THE WAR JOKE - IT WAS ABOUT OIL

I believe this was the first American joke of World War Two: holding up a newspaper headline that read "Japs Bomb Pearl Harbor”, the hung-over volunteer in boot camp sadly announced, “I thought Pearl Harbor was a girl!” It's a good joke, and has been since 1942.  And despite holding a ten year lead, the best Japanese gag of the war has largely been forgotten, because somehow many of the Japanese never got the joke themselves. Typical of the humorless sons of Nippon was Lt. Col. Kingoro Hashimoto, who wore the Japanese neo-con mantle long before such right wing ideologies could have been called “neo”.

Kingoro was known for being “… arrogant and insubordinate,” as well as “…ignorant and dangerous” and “a publicity hound”.  And that was the way a Japanese general described him. Robert Butow pointed out in his 1961 book “Tojo and the Coming of War”, that Kingoro “…seemed to reappear on the national scene - whenever crises threatened – like a jack-in-the-box when the lid is released.” And that is actually my favorite image of this Japanese anti-social psychopath, as a jack-in-the-box, popping up to play martial music to drown out the punch line.

 It was Kingoro who helped plan two attempts to overthrow the elected government in 1931. Both attempts failed, and in response the public elected a moderate Prime Minister. So in 1932 Kingoro supported the assassination of that Prime Minister.  In September of 1933 Kingoro help manufacture the Japanese takeover of Manchuria. And it was Kingoro who, during the 1937 infamous “Rape of Nanking”, in China , ordered the attack on the American gun boat Panay, which killed three American sailors and wounded 48 others. That little joke cost the Japanese $2 million in indemnity paid to the United States. 

However it provided yet more proof that many others in Japan did not favor the lunatics like Kingoro. Public pressure forced Kingoro’s recall and the American ambassador to Japan noted that his embassy was deluged by “…people from all walks of life, from high officials, doctors, professors, businessmen down to school children, trying to express their shame, apologies, and regrets” with the Panay sinking. The Ambassador noted that “never before has the fact that there are 'two Japans' been more clearly emphasized.”  There were two Japans, and as the war with China dragged on year after year, the lunatic one remained not amused nor un-amusing.

According to the humorless plan of the Japanese ultranationalists, China was supposed to supply workers for Japanese industry.  But instead of a pool of unlimited manpower, China became a swamp, a drain on Japanese resources, both human and industrial. Could the ultra-nationalists like Kingoro Hashimoto have been wrong? By 1940 there was nobody left alive in a position of authority to suggest so. In September the nationalists doubled-down their bet by invading French Indo-China, looking for natural resources to support their war in China, which was supposed to have made Japan industrially independent

The American response to this invasion was to cut off all oil shipments to Japan: just not right away. We were the world’s largest oil exporter.  And the American oil companies fought any crimp in their profits tooth and nail. Congress did not approve the embargo until July of 1941, which gave the Japanese time to plan their response. The Japanese navy was burning 2,900 barrels of oil every hour, 11,600 barrels every day. By September their reserves had dropped to 50 million barrels, just about a six month supply.

The Japanese neo-ultra-nationalists now faced a choice. They could admit they had been mega-stupid. Or they could invade the Dutch West Indies, to capture the oil fields on Borneo. To protect the flank of that massive operation, the Japanese were forced to include the invasion of the American protectorate of the Philippines, and that forced them to create something they called Operation Z.

 While Americans were sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner on 20 November, 1941, six fast Japanese aircraft carriers and their escorts were taking on a full load of fuel oil. On 26 November, they steamed for Oahu.  And in the predawn hours of Sunday, 7 December, 1941 they launched almost 400 aircraft in two waves to attack the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The attack sank four battleships, damaged four others, damaged three cruisers, three destroyers and one mine layer, destroyed 188 aircraft, and killed 2,402 and wounded 1,282 American servicemen. It was a brutal wake up call for the Americans.  And for Japan the attack was a complete and total failure.

To quote from Ted Mahar, and his article on the History Net, “The Battle That Ignited America” ; “The attack on Pearl Harbor modernized the U.S. Navy in two hours, neutralizing our battleships and forcing us to use the weapon we should have been stressing all along, our carriers, none of which was even damaged, since none was there.  Political wrangling between carrier admirals and battleship admirals could have slowed our retaliation. The Japanese streamlined the discussions.”

But more specifically, as was pointed out by U.S. Air Force Major Patrick Donovan in his 2001 paper “Oil and Logistics in the Pacific War”, “By far, the more surprising target oversight of the Japanese attack was the oil and gas storage tanks. The entire fuel supply for the Pacific Fleet was stored in above-ground tanks on the eastern side of the naval base. These tanks were perfectly visible to the naked eye and, ergo, perfect targets. These tanks were particularly susceptible to enemy action…Even a few bombs dropped amongst the tanks could have started a raging conflagration.

“The US Navy had just finished restocking Pearl Harbor to its total capacity of 4.5 million barrels of oil. …The Japanese strategic disregard of the fragile U.S. oil infrastructure in the Pacific was an incredible oversight on their part.”

In other words, the entire raid on Pearl Harbor could have been substituted with a dozen strafing attacks over those fuel tanks with incendiary bullets. Without the oil in those tanks the U.S. Pacific Fleet would have been forced to withdraw to California and Washington State. Hawaii would have been indefensible. And, in the words of Admiral Chester Nimitz, the man who won the war in the Pacific, “Had the Japanese destroyed the oil (stored at Pearl Harbor), it would have prolonged the war another two years.”

It displays an underlying truth about the ideological hawks who preach “preemptive strikes” and wars: once the shooting starts they usually prove to be incompetent idiots.  Kingoro Hashimoto was a perfect example. The man who once warned the world, “Watch me, Hashimoto. I am no man to sit still and talk”, was never promoted within the army.  Instead he went into politics. Staying at home after 1941, he survived the war uninjured. He was convicted in 1948 of crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to life in prison.

He thus provided the best Japanese joke of World War Two. Did you hear about the super patriot who sent tens of thousands of young Americans and millions of innocent young Chinese and Japanese to their deaths? He died in his own bed, at 67 years of age, from lung cancer.

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MR. LYNCH'S AWFUL UNLAWFUL LAW

I am amazed by the number of prominent men named Lynch hanging around the Piedmont country of Virginia in 1781. There was a William Lynch from Pittsylvania County who became a militia captain. Lynchburg was named for John Lynch who in 1781 had a stranglehold on ferry service over the James River. There was a James Lynch who had died in March at the Revolutionary War battle of Guillford Courthouse, just 40 miles south of the Virginia border. And in October of that year, about a hundred miles to the east, James Head Lynch hung out his shingle, identifying his tavern, near the camps occupied by French troops during the battle of Yorktown. But the Lynch I get breathless about was a Quaker who lived 13 miles due south of Lynchburg.

At 19 years of age Charles Lynch tied the knot with Miss Anna Terrell and moved into a log cabin that he called Green Level, and which he roped into more than six thousand acres between the Roanoke and Otter Rivers. To work his fields Charles kept up to 24 human beings tied in bondage, which required dancing quite a moral jig for a Quaker, and something we know Charles was bothered by – just not bothered enough to stop profiting from it. The tobacco Charles grew was exported to England. And in cash poor Virginia that made him a local economic power. Charles was now in the loop of the planter-class society; no more mood swings for Chuck.

In 1766 Charles became a Bedford County Justice of the Peace, tied to the courts in New London, the county seat, and the House of Burgess in Williamsburg. With the coming of the American Revolution, the now forty year old Charles was appointed a Colonel in the Virginia Militia. And as a militia leader his immediate concern was not the British, but the Cherokees.

While the Minute Men in New England were killing red coats at Bunker and Breed’s Hills, Virginia politicians were worried that this was no time to leave their isolated frontier settlements out on a limb. So in October of 1776 a force of 1,600 Virginia and North Carolina militia, including Colonel Charles Lynch and his men from Bradford and Pittsylvania Counties, mounted a preemptive strike. They burned over 50 Cherokee towns, murdered their male inhabitants, ravaged their crops, slaughtered their livestock and left the women and children survivors to twist slowly in the cold winter winds. In desperation the frayed survivors retreated over the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, surrendering five million acres to their American executioners. This one expedition secured Virginia’s open flank, and for four years the state felt safe.

But, as they say, no noose is good noose. And in the winter of 1780 came word that the scourge of Independence, Benedict Arnold, leading a mix of red coats and Tories (loyalists), had arrived to choke off the revolution by giving Virginia the same treatment Virginia had given the Cherokee. The towns of Williamsburg and Richmond were captured. The state's new Governor, Thomas Jefferson, missed the gallows by a hair’s breath. Half the Virginia legislature was lassoed. Their plantations were burned. At the same time General Cornwallis was approaching Virginia, chasing Nathanial Green’s little Continental army northward across the Carolina border. The Tories were in every patriot’s pocket, as the region was suddenly awash in counterfeit Continental dollars. Virginia was suddenly standing on a trap door, and the British were ready to pull the lever and drop the patriots into eternity.

The local Tories saw this as the opportunity to strike at the Patriots who had been bullying them for 5 years, or so the bullies assumed. Rumors strung across the Piedmont of Tory plans to sabotage the lead mines owned by Charles, the iron works outside of Lynchburg (in which Charles was an investor), free the 4,000 British and Hessian prisoners held at present day Charlottesville, and worse, capture the Patriot arsenal at New London, Virginia, which Charles had invested in.

Every sickened horse was presumed to have been poisoned by Tories. Every house and barn fire was assumed to have been Tory arson. As the newly appointed sheriff of Bedford County, Charles Lynch decided he had reached the end of his rope. He had to act, if for no other reason than to galvanize the frayed Patriot nerves. He deputized a core of supporters and began throwing a noose over the countryside, roping in suspected Tories and bringing them to trial before a rump court in his own front yard, at Green Level.

The trials were brief while the punishments were swift and brutal. None of those arrested were strung up, but they were forced to either swear allegiance to the patriot cause or be tied to a tree and receive 39 lashes on their bare backs, followed by imprisonment. It seems to have been effective, as no Tory uprising occurred - if there had ever been any real possibility of such an uprising.

As spring approached, and the courts at Green Level continued, Governor Jefferson asked Charles to lead a regiment of riflemen to support Nathaniel Green in North Carolina. Did Jefferson make that request, at least in part, to bring an end to the Mr. Lynch’s courts? Jefferson never said so. He did send a letter thanking Charles for his "defense of liberty". But the Lynch courts also dropped off the agenda of the new sheriff.

When General Green made his stand at Guilford Courthouse Charles was in command of the Patriot right flank. After Cornwallis’ costly victory there, Green kept Charles in North Carolina; even after Cornwallis’ wounded army limped north across the Virginia border and into the trap at Yorktown.

In 1782 the Virginia legislature voted retroactive approval of Colonel Charles Lynch’s courts. The punishments Charles had rendered in his front yard were now called “Lynch’s Law”. But the House of Burghers set up no mechanism to repeat such 'Lynch courts' during any future crises.

In 1793 Charles freed five of his slaves, writing by way of explanation, that it was, “…our duty to do unto all men as we would they should do unto us.” However he freed only those five and left the rest in bondage to be inherited by his children, like a barn or a favorite chair. Charles Lynch died in his home at Green Level in 1796. He was sixty years old.

Some years later a Captain William Lynch, then living just over the Virginia border in North Carolina, stepped forward to claim that he had been the origin of the phrase “Lynch Law”. But there is no evidence William Lynch ever issued any pseudo-justice which would have inspired such an appellation. The vigilante compact of the Pittsylvania County Alliance he supposedly signed seems to have been an invention for an 1836 magazine article by Edgar Allen Poe, a known writer of invention (see “Tell Tale Poe”). And anyone who would claim credit for such a ga-rotten conception should be lynched, because that is just not puny.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-lyn1.htm

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ADDICTED - Tobacco Evolved to Kill

I was surprised to learn that the tobacco plant did not evolve until just after the last ice age, only about 8,000 years ago. Its innovative strategy for survival against the surge of new insects and herbivores the warmer weather had created, was the elevated production of an insecticide called nicotine. It's bitter taste discouraged any hungry herbivores. And if swallowed, it sicken and killed any bugs or small mammals.

But this strategy for defense played right into the human trait of becoming addicted to things that are bad for us. By 2,000 years ago the Mayans were using tobacco to get a rush from nicotine. But their favored method of delivery – as an enema – limited the distribution of the drug, not to mention the mobility of the users. Still, the way these two life forms meshed together, like gears in a machine - a plant which produced a poison to protect itself and a creature which tended to become addicted to poisons – may be the ultimate proof that humans bring out God's sense of humor. Which makes sense since it seems that humans seem to bring out God.

In 1492 Columbus arrived, uninvited,  in the new world and the natives presented him with a canoe filled with fruit and “dried leaves”. The natives were probably hoping Christopher would set the canoe on fire while sitting in the canoe and smoking the leaves. Instead the Spaniards ate the fruit and threw the leaves away; no word on what they did with the canoe.

However a later Spanish explorer, Rodrigo de Jerez, who was in Cuba dreaming of gold and the good life, tried “drinking” the smoke from the burning leaves. He was immediately addicted. When he brought his new addiction back to Spain with him, he was arrested and thrown into a dungeon. When he was finally released 7 years later, the streets of Seville were crowded with addicts merrily puffing away in public. Ironic, huh.

By 1577 English physicians were recommending tobacco as a treatment for toothache, worms, lockjaw and oddly enough, cancer. In 1603 they petitioned the king to make tobacco a controlled substance, not because it was unhealthy but because they were not getting their cut of the profits. And in 1610 Sir Francis Bacon made a note that he really wanted to quit smoking but was finding it really hard to do. It would take another three hundred and fifty years before the American Medical Association would come to the official conclusion that nicotine is addictive.

In 1612 John Rolf harvested Virginia’s first crop of tobacco. Three years later his first shipment hit the streets of London. The result was similar to the introduction of crack cocaine in American inner cities in the 1980’s. By 1618 there were “…7,000 shops, in and about London, that doth vent tobacco”, according to Mr. Barnaby Rich, a tobacco addict.

As the weed spread around the globe, many governments set a zero tolerance level. Sultan Murad IV executed 18 smokers a day for ten years. It did not work. Czar Alexis sent first time smokers to Siberia with their noses slit. Second time smokers were executed. That did no good.  In China if you were caught carrying tobacco with the intent to distribute the penalty for a first offense was decapitation. There is no record of any second time offenders, so in that regard the zero tolerance worked. And yet, the weed still thrived as a personal sin, even in China. Those who advocate the standard American approach of punishment first, toward cocaine and marijuana, might want to consider the Chinese failure with tobacco. It seemed there was only one thing that would make smokers stop smoking. Death.

Lung cancer was first described in 1761 by, appropriately enough, Giovanni Morgagni. He was the inventor of pathology. He described it as a rare affliction. And even a century later, the disease accounted for only 1% of all cancers.

However, less than a century after that, (by 1927) as cigarette smoking became more common, lung cancer had climbed to 14% of all autopsies. Dr. Fritz Lickint made the first statistical link between smoking and lung cancer in 1928. Five years later the prestigious “Journal of the American Medical Association” began carrying advertising for cigarettes in their own publication. And, oddly  enough, research into smoking and cancers began to fade from the pages of that publication as soon as the tobacco money appeared.

The addictive quality of tobacco should have been obvious from the actual advertising campaigns used to sell cigarettes. “Not a cough in a (rail) car load”, “More Doctors Smoke Camels than any other Cigarette”, “L and M cigarettes. Just what the doctor ordered”... "Making smoking 'safe' for smokers” (who else would it be safe for?), and my favorite,  “We're tobacco men ... not medicine men”.

And the rationalization approach was also big along Madison Avenue, the advertising venue of choice in mid-twentieth century America. "When smokers changed to Philip Morris, every case of nose or throat irritation--due to smoking--either cleared up completely or definitely improved”, “That must be why my mother started smoking Pall Mall's when she was 15”. And then there was the confusing yet illogical approach. “39,468 dentists say, "Smoke Viceroy Cigarettes.” Who cares what dentists say about lung cancer? If those catch phrases didn’t drive people away from tobacco, nothing could.

Consider the particular brand of cigarettes called “Marlboro”. It was first introduced in 1924 and marketed as an upscale cigarette for women (“Mild as May”). It struggled as an “also-ran” until Phillip Morris reintroduced it as a filtered cigarette.

The new advertising campaign featured a craggy faced cowboy working the range, with the theme music from “The Magnificent Seven” swelling underneath. By 1957 Marlboro was the best selling cigarette in the world. The only problem was that the original “Marlboro Man”, Carl Bradley, actually smoked a different brand of cigarettes (“Kools”). Luckily for Phillip Morris, Carl was thrown off a horse into a pond and drowned before anybody found that out.

Of the approximately one dozen men who replaced Carl in print and television ads over the next forty years, three of the "Marlboro Men" died of lung cancer (Wayne McLaren, David McLean and Dick Hammer). By the 1970’s the brand was unofficially known as “Cowboy Killers”. But that didn't seem to hurt sales. I used to smoke them myself.

Today, with 1/3rd of the world’s population still smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco or inserting tobacco enemas, 4,000 Americans still die each year (5.4 million world-wide) from tobacco caused cancer, strokes, or house fires caused by smoking. The number of fires caused by tobacco enemas is thought to be insignificant, but I remain suspicious of this method of nicotine delivery.

Under heat Cigarettes (or little cigars) convert the nicotine fortified tobacco contained in modern cigarettes into 60 various carcinogens, and 96% of all lung cancer patients each year describe themselves as moderate to heavy smokers.

These figures mean that smoking tobacco has killed far more people than smoking marijuana. And yet, despite this, every day we send people to prison for selling the “gateway drug” while the only tobacco related criminals in jail are those caught avoiding state cigarette taxes. Yea, God must be having a real laugh over his experiment with tobacco.  Not so much his experiment with humans.

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BIRTH OF THE BOYCOTT - Social Media in 1880.

I can describe the exact moment of conception. On the evening of 22 September, 1880,  Father John O’Malley was sharing a meal with American journalist James Redpath. At some point during dinner the priest noticed that the American had stopped eating. When queried, Redpath explained, “I am bothered about a word. When a people ostracize a land grabber..." And Redpath struggled for a moment, before explaining, "But ostracism won't do" The priest, according to Redpath, "tapped his big forehead, and said, 'How would it do to call it "to boycott him?”  Mr. Redpath wrote, “He was the first man who uttered the word, and I was the first who wrote it.” (Talks About Ireland, 1881) And thus was born another contribution to the English language. Of course the importance of this invention requires a little explanation.

Freed from its incubator in the central highlands of  Mexico, 'Phytophthora infestans' -  the Potato Blight - arrived in Ireland in the 1830’s. By then the humble potato, which had preceded the blight, had become the primary food for the 8 million people of Ireland. It could be grown almost year round. It produced so much protein per square foot that a family could be supported on a quarter of an acre of land. But because of this dependence, in the decades after 1845, the blight created "The Starving Time". Each year more and more of the crop was consumed by the moldy blight.  But because it did its work underground, unseen, its ravages could not be seen until the crop was harvested.  By 1855 20% of the population of Ireland had starved to death, and another 20% had emigrated.

The British government struggled to respond to the disaster with church based relief, but politics then compounded the human misery.  Potatoes were molding away in the fields. But wheat, which was growing healthy and abundant in Ireland, was too expensive for the starving Irish to buy,  thanks to the Corn Laws. These were duties (taxes) charged on imported grain. This was done to protect the Irish and English landowners from having to compete with cheap American wheat.  But by 1880, of the four million souls still surviving on the emerald isle, fewer than 2,000 owned 70% of the land. The three million tenant farmers owned nothing, not even their own homes, and over the two previous years their rents had been increased by 30%, and many were being thrown out of the their ancestral rented homes (above).  The very life was being squeezed out of the people of Ireland.

Meanwhile, most of the largest, wealthiest landowners, those benefiting from the Corn Laws, were absentee landlords, Englishmen and women who hired local farmers to manage their Irish estates. “Captain" Charles Cunningham Boycott was one of these local farm owners/managers. Those tenants who could not pay their rent were evicted by the managers. Those who were evicted usually died. To argue it was not intended as “genocide” misses the point. Intended or not, it was mass murder. Ireland was teetering on the edge of a revolution.

On Tuesday, 3 July, 1880, outside the quaint village of Ballinrobe, County Mayo, three men emptied their revolvers into the head and face of twenty-nine year old David Feerick,  an agent for a absentee landlord.  No one was ever charged with that murder.  In early September, outside of the same village, “Captain” Charles Boycott, called on the tenants to harvest the oat crop of absent landlord Lord Erne. 

“Captain” Boycott would be described by the New York Times (in 1881) as 49 years old; "a red faced fellow, five feet eight inches tall, the son of a Protestant minister who had served in the British Army." He earned his title of Captain not in the military but for his daring attitude in sport. Besides managing Lord Erne's property, Boycott  owned 4,000 acres of Irish farmland.  The day he called them back to work Boycott also informed the tenants that their wages were being cut by almost half.  The tenants simply refused to work at those wages.

The Boycott family and servants by themselves struggled for half a day to cut and harvest the oats before admitting defeat. Mrs. Boycott then appealed to the tenants personally. They responded to her by bringing in the oat crop before the winter rains ruined it.

On Sunday, 19 September 1880,  Irish politician Charles Stuart Parnell (above), addressed a mass meeting in the town of Ennis.  Parnell called on the crowd to shun any who took over the property of an evicted tenant. “When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and the marketplace, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him severely alone — putting him into a kind of moral Coventry — isolating him from his kind like the leper of old.”  It was the birth of the modern non-violent protest. Unstated, was the reality that this was a religious war, the Catholic south of Ireland against the Protestant controlled north and England.

On Tuesday, 22 September, 1880, a local process server, under orders from "Captain Boycott",  and accompanied by police, issued eviction notices to eleven of Lord Erne's tenants.  The tenants were not surprised. Speaking of Boycott, one tenant told a local newspaper, “He treated his cattle better than he did us.”  The server would have issued even more eviction notices, but a crowd of women began to throw mud and manure and the agent and his police escort had to retreat into the Boycott home. That night, in the house of Father O'Mally, the word "Boycott", as a verb, was invented.  It was put to immediate use.

The next morning, Wednesday, 23 September, a large crowd from Ballinrobe (above) marched to the Boycott home and urged the servants to leave. By evening the Boycotts and a young niece living with them, were alone in the house.

A letter written by “Captain” Boycott was published in the London Times. It made no mention of the raising of rents, only of the refusal to pay those rents. It made no mention of the cutting of salary, only of the refusal to work. It did detail the travails of Captain Boycott and his family. His mail was not being delivered. He was followed and mocked whenever he left his farm. “The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed…”

 Harper's Weekly Illustrated News for 18 December, 1880,  reported what happened next. “A newspaper correspondent first started the idea of sending assistance to Captain Boycott…one person alone promised to get together 30,000 volunteers.  Mr Forester, Chief Secretary for Ireland, at once vetoed the project of an armed invasion…

"It was accordingly decided to pick out some fifty or sixty from the great number of Orange (Protestants) from northern Ireland who were anxious to volunteer. Under military protection (of 1,000 troops) these men harvested Captain Boycott’s crops… The cost of this singular expedition was about ten thousand pounds…” (over $200,000, today).

It took two weeks under military guard for the inexperienced Ulster men to bring in the crop of turnips, wheat and potatoes, valued by Boycott as worth about three hundred and fifty pounds ($8,000).  Mr. Parnell estimated the harvest had cost the English government “one shilling for every turnip.”

Boycott left Ireland with his family on Wednesday, the first of December, 1880,  shrouded in the back of a military ambulance and escorted by soldiers.  His exit had been achieved by nonviolence. He never returned. Some one described his exile as the “death of feudalism in Europe".   Or perhaps, with more hope, the birth of modern Ireland.

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