MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-01-23 |
| FROM | Rick Moen
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] well,
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Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben-at-mrbrklyn.com):
> Yeah, I agree. He will not survive if he doesn't learnt to shut up and
> let things be. Let them protest until they turn blue and burn themselves
> out. He should understand that their protesting is a good thing. It
> means he is getting things done.
I don't actually wish the short-fingered vulgar idiot any harm, so for his
health I hope he learns to let it go. Over thirty years of taunting by
_Spy Magazine_ (which I loved, BTW), he was never able to let _anything_
go, ever -- and so far all hopes that he'll learn to focus and not go
off on stupid Twitter ragestorms have proven unrealistic. I think
those are, as the saying goes, the triumph of hope over experience.
What you have with The Donald is exactly what's written on the tin:
a crass and slightly dim aggressive blowhard and Dunning-Kruger
poster-child who never listens, never learns, acts on impulse because he
never learned not to, and in general has the disposition of a small
child. And who is now occupying the White House, even though it's
illegal for sex offenders to live in government housing.
> BTW - it is not going to get worst from here. The sky is blue and
> sanity has taken hold in Washington while the crazy people protest.
I know you're short of dosh at the moment so I won't suggest a wager on
this, but figure I can make book. Things are going to get _very_ much
worse, in every way including lashback.
> One more thing. Your long and intersting post on US defenses after
> Pearl Harbor is all 20/20 hindsite.
>
> There was a real threat of an attack on the West Coast....
Oh, now you _really_ shouldn't have gone there, because now I have to
pretty much do the ASCII equivalent of handing you your head in a
basket.
You have _totally_ moved the goalposts, and that is just not cricket,
sir, no, not at all. Misrepresenting what you asked and what I answered
is not right.
What I called bullshit on was your assertion (by way of excusing the
inexcusable, i.e., the interning of West Coast Americans of Japanese
descent (but not others including those in Hawaii) of a very real,
imminent threat of a West Coast _invasion_ -- an entirely different
thing. Now, you are completely changing your tune, and I have to ask:
Are you aware of pulling a fast one, or is this a screw-up?
(By the way, my mom throughout the war was a fairly high-level official
at the Office of War Information, so she was able to say that the
hysterical belief of some that a threat of invasion was bullshit from
having been in the loop at the time with _contemporaneous_, not
'hindsight', access to official sources. I grew up with detailed expert
tutoring on this entire subject.)
Since you raised it, here's what I actually _did_ say:
[To my question of, _if_ the interning without trial or hearing of all
American citizens of Japanese descent was justified as you claimed,
shouldn't the same apply to citizens descended from peoples arriving
from other Axis powers?]
> That is an excellent question. It is harder because Germans made up
> nearly 1/3 or the US population and the Italians were sicilian. I
> would certainly have those communities under servalence (sic).
Or to put it another way, the Japanese-Americans had small enough
political power that they could be bullied and abused, while
German-Americans and Italian-Americans did not.
> BTW - the real difference here is that the West Coast was completely
> undefended after Pearl Harbor, and the immediate threat of an invasion
> was very real... something the Axis never really managed on the east
> coast.
Bullshit.
There never was any realistic risk of West Coast invasion, and the
political/military authorities knew that.
Nor was the West Coast undefended.
Let's talk about the Navy's Pacific Fleet and Asiatic Fleet first, as
that was the most significant problem. The attack on Pearl Harbor took
out two battleships completely, four had damage that was repaired
immediately, and two were sunk but quickly re-floated and put back into
service. They also sank three cruisers, three destroyers, an
anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. They also destroyed 188
aircraft and damaged 159 others, mostly at Hickam Field. No aircraft
carriers were damaged, as they had all been ordered out to sea, and no
submarines. The Asiatic Fleet, then based in Manila... I don't have a
full list, but it included heavy cruiser Augusta, heavy cruiser Houston,
light cruiser Marblehead, 13 Clemson-class destroyers, 1 destroyer
tender, and 23 submarines, The Pacific Fleet, in addition to the
remaining five-and-then-more battleships (see below), and aircraft
carriers (see below) comprised 15 remaining cruisers, plus I'm not sure
how many destroyers, but 'a lot', and as to submarines, ditto, basically
'a lot' and 'all of them'.
The combined Pacific and Asiatic Fleets now, of course, had a big
battleship hole in them, but still had the battleship Colorado, which was
in Bremerton at the time. Within a week or so, the four mildly damaged
battleships were back in service. Within about a month, the two sunk
but refloated battleships were back. So, the US Navy at that time had
five battleships (and then within a month, seven) facing the IJN's ten.
The six American aircraft carriers remained in the Pacific. They were
all full aircraft carriers. A seventh full carrier, the Ranger, was
deployed to the Pacific later. The IJN had ten aircraft carriers, but
only six were first-line carriers capable of operating large air groups.
The rest were little more than converted cruisers.
The Japanese didn't even have the striking power to invade and hold the
Hawaiian Territory, let alone any part of the West Coast. One of the
key planners of the Pearl Harbor attack, IJN Commander Minoru Genda,
proposed to Tokyo a Hawaiian Islands invasion instead of just a raid on
the fleet and airfield, but it was immediately turned down by senior IJN
officers as flat-out impossible. Source: John J. Stephan, _Hawaii
Under the Rising Sun_.
And Washington had an even better assessment of the utter impossibility
of the Japanese invading _either_ the Hawaiian Islands or the West
Coast.
Yes, there was a great deal of bullshit loose talk in the popular press
about an imminent invasion, but that's the sum-total of what it was,
bullshit. They barely had the fuel to send a task force successfully to
Hawaii and back. The distance to the West Coast is so much greater that
carrying out and sustaining an invasion force to the West Coast was
totally out of the question. The logistics were prohibitive.
If you grant the assumption that they could get together the refueling
to take a maximum task fleet over to, say, Seattle, OK, ten IJN aircraft
carriers and a bunch of lesser craft arrive in Puget Sound and stage
landings. They fire off a lot of shells, and create a lot of damage.
And then what happens? The United States combined forces counterattack
with orders of magnitude more reserves, more manpower, more depth of
supplies, and tight, tiny supply lines. Conclusion: The supposed
invasion force gets creamed. The Japanese would now have a fatal hole
in the one resource on which they were most handicapped: reserves of
trained soldiers.
Admiral Yamamoto warned the General Staff against going to war against
the USA because he knew that Japan had nothing like the depth of
resources necessary to prevail over the long term. When he was advised
that Pearl Harbor was going ahead, he warned that Japan would then, if
the attack were successful, have about two years to consolidate any
gains Japan made in the Pacific, before the USA fully recovered and
would have again the power to utterly wipe them out. And he was right.
(This is not surprising: He and several other senior naval officers
actually had been to the USA and knew its depth of resources. The
Japanese Army staff in general, by contrast, consistently underestimated
their main foe because they didn't know our country.)
> > And also, would you have rounded up all Americans of Japanese
> > ancestry in California, Washington, and Oregon, but _not_ done so
> > for Americans of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii and along the entire
> > Eastern seaboard?
>
> If it was my decision, probably.
Well, that's at least consistent. Stupid, but consistent.
> > Because that is what was done, and it makes no sense at all to me.
>
> The threat was the California coast line.
Nope. Paper tiger. Logistics.
> After seeing the real threat of Islamic groups up close in Brooklyn, I
> fully appreceate just how real the threat was of the Japanese
> community.
Again, you keep calling them 'Japanese'. These were Americans, Ruben.
Americans.
You know who are the most-honored military unit in US history? The
442nd Regimental Combat Team. During WWII, it was composed almost
entirely of American soldiers of Japanese ancestry. Most of the
soldiers' families were confined to internment camps while their sons
were fighting and dying for us. Over two years, the unit suffered 250%
casualties, was awarded eight Presidential Unit Citations (five in one
month), 21 of its members got Medals of Honor, and they got 9,486 Purple
Hearts.
How well did they fight, you ask? They were 'Holy shit' effective.
They broke the Germans at Anzio and Monte Cassino. They led the
invasion of southern France. They rescued the Lost Battalion in the
Vosges Mountains near Biffontaine, they freed the inhabitants of Dachau,
and they broke the Gothic Line.
And exactly zero of these Americans of Japanese descent were draftees.
They were all volunteers -- volunteers who had a strong, justifiable
fear that the brass would treat them as cannon fodder.
You may have heard of one of these soldiers: Senator Daniel K. Inouye.
Second Lieutenant Inouye lost his right arm to a German rifle grenade
while charging and taking a bunker on the Gothic Line in Tuscany. This
was the attack that Inouye was leading while deliberately ignoring
having already been shot in the stomach, and refusing treatment.
_After_ getting his arm mostly shot off, he grabbed the live grenade
from his mostly-severed right arm, threw the grenade into the bunker,
and ran towards the bunker shooting from his Thomson submachine gun with
his left arm, was shot again in the leg, and fell unconscious. When his
platoon found him and revived him, he resisted being taken to a field
hospital, saying 'Nobody called off the war!' He volunteered to go
-back- into fighting without his right arm (removed surgically because
it was barely hanging and not repairable), but was honorably discharged
with the rank of Captain.
Oh, one last thing, about that Fred Korematsu guy:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/fred.html
[the 442nd:]
> and they were sent to Europe ;) Not Japan.
And German-Americans were not sent to the front against Germany.
And Italian-Americans were not sent to invade Italy.
And I'll bet Hungarian-Americans were never deployed anywhere near
Hungary, and Austrian-Americans never deployed close to Austria.
Hell, you know? The USA created a task force to attempt to liberate
Norway during the closing days of the European war, and they
deliberately had not a single Norwegian-American in it. As it happens,
they didn't need to invade because Kriegsmarine Admiral Dönitz, who took
command after Hitler suicided, ordered Reichskommissar Terboven and
General Böhme to surrender to the Allies, and ordered other officers to
shoot them if they refused. So, the first American task force to reach
Norway after the capitulation included exactly zero of the Norwegians
who'd been training in the US Army, Navy, and Army Air Corps.
> I'll quote this source, because I don't feel like typing the details
> from Seymour Friedmans text by hand:
I call fraud, on this: You have retroactively changed the subject.
In February '42, IJN submarine I-17 shelled Ellwood Oil Field near
Santa Barbara for 20 minutes, not really hitting anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood
There were also six other IJN submarines looking for merchant ships to
sink for a while. I-25 likewise tried to shell Fort Stevens at the
mouth of the Columbia River and likewise hit basically nothing except a
couple of telephone cables. I-26 bizarrely attempted to shell
_Canadian_ Estevan Point Lighthouse on Vancouver Island, British
Columbia, and missed.
The wildly inaccurate shooting was in significant part because the subs,
if surfaced, were extremely vulnerable to being sunk by US aircraft,
hence the few times they came up, they tended to shoot, panic, and run.
Neither they nor any other IJN force had a prayer of a chance at
carrying out an invasion, let alone holding anything from a theoretical
invasion.
And that, sir, is what we _actually_ talked about.
And you can apologise right here, right now.
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