Indianapolis - Kouroo Contexture

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THE USS INDIANAPOLIS

“Denial is an integral part of atrocity, and it’s anatural part after a society has committed genocide.First you kill, and then the memory of killing iskilled.” — Iris Chang, author of THE RAPE OF NANKING

(1997), when the Japanese translationof her work was cancelled by BasicBooks due to threats from Japan,on May 20, 1999.

“Historical amnesia has always been with us:we just keep forgetting we have it.”

— Russell Shorto

This is the sort of weapon with which the skipper wound up defending his honor.

USS INDIANAPOLIS USS INDIANAPOLIS

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November: The USS Indianapolis (CA-35), a 9,800-ton Portland class heavy cruiser built at Camden NJ, was commissioned.

1932

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November/December: The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) hosted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during a cruise to South America.

1936

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Late 1941-Early 1942: During the aerial attack on Pearl Harbor the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) had been taking part in a training exercise off Johnston Atoll. Following that attack it was absorbed into a task force searching fruitlessly for the Japanese carriers from which the planes had been launched.

1941

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Spring: The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) took up station in Alaskan waters.

1942

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February: At Swansea on the coast of Wales, the Canadian “Liberty Ship” Fort Halkett (named in honor of John Wedderburn Halkett) was loaded with military cargo intended for Bône, Algeria.

The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) sank a Japanese transport in Alaskan waters.

1943

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The poem “Is Now,” by Mark Van Doren, expressed an exceedingly Thoreauvian attitude:

Late in the year: The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) became the flagship of the US 5th Fleet. In that role, into mid-1944, she would take part in operations against the Gilberts, Marshalls, and Marianas, and elsewhere in the central Pacific.

In Vilna, Lithuania, in an effort to conceal their activities from the approaching Red Army, the German SS detailed some 80 of their Jewish prisoners to open mass graves at Ponary and burn the bodies of those they had been executing. As more of this concealment, those on this work detail would of course later themselves be executed.

Eternity is not to be pursued.Run, and it shortens; arrive, and it is shut:Forward or backward, nothing but the foldsOf time, that you will tighten, fumbling them.Eternity is only to be enteredStanding. It is everywhere and still.Slow, and it opens; stop, and it is wholeAs love about your head, that rests and sees.Eternity is now or not at all:Waited for, a wisp; remembered, shadows.Eternity is solid as the sun:As present, as familiar, as immense.

TIME AND ETERNITY

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September 15, Friday: Soviet forces occupied Praga, near Warsaw, but again came to a halt.

American forces landed unopposed on Morotai Island in the Netherlands East Indies, but simultaneous 1st Marine Division landings on Peleliu (Palau) Island in the Carolines met fierce Japanese resistance. The naval operation was commanded by Vice Admiral T. S. Wilkinson, and the landing was preceded by several days of intensive carrier-based aircraft bombing and ship gunfire bombardment. The heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35) participated in this operation.

The Marine landing itself was commanded by Major General W. H. Rupertus.

A naval task force under Rear Admiral D.E. Barbey landed Army troops under Major General J.C. Persons on Morotai Island in the Netherlands East Indies. The assault was supported by the cruisers and destroyers of Rear Admiral R.S. Berkey and aircraft from the escort carriers of Rear Admiral T.L. Sprague.

Submarine Stingray (SS-186) landed men and stores on Majoe Island, Molucca Sea.

Carrier Shangri La (CV-38) was commissioned at Norfolk, Virginia.

Japanese naval vessel sunk: Transport #3, by submarine Guavina (SS-362), Philippine Islands area, 5 degrees 34 minutes North, 125 degrees 23 minutes East

1944

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February/March: The USS Indianapolis (CA-35), again flagship of the US 5th Fleet, joined in attacks on Iwo Jima, the Japanese home islands, and the Ryukyus.

March 30, Friday: Indian troops took Kyaukse, south of Mandalay.

Soviet forces captured Danzig (Gdansk).

At Ravensbrück, Jewish women being led to execution struggled with guards. Nine escaped and were recaptured and killed.

Béla Bartók completed a 3d volume of Rumanian Folk Music.

United States naval vessels damaged:

• Heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35), by Japanese Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 25 minutes North, 127 degrees 30 minutes East

• High-speed transport Roper (APD-20), by collision, Philippine Sea, 20 degrees 57 minutes North, 132 degrees 5 minutes East

German submarines sunk:

• U-2340, by Army aircraft, Hamburg, Germany.• U-96, U-429, U-3508, by Army aircraft, Wilhelmshaven, Germany.• U-72, U-329, U-430, U-870, U-884, U-886, by Army aircraft, Bremen, Germany

March 31, Saturday: British and Chinese troops captured Kyaukme, 115 kilometers northeast of Mandalay, thus clearing the Burma Road from Mandalay to Lashio.

The provisional government of Poland claims Danzig (Gdansk) as “an inseparable part of the Polish Republic.” French troops cross the Rhine at Speyer and Germersheim, north of Karlsruhe.

Anton Webern and his wife leave their home near Vienna on foot, hoping to reach their house in Mittersill some 300 kilometers to the west. They reach Neulengbach, on the rail line to Salzburg.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams opened at the Playhouse Theater in New York.

American forces complete the captured of the Kerama Islands in the Ryukyus. While operating in the Ryukyus, the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was hit by a Kamikaze and would need to return to home port in California for repairs.United States naval vessels damaged:

1945

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ANTISEMITISM





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• Heavy cruiser Pensacola (CA-24), by collision, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 10 minutes North, 127 degrees 19 minutes East

• Light minelayer Adams (DM-27), by Japanese Kamikaze, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 12 minutes North, 127 degrees 8 minutes East

• Seaplane tender (small) Coos Bay (AVP-25), by collision, Central Pacific area, 12 degrees 7 minutes North, 156 degrees 27 minutes East

• Attack transport Hinsdale (APA-120), by Japanese Kamikaze, Okinawa area, 25 degrees 54 minutes North, 127 degrees 49 minutes East

• LST724 and LST884, by Japanese Kamikaze, Okinawa area, 25 degrees 59 minutes North, 127 degrees 50 minutes East

Japanese submarine sunk: Submarine I-8, by destroyers Morrison (DD-560) and Stockton (DD-646), Okinawa area, 25 degrees 29 minutes North, 128 degrees 35 minutes East

Germany submarine sunk sometime in March: U-348, U-350, U-1167, by Army aircraft, Hamburg, Germany

July 16, before dawn: Richard Harkey, a little boy, was waiting with his father for the train to arrive in Ancho, near Alamagordo, New Mexico, 200 kilometers south of Albuquerque, when he and his father heard a very, very loud blast. He tells us now that his father suspected that the steam locomotive on the train for which they were waiting had blown up, somewhere down the tracks. But they would find out that nothing ordinary was the reason for this particular very, very loud blast. The first atomic device, known as “The Gadget,” had just been detonated atop a tower at nearby Trinity test site, and a new world had just come into being.1

All life was ended within two kilometers of the gynormous explosion. The temperature at ground zero was three times hotter than the surface of the sun. The steel tower atop which the device had been placed was turned to gas. Windows were blown out at a distance of 320 kilometers. Light from the blast was apparent at a distance of 650 kilometers.

1. The Manhattan Project yielded three atomic bombs, each of which needed to be tested. The first of these bombs was a deviceknown as “Gadget,” and because the Plutonium239 bomb mechanism was more complicated and failure-prone, was a test model ofthat device. The next bomb, this time a device meant to be dropped from an aircraft, was know as “Little Boy” and was ourUranium238 model. It would be tested in warfare over the city of Hiroshima, which had purposefully been left untouched so thatthe bomb damage could be accurately assessed. The U238 bomb did not have a test model not only because it was a very simpledesign but also because Oak Ridge had not yet enriched enough U238 to create two devices. The third bomb was the Pt239 modelknow as “Fat Man” and was the same design as the “Gadget” but prepared to be dropped from an aircraft. It would be tested inwarfare over the city of Nagasaki, which had purposefully been left untouched so that the bomb damage could be accuratelyassessed and compared with the bomb damage resulting from our other design. We had to rush to get this one dropped before Japanhad a chance to surrender unconditionally, as we simply had to obtain some objective basis for determining which of the twoprograms, the U238 program or the Pt239 program, should be continued in the postwar world, and which discontinued.

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ATOM BOMB

Suicide bombing is not a new trick.





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A short while before, when General Leslie R. Groves had briefed President Harry S Truman, he had suggested that if the president now failed to detonate this device which had cost the nation $2 billion (like $26 billion in today’s money) it would “cast a lot of reflection on Mr. Roosevelt,” whose portrait was hanging on the wall.

“He went along for the ride like a little boy on a toboggan,” this fat-assed Atom General reported. Truman would soon be writing in his diary “It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Area, after Noah and his famous Ark.” However, this leader would not get everything he wanted, because he wanted to drop one of his two remaining A-bombs on Kyoto. If we dropped on an “intellectual center” such as Kyoto

rather than merely on industrial port cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he felt, the people down there on the ground, being more intelligent, would be “more apt to appreciate the significance” of what had happened to them. The question I would raise, and the reason why I have inserted this material in this database, is, what if General Groves had been attempting to sell this bomb to Henry David Thoreau? (Yeah, I do know that’s ridiculous.) Having, say, refreshed his recollections of WALDEN and “Life without Principle” the night before, what would Groves have felt it appropriate to say to Thoreau, more or less in the vein of his gesturing toward the image of FDR on the wall, the father figure Truman wanted so much not to disappoint? And how would Thoreau have then responded to him? Would the fat-assed Atom General have been able to come out of the cabin and stand in the sunlight by the pond and report to his colleagues “He went along for the ride like a little boy on a toboggan”?





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Or would our atomic era, encountered by one man of principle, have ended before it began, with the cork put firmly back in this bottle?

The poem “Locksley Hall” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, written in 1837-1838,2 describes the frustrated yearnings of a young man who has been denied a woman he desired. The poem contains a phrase

In 1910, a Missourian named Harry S Truman had considered that this constituted a legitimation for whatever viciousness he needed to perpetrate in life. A life agenda for a “show me” guy. For the result imagined in Tennyson’s poem is an earth finally at peace:

This poem somehow constituted for that young man from Missouri a dip into the future far as human eye could see, something he could hope for and fantasize about and scheme for, a vision of the world and all the wonder that would be. A poet had told him that out of the greatest evil, a final good could come. In 1945 President Truman pulled this creased slip of paper out of his billfold and showed it to a reporter, at a signal moment in his life.3 Truman was elated because he was sailing toward Potsdam for the end-of-war conference to decide the global configuration of politics, July 7-August 2, 1945, after having been briefed on a trump card for the negotiations, the Manhattan Project’s development of an ultimate indiscriminate weapon of war, a terror device that could be aimed –aimed only– at cities of workers, women, and children:

“The intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.”

— William Langewiesche, THE ATOMIC BAZAAR:THE RISE OF THE NUCLEAR POOR,NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007

2. NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 4th Edition, NY 1979, W.W. Norton & Company, II:1117-23. 3. Franklin, H. Bruce, 1989, “Fatal Fiction: A Weapon to End All Wars,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 45, Number 9(November 1989):18-25.

there rain’d a ghastly dewFrom the nations’ airy navies

the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furledIn the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

Yes, folks, we’re talking about a US president here: we’re talking about the mass murderer whose memory was so much honored by both of our presidential candidates in the 1992 election.

Truly, the peace we obtained after two generations of cold warriors, and now the aftermath, the ethnic cleansers, is a grave peace.





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Taking this creased slip of paper into consideration, the stories that are told about the American decision to drop the atom bomb are incredible. Taking this creased slip of paper into consideration, there is only one explanation that is plausible.

Carolyn Eisenberg of Hofstra University, who has had occasion to make careful study of the primary documents of the Truman presidency, including many transcripts of many White House meetings, comments that we should be most careful in condemning this very limited man because “What’s very striking about Truman is that very often he just doesn’t know what’s going on.... He just has no understanding of the policies being made in his name.” Taking that into consideration, what we have to ask ourselves in considering his role in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be, was this one of the occasions on which his staff pulled the wool over his eyes? Or, on the other hand, was this one of the occasions on which he was fully alert, and fully briefed, and directed and led others into the way of wickedness? —I would say that this creased slip of paper that he pulled out of his billfold to show to a reporter establishes, establishes definitively, that there is no excuse to be made for this limited man in this particular regard. For this viciousness he bears a full measure of responsibility.

US warships shelled Muroran on Hokkaido Island.

This day was the first day of the Potsdam Conference. Robinson Jeffers would write the following on the basis of President Truman’s conduct while sailing home from the Potsdam conference:

Moment of GloryThey have their moments, and if one loved them they ought to die in those moments:

but who could love them?Consider Churchill contemplating the ditch where his great enemy’sBody was burned in the roaring ruins of Berlin — and turning away, grinning,

making his cockneyVictory-gesture. Consider Hitler prancing stiff-legged over fallen France.

Consider little Truman,That innocent man sailing home from Potsdam – rejoicing, running about the ship,




The battle flag of the aircraft carrier Harry S Truman CVN75 was inspired by the delight we all knew he took in the doing of harm to others.


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telling all and sundryThat the awful power that feeds the life of the stars had been tricked downInto the common stews and shambles.

Contemptible people? Certainly.But how they enjoy their points of glory.4

Our poet was severely persecuted and censored for his attitude toward the Second World War and toward our leaders in it.

Robin Jeffers, our pre-eminent West Coast poet of place, in all his life never read Thoreau, our pre-eminent East Coast poet of place. He also never found out, prior to his death in 1962 in Carmel CA, that while the president he had so savagely criticized for his disgraceful conduct subsequent to the Potsdam conference had been sailing toward that conference, an incident quite as damning had already occurred.

It would be an interesting exercise, to attempt to construct, on the basis of some similar psychology of some similar individuals with whom Thoreau had to deal during the war against Mexico during his lifetime, what Henry David Thoreau would have had to say about all this WWII craziness.

J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves ordered that the gun and bullet components of the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, Little Boy, be loaded aboard the newly repaired heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35), and Charles Butler McVay III, its captain, received orders to steam at full speed to the island of Tinian where we were establishing a long, heavy airstrip, making “all possible haste.”5

4. THE DOUBLE AXE, page 137. Despite the fact that the war had been over for a couple-three years, this volume of poetry wouldbe heavily censored by Bennett Cerf and Saxe Commins of Random House, and even in its abbreviated condition, with ten poemsabsent, would be allowed to appear only with a publisher’s disclaimer message in regard to “the political views pronounced by thepoet.” In this poem, the publisher objected to “little Truman,” and Jeffers allowed them to alter it to “Harry Truman,” since it reallymattered to them, but pointed out to them that the President was “little” only in a historical sense — since in person in physicalactuality he was taller than Winston Churchill, and taller than Adolf Hitler. To the publisher’s objection that the poet was too easyon Hitler, the poet responded that the whole world was full of people cursing Hitler — but also the poet would agree that “Hitlerdeserves worse than he gets.”5. Initially, J. Robert Oppenheimer would attempt to justify his role in the Manhattan Project on the grounds that this new big bombmight be a deterrent to future warfare, ushering in Immanuel Kant’s era of perpetual peace (perchance he also believed in the toothfairy). Later on, after this pathetic ploy had been crushed by the weight of history, in 1962, he would attempt a rather more elaborateself-justification according to which he had been just another scientist: “It is a profound and necessary truth, that the deep things inscience are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

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July 21, Saturday: Beginning today and over the next three days, US soldiers search all buildings and people in their German occupation zone. 80,000 people were arrested, but many of those were released once they establish their identification.

United States naval vessel damaged: Attack transport Marathon (APA-200), by Japanese piloted suicide torpedo, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 13 minutes North, 127 degrees 50 minutes East

The USS Underhill (DD-682) was sunk by a Japanese submarine in the same area in which the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) would later be sunk. Because of the nature of a general directive from the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, it would not be possible to provide Captain Charles B. McVay III with this information, nor would he be informed that Japanese submarines I-58 and I-367 had been operating in the area.

July 26, Thursday: The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) arrived at Tinian and the gun and bullet components of the atomic bomb to be dropped over Hiroshima, Little Boy, were off-loaded. Captain Charles B. McVay III received orders to proceed to Guam and then Leyte for gunnery practice on August 2nd with the USS Idaho (BB-42). The message the Idaho received about the Indianapolis was garbled but no request was made for retransmission, so the officers of the Idaho were unaware of the Indianapolis being en route.

The governments of the United States, Great Britain and China demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan. “The alternative for Japan was complete and utter destruction.”

The results of the British general election were promulgated giving the Labour Party a majority in the House of Commons, up 227 seats from the last Parliament. Prime Minister Winston Churchill tendered his resignation. King George VI asked Clement Attlee to form a new government.

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The US War Production Board announced that a new insecticide, DDT, would soon be available to the public.

The ballet The Ivory Tower was performed for the initial time, in Oakland. The music was a chamber orchestration of Darius Milhaud’s La muse ménagère.

In the port of Cheribon in northern Java, on a day in late July, a Japanese submarine took on its deck 90 European civilian prisoners. The group included women and children. As dusk fell the submarine left port, traveling on the surface. Fearful, many of the women began to sob. After about an hour the submarine began to submerge and they were all swept into the shark-infested seas. There would be a survivor, who would be picked up by three Javanese fishermen minus an arm and a foot. He would, before he bled out, be able to inform these fishermen of what had happened. The fishermen, fearful that the Japanese would kill them, let his body slip back into the sea and for the time being held their tongues. (Soon they would be able to repeat this man’s story to the authorities but, as the Japanese destroyed all their naval files and records of ship movements at the end of the war, the identity of this submarine and its commander would not be ascertained.)

US President Harry S Truman issued the Potsdam Declaration that the Japanese surrender must be unconditional.

United States Destroyer Lowry (DD-770) was damaged by an explosion in the Philippine Sea, at 19 degrees 30 minutes North, 128 degrees 0 minute East.

July 28, Saturday: The Japanese government announced that they would be “ready to talk peace only when the whole of East Asia was freed from Anglo-American colonial exploitation….”

Prime Minister Clement Atlee arrived at Potsdam to took the place of Winston Churchill.

The United States ratified the Charter of the United Nations.

A fog-bound B-25 bomber crashed into the 78th and 79th floors of the Empire State Building in New York City. The crew of 3 aboard the plane and 10 in the building were killed, and 25 injured.

On the island of Guam, Captain Charles B. McVay III requested an escort –such escort vessels were always provided for heavy warships of the class of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35)– but in this case the request was

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TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

http://www.theonion.com/article/thousands-turn-out-for-empire-state-buildings-annu-20748





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denied. The ship had to make the trip from Guam to Leyte unescorted and without the ability to detect enemy subs — this was the 1st heavy warship to be exposed in such a manner in the entire course of the Second World War. The orders received gave the captain discretion as to whether or not to zigzag.

United States naval vessel damaged: Destroyer Prichett (DD-561), by Japanese Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 25 degrees 43 minutes North, 126 degrees 56 minutes East

United States naval vessel sunk: Destroyer Callaghan (DD-792), by Japanese Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 25 degrees 43 minutes North, 126 degrees 55 minutes East (the Callaghan would be the final Allied vessel to be sunk by a Kamikaze).

Aircraft from fast carrier task forces of the Third Fleet (Admiral W.F. Halsey) struck the Inland Sea area of Japan, between Nagoya and northern Kyushu, the principal target being Kure Naval Base. Japanese naval vessels sunk in the Inland Sea area of Japan:

• Aircraft carrier Amagi, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 11 minutes North, 132 degrees 30 minutes East

• Heavy cruiser Tone, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 14 minutes North, 132 degrees 27 minutes East

• Old heavy cruiser Izumo, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 14 minutes North, 132 degrees 30 minutes East

• Light cruiser Oyodo, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 13 minutes North, 132 degrees 25 minutes East

• Destroyer Nashi, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 14 minutes North, 132 degrees 30 minutes East

• Submarine I-372, by carrier-based aircraft, 33 degrees 0 minute North, 133 degrees 0 minutes East

July 30, Monday: This week’s edition of TIME Magazine reported that “In Minneapolis, 35 C.O.s (Conscientious Objectors) have been voluntarily starving for six months. Under the watchful eyes of four religious service committees (Brethren, Quaker, Mennonite and Unitarian), these ‘human guinea pigs’ of some ten denominations have lived in the South Tower of the University of Minnesota stadium, undergoing scientific experiments in semistarvation.”

US warships shelled Hamamatsu on Honshu Island.

Former Prime Minister Edouard Herriot testified against Henri Petain at his trial in Paris.

Aircraft from fast carrier task forces of the Third Fleet (Admiral W.F. Halsey) bombed airfields and industrial targets in central Honshu, Japan.

United States naval vessels sunk:

• Heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35), by submarine torpedo, Philippine Sea, 12 degrees 2 minutes North, 134 degrees 48 minutes East

• Submarine Bonefish (SS-223), Pacific Ocean area, reported as presumed lost

Japanese naval vessels sunk, Sea of Japan:





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• Destroyer Hatsushimo, by mine, 35 degrees 33 minutes North, 135 degrees 12 minutes East• Frigate Okinawa, by carrier-based aircraft, 35 degrees 30 minutes North, 135 degrees 21 minutes

East

July 31, Tuesday sunset: It was overcast and cloudy. Captain Charles B. McVay III went to the bridge to discuss the weather conditions. Due to the intelligence briefings provided to him prior to departure from Guam, he believed these waters to be free of Japanese submarines. The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was making 17 knots and because of the poor visibility Captain McVay gave instructions to cease zigzagging. He left orders that he was to be awakened if there was a change in the weather.

August 1, 0004 hours: Launched on March 30, 1930, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35) had served throughout the Pacific War. It had taken part in one of the war’s most secret missions, the delivery of components of the “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima. After this special delivery to the B29 Bomb Squadron on the island of Tinian, the Indianapolis had departed for Leyte to join up with the USS Idaho for gunnery practice before rejoining the rest of the US fleet off Okinawa for the expected invasion of Japan. Halfway between Leyte and Guam (12 degrees-2 minutes north by 134 degrees-48 minutes east) the vessel was struck by two of a fan of 6 torpedoes from Captain Hashimoto’s I-58. One torpedo tore off 60 feet of her bow and another hit amidships, igniting the powder magazine and shutting off most of the electrical power. Radio Technician 2nd Class Herbert J. Minor observed as Chief Radio Electrician L.T. Woods sent out an SOS with the position of the sinking ship on 500 kilocycles from Radio Room II, which had maintained power.

According to Minor, at least three such signals were transmitted before the cruiser rolled over and sank bow first. Former Yeoman 2nd Class Clair B. Young stated in a letter to Commander T E. Quillman, Jr. that “while stationed at U.S. Navy 3964 Naval Shore Facilities Tacloban, Philippine Islands, ... he personally delivered the SOS message to Commodore Jacob H. Jacobson, US Navy,” awakening him. The yeoman noted a strong odor

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of alcohol in the room while Commodore Jacobson read the message, which identified the ship, her location, and her condition. The yeoman asked the commodore “Do you have a reply, sir?” The answer he received was “No reply at this time. If any further messages are received, notify me at once.” Which is to say, the SOS had been received and communicated, but was ignored. Meanwhile, Commander Hashimoto of the I-58 sent a radio message to Japan that he has just sunk a battleship, and provided the location. This message was intercepted and decoded by the US Navy but still, no one though to check on the whereabouts of the Indianapolis.

883 died. 316 of the 1,199 crewmen became floaters. Most of these would not survive the long exposure and the shark attacks. Of the 39 Marines on board 30 died and 9 floated.6

The surviving floaters would be picked up 4 days later by US destroyers Cecil Doyle, Talbot, and Dufilho. After hospital treatment on Guam they would soon be on their way home on board the carrier USS Holandia. (The captain of the Indianapolis, Charles Butler McVay, was later court-martialled for failing to zig-zag in hostile waters. His sentence was remitted by the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, and he was restored to duty. He retired as a Rear Admiral in 1949 and in 1968, in Litchfield, Connecticut, committed suicide by putting a service pistol to his head. Our national trajectory might have been somewhat altered, had Captain Hashimoto been able to get at this cruiser on its outward journey!)

August 2, Thursday: The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was due to arrive in Leyte that morning. When it failed to arrive it was simply taken off the plotting board and no effort was made to determine what might have happened to it. Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King had left standing orders, that the arrivals of combatant ships in port were not to be reported to him — which was being taken, by his subordinates, to imply that he was likewise uninterested in non-arrivals.

A few miles west of Honshu is Sado, Japan’s 5th largest island. At the Aikawa Ore Mine there, the Japanese had their POW Camp109, holding miscellaneous British, Australians, Dutchmen, and Americans who had been sent there as slave labor. On this morning the camp commandant ordered that the 387 Allied POW slave laborers be herded to the deepest part of the mine, which was some 400 feet beneath the surface. Demolition charges had already been placed the previous night at depths of 200 and 300 feet. The guards hurriedly departed and at 9:10AM the charges were detonated. As soon as the dust and smoke had settled, they set about dismantling the narrow-gauge railway and packing the parts inside the entrance to the mine. They then set off a final detonation at the surface, causing an avalanche of rock and earth to obscure the entrance. During the next few days they would dismantle this entire camp complex and remove all signs of previous occupancy.

6. At a first order of approximation there seems to be a remarkable similarity between fighting at sea and feeding fish.

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(Lieutenant Yoshiro Tsuda would offered under interrogation, that he had merely been obeying his orders. He had himself had no misgivings whatsoever about this processing of such a large number of prisoners. As he pointed out, an Imperial Army Extermination Order had directed the swift extermination of all POWs should the islands of Japan be threatened by invasion.)

800 US bombers attacked Hachioji, Toyama, Nagaoka, and Mito with 6,632 tons of explosives.

At 7:15AM Pietro Mascagni died in his hotel apartment in Rome at the age of 81. He was attended by his wife and other family members although his son Edoardo was currently in prison for fascist activities. The French commanders, who used the hotel for their officers, ordered their flag outside lowered to half staff. As the news was broadcast on the radio a crowd began to form outside the hotel.

The Potsdam Conference that had begun on July 17th came to an end. The Allied powers agree on the future of Germany, reparations for the USSR, the borders of Poland, transfer of Germans living in other countries and freedom of the press in occupied Axis countries. Königsberg was transferred to the USSR. They condemned Spain for “close association with the aggressor states.”

August 3, Friday: Pierre Laval testified in Paris at the trial of Marshal Henri Petain.

In Paris, the French Consultative Assembly held its final meeting. This would be replaced in the autumn by an elected body.

When the public was admitted to the hotel in Rome where the body of Pietro Mascagni was lying in state, thousands streamed in.

In a Los Angeles drugstore, two German-speaking emigres, Arnold Schoenberg and Bertolt Brecht, met by chance.

Walter Brown, special assistant to President Harry S Truman’s Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, made an entry in his diary about events aboard the USS Augusta involving his boss, the President, and Admiral William D. Leaky: “Aboard Augusta/President, Leahy, J.F.B. agreed Japs looking for peace.”

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Well, first things first, they were looking for it but they weren’t going to get it — until we had first been able to test on them, for military effectiveness, both our new Uranium238 bomb and our new Plutonium239 bomb





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so we would know which one of the two was more worthy.





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Lieutenant Wilbur Gwinn, in a Ventura bomber, happened to notice the groups of survivors of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) and radioed Palau for rescue operations to commence. Lieutenant Adrian Marks landed his PBY in the heavy seas and managed to pick up 56 survivors. When Tom Brophy defied orders to leave his group and attempt to swim to the plane, he was not seen again.

United States naval vessels damaged:

• Destroyer escort Earl V. Johnson (DE-702), by explosion, Philippine Sea, 20 degrees 17 minutes North, 128 degrees 7 minutes East





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• Attack cargo ship Seminole (AKA-104), by collision, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 14 minutes North, 127 degrees 50 minutes East

August 4, Saturday: In Rome, 200,000 people viewed the funeral procession in memory of Pietro Mascagni. Though only a short distance, it took three hours to complete. The honor guard was provided by the French army. After a service in the Church of San Lorenzo the casket was placed in the Campo Verano cemetery.

Rescue operations for the crew of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) started in a 50-mile radius. Efforts over several days would save only about a quarter of her nearly 1200-man crew.

August 15, Wednesday: The US Navy released information about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35). The press began to ask questions, such as why this ship had been sunk without being missed. Eventually the father of Tom Brophy, who had drowned while attempting the swim to the PBY, went to Washington to meet with Captain Charles B. McVay III. According to Mr. D.J. Blum, the father was told to arrange the meeting for the following week because the officer had a prior commitment. When Brophy trailed the captain, he discovered that the “prior commitment” in question was a party. Furious, he contacted a Washington friend of his, President Harry S Truman, who got in touch with Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, the officer who appointed the members of the court, all of whom depended of course upon this Admiral for their promotions. A court-martial would be scheduled.

Nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh asked the US to declare Vietnam an American protectorate, similar to the Philippines. He would receive no reply.

WORLD WAR II

WORLD WAR II





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A Paris court found Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain guilty of intelligence with the enemy and sentenced him to death. His property was confiscated. Marshal Petain would be flown to Portalet Fort in the Pyrenees to there await the pleasure of President de Gaulle.

When Die Dreigroschenoper was performed in the Hebbel-Theater, Berlin, the music of Kurt Weill was heard in Germany for the first time in a dozen years.

The US government ended rationing on gasoline, fuel oil and oil stoves, canned fruits, and vegetables.For the first time the voice of Japanese Emperor Hirohito (recorded) was broadcast over the radio, in an announcement of the intention of his government to surrender. Among other things he asserted that it had been “far from Our thoughts either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement,” as if the entire affair had been some sort of lamentable miscommunication. The cabinet resigned.

In the Andaman Islands, a burial detail of Japanese troops went out to the island of Tarmugli where they had conducted the massacre on the previous day, to destroy all traces of this. Within twenty-four hours they would collect all 798 bodies and reduce them in funeral pyres to fragmented bones and ashes. This residue they then buried in deep pits they dug on the beach. (The presiding Japanese officer would be tried by a British Military Court and sentenced to two years imprisonment.) Following the Emperor’s radio broadcast, 16 captured B-29 crewmen on Kyushu Island were trucked to a wooded hill, led into the woods stripped of their clothing, and executed. Before the announcement of the end of hostilities was received by our forces, aircraft from fast carrier task force (Vice Admiral J.S. McCain) raided airfields in the Tokyo area and encountered heavy airborne opposition.

President Truman announced that Japan had unconditionally surrendered (actually, the surrender hadn’t been exactly unconditional as we had promised to allow them their emperor). Anyway, VJ Day was declared. In the course of the war 6,255 Minnesotans had been killed in uniform. In Minnesota, land of euphemism, it was being continuously asserted that what had happened was that our boys had “given their lives for their country.” The state legislature embraced an official state song, “Hail! Minnesota.” Naval task group (Commodore R. W. Simpson) was established to liberate, evacuate, and extend medical care to Allied prisoners of war in Japan. An agreement divided Korea into US and Soviet occupation zones along the 38th Parallel.7

On this day President Truman authorized a study of war events — when this study would be released more than a year later, it would baldly declare that what his generals and admirals had been insisting to him –that there was no military necessity to drop the atomic bombs– had been entirely accurate, and that his decision to drop the A-bombs and then pronounce that this had been out of military necessity could only have been either a mere cover story intended for domestic political purposes, believed not even by himself, or at best, if he truly himself at the time believed it, a tendentious and devastating error in judgment:

[C]ertainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probabilityprior to 1 November 1945 [the date on which the US had plannedto launch its major landing of US troops across the beaches ofthe Japanese home islands], Japan would have surrendered evenif the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had notentered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or

7. 38th Parallel. Hmm....





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contemplated.





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New research on Hiroshima, NagasakiTruman was a war criminal

by John Catalinotto

Why was Harry Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons againstHiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 60 years ago, like George Bush’sdecision to invade Iraq in 2003? They were both war crimes,of course. And they were both based on a Big Lie.In Bush’s case the lie was the now-discredited claim that theUS had to invade Iraq to stop the use of “weapons of massdestruction.” In Truman’s case, it was that the US had to dropA-bombs to force the Japanese to surrender — or this wouldrequire a land invasion that would cost hundreds of thousandsof US casualties.With the 60th anniversary of the bombings coming up, it is morethan likely that the big lie of 1945 will be repeated ad nauseamby politicians, corporate media and bought-off historians of USacademia. There are, however, two historians who are marshalingold and new arguments and facts to expose this lie.They are Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear StudiesInstitute at American University in Washington DC, and MarkSelden, from Cornell University in Ithaca NY. Kuznick and Seldenpresented their latest findings at a press conference July 21organized by Greenpeace in London. The Greenpeace site has avideo presentation by the two historians.Their findings support an argument made earlier: that the mainreason the US used nuclear weapons on Japan was to get a jumpstart on the war against the Soviet Union. Truman used the bombin 1945 so the US could threaten to use it against Korea, Vietnamand in many other battles. These new findings reveal that theUS officials making the decisions themselves knew and admittedtheir Big Lie was a lie.The two historians studied the diplomatic archives of the US,Japan and the USSR. They found that on August 3, 1945, threedays before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was“looking for peace.” All the U.S. senior generals and admirals,including General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthurand Admiral William Leahy, told him it was unnecessary to usethe A-bomb to defeat Japan. “Impressing Russia was moreimportant than ending the war,” Selden says.Kuznick and Selden also show that the Japanese authorities wereanxious to avoid a Soviet invasion of the Japanese main islands.The USSR officially entered the Pacific war on August 9, 1945,sweeping through Japanese-occupied China and half of Korea.At the press conference, Kuznick and Selden didn’t discuss indetail why the Japanese imperialists feared a Soviet occupationmore than one by the US, when the US posture was so hostile toJapan. The Japanese imperialists’ fear can only be explained bythe socialist underpinnings of the USSR, which threatened achange in property relations wherever the Red Army liberated





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territory. This happened, for example, in Eastern Europe andEast Germany.On August 15, 1945, Truman ordered a survey of the war events.Published over a year later, it stated: “Based on a detailedinvestigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimonyof the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’sopinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in allprobability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would havesurrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, evenif Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion hadbeen planned or contemplated.” November 1 was the date the UShad planned the invasion.

“A crime against humanity”In Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a splitsecond on August 6. Some 13 square kilometers of the city wereobliterated. By December, at least another 70,000 people haddied from radiation and injuries. Three days later, on August9, the US dropped an A-bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in the deathsof at least 70,000 people before the year was out. About 10percent of the casualties were Koreans forced to work in Japanat the time.Kuznick and Selden put most of the blame on Truman. “He knew hewas beginning the process of annihilation of the species,” saysKuznick, “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime againsthumanity.”A revealing comment regarding US war crimes came from JohnBolton, recently appointed US ambassador to the United Nations.Bolton was arguing in 1998 against the International CriminalCourt. “Much of the media attention to the American negotiatingposition on the ICC concentrated on the risks perceived by thePentagon to American peacekeepers stationed around the world,”wrote Bolton. ... “[O]ur real concern should be for thepresident and his top advisers.”Bolton continued: “The definition of ‘war crimes’ includes, forexample: ‘intentionally directing attacks against the civilianpopulation as such or against individual civilians not takingdirect part in hostilities.’”Bolton wrote that under the ICC rules, US leaders could havebeen found guilty of a war crime for dropping atomic bombs onHiroshima and Nagasaki, and for all the aerial bombardments ofGerman and Japanese civilian areas.The A-bombs were not the only crimes. US nighttime raids usingconventional bombs against residential areas of Tokyo, Osaka andother industrial cities caused hundreds of thousands of Japanesecivilian deaths, and Dresden, Germany, was obliterated in early1945, killing mainly refugees. But Truman’s decision opened thedoor to massive use of these new terror bombs.Now the Bush administration, fresh from being caught in a seriesof lies justifying aggression against Iraq, plans to increasethe Pentagon’s reliance on a new generation of nuclear weapons.On the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, it is past time to organize





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to prevent the new crimes US imperialism has in its plans.

This article is copyright under a CreativeCommons License. Workers World, 55 W. 17 St. NY 10011

August 19, Sunday: A Japanese delegation in Manila was informed of the terms of their surrender as dictated by General Douglas MacArthur.

Near Hankow in northeast China, a civilian group of Chinese managed to capture 26 Japanese soldiers. They beheaded the initial 4, then tied 4 to posts and shot them in the back of the head, then broke and crudely amputated the arms and legs of the next 4, and cut off the hands and feet of 4 and stuffed their genitals into their mouths.

Then with the remaining 10, they gouged their eyes and used them for bayonet practice. (Were these dudes trying to prove that Chinese can be as inventive as Japanese?)

The war being over, the American newspapers revealed that there had been in January 1945, while John R. Kellam was in the Toledo jail awaiting his big day in court, a possibility that Japan might surrender before the A-bomb, a possibility upon which then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had simply refused to follow up. The following appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington DC Times Herald, on page 1:

BARE PEACE BIDU.S. REBUFFED7 MONTHS AGO-------------------------------------------------BY WALTER TROHANChicago Tribune Press ServiceWashington, D.C. Aug. 19 - [1945]

WORLD WAR II

HEADCHOPPING

WORLD WAR II





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Release of censorship restrictions in the United States makesit possible to announce that Japan’s first peace bid was relayedto the White House seven months ago.Two days before the late President Roosevelt left for the Yaltaconference with Prime Minister Churchill and Dictator Stalin,he received a Japanese offer identical with the termssubsequently concluded by his successor, President Truman.The Jap offer, based on five separate peace overtures wasrelayed to the White House by Gen. MacArthur in a 40-pagecommunication. The American commander, who had just returnedtriumphantly to Bataan, urged negotiations on the basis of theJap overtures.

All Acting for the Emperor

Two of the five Jap overtures were made thru American channelsand three thru British channels. All came from responsibleJapanese, acting for Emperor Hirohito.President Roosevelt dismissed the general’s communication,which was studded with solemn references to Deity, after acasual reading with the remark, “MacArthur is our greatestgeneral and our poorest politician.”The MacArthur report was not taken to Yalta. It was preservedin the files of the high command, however, and subsequentlybecame the basis of the Truman-Attlee Potsdam declarationcalling for surrender of Japan.

News Kept Secret

This Jap peace bid was known to THE TRIBUNE soon after theMacArthur communication reached here. It was not published,however, because of THE TRIBUNE’S established policy of completecooperation with the voluntary censorship code.Now that peace has been concluded on the basis of the termsMacArthur reported, high administration officials prepared tomeet expected congressional demands for explanation of thedelay. It was considered certain that charges would be hurledfrom various quarters of congress that the delay cost thousandsof American lives and casualties, particularly in such costlyoffensives as Iwo Jima and Okinawa.It was explained in high official circles that the bid relayedby MacArthur did not constitute an official offer in the samesense as the final offer, which was presented thru Japanesediplomatic channels in Bern and Stockholm for relay to the fourmajor allied powers.

War Lords Feared

No negotiations were begun on the basis of this bid, it was said,because it was feared that if any were undertaken the Jap warlords, who were presumed to be ignorant of the feelers, wouldvisit swift punishment on those making the offer.It was held possible that the war lords might assassinate the





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emperor. Officials said Mr. Roosevelt felt that the Japs werenot ripe for peace, except for a small group, who were powerlessto cope with the war lords, and that peace could not come untilthe Japs had suffered more.The offer, as relayed by MacArthur, contemplated surrender ofeverything but the person of the emperor. Japanese quartersmaking the offer suggested that the emperor become a puppet inthe hands of American forces.

Full Surrender Offered

Jap proposals in the MacArthur communication contemplated:1. Full surrender of Jap forces on sea, in the air, at home,on island possessions, and in occupied countries.2. Surrender of all arms and munitions.3. Occupation of the Jap homeland and island possessions byallied troops under American direction.4. Jap relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea and Formosa, as wellas all territory seized during the war.5. Regulation of Jap industry to halt present and futureproduction of implements of war.6. Turning over of Japanese the United States might designatewar criminals.7. Release of all prisoners of war and internees in Japan properand in areas under Japanese control.

In fact the idea that the Japanese would never surrender had been little more than an American wartime myth, and rather than being a piece of useful realism had constituted the primary obstacle to negotiation toward a Japanese surrender. How do we know this? Well, we can trust the attitude of the Sinologist George Edward Taylor of the University of Washington on this one, because he was a cold warrior on the inside and anything but a bleeding-heart liberal — he would become a Nixonian reactionary and support the Vietnam War on the campus of the University of Washington. Questioning the wisdom of using atomic weapons against Japanese civilians to end the war in the Pacific, it appears, had not been a position reserved for the softhearted: before the dropping of the atom bombs there had been embedded conservative members of the military-intelligence community, international men of intrigue, hawks, who had viewed this as an unnecessary atrocity. During WWII Taylor worked with Rand Corporation, with the Department of State, and with other articulations of the revolving door of American intelligence institutions private and public. As the Deputy Director for the Far East of the Office of War Information, he supervised a small army of anthropologists who were, basically, weaponizing anthropology against the Japanese. It was Taylor’s team that crafted the leaflets dropped from airplanes on Japanese soldiers and civilians. His team of government anthropologists had access to 5,000 diaries seized from captured and killed Japanese soldiers and studied such documents carefully for clues as to Japanese behavior tendencies. At the beginning of the war Taylor had viewed his psychological warfare programs as a means of ending the war by helping the Japanese overcome all the cultural obstacles preventing their surrender, but as the war progressed and it became abundantly clear that the American side would triumph he began to see his job as being one that needed to be done at home: he needed to convince US civilian and military leaders that they did not in order to end the war need to engage in any acts of genocidal annihilation. He came to perceive the War Department and the White House as in the grip of racist stereotypes of maniacal Japanese soldiers and citizens fighting to the death, and he and his staff began to struggle against this domestic attitude as a prime obstacle to peace. In the typescript of a speech that he probably delivered in 1944, we find





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him arguing that “If we accept, as we must, the view that Japanese soldiers, in spite of their indoctrination, are as human as other troops, we shall be the less surprised at the mounting evidence of their very human reactions to defeat. We are taking more and more prisoners. Two years ago it would have been very unusual for 60 men to allow themselves to be picked up out of the water when their transport had been sunk. In New Guinea and Burma stragglers are coming in out of the jungles to surrender without a struggle. We have known for a long time that many Japanese officers have been evacuated from indefensible positions and that their reaction on places such as Attu, where escape was impossible, was not to fight to the last man.” Such thinking would be ignored by the War Department and White House. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted on including the demise of the Japanese Emperor as part of America’s demand for unconditional surrender, and it was not until after this man had collapsed and died that the government was able to communicate a more relaxed position on this point to the Japanese. A May 11, 1945 communication intercept being studied inside the US government had supported the attitude of Taylor and others at the Office of War Information that the Japanese military were ripe for surrender: “Report of peace sentiment in Japanese armed forces: On 5 May the German Naval Attaché in Tokyo dispatched the following message to Admiral Doenitz: ‘An influential member of the Admiralty Staff has given me to understand that, since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable.’” To this communication intercept, someone in US military intelligence had appended the following: “Previously noted diplomatic reports have commented on signs of war weariness in official Japanese Navy circles, but have not mentioned such an attitude in Army quarters.” A July 20, 1945 communication intercept had revealed that Japanese Ambassador Sato was advocating a Japanese surrender providing that the United States would assure the Japanese that the “Imperial House” would remain in existence. Like many others, regardless of how hawkish they were, Taylor would come to consider that what President Harry S Truman’s decision to use of nuclear weapons probably had to do with was “scaring the hell out of the Soviet Union,” and that the idea of saving American lives during an invasion of the Japanese homeland islands was a mere cover story that of course the American public would readily buy into in order to avoid the thought that we had committed a war atrocity.

December 3, Monday: The Arab League voted in Cairo to boycott all goods from Jewish Palestine.

The Catholic hierarchy in Buenos Aires directed the faithful that they were not to vote for communists, socialists, or their allies.

Court-martial of Captain Charles B. McVay III began on charges of “failure to follow a zigzag course” before the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was struck by torpedoes, and “failure to sound an abandon ship” while she sank. The had captain requested as his defense counsel Lieutenant-Commander Donald Van Koughnet, Chief Legal Officer of the U.S. Navy Military Government for the Marianas Islands, but Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King rejected that request.

ANTISEMITISM

WORLD WAR II





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December 13, Thursday: In retaliation for the murder of occupants of a British plane that had crash-landed three weeks earlier, British troops burned the nearest town, Bekasi, to the ground.

40 members of the staff of Dachau concentration camp were found guilty of crimes against humanity. 36 would be sentenced to death, 4 to long prison terms. 11 convicted of crimes at Belsen and Auschwitz were to hang.

The British Parliament accepted the terms of a $3,700,000,000 loan from the United States. The terms included convertibility from Sterling to US dollars.

An instance of the old lawyer wisdom, that “if you don’t know the answer don’t ask the question,” occurred because Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King had flown in the commander of the Japanese I-58 submarine, Captain Mochitsura Hashimoto, under guard, to testify against Captain Charles B. McVay III. On the witness stand the submarine commander asserted, in translation, that he would have been able to sink the unescorted USS Indianapolis (CA-35) no matter how it had maneuvered — had the initial 6-torpedo spread somehow missed its target other weaponry had been available. This vessel that the Navy had sent out without any escort or protection had been what is known technically in the trade as a sitting duck.

December 19, Wednesday: Thunderbolt P-47 for orchestra by Bohuslav Martinu was performed for the initial time, in Washington DC.

The inconvenient testimony of Japanese I-58 submarine Captain Mochitsura Hashimoto was ignored and Captain Charles B. McVay III was found guilty of having hazarded his sitting-duck ship. Of more than 700 vessels lost during WWII, the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) would be the sole one on which its skipper would face court-martial. The sentence (loss of 100 promotion numbers) would later be remitted but this conviction would stand.8

8. The question why the men of the USS Indianapolis spent five nights and four days in the water without anyone noticing that the ship was missing was not considered in the trial. Since 1991, several Navy documents have been declassified which show that Captain Charles B. McVay III had not been provided with intelligence that could have prevented this disaster. This could have been useful to the defense, but was still Top Secret even when the war was over.

WORLD WAR II

WORLD WAR II





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November 6, Thursday: Former Captain Charles Butler McVay III of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) committed suicide with his Navy issue .38-caliber revolver.

If we give you a pistol, will you fight for the Lord?But you can’t kill the devil with a gun or a sword!

1969

WORLD WAR II

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz5LgEIg61U





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The VCR came into production — at long last home movies! Steven Spielberg’s Jaws depicted the shark-obsessed Quint (played by Robert Shaw) as a survivor of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during WWII, helping summer residents along the Atlantic coast of Cape Cod cope with their dread of ocean lurkers (this was a plot innovation not present in Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel JAWS). Thoreau had written amusingly about

1975





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this dread of the Atlantic-side sharks generations earlier, in CAPE COD:

CAPE COD: Sometimes we helped a wrecker turn over a larger logthan usual, or we amused ourselves with rolling stones down thebank, but we rarely could make one reach the water, the beach wasso soft and wide; or we bathed in some shallow within a bar, wherethe sea covered us with sand at every flux, though it was quitecold and windy. The ocean there is commonly but a tantalizingprospect in hot weather, for with all that water before you, thereis, as we were afterward told, no bathing on the Atlantic side,on account of the undertow and the rumor of sharks. At the light-house both in Eastham and Truro, the only houses quite on theshore, they declared, the next year, that they would not bathethere “for any sum,” for they sometimes saw the sharks tossed upand quiver for a moment on the sand. Others laughed at thesestories, but perhaps they could afford to because they neverbathed anywhere. One old wrecker told us that he killed a regularman-eating shark fourteen feet long, and hauled him out with hisoxen, where we had bathed; and another, that his father caught asmaller one of the same kind that was stranded there, by standinghim up on his snout so that the waves could not take him. Theywill tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which Ido not presume to doubt utterly, — how they will sometimes upseta boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easilybelieve in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in adozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach ahundred miles long. I should add, however, that in July we walkedon the bank here a quarter of a mile parallel with a fish aboutsix feet in length, possibly a shark, which was prowling slowlyalong within two rods of the shore. It was of a pale brown color,singularly film-like and indistinct in the water, as if all natureabetted this child of ocean, and showed many darker transversebars or rings whenever it came to the surface. It is well knownthat different fishes even of the same species are colored by thewater they inhabit. We saw it go into a little cove or bathing-tub, where we had just been bathing, where the water was only fouror five feet deep at that time, and after exploring it go slowlyout again; but we continued to bathe there, only observing firstfrom the bank if the cove was preoccupied. We thought that thewater was fuller of life, more aerated perhaps than that of theBay, like soda-water, for we were as particular as young salmon,and the expectation of encountering a shark did not subtractanything from its life-giving qualities.





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Relics of King Tut’s tomb toured the United States.

John B. Ferzacca dramatized the events of the WWII court-martial of Captain Charles Butler McVay III of the USS Indianapolis, in a play “The Failure to ZigZag” (an interesting alternate title for this play would have been “Jaws,” with the members of the court-martial panel cast as the remorseless giant shark).

1978





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August 10, Friday: Captain Russell E. Sullivan wrote to Senator Richard Lugar (Republican-Indiana), stated that in 1945 he had been on board troop carrier AP-134, which had traveled the same course as the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) after it had been torpedoed by the Japanese submarine and had actually cruised through its debris field of bodies and flotsam. Captain Sullivan provided the following information to exonerate Captain Charles B. McVay III of the unlucky Indianapolis of responsibility for not having been zigzagging: “We had not received orders to zigzag. We had 4,000 troops on board. We had not been notified that an enemy submarine was in the area. The foregoing can be confirmed by referring to the official log of the USS General R.L. Howze for August of 1945.”

1990

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The Japanese “bubble economy” burst due to a sudden and complete failure of trust in the credibility of old-boy accounting and the transparency of insider dealings. Stock prices would decline for a full decade, quite erasing trillions of dollars of wealth. (It’s this sort of thing that can’t happen in the United States of America, where we do insist upon credibility in arms-length accounting and transparency in financial dealings.)

A made-for-TV movie starring Stacy Keach, “Mission of the Shark,” depicted the ordeal of the men of the USS Indianapolis abandoned in the shark-infested waters off Okinawa toward the end of WWII after their unprotected sitting-duck ship had been (but of course) targeted by a submarine with a “fan” of five torpedoes and sank in 12 minutes.

Friend Floyd Schmoe created a tiny Peace Park at the north end of Seattle WA’s University Bridge overlooking Lake Union, in commemoration of those who had died in our bombing of Hiroshima. The Quaker, age 95, had

1991





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not only applied for permits, raised funds, and organized volunteers, but himself had accomplished much of the bulldozing, raking of gravel, planting of trees, and grass mowing. The park contained a statue of a girl who had been killed by leukemia 12 years after we dropped our World War II atomic bombs on Japan. The bronze figure of Sadako Sasaki held aloft a crane origami.

THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY





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Schoolchildren would often hang colorful paper cranes on this statue.

The Friends School began in the rented First Day School building of the monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends near Princeton, New Jersey was permitted to begin to make use of the Schoolmaster’s House on the Quaker Stony Brook property. At some point, also, the local meeting granted permission for the





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school to erect a new building on the property. The trustees of the monthly meeting granted $50,000 to the school as seed funding for a capital campaign.





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February 10, Tuesday: Dr. Lewis Haynes, who had been the chief medical officer aboard the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) when it had been sunk by torpedoes by an enemy submarine, stated that, as he was treating Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz later at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, the admiral had commented to him that Captain Charles B. McVay III “should not have been court-martialed” for his conduct in having lost his vessel in such a tragic manner.

1998

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July: The Navy Department announced that the service record of deceased Captain Charles B. McVay III has been amended to exonerate him for the loss of his ship the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) and the lives of those who perished as a result of her sinking by torpedoes from a Japanese submarine in wartime. This was done by Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England at the request of New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith after the dishonored man committed suicide with his service revolver. (Neither such a correction in a personnel folder, nor even a Presidential pardon, however, could conceivably expunge a conviction by court-martial from an officer’s record — and the other survivors of this disaster are still seeking a presidential order that would expunge their skipper’s conviction itself from the official record.)

Strangely, although Friend John R. Kellam has been acknowledged as a legitimate conscientious objector (CO) and adherent of the Quaker Peace Testimony, not only in E. Raymond Wilson’s UPHILL FOR PEACE but also in Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith’s SINCE YOU WENT AWAY: WORLD WAR II LETTERS FROM AMERICAN WOMEN ON THE HOME FRONT, to date there has been no similar effort to obtain an exoneration for him from the US federal government or to compensate him for his experiences as a WWII prisoner of conscience!

Go figure.

In 1972 the US and 143 other nations had ratified a Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the world’s first treaty to ban an entire class of weapons. The treaty had banned possession of deadly biological agents except for defensive research. With no mechanism for its enforcement and no program for its verification, the treaty had proven to be a toothless tiger. Signing the treaty had merely provided some propaganda cover for the Soviet Union — which just at that point, we now know from the testimony of defectors, had been radically expanding its program of offensive biowarfare.

At this point, our representatives stood up and walked out of a London conference, since a 1994 protocol designed to strengthen the Convention by providing for on-site inspections was to be discussed — and we were opposed to any such strengthening!A United Nations Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms was drafted, and was approved by everyone except the United States of America.

An international plan was created for cleaner energy. All the other industrialized nations –Canada, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom– signed up. The United States of America refused.

2001

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THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY





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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <[email protected]>.

Prepared: June 9, 2015

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

mailto:[email protected]

Well, tomorrow is such and such a date and so it began on that date in like 8000BC? Why 8000BC, because it was the beginning of the current interglacial -- or what?

Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.





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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.





HDT WHAT? INDEX


Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <[email protected]>. Arrgh.

mailto:[email protected]




Indianapolis - Kouroo Contexture

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