On this day, in 1941, a Jap carrier fleet’s airmen sneak-attacked our naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. They sunk five battleships and several other ships. They destroyed 188 aircraft and damaged 159 others on the ground. (There were 402 military aircraft on Oahu.) They murdered 2335 military people and scores of civilians.
We declared war on the Japs quickly, then Hitler the bisexual leather freak who ran Germany foolishly declared war upon us.
World War Two would cost us about 400,000 men and some women military dead, and many hundreds of thousands more wounded, diseased, and blinded or crippled for life. It cost about 15 million men and some women some of the best years of their lives. The war also shortened the lives of many Americans who had to fight it.
These included my Dad, my Uncle Chuck, and my Uncle Rusty, and virtually all their friends. And my Aunt Billie, who was an Army nurse. It also set up the Korean War, in which my Uncle Don suffered enough wounds to earn the Purple Heart five times – as a medic! The Red Chinese used his medic cross as a target. My Aunt Olive also served in that war as a nurse.
The Japanese are strategic thinkers. In 1920, right after World War One, a young Japanese named Isoroku Yamamoto was a student at Harvard. In his free time, he “quietly surveyed U.S. oil fields and refineries,” wrote Nathan Miller, on page 303 of his book “The U.S. Navy: An Illustrated History.” Yamamoto was also a junior officer in the Japanese navy; two decades later, he would be the evil genius behind the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Our airmen shot his plane out of the sky and killed him in 1943.
The Japanese demonstrated their savage bestiality in Asia in World War Two every bit as thoroughly as the Nazis showed theirs in Europe. The Bataan Death March was typical of the Japs’ subhuman treatment of captured American soldiers. They also raped, burned, shot, and beheaded millions of Chinese civilians in World War Two. They turned Korea into a sex slave colony. They raped and beheaded many European, Australian, and American women and children they captured in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.
They even shot the radio man on Attu in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands while his terrified wife watched, then chopped off his head in front of her and the children on the little island. The Japs took them to Japan and worked them as slaves. Half of the enslaved islanders died in Japan.
The militant savagery of the Japanese earned them the hatred of the Chinese and Koreans, the peoples of Southeast Asia, and the Americans. Roughly one-third of Americans in Japanese captivity died or were murdered; fewer than 10% of Americans in German captivity met the same fate. The Germans have apologized for their savagery and have paid billions of dollars in reparations. The Japanese are still largely in denial, still refuse to apologize or pay reparations in most cases, and portray themselves as victims of the Americans who justifiably nuked them.
Japanese military officials forced roughly 200,000 girls and young women from Korea, China, and the Philippines to serve as unpaid prostitutes. When Jap soldiers impregnated them, Jap doctors aborted them so they could get back to work. The Japs also raped several thousand American, British, Australian, and Dutch women they caught in the Far East.
Then there was Unit 731, a Japanese research camp in Manchuria whose medicos rivaled Dr. Mengele in savagery and cruelty. They dissecting still-living prisoners, mostly Chinese men and women, to see the effects of biological agents they inflicted on them. They dissected prisoners while alive, subjected them to biological agents, exposed them to test frostbite damage, and committed many other atrocities in the name of science. Most of these bestial bastards got away with their crimes. American officials wanted their biological warfare research and spared their miserable lives to get it. A much better action would be to get all the info, and then kill the offenders.
The Japanese murdered roughly 20 million people during World War Two. The vast majority were civilians. And they didn’t quit easily. They deserved to be nuked. As many times as it would take for them to surrender.
My Dad, a “deck ape” (aircraft mechanic) aboard the escort carrier USS Sargent Bay, saw duty in the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns. The Sargent Bay had to return to San Pedro, California for repairs in August 1945. There Dad and the rest of the crew heard about the nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said they cheered till they puked, because they knew an invasion of Japan would be a bloody operation.
Before World War Two, Japanese military people captured and raped our own aviatrix Amelia Earhart, according to islanders who witnessed them parading her through their village, bound and stripped to her panties and bra. Amelia was on a reconnaissance mission against the Japanese buildup in the Pacific at the request of FDR in 1937 when her plane went down. She tried to cover her sleuthing with an announced flight around the world. But the Japs weren’t buying her story. American Marines found Amelia’s personal effects when they took Saipan in 1944, only days after a Japanese swordsman reportedly beheaded her. In other words, Jap savages kept her alive for serial sexual abuse for seven years. American leaders from FDR down to the lowest official who knew about her mission shamefully disavowed all knowledge of Amelia’s mission when the Japs captured her.
Fred Goerner’s book “The Search for Amelia Earhart” details the aviatrix’s capture and likely execution. He wrote it in 1960, when many of the characters who knew about Amelia were still alive. The CIA and some American military officers tried to thwart his investigation. The CIA would later come under suspicion for acting at the behest of Lyndon Johnson to help murder John Kennedy.
FDR and his chain of command were criminally liable for unreadiness at Pearl Harbor. Any competent investigation would have disclosed this to the American public. But no official investigation ever took place.
British military historian John Costello, an expert on Pearl Harbor and the friend of several of the officers who lived through that tragedy, in a 1994 book titled “Days of Infamy” disclosed FDR made threats to the Japanese to get America into the war to protect the British colonies in Asia. (It wasn’t our duty to protect British imperialism, the Brit acknowledged.) And he noted FDR made ultimatums to the Japanese knowing American forces would not have enough weaponry in the Philippines to back up his threats until at least 1942. This bit of criminally negligent brinkmanship gave the Japs the window they needed to strike in late 1941.
General Douglas MacArthur, our top military man in the Philippines, refused to bomb the Japs assembled on Taiwan (they were set to invade the Philippines) with our B-17s even though he got the message about Pearl Harbor. Instead, the Japs caught his bombers (which, with fighter escort, could have destroyed their planes on the ground and sunk the invasion fleet from Taiwan) on the ground, and this allowed the Japs to land on the Philippines, torture and murder captive Americans, and use the women of the Philippines and many captured American nurses and female government employees as sex toys.
Was it bad judgment? No, said Costello, it was much worse. An archive declassified showed MacArthur got $500,000 from the civilian government of the Philippines, allegedly not to strike first … the top Filipinos hoped the Japs would ignore them as they gobbled up Indonesia from the Dutch and moved toward Australia. And so many of MacArthur’s soldiers were bayoneted, shot, beheaded, or left to rot in concentration camps as a result, and American and Filipina females were victimized and some were beheaded or otherwise murdered by the scum from Japan. If what Costello says the record says is true, and I believe him to be true on this, the authorities ought to bury MacArthur next to turncoat general Benedict Arnold. And they could disinter FDR and relocate him next to the Rosenbergs, who were electrocuted for espionage in New York.
President Trump has ordered the release of the remaining JFK murder case documents. I hope he will declassify and release all papers concerning Pearl Harbor, MacArthur’s decision not to strike first from the Philippines despite getting info about the attack on Pearl Harbor as it was happening, and on Amelia Earhart’s spy mission and execution. Make all these records public so we can find out what our officials knew and when they knew it, and if their actions were criminal or incompetent.
History repeats itself if we don’t learn its lessons. We have the records to learn these particular lessons if the feds will declassify the documents as they should.
And one war monument we should tear down and turn into ordnance is the Jap memorial on Attu.
President Trump has come under fire for recognizing Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The most available public record in the world – the Bible – notes this has been the case since King David made it his capital. Last time I checked the Bible I couldn’t find any mention of Tel Aviv.
This brings up another point. One of the most miserable things FDR’s people and the British leaders did was refuse to evacuate Jews to the Holy Land. In fact, the British actively kept Jews from trying to come to the Holy Land, which was under British rule until a successful Jewish guerrilla war after World War Two prompted the British to leave. FDR’s people and the British higher-ups claimed they lacked shipping to save Jewish refugees because the ships were in use feeding free Europe and transporting men and weapons there for the war. Yet many ships on such duty returned empty, when they could have transported refugees. Meanwhile, the Allies seemed to have plenty of ships available to help Moslems who wanted to make pilgrimages to Arabia, and the British had plenty of navy vessels available to stop Jews who tried to emigrate to the Holy Land.
The appeasement of the Moslems did no good. During World War Two, many Arabs sided with Hitler because he was killing Jews and because of British imperialism. British and American forces essentially had to overthrow the governments of Iraq and Iran during the war to ensure the oil supply and to make a route through Iran to supply the Soviets with roughly $11 billion of American Lend-Lease food, machinery, trucks, and weapons, not counting Harry Hopkins’ atomic bomb “care packages.”
A related controversial action of FDR’s was the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. While sad, it is more understandable, given the temper of the times.
In 1940, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was transferred from the Labor Department to the Justice Department. The INS normally ran Ellis Island and enforced immigration policy. But these were not normal times.
In 1939, the U.S. Coast Guard requisitioned most of Ellis Island as a training station. They would use most of Ellis Island for this purpose until 1946, after the end of World War Two. Angel Island, the immigration station in San Francisco Bay, likewise would have barracks for Coast Guard men and Women’s Army Corps women during the war. Physically, Angel Island is a couple of square miles in area with good-sized hills and plenty of trees; it is one of the most gorgeous islands in America and has a panoramic view of the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay. Ellis Island is only about 30 acres, pancake-flat, and much of it man-made.
Immigration officials still held detainees for possible deportation on Ellis Island, and still processed the relatively few immigrants coming into the country. During World War Two, American officials detained several hundred aliens from Germany, Italy, and Japan each night on Ellis Island until they moved them to other detention facilities or released them. The island also hosted as prisoners some foreign seamen who had jumped ship or had bad papers. Federal officials allowed the detained aliens to have visitors while they were in custody on Ellis Island.
Nationwide, there were 600,000 registered Italian aliens, 300,000 German aliens, and 90,000 Japanese aliens. There were smaller numbers of registered Austrian, Hungarian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Romanian, Croatian, and Finnish aliens …. men and women from all of these countries were fighting on the side of Hitler, or against the Soviet Union or Serbia/Yugoslavia or Greece, allies of Russia or Britain. Ellis Island was much too small to serve as a holding cell for those among all these people who were clearly dangerous. Most of the German and Italian and other European registered aliens were not detained during the war.
However, the same thing could not be said for the Japanese aliens. FDR, on the advice of California state attorney general Earl Warren, would order American citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry interned in relocation camps during World War Two. Since the Japs sneak-attacked Pearl Harbor, it was rational to expect there were some sleepers and saboteurs among the Japanese population of California and other Western states. However, FDR made everyone a suspect, and had 110,000 of them interned, citizens as well as aliens. There were insiders who profited by getting Japanese-American and Japanese resident owned businesses and real estate for a song when FDR had the rightful owners locked up.
Dwight Eisenhower would later make Warren the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Warren turned out to be almost as much a disaster to the protection of the American public as FDR’s appointee Klansman, anti-Catholic bigot, and criminal lover Hugo Black was.
Sadly and ironically, the most decorated regiment in the U.S. Army was the 442nd “Go For Broke” outfit, which was made up of Nisei (American-born Japanese) soldiers. Daniel Inouye, a long-time senator from Hawaii, was one of these men, and he lost an arm in combat in World War Two in Italy. Incidentally, his long-time opponent and colleague Kansas senator Bob Dole lost the use of an arm in combat in World War Two in Italy.
Note the Japanese Americans served America well during World War Two. There is nowhere near the volunteerism of America’s Moslem immigrants for our nation’s military services now. The truest form of patriotism and assimilation is a group’s enlistment in the military of a nation to which they have migrated.
Now for another look at the war. I grew up in California, where memories of the war and the internment remained among the adults.
On December 7, 1971, a high school teacher of mine named Miss Kobata gave our high school class a pop quiz. I stood on my desk, cupped my hands to my mouth to mimic a P.A. announcer’s voice, and intoned, “Nip sneak attack. Nip sneak attack. Nip sneak attack.”
Miss Kobata went into an angry crying jag. While still crying, she said she and her family had been interned because they were of Japanese ancestry. When she recovered, she told me to report to the administrator in charge of punishing the school’s boys. Mr. XXXX looked like Jack Webb. He may have gone on to his reward, but if he is still alive, I won’t name him to protect him from the politically correct Nazis in the Granola State.
He said, “Well, Mister Sherlock, what brings you here today?”
(I was a “regular” when it came to being in hot water at the school.)
“Well, Mr. XXXX, Miss Kobata gave a pop quiz, and today being Pearl Harbor Day, I did this….”
I then replayed the “Nip Sneak Attack” mock announcement.
I knew my audience. Mr. XXXX was drinking coffee, and he spit and snotted it all over his desk because he was laughing so hard. He had been a Marine in the Pacific Theater during the war. So his perspective was different than that of Miss Kobata. He said to give Miss Kobata a couple of days to calm down, and he’d get me back into class.
A few Fridays later, I took home “Jane’s Fighting Ships” from the high school library. When my Dad saw me reading it, he said, “Look up the Sargent Bay.”
I read the info on Dad’s ship, and said, “You ain’t gonna like it, Dad.”
“WHY?” He demanded.
“Dad,” I replied, “it says they scrapped your ship in 1958 and sold the scrap to Japan.”
Dad spent the entire weekend alternating between cursing the Japs and cursing the Eisenhower administration. The USS Sargent Bay had been his home and his duty station during the war, and the year afterward, when it was in Boston Harbor. He had framed photos of his unit aboard the aircraft carrier and of the carrier itself, and he had other mementos of the war. Our government threw out his history and sacrifice and sold it to his enemies, who we were now trying to cultivate as allies.
War brings out the best and worst in mankind. It is not just an old memory of old people, but an event that permanently altered their lives.
America should be reluctant to enter any war. We should enter a war only if attacked or if we cannot avoid war due to questions of the lives of our people and other legitimate issues of national honor, as Zachary Taylor would say. But once we enter a war, we should be single minded in winning the war. Anything less is the cruel waste of the lives of our fighting men and our service women.
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
END NOTES
Sources of information on the shameful behavior of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and other American and British and French officials concerning the Holocaust include Gordon Thomas’ and Max Morgan Wills’ book Voyage of the Damned, Arthur Morse’s book While Six Million Died, and Paul Johnson’s book A History of the Jews (pages 503-504).
Morse grudgingly acknowledged some of the work Pope Pius XII and Cardinal Roncalli (the eventual Pope John XXIII) and other Catholic officials, priests, nuns, and lay people did to rescue the Jews. Morse concentrated on the inaction of the FDR regime in his book. One of his most devastating criticisms was aimed at FDR’s people and the British for failure to evacuate Jews to the Holy Land. He noted both governments claimed they lacked shipping to save Jewish refugees because the ships were in use feeding free Europe and transporting men and weapons there for the war. Yet many ships on such duty returned empty, when they could have transported refugees. Morse noted, “The British report included a reference to the fact that the Allies always managed to find shipping to transport thousands of Moslems on their annual pilgrimage to Jidda, while simultaneously denying the availability of ships for Jews in flight (page 99).”
Information on Ellis Island’s use during World War Two comes from the Historic Research Study, Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island National Monument, by Harlan D. Unrau, National Park Service, 1984. (pages 822-828).
Data on World War Two detainees comes from the Unrau study (pages 833-838).
Daniel Inouye’s story comes from a Reader’s Digest book called “True Stories of World War II.”
Info on Unit 731 comes from Unit731.org.
Info on the Jap atrocities on Attu Island comes from a 5/18/2017 article by Lee Jordan for the Echo News, an Aleutian Islands, Alaska paper.
