An old Alaska boy myself (and a journalist who has written about World War II in the Aleutians), I thoroughly enjoyed the treatment given to the subject by my homeboy colleague Scott Banks (“Empire of the Winds,” April/May 2003). But I must take exception to his saying that “it was the war’s only campaign fought on American soil.” I was told the same thing back during the 1980s; it’s a myth perpetuated by those in Alaska who don’t understand the status of Hawaii and Guam in the 1940s (they were very much American soil). While Hawaii was never occupied, it certainly saw a good deal of fighting on December 7, 1941, and and Guam certainly qualified on all scores. The real claims to fame go something like this: Guam was the only American soil with a substantial civilian population that was occupied by the Japanese during World War II; the Aleutians were the only North American soil occupied by them.
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January 2011
In his column about fighting for the other side (“In the News,” June/July 2002), Kevin Baker’s use of a term like right-wing pundit seems to justify Ann Coulter’s charge, in her bestseller Slander , that such statements are not intended to be informative but to make their targets hurt. I’d be interested to know how many times Kevin Baker has used the term left-wing pundit in previous writings.
25 Years Ago
June 6, 1978 California voters approve Proposition 13 imposing strict limits on property taxes.
June 28, 1978 In Bakke v. Regents of the University of California , the U.S. Supreme Court rules that inflexible racial quotas are illegal in university admissions.
50 Years Ago
June 18, 1953 A U.S. Air Force plane crashes near Tokyo, killing 129 people, the world’s worst air disaster up to this point.
June 19, 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple who gave nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, are executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York State.
July 27, 1953 North Korean and United Nations officials sign a truce that ends the Korean War.
100 Years Ago
On June 18, 1778, the last of 10,000 British troops led by General Henry Clinton left Philadelphia and began marching toward New York City. The withdrawal was one of the first fruits of the colonists’ alliance with France, as Clinton had feared a blockade by the French Navy. On hearing of the departure, George Washington broke camp at Valley Forge and distributed his Continental Army and the local militia around southern New Jersey. On June 24, he sent a force to Monmouth to confront the British there. Leading this detachment was the Marquis de Lafayette.
Americans like their “first dogs.” Barney, Spot, Buddy, Millie, King Timahoe, and Fala all have been celebrities. So you can imagine my pleasure when I discovered the story of a hitherto unknown canine that supplied comfort and diversion to an earlier President. I found him among old letters saved by Margaret Lynch Suckley, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s distant cousin (it was she who gave him Fala). While rummaging through trunks of documents in the attic of Wilderstein, Miss Suckley’s ancestral home in Rhinebeck, New York, looking for material on which to base a family history, I came upon the tale of a stray dog that made the household of President Abraham Lincoln his own.
I have just completed reading the most interesting article, “Where Berlin and America Meet,” by Fredric Smoler (April/May 2003). When my husband and I were in Berlin the summer before last, we tried to follow the path of the Wall as best we could, and I must question Mr. Smoler’s comment that “only a short stretch of the Wall remains. It’s the Berlin Wall Memorial, at the corner of Bernauerstrasse and Ackerstrasse.” My husband and I visited this section of the Wall with the “Topography of Terror” exhibit nearby, but we also found two other sections remaining near Potsdamer Platz in the middle of a construction site. Actually, I believe the picture shown on page 59 bearing the caption “The Wall as art gallery” is of a section called the East-Side-Gallery. Something may have changed in the two years since we were there, but I hope not. We’re planning a return visit in October, and we’ll be checking. We spent only three days before, and it just wasn’t enough time.
Peter Quinn’s “Race Cleansing in America” (February/March 2003) stopped short of disclosing the full extent to which Nazi Germany adopted the eugenicists’ goal to “emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.” Following the end of World War II, my unit, the 24th AAA Group HQ, was transferred to Loebendorf, Germany. We were told that our military government included a baby factory. The infants were housed in a lovely home on a lake, in the care of midwives and nurses. Farther up the lake was an imposing villa that was the rest and recreation facility for selected SS sperm donors. The young mothers stayed in a privately operated lodge farther down the lake. Romance and procreation, Nazi style. Not far from this baby factory was a death factory, Dachau.
In the enlightening interview “The Shah Always Falls” (February/March 2003), Ralph Peters, when asked about the prohibition of assassination, said it is a loaded word, and also said that we don’t have a better one. However, in my 1935 edition of Webster ’s Twentieth Century Dictionary , I happened upon a word that has fallen out of usage and which could be revived: “tyrannicide, n. (L. tyrannus, tyrant, and caedere, to slay) 1. The act of killing a tyrant. 2. One who kills a tyrant.”