How much support for Ukraine?

 

When we talk about our support of Ukraine, we have to realize what is taking place in Eastern Europe.  People in the Baltic states are very on-edge and resolved not to let Russia retake their lands. Lithuania hosts enormous numbers of refugee Ukrainians and had no trouble getting 2% GDP spending on defense.  The legislature upped it to almost 3%.  (2% is what Trump trumpeted) Estonia does 4%. Gun carry permit applications have tripled in Latvia.  And everybody says that Russia won’t stop if they take over Ukraine.  Balts are next. So while we may groan about how USA is spending so much more than our NATO allies, just how much can Estonia with 1 million people and an economy still recovering from communism support?  During the Soviet era, Russia removed half the populations of the Baltic countries to Siberia and replaced them with Russians. After 1992, some came back but large enclaves of Russians live in their countries--many of whom agree with the Balts that they don’t want Putin. If USA doesn’t defend the Baltic countries, we will be the horse’s ass of the world.  Likewise Finns want to join NATO in the worst way, yet Ergodamn of Turkey won’t vote for them.  Finland is very well-armed. EVERY young man must serve in the military. It’s unlikely that Russia would attack Finland.  They tried during WW II and failed.  And if Estonia is attacked, look for Finland to come in. They are the same people with the same language and culture.  Poland and Ukraine were once the same culture and people, split over religious denomination and leadership.  Poles are harboring something like 5M Ukrainian refugees. They wanted to give old MIGs to Ukrainians and Biden drug his feet.  Moldova is another small country full of half-Germans and half swamp.  Russia craves their land on the southwest of Ukraine because it is a staging ground for influence into Slovakia and Serbia. (Slavs.  Russia claims to be lord of all Slavic people the way Hitler claimed any country with a large German minority should be his.)

            What do we make of this?  Yes, we are spending a lot in a proxy war and need to watch this.  Yes, there needs to be a plan to win and an end game. But the people who have lived under Russian dominance are very willing to fight. Dither and Europe will lose. But as each day goes by, Europe becomes more united against Putin.  The Macaroon guy and the Socialist Democrat Sargeant Scholtz guy are coming around.  Europe’s economy is recovering better than USA (less inflation!) and Ukraine is full of talk about how they have to become more democratic and leave behind the oligarchs they had like Russia. And we face a mixed choice of what to do. But so did France in 1781 over the rebels in America.  Support or get involved or what? They showed up just in time to blockade the Chesapeake, denying British resupply of Cornwallis at Yorktown.  Washington and the other people much-motivated to fight for their country, did the rest. If that French commitment hadn’t happened, we’d be singing “God save the King” (Charles III and his messy outfit), drinking tea with cakes instead of having a good steak for supper ( or enchiladas or lasagna) and we would have had slavery much longer to support their lousy textile industry.

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.”

           

 

 

Hitler's obsession with USA

Hitler’s “Secret Book”(1928-33 journals), published in obscurity after WW II, is telling new things about the diabolical dictator. He was less obsessed about Jews than USA. In his early years, he couldn’t afford a placement in the Vienna School  of Fine Arts, while other richer Jewish kids bought a seat. Hence he became disgusted with Judaism and agnostic.  But in the Secret Book he talked about being in charge of POWs in WW I.  He came off convinced that Germans who had immigrated to America had depleted Germany and enriched USA.  He viewed everything through racial eugenics and Germans were supposedly the Master Race. Eugenics and social Darwinism had been all the rage since 1890 among intellectuals. British were also long-lost Saxons and together with USA, they threatened to dominate the world. 

Meanwhile Germany lagged economically.  USA’s  Great Depression looked like a decent economy to German farmers of the time. Hitler despised the capitalism of USA and UK, so he adopted Mussolini’s socialism. It seemed to him that a Jewish banking culture had ruined Germany when the finance world conspired to cut down the German empire after WW I.

What to do? First Jews and Slavs had infiltrated German stock and he wanted to banish or genocide them.  Historians have mostly focused on this.  But secondly, he wanted an intense effort to raising up a contaminated German people. Central to every aspect of his Third Reich were things like Pure Aryan Art, Hitler Youth, Strength Through Joy athletic events and demands that good Aryan mothers bear as many children as possible. Thirdly there was Lebensraum, “living space”.  The military was rebuilt with clear intent to take over Eastern Europe and Russia as a “frontier” much as USA had taken over native Americans. Hitler had a unique gift to turn rhetoric into hideous reality.  Others decried the Weimar Republic; Hitler destroyed it.  Others castigated Jews for being money obsessed; Hitler planned a Final Solution.  Other politicians wanted a strong Germany; Hitler took over Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

America it seemed to his racial Darwinistic worldview  was economically mighty but culturally degenerate. Jazz, republican democracy, and Wall Street were things he found disgusting.   His hope was to stave off confrontation with America/Britain until 1943, but a miscalculation in starting war in Poland, then Japan’s Hawaii attack in 1941 stopped this delaying plan. Confronted with America’s military, he had no answers.  He distrusted Japan as they did him. As FDR endorsed a “Europe First” strategy and US industry out-produced Germany 5 to 1, the Germanic Darwinian cause was lost.  

Did we miss the 9/11 lessons?

Rand Paul.  I would have trouble supporting that guy.  Sean Hannity was trying to make the point that the Iraq war was basically won and that Obama had only to make security arrangements but fell down on the job which allowed ISIS to grow.  Paul avoided comment, so Hannity repeated himself.  Paul would hardly agree, saying that the country was no country at all and that Iraq was probably doomed.  Yeah, but.  If someone declares war on you, it doesn’t matter if you’d rather be on the golf course, you better learn to respond.  Freedom isn’t free.  And that is why Paul seems out of step with most of the Republican party.

            Monica Crowley, Phd. in foreign affairs, says quite correctly that some Muslims are jealous to the point of insanity.  They can’t accept the fact that Christianity and the West has succeeded while Islam and its society has crashed and burned.  They were supposed to be on God’s side! They were supposed to conquer the world! And so we see successful Muslims, going to our schools and practicing their skills in good jobs, yet secretly turning to violent jihad.  Hasan and bin Laden, Tsarneavs and Mohammad Atta, 4 physicians who tried to car bomb Glasgow airport, name after name, all were successes.  (It’s not the dregs of Islamic society who do this.) Yet being successful in the West made them feel like traitors to Islam—a faith and a political society mashed into one.  So just as Islam teaches that ALL people go to hell-- pagans and infidels to burn forever, true Muslims to be refined by torture until they are ready for heaven—except for martyrs for Allah’s faith who go straight to heaven, they choose martyrdom.  And this attitude is proven by their targets.  They hate the success of the West so they targeted the World Trade Center instead of say, a football game where there would have been far more easy casualties.  And they targeted the USA’s political hub—Congress and the President.  But one pilot overflew the White House which is hard to pick out from the air and he crashed into the Pentagon.  The plane that was supposed to hit the Capitol was taken down by passengers and crashed in Pennsylvania. 

            And so we listened to a President speak strong words about ISIS the night before the 9/11 anniversary.  He had hopes that should some disaster occur, he would seem prepared and leaderlike.  It was pretty transparently political, even to MSNBC.  Their commentators kept making the excuse, “Well we couldn’t have done any different because Maliki didn’t want us in Iraq.”  That’s probably the lamest whining I’ve heard in years.  We shall see what the next two years bring.