THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC

By William H. Benson

November 6, 2003

     Although I am not a big fan of Stephen Ambrose, I did read his last book, To America—Personal Reflections of an Historian, which he published just prior to his passing a year ago in October, and I liked it.  Right in the center of the book he began his chapter “The War in the Pacific” with a short declarative sentence–“It was the worst war that ever was.”—and then backs it up with reasons.

     And he really should know why it was the worst.  Ambrose claimed that over his lifetime he had studied and visited most of the major battle sites all over the world: those of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Indian battles, and the European battles of World War I and II.  Still he concluded that “None was as testing, as difficult, as dangerous, as shocking in the ordeal they presented to the Marines as Peleliu, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa.”

     In Europe during World War II it was often Germans fighting German-Americans.  Cousins fighting cousins.  But in the Pacific the Japanese hated the Americans, and the Americans hated the Japanese.  Infantrymen on both sides had been fed a steady diet of racial propaganda by their leaders that had dehumanized the other side.  “The extent of the mutual hatred was higher than the tallest mountains and deeper than the bottom of the sea.”

     The Marines intensely hated the Japanese, in part due to racism and in part due to Pearl Harbor, but mainly because of the Japanese way of fighting.  They shot the medics who wore red armbands.  One of them would pretend to surrender, and then as the Americans approached, others would crawl out of hiding and shoot them. 

     And both sides committed unspeakable atrocities.  Unlike in Europe where the Germans, once out of ammunition, would surrender and expect to be treated decently as a POW, in the Pacific the Japanese would fight to the death, never surrender, hoping to take ten Americans down with him.  There were few POWs.

     Ambrose argued that it is a mistaken idea that Americans won the war in the Pacific because they had superior air power and bombing capability.  From a distance the Marines would watch the pre-invasion bombardment of an island and conclude that “nothing could live through that.”  And yet when they hit the beach, the Japanese defenses were intact, and the men ready to fight.

     The Japanese held out in caves, trenches, foxholes, and tunnels, and so if the battle was to be won, the Americans would have to fight it man-to-man, diving into each tunnel and each cave and each foxhole, until the last Japanese soldier was pulled out.  Superior air power and bombing capability did not give the Marines on those islands as distinct advantage as believed.

     Ambrose is very convincing that the “Marines were the best fighting men of World War II.  The U.S. Army was second, and not far behind.”  In order to take one after another of those islands, the Marines just had to be better soldiers than the Japanese.  And they proved themselves.

     All of those battles on each Pacific island during 1942—1945 were just a warm-up for what they suspected would be the final all-consuming battle, the invasion of Japan itself, the Battle of Tokyo, scheduled for November 1, 1945.  Estimates of the casualties ran as high as 800,000, based on what had happened on the islands.

     But then in August President Harry Truman gave the ok to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, and the Japanese surrendered.  “The worst war that ever was” was over.

     Next Tuesday is Veterans Day, and we should pause and remember the ordeal that those soldiers endured, descending into hell itself, “not as visitors but as participants,” as Ambrose put it.  The citizens of the United States enjoyed peace and security, free from attack, for the next fifty-six years, until 9-11, in no small part because of what those American men did on those treacherous Pacific islands.  It was the worst war that ever was.

SMALLPOX

By William H. Benson

October 23, 2003

     The minister at the North Church in Boston, Cotton Mather, received his first printed copy of Magnalia Christi Americana on October 29, 1702, and on the same day he discovered that his 8-year-od daughter had smallpox.  Soon all four of his children had the disease, and it was a miracle that they all survived, but then on December 1^st, his wife died, but probably of breast cancer. 

     Mather remarried Elizabeth Hubbard, and they produced six more children.  But then the measles epidemic that arrived in Boston in late October of 1713 struck the Mather family hard, taking Elizabeth first, then their maid, then the twins—Eleazar and Martha—only two weeks old, and finally their two-year-old daughter Jerusha.  Cotton was overwhelmed with grief.

     As if that was not enough, yet another smallpox epidemic swept across Boston in April of 1721, but this time Cotton Mather decided to fight back.  He and Dr. Boylston promoted a new technology that Mather had heard about, an inoculation with serum draw from another’s lesions.  Mather’s son Samuel, who was born after the previous epidemic, begged for the new treatment, and although he suffered afterwards, he lived.

     However, James Franklin, the editor of a new Boston newspaper, the Courant, sensed that popular sentiment was set against Mather’s inoculation, and so he shouted in defiance against the treatment.  For months as the epidemic ended up killing over eight hundred people in Boston, young Franklin screamed out a series of editorials against Mather’s inoculation.  When the two men happened to meet on the street, they exchanged harsh words, but it was Mather who was later proven right because the treatment seemed to work; few of those treated died.

     Years later in a kind of turn around, James Franklin’s younger brother Benjamin was then living in Philadelphia when his four-year-old son, Francis, came down with smallpox, and within two weeks he was gone.  Benjamin was never able to relieve himself of the guilt that he felt because he had not inoculated his son, even though by then, he believed in its effectiveness.

     The worst biological disaster in human history occurred in the Americas when Columbus and the other Europeans arrived with their diseases, especially smallpox.  The native population in the Americas had had no experience with this disease, and thus they had not developed any immunity. Any numbers or percentages as to how many died would only be guesses, but it was enormous.

     “The Europeans were able to conquer America not because of their military genius, or their religious motivation, or their ambition, or their greed.  They conquered it by waging unpremeditated biological warfare.”

     In 1796 a scientist Edward Jenner discovered that women who milked cows infected with cowpox did not seem to ever get smallpox.  He withdrew material from a cowpox lesion and inoculated a young boy who, when infected with smallpox, did not get the disease.  He called his serum a vaccine, from the Latin word vaccinus, meaning of or from cows.

     Unlike influenza which is found also in chickens, turkeys, and pigs, besides humans, it is only the humans who can suffer from smallpox.  And once contracted there is no cure or even a specific treatment for smallpox.  It is better never to get it, because the mortality rate in the worst variety is 20 to 40%. 

     The last recorded case of smallpox occurred in 1977 in Somolia.  It was a human triumph that the World Health Organization eradicated smallpox from the globe that year.  Today the virus exists in two laboratories: one in Atlanta Georgia and the other in Novosibirsk, Russia, and in early 2002 WHO officials voted against destroying the remaining stock of the virus, choosing instead to retain it for research purposes.  But in the wrong hands those vials would have serious consequences, a weapon of mass destruction, for the mass of population today is not immunized. 

     If alive today, Cotton Mather would feel vindicated, and he would think that our good fortune to have a vaccination.

TUESDAY–SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

by William H. Benson

September 11, 2003

     Last week Newsweek reported that Osama bin Laden, hiding in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, spoke last January at the funeral of one of his daughters-in-law, who had died in childbirth, and he blamed America for her death.  He said, “I had enough riches to enjoy myself like an Arab shiek, but I decided to fight against those infidel forces that want to sever us from our Islamic roots.  For that cause, Arabs, Taliban, and my family have been martyred.”

        The Islamist extremists, such as bin Laden, are scathing in their denunciation of the United States and the way the American people live such shallow, casual, and undisciplined and irreligious lives.  Majid Anaraki, an Iranian, described the United States as a “collection of casinos and supermarkets linked together by endless highways passing through nowhere.”

     They are aghast that this corrupt and sinful culture through satellite television and the internet can infiltrate into what they see as the superior and purer Islamic nation and influence its citizens to abandon their committment to Allah and his prophet Mohammed.

     They are especially offended that Christian America and the Israeli Jews hold a measure of control over two of the holiest places in the Islamic faith: Mecca and Jerusalem.

     In 1998 Osama bin Laden told his followers, “The call to wage war against America was made because America has spearheaded the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousand of its troops to the land of the two holy mosques.” 

     He was referring to the first Gulf War when the ruling elite in Saudia Arabia allowed American soldiers to step on the land of Mecca and Medina in order to defend them against Saddam Hussein.  This was a humiliation from which the Islamic nation has never fully recovered.

     All of Islam is offended by the Middle East’s weak and powerless position and the backwardness of its people, for some one thousand years ago, the Middle East was vastly superior to both Europe and Africa which were seen as outposts of ignorance and barbarity.  And then Europe caught up and surpassed the Middle East, vastly outdistancing their civilization.

     Bernard Lewis in his book What Went Wrong makes the point that the works of Mozart, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Stravinsky, and George Orwell have traveled all over the globe.  But they stop at Islam’s borders, which has shown little interest in how others think, write, and compose.

     Just as easily as the Middle East can point out what is wrong with the West, the Western world can quickly point out what is wrong in the Middle East.  It is a closed society.  Religion is mixed up with politics.  Individual liberties are sublimated in order to maintain religious purity.  An open and liberal education is not readily available.  Women live lives as semi-slaves.  The society discourages the free flow of ideas, both political and religious.

     It is as if two men are standing on either side of a great gulf pointing an accusing finger at the other.  One is powerful; the other is weak.  One tolerates any religion; the other allows only one.  One guarantees personal freedoms; the other demands allegiance to Allah.  One is supposedly corrupted by his wealth and power; the other lives a religiously pure life.  One unleashes “shock and awe”; the other unveils terror.  And both think that they are right. 

     And the fault line that separates the two men runs through places like Ground Zero at the site of the former twin towers and at the Pentagon and in a wooded area in Pennsylvania.

     Bernard Lewis wrote that the Arab world is now continually asking itself pertinent questions, such as: Who did this to us?  What did we do wrong?  How do we put it right?  What has Islam done to the Muslims? or better yet–What have the Muslims done to Islam?

     Lewis makes the case that if the Middle East continues to follow the path the extremists demand, “the suicide bomber will become the metaphor of the Middle East and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression. The road to democracy is long and hard and full of pitfalls and obstacles.”

     Two years separate us now from the second bloodiest day in U.S. history (behind Antietam in the Civil War), when on Tuesday morning, 9/11/2001, just over 3000 people died at the hands of suicide hijackers.  The healing process, if there can be such a thing, is just beginning.  

THE WILL POWER TO WIN

by William H. Benson

August 28, 2003

     The Sixties were years marked by two massive struggles: first, the Black Americans demanded equality and an end to discrimination and second, whether to fight or give up in Vietnam.  The outcomes of both hovered around the question of who had the superior willpower.

     Young Americans today often fail to understand the widespread discrimination and racism that characterized American society up and into the Sixties.  Beginning in 1955 when Rosa Parks sat down at the front of the bus, the blacks demanded a chance to get out of the ghetto and to find better jobs, homes, and educations.  Too often black children in the ghetto had picked up the message that they were neither able nor expected to get anywhere.

     Black leadership gathered around Martin Luther King, who called for a year-long boycott of  Montgomery, Alabama’s bus system until a federal court ordered desegregation.  He then led a march to Washington D.C. that included 250,000 people, and on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial he spoke for sixteen minutes on August 28, 1963, forty years ago today.

     “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by their character.  I have a dream.”  His words are now chiseled into the Lincoln Memorial’s steps.

     King had argued for peaceful nonviolent resistance, using the boycott and the march, but after his assasination the pent-up frustration that discrimation had produced boiled over into city-wide destructive riots that tore at the very fabric of American society.

     However, by then the black leadership’s will to win had produced results.  President Johnson stood before Congress in 1963 and said, “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights.  We have talked for a hundred years or more.  It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”  The result was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Twenty-fourth Amendment that eliminated the poll tax.

     As for the war in Vietnam, as early as July 14, 1964 the Joint Chiefs reported to President Johnson that, “There seems to be no reason we cannot win if such is our will–and if that will is manifested in strategy and tactical operations.”  The air force told him that the offensive would produce results if it was heavy, swift, repeated endlessly without pause nor restraint.

     But when General Earl Wheeler told Johnson that it would take 700,000 to a million men and seven years, Johnson was unwilling to pay this bill.  Instead, he chose the cheap way with hesitant, slow, and restricted bombing that allowed the North Vietnamese time to build shelters and adjust.

     And the North Vietnamese leaders never wavered in their determination to control the entire country at any cost; they were never influenced by the number of the casualties they received or gave.  The will to win was all on their side.

     The media turned against the war first, and so the coverage of the war became biased.  The media was misled by others, and in turn it misled its readers and viewers.  American successes became reverses when the facts were often otherwise.  Paul Johnson, the historian, wrote, “Once the TV presentation of the war became daily and intense, it worked on the whole against American interests.”

     In the face of media criticism, Johnson’s once strong spirit in Vietnam faltered, and he announced he would not run again for President in 1968.  His will to win had vanished.

     Then, on August 28, 1968 Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daly called in the police to break up an anti-war demonstration during the Democratic National Convention.  The cameras zoomed in, and finally public opinion against the war soared to record levels.

     To fight and defeat an enemy requires an overpowering will to win.  Lincoln had it, and so did Grant and Sherman, as did Churchill and FDR and Truman.

     Today across the map of the Middle East, America is fighting terrorism and totalitarianism and fundamentalism–all subverted and twisted ideologies.  To win this war, to pass on to our children the rights and privileges of Western Civilization, we must tap into a deep reserve of strength and willpower.  In so doing we can find the will as well as the way to win.

CALIFORNIA AND ILLEGAL ALIENS

by William H. Benson

August 14,. 2003

     By August 13, 1521 Cortez had effectively conquered the Aztec Indians in present-day Mexico City.  He and his fellow conquistadors established a two-tiered class structure with the very powerful ruling elite on top and always anxious to retain their control and the very poor and subservient people underneath.  A great gulf, or a chasm, stretched between the two social groups then as it still does today. 

     To prevent any chance for reform or a disastrous revolution, the Mexican government looks the other way as the more ambitious and daring of its citizens flee north into the United States to find work, and so immigration has become the ruling elite’s safety valve on Mexican society.

     If the immigrant survives the trip across the burning desert, he or she soon discovers another chasm.  Yes, there are jobs available for the alien in the United States, but they are backbreaking and mind-numbing, the kind of work that the Americans themselves do not want, like field work.

     Victor Davis Hanson, a professor in the Greek and Latin classics at California State in Fresno, described what it is like to pick peaches: “The 12-foot ladder is heavy and unstable, especially when you must clamber up among the top branches 60 or 70 times a day and then descend with 50 pounds of peaches.  You tend to run rather than walk because at piece-rate labor, you can make $90 to $120 in a 9-hour shift.”

     Hanson is a fifth-generation California farmer as well as a member of California’s educational system–the 10 campuses that make up the University of California, including Berkeley and UCLA, and the 23 campuses that compose the California State University system.  Plus there is a web of community colleges.  Together it is a vast public university system and an invaluable source for upward mobility for the recent arrivals–legal or illegal.

     To crawl up that social ladder, up and out of the peach orchard and into the classroom teaching Plato’s Dialogues, required for Hanson’s family 5 generations.  Some families can climb quicker, in just a couple of generations, but most require three or more.

     The news coming out of California is that the Governor, Gray Davis, will face a recall election, and that a variety of personalities, including Arnold Schwartznegger, want the state’s top job.  The chasm in the state’s projections this year yawns wide, and Gray Davis is catching the blame.

     I think that the columnist Mona Charen unfairly pinned the blame when she wrote, “The huge array of government services that these newcomers expect and get are bankrupting the state and will continue to do so absent an abrupt change of direction.”  The presence of the illegal aliens is  only one of several reasons that together have created the state’s crisis.

     But what should California do about the illegal aliens?  And here another chasm gapes open; this one over ideologies.  Victor Hanson in his new book, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming argued forcefully for “assimiliation” which as a model has worked well for centuries in creating happy and productive American citizens.  Immigrants were expected to learn English, adopt America’s history and culture as their own, and form close ties to their new country.

     But then over the past four decades a new ideology, “biculturalism,” has eclipsed assimilation.  The bicultural teachers have taught that the immigrant’s government, language, and culture are superior to anything that America has, which is then depicted as cruel, demanding, and intolerant. The immigrants tend to end up loaded with resentment and feeling victimized when asked to learn English and American history.  It is difficult to climb a social ladder carrying such feelings.

     Californians will work toward resolving their current crisis–with or without Arnold Schwartznegger’s help.  California will continue to deal with the illegal aliens, and the California educational system will be forced to trim its excess fat, to the bone if necessary.

     And today’s immigrant, from whichever corner of the planet, will have a choice: nurse his or her wounded pride that his language and culture and history are not appreciated here or learn the English language and adopt the American culture, which is what Arnold Schwartznegger did.