Slashdot Mirror
World War II's Last Surviving Doolittle Raiders Make Their Final Toast
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "As we come up on Veteran's Day, Barrie Barber reports for the Dayton Daily News that the last Doolittle Raiders symbolically said goodbye to a decades-old tradition and to a history that changed the course of the Pacific war in World War II. Gathering from across the country together one last time, three surviving Raiders sipped from silver goblets engraved with their names and filled with 1896 Hennessy cognac in a once-private ceremony webcast to the world at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. Robert E. Cole, 98, led the final toast to the 80 members of 'the Greatest Generation' who took off in 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers April 18, 1942, from the deck of the USS Hornet to bomb Japan four months after a Japanese surprise naval and air attack on Pearl Harbor. 'Gentleman, I propose a toast,' said Cole, as about 700 spectators watched one final time, 'to those we lost on the mission and those that passed away since. Thank you very much and may they rest in peace.' Acting Secretary of the Air Force Eric Fanning said the raid showed the courage and innovation of the World War II airmen flying from a carrier in a bomber that had never seen combat to attack a heavily defended nation and to attempt to land at unseen airfields in China in a country occupied by Japanese troops. More than 70 years after the attack, Edward J. Saylor, 93, remembered ditching at sea once he and his crew dropped their bombs and several close calls with being discovered by the Japanese Army while making his way through China. 'This may be the last time I see them together,' said the 92-year-old raider who has attended Raider reunions since 1962. 'It's a little sad for me because I've known them so long and know the story of what they did in 1942.'"
...
Perhaps you should learn the difference between celebration and commemoration.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
On this Veterans Day, I would like to thank all veterans for serving our country for protecting our freedoms and way of life.
Without these brave men and women, we would not be the mightiest, richest, most powerful nation on Earth.
God Bless America.
Such sympathy does not apply to the side that starts a war and loses. Food for thought, when America remembers all the wars it has started and lost.
Have you ever gone to Pearl Harbor? It's a hotspot for Japanese tourism. Americans also go to Hiroshima when site seeing in Japan.
Remembering historic events does not indicate rubbing it in the face of your former enemy.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
More to the point, what about the Chinese casualties? The often ignored result of the raid was that the Japanese, in reprisals against any family, village or town that they thought might have helped the escaping Doolittle raiders, murdered about 250,000 men, women and children. That number is not a typo. It is not a mistake or an exaggeration. Two hundred and fifty thousand Chinese were slaughtered by the Imperial Japanese Army during the search for Doolittle's men.
Now please remind me again why I should care about the Japanese casualties.
No left turn unstoned.
Dead citizens in Tokyo were for certain not involved in massacring the Chinese. Why should you care about Japanese casualties? For the same reason you care about anyone that dies needlessly in a war.
The short of it is the Doolittle raid led to the battle of Midway which is considered a major turning point of the war.
http://www.angelo.edu/content/news/1466-doolittle-raid-remembered-for-impact
I don't agree. For all that I've no use for people who don't realize that, unlike many recent ventures, the US fought WWII for very good reasons, and probably saved millions of lives by doing so, I'm not completely averse to the Japanese remembering their civilians lost in the war. Personally I have little use for Japanese sanctimony about the use of the A-bombs, but commemorating the dead is another matter. Even remembering, if not commemorating, their rank-and-file war dead, while a touchy subject, doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me. Many of the rank-and-file had little choice but to "serve".
. . . without everyone making a international political fuss about it? War is terrible for all . . . and these lucky few just want to celebrate that they managed to get their hairy asses out of that shit alive.
Leave 'em alone.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I am quite content to both commemorate and celebrate the victory of the allied powers over:
Imperial Japan
Nazi Germany
Fascist Italy
I am quite happy to welcome the friendship of, and cheer for, democratic Japan, Germany, and Italy.
The world would be a very dark place indeed had the former regimes not been defeated.
Now their peoples and nations are shining examples to the world - long may they live and prosper.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Given how easy it is to get normally good people to do terrible things with a surprisingly small amount of peer pressure, I am comfortable extending sympathies even to those who one might call 'brainwashed'. While we like to think of ourselves as strong, it has been shown a disturbing number of times just how easy it is tweak someone into such behavior.
You make an excellent point. Reminds me of the experiments where a person was made to think they were executing someone in the name of science. While a part of me keeps saying the brainwashed are weak, I need to remember I'm probably not any stronger and am deluding myself to think otherwise.
Pop quiz: Who sold the Nazis fuel and metal so that they could run around killing
Pop quiz: were all 150 millions Americans of a like mind and did they act in perfect concert during WWII?
As for for FDR's cynical, but perhaps justified, treatment of such actions during the war, perhaps you'd like to read the descriptions of the very people whose research uncovered this treason. You can start here. Should the "business people" responsible been tried for treason after the war? Hell yes.
We fueled the war deliberately
You mean by things like the Lend Lease Act? Ask the British if they objected to US aid prior to our entry into the war.
then entered the war
You mean an America with a strong isolationist sentiment, and a desire not to get hundreds of thousands of her own people killed, didn't enter the war until after we were attacked by Japan, and then a few days later, Nazi Germany declared war on us? That's true.
It permitted us to reduce a bunch of our excess population
You mean the population that people were concerned had a declining birth rate, due to the Great Depression? At any rate, it wasn't a very effective policy for reducing our population. As horrific as our losses of over 400,000 Americans were, it reduced the population by only 0.27%. Then the whole thing was undone by the millions born in the post-war baby boom. A seriously failed policy.
One other minor problem: there is absolutely no evidence for the absurd notion that we wanted to "reduce a bunch of our excess population".
You always have a choice.
Technically that's true. If somebody puts a gun to your head and tells you to either join the military or be shot now, and you choose the bullet now, your heirs will be free to praise you morality. Until and unless that happens to you, shove your sanctimony.