Midway

 

God is wise and in not telling us the future of events on earth.  We usually can’t handle it. Saul knew full well, God had picked David as future king and spent the remainder of his life fighting it. Hezekiah got another 15 years of life and then squandered it.  But the Navy boys didn’t squander their opportunity in the decisive, historic victory in the battle of Midway.

            The disaster at Pearl Harbor was missed by military intelligence, and nobody felt worse for it than Capt. Ed Layton who was commander of HYPO, a military intel group in Honolulu.  He offered to resign, but Adm. Chester Nimitz asked him to stay on.  We now know that Layton and Capt. Joseph Rochefort had missed the attack because Washington, DC, high command had not let them see diplomatic messages.  Rochefort was a brilliant, eccentric officer who often wore slippers and a bathrobe over his uniform.  He often spent days sequestered with a code.  He and Layton had met on assignment in the 30s to the Tokyo embassy and knew fluent Japanese.  USA had decoded part of the Nippon’s JN-25b code. HYPO deduced that the next likely attack was Midway, 1300 miles NW of Hawaii.  Gaining its air field, Japan could bomb and then invade Hawaii. They also found evidence for an attack on Alaska.  Washington disagreed.  They had the same messages and thought Solomon islands were likely--to cut off  Australia and New Zealand and invade there. It came down to identifying target “AF”. Who was right? Nimitz trusted his Pacific HYPO guys and withdrew the Enterprise near to Midway.  But such was a neglect of his orders to return to Hawaii.  Yorktown was in Hawaii and he ordered a frantic fix of the crippled carrier.  What we now realize is that the Japanese Army and Navy were arguing.  The Army wanted to invade Alaska.  With only 30,000 non-natives it would be a cakewalk. Nippon’s.Navy was intent on going for the kill of America’s Navy with a trap set at Midway.  High command decided both attacks would happen simultaneously.

            Nimitz told HYPO they’d have to come up with “proof” to convince DC that a strike was due at Midway. Jasper Holmes, an engineer at Hawaii University, had been reactivated and had just joined HYPO.  He had a plan.  Have the Midway base broadcast, without encryption, that they had an emergency with their desalination water plant. Sure enough, Rochefort intercepted a coded Japanese message to include extra water with the invasion fleet.  Plus, there was a surprise—exact date of the attack, June 4, 1942.  Then Rochefort worked on another more heavily encrypted message containing the battle plan, route, etc.  By luck he found the code-breaker and thus Nimitz knew the battle plan.  The Admiral had 3 fleet carriers and six small sea carriers and the airbase.  Japan had 4 fleet carriers and a dozen sea carriers, far more destroyers and battleships. And they mistakenly thought, secrecy.

            With advance notice, Midway sent its planes aloft and was ready with anti-aircraft guns.  As they held off the bombing raid, planes attacked the widely dispersed (for secrecy) Japanese fleet.  But inexperienced US pilots and pitiful American torpedoes that wouldn’t detonate, plus Japan’s skilled fighter pilots won resoundingly.  The Nipponese badly disabled Yorktown.  Then they received word that Midway had been on alert and not much hurt by the raid.  So another round of land bombs was being re-armed on returning planes.

             Then came America’s Dauntless.  Dauntless Douglas Dive-bombers under Lt. Dick Best and Wade McClusky, squadron commanders, targeted the Kaga and Asagi (flagship). Kaga took several hits and because the Japanese were re-arming, bomb stacks, fuel hoses lay all over the lower decks. These erupted in massive fires.  Best then targeted Asagi.  His own DSB Dauntless put a 500-lb. bomb down the elevator of the ship causing a terrific explosion. Japanese carriers had cost-saving wooden decks and thus were at risk for fire.  A third carrier, the Soryu, was also destroyed. Hence returning Japanese pilots, with no place to land, had to ditch in the sea.  The following day, the Dauntlesses destroyed the Hiryu and the Japanese called a retreat. They had lost 6000 men and half their Pacific fleet.  Nipponese naval dominance never recovered after Midway. With Yorktown unsalvageable, the United States now had just 4 Pacific fleet carriers vs. Japan’s 4.  In the next 3 years, Japan would build 3 more.  But USA built 24. And the Japanese Army found themselves stranded without Navy support on two Aleutian islands after Midway.

            Layton, Rochefort, Holmes, and Best all came from small town America—small towns with big churches—and each of them was influenced by Protestant faith.  As Dick Best said, “You never know when your end is coming so live as much as you can.”  He fought Midway with tuberculosis and was discharged later that year.  Layton became a Rear Admiral; Holmes, head of the HU math department. Cryptoanalyst, Joseph Rochefort  died in 1976 and peers took up cause that he be decorated (He had not. Did the Navy have to have someone to blame for Pearl??).  Posthumously, he was awarded the President’s Medal of Freedom. Richard Halsey “Dick” Best, the super pilot, fought through his TB, and outlived them all.  He died in 2001.  “Live as much as you can.”

           

 

 

Flavius Josephus--a fairly truthful historian

 

This story with Christian evidence unnoted by many historians came to my attention from my son who had purchased “The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus”.  Flavius Josephus [FLAW vee us Joe SEEF us] was a Jew who was born 4 years after Jesus’s death and went on to become a prolific writer of firsthand accounts of the revolt of the Jews in the 60s AD as well as much we know about Jewish culture. His mother was royal, Hasmonean, related to Herod the Great. His father, Mattias, was a priest and so Josephus Ben-Mattias became one too.  His life was roughly 33 years of training for the priesthood followed by captivity and then citizenship and return to status when he wrote his histories. Compared to other ancient “historians” he is a rarity,quite factual.  Others, in service to kings wrote propaganda.  But Josephus wrote to defend Judaism and Jews and this colors his text.  Yet he was looked upon as a sell-out by Jews of his day.  He studied Sadducees and Essenes but decided to become a Pharisee, like the apostle Paul. Banus, an Essene was his close friend. 

            After a revolt in 64 AD, Josephus went to Rome to plead for release of 3 priests, sent there for trial by Proconsul of Palestine Felix.  That was the year of the burning of Rome.  Emperor Nero’s wife, Poppaea, was a God-fearer (Gentile who admired Judaism).  So while Jews and especially Christians were being persecuted, the priests were released. Josephus realized that Rome was undefeatable and the Romans realized he was good at diplomacy.  But upon returning to Jerusalem, he was persuaded to side with another revolt.  The following year his forces were defeated by Vespasian.  He was captured in a cave and certain to be executed.  But he had a dream that Vespasian was to be emperor and told his captor about it.  Vespasian decided to keep Josephus as a slave and interpreter, growing fond of his attempts to quiet the Jews.  In 69 AD, Nero was voted out of the Consulship by the Senate and he committed suicide, thus ending the Julian line of emperors without heir.  Vespasian returned to Rome and became emperor just as Josephus had predicted.  He left behind his son Titus to quash rebellion, and Josephus with him, who tried to convince Jerusalem not to resist. It didn’t work.  Jerusalem was totally destroyed by the Romans. Half of Palestine’s 2 million people were killed. Vespasian granted Josephus citizenship and Titus gave him a land grant, but he retired to Rome to write as he was viewed as an egotistic opportunist traitor by the Jews.  He adopted Flavius, the Vespasian family name and died in 103 AD.

            Josephus became a highly educated writer who wrote about the Hasmonean dynasty that ended with the Herods, the Jewish rebellion and life after the Temple.  Very briefly he mentioned another. “Now there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works—a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.  He drew over to him[self] both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles.  He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate at the suggestion of the principle men among us, had condemned him to the cross on [Roman date of  April 3, 33AD].  Those that loved him at first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named for him are not extinct at this day.” (Antiquities,ch.3, vs. 3)

            The truthful Josephus, unlike fellow Pharisees, admired Jesus, acknowledged him to be the Christ, but without understanding the implication of that, was not a Christian himself.  He considered Christians as another Jewish sect, not bringing up the animosity for Christians that arose after 70 AD among both Romans and Jews.

1973

1973.  I remember it well. Trying to finish a degree and programming with punched cards. I’d get tired of doing physics derivations that were 4 or 5 pages long and go over to the college library and read an economist I had just discovered, Milton Friedman, who wrote a monthly magazine article.  In the spring of 73 things were booming.  Farmers, flush with cash from Nixon opening up trade to Russia, bought all new pickups and tractors.  All their old equipment was circa 1948-52, the last time farming had been good. Food prices shot up 10% that spring and farm products rose at an annual rate of 50%.  All the other commodities then took off too.  Things looked oh so rosy. 8% annual growth!  Unemployment was 3.4%.(When Dems called Trump on his claim to lowest unemployment in history, they were actually correct until 2019 saw 3.3%) Nixon had lifted his price controls and people couldn’t get supplies.  Ponca City still has plumbing horror stories about copper-aluminum pipes that ruptured 15 years later , installed as a substitute in a copper shortage.  The Dems controlled Congress with a Veto-Proof Majority.  Nobody could stop their deficit spending. But Friedman was worried about Fed expansionism, keeping interest rates low.  He wanted us to watch the alternate money supply, M2 and adjust interest accordingly. And Congress was living on the edge, he insisted, with massive spending. Meanwhile, shortages of certain commodities started showing up.  Coffee went sky high. People substituted roasted barley and even milo for a true battery acid. Every product seemed rushed from the Chevy Vega to Disco music. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Stayin’ alive! Today we are all enthused about the end of COVID and want to travel.  In 1973 everybody went traveling too while Nixon fought for his political life, vetoing nothing.  By the end of summer inflation had risen to 11% and continued at that pace until 1980 when Paul Volcker’s Fed made the Fed Discount rate 18% and prime rate was 21%.  Gasoline went from 35 cents to over a dollar in 7 years. People felt so hopeless that only Jessica Beale’s movie “Flash Dance” about hope in dying Pittsburgh was relief. The Fed got inflation under control at the cost of a horrid 4-year recession. But that wasn’t the only recession with inflation (stagflation) in the 70s.  The 1973-74 winter saw things collapse with OPEC withholding crude oil  and Gerald Ford could just kiss his idea about running again good-bye.  But the thing about Congress is that they didn’t recognize any problem with deficits. And the Fed was slow on the trigger to raise interest rates.  You’d hear Congressmen argue that Congress had always spent money before to no ill effect.  The Fed argued that their quarter point raises were what they had always done before and things always went back upright.  If inflation gets its claws into a demand-fueled , supply constrained economy, it doesn’t let loose easily, Friedman warned.  Indeed, labor unions wanting a 3% raise would tack on 5% for inflation and demand 8%.  Suppliers “charged ahead” to next year’s prices.  Everybody wound up speculating in natural resource stocks that bubbled and collapsed in 1979.

            Today, it seems so similar. Obstinate Dems and Fed, commodities going up fast, people hoping for a spending spree after they buy that new house.  Demand everywhere, supplies low, housing wild. Maybe gild the lily with  popcorn ceilings, a shake roof, and  paneling on that house.    

Kildare and Newkirk

 There are two towns in Kay County, Oklahoma which have very historic and Christian-related names. How many citizens from there know the origin of their town name?

            The Gaelic word for church is kirk.  When the Scottish Reformation under John Knox took place it was, as in all countries, part motivated by resentment of the vast lands and taxes of the Roman Church.  Edinburgh, the capital, also welched under the influx of Frenchmen who accompanied Mary of Lorraine who married James V of Scotland in 1538.  James died and Mary became regent queen for her son, James VI.  The clergy supported the French entourage that came with Mary, and obliged with religious processions, in which effigies of the Virgin or saints  were paraded and worshipped.  The practical Scots had ridicule and doubts, and in 1557, a mob seized an image of St. Giles in the Motherkirk (Cathedral of St. Giles) in Edinburgh.  A group of nobles formed a group and signed the First Scottish Covenant, resolving to establish the Reformed church in Scotland.  This inflamed Rome and especially the French Catholics who demanded Mary cut down the Protestants as Mary Tudor had done in England.  But Mary Stuart was not a leader and she merely signed a capitulation. Then she fled for her life or French rescue (which never materialized).  Parliament met in 1560 and accepted the confession of faith of John Knox, a reformed cleric.  But when the nobles proceeded to divvy up most of the land of the church among themselves, leaving only 1/6 of it to the clergy and church finances, Knox got angry and declared a movement and alliance of Scottish Presbyterianism and democracy. That tradition continues to this day. The reorganized church was called Newkirk by the common people.

            The second city named with Christian historic roots is Kildare.  I will let historian Will Durant explain.

            “Only second to him [Patrick] in the affection of the Irish people stands the woman who did most to consolidate his victory.  St. Brigid, we are told, was the daughter of a slave and a king; be we know nothing definite of her before 476, when she took the veil.  Overcoming countless obstacles, she founded the “Church of the Oak Tree” –Cill-dara, Kildare—at a spot still so named; soon it developed into a monastery, a nunnery, and a school as famous as that which grew at Patrick’s Armagh.  She died about 525, honored throughout the island; and 10,000 Irish women still bear the name of “The Mary of the Gael”.