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To: kearnyirish2
Hey kearny! Not bad at all down here on The Jersey Shore. Was more bluster than anything else. How about you? Yes WW2 in the Pacific was certainly the most wide ranging. Considering the Pacific Ocean covers some 12 million square miles. No other country's navy could do the job and rose to the challenge as did ours. The Japanese never fully developed a convoy system that could adequately supply their forces and the reality and the Japanese code of the warrior meant for those troops on those islands that theirs was a one way trip. They were basically there to die for the Emperor. Some of them didn't give up for years after the war ended.
20 posted on 03/08/2018 7:09:48 AM PST by jmacusa ("Made it Ma, top of the world!'')
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To: jmacusa

Only 5-6 inches in town; much more (18”+) just a few miles west.

You realize how large the Pacific is when you can turn a globe in such a way that almost one half is the Pacific Ocean. Supply was the Achilles’ Heel of the Japanese; many of the troops they landed in Alaska killed themselves before the Americans arrived to remove them because they realized they had no way out. I read an account of the last guy they brought in from the Philippines (around 1974), and it was so depressing. He was with another one or two guys, and they’d stolen a radio. They heard that Japan was hosting the Olympics, so they figured the war was going well; they’d hear about the war in Vietnam, and thought we were dealing with the same Viet-Minh that resisted Japanese occupation. Filipino villagers would shoot at them because they’d steal food and set fire to haystacks at night; when asked about setting the fires he said they were signaling Japan they were ready to help with the re-conquest of the Philippines. Eventually the others were killed, and Americans had to bring his former sergeant there to lure him our of the jungle. His uniform was in tatters but his rifle was kept in great shape. I believe he joined a small colony of similar people who couldn’t adjust to modern Japan; they went to live in the jungle in Brazil, IIRC. While feted as a hero, he saw nothing heroic about what he’d done; he had simply done his duty.

I recently watched “1898, Our Last Men in the Philippines” (based on a true story) about an isolated Spanish garrison that holds on for almost a year in a remote part of the Philippines because they don’t believe the restive peasants when they say that Spain has lost the Philippines to the US in the Spanish-American War. The officer shoots a couple of guys for deserting before realizing the truth; very sad.


24 posted on 03/09/2018 2:48:12 AM PST by kearnyirish2 (Affirmative action is economic warfare against white males (and therefore white families).)
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