A selection of images from Flickr, to remember the day.
2. Pearl Harbor, originally uploaded by spaz_writer999.
Pearl Harbor 141, originally uploaded by savage_man_2003.
Pearl Harbor 138, originally uploaded by savage_man_2003.
Pearl Harbor 135, originally uploaded by savage_man_2003.
Pearl Harbor 120, originally uploaded by savage_man_2003.Part I:
Part II:
I am not going to say much about the day, surely we all know what it is. Suffice to say that I remember the thousands—and in particular 24 countrymen—on many more days than this one.
I am not criticising anyone who posts remembrances, for it was a shocking day, but I feel the best course of action is not to pause, not to grieve; but to move forward toward victory. To expose the philosophical underpinnings of a dangerous and murderous ideology; to defeat those that promote it with the sword and the pen; to not (as the Flea puts it) let the mote in our eye obscure the plank in the Taliban’s eye.
By all means, remember the fallen. First and foremost, remember to win.
Capt. Bobby C. Wilks, USCG (Ret). Family photo
The Coast Guard’s first black aviator, Captain Bobby C. Wilks, passed away last month in Woodbridge, Virginia, at the age of 78.
Captain Wilks joined the Coast Guard in 1955, got his wings in 57, and accrued some 6,000 hours of flight time in 18 different types of airframe (both fixed and rotary-wing). He also became the first black person to command a Coast Guard station.
The Washington Post has an interesting anecdote in their obituary:
John “Bear” Moseley, who was in flight school with Capt. Wilks, remembered him as “a heck of a good stick” (a good pilot).
Moseley recalled another near-miraculous open-sea landing that Capt. Wilks executed during summer 1963, when he was dispatched to evacuate a critically ill seaman from the destroyer USS Mills near Cay Sal Bank off Cuba. Capt. Wilks directed the Mills captain to increase his speed to 27 knots as a way of smoothing out the choppy waters so he could land his HU-16 Albatross, an amphibious flying boat, while taking care not to smash into the destroyer.
He brought the plane down in the wake, got the patient aboard and took off, despite being unable to use jet boosters to help lift the plane out of the water. He basically “ballooned the aircraft into the air . . . smacked the top of the next wave and then was airborne,” Moseley said, noting that then-Lt. Wilks immediately had to worry about banking the plane without stalling, so he wouldn’t hit the destroyer.
– Joe Holley. ”Bobby C. Wilks, 78, Coast Guard’s First Black Aviator“, Washington Post, July 24th, 2009. [Hyperlinks in article are mine]
If that doesn’t sound too amazing to you, let me explain.
It’s a common misunderstanding that amphibians or flying boats can just put down wherever there is a thimble of water, including the open ocean, and it’s all very routine. Not so. These aircraft generally require sheltered water away from ocean swells—although they have boat-like hulls, they are not as hardy as boats of the non-flying variety. Large swells (not to mention surface debris) can take an amphibian hull apart. Remember that the plane’s own skin is smacking the surface of the waves at about 200mph when it touches down—like landing on bricks. So one generally wants the bricks to be as small and pleasant as possible.
I have to give the man credit. His flying boat shows up, but it’s too choppy to land. Instead of turning around and going home, he has the destroyer captain drive at high speed and lands in the ship’s wake. Takes on his critically ill passenger, and takes off in the destroyer’s wake.
That takes some guts and “outside the box” thinking.
I also love that he had a silver DeLorean, like Emmet Brown.
So long Captain, I wish I had heard about you while you were still alive.
For our southern brothers, who remember their glorious dead.
Golden Gate National Cemetery, from r o s e n d a h l’s Flickr photostream.
Image: Fence at Buchenwald, from Ralf Stockmann’s Flickr photostream.I had meant to write something lengthy and thoughtful in recognition of the day, but once I started reviewing the imagery and anecdotes, my anger and horror at the scale of the extermination became overwhelming. Similar reactions occurred over a half-century ago when Allied commanders toured the Ohrduf forced labour camp, a sub-camp of the more famous Buchenwald facility.
The generals [Omar Bradley, George Patton, and Dwight Eisenhower], though used to carnage in many forms, were shocked. “The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade,” Bradley remembered five years later. “More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. Lice crawled over the yellowed skin of their sharp, bony frames.” Bradley recalled that Eisenhower turned pale and silent, but insisted on seeing the whole camp. And that they saw, from the shed piled to the ceiling with bodies, to various torture devices, to a butcher’s block used for smashing gold fillings from the mouths of the dead (some of which no doubt had ended up in the Merkers mine). Patton retired behind a barracks and became physically ill…
Soon after seeing Ohrdruf, Eisenhower ordered every unit near by that was not in the front lines to tour Ohrdruf: “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.’” Eisenhower felt it was essential not only for his troops to see for themselves, but for the world to know about conditions at Ohrdruf and other camps. From Third Army headquarters, he cabled London and Washington, urging delegations of officials and newsmen to be eye-witnesses to the camps. The message to Washington read: ‘We are constantly finding German camps in which they have placed political prisoners where unspeakable conditions exist. From my own personal observation, I can state unequivocally that all written statements up to now do not paint the full horrors.”
– Abzug, Robert H. (1985). Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, USA. p.27-30.I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.” Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.
– Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1948). Crusade in Europe. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company. p.409.
Oh that our leaders would be blessed with such insight into human nature today. Twenty-first century cynicism now runs so deep that a significant number of people cannot accept even the positive events within living memory, like landing men on the moon. Even as they sit typing on a technological marvel whose raw computational power is a hundred thousand times greater than those that guided men from Cape Canaveral to the lunar surface. Small wonder that some now cannot be moved by words and images of an incomprehensible horror, now several generations distant.
Not one of the high-throughput extermination camps, Buchenwald was reported to have “only” a 24% date rate (or 56,545 persons) amongst the 238,380 prisoners who passed through its gates. It would continue to maintain that rate of attrition under its new Soviet masters, who rechristened it “Special Camp No. 2” and continued to operate it until 1950. From 1945 to 1950, a further 7,113 individuals (of the 28,455 held there) perished during Soviet internment. Remember that the next time you see some moral defective wandering about with communist iconography on his shirt.
So do not be lulled into complacency by thinking that the defeat of Nazi Germany means a permanent retreat from the worst depths of human barbarism. Human evil always finds a way of perpetuating (and even outdoing) itself. Now that many nations have much more destructive nuclear, biological and chemical tools at their disposal, and a significant concentration of Jews continues to abide in their ancient homeland, the temptation for Jew-haters to strike will only and ever increase.
Regrettably, the gulf between saying “never again” and acting to prevent another “again” is widening by the day. Today’s Jewry face opponents who will not be ashamed of the killing; indeed, they revel in the thought. A man who is on record calling for the extermination of the Jewish homeland on numerous occasions is on the threshold of developing mankind’s most destructive weapon. Meanwhile, an enormous international military coalition works and lives next door, but no one orders them across the line.
Thankfully, I do not believe that anyone will ever succeed in removing Jews or Israel from this planet. But I do believe we will see them try, within my lifetime. And the attempt will be much more gruesome, devastating and all-encompassing than the last one.
So long, Mr. Montalban.
The best villain Star Trek ever had, and by all accounts, a prince of a man universally liked by his peers. Rest in peace.
The 24 ordinary Canadians slaughtered while doing their ordinary, everyday jobs.
DAR AL-ISLAM UPDATE: Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.
In honour of the great man himself, I present to you, my review of Sydney Pollack films I was forced to see as a young child; somewhere between the ages of two and twelve. I believed then, and now, that none of his efforts from 1975-1985 contained anything remotely interesting to a person of my age. Which raises the question of why my mother would drag me to these things. I don’t know; it certainly wasn’t for my entertainment. I would have been happy watching Sesame Street.
The good news is I got revenge by making mom sit through Robocop, Blade Runner, two of the Jaws sequels, and Godzilla 1985. Oh and one of the mid-90s Pokemon movies, just because.
Three Days of the Condor (1975). Robert Redford is the prehistoric version of a news reader for the CIA, checking books and publications for derring-do ideas that the agency might later put to good use. Or uh, bad use, since this is the 70s, and we all know American government agencies in the 70s are always doing the exact opposite of whatever their lawful chartering legislation requires. Redford reads something interesting in a pulpy novel one day, goes to lunch, and when he comes back, his department is uh… right-sized with .45cal severance packages. Redford gets in touch with seniors bureaucrats at CIA, thinking he is in danger, but they try to off him too. Eventually he holds a woman (Faye Dunaway) hostage and the woman, instead of thinking he is a dangerous psychopath with paranoid delusions, buys into his unlikely story and helps him.
The Electric Horseman (1979). A washed-up five-time rodeo champ (Robert Redford, again) is recruited to sell breakfast cereals for a sinister megacorp. The horse he is supposed to ride for these ads is a former racehorse, now injured, and it has to be drugged to get it on stage. Apparently it doesn’t handle the hustle-bustle of cereal promotion very well. Redford the rodeo champ decides this is too cruel a fate for such a majestic animal. He steals said horse to release it into the wild, leading the authorities on an extremely athletic (for the horse!) cross-country chase.
The whole “riding the horse to exhaustion across a continent to save it from occasional sedation and use in commercials” storyline didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. You may be surprised to learn that it (according to IMDB) is almost kinda sorta based on a real incident:
This movie was inspired by a case where “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” (1971) invited Penny Chenery in 1973 to bring her horse, the legendary Triple Crown winner Secretariat to appear on the show. Chenery, knowing her horse wouldn’t care for a TV studio, declined.
A lot of 1970s paranoia movies seem to be derived from the basic concept of “Let’s imagine a scenario where somebody suggests an arbitrarily stupid idea, and instead of common sense ruling the day (as it did in real life), they make the stupid idea real!” I am inclined to believe that most of these projects got greenlit because the studio execs were using powerful hallucinogenic controlled substances.
Tootsie (1982): A washed-up actor (Dustin Hoffman) can’t get any acting gigs, so he decides to play drag queen and lands a leading role on a daytime soap opera. Unfortunately all his male co-stars end up falling in love with him, and of course he can’t blow the scam by going after his female co-stars (Jessica Lange and Teri Garr) either.
This is probably the only one of Pollack’s flicks that did not require my childhood brain to try and grasp the minutiae of current events or the alleged nefarious doings of a secret government agency. At the time I recall this film being the most enjoyable of a bad lot, but not nearly enjoyable enough to warrant a second viewing.
Out of Africa (1985): Danish woman (Meryl Streep) assents to marriage of convenience to titled Swedish cousin, tries to start plantation in Kenya. Ends up getting VD, a failed marriage, and an on-again, off-again affair with an American aviator (Robert Effin’ Redford) with commitment issues. The actual person portrayed by Redford was British, but surprise surprise, a realistic accent is beyond the realm of the possible for this gifted thespian.
Also as a result of my pint-sized movie critic career, I have decided that Robert Redford is the winner of the All-Time Kick in the Pants Award. When I die I am going to provide funding for random strangers to kick him or his heirs in the nads, in perpetuity. Meryl Streep would have won that award for Kramer vs. Kramer (another overwrought drama seen two or three times in early childhood), but she redeemed herself with a hilarious portrayal of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada.
If you or your heirs would like to apply for the role of Redford nad-kicker, enlist in the comments below. Don’t think that you’ll be getting free money either, because although I’ll be dead, I’ll be keeping an eye on you to be sure that you do the job. Anything worth doing is worth doing right.
I think it is nice of officialdom to want to grace our honoured dead with ceremonial recognition, but lowering the flag on the tallest point of the federal Parliament Buildings is not a terrific idea.
First, soldiers are generally big on tradition. It is inculculated in them through the countless greater and lesser traditions woven into the fabric of military life. To be blunt, if you have problems with the regular observance of ceremony and tradition, then the military life is definitively not for you. One of Parliament’s long-standing traditions is that the Peace Tower flag gets lowered only for the death of the Sovereign (or Her family), the current and former governor-general, prime minister, chief justice of the Supreme Court, lieutenant-governors, current members of Parliament, senators and privy councillors.
Recently, we have breached this tradition by adding other days to the roster, and the possibility exists that this gesture will become devalued by overuse. Kind of like how gold credit cards once represented premium customers, but now lack all snob cachet because they became too common. Eventually they were superseded in snob appeal by platinum cards, which are also now very common, and now black cards are the mark of the truly exceptional credit risks. Or at least they are until everyone has one. Start handing out the exclusive honours to everybody and sooner or later they stop being exclusive, or an honour. And when we are talking about national honours and not mere credit cards, it becomes a tragedy.
Second, it is a transitory gesture. Lowering the flag is a mark of honour and respect, yes, but it is low-cost and entirely temporary. There is no sacrifice on the part of the public. Not unlike those little fabric ribbons that proliferated in the ’90s for a multitude of causes most of us can’t remember. You wear them for a week and then toss them in the garbage, and five or ten years later you’ve completely forgotten those little ribbons ever existed. The men and women who die under arms in the service of this country deserve something permanent that demands a little effort and exertion from those of us at home. Like an enormous old-school bronze-and-stone monument placed prominently on public property.
I am not the world’s foremost expert on Canadian contributions to the Boer War, but I pass a memorial to it on a semi-regular basis. It is readily apparent to me, from the prominence of that memorial—in the median of University Avenue—that 1) this city sent forth a worthy contingent of her sons, and 2) the citizens honoured that sacrifice and wanted future generations to honour it as well. You want to honour the dead who gave their all? Start collecting money for a permanent memorial. Lowering flags is great but all too ephemeral.
Third, I have a sneaking suspicion that politicians of all stripes are inherently craven and lazy, and checking the flag on the Peace Tower is an easy way for them to figure out whether there’s a death going on they can score political points from. That is not its purpose. You want to score points, read the papers and learn the names of the dead soldiers. Read about what they did and then decide if you want to play politics with it.
As worthy as it is, I do not want the most notable memorial to our war dead to be the lowering of the flag on the Peace Tower. They deserve something a little grander that will speak to us and our future generations.
Chris Taylor: Funnily enough, they were brand-new to me, too! At least until last night when I acquired a copy of...
Nathan B.: I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues, too. This is an excellent post, Chris, and I also...
Chris Taylor: I like to think my solution satisfies both punitive and restorative aims, and has a couple of... Nathan B.: Brilliant, Chris! I love your suggestion. Chris Taylor: David did a lot of atrocious things, but I think it’s pretty evident that a whole lot of them...
Chris flies a desk for a living but is an aeronautics enthusiast who delights in the Golden Age of Aviation. He admires all the pioneering men and women who travelled the world equipped with only a map, compass, sextant, and the conviction that there was no place they could not reach.
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