colloquial, provincial-lingo, first-person account, writ down anyways not til some twenty years after the war, and then only on account of the writer as he says wanting his heirs to know whut the war wuz to them as fought it, that it’s so easy 150 years later to sort of patronize or deligitimize such corny old artifacts as sort of a sideshow or comic relief to the real war, the one in that academic literature.
One wonders which, a hundred fifty years from now, which “Vietnam War” will have not been thrown away. Which will by then be ‘the story’? Gen Abrams’ account? Or will the only one not forgotten be the one described by say Bill Ayres, or maybe that fake Indian from Univ of Colorado ward Churchill?
blert@232 responded to 227
“…Anyhow, If I can find the name I’ll post a refutation to every point you’ve made…”
Samuel A. Goudsmit, perhaps? Or Boris T. Pash, possibly?
Yes, as you point out, the Germans had failed to develop the equivalent of the Met Lab carbon pile. They seem not to have rejected the centrifuge in any direct way – rather they never seriously considered enrichment technology at all.
And yes, as I mentioned at 227, a group of scientists based at the Met Lab, acted as you describe. Their leader was Leo Szilard who felt responsible for the bomb since it was his letter (signed, but not written by Einstein) that prodded FDR to create the Manhattan project.
It’s interesting that your guy (whether Goudsmit, Pash, or someone else working for Pash) would emphasize the shortcoming of the German technology relative to that of the Met Lab, without mentioning other shortcomings that would relate to work at Oak Ridge or Los Alamos. That suggests to me that he was familiar with the Met Lab (which focused on the basic physics) but not with the weapons related aspects of the program.
My guess is that your guy was accurately describing what he observed at the Met Lab in the spring and early summer of 1945 but that Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos were invisible to him. As you said, he had a grasp for the basic physics (which had been explored at the Met Lab) but was not familiar with the secret aspects of the Manhattan project (which were at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford). His error, which you repeat and to which I respond, was to attribute Met Lab attitudes to those at the serious weapons program at Hanford and Los Alamos.
Note how the timeline disproves his claim about delays. The Fat Man concept was proven in the Trinity test on July 16. The first Fat Man weapon was exploded at Nagasaki on August 9. That’s roughly 3 weeks from proof of concept to application. Where is the delay?
More – the Los Alamos package for the second Fat Man weapon was scheduled to arrive on August 13 w/o a plutonium core, with the plutonium core due by August 20 (or 24th depending on the source). No evidence of delay there – the pace was determined by the plutonium production rate at Hanford.
Still more – by October 60 Fat Man units, most of them waiting for cores to be provided from Hanford, were in inventory at Los Alamos.
Bottom line: my guess is that the entire issue between you and me stems from your guy’s confusion of the Met Lab attitudes with those at Los Alamos and Hanford, which were off limits to him.
244. Chester White
Do you happen to know what the Germans said in German in the movie Band of Brothers. I don’t recall seeing subtitles when they spoke and later when I looked into it–I couldn’t find out what they said.
Rich Rostrom #240: I will stop being a Confederate the day you manage to pry my
Spencer and Rogers from my cold dead fingers.
I have read much of what you and others reference. Have you bothered reading things that disagree with your premises?
My introduction to how secession and slavery were intertwined came from an old Cavalry officer who wrote a thumbnail history of Texas in the Confederacy. In his introduction he points out that he was born a damnyankee and that he would remain
an unreconstructed one. And he called everything “The War Of The Rebellion”. And
his book sold like hotcakes in Texas.
You see, he pointed out how we allowed ourselves to be stampeded by a bunch of rabble-rousers and agents provacateur. How we sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. By speaking objective truth he felt no need to call us liars or to refer to us with any perjorative terms. Do you think you might learn to come up to his standard?
Now put this one in your pipe and smoke it: SECESSION IS A NATURAL RIGHT. The reasons may be good, the reasons may be bad, the reasons may be indifferent. No matter. To say ” I know longer wish to continue my association with you and will
now take my leave” is a RIGHT. The great shortcoming of the Constitution is its
failure to provide for the excercise of said right by one or more of the sovereign states. As a result of that shortcoming, our Federal Union ceased to exist in 1861. Fortunately we do manage to maintain a federal system of governance rather than the unitary form so many desire. Figure out how this has come about and you will learn, as did I, that your well-being has often depended on the efforts of those
whom you dislike. The lesson is called Christian Humility.
Getting back to the main point, I believe O’bummer had no business sending an American delegation including Ambassador John Roos to the anniversary of Hiroshima. It is a backhanded apology! O’bummer should be kick out of Office for doing so!
Gen. Tibbets son:
Gene Tibbets, son of Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., says Friday’s visit to Hiroshima by U.S. Ambassador John Roos is an act of contrition that his late father would never have approved.
“It’s an unsaid apology,” Tibbets, 66, told FoxNews.com from his home in Georgiana, Ala. “Why wouldn’t it be? Why would [Roos] go? It doesn’t make any sense.
See Tibbets son disapproves:
http://tinyurl.com/2abklmk
0’bummer makes me want to vomit!
Untitled
“In February 1945, a woman now dying of lung cancer grabbed two of her children and jumped out the window to escape Imperial Japanese Marines crashing through the door intent on bayoneting everyone in the burning house. Finding no one, they went on to the next house to continue their massacre on a street not far from the Rizal Memorial ballpark, where Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth both played in sunnier days before the forgotten Battle of Manila. The 100,000 civilians who died in the largest urban battle of the Pacific War — more than at Hiroshima — are not remembered in beautiful candles floating down darkened rivers or in flights of doves soaring into the blue sky; there is no anti-American significance to their deaths. But they still live in the fading memory of that woman, who hid for two days in the smoldering ruins of the neighborhood until the first American patrols came into view.
I saw my aunt last as she stood in a window of a Sydney hotel and waved goodbye. I hope to see her again.”