Month: September 2011

Operation Zipper, Sept 9, 1945 — The Other “Invasion That Never Was”

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Sixty six years ago today, had Japan not surrendered to the Allies after the dual A-Bomb attacks and the Soviet Invasion of Manchuria, the armed forces of the British Empire would have stormed the western beaches of Malaya at Port Dickson and Port Swettenham with two infantry divisions, one infantry brigade, lead by a regiment of DD-tanks and flame throwing landing vehicles. This invasion would have set off a chain of events that would have seen hundreds of thousands, if not millions, murdered and killed before the Allies put down the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces, starting with Allied Prisoners of War. The word of that atrocity would have prevented a later Japanese surrender as the British and American public’s rage would have left the American President and British Prime Minister no other options.

This is was a very near run thing as Britain’s ambassador to Japan Hugh Cortazzi (1980 to 1984) said here:

On Aug. 15, 1945, the Japanese authorities “announced that although Nippon had agreed to unconditional surrender, Field Marshal Count Terauchi, Commander in Chief of the Southern Army, did not associate himself with it and intended to fight on. What we did not know then was that a plan existed at Count Terauchi’s Saigon headquarters to execute all prisoners in case of invasion.”

This passage on page 573 of “Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb“ by George Feifer, makes clear the human cost of that “Kill All” order being executed:

“After the fall of Okinawa, Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchin issued an order directing his prison camp officers to kill all their captives the moment the enemy entered his southeast Asia theater. That would have been when those 200,000 British landed to retake Singapore, less than three weeks after the Japanese surrender. There was a real chance that Terauchi’s order would have been carried out, in case up to 400,000 people would have been massacred.”

And it would not have stopped there. When the British reached Singapore, it would have found a repeat of “The Rape of Nanking without wartime censorship being able to cover it up. More importantly, Allies Ultra and Magic code breaking let Allied leaders know this was on the table.

From Truman’s August 9, 1945 Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference.

I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.
 
Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.
 
That is why we felt compelled to undertake the long and uncertain and costly labor of discovery and production.
 
We won the race of discovery against the Germans.
 
Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.
 
We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.

Emperor Hirohito took the hint and sent a personal representative known to Field Marshal Count Terauchi to get the Count to enforce a surrender on his troops.

11 Sep 2011 UPDATE (Below the Fold)

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Weather Girls

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Every day I get up at Oh Dark Thirty and trudge to the salt mines to make a few kopeks to keep the bill collectors at bay. I usually pick up a sugary soda (real sugar, mind you) and a couple of hard boiled eggs on the way, make my way to work and plunk myself down to blast away at my typically filled inbox. I get more done in the two hours before my employees show up than I do the rest of the day.

Along with my breakfast of champions described above I give myself one other guilty pleasure to start my day off. The Weather Girls. Every day I get my forecast delivered by several cute Asian ladies (I think these are actually Taiwanese). The forecast is always wrong, the cities are out of order and I don’t understand a word of what they say. Like it matters.

Today’s forecast was special. Tell me if you can see anything, well, unusual in this clip.

[youtube Y5AMRNYuqyk Weather Girls]

Book Review: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan

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A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

The American space program, like its Russian counterpart, was largely an epiphenomenon of the ballistic missile program. A great deal has been written about the space programs; regarding the missile programs themselves, not so much. This book remedies that gap by using the life of General Bernard Schriever, who ran USAF missile development programs, as the centerpiece for a history of the Cold War’s defining weapon. Although Schriever is the central character, the book describes the roles played by many other individuals, including:

–John von Neumann, the Hungarian-American mathematician–an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union who advocated a strong American military posture and perhaps even a nuclear first strike

–The bomber general Curtis LeMay, who to put it mildly was not a Schriever fan. After Schriever received his fourth star, LeMay glared at him and said, “You realize if I had my way, you wouldn’t be wearing those.”

–Simon Ramo, who as a high school student withdrew all his savings to buy a violin in the hopes of winning a college scholarship in a music contest…he did win, and as a young engineer was chosen by GE over another job candidate because the Schenectady orchestra needed a good violinist! Ramo went on to co-found the Ramo-Wooldridge Company (later TRW) which basically created the discipline of systems engineering and was used by Schriever to address some of the most difficult technical challenges facing the missile program.

–Colonel Ed Hall–a brilliant designer of missile engines, a hard-driving project manager, and in the opinion of many associates a complete jackass to work with. To call Hall “assertive” would be putting it mildly–when his wife was giving birth (in England during WWII) and the obstetrician was in Hall’s opinion acting indecisively, Hall pulled out his revolver and gave the doctor highly specific orders as to exactly what to do.

Schriever himself was a boy from a not-very-well-off family of German immigrants in the Texas hill country, who joined the air force after first considering a career as a professional golfer. He became a protege of Hap Arnold, and after Pacific-theater service during WWII focused on the leadership of R&D efforts rather than operational command. Throughout his career, Schriever demonstrated an unwillingness to fit his views on important issues to the opinions of those in higher authority–even when higher authority was represented by someone as intimidating as LeMay, with whom Schriever clashed soon after the war on the issue of high-level versus low-level attack tactics for bombers, or Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott, whose order to relocate certain missile facilities (from the west cost to the midwest) Schreiver flatly refused, citing his “prior and overriding orders” to get the program done in the shortest feasible time. By then a general, Schriever stuck by his position on this even when Talbott threatened him that “Before this meeting is over, General, there’s going to be one more colonel in the Air Force!”

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Permanent deficits are not Keynesian

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John Maynard Keynes, in addition to being the brother of the author of the first book on blood transfusion, was a famous economist whose policy recommendations have been widely abused by politicians for 50 years. His first widely known book was on “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.” It predicted that the harsh Versailles peace treaty would ruin Europe, a prediction that came true in 1929.

Reparations were set at a level that Keynes perceived would ruin Europe, Woodrow Wilson refused to countenance forgiveness of war debts and would not even let the US Treasury officials discuss the credit program. While Keynes’ proposals were far sighted, few others at the Versailles Conference understood their importance and Keynes’ proposals would have been controversial in nations such as France, Britain and the US.

Keynes’ book had a major effect on the US Congress’ refusal to ratify the League of Nations treaty.

Another critical insight was his prediction of the consequences of inflation.

Keynes outlined the causes of high inflation and economic stagnation in post-WWI Europe in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
 
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some… Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
 
Keynes explicitly pointed out the relationship between governments printing money and inflation.
 
“The inflationism of the currency systems of Europe has proceeded to extraordinary lengths. The various belligerent Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance.”

It is significant that the US has debased its currency the past 40 years far more than the average citizen realizes. The present dollar is worth about 40 cents in 1970 dollars. Using the methodology at this site, which uses US Department of Labor data, a $100. item in 1970 would cost $582.60 in 2011 dollars. That uses a cumulative inflation rate of 482.6%. Using that calculation, the present dollar is worth 20 cents in 1970 currency.

The most common attribution to Keynes is the “pump priming” role of running budget deficits. However, his theory was the “countercyclical” principle of government budgets. That supposes that the government runs surpluses in good economic times, then deficits in bad economic times. Keynes assumed that these two phases of government action would cancel each other out. His work was based on his theories of how the Great Depression occurred. His apologists have used the Second World War as an example of Keynesian economics. They do not mention that the high deficits that were run during WWII were funded by US citizens who bought war bonds. Inflation was limited by price controls and consumption was limited by rationing. The excess income that was generated in war industries was invested in the national debt. We were not borrowing from another country and, after the war, the budget rapidly paid off the war debt. The national debt was small before the war.

US National Debt

What we have today is very different. Here is a useful explanation of why Keynes is not the author of present national policy. There is more explanation here.

If Keynes were alive today, what would he think of President Obama’s fiscal policies?
 
He would roll over in his grave if he could see the things being done in his name. Keynes was opposed to large structural deficits. He thought that they chilled rather than stimulated the economy. It’s true that we’re stuck with large deficits now. The goal should be to reduce them, not to take on new spending that makes them worse.
 
Today, deficits are getting bigger and bigger with no plan to significantly lower them. Keynes understood what the current administration doesn’t understand that the proper policy in a democracy recognizes that today’s increase in debt must be paid in the future.

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