The Giants of Flight 93, Plus 17 years

In October 2002 a friend of mine, Tom Holsinger, wrote  about 9/11/2001   and the people on Flight 93 — Our fellow citizens who rose up and fought Al Qaeda, when all others, our military, our political leaders, our law enforcement, were frozen in surprise — at the strategypage.com web site.

While today’s dedication speech by Pres Trump of the “Tower of Voices” in Shanksville, PA. came close, I have not read any written commemoration of their act, before or since, as moving as this passage:

Students of American character should pay close attention to Flight 93. A random sample of American adults was subjected to the highest possible stress and organized themselves in a terribly brief period, without benefit of training or group tradition other than their inherent national consciousness, to foil a well planned and executed terrorist attack. Recordings show the passengers and cabin crew of Flight 93 ordinary Americans all exemplified the virtues Americans hold most dear.

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Certain death came for them by surprise but they did not panic and instead immediately organized, fought and robbed terror of its victory.  They died but were not defeated.

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Ordinary Americans confronted by enemies behaved exactly like the citizen-soldiers eulogized in Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture.

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Herman Wouk called the heroic sacrifice of the USS Enterprise’s Torpedo 8 squadron at the Battle of Midway “… the soul of America in action.”  Flight 93 was the soul of America, and the American people know it.  They spontaneously created a shrine at the crash site to express what is in their hearts and minds but not their mouths. They are waiting for a poet. Normally a President fills this role.

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But Americans feel it now.  They don’t need a government or leader for that, and didn’t to guide their actions on Flight 93, because they really are America.  Go to the crash shrine and talk to people there. Something significant resonates through them which is different from, and possibly greater than, the shock of suffering a Pearl Harbor attack at home.

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Pearl Harbor remains a useful analogy given Admiral Isokoru Yamamoto’s statement on December 7, 1941 “I fear we have woken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”  They were giants on Flight 93.

 

 

 

A chainlink fence covered in mementos and flags dedicated to the flight 93 crash

This is the spontaneous memorial wall erected by Americans for the passengers and crew of Flight 93 in a field near Shanksville, PA.

9/11 Plus Seventeen Years

I guess I thought they were all gone, those types of monsters, stranded on reels of black and white film.Cara Ellison  (blog no longer available), in a 2007 post about 9/11/01.

Bookworm:  “My life is divided into two parts:    Before  September 11, 2001 and  after  September 11, 2001.”

Simply evil: Christopher Hitchens suggests that sometimes the simple and obvious explanation for an event is more accurate than an explanation which relies on an elaborate structure of “nuance”

An attack, not a disaster or a tragedy. George Savage explains why the persistent use of terms like “tragedy” by the media acts to obfuscate the true nature of the 9/11 attacks.

Claire Berlinski  was in Paris on 9/11. Shortly thereafter she wrote  this piece for City Journal

Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney  were F-16 pilots with an Air National Guard squadron. Their order was to bring down Flight 93 before the terrorists in control of it could create another disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center…but their aircraft were configured for training, with no live ammunition and no missiles. A video interview with Major Penney  here

Joseph Fouché  writes about how the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, and the murder of Ahmed Shah Masood on September 9 of that year, prefigured the 9/11 attacks.

The Diplomad  posts a speech he gave on 9/14/01, when he was charge d’affaires at a U.S. embassy.  You did not hear speeches like that being given by diplomats under the administration of Barack Obama.

On September 11, 2005,  Rare Kate  didn’t go to church. Follow the link to find out why. In my original post linking this, I said “What if American and British religious leaders had responded the depradations of  Naziism  in the spirit of this liturgy?  Actually, some of them did. The impact on preparedness was certainly malign, and the people who took such positions certainly bear a share of moral resposibility for the deaths and devastation that took place. Ditto for those who are behaving in a similar way today.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an important leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany (executed in 1945), wrote the following:

Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and the brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearannce they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.

The refusal on the part of many individuals to face the seriousness of the radical Islamist threat to out civilization stems in significant part, I feel certain, from a desire to avoid the uncomfortable and even dangerous kind of clarity that Bonhoeffer was talking about.

In previous posts I’ve introduced the metaphor of the  attrition milla machine in which two steel disks, rotating at high speed in opposite directions, crush between them the grain or other substance to be milled. Our society is caught in a gigantic attrition mill, with one disk being the Islamic terrorist enemy and the other being the “progressive” Left within our own societiessome of whom are wishful thinkers who deny uncomfortable realities, an alarming number of whom forthrightly despise their own societies and the majority of their fellow citizens. Without the existence of the second disk, the terrorist threat would be serious, inconvenient, and dangerous, but would not be an existential threat to Western civilization. But it is the interaction of the two disks, despite the differences in their stated philosophies of life, that increases the societal threat by orders of magnitude.

Monica Crowley digs up an article written on September 19, 2001, by an Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama…and analyzes what it tells us about this man’s worldview and lack of intellectual depth.

Enid and Geraint…a poem written by Grim on 9/11/2001

Three Days in September, by Sarah Hoyt

A time bomb from the Middle Ages. Roger Simon explains how 9/11 altered his worldview and many of his relationships.

 

 

 

Seth Barrett Tillman: Some Reflections on Trump and his North Korean Condominiums

On Omaha Beach, the French have put up two monuments—one traditional and one more modern. The beach itself is open and used. People traverse the beach and dip their feet in its cold water. Small children play in the sand. There is ample parking for tourists. There are places to buy souvenirs. And not so distant from the epicentre of the beach and its monuments—people have private homes. Maybe some of those homes are condominiums—I don’t know. What this means is that at some point, temporally and geographically, the mourning and the monuments must run out. Yes, the dead are buried. But the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.

Read the whole thing.

History Week End: MacArthur’s Forgotten New Guinea Air Warning Wireless (NGAWW) Company Aircraft Spotters

I have often stated in an earlier Chicago Boyz columns on Gen Douglas MacArthur that:

One of the maddening things about researching General Douglas MacArthur’s fighting style in WW2 was the way he created, used and discarded military institutions, both logistical and intelligence, in the course of his South West Pacific Area (SWPA) operations. Institutions that had little wartime publicity and have no direct organizational descendant  to tell their stories in the modern American military.”

Today’s column is on another of those forgotten institutions, the  New Guinea Air Warning Wireless (NGAWW) company, and the US military leader who saw to it that it’s story was forgotten in the institutional American military histories of World War II.

Australian signallers from the New Guinea Air Warning Wireless Company (AWM photo 015364 ).jpg
Australian signalers from the New Guinea Air Warning Wireless Company with a  AWA 3BZ Teleradio  transceiver  (AWM photo 015364 ) Public Domain photo found on Wikipedia

DESPERATION & INNOVATION

In January 1942 — after the Fall of Rabaul and before the Japanese Carrier Strike on Darwin — the Australian military recognized it needed a system of radio equipped ground observers in New Guinea to warn Australian outposts of incoming air attacks.   Thus was born the  New Guinea Air Warning Wireless Company (NGAWW), which was a inspired combination of innovation and desperation using the organizational templates (and Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA)   Teleradio series wireless sets) of the Australian Royal Navy Coast watchers and the Royal Air Force Wireless Observer Units    used in North Africa.   [1] [2]

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Happy VJ-Day, Plus 73 Years

Happy  Victory over Japan Day!

On August 14th in 1945 Imperial Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and averted  Operation Downfall, the two stage invasion of Japan. On Sept 2, 1945 the surrender was signed on the USS Missouri in Tokyo bay, This invasion would have resulted in at least a million American casualties and up to 20 millions of Japanese dead from direct effects of the invasion plus the mass starvation that would have been sure to occur in its aftermath.

Since August 2010, it has become an nine years and counting tradition (See link list at the end of this post) for the Chicagoboyz web site to commemorate the major events closing out World War II in the Pacific and address the leftist agitprop surrounding those events. Where the worst recorded war in human history became a nuclear war via the August 6th and 9th 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the Imperial Japanese acceptance of the terms of the  Potsdam Declaration, and the Sept 2, 1945 formal surrender on the battleship USS Missouri.

This years year’s Chicagoboyz commemoration will focus on how the Imperial Japanese Military’s two nuclear weapons programs — one each for the Army and Navy — helped to obtain a surrender in an irrational polity bent on suicidal martial glory.   And how their existence has been erased from the narrative of Japanese surrender by the identity issue academics in the diplomatic history community.

Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 Imperial Japanese Surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.
Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.

Historical Background   IJA Ni-Go & IJN F-Go  Genzai Bakuden Programs

The Imperial Japanese Military’ s atomic bomb or “Genzai Bakuden” program  had a two separate Army and Navy projects;   the Army’s Ni-Go program and the Navy’s F-Go. [1]    Neither of these programs produced a working device, despite 1946 rumors about a test near  Hungnam, Korea that were later incorporated into the 1985 book  Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb. [2]

The bottom line is that if Imperial Japan of the summer of 1945 had a prototype atomic device.   It’s first test would have been on a ship or aircraft kamikaze aimed where they thought it would hurt the American war effort the most.

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