It is especially difficult to make the case that inequalities of outcomes can be automatically assumed to have been caused by discrimination by dominant majorities against subordinate minorities, when in fact many subordinate minorities have economically outperformed dominant majorities in many countries around the world and in many periods of history.
A study of the Ottoman Empire, for example, found that none of the 40 private bankers listed in Istanbul in 1912 was a Turk, even though Turks ruled the empire. Nor was any of the 34 stockbrokers in Istanbul a Turk. Of the capital assets of 284 industrial firms in the Ottoman Empire, employing five or more workers, 50 percent of these firms were owned by Greeks and another 20 percent were owned by Armenians. The Ottoman Empire was by no means unique.
Racial or ethnic minorities who have owned or operated more than half of whole industries in particular nations have included the Chinese in Malaysia, Germans in Brazil, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in Poland, Italians in Argentina, Indians in East Africa, Scots in Britain, Ibos in Nigeria, and Marwaris in India.
By contrast, we can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of the proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition—in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history.
Thomas Sowell, Social Justice Fallacies (2-3). Basic Books. [2023] Kindle Edition.
Thursday, November 30, 2023
REPRESENTATION
Friday, November 24, 2023
MacArthur
Although the truth would not come out until years later, MacArthur’s conduct on the first day of the war had been at least as culpable as that of Kimmel or Short. Receiving nine hours’ warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, MacArthur had remained cocooned at his headquarters and refused to communicate with his air commanders, despite their repeated efforts to reach him. As a result, his main force of B-17 bombers and P-40 fighters was paralyzed for lack of orders, and more than half of the aircraft were destroyed on the ground by the first Japanese air raid on Philippine territory. Leaders in Washington were dismayed by this “second Pearl Harbor,” hours after the first, but no one outside a privileged circle even knew that it had happened. Press reports on December 7 only stated that Japanese airplanes had been spotted in Philippine airspace. Three days later, the White House announced that the Japanese had attacked Clark Field, an air base north of Manila, but offered no details: “General Douglas MacArthur thus far has been unable to report details of the engagement.”
The different standards of accountability imposed in Hawaii and the Philippines have bothered historians ever since. The latter events were never formally investigated, and MacArthur never answered for errors and derelictions that seemed at least as blameworthy and certainly more avoidable than those in Hawaii. The discrepancy can only be explained as a peculiar result of the way the opening sequences of the Pacific War were reported in the United States. If MacArthur was to be relieved of command, the action needed to be taken immediately, or not at all—and it was not taken immediately. And by the second week of the war, the mood of the American people had changed. Now they seemed eager for a redemptive narrative that would expunge the trauma and shame of Pearl Harbor. MacArthur’s beleaguered army, half a world away, with little hope of support or reinforcement, was making a stirring fight against long odds. The man at the head of that army seemed a brave and noble figure, an American paladin straight out of central casting. His daily war communiqués, composed in a style ranging from the lurid to the vainglorious, kept the American people in thrall.
Ian E. Toll, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (Vol. 3) (The Pacific War Trilogy) (p. 12). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Friday, November 17, 2023
OWEN STANLEYS
“The Green War”
William Manchester, American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978, 297-304
Other approaches to Port Moresby having failed, the Japanese now attempted the incredible, an offensive over the Owen Stanleys. At first the small rear guard of the digger militiamen, who remained in the range until August 8, assumed that the enemy soldiers climbing towards them were merely patrolling. To their astonishment, massed infantrymen, manhandling mortars, machine-guns, and fieldpieces, crept slowly up the slimy, zigzagging, hundred-mile Kokoda Trail. In four weeks Major General Tomitaro Horii’s fourteen thousand men had crossed the raging Kumusi River at Wairopi and struggled through thirteen-thousand-foot Kokoda Pass. Five jungle-trained battalions leapfrogged one another into Isurava village, fifty-five miles from their starting point, and pushed down the precipitous southern slopes toward Imita Ridge and Ioribaiwa, twenty miles from the bluffs around Port Moresby. How many men succumbed in this heroic endeavor will never be known. Many perished in the Kumusi, and others disappeared in quicksand or plunged into gorges. In places the winding trail, a foot wide at most, simply disappeared. It took an hour to cut through a few yards of vegetation. The first man in a file would hack away with a machete until he collapsed of exhaustion; then the second man would pick up the machete and continue, and so on. In that climate the life expectancy of the men who lost consciousness and were left behind was often measured in minutes.
MacArthur had sent two of his best brigadiers, Pat Casey and Harold George, to survey the Papuan terrain. They returned to Brisbane shaken. Until now they had assumed that Bataan and Samar were covered with the densest jungle in the world, but New Guinea was unbelievable. They told the General that they didn’t see how human beings could live there, let alone fight there. From the air, whence they had first seen it, Papua’s most striking feature had been the razorback mountain range, stretching down the peninsula like the dorsal vertebrae of some prehistoric monster, its peaks obscured by dark clouds swollen with rain. It wasn’t until they had landed and ventured into the rain forest on steep, slippery, root-tangled trails that the full horror of life there had struck them. Blades of grass seven feet high that could lay a man’s hand open as quickly as a scalpel. The jungle was studded with mangrove swamps and thick clumps of bamboo and palms. Often the trail was covered with waist-deep slop. The air reeked with vile odors—the stench of rotting undergrowth and of stink lilies. Little light penetrated the thick matted screens of liana vines overhead, but when the rain stopped and the sun appeared, vast suffocating waves of steam rose from the dank marshes.
This was the setting of the green war: the green of slime and vegetation, the green of gangrene and dysentery, and the green-clad enemy, whose officers smeared yellow-green, bioluminescent organisms on their hands so they could read maps at night. The diggers, and the GIs who were now joining them, called themselves “swamp rats.” The hideous tropical ulcers that formed on their feet, arms, bellies, chests, and armpits were known as “jungle rot.” Waving away the clouds of flies and mosquitoes that swarmed over mess gear was called “the New Guinea salute.” Bugs were everywhere: biting ants, fleas, chiggers, poisonous spiders, and brilliantly colored, enormous insects that would land on a sleeping man and, like vampires, suck his bodily fluids. Twisted vines swarmed with vividly colored birds and great winged creatures with teeth, like gigantic rats. Pythons and crocodiles lurked in the bogs and sloughs, waiting for a man to stumble from the mucky trail. At night a soldier would rip away blood-glutted leeches from his genitals and rectum. Bug bites, when scratched, turned into festering sores. Since native bearers were reluctant to help him, especially near the front line, the average soldier had to carry as much as a hundred pounds on his back, and he nearly always ran a fever. It was a rare infantryman who wasn’t affected with yaws, scrub typhus, blackwater fever, ringworm, malaria, amoebic dysentery, or bacillary dysentery. For every man suffering from a gunshot wound, five were laid low with illness, and that is not a true measure of the sickness, because no one was hospitalized unless his fever rose above 102 degrees.
MacArthur heard all this while treading back and forth in his Brisbane office. Then he stopped, turned to Sutherland and Dick Marshall, and said in a ow, trembling voice, “We’ll defend Australia in New Guinea.” He called an off-the-record press conference to provide war correspondents with background for their future dispatches. Gavin M. Long tells how “the thirty or more war correspondents and officers rose as the General made an impressive entry—bare-headed, grave, distinguished looking, immaculate. His right arm was raised in salute. There was no other introduction. Pacing to and fro…MacArthur immediately began to declaim his statement of the military situation. His phrasing was perfect, his speech clear and unhalting, except for pauses for dramatic emphasis; the correspondents took notes, but there was no interruption of any kind. The conference room had become a stage, MacArthur the virtuoso, the other officers the ‘extras’ in the cast, and the correspondents the audience. It was a dramatic occasion.” George H. Johnston, an Australian journalist, recalls that the General held them spellbound for two hours, never groping for a word and displaying “the histrionic ability of Sir Henry Irving.” He told them that Australia would be saved in Papua, and only in Papua. He said: “We must attack, attack, attack!” The meeting over, Long writes, “the General raised his right arm in salute and strode from the room followed by one or two staff officers. The conference was over. One man alone had spoken—the Supreme Commander. There was no questioning, no opportunity to clarify the meaning of the statement. It had come directly from the lips of General Douglas MacArthur, and as such it was, evidently, beyond question.”
Sir Thomas Blaney, the cheerful, ruddy, stubby Australian who commanded MacArthur’s ground forces, was one of the few officers who didn’t believe that the Japanese would throw the Allies out of New Guinea. Most of MacArthur’s staff, by contrast, was shocked. They hadn’t anticipated this decision, which, he said, was one of the reasons he made it; if they hadn’t expected it, neither would the Japanese. And in fact the enemy was caught off balance. After the war Captain Toshikazu Ohmae of the Imperial Japanese Navy, who had been the senior staff officer of the Southeast Asia Fleet at Rabaul, told an interrogator: “The Japanese did not think that General MacArthur would establish himself in New Guinea and defend Australia from that position. They also did not believe that he would be able to use New Guinea as a base of offensive operations against them. The Japanese felt that General MacArthur could not establish himself in Port Moresby because he did not have sufficient forces to maintain himself there.”
His forces were certainly meager, but he was convinced that if the Nipponese established a single beachhead in Australia, the continent would be lost; a foe gallant enough to cross the Owen Stanleys would quickly sweep across the plains down under, and at the time MacArthur lacked the reserves to envelop them. If, as he later wrote, the jungle was “as tough and tenacious an enemy as the Japanese,” it was the enemy’s enemy, too. Better a bloody, head-on, grinding collision on Papua, he reasoned, than a battle of maneuver when he had no troops to spare for maneuvering. At the same time, Guadalcanal was on his mind. The issue there was very much in doubt. He believed his drive in New Guinea would relieve some of the pressure on that beleaguered island. In fact, as we know from other postwar interrogations, once he swung over to the attack the Japanese decided to give Guadalcanal priority; Horii was told that the capture of Port Moresby would be delayed until the marines had been driven into the sea. Nevertheless, the General’s overruling of his staff was as courageous as it was shrewd. In George Kenney’s words, “MacArthur without fear of criticism might have decided to remain on the defensive until sufficient forces could be made available…With insufficient naval forces to insure his supply line to New Guinea, with a vastly outnumbered air force, and with the apprehension of the people of Australia in regard to invasion of that continent by the enemy, a lesser general might even have considered the abandonment of Port Moresby, his only base in New Guinea.”
…One of the first American soldiers to learn that MacArthur was about to send them to New Guinea was E.J. Kahn, Jr. The general addressed the troops, disdaining a Signal Corps microphone and speaking to them directly. As Kahn recalls, “His speech was extemporaneous, but it was full of the rich, labyrinthine sentences that distinguish his prose. His main point, though, was crisply and pointedly made. He said we’d soon be in action. ‘And I want each of you to kill me a Jap,’ he added. Up to that moment few of us had guessed that we’d shortly be in a position to comply with such a request. Less than a month later our first detachments were on the way to New Guinea.”
It was now mid-September [1942]. To the east, the marines were struggling to hold their defensive perimeter around Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field. MacArthur expected just as cruel a fight to retain Moresby; Horii’s men were so close to the port that at night they could see its searchlights crossing the sky above it. But on Thursday, September 17, the day that the Australians ferociously hurled back the enemy’s final lunge southwest of Ioribaiwa, Horii issued his last rice rations to his feverish, emaciated troops. Three days later he told them he had decided to withdraw back across the mountains. (“No pen or words can depict adequately the magnitude of the hardships suffered,” he said. “From the bottom of our hearts we appreciate these sacrifices and deeply sympathize with the great numbers killed and wounded.”) Four days after that he disengaged north of the Imita Ridge and began leapfrogging his battalions backward.
The terrain was just as merciless going the other way, with the additional handicap that the worst of what Australians call “the wet”—the rainy season—was upon them. On October 1 MacArthur ordered his field commanders to push the disease-ridden enemy back across the Kumusi, but it wasn’t really necessary; the Japanese retreat had become a rout. So eager were they to fall back on Buna and Gona, where they knew godowns bursting with rice awaited them, that they trampled one another underfoot. Before the campaign ended they had lost over ten thousand men, including Horii, who had drowned in the swollen river.
Monday, November 13, 2023
442nd INFANTRY
To the confusion of their guards they assembled each morning to raise the Stars and Stripes and salute it while their Boy Scout drum and bugle corps (every camp had one) played the national anthem. At Camp Topaz 3,250 adults were enrolled in camp courses; the two most popular were the English language and American history. Saturday evenings they sang ‘America the Beautiful,’ and after January 28, 1943, the men of military age did a lot more than sing.
On that Thursday Stimson announced that the Army would accept Nisei volunteers. Immediately more than 1,200 signed up, and before the war’s end, 17,600 Japanese had joined the Army, taking the recruit’s oath of allegiance while still behind barbed wire. In Italy they served with distinction in the 100th Infantry and the 442nd Infantry. No Nisei ever deserted. During the Italian campaign the 442nd alone suffered the loss of three times its original strength while winning 3,000 Purple Hearts with 500 oak leaf clusters, 810 Bronze Stars, 342 Silver Stars, 47 Distinguished Service Crosses, and 17 Legion of Merit awards. In Europe these units were a legend. Bill Mauldin wrote that ‘to my knowledge and the knowledge of numerous others who had the opportunity of watching a lot of different outfits overseas, no combat unit in the Army could exceed them in loyalty, hard work, courage, and sacrifice. Hardly a man of them hadn’t been decorated at least twice, and their casualty rates were appalling.’
Those who fought beside the Nisei knew what drove them. They were trusting that when word of their war records reached California, attitudes toward their families would improve, and that the Issei’s prewar possessions would be returned to them. It was a vain hope. Japanese–American homes, farms, and businesses had been taken over by white Californians, most of whom, with Hearst’s aggressive support, kept their loot. The Nisei themselves, returning in uniform, were rejected by barbershops and restaurants. After the San Francisco Examiner had run the headline SOLDIERS OF NIP ANCESTRY ALLOWED TO ROAM ON COAST, a Nisei who had lost a leg in the ETO was publicly beaten. That was too much even for bigots, and overt outrages subsided.
To imply that everyone in the state was a xenophobe would be to compound injustice. But a great many people sat on their hands and looked the other way. The War Department became concerned about Nisei incidents; white officers who had served with them were sent on West Coast lecture tours to describe their gallantry to farmers and businessman. One first lieutenant was asked by a lanky farmer, ‘How many of them Japs in your company got killed?’ The lieutenant replied, ‘All but two of the men who started in my platoon were killed by the end of the war.’ The farmer said, ‘Too goddam bad they didn’t get the last two.’ People stared at the ceiling, at the floor, at their laps. No one said a word.
William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream,
(New York: Bantam Books, 1980) 301–302
Monday, November 6, 2023
LEARNING TO WRITE
[“It is assumed students will learn how to write in college.”]
Concord, Massachusetts 01742
I want to thank you for publishing my essay in the fall edition of The Concord Review. Before beginning the seven-month odyssey of researching and writing on my topic, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, I considered myself a lover of history but a possessor of second-rate writing skills. Part of the reason for my lack of confidence is that I attend a school where students are given few opportunities to develop their talents in this field (it is assumed students will learn how to write in college). With publication in your journal as my goal, and with the help of my teacher, Mr. Timothy Rood, I began the process of learning how to use the English language to prove my thesis. The results were not only vastly improved skills but also, due to the nature of my topic, the questioning of my own feminist beliefs.
The back copies you sent me were a great help. I want to thank the other students who have been published in The Concord Review, the quality of their articles was what I aspired to. In the future I will use their techniques, such as using more original sources, to enhance my writing.
Friday, November 3, 2023
HOMESCHOLARS
Home Education Magazine
“Good Stuff” Column
November-December 2001
Pages 50-51
The Concord Review
The Wall Street Journal described it as “one of those little starbursts of intelligence sparkling over our dreary educational landscape.” The Concord Review—founded in 1987 by Will Fitzhugh, a Massachusetts history teacher—is the only academic journal in the world that publishes the work of high-school students. Furthermore, to be published in it is a definite feather in the cap. Review authors, according to the publisher, often include reprints of their papers with their college application forms; the result has been admission to a raft of prestigious institutions, among them Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.
For those (high-school-level) history students who feel up to the challenge, the standard Concord Review submission is an essay approximately 5,000 words long, with endnotes and bibliography, on any historical topic (ancient or modern, domestic or foreign). Many previously published examples can be seen at the Review website (www.tcr.org); titles in the Summer 2001 issue include “Grigori Rasputin,” “Women in WWII,” “German Witch Trials,” “Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and “Darwin in Kansas.” The essay submission form—which asks for school address and names of teacher, principals, and superintendents—is targeted towards public school students, but the Review welcomes the work of homeschoolers. (Mr. Fitzhugh refers to us as “homescholars,” a lovely term.)
An annual subscription to TCR (four issues) costs $40; [now $60 or $100—WHF] order from TCR or call the journal office at 978-443-0022. Essays, along with the completed “Form to Accompany Essays” and a check for $40, should be sent [online now—WHF] to The Concord Review, 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776. For more information, visit the TCR website at www.tcr.org, call 978-443-0022, or email fitzhugh@tcr.org.
