Beyond that, I still believe the plane was an amazing technological achievement and as to why Americans did not recognize it as such at the time…well, it seems that a lot of the military was shocked that the Japanese could produce anything that was better than us. (A shock that was duplicated by the Vietnamese and several others in the years that followed.)

I remain in awe of Mr. Baker’s research on this book Ed, although my own conflicts with how he presents his information continue to prevent me from loving it.

Sorry about my screw-up…next time I will spend more time proof reading before I hit “send”.

“But I’ll just say one thing: if mental resistance has no effect in a dictatorship, how then did Cardinal Clemens von Galen convince Hitler to halt the T-4 program? Hypnosis?”

The story of Galen stopping the T-4 program is largely mythological. The program had already killed over 80 thousand people by the time Hitler ordered that particular way of murdering people stopped. Galen’s very courageous protest played only a role among many other factors. Including the fact that T-4 had killed the number of people it was originally slated to kill.

Certain killing programs associated with T-4 continued and T-4 itself was replaced with so called “wild ethunasia” which killed over 100 thousand people. I note that the Nazi seemed to have had little trouble murdering and slaughtering through out Europe despite mental resistance. Certainly Mental resistance didn’t seem to help vast number of Jews and Gypsies to say nothing of Poles, Russians etc.

The story of Galen’s successful ending of the program is a pious myth

As I said above, Miss Mondor’s assertion that the Corsair was designed around the Zero is absolutey untrue. Design work for the Chance Vought F4U Corsair began in 1938 and the first flight took place on May 29, 1940–over a year before the US armed forces even knew about A6M’s existence and over two years before the US captured the first intact Zero in Alaska. It was the Grumman F6F Hellcat fighter that had some aspects of its flight envelope designed around the captured Zero and not the Corsair.

As for Baker’s work “Human Smoke”, speaking as a World War II historian, it is a very poor effort; the work should not be taken seriously by students or scholars wishing to understand the origins or the consequences of the Second World War. He really should stick to novel writing.

Anthony J. Mireles
Author
FATAL ARMY AIR FORCES AVIATION ACCIDENTS
IN THE UNITED STATES 1941-1945

All the contributors brought something of interest (and avoided the group-think, opinion-chunk recycling that drives me up the wall).

I once pissed Ed off (for a nanosecond, I’m assuming) by sniping at that home-porno piece of a few months back, but, yeah: this is more like it, man. (I just know you’ll tell me to f-off, anyway, because you embrace the high and the low in equal measure and all that…)

Baker’s intervention at the end just added a horse’s-mouth element that deepened the counterpoint and rendered this an ideal example of a very good thing that could *only* have been done online. Not even the Paris Review, or Granta, or the Saturday Review (laugh), in their heydays, could’ve done exactly this.

I’m generally frugal with praise (as it’s too often mere online social butt-grease) but here’s a bucketful of it.

Bravo to Mr. Champion for undertaking this project!

But I’ll just say one thing: if mental resistance has no effect in a dictatorship, how then did Cardinal Clemens von Galen convince Hitler to halt the T-4 program? Hypnosis?

The moderate factions (the army) were put completely in disarray by the victories of 39-40. Any ceasefire would have strengthened Hitler’s hand, as it would expressly be on favourable terms, and a sign of Allied weakness.

Also, I can’t help suspecting that the stepped-up British bombing campaign of 1940 and 1941–”Keep the Germans out of bed, and keep the sirens blowing,” as Lord Trenchard put it–was a gift outright to Hitler’s government, in that it helped a rage-prone, mentally ill, murderous fanatic hold on to power through five years of hell. (That’s why I quoted Shlomo Aronson, who said that the bombing offensive united Germany behind Hitler and helped him “justify further Nazi atrocities against the remaining Jews.”)

Baker’s use of the Trenchard quote here is pretty telling. The Allied bomber raids of 40-41 were highly ineffective, the motivation may have been to keep the air raid sirens on but the reality was somewhat less impressive: navigation and pathfinding were so primitive that simple camouflage efforts were able to mislead entire raids into bombing empty fields and fake cities. They were an embarrassment to the German government, but it’s tendentious to assert that in they had any role in Hitler’s decision to prolong the war – he’d just secured all of Western Europe, and was expecting an Allied surrender so he could get on with the long-term strategy outlined in his unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, ‘the Second Book’: securing the resources and territories of Russia and Eastern Europe in anticipation of the eventual climactic showdown with the United States, headquarters of World Jewry.

While the Allied and US embargo on Jewish refugees was utter despicable, Baker doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that they were in German hands regardless, and the decisions to use Allied attacks to heighten their persecution were the Nazis and the Nazis alone. To say otherwise is to fall into the Bosnian Sniper fallacy and switch the responsibility from the person holding the gun and say ‘look what you made me do’.

“We now know that those who wanted to oppose the Hitler regime with nightly fleets of four-engine bombers were on the wrong track–the result was a very long war in which six million Jews died and the ancient cities of Europe were laid waste. The military option was tried and it worked out mind-bogglingly badly. Is it so naive to think that in 1939 and 1940 negotiation and ceasefire–a physical but not a mental capitulation to
Hitler’s invading armies–might have saved an enormous number of lives?”

Again, this is selective. Sections of the strategic bombing campaign were brutally indiscriminate, and in the case of Harris and LeMay’s emphasis on mass ‘de-housing’ a war crime unpunished. It’s easy to pick out areas where the Allies were ineffective and brutal, but facile unless it’s tempered with an understanding of the positions and knowledge with which they operated, and the nature of the opponent they were facing – an opponent who had resorted to terror-bombing bombing of civilian centres within the first weeks of the war, who prior to the war had shown a remarkable ability to renege on treaties at a moment’s notice and whose diplomacy was charactered by bellicosity, bluster, and deliberate attempts to force conflict and crisis through the manufacture of ‘incidents’ – most famously at Gleiwitz (an actual flase-flag attack).

As for the counterfactual scenario: Jesus, mate – AB-Aktion. Unternehmen Tannenberg. Hans Frank. General Government of Poland. Google them, they didn’t get a lot of paragraph inches in the NY Times Evening Editions. Einsatzgruppen slaughter of Polish intellectuals, Jews, and any other enemies of the Reich began on day one of the campaign, entirely premeditated without any possible provocation.

This is a government that when drawing up plans for the administation of its territories in the East explicitly stated that all available grain would be confiscated save a bare minimum to enure a rural population survived for next years harvest. That would have entailed the forced starvation of the entire urban population of the Ukraine and Eastern Russia, had the Nazis triumped in Operation Barbarossa. Thirty million people. I don’t know what use mental resistance is when you’re sealed up in a frozen city with no food.