Category Archives: U.S.

by Joel | 28 January 2007 · 7:58 pm

WW2 Interservice Rivalry in the U.S. and Japan

Interservice rivalry existed in Tokyo, to be sure, but on the fighting front both services cooperated fully, as was evident in Malaya, where General Tomoyuki Yamashita and Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa displayed perfect teamwork. In the Guadalcanal operations, also, the Japanese Army and Navy cooperated.

The Americans at the front, however, did not yield to each other. One conspicuous example of this occurred when an emergency policy conference was held on 4 September 1942 at Noumea to discuss the Japanese counteroffensive, which was endangering the American forward lines. Present at the conference were Admiral Nimitz, CINCPAC; General Arnold, Air Force Chief of Staff; Admiral Ghormley, Commander in Chief, South Pacific; General Sutherland, Chief of Staff, Far Eastern Army; and General Turner, Commandant of Marine Corps. General MacArthur refused to come to the meeting. When Admiral Nimitz asked General MacArthur for 10,000 soldiers as reinforcements, MacArthur turned down the request, saying that he could not divert a single man from the New Guinea operations—even though he then had 55,000 men under his command. When MacArthur in turn asked Admiral Nimitz for a fleet with two carriers, one Marine division, and a squadron of large bombers for his northward operations, Nimitz refused and explained that operations at Guadalcanal would not permit such a diversion of his forces.

When the situation at Guadalcanal became critical for the United States, President Roosevelt finally took direct measures to dissolve the interservice rivalry. On 24 October 1942 he sent an emergency order, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, directing the immediate reinforcement of Guadalcanal….

Turning to Japan, we see a different kind of rivalry. The battle of the Solomons was fought mainly by the Naval Air Force. Plane losses ran to the staggering total of 7,000. The nation’s capacity for plane production should have been mobilized to replenish these losses. The Army, however, insisted on one half of all aircraft production for its own use. Since the Army Air Force had sustained no losses in the Solomons, it should have relinquished its quota to the Navy, but it did not. Two decades earlier, when the Navy under Admiral Tomosaburo Kato was feverishly trying to build its 8-8 Fleet, the Minister of War, General Giichi Tanaka, offered to divert part of his appropriations to assist the Navy’s expansion. Such understanding and cooperation, however, could not be expected from the Army leadership of General Tojo. The Navy’s antipathy toward Tojo was extreme, and men in the Navy Ministry were correspondingly disturbed by their weak leadership in Admiral Shigetaro Shimada. In the United States, harmony prevailed at the highest level of command, while discord erupted between field commanders. In Japan, on the other hand, there was harmony among field commanders of both various services, but disunity and friction at General Headquarters.

Meanwhile, the scheduled offensives were launched by Admiral Nimitz in the Gilberts and the Marshalls, and by General MacArthur in New Guinea. Japan had no way of knowing which was the main offensive line. She abandoned the Solomons operations, gave up her outer perimeters, and was forced to withdraw to an inner defensive line along the Marianas and the Philippines. This forced withdrawal left Japan with makeshift lines which were indefensible. If she had been content with these inner defensive lines in the first place, and had devoted her efforts to establishing strong positions along these lines, she would have given a much better account of herself.

SOURCE: The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy, by Masanori Ito, trans. by Andrew Y. Kuroda and Roger Pineau (Jove Books, 1984), pp. 88-92

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by Joel | 27 January 2007 · 10:55 am

Dancing Destroyers and Submersible Freighters, 1942–43

In November [1942] there were on Guadalcanal nearly 15,000 Japanese officers and men, thousands of whom were incapacitated by sickness—malaria, stomach disorder, malnutrition. All day they had to fight against steadily growing enemy land forces. At night they were engaged in receiving such food, ammunition, stores, and medical supplies as might be brought in by fast destroyers or submarines. The “grocery runs” were made at full speed, under cover of darkness on moonless nights.

In hope of avoiding air attacks, Japanese destroyers stayed by day at Shortland Bay in Bougainville. Yet even there they were subjected to bombing attacks by the far-ranging American planes. These regular bombings were dubbed teikibin [定期便], meaning scheduled runs.

When the air-raid alarm sounded, all ships would get underway and maneuver violently, swinging their bows hard left or right to dodge the falling bombs. These attacks came so frequently and regularly that the destroyer skippers began to look forward to them as a chance for practicing evasive tactics. Admiral Tomiji Koyanagi, commander of the destroyer squadrons, nicknamed these evasive maneuvers the “Bon Dance” because of their left and right swinging movements, so reminiscent of the dancing in the annual Bon Festival of Lanterns. The dance of the destroyers was laughable, if one could ignore the deadly consequences of a misstep….

Deplorable as was this destroyer situation, the story of misused submarines is even sorrier.

When first-line submarines were employed almost exclusively in the demeaning task of supply operations, the war for Japan on a gloomy aspect despite many great naval victories.

Early in the effort of supplying Guadalcanal by surface ship, it was realized that nocturnal destroyer runs could not bring in enough material. Accordingly, submarines were detailed to the same task. As need for supplies increased, more submarines were assigned until, by January 1943, thirty-eight submarines were eventually involved. This “submerged freight service” cost Japan the loss of 20 submarines and their seasoned crews. During this period another four submarines were sunk in the Solomons area while on regular patrol. The loss of 24 submarines in a few short months was bad enough, but it was especially painful that 20 of these aggressive fighting machines should be lost in the course of nonaggressive operations for which they were never intended.

Submarines assigned to this duty were stripped of all torpedoes, shells, and guns to make room for supplies. Crews were dejected when informed of their mission, even though they realized the importance of bringing needed materials to Guadalcanal. It was a further blow to morale when the crews witnessed enemy submarines, on proper offensive missions in the same area, attacking our ships and disrupting our supply lines.

Quite naturally our submariners felt that their proper and primary task was to cut off the line of supply between the mainland of the United States and Guadalcanal, or to attack the line of communication between Guadalcanal and Australia. Disruption of the enemy’s line of communication to Guadalcanal—so much more extended than that of Japan—would have been far easier for Japanese submarines had they been allowed to pursue their proper function. And it would also have been far more profitable to the Japanese war effort.

With only three Japanese submarines engaged in offensive operations around Guadalcanal, it is to their great credit that they succeeded in sinking the enemy aircraft carrier Wasp. The poor showing of Japanese submarines in World War II, as compared with those of Germany and the United States, must be attributed in major part to their unwise employment in late 1942 and early 1943.

If the thirty-odd Japanese submarines available in the Solomons had been mobilized offensively to the east and south of Guadalcanal they could have seriously disrupted enemy convoys and been a great threat to the supply strategy of the United States. When Japanese submarines were finally released from logistic support operations and resumed regular offensive tasks, there was a marked increase in their effectiveness against enemy ships.

SOURCE: The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy, by Masanori Ito, trans. by Andrew Y. Kuroda and Roger Pineau (Jove Books, 1984), pp. 79-83

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by Joel | 26 January 2007 · 5:19 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Rengou Kantai, Ketteisen

The other old mass-market paperback that I recently bought for $1.39 was The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy, by Masanori Ito (1956), translated by Andrew Y. Kuroda and Roger Pineau (1962). It offers an interesting critical retrospective on the Pacific War from the point of view of the Japanese Navy’s high command. It also offers a chance to combine book excerpts with Wordcatcher Tales.

聯合艦隊 rengou kantai – 聯合 rengou ‘combined, united’ has now been simplified to 連合. The first character also occurs in the abbreviated name of the old Soviet Union (ソ連 soren [so- is short for sobietto ‘Soviet’]) and in the translation of United Kingdom (連合王国 rengou oukoku). The second word, which can mean either ‘fleet’ (if large) or ‘squadron’ (if small) is composed of 艦 kan ‘warship’ and 隊 tai ‘squad, troop’. In Japanese, navy submarines are warships, not “boats”: 潜水艦 sensuikan ‘submerge-water-warship’. The 隊 tai can also translate ‘corps’, as in 挺身隊 teishintai ‘volunteer (lit. ‘offer-body’) corps’, which is the standard term for the military ‘comfort women‘ in Korean (chŏngshindae).

TO THE JAPANESE PEOPLE “Rengo Kantai” is a familiar and honored term meaning “Combined Fleet.” When World War II began, the Japanese Navy—the third most powerful in the world—included some of the mightiest ships in naval history and was a force worthy of the pride and trust of the Japanese people. Then, in less than four years, this great war machine fell from glory to oblivion. Of ten battleships riding in Hiroshima Bay in December, 1941, nine were sunk. The lone survivor, Nagato, died at Bikini Island as a target in an atomic bomb test.

As early as the spring of 1946, Bungei Shunju magazine urged me to write of the last days of the Combined Fleet. I refused because I did not wish to disturb the dead bodies of my friends. Even if I had forced myself to write, I would not then have been able to assemble all the material now available to me. In the years since Japan’s defeat, the war-troubled mind of the people has been calmed, but I find that there is still nostalgia for the Combined Fleet in many hearts. It was at the request of Japanese readers that my newspaper articles were assembled into this book.

Movements to romanize our language may some day succeed [!!], but the ideographs for Rengo Kantai [聯合艦隊] will always stir Japanese hearts, just as do some of Admiral Heihachiro Togo‘s famous words. His dispatch as battle was about to be joined at Tsushima Strait: “The enemy has been sighted; the Combined Fleet is moving to annihilate him. The waves are high but the day is clear.” [pp. 1-2]

決定戦 ketteisen ‘decisive battle, showdown’ – The components are 決める kimeru ‘to decide’, as in the Sino-Japanese compound 解決 kaiketsu ‘solution, settlement’; 定める sadameru ‘to decide, fix’, as in the compound 定食 teishoku ‘set meal’; and 戦う tatakau ‘to fight’, as in the compound 戦争 sensou ‘war’. The term can refer to any kind of decisive showdown, whether between sumo wrestlers, gameshow contestants, or dinosaurs.

Army leaders in Japan believed that the United States could be easily defeated. But Admirals Yamamoto and Nagano knew the temper, traits, and character of the American people, as well as the military history of the country, and they had no illusions of an easy victory for Japan.

Their hope was that Japan might quickly achieve such overwhelming successes that the United States would accept a compromise peace. There was risk involved, but Yamamoto decided in favor of decisive battle. The question then remained as to where the battle should be fought. The Naval General Staff hoped that it could be in the Solomons.

The Solomon Islands, stretching southeasterly from Rabaul to Guadalcanal, could provide valuable bases for the Japanese fleet. The General Staff figured that seizure of these islands would constitute such a threat to Allied lines of communications that the United States Navy would oppose their occupation, and could then be annihilated. This concept depended heavily on the enemy’s rising to the bait. If the enemy shied from decisive battle in the Solomons, Japan would be faced with a long war.

Admiral Yamamoto, on the other hand, advocated Midway as the battleground. He reasoned that Japanese occupation of Midway and the Aleutians (all part of the same operation plan), would guarantee a challenge from the United States Navy. He felt that Americans could accept the fall of Guam and Wake, but that they would not tolerate Japan’s advance beyond the 180th meridian. He also felt that his Midway plan had a better chance of success than the Solomons strategy.

The Midway strategy, however, involved a greater risk. The distance from Japan’s Inland Sea to Midway is more than twice the distance from Pearl Harbor to Midway. Midway’s comparative proximity to Pearl Harbor would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Japan to support an island garrison. The chance was very great that the enemy could easily recapture the atoll.

But Admiral Yamamoto argued that the opportunity for a decisive battle must be expected to entail risk. Midway should be seized. If the enemy came out to regain the island, Japan’s long-sought opportunity would be provided. A fleet-opposed action of Japan’s choosing would lead the way to another “Pearl Harbor,” in which, this time, enemy aircraft carriers could be destroyed. With the U.S. Navy’s strength divided between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Yamamoto felt that the Pacific half would fall easy victim to the concentrated Combined Fleet of Imperial Japan. [pp. 52-53]

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by Joel | 24 January 2007 · 8:58 pm

Operation Bismarck Sea, 2–4 March 1943

One reason I’ve been posting a bit less is that I’ve been reading a book that is not very bloggable—Operation Bismarck Sea, by Lawrence Cortesi (Major Books, 1977)—which I picked up for $1.39 at a used book store. It interested me because it describes a major air–sea battle in the area of Papua New Guinea in which I did fieldwork in 1976, and where I heard many stories about the Pacific War in that neighborhood. I shan’t keep it. There are much better resources online these days.

The little mass-market paperback book has all the accuracy of a TV docudrama by Ollie North. In other words, it has lots of accurate and fascinating facts and figures, but it’s quite one-sided. Among the earliest tipoffs that the Japanese side was badly misrepresented was the improbable name Yukata Tishayuna, a fictional captain subordinate to the real admiral Masatomi Kimura (citing the names in English order). That, plus the fact that the captain addresses his superior as the ‘Honorable Kimura’, and the Japanese speak in orientalized clichés:

“Before the first buds of cherry blossoms seek the sunlight of spring,” the aide said, “we shall destroy the cancer at Wau.”

“Banzai,” Okabe answered softly with a grin.

Other names are also screwed up: a Japanese ship named Arishio (蟻潮 ‘ant tide’?) instead of Arashio (荒潮 ‘rough tide’); and an island called Undoi instead of Umboi (the former somehow distinguished from Rooke Island, the latter synonymous with Rooke Island, and also known as Siassi Island).

Nevertheless, there is one passage that seems worth quoting on pp. 182-183:

The Imperial Japanese Staff had always been too cautious, even when they possessed far superior numbers. They were never willing to commit more troops or planes or ships than necessary, especially in air and sea battles.

At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had come up short of a true knockout blow because they were too cautious to move in for the kill and perhaps occupy the Hawaiian Islands. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, though their forces far outnumbered the understrength Allies, they retired after suffering the loss of a single carrier, even though they had sunk two American carriers. In the Battle of Midway, although Japan’s air and sea units had suffered losses, they still had a formidable, unscathed striking force in the area; but instead of pressing on against the depleted American carrier force, they again retired.

The same might be said of the Solomons campaign. Japanese caution was the major reason for American success at Guadalcanal. In most of the naval fights during the Solomon campaign, the Japanese task forces did more damage to the American navy than the Americans had meted out. Yet, after successful naval engagements, such as the Battles of Savo Island or Cape Esperance, the Japanese naval units retired after their victories instead of pressing forward. As a result, they had allowed the American navy to lick its wounds and regain its strength.

As to Japan’s aerial strategy, the worst kind of caution prevailed. While American pilots were generally superior to Japanese pilots, and while the American P-38 was superior to the Hamp and Zero fighter plane, the Japanese could muster many more planes. Further, they were superior to the earlier P-39 and P-40 used by the American air force prior to 1943. Yet they never sent more than a squadron or two of fighter planes into an aerial engagement. They thus allowed even terms to inferior numbers of Allied army and navy units, which could rarely muster more than a squadron or two of planes to meet a Japanese challenge. So, because of the superior training of Allied airmen, the Allied pilots usually defeated their opponents.

The Japanese also followed this caution in the use of their bombers. Hundreds of Sally and Betty bombers sat on the many Japanese air bases in the Bismarck Archipelago, especially at Rabaul. Yet they rarely committed more than 20 or 30 bombers to an air attack against an Allied base. Against navy ships, the Japanese only used their light naval fighter-bombers. They rarely sent their heavy and medium bombers that were only a stone’s throw from the Ironbottom Strait [or Sound] in the Solomons where most of the action took place during the Guadalcanal operation. The biggest raid ever conducted by the Japanese in the Southwest Pacific was the 5-plane raid on Port Moresby in February, 1942.

At the conference in Rabaul in February 1943, where the Japanese staff planned operation 157, Admiral Junichi Kasaka of the Imperial Eleventh Naval Air Fleet, boasted of his great airpower. He could count hundreds of planes scattered among the various Japanese airfields in the Bismarck Archipelago. Why then, didn’t Admiral Kasaka maintain a cover of a hundred or even two-hundred planes over the convoy all the way from Rabaul to the Huon Gulf? Kasaka’s land-based aircraft were never more than an hour or two from the route of Kimura’s convoy. And, ironically, Kasaka did maintain heavy air cover over the convoy during the early part of the voyage, when the convoy was far into the Bismarck Sea and out of range of Allied medium or light bombers. But he failed to maintain this cover as the convoy neared Huon Gulf, within range of any Allied plane in New Guinea.

Moreover, Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, commander of the Eighth Outer Sea Fleet, could proclaim that he had all but chased the American navy from the Bismarck Archipelago because of his superior numbers in naval ships. Why then, didn’t he allot one or even two aircraft carriers to escort the hugely important 22-ship convoy into Lae? Again, because the Japanese had an obsession with safeguarding their heavy strength. They kept planes and ships ever in reserve for future emergency.

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Filed under Australia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, U.S., war

by Joel | 24 January 2007 · 6:00 pm

My Reaction to the State of the Union Speech

I was only half-watching U.S. President Bush’s State of the Union speech on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, but I came away very disappointed in Speaker Pelosi. Why? Well, for passing up the perfect chance to give the President a surprise shoulder-massage like the one he gave to German Chancellor Merkel. The House Speaker might have one more chance next year, but tensions between his shoulders and between the two political parties will be even worse in 2008, I expect.

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by Joel | 21 January 2007 · 4:15 pm

How to End Another (Anti-)Opium War

I’ve been too busy with other projects lately to follow up on some news reports that relate to my recent excerpts from Rory Stewart’s travels in Afghanistan, in particular Anne Applebaum’s column last Tuesday advocating control rather than eradication of opium, the country’s largest cash crop by far.

Of course it isn’t fashionable right now to argue for any legal form of opiate cultivation. But look at the evidence. At the moment, Afghanistan’s opium exports account for somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the country’s gross domestic product, depending on whose statistics you believe. The biggest producers are in the southern provinces where the Taliban is at its strongest, and no wonder: Every time a poppy field is destroyed, a poor person becomes poorer — and more likely to support the Taliban against the Western forces who wrecked his crops. Yet little changes: The amount of land dedicated to poppy production grew last year by more than 60 percent, as The Post reported last month….

Yet by far the most depressing aspect of the Afghan poppy crisis is that it exists at all — because it doesn’t have to. To see what I mean, look at the history of Turkey, where once upon a time the drug trade also threatened the country’s political and economic stability. Just like Afghanistan, Turkey had a long tradition of poppy cultivation. Just like Afghanistan, Turkey worried that poppy eradication could “bring down the government.” Just like Afghanistan, Turkey — this was the era of “Midnight Express“– was identified as the main source of the heroin sold in the West. Just like in Afghanistan, a ban was tried, and it failed.

As a result, in 1974 the Turks, with American and U.N. support, tried a different tactic. They began licensing poppy cultivation for the purpose of producing morphine, codeine and other legal opiates. Legal factories were built to replace the illegal ones. Farmers registered to grow poppies, and they paid taxes. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the latest White House drug strategy report– which devotes several pages to Afghanistan but doesn’t mention Turkey — but the U.S. government still supports the Turkish program, even requiring U.S. drug companies to purchase 80 percent of what the legal documents euphemistically refer to as “narcotic raw materials” from the two traditional producers, Turkey and India.

Why not add Afghanistan to this list?

Registan contributor Joshua Foust notes an ominous sign that the U.S. seems to be taking the opposite approach.

President Bush has named William Wood as the new ambassador to Afghanistan…. Wood hails from Colombia, which makes sense. The theory must be that he has experience running an anti-narcotics effort. Of course, the anti-cocaine effort in Columbia is an abysmal failure, and repeating the same tactics in the anti-opium effort in Afghanistan look set to make the security problems—to say nothing of the drug problem—far, far worse.

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by Joel | 19 January 2007 · 5:53 pm

"Poor students need only love, idealism and martyrdom"

In today’s New York Times, a 10th-grade history teacher at a public school in
the Bronx reviews Hollywood’s latest inspirational-teacher flick.

The great misconception of these films is not that actual schools are more chaotic and decrepit — many schools in poor neighborhoods are clean and orderly yet still don’t have enough teachers or money for supplies. No, the most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher.

Films like “Freedom Writers” portray teachers more as missionaries than professionals, eager to give up their lives and comfort for the benefit of others, without need of compensation. Ms. Gruwell sacrifices money, time and even her marriage for her job….

“Freedom Writers,” like all teacher movies this side of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” is presented as a celebration of teaching, but its message is that poor students need only love, idealism and martyrdom.

I won’t argue the need for more of the first two, but I’m always surprised at how, once a Ms. Gruwell wins over a class with clowning, tears, rewards and motivational speeches, there is nothing those kids can’t do. It is as if all the previously insurmountable obstacles students face could be erased by a 10-minute pep talk or a fancy dinner. This trivializes not only the difficulties many real students must overcome, but also the hard-earned skill and tireless effort real teachers must use to help those students succeed.

It seems to me that Hollywood takes exactly the same short-attention-span approach to foreign policy. Each international crisis is a movie project. Activists devote their attention to it for six months or so, generating media events and raising tons of cash. When that’s done, they take several months off, then they’re ready for new causes, new projects, new scripts, new locations, new casts, new marriages. Nothing can’t be solved by media events, cash, and lots of feel-good self-congratulation. Who cares if their solution bombs with the people it aims to rescue. They’re not really the audience. They’re somebody else’s responsibility. And it was all somebody else’s money to begin with.

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Filed under cinema, education, U.S.

by Joel | 9 January 2007 · 9:52 pm

Appalachian Roots of the Klezmer Revival

Dumneazu (whom I think of as Klezmerescu) has a fascinating post about the Appalachian roots of the revival of Klezmer musical traditions in the U.S.

Like a lot of folks who play Klezmer music, I got my start playing American traditional folk music back in the 1970s. New York was a magnet for folk music, and there was a very active scene of people playing traditional Appalachian fiddle music and old-time southern music styles. One peculiarity of the New York Appalachian fiddle and bluegrass scene was that almost all of the local music enthusiasts were either Jewish or Italian…. Young New York musicians would make the pilgrimage south to North Carolina or West Virginia to learn to play at the feet of some of the old masters of traditional folk fiddling, like Tommy Jarrell of Toast, North Carolina. Tommy’s style (generally known as “Round Peak” style) became the New York City default mode for fiddling.

UPDATE: Nathanael at Rhine River sees the “Hillbilly Klezmer” pair of aces and raises the bet with a link to a current story in the Hartford Courant headlined However Unlikely, Connecticut Becomes A Center In The Ukulele’s Resurgence.

To stand in the Clinton home of Jim and Liz Beloff is to find yourself in an unofficial Ukulele Information Center.

The husband-and-wife team, both in their 50s, have carved out a rather singular niche for themselves as experts on all things to do with the plucky four-string instrument. They’re widely credited within the ukulele community (indeed, there is one) for the recent resurgence in uke activity….

Beloff figures we’re in the “third wave” of the ukulele (the first being in the early 1920s, the second in the 1950s). This new wave has produced a breed of ukuleleists, mostly from Hawaii, who defy expectations of what the ukulele can do. John King plays classical music on his uke (it sounds a lot like a harpsichord).

The current uke superstar is Jake Shimabukuro, a lightning-fast player who lists guitarists Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen as influences. In concert, he often uses guitar effects to manipulate the sound.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain has brought an avant-garde sensibility to the ukulele by deconstructing old standards. Though not so big in its namesake country, the group is popular in Japan.

“Many started taking it up for the philosophy and for the iconography that the ukulele represented,” says Bill Robertson, whose recent documentary “Rock That Uke” chronicled the punk and alternative ukulele scene (yes, there is one). “Since that time, it has become the instrument for musicians to demonstrate their virtuosity.”

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by Joel | 29 December 2006 · 1:29 pm

A Contrarian Take on the Six-Party Talks

On Christmas Eve, the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal ran a short stocking stuffer of an op-ed by literary contrarian B. R. Myers, who wrote his dissertation on North Korean literature (reviewed here).

No country today is as misunderstood as North Korea. Journalists still refer to it as a Stalinist or communist state, when in fact it espouses a race-based nationalism such as the West last confronted during the Pacific War. Pyongyang’s propaganda touts the moral superiority of the Korean race, condemns South Korea for allowing miscegenation, and stresses the need to defend the Dear Leader with kyeolsa, or dare-to-die spirit–the Korean version of the Japanese kamikaze slogan kesshi [決死]. The six-party talks are therefore less likely to replicate the successes of Cold War détente than the negotiating failures of the 1930s. According to early reports from Beijing, the North Korean delegation appears more confident than ever. It has clearly been emboldened not only by its accession to the nuclear club, but by the awareness that Seoul will continue providing food and financial support no matter what happens….

The ideological landscape of the peninsula defeats the reasoning that led to the six-party talks in the first place. North Korea is not a communist country with ideological and sentimental reasons to listen to China and Russia; it is a virulently nationalist state that distrusts all the other parties at the table. And though the rhetoric of a “concerted front” against North Korea has proved to be just that, it has sufficed to heighten South Korea’s sense of solidarity with the North. This will continue to mean plenty of aid money for Kim Jong Il with which to build weapons. The U.S. has urged Beijing to bring more pressure to bear on the North. But if America can do nothing with its own ally, it can hardly expect the Chinese to do more with theirs.

via The Marmot’s Hole

UPDATE: B. R. Myers responds to comments over at The Marmot’s Hole.

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, nationalism, Russia, U.S.

by Joel | 25 December 2006 · 8:54 am

Anglosphere Navies vs. Cuban Pirates, 1820s

The United States sent out a second pirate-hunting squadron in 1823, this time under the command of Commodore David Porter, a naval hero who had captured the first British warship taken in the War of 1812. There had been a debate during the winter as to the best method of combating the pirates and it was decided that, to be fully effective, the squadron ‘will require a particular kind of force, capable of pursuing them into the shallow waters to which they retire’, as President Monroe informed the Senate. And so, in addition to the ships which had sailed with Biddle in 1822, Commodore Porter was supplied with a fleet of vessels specifically tailored to the task in hand, the first time that such a sensible policy had been adopted in pirate-hunting history. These included ten fast schooners, with a draught of less than seven feet and fitted with twenty or twenty-four sweeps, and five light double-bank cutters or barges, each to row twenty oars and adapted to carry forty men, well armed with muskets, pistols, boarding pikes and cutlasses. The squadron was also graced by the presence of the US steam brig Sea Gull the first naval steamer of any country to serve in action. She was originally built as a New Jersey ferry and ‘the croakers predicted that she would founder at sea in the first blow’, as Porter told his son who later wrote his biography. But in fact the Sea Gull did good service, mainly as a mother ship to the rowing vessels, though she had a chance to use her powerful guns on occasion and in May 1825 was reported to have sunk a pirate ship after a two-hour gun battle off Matanzas.

Porter chose as his base Key West, American since 1819 and only a hundred miles from the coast of Cuba. The United States was now at last getting cooperation from the Spanish authorities in Cuba and his orders permitted him to pursue pirates ashore, having first given notice of his intentions, orders which shared the ambiguity of those given to the British commanders. American relations with these British counterparts were excellent, the British going so far as to replace the normal admiral commanding the Jamaica station by a commodore so that Porter would not be outranked and ‘we might meet on equal terms’, as the American commodore recorded with gratitude. There was a certain amount of division of labour, the British concentrating their searches on the south coast of Cuba and the Americans on the north, but men of the two navies also hunted together, as in March 1825 when the boats from the British frigate Dartmouth and the schooners Union and Lion joined up with boat crews from the Sea Gull in a successful pursuit of the pirate schooner Socorro. ‘I am happy to say,’ reported the British commodore Sir Lawrence Halsted, ‘the greatest harmony prevailed throughout the service, the men of either nation receiving orders from the officers of the other and obeying each with equal alacrity.’ This harmony was echoed by Lt. Com. McKeever of the Sea Gull who praised ‘the handsome manner in which we were seconded by the officers and crews of the boats of HMS Dartmouth. There had been a certain amount of cooperation between the British and French in previous anti-pirate campaigns, in both the Leeward Islands and West Africa, but nothing on the scale of this Anglo-American camaraderie, this being nicely epitomised by the kind and friendly treatment given to sick British sailors at Key West which included taking convalescent men for a trip round the Florida Keys in the steam brig.

Such cooperation, along with Spanish assistance and the choice of the right sort of vessels for the job, was to prove the doom of the Cuban pirates, but the service was quite incredibly arduous for the British and American sailors and marines involved. Nearly all the close-up work was done by men rowing in open boats who pursued the elusive pirates from cay to cay, through shoals and reefs and into hidden passages through the mangrove swamps, such close pursuit often being done under fire from the retreating pirates. Captain Godfrey of HMS Tyne reported a successful cruise by his men who had chased pirates ‘in open boats without any kind of shelter for thirty days and thirty nights’, a record beaten by Lieutenant Platt of the United States Navy who was employed for sixty-eight successive days in an open boat on the north-west coast of Cuba, ‘in the examination of the inlets, bays, keys, and other places of piratical resort’. A report to the House of Representatives in January 1825 stressed the perilous service being imposed on Americans engaged in anti-pirate duty, who faced disease as well as danger in vessels too small to maintain health on long cruises. But such sacrifice was justified by the result. ‘They enabled the commanders to scour the coast, to penetrate into the shoal waters of the creeks and inlets, to the very margin of the land.’ No pirate hunters in the past had ever shown such zeal, determination and courage as these truly professional British and American sailors and marines.