Category Archives: U.S.

by | 25 May 2005 · 12:46 pm

Reporting from the American Civil War

Like many other aspects of the Civil War, its war correspondents have been romanticised into legend….

The legend conveniently overlooks the fact that the majority of the Northern correspondents were ignorant, dishonest, and unethical; that the dispatches they wrote were frequently inaccurate, often invented, partisan, and inflammatory. Edwin Godkin [of the London Daily News] wrote of his American colleagues: “Their communications are what you might expect from men of this stamp–a series of wild ravings about the roaring of the guns and the whizzing of the shells and the superhuman valour of the men, interspersed with fulsome puffs of some captain or colonel with whom they happened to pass the night.” Henry Villard, one of the better American correspondents, said, “Men turned up in the army as correspondents more fit to drive cattle than to write for newspapers,” and Professor J. Cutler Andrews, in his mammoth work The North Reports the Civil War, wrote, “Sensationalism and exaggeration, outright lies, puffery, slander, faked eye-witness accounts, and conjectures built on pure imagination cheapened much that passed in the North for news.” Given that it was an age of declamatory journalism and that objectivity was a rare quality, it is still a little disconcerting to find that one correspondent saw his job in these terms: “It is not within the province of your correspondent to criticize what has been done by the army or navy; nor will he state occurrences which it may be unpleasant to read.” Like him, most correspondents on both sides saw as an integral part of their task the sustaining of both civilian and army morale. A skirmish became “a glorious overwhelming victory,” a rout was transformed into “a strategic withdrawal before a vastly superior enemy,” a dead Confederate soldier had been not merely killed in battle but “sacrificed to the devilish ambitions of his implacable masters, Davis and Lee”; Confederate women had necklaces made from Yankee eyes, while the “unholy Northerners” used heads of Confederate dead for footballs. In this sort of reporting, accuracy mattered little, and the Northerner Henry Adams wrote from London to complain that “people have become so accustomed to the idea of disbelieving everything that is stated in the American papers that all confidence in us is destroyed.”

The correspondents fared little better in recognising the historic incident, in realising that they were privileged to be present at moments millions would later want to study as part of their nation’s development. No correspondent attending the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg took any notice of President Lincoln beginning, “Four score and seven years ago …” At the best, they reported, as did the Cincinnati Commercial, “The President rises slowly, draws from his pocket a paper, and when the commotion subsides, in a sharp, unmusical treble voice, reads the brief and pithy remarks,” and, at the worst, ended their accounts of the event with the single sentence “The President also spoke.”

One would have expected that the war correspondents from Europe, more experienced, more mature, and less involved than their American colleagues, performed more ably in the Civil War. Unfortunately, the majority were as bad, if not worse. More subtle in their bias, more devious in their propaganda, and better assisted by the political intrigues of their editors, they completely misled their readers on what was really occurring in America. The Times of London was particularly bad.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 20-22

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by | 25 May 2005 · 10:19 am

British Reporting on the American Civil War

The American Civil War held considerable importance for Britain. In 1861 it was estimated that one-fifth of the entire British population was dependent directly or indirectly on the prosperity of the cotton-manufacturing areas, which in turn depended on the American South for 80 per cent of their supplies. This clear commercial relationship made for sympathy with the South, but after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation it also became an embarrassment, because then the commercial interest had to be reconciled with Britain’s long-preached sentiments of humanity. A country so experienced in moral accommodation would no doubt have had little difficulty in bringing about this reconciliation, but the issue was further complicated by a major political factor. The ruling class in Britain had nurtured a barely concealed hatred of America and her democratic institutions, and now clearly desired their downfall. If the American experiment in democracy could be shown to have failed, demands for greater democracy in Britain could be kept from becoming an issue. Britain’s interests in the war were, then, very strong, and at one stage it appeared highly likely that she would actually intervene–the American general Winfield Scott, in Paris on a propaganda mission for Lincoln, had to return to New York to prepare for its defence against a British invasion….

But The Times began with a heavy disadvantage. Its chief proprietor, its editor, and its foreign manager were all singularly ill-equipped to handle the news from America during this important period of history. The chief proprietor, John Walter III, was openly anti-Unionist. The editor, John Delane, was ignorant of American affairs and had little feeling for American institutions. The foreign manager, Mowbray Morris, had been born in the West Indies and was in sympathy with the South and slavery. Since these were the men who not only engaged the correspondents to cover the war but also presented the news the correspondents sent, it is not surprising that The Times’ coverage of the Civil War caused such a cleavage between the two nations that it required a generation to heal it….

The engagement of [biased] war correspondents like Mackay and [Francis] Lawley and the adoption of a pro-South attitude in its leading articles were bad enough, but The Times went even further to promote the Southern cause. When New Orleans fell it carried black mourning borders; it suppressed the fact that a Liverpool shipyard was building a warship, the famous Alabama, for the South and recorded her sailing to begin a career as a commerce raider in only five words in its “Ship News” column. And it commissioned Spence, the Confederate agent in Liverpool, to write a series of pro-South articles for The Times, under the signature “5,” for which it made him a gift of a specially bound edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The combination of poor and subjective war correspondents and the attitude at The Times’ office towards America produced a disastrous coverage of the war.

In July 1863, misled by Mackay (who was to be made to pay for it later), The Times confidently predicted that the Southern general Lee was about to capture Washington. In 1864 it reported Sherman’s march to the sea as a folly from which he would find it difficult to extricate himself. When Sherman reached Savannah, Delane was made physically ill by the set-back, but recovered rapidly and was able to write that The Times was doing its best “to attenuate the mischief.” This took the form of a piece in which Sherman was given credit for “one of the ablest, certainly one of the most singular military achievements of the war,” but which then went on to say that the South had little use for Savannah as a port anyway.

At the beginning of the war The Times referred to Lincoln as an uneducated rail-splitter. Half-way through the war he was “a sort of moral American Pope” or “Lincoln the Last.” When he was assassinated, he was suddenly recognised as having been “one of England’s best friends.” Naturally, this recognition that it had been wildly astray in its military and political estimates of the war was not accomplished by The Times without some unpleasant recriminations and extensive scapegoat-hunting. Although it was clear that at least some responsibility lay with the executives, who had allowed their prejudices to interfere with their selection of war correspondents and with the manner in which they were briefed, blame had to be placed farther down the editorial ladder. So Mackay was peremptorily sacked. Morris broke the news to him. “This has been brought about by your blind and unreasonable condemnation of all public men and measures on the Federal side,” he wrote. “You have presented the English public with a distorted view of the Federal cause … Every statement was one-sided and every remark spiteful.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 34-40

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by | 16 May 2005 · 9:12 pm

Gaddis on Why Grand Strategy Is Tough for Academics

Yale history professor John Lewis Gaddis recently spoke at Middlebury College in Vermont. He had a lot to say, but one thing that struck me was his analysis of why grand strategy is difficult for academics.

First, that grand strategy is, by its nature, an ecological enterprise. It requires taking information from a lot of different fields, evaluating it intuitively rather than systematically, and then acting. It is, in this sense, different from most academic training, which as it advances pushes students toward specialization, and then toward professionalization, by which I mean the ever deeper mastery of a diminishing number of things. To remain broad you’ve got to retain a certain shallowness – but beyond the level of undergraduate education and sometimes not even there, the academy is not particularly comfortable with that idea.

Second, grand strategy requires setting an objective and sticking to it. The academy does not take easily to that idea either. It asks us constantly to question our assumptions and reformulate our objectives. That’s fine to the extent that that sharpens our intellectual skills, and therefore prepares us for leadership. But it’s not the same thing as leadership: for that, you’ve got to say “here’s where we ought to be by such and such a time, and here’s how we’re going to get there.” Taking the position that, “on the one hand this, and on the other hand that,” as you might around a seminar table, won’t get you there. Nor will saying that you voted for the $87 billion appropriation before you voted against it.

Third, grand strategy requires the ability to respond rapidly to the unexpected. It acknowledges that trends can reverse themselves suddenly, that “tipping points” can occur, and that leaders must know how to exploit them. The academy loves this sort of thing when it happens on the basketball court or the hockey rink. In the classroom, though, it resists the idea: instead the emphasis is too often on theory, which promises predictability, and therefore no surprises. That’s why the academy tends to be so surprised when events like the end of the Cold War and 9/11 take place. Leaders, like athletes, have to be more agile.

Fourth, grand strategy requires the making of moral judgments, because that’s how leadership takes place: in that sense, it’s a faith-based initiative. You have to convince people that your aspirations correspond with their own, and that you’re serious about advancing them. You don’t lead by trying to persuade people that distinctions between good and evil are social constructions, that there are no universal standards for making them, that we should always try to understand the viewpoint of others, even when they are trying to kill us.

Finally, grand strategy requires great language. As the best leaders from Pericles through Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan have always known, words are themselves instruments of power. Their careful choice and courageous use can shake the stability of states, as when Reagan said, before anybody else, that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” headed for the “ash-heap of history.” They can also undermine walls, as when Reagan famously demanded, against the advice of his own speech-writers, that Gorbachev tear one down.

But where, within the academy is the use of great language taught? Where would you go to learn how to make a great speech? Certainly not to political science, language, and literature departments at Yale, where as students advance they are spurred on toward ever higher levels of jargon-laden incomprehensibility. I think not even to my beloved History Department, where my colleagues seem more interested in the ways words reflect structures of power than in ways words challenge or even overthrow structures of power.

The art of rhetoric, within the academy, is largely a lost art – which probably helps to explain why the academy is as often as surprised as it is to discover that words really do still have meanings – and that consequences come from using them.

via Roger L. Simon

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by | 22 April 2005 · 8:46 pm

When Paducah (Kentucky) Goes International

Once a year, Paducah goes international, headlines the 21 April 2005 Paducah Sun (subscribers only):

The quilt show isn’t the only reason Pauline Jewell traveled halfway around the world to Paducah this week.

“Even if there was no quilt show, I would come to Paducah,” said Jewell of Jakarta, Indonesia, who uses a wheelchair. “I just love the area. I feel it’s welcoming and relaxing, and everyone is really helpful, especially being in the wheelchair. People go out of their way in a way I don’t find anywhere else in the world.”

In past years, Jewell has traveled from her former homes in Shanghai, China, and Hong Kong to Paducah. “I enjoy the atmosphere,” she said. “It opens your mind to different ideas. I learn what’s new, and there’s the shopping. Let’s not forget the shopping.”

Foreign accents are common in the halls of the Paducah Expo Center as the American Quilter’s Society Quilt Show & Contest is becoming an international destination.

International quilters had 137 entries in the show this year, with 89 from Japan, nine from Australia and eight apiece from the United Kingdom, Canada and Turkey.

Salinder Gammage of Cardiff, Wales, Rosemary Burton of South Yorkshire, England, and her “mum-in-law,” Pearl Burton of West Yorkshire, England, traveled to Paducah with a tour group of 45 quilters from England, Scotland and Wales. They visited St. Louis and the Amish in Iowa before coming to the quilt show.

“Everybody assumed we’re going to Florida,” Rosemary Burton said. “I said, ‘I’m not going to Florida. I’m going to Kentucky.’ Oh, then there was a change of subject.”

Gammage said cheaper prices meant they could afford to take home more fabric and souvenirs. “We had to buy extra suitcases,” she said.

Helen Van Loon of Forest, Ontario, walked around the exhibits wearing a small Canadian flag stuck in her straw hat. Van Loon and friends from New York and Mississippi, whom she met through an Internet group called “Quilting Around the World,” are visiting Paducah together.

“I’ve been having a ball,” she said. “It’s been just a riot. Two buses I know about came down to Paducah from my area.”

Heinui Hanere, a Tahitian now working as a vendor for Roxanne International of Lathrop, Calif., spoke Japanese to several Japanese quilters who strolled by his booth. “I speak it a little bit,” Hanere said. “Every year people come from all over the world — Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and even France.”

Christian and Christine DuFrix of Bordeaux, France, are taking photos of quilts for an article Christine is writing about the show for France Patchwork magazine. “I came two years ago, and it was very marvelous,” she said. “That’s why we came back. But it’s very difficult to find a room. We had to stay in Cairo (Ill.).”

Tadako Nagasawa of Nagano, Japan, who has entered a quilt in the contest for five years, brought her husband, Mitsuru, to the show for the first time — literally. She does all the driving. “I cannot drive,” said Mitsuru Nagasawa, president of Toyota Technological Institute in Nagoya. “I lived in St. Louis 45 years ago, so I have many friends in St. Louis. They are coming here.”

The Nagasawas are going to meet their friends today in front of her quilt, “A Memory of Sicilia,” which recalls a trip to the Palace of Palermo.

Japanese quilters who don’t speak English received help from translator Seiko Dickson, a Paducah resident who is from Okinawa, Japan.

Dickson, who wore a traditional Japanese kimono made by her mother, also served as a white-glove hostess.

Americans “think I’m the one who made the quilt,” she said. “Japanese don’t think I’m Japanese. They just think I’m a volunteer. They can understand English a little bit, but they don’t speak it. I like to meet them and help them.”

Lorraine Downey, a quilt shop owner from Sydney, Australia, is in Paducah this week helping a vendor, Paper Pieces of Sycamore, Ill.

“It took me 24 hours door to door (of traveling time), but it’s worth it,” Downey said.

“Australian quilters love to come to Paducah. We’re amazed at how the town makes you feel so welcome, and we feel safe here. When I go home, I say, ‘Hi, y’all,’ and they know where I’ve been.”

via a Paducah Sun subscriber

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by | 17 April 2005 · 9:23 pm

Florida Church Excommunicates Schiavo Judge

The latest issue of The Christian Century reports that a Florida judge was asked to leave his Southern Baptist church over the Schiavo case.

Judge George Greer, a Florida county judge in the spotlight three times for ordering Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube removed, was advised by his Southern Baptist pastor to leave the congregation—despite the judge’s reputation as a conservative Republican and conservative Christian.

Greer, 63, a Pinellas County circuit judge based in Clearwater, also rejected an attempt by the U.S. House to subpoena the brain-damaged woman as a means to force reinsertion of her tube….

Calvary is regarded as one of the Florida (Southern) Baptist Convention’s most prominent conservative churches. According to the St. Petersburg Times, Greer became inactive in the congregation because of its free distribution to members of the Florida Baptist Witness, one of the denomination’s most conservative publications….

Mary Repper, a longtime friend of Greer, told AP that while Greer took comfort in being upheld by higher courts, he was upset by the church’s stance. “The people in that church should be ashamed of themselves, to demonize George and to ask him to leave for doing his job, for upholding the law,” she said. “To me, that was the most offensive thing that has happened so far.”

via my brother Ken, another ex-Southern Baptist, but he at least remains a Christian

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by | 10 April 2005 · 9:27 pm

Deaths in the Family

All the news coverage surrounding the drawn-out deaths of more famous people back around the Kalends of April this year cast a macabre shadow over the much quieter deaths of two of my kinfolk, my second oldest surviving uncle and my youngest aunt.

As their deaths began to sink in, I found myself reduced to a kind of catatonic state: staring off into the distance rather than burying my nose in a book as I usually do while waiting for the bus to work; tolerating sappier shows on TV than I would normally have the patience for; damping down my verbal input and output while silently recycling old memories through my head—all subtle mourning behaviors for someone who is fairly quiet to begin with.

Although he had a Hebrew middle name like half his brothers (whose monikers included Jeptha, Joel, and Jahue), Uncle Bernard Elijah was not a recent Jewish immigrant. His (and my) ancestors arrived from England on the Atlantic shores of Virginia back in the mid 1600s, but they didn’t get very far past the Great Dismal Swamp until the mid 1900s. Most were either Baptists or Quakers, the latter being especially fond of Hebrew names, it seems.

As the middle kid of seven who survived childhood on tenant farms in Southampton County, Va., Bernard was my father’s next older brother. Although not very religious himself, he looked after his missionary kid brother’s family in Japan. We always enjoyed the Virginia ham he would send every Christmas, and looked forward to visiting him and his family every furlough.

He had retired after 33 years as a produce buyer for Colonial Stores, and had been married to my Aunt Marie for 63 years. He was a tough old bird. He was riddled with cancer, was in constant pain, and had been given six months left to live for about eight years before he finally gave up the fight. He was 84.

Aunt Becky was not blood-kin. She was married to my father’s youngest brother, whom he called Junior, so that we kids referred to him as Uncle Junior, just as we used to talk about Dad’s sister as Aunt Sister.

But Becky proved to be just the kind of kin I needed when I landed on her doorstep in tiny Ivor, Va., disoriented by rural America after a childhood in urban Japan, disillusioned with my religious heritage, and disinterested in continuing my formal education.

Uncle Junior offered me work therapy at the filling station and tire shop he managed for Becky’s Dad, who owned an oil distributorship, a couple of service stations, a furniture store, a plumbing business—a fair portion of what few commercial opportunities were available in a town of not much more than 300 souls. Work therapy was just what I needed. There’s nothing like repairing a flat tire on a mud-encrusted logging truck to bring one’s airy philosophizing back down to earth.

Meanwhile, Aunt Becky offered me talk therapy: a sympathetic ear and a genuine curiosity about the wider world. Only ten years older than me, she was as much an elder sister as an aunt and foster mother.

Being from a relatively prosperous family, she had been away to college, but she never seemed able to find a healthy compromise between her roots planted deep in the local soil and her longing to soar far beyond. She seemed to keep sacrificing one for the other. But maybe I’m just projecting my own sense of the same everlasting tensions.

With their encouragement, and financial support from a secret local benefactor, I went off to college, but dropped out in my sophomore year and had to join the Army. Becky and I eventually lost touch after she and my uncle divorced. By then, I had settled far away.

A few years ago, out of the blue, I got an email message from her. We were back in touch. I was able to pay her a visit when I went to D.C. for a meeting. Last Christmas, she sent us a Virginia ham. Last year, during my daughter’s spring break, I dragged her around to see a bunch of my Virginia uncles and aunts and cousins, and also to see the Quaker cemetery where her paternal great-grandparents, great-great grandparents, and other assorted kinfolk are buried. City kid Rachel (another Hebrew name!) thought it odd to be so attached to a patch of soil. It was a curious spring break for a Yalie. I suppose she should have been skiing in Switzerland.

It was during this year’s spring break that we first got word from a cousin by email that Aunt Becky was in Portsmouth Naval Hospital. Not just in hospital, but on life support. She had gone in because her legs were giving out on her. It turned out her kidneys were failing. And then everything seemed to give out at once. Dialysis and artificial blood hormones had to take over the work of her stalled kidneys. A respirator did the work of her emphysema-damaged lungs. An external filtering machine had to screen out a deadly organism in her blood. And heavy sedation was needed to prevent the panic attacks that made her blood pressure spike and plunge.

The doctors worked to stabilize her for weeks, but couldn’t seem to rescue one organ without endangering the others. Meanwhile, her three children made sure she always had a familiar face and voice at her bedside. At noon on 30 March 2005, she was disconnected from all the various means of artificial life support. Before sunset, she had slipped away forever.

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by | 9 April 2005 · 2:43 pm

Surrender Negotiations, 7-9 April 1865

Today marks the 140th anniversary of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. My ancestors who fought for the Confederacy were already POWs by then–one was among the 1600 men left in Wharton’s two brigades who surrendered to Gen. Sheridan at Waynesborough on 2 March 1865 at the end of the Shenandoah Valley Campaign; the other was wounded and captured at of Five Forks on 1 April 1865, where Gen. Sheridan’s troops broke Confederate Gen. Lee’s supply line and forced him to flee toward the west, evacuating Richmond and Petersburg.

On 7 April 1865, Gen. Grant initiated a poignant exchange of letters with Gen. Lee.

“General R.E. Lee, Commanding C.S.A.:
5 P.M., April 7th, 1865.
The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the Confederate States army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.
U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General”

“April 7th, 1865.
General: I have received your note of this date. Though not entertaining the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia, I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, and therefore, before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on condition of its surrender.
R.E. Lee, General.”

“April 8th, 1865.
General R.E. Lee, Commanding C.S.A.:
Your note of last evening in reply to mine of the same date, asking the conditions on which I will accept the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, is just received. In reply I would say that, peace being my great desire, there is but one condition I would insist upon,–namely, that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged. I will meet you, or will designate officers to meet any officers you may name for the same purpose, at any point agreeable to you, for the purpose of arranging definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia will be received.
U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General”

“April 8th, 1865.
General: I received at a late hour your note of to-day. In mine of yesterday I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, but to ask the terms of your proposition. To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of this army, but, as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all, I desired to know whether your proposals would lead to that end. I cannot, therefore, meet you with a view to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia; but as far as your proposal may affect the Confederate States forces under my command, and tend to the restoration of peace, I should be pleased to meet you at 10 A.M. to-morrow on the old state road to Richmond, between the picket-lines of the two armies.
R.E. Lee, General.”

“April 9th, 1865.
General: Your note of yesterday is received. I have not authority to treat on the subject of peace. The meeting proposed for 10 A.M. to-day could lead to no good. I will state, however, that I am equally desirous for peace with yourself, and the whole North entertains the same feeling. The terms upon which peace can be had are well understood. By the South laying down their arms, they would hasten that most desirable event, save thousands of human lives, and hundreds of millions of property not yet destroyed. Seriously hoping that all our difficulties may be settled without the loss of another life, I subscribe myself, etc.,
U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General”

“April 9th, 1865.
General: I received your note of this morning on the picket-line, whither I had come to meet you and ascertain definitely what terms were embraced in your proposal of yesterday with reference to the surrender of this army. I now ask an interview, in accordance with the offer contained in your letter of yesterday, for that purpose.
R.E. Lee, General.”

“April 9th, 1865.
General R. E. Lee Commanding C. S. Army:
Your note of this date is but this moment (11:50 A.M.) received, in consequence of my having passed from the Richmond and Lynchburg road to the Farmville and Lynchburg road. I am at this writing about four miles west of Walker’s Church, and will push forward to the front for the purpose of meeting you. Notice sent to me on this road where you wish the interview to take place will meet me.
U. S. Grant, Lieutenant-General.”

They finally met face-to-face at the home of Wilmer McLean.

General Grant began the conversation by saying ‘I met you once before, General Lee, while we were serving in Mexico, when you came over from General Scott’s headquarters to visit Garland’s brigade, to which I then belonged. I have always remembered your appearance, and I think I should have recognized you anywhere.’

‘Yes,’ replied General Lee, ‘I know I met you on that occasion, and I have often thought of it and tried to recollect how you looked, but I have never been able to recall a single feature.'”

… Within a month of Lee’s surrender, the remainder of the Confederate forces give up the fight.

SOURCE: “Surrender at Appomattox, 1865,” EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (1997).

And North-South reconciliation has continued–in fits, starts, and turnarounds–for 140 years.

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by | 10 March 2005 · 6:28 pm

Acts of War, 60 Years Ago

The Marmot reminds us that today marks the 60th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Tokyo, as a BBC report notes.

People in Tokyo have been marking the 60th anniversary of a massive US night-time bombing raid which destroyed much of the city in 1945.

Several memorial services have been held across the city to remember the more than 100,000 people who died.

The raid was part of an American strategy to try to wear down Japanese morale ahead of a possible invasion.

Last month, we commemorated the 60th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Dresden.

An aspect of the Dresden bombing that remains a question today is how many people died during the attacks of February 13/14, 1945. The city was crammed with uncounted refugees and many POWs in transit when the raids took place. The exact number of casualties will never be known. McKee believed that the official figures were understated, and that 35,000 to 45,000 died, though “the figure of 35,000 for one night’s massacre alone might easily be doubled to 70,000 without much fear of exaggeration, I feel.”

The battle of Iwo Jima began 60 years ago, shortly after the fire-bombing of Dresden, and didn’t end until after the fire-bombing of Tokyo.

The battle for Iwo Jima began Feb. 19, 1945, but didn’t end until March 15, with nearly 7,000 Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese killed. After years of retaking soil conquered by a Japanese military machine, America was knocking on the enemy’s door by taking Iwo Jima. It was the first invasion of Japanese soil since Pearl Harbor. Iwo Jima was heavily entrenched with a network of caves, tunnels and pillboxes. The brilliant Japanese commander defending the island, Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had been told to fight to the death — no Japanese survivors — hoping high American casualties would deter further attacks against Japanese territory.

And in April, we will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the battle of Okinawa.

Okinawa was the largest amphibious invasion of the Pacific campaign and the last major campaign of the Pacific War. More ships were used, more troops put ashore, more supplies transported, more bombs dropped, more naval guns fired against shore targets than any other operation in the Pacific. More people died during the Battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle.

The battle of Okinawa proved to be the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. Thirty-four allied ships and craft of all types had been sunk, mostly by kamikazes, and 368 ships and craft damaged. The fleet had lost 763 aircraft. Total American casualties in the operation numbered over 12,000 killed [including nearly 5,000 Navy dead and almost 8,000 Marine and Army dead] and 36,000 wounded. Navy casualties were tremendous, with a ratio of one killed for one wounded as compared to a one to five ratio for the Marine Corps. Combat stress also caused large numbers of psychiatric casualties, a terrible hemorrhage of front-line strength. There were more than 26,000 non-battle casualties. In the battle of Okinawa, the rate of combat losses due to battle stress, expressed as a percentage of those caused by combat wounds, was 48% [in the Korean War the overall rate was about 20-25%, and in the Yom Kippur War it was about 30%]. American losses at Okinawa were so heavy as to [elicit] Congressional calls for an investigation into the conduct of the military commanders. Not surprisingly, the cost of this battle, in terms of lives, time, and material, weighed heavily in the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan just six weeks later.

Japanese human losses were enormous: 107,539 soldiers killed and 23,764 sealed in caves or buried by the Japanese themselves; 10,755 captured or surrendered. The Japanese lost 7,830 aircraft and 16 combat ships. Since many Okinawan residents fled to caves where they subsequently were entombed the precise number of civilian casualties will probably never be known, but the lowest estimate is 42,000 killed. Somewhere between one-tenth and one-fourth of the civilian population perished, though by some estimates the battle of Okinawa killed almost a third of the civilian population. According to US Army records during the planning phase of the operation, the assumption was that Okinawa was home to about 300,000 civilians. At the conclusion of hostilities around 196,000 civilians remained. However, US Army figures for the 82 day campaign showed a total figure of 142,058 civilian casualties, including those killed by artillery fire, air attacks and those who were pressed into service by the Japanese army.

The only TV news that I can sit through for more than 15 minutes without channel-surfing away (usually in response to commercials or “celebrity justice” stories) is The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, which ends each broadcast with a photographic listing of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq (no other individuals killed in Iraq or elsewhere). I view them all, with a mixture of sorrow and respect. Can you imagine how long The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer would have to be to list onscreen the names and photos of just the U.S. military personnel killed during World War II? It would have to be NewsWeek 24/7 with Jim Lehrer. I remind myself of that when I get too depressed about the state of the world 60 years later.

An imaginary Jim Lehrer Sr. in 1945: “And now, in silence, are 7,000 more …”

UPDATE: Tokyo-based White Peril has much more.

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Filed under Japan, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 25 February 2005 · 6:07 pm

The Last Yankee in the Pacific

In the Winter 2004 issue of American Speech (Project Muse subscription required) two dialectologists, Daniel Long of Tokyo Metropolitan University and Peter Trudgill of the University of Fribourg, have traced the linguistic heritage of an English-speaking native of Japan’s Bonin Islands back to a very distinctive accent found only in eastern New England.

ABSTRACT: On the isolated Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands in the western Pacific Ocean, the English language has been in use for close to two centuries. The first human residents arrived in 1830, and one individual from Massachusetts, in particular, left his progeny and his mark on island society. In this paper, we analyze tape recordings made in the 1970s of a speaker born (in 1881) and raised on the islands and demonstrate that his vowel system remarkably resembles that of Eastern New England, in particular that he maintains a phonemic distinction between NORTH and FORCE vowels. We discuss other conservative dialect features of his speech, such as a nonlabiodental variant of /v/ ([ß]) [like the Spanish /v/], which appears in complementary distribution with the mainsteam [v] variant, and contact features, such as th-stopping [i.e. th sounds like t or d]. In order to place this language variety, this speaker, and these recordings within their sociohistorical context, we provide a description of these unique islands and their complex linguistic heritage.

Here’s one of the key pieces of evidence: the vowel distinctions or lack thereof among LOT, THOUGHT, NORTH, FORCE (or stock, stalk, stork, store). (I’ve replaced phonetic symbols with lay equivalents: ɔ = aw, ə = uh.)

Conservative General American: LOT ≠ THOUGHT ≠ NORTH [awr] ≠ FORCE [or]
Modern General American: LOT ≠ THOUGHT ≠ NORTH = FORCE [awr]
Canadian: LOT = THOUGHT [a] ≠ NORTH = FORCE [or]
Scots: LOT = THOUGHT [aw] ≠ NORTH [awr] ≠ FORCE [or]
Conservative RP (“Received Pronunciation”): LOT [a] ≠ THOUGHT = NORTH [aw] ≠ FORCE [awuh]
Modern RP (“Received Pronunciation”): LOT ≠ THOUGHT = NORTH = FORCE [awh]
Eastern New England: LOT = THOUGHT = NORTH [a] ≠ FORCE [awuh]
19th-Century Bonin English: LOT = THOUGHT = NORTH [a] ≠ FORCE [owuh]

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Filed under language, Pacific, U.S.

by | 15 February 2005 · 8:11 pm

The "Charter Generation" of American Slavery

Geitner Simmons of Regions of Mind has a fascinating post in response to the new PBS series on Slavery and the Making of America. He quotes from Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard Belknap, 1998):

In regard to free blacks during that period, Berlin writes: “A considerable portion of these new arrivals — fully one-fifth in New Amsterdam, St. Augustine, and Virginia’s eastern shore — eventually gained their freedom. Some attained modest privilege and authority in mainland society.”

Of free blacks in the 17th-century Chesapeake region, he explains: “When they found the weak points, they burst the constraints of servitude, race, and impoverishment. The fluidity of colonial society, the ill-defined meaning of slavery, and the ambiguous notions of race allowed Atlantic creoles to carve a place for themselves in the Chesapeake and occasionally achieve a modest prosperity, despite the growing weight of discriminatory legislation.”

A fascinating aspect of this history involves the legal circumstances in the Chesapeake:

Like their white neighbors, free people of color were a litigious people. Throughout the 17th century, they sued and were sued with great frequency, testifying and petitioning as to their rights. Though many black men and women fell prey to the snares of Anglo-American jurisprudence — bastardy acts, tax forfeitures, and debt penalties — their failure was rarely one of ignorance, as members of the charter generation proved adept at challenging the law on its own terms and rarely abandoned a losing cause without appeal.

The rise of plantation slavery brought wide-ranging change. Berlin writes: “The touchstones of the charter generations — linguistic fluency, familiarity with the commercial practices of the Atlantic, knowledge of European conventions and institutions, and (occasionally) their partial European ancestry — vanished in the age of the plantation.”

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Filed under slavery, U.S.