I'm reading "Drawing like a kid isn’t child’s play — but does it deserve an exhibition?/Picasso and Miró prized naivety and there’s more to the infantile cartoons of Yoshitomo Nara at the Hayward Gallery than meets the eye" (London Times).
I was surprised at "this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation." "Never" is a strong word. The war with Germany was over by the time the atom bomb was ready, but we had other bombs and we used them very harshly against the Germans. We used dehumanizing stereotypes against the Japanese and also against the Germans. I'm disgusted to see "this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation" in the London Times.
The Times art critic is Waldemar Januszczak, who was born in England to parents who were Polish refugees of WWII.
Here's the Yoshitomo Nara art:
Posts
98 comments:
"I have one word for you, one word... Dresden."
I've mention Waldemar J. before. I love his art commentary shows. they are delightful.
The destruction visited on Germany was the near-equal of the atomic bomb, and there would have been no hesitation to use it on Germany had it been possible. As far as "racism" goes, the whole Japanese vague "anti-war" act is a very clever way of evading the incredibly brutal racist actions of the Japanese against the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and any unfortunate white captives they happen to run across.
BTW, Imperial Japan took a back seat to nobody in the racism department.
As is often noted, the Allied air forces firebombed Dresden among other German cities, causing horrific civilian casualties. I'm also becoming less and less convinced that there was any fundamental difference between the physical impact of the atomic bombs and firebombing of many other Japanese cities. The nukes had a limited psychological impact on the Japanese leadership but even if we had not been successful in the development of nukes, or chose not to deploy them, we would have razed every Japanese city within bombing range and the civilian casualties from Operation Downfall would have likely been an order of magnitude greater. The angst over the use of nuclear weapons is mostly a back projection of subsequent horror at the prospect of Cold War nuclear annihilation and a convenient way to sidestep the war crimes of the Japanese which are different in kind rather than degree from Germany.
"...that we dropped two atom bombs on Japan to fast-forward the end of the Second World War, and that this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation. "
racist assault? Yeah - dude you are a great art critic - but what the hell? Stick to art critique.
Japan was asked to put the gun down, again, and again, several times even - and they refused.
Japanese fighters were taught to never stop fighting. Fight to the death.
The cruelties perpetrated by the Japanese towards their captives - unspeakable horror.
What we did to Dresden was worse than Hiroshima.
That said we shouldn't have dropped the Second bomb. That is pretty clear now.
Tags: art, Japan, race consciousness, WWII
"When Uncle Sam put out the call for able-bodied illustrators to draw racist propaganda cartoons of the Japanese Emperor, I was first in line! ...Do you know how many people joined the Army because of my racist cartoons?"
The Japanese culture was bloodthirsty and barbaric, as shown by the artistry of Yoko Ono.
btw- My folks were just in Japan visiting. They went to the two bomb-sites. Not much there but small memorials. The city around is bustling. My grandfather was a Seabee in WWII - stationed in Japan - there to help rebuild after the war.
He's probably a lefty - no doubt. But I still love him.
His show on The Impressionists is so very good. I've watched it several times.
Nuclear weapons are much larger in both power and number today, so where will the next one be used? It is inevitable, although somehow through some miracle, we have avoided it so far, which is arguably mankind's greatest accomplishment to date. I believe an American city is the most likely target. Happy Father's Day!
Waldemar's show on The Impressionists.
Re: Jaq:
Honestly, have to differ. They most definitely took a back seat to Nazi Germany in the racism department since, you know, they didn't try to exterminate an entire race. In addition, while they definitely had an ideology that situated the Japanese as a master race, it was rather different from the Nazi ideology. The Japanese army, for example, despite being probably the single most deraned and radical institution in Japanese society at the time, was comfortable placing non-Japanese (Korean) officers in command of Japanese troops. Because in the years prior to the war, the military academies accepted only tiny numbers of Korean applicants every year (because they were racist), there were only two Korean generals in active service in the Imperial Army during the war (Prince Yi Eun and General Hong Sa-ik), though there were a handful of midlevel officers and then a bunch of lieutenants, many of whom later took over the government of South Korea in the 1960s, under former IJA officer Park Chunghee.
Not to say that the IJA wasn't racist -- at the end of the war apparently one of the instructors at the Japanese military academy shot a Korean officer cadet dead while somehow blaming Koreans for Japan losing the war (?). And racism towards Korean and Taiwanese enlisted was enough of a problem that the army had to put out guidance saying you have to treat them fairly. But Japanese racism was very, very different from the totalising racism of the Nazis. The Nazis wanted to exterminate Jews, and also clear out Slavs from Eastern Europe. The Japanese (mostly) had no such plans. I say "mostly" because there were some maniacs, like Tsuji Masanobu (involved in various systematic atrocities, e.g. the Sook Ching massacres in Singapore and British Malaya), who I could easily believe dreamed of implementing something like the Holocaust in East Asia.
It is completely unsurprising that "this racist assault on the Japanese" appeared in the London Times.
Somebody over there needs to Google up "Dresden." And "The Rape of Nanking."
Balfegor said...
Re: Jaq:
Honestly, have to differ. They most definitely took a back seat to Nazi Germany in the racism department since, you know, they didn't try to exterminate an entire race.
You need to go look at what they did in Manchuria.
That is on the same level as the Holocaust in terms of barbarity. They probably killed a lot more than 6 million people too. They were just a lot less meticulous in their documentation compared to the Germans.
Waldemar's wife is Japanese, I think.
It doesn't matter that the the Allies clearly were willing to massacre German civilians and the bomb was not ready for use before the Germans surrendered. The London Times journalist believes that racism factors into every decision we make, explicitly or implicitly or whatever. So there is no point in arguing with her.
But I think it's not so much racism as practical considerations that may have led American war planners to prefer Japan over Germany. The Americans believed that the first bombs would likely be duds. If a dud landed in Germany and was recovered, it would be much more dangerous than if it were to land in Japan. Plus the first atomic bombs were very big. The only plane that could drop them was the B-29 and the B-29 was not used in the European theater.
This isn't just wrong, it's 180 degrees wrong. FDR started The Manhattan Project after a discussion with Albert Einstein, who informed him that Germany had the potential to built nuclear weapons. The entire project, filled with scientists who had fled Europe because of the Nazis, was animated by a intense drive to drop nuclear weapons on Germany before they could drop on on the Allies. The bombs were 100% built to be dropped on Germany. When they surrendered 2 months before the Trinity Test, most of the scientists had no idea Truman would drop it on Japan. Not a single combatant nation in WWII would not have used it if they had had it. Not a single one.
aggressively wrong as spelled out above, the war was over by the time the first a bomb test, of course, the scap empowered most of the militarist class, like kodama and kishi, after a spell
Achilles said...
"That said we shouldn't have dropped the Second bomb. That is pretty clear now."
Disagree. The Japanese very nearly did not surrender, even after Fat Man was dropped. It took direct intervention from the Emperor to force the issue. And the Emperor was very nearly deposed for it.
"The Times art critic is Waldemar Januszczak, who was born in England to parents who were Polish refugees of WWII" and should know better.
of course the german nuclear program was under the direction of conrad stark, a decent physicists, but race obsessed, so most of the best scientests ended up working for the Americans
hiroshima was the naval base, nagasaki the army, they were the untouched targets on the list,
Judge the historic action by the outcome. Japan has had 80 years of peace and freedom.
Had the bombs not be dropped and the emperor not surrendered, Japan would have continued to fight, until the island was subdued.
What would the last 80 years have looked like on Japan if intense combat had ranged over the entire country? Millions more Japanese dead, infrastructure gone, Allied forces in no mood to be magnanimous after a punishing win and half the island governed by Russia.
the Russians might have moved north to seize the top islands, the Allies come in from the south, the wars would have continued in India and other places,
Spiros said...
"The Americans believed that the first bombs would likely be duds."
During development, there was concern that the complex device would not reliably go off. But by the time of the first bomb, Oppenheimer & crew were confident it would work. That's why we nuked New Mexico first as proof.
Little Boy was a uranium bomb and Fat Boy was plutonium. They developed both designs simultaneously in case one approach had issues. The plutonium design has some additional issues to resolve, which is why they used Little Boy first.
Both designs had multiple redundancies built in to ensure that they would work.
Ithell Colquhoun featured below is much more interesting than the derivative childish appropriation of the headlining artist. A mix of Dali and O'Keefe
Nanjing Massacre
the Chinese writer, PF Kuang, has repurposed the Chinese theatre into a dark magical realist series with Games of Thrones resonances,
That said we shouldn't have dropped the Second bomb. That is pretty clear now.
What's pretty clear is that we had to drop the second bomb. Why?
The first bomb—Hiroshima—was a uranium bomb. The mere fact that it was a uranium (concentrated U-235) bomb informed the Japanese (via their nuclear experts—yes, they had some, indeed a whole nuclear bomb project) that the U.S. must have few or likely even no further such weapons at hand (which indeed America did not, due to the extreme physical difficulty in concentrating the fissionable U-235 isotope); ergo, the Japanese Imperium refused to surrender in response to what they could see was almost certainly a bluff.
Then Nagasaki—a plutonium bomb—struck. Plutonium can be (must be) manufactured in nuclear reactors, potentially in quantity. (Plus, to make a plutonium bomb work was extremely difficult, requiring a whole “implosive” technological revolution beyond what uranium bombs needed.) The plutonium nature of the Nagasaki bomb implied that the U.S. had succceeded in that revolution, and furthermore might have many such weapons—perhaps enough to obliterate Japan in short order. (As it happened, the U.S. actually had no more plutonium bombs either at that point—Nakasaki was also really a bluff.) However, the Japanese government couldn't know that reliably; and as a result surrendered.
The two atomic bombs are estimated to have killed about 225,000 people, mostly civilians, including those who died after the war from radiation sickness.
The Japanese, in the meanwhile, are estimated to have killed somewhere between 3 million and 10 million people from 1937 to the end of WW2, including:
Including, that is, about 140,000 prisoners of war (nearly 30% of all POW's held by the Japanese); between 30,000 and 100,000 Asian forced laborers working on the Burma-Thailand railroad; somewhere around 300,000 Indonesian forced laborers; somewhere between 270,000 and 810,000 Korean forced laborers; 100,000 to 200,000 Manchurian forced laborers; 90,000 Philippinos under Japanese occupation; between 55,000 and 100,000 Malaysians, of whom 37,000 were executed. Note that the vast majority of these were civilians.
"conrad stark, a decent physicists, but race obsessed, so most of the best scientests ended up working for the Americans"
So it could be argued that racism saved the world. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
McNeil - exactly.
Those big evil bad bombs- saved lives.
and I remember there was a rudimentary japanese nuclear program, that never really got off the ground
It's a myth (promulgated by revisionist historians) that Japan was about to surrender before the atomic bombings. Beyond that, had the Japanese Imperium not surrendered when it did in response to those atom bombs (in early August 1945), the Allied invasion of the principal Japanese island of Honshu wasn't planned to occur until November 1946—nearly 16 months later.
Simultaneously, Japanese forces in war theaters outside the Japanese home islands were slaughtering between 250,000 and 400,000 (mostly) Asians per month during the earlier 1945 timeframe.
Do the math. Forcing an end to the war when the A-bombs did indubitably saved millions of (non-Japanese) Asian lives—not to speak of the (also probably in the millions of) Japanese and Allied servicemen whose lives were spared.
I heard about stark, from jorge volpi that interesting new wave mexican novelist, who wrote a romantic triangle in search of klingsor, his subsequent works were not as good,
At least according Oppenheimer (the movie), the Jewish scientists who largely built the bomb did so to stop the Nazis. They were less than enthusiastic about dropping it on Japan, but they finished it anyway. The idea that we would never kill Germans is some ignorant nonsense
gar alperovitz mostly, taking some scraps from stimson's papers,
Spiros wrote: " The Americans believed that the first bombs would likely be duds." Citation, please. The gun-type U-235 bomb ('Little Boy') was considered so sure-fire (sic) that the one and only example was used on Hiroshima without testing a prototype. The implosion-type plutonium bomb ('Fat Man') had a successful test-firing: the Trinity test. I have never seen a statement that the U.S. was resigned to dropping dud nukes on Japan.
Spiros wrote: "Plus the first atomic bombs were very big. The only plane that could drop them was the B-29 and the B-29 was not used in the European theater." The first nukes weighed about ten thousand pounds. The standard load for an Avro Lancaster was fourteen thousand pounds. With some structural modifications, a load of twenty-two thousand pounds could be carried.
"Racism" in British English has a much wider definition than over here. It includes religious discrimination (even though half or more of British Muslims are Caucasian Indo/Pak people, not to mention Albanians and other whites), and intra-white ethnic chauvinism, such as against Januszak's own Poles.
Maybe he didn't want to call anti-German furor (pun intended) "racist" as that would validate Hitler seeing the Poles as an inferior race rather than just another bunch of Europeans.
I'm sure his parents and grandparents cheered on Bomber Harris's laying waste to German cities, whatever they called it.
JSM
Insufferable prick.
Ask grandmummy and granddaddy about Dresden.
This whiner evidently never toured Dresden, etc., after WWII.
"...this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation."
'Tell me you know nothing about Dresden and Würzburg and Nuremburg without saying "I know nothing about Dresden and Würzburg and Nuremburg."'
Ironic, because as far as most Times writers are concerned, WWII is the only war that ever happened. But Times writers are now all one-trick ponies (one-trick phonies?) who believe that "racism" is the most powerful force--really the only force--in the universe.
Many of the people who developed the atomic bomb were doing it to bomb Germany. Often they were Jewish, at least culturally. Some actually turned against the bomb when Germany surrendered before it was used. They were the core that formed The Atomic Scientists, who published the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and came up with the Doomsday Clock, which somehow has never moved more than a few minutes; it's always almost midnight and worldwide destruction.
yes lemay would have had no qualms about this
Of fer fuck’s sake. The vast numbers of lily-white German civilians we firebombed would beg to differ with your incendiary and stupid racial contentions.
Spiros, DJ99 and others are right. The Japanese were genocidal and particularly vicious captors. A few Korean commanders hardly disproves that. The Massacre and Rape of Nanking alone inflicted more casualities than both bombs. As of 2015, the Japanese government was still denying the carnage and death inflicted on captured women forced to service Japanese soldiers. Nearly all these women were murdered or starved to death by the war's end. But hey, what's a couple hundred thousand women raped to death?
We put German-American citizens in internment camps in WWI, under starvation conditions. Not defending the German state. But how many kids learn this in school? And why not? Because we cling to the idea that whites are uniquely racist only towards non-whites.
The entire war in Europe was about race. Uber Alles and such.
Where's that "without evidence" phrase when it is needed the most?
Stay in your lane - art guy!
FWIW I am satisfied about the bombs for selfish reasons. My father was in the European theater when Germany finally surrendered. There was zero thought he'd be sent home, duty complete. There is 100% thought he'd be shipped to the Pacific theater.
NO ONE can say the Japanese would have surrendered after the first bomb drop if we'd just waited, and waited, and waited. In fact evidence seems to support the opposite. But... the left, the London Times, the useful idiots...
Spiros wrote:
"Plus the first atomic bombs were very big. The only plane that could drop them was the B-29 and the B-29 was not used in the European theater."
RNB responded...
"The first nukes weighed about ten thousand pounds. The standard load for an Avro Lancaster was fourteen thousand pounds. With some structural modifications, a load of twenty-two thousand pounds could be carried."
The US considered the Lancaster just long enough to reject it. It had multiple flaws, any one of which would make it unsuitable for the task at hand.
- In 1939, the Brits quickly discovered that almost all of their Lancasters were getting shot down on day raids over Germany, so they switched to night raids. The nukes were precisely targeted for maximum impact, something not possible at night or even cloudy weather (Nagasaki was the alternate target; the primary was clouded over). And Japan's fighters of 1945 were superior to German interceptors of 1939. No way would a Lancaster get through to target.
- It could not fly fast enough. The B-29 was 50% faster. It needed to get in and out quickly to minimize tracking by defenses. And it needed to get the hell away as fast as possible from the big blast. A Lancaster would have received fatal doses of radiation, it not "shot down" in the blast.
- It could not fly high enough. The Lancaster was operated at even lower levels than the American Bombers of 1939, let alone the higher altitude B-29, which needed to fly above much (but not all) of the Japanese defenses. It would be 1939-like sorties all over again.
- It could not fly far enough. The Avro could not make it from Tinian to Japan and back. The US had closer bases, but they were in reach of Japanese attacks. No way the US was going to risk the atomic weapons being destroyed in a Japanese raid on the airbase.
- Takeoff and landing are two of the riskier parts of flying (aside from being shot at by the enemy). And British bombers could not arm bomb loads in flight, meaning they had to take off with live ordinance, and land with it in case of an aborted flight. They were willing to risk unintentionally bombing their own people in those circumstances.
American bombardiers would go back into the bomb bay and arm the bombs once they were away from Allied soil. They could also disarm ordinance in case of an abort. No way would the US permit a takeoff with a live atomic bomb. Or even jettison a live nuke over the ocean if the situation called for it.
IIRC, it the B-29 bombardier about 45 minutes to arm the nukes at the proper time of the flight. And there were only a couple qualified to do this, as the complex procedure was different from arming ordinary high explosives.
Tina Tent said...
"We put German-American citizens in internment camps in WWI, under starvation conditions."
We put German- and Italian- Americans in internment camps in WWII, too, just not in the numbers that we did with the Japanese-Americans.
Tina Tent said...
"We put German-American citizens in internment camps in WWI, under starvation conditions."
**********
You gotta source for that....where, how many, how long..
I couldn't find anything to support that claim. even with AI help. Perhaps you meant German nationals living here?
Here's AI Claude on that topic:
"The U.S. government required enemy aliens (non-citizens from Germany and Austria-Hungary) to register and restricted their movements
"Some German aliens were detained or interned, but this was a much smaller scale than what occurred to Japanese Americans in WWII"
Operation Olympic was planned for November 1, 1945, not 1946. My 17 y.o. father was being trained up for the naval portion of the imvasion. My father-in-law was starving in a Japanese POW camp after being captured in January 1942 as a part of the invasion of the Dutch East Indies.
Fun fact, his camp was supposed to be emptied to go work on the Thailand-Burma railway but the freighter scheduled to take them was torpedoed. 95% of the Asian laborers assigned to the construction died.
Due to the liberal milieu my kids were raised in, I had to inform them every Hiroshima day that without the Bombs they may have never been born.
Achilles, what scale do you use to determine that Dresden was worse than Hiroshima?
As for the substantive argument about race, it is absurd, as has been noted.
I'm old enough to remember when people used to say that napalm was only designed for use against POC . . .
Januszczak's television specials were good, but if it's not baroque (or rococo) don't ask him to fix it.
Would we have used the bomb against Nazi Germany? If the war in Europe were in its last stages and we were concerned about the environmental effects in Europe we might not have. At that point, Germany was going to surrender even without an a-bomb. Japan wouldn't have surrendered without it.
If we'd had the bomb in 1942 or 1943, we would have used it against Germany. Later, when the war in Europe was drawing to an end, I wonder if anyone would have said that we must use it against Germany, lest we be thought racist.
"Fast Forward" The expectation was that if we had to invade mainland Japan then literally millions of people would die, including Japanese. Some people will claim that Japan was trying to surrender, but the U.S. ordered 500,000 purple hearts in anticipation of invading Japan so apparently somebody didn't think they were.
Effinayright. Again, AI fails. I believe the Georgia Encyclopedia or a real librarian can easily produce the records for you. I renovated one of the tiny internment camp houses south of Turner Baseball Stadium. The men were sent to the federal prison up the street. The women and children grew gardens and were allowed to sell poured iron(?) toys and German pastries through the gates to subsist. This was done in other states too, including Florida, for one. The toys are collectors' items now. The neighborhood was called Germantown until Mayor Maynard Jackson changed it to Boulevard Heights.
Try reading a book, not asking a clearly inaccurate if not biased AI system. And if you want more information from me, use your real name.
Enemy aliens were treated quite harshly in WWI by all the countries involved, the USA included. It was the first war in which most of the belligerent powers had to deal with large numbers of them - a step in the process of globalization - and no one had given the matter any thought. The National WWI Museum in KC had a very fine exhibition about it a few years ago, and no doubt has put something online.
Rocco, who is usually impeccably correct, is mistaken about the Lancaster's chronology. Not that it matters to the argument, but it wasn't deployed until early 1942. The bombers being massacred in 1939-1941 were types like the Wellington, Whitworth, and Hampden.
Rocco, you're right.
Also, anyone who thinks we wouldn't have used the Atomic bomb on Germany doesn't know much about WWII.
Dresden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwkMo1_rWM0
This would be a good time to cite Paul Fussell's "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb," and Richard Frank's "Downfall."
The Performance
by James Dickey
The last time I saw Donald Armstrong
He was staggering oddly off into the sun,
Going down, off the Philippine Islands.
I let my shovel fall, and put that hand
Above my eyes, and moved some way to one side
That his body might pass through the sun,
And I saw how well he was not
Standing there on his hands,
On his spindle-shanked forearms balanced,
Unbalanced, with his big feet looming and waving
In the great, untrustworthy air
He flew in each night, when it darkened.
Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth
Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,
To demonstrate its suppleness
Of veins, as he perfected his role.
Next day, he toppled his head off
On an island beach to the south,
And the enemy's two-handed sword
Did not fall from anyone's hands
At that miraculous sight,
As the head rolled over upon
Its wide-eyed face, and fell
Into the inadequate grave
He had dug for himself, under pressure.
Yet I put my flat hand to my eyebrows
Months later, to see him again
In the sun, when I learned how he died,
And imagined him, there,
Come, judged, before his small captors,
Doing all his lean tricks to amaze them—
The back somersault, the kip-up—
And at last, the stand on his hands,
Perfect, with his feet together,
His head down, evenly breathing,
As the sun poured from the sea
And the headsman broke down
In a blaze of tears, in that light
Of the thin, long human frame
Upside down in its own strange joy,
And, if some other one had not told him,
Would have cut off the feet
Instead of the head,
And if Armstrong had not presently risen
In kingly, round-shouldered attendance,
And then knelt down in himself
Beside his hacked, glittering grave, having done
All things in this life that he could.
"The angst over the use of nuclear weapons is mostly a back projection of subsequent horror at the prospect of Cold War nuclear annihilation"
Agreed. To the politicians they were just a very powerful weapon of war. And hey, wasn't it that adorable pacifist Albert Einstein who counseled FDR to start the Atomic bomb project?
On behalf of my dad, who was 18 years old and on a boat heading toward Japan in August 1945, I'm generally ok with how things turned out.
I remember reading once that 'before the bomb', the War Department made an estimate of the number of casualties to be expected, if the US had to invade Japan and fight a ground war, and planned accordingly - which is why we're still handing out Purple Heart medals that were made during WWII, but never needed back then, because of the bomb. Fighting to the death wasn't an ethos for just the Jap military - their citizens were also conditioned to do the same.
A B29 did fly one mission over Germany. I don't think it dropped anything.
It was done to spook the Germans
John Henry
In early 45 usaf firebombed Tokyo killing over 100m civilians. If you look at photos of Tokyo and Hiroshima the total destruction of both cities is indistinguishable
John Henry
In September 45 the Japanese still had 1.5-2mm troops fighting in China.
There was some worry that they might not surrender.
John Henry
The death of a ball turret gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
that this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation
What a complete fucking ignoramus.
In fact that creators of teh Manhattan Project PUSHED it as "we must get atom bombs before Germany, then use them on them."
The ONLY reason we used the nukes on Japan was because Germany had already surrendered. Otherwise Berlin would have been target #1
From what I’ve seen, the conquest and reconstruction of Japan could not have gone better.
No one who is familiar with what Japanese did in Nanking, or in Manila after MacArthur returned to retake the Philippines, or who has heard of Unit 731, thinks that the Japanese did not deserve everything they received.
No one who has watched videos of Japanese women on Okinawa throwing their children off cliffs into the sea, and jumping after them, lest they be captured by Americans, can possibly believe that ending the war quickly was not a blessing for Japanese civilians too.
John henry's @333 is of course Randall Jarrell's famous poem.
(For the few who might not know.)
Thanks, Narr. I should have credited him.
Most of the poem doesn't do that much for me. The last lines "when I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose" has given me the heebie-jeebies for 40 years or more.
John Henry
I assumed it was an oversight. I often forget to include important info in my own comments.
@Narr. Thanks for the correction on the Lancaster timeline. For some reason I was thinking it was a pre-war design when it was not. Even the Avro Manchester on which it was based did not go into service until after the war started.
Tina Trent said...
Effinayright. Again, AI fails. I believe the Georgia Encyclopedia or a real librarian can easily produce the records for you. I renovated one of the tiny internment camp houses south of Turner Baseball Stadium. The men were sent to the federal prison up the street. The women and children grew gardens and were allowed to sell poured iron(?) toys and German pastries through the gates to subsist. This was done in other states too, including Florida, for one. The toys are collectors' items now. The neighborhood was called Germantown until Mayor Maynard Jackson changed it to Boulevard Heights.
Try reading a book, not asking a clearly inaccurate if not biased AI system. And if you want more information from me, use your real name.
****************
Dear Tina: Fuck you. In the intellectual tradition I come from, if YOU make the claim, YOU back it up.
I defy you to provide information from the Georgia Encyclopedia article you failed to site specifically confirming that German-American citizens were interned in The Georgia camps.
Here's the citation:
Copeland, Susan. "Foreign Prisoners of War." New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified Jun 6, 2017. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/foreign-prisoners-of-war/
It seems you've treated anecdotal evidence as expressing federal policy. DERP
And a double Fuck you for demanding I use my real name. It's entirely irrelevant to the argument *you* lazily didn't care to substantiate. It's also an implicit request that I put myself into a positioned to be doxxed.
And if Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, Samuel Adams and Ben Franklin could use pseudonyms , so can I.
John henry said...
“Most of the poem doesn't do that much for me. The last lines ‘when I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose’ has given me the heebie-jeebies for 40 years or more.”
Ball Turret Gunners had the highest mortality rates of any crew position. Hanging off the bottom of the bomber, they were more exposed to both enemy fighters and AA fire.
They were also the inspiration for the scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke and Han had to fight off Imperial Tie fighters while escaping from the Death Star.
My Opa and Oma were both unnaturalized Germans who arrived (separately) in Memphis in the few years before Kaiser Bill's war.
They never talked about their treatment during the conflict.
Opa got right with Uncle Sam in the '20s, but Oma procrastinated and didn't become a citizen until 1944, after which my father the B-25 pilot was posted to a combat unit after many months as an instructor.
Hanging off the bottom of the bomber, they were more exposed to both enemy fighters and AA fire.
The ball turret gunners also became a long red smear on the runway in case of a landing gear failure.
Several famous American poets flew Air Force missions in WWII: Jarrell, Dickey, Richard Hugo. The British soldier-poets of the trenches in WWI are remembered and studied, but the American fighter-pilots are passed by. I don't ascribe any particular cause for this, except perhaps reading habits were changing, and in WWII, novels were ascendent. There was also France's heroic aviator-author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Wind, Sand, and Stars is a good read.
No one is down here - but - I was thinking the Waldemar is very clever and he knows his audience is going to eat up the anti-Western/ anti US stuff.
F and A: if someone calls you a liar, why would you bother to submit to his anonymous demands? It's not like simply conversing with a stranger. The Encyclopedia was merely a suggestion: I'm sure it focuses more on our POW camp holding German citizens who were in the U.S. when war started and military captives: different phenomena. But there are plenty of sources out there for what I mentioned. Do your own homework, if you care so much.
Hassayamper@307--
The normal procedure was for the ball turret gunner to be out of his battle station at takeoff and landing. He became a schmear only when the exit was damaged.
Jan Jarboe Russell's book "The Train to Crystal City" (available at a portal near you) recounts the history of the internment camp of that name, where German and Italian aliens and their American-born children were held, and sometimes exchanged for Americans, during WWII.
In WWI a nice resort in North Carolina became a pen for German nationals and their American-born children. Sadly, I can't find the details, but will keep looking.
I don't know what the problem is. Searching the net for German-American internment camps and German POW camps in the US both provide ample results. No fancy AI searches required.
Thanks Narr and Biff. It's bewildering to me when people call me a liar then want me to do a simple internet search for them.
I've seen the little lead toys from the Germantown, Atlanta internment camp at an exhibition many years ago. I've stripped the German newspapers insulating the walls of an internment camp house I bought and renovated. And I've heard the stories of the camp from some of my elderly neighbors back then. It's not a secret. I don't understand the antipathy towards believing a fairly common wartime practice. I'm not advocating for it. Worldcat might have some sources.
I found a few sources: now I'm interested. This is a small article that explains the perceived threat (and doubtlessly sometimes true -- as with some Japanese spies interred later) : https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4992032/Germans-AMERICA-World-War.html
There were different types of interred Germans. Some were German civilian ship sailors who happened to be docked here, many of whom had military backgrounds. Some later were combatant POWs. But many were longtime American civilians. Some were lynched. The government seized $500 million dollars in private property and farms from German-Americans. Not clear if that is in today's dollars or 1918's.
Elite German visitors were held in country-club like facilities. These included professors and a famous conductor. And that made me wonder: were there any German citizen Jews interred here during WWI? That would make an interesting story.
Though I'm mostly of Italian descent, my German great-grandfather changed his name from some long German word that may have meant stale bread to "Trent." And a great-aunt I never met was a phycisist who worked on the Manhattan Project: the family had abandoned my father as an infant to a workhouse orphanage and left him there when his mother died of TB, so I don't know more. Not an uncommon story of those days. "There was hunger prefossil" as Thomas Lux wrote, though he's a second-rate grifter poet.
@Tina Trent - To be fair to everyone involved, I didn't try to do a close reading, but I found the conversation to be very confusing. I honestly wasn't entirely sure who was trying to make what points. I suspect there was a miscommunication somewhere, and the conversation spun out of control. I'm not going to try to figure out when or by whom.
I grew up in a town in northern NJ that is within sight of the NYC skyline. It had a substantial pre-war German immigrant population. There were a lot of German social clubs, and the German American Bund had a big enough presence that my town drew special attention from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. By the time I was growing up in the 70s, the town had become a lot more Italian, Irish, Hispanic, and Jewish, but there remained some German old-timers. One of my closest childhood friends was the son of a German couple that immigrated to the US in late 50s. Even as a kid in the 70s, I could sense that the other parents in the neighborhood tended to keep their distance from my friend's parents. His parents were nothing but model citizens, but a lot of the families in town had firsthand experience with the war in Europe, and the memories did not fade easily. One of my childhood neighbors was an English "war bride", and it was pretty clear how she felt about the Germans in the neighborhood: "I crossed an ocean, and they're closer to me here than when they were across the channel!"
I'm going to take a look at Biff's links--thanks for doing that!
I sit here less than a mile from one of Memphis's little gems, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens (now free). It was the fine mansion of Hugo Dixon, an Englishman who was interned in Germany from 1914 to 1918. He made a lot of money in cotton later and collected French Impressionist paintings (mostly) and other objets d'art. It's well worth a visit and stroll if you ever make it to Memphis.
At the UM Special Collections there's an original of a Christmas celebration program done by Russian PoWs in a German camp in 1915 or '16. It's very homemade looking of course, and I think is mimeograph (or a like process). Quite different treatment to what happened to their sons if they surrendered to the Wehrmacht.
Just some memories on a theme.
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