Bainbridge and the Pirates

I suppose it's too much to expect the media to pick up on the connection between the USS Bainbridge and the history of the US vis a vis Africa-based pirates. Here's the story:

Commodore William Bainbridge (after whom the ship is named) was born in 1774 and went into the US Navy (such as it was) in 1798. In those days the main overseas irritation the US suffered, apart from having her seamen impressed (that is, stolen) by the Royal Navy (after all, everyone was impressed, in the modern sense, by the Royal Navy in those days), was this pesky group of pirates operating in the Mediterranean out of the area that is now roughly Libya, under the auspices of the Pasha of Tripoli (some things never change), and taking over US merchant ships.

To avenge this affront to US sovereignty, not to mention to its commerce, the Jefferson Adminstration sent Commodore Preble to do whatever he had to to stop the piracy. Serving under Preble (there's a town near Syracuse, NY, named after him) was Commandant Bainbridge in command of new frigate USS Philadelphia, at 36 guns one of the most powerful ships in the US Navy, and whose original captain had been Mr Preble. US ships, incidentally, were more powerful than their British "equivalents" due to the genius of Joshua and Samuel Humphreys, but we won't get into that here.

This was a ship intended for combat on the open sea, so operating in Tripoli Harbor was a challenge and Bainbridge, while chasing a small Tripolitan galley, managed to run the thing aground on a sand bar. When the Tripolitans surrounded the helpless ship, Bainbridge surrendered her rather than having his crew of 307 killed, or worse. So they were imprisoned.

The Tripolitans managed to re-float the Philadelphia, which alone would have more than doubled their naval strength. Lieutenant Stephen Decatur was then sent over from the US with a small fleet and, with the able assistance of Marine Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon commanding 7 Marines and a bunch of Mameluks, who made the overland march from Alexandria, burned the Philadelphia to the waterline, freed the prisoners, and humbled the Pasha. This is where "to the shores of Tripoli" comes from in the Marine Hymn -- we can talk about the "Halls of Montezuma" some other time. That's O'Bannon on the left, Decatur on the right.

Once Bainbridge's reputation was rehabilitated, he was given command of USS Constitution and was in command during her famous victory over HMS Java during the War of 1812. This was his greatest achievement and probably accounts for his having the current USS Bainbridge (DDG-96) named after him.

Another Problem With the Media

If I'm off-base about any of the following, I'd love to hear a reasoned argument as to why. No fact-free left-wing political rants, please:

First of all, let's establish that, by almost any parameter, life in the US today is, on balance, better than life anywhere, at pretty much any time in human history. If you don't buy that, I'd love to hear your example of when it was better. Yes, there are plenty of anecdotal stories of suffering and inequities of all sorts; but if you have studied history, you know that the entire grid has moved upward, and most of what we consider problems today would not be recognized as such by our ancestors, from the caves forward. The "problems" we have today have generally existed in some form throughout history, but were so far down the list that they were accepted as facts of life (disease, standard of living, life expectancy, infant mortality, incessant warfare, oppression -- you can pretty much name it). Now that we have solved so many of the issues that flummoxed our forebearers, those previously seen as less serious, have risen to the top and, for lack of the previously-solved ones for comparison, are seen as just as serious (even more threatening) than they were. Anyone who has studied history or Abe Maslow understands this.

So why are we so discontented? In my humble opinion, it is the result of two primary causes: first, the study of history has gone out of fashion among the general public. Without that, there is no way for the average person to put current events into any context other than what he has known during his own lifetime. What seems to result is a tendency to gauge our condition against perfection, an unattainable and counter-productive goal.

It is important to realize, when comparing our condition to that of our ancestors, that until recently history was generally written by and about the upper classes. Why? Because they were the only ones who could read and write and who had the luxury of time to do it -- most people were too busy just trying to survive, which also speaks to the general improvement in our living standard. So, unless one has the time and interest to really dig into it, one can easily have an excessively rosy picture of what life was like for the average person in, say, Elizabethan England. Very few people were dressed in frilly outfits, writing poetry, and eating grapes by the River Tyne.

Secondly, the rise of the 24/7 media and its voracious appetite for "news", combined with the ability to spread it instantly from coast to coast. Absent the study of history for context, the constant drumbeat of negative news ("if it bleeds, it leads") in aggregate from coast to coast, gives the impression that these are the worst of times. Every mother in California hears about the kidnapping of a 3-year-old in Florida (and over and over, to boot), and news of robberies, murders and other bad stuff is spread all over the country so that we are bombarded with the sum total. This was not true until about 20 years ago, prior to which, with rare exceptions, these were local events (24/7 news really ramped up for the first Gulf War, which ended so quickly that they were left looking for something, anything, to fill their time). Unless one has a good understanding of what has gone before, this can leave one with the impression that crime is higher, the economy is worse, poverty is more widespread, government competency is lower, partisanship is greater, and life is generally tougher, etc, than at any time in history. All of that, of course, is absolutely untrue, but I'll bet if you asked 100 people on the street, most would think it was.

It would be nice if the media themselves would provide some context but, except for such as PBS (which has other objectivity issues) and a few columnists such as Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and William Bennett, the evidence points to their being unequipped to do so. Note that the above examples lean to the right; I have said elsewhere, and I will say again, that most of those on the left side of the political spectrum simply lack the knowledge and depth of analysis, absent which the shallow appeal of liberal arguments prevails. If you doubt this, watch Rachel Maddow or Keith Olberman on MSNBC as long as you can stand it. There is utterly no evidence that either of them (and they're among the higher profile leftist commentators) have the least understanding of the historical context of the events which are the targets of their shallow rants. Television news hires almost exclusively young, attractive people as news readers and reporters. While I am sure this works for them ratings-wise, I do think the over-emphasis on looks and on-screen persona crowds out general knowledge and perspective . . . which, of course, tends to promote a liberal viewpoint.

So why does this matter? One reason is that we lose sight of why previous decisions were made. Take the banning of DDT: used to be that crop failures and insect infestations with their attendant diseases were a rampant, everyday fact of life. DDT came along and ended much of that. Time goes by, and we take for granted that there are not massive crop failures, bubonic plague, typhus, etc; with no historical memory, all we see are the supposed ill effects based upon an early '60's book by some whacked-out chick, and the supposed effects on a few species whose value is questionable against the lives lost and now at risk for want of DDT. Africa is a textbook example.

And now we've got to tear down all these dams because the fish are dying. The folks advocating this are the same ones who are against building any nuclear power plants (primarily because they don't understand the technology and inclusion of the word "nuclear" is sufficient), coal-fired generators, etc. I suppose a few of these left over '60's hippies can live in the woods without electricity, but where would the country be without it. Wind farms? The fine (and environmentally-conscious-until-it-affects-them) residents of Hyannis won't stand for any to be built in a windy location in Nantucket Sound because they will see them. Perhaps they're hoping for a revival of the New England whaling industry to supply whale-oil lamps in lieu of electric ones . . . that is, until they see how the whales come out of it.

Or, more currently, repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, which had required that banks keep separate their deposits and investments, the idea being that profligate speculation with the latter had done much to cause their failure when the stock market crashed in 1929. After all, the banks were now behaving themselves and there was much money to be made in exotic instruments via Wall Street. The fact that we couldn't have it both ways was just waaaay too arcane for the pundits. There was more to it (the Community Reinvestment Act being the biggest), but this was one of the watersheds that led to the current economic mess.

Or the decline of religion in much of the population and the ongoing effort by such nut-jobs as the ACLU to stamp every vestige of it out of anything connected with the government. I hope I'm not breaking any big news when I say that religion (primarily Christianity) has been woven into the fabric of this country from before Day One, and was such a part of every day life and belief at the Founding that the Founders couldn't imagine it necessary to address every aspect of its relation to government. Unfortunately that, fostered by a general public ignorance of the extent to which (primarily) Christianity as been at the center of our development as a nation, has been used by some in an effort to expunge it from all forms of government and public life in this country. The inter-weaving of Judeo-Christian ethics and beliefs into the forming and framework of the US government and institutions is a significant part of why this country has evolved to be the envy of the world.

By the way, I suspect that the recent reports of the reduction in the number of Americans who call themselves Christian have as much to do with the fact that the very term "Christian" has acquired an Evangelical connotation that many mainstream Christians don't identify with as it does with any reduction in faith.

Let's look at the last Presidential election. Absent an understanding of history, a sufficient plurality of the voting public was swept away by the shallow appeal of a good-looking, well-spoken Demagogue. Their gullibility allowed them to fall for a litany of promises that no Reasonable Person could possibly keep, from getting out of Iraq within the time frame required to insure election, to the immediate closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison, to universal health care, to economic aid to the needy, to winning the International Popularity Contest, World Peace, and on and on. The Miss Universe interviews have nothing on this Guy.

So He's inaugurated and son-of-a-gun the backtracking begins: "the generals say we can't get out of Iraq for 16 months and I need Congress to appropriate more money for the War"; "I've ordered prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay transferred within a year"; and "the economic problems of the country are much worse than We were led to believe" (the classic excuse of a new President, as it neatly lays the blame for renegging on campaign promises on the prior Administration -- seriously: who did not see that coming?). Our enemies must feel that their persistence will, after all, be vindicated, as the US shown that it has tired of fighting them, by electing a President who professes to want to make nice and be atop the international popularity polls; i.e, cave in. The current President is either very naive, very cunning, very cynical, or all of the above. Those who voted for Him were certainly naive (and many have now got their knickers in a knot because he's not doing what he said he'd do to get elected), and we are now saddled with having to go once again thru the learning curve trod by, among others FDR (the economy) and Jimma Carter (foreign relations), since we have failed to learn from the history of their administrations what works and what doesn't.

So that's why it matters.

Another Slip Down the Slope

So now we have the Federal Government about to give GM more money, in exchange for which they apparently want CEO Rick Waggoner's head. Clearly GM (and US automakers generally) has made a lot of mistakes, foremost among which was repeatedly caving into the unions over the years and thus saddling themselves with mountains of "legacy" debt. To me this, along with the industry's historic focus on quarterly profits (and they're related), is the problem that underlies all. Sure, you can cite non-competitive cars, and that was certainly a valid criticism in the late 1970's thru the late 1980's or so, when they had the ability (ie, money) to address it, but were too fat, dumb, and happy to do anything about it. But not so much now. That's a covert photo of the post-bailout Cadillac above.


To counter the idea that sales are hurt by the prospect of GM or Chrysler going out of business and not honoring their warranties, Obama has promised that the Federal Government will stand behind them. I have a question: who is going to perform the repair work? If GM and Chrysler went under, does anyone think their dealers are still going to be just sitting there waiting for the cars to break? They'll be gone. At the very least, we're going to have another massive government bureaucracy (The Bureau of Automotive Repair?) to reimburse repair shops for all this warranty work. And most independent repair shops work on older cars; they don't have the equipment necessary to work on current ones. Ask your doctor how he likes reimbursement by the Feds for Medicare patients. Typically, more time is spent on paperwork than on the patient.


Now, I know this is Obama happy talk, hoping that it will alleviate fears and help sales, thus avoiding the whole issue. I sure hope it works, because it doesn't stand up to even the most elemental scrutiny.


But here we go with another couple of cannons on the Vasa: each cannon seems logical at the time, but the total of them sinks the ship (see "A Brief History of Panic" on this Blog). The first cannon is the Feds giving (loaning?) GM money to keep it afloat, to avoid the admittedly dire consequences of its failure. Now that we've poured all that money into GM and are therefore a stakeholder in it, we need to do everything possible to ensure that our investment is not lost . . . so the Feds begin using the cash as leverage to tell GM how to run the company. And, just to make sure the public understands, let's throw another cannon on there and fire the CEO, Admiral Kimmel . . . oh wait, Rick Waggoner. To get the public to understand that Waggoner inherited the bulk of GM's problems and is actually a very competent guy, is just way too arcane an argument to make. GM is in trouble on his watch. By that logic, Obama should soon step down.


The point, as explained further in A Brief History of Panic, is that each of these steps seems emminently logical and necessary, and the focus on solving the immediate problem completely overrides any consideration of the long-term consequences . . . which are that the government is now in the car business. Just like the Russian government was and many European governments are. This is socialism, pure and simple. If that's what we want, fine.


I'm sure everyone understands that the next big public scandal will be the serverance package that Waggoner gets upon departure. I have heard a whisper of this in the media, but I can practically guarantee that the perception will be that a portion of the "bail-out money" went to aggrandize the outgoing CEO.


The focus on short-term profits, necessitated by having to keep investors/stockholders happy, causes all sorts of undesirable long-term consequences: 1) Unions threatening to strike? Just give them what they want or our profits (and stock price) will tank; 2) The tendency to save money by designing the cars for convenience of production, with apparently no thought to what it would cost to maintain or work on them later -- I've always wondered if the tendency of cars in Michigan to rust out after a few years abetted this policy, along with creating a desire on the part of the owner to just buy a new one; 3) The excessive focus on marketing. Detroit has a habit of coming out with a high-end car which it markets as "Limited Production" or whatever only, within a year or two, to cash in on whatever small value the brand has accrued by demoting it to the standard model and come out with a new "Limited" model. It's all marketing -- there is almost never anything substantive to set the new top of the line apart. There are countless examples of this over the years, especially at Ford.


At GM, the latest example is Saturn: originally "a different kind of car company", freestanding from GM, no unions, gimmick-free marketing, designed from a clean sheet of paper, showing that US automakers could make a car competitive with the Japanese, yadda, yadda. The temptation on the part of the huge mother company to bastardize Saturn must have been overwhelming from the start. After all, the profits from such a small division were a drop in the bucket. I can see some bean-counter at his desk at 2 am: "Hey, the car has 4 wheels and an engine -- and look, the wheelbase is about what a Chevy Cavalier (or whatever) is. Let's just build the Saturn on the Cavalier platform and save all that duplication cost! Why didn't anyone think of this before?" Completely lost in this is the original concept. The wonder is that the original idea lasted as long as it did.


By this process, the automakers have mortgaged the future to make the present more palatable, and have thus created the situation that now exists. Well, the future is here. The perception in much of the public mind is that Detroit products are inferior to many foreign ones, even tho the quality has been very good for the last few years. Once that hole has been dug, it takes longer to remedy than a focus short-term profits will ever allow. The history of US automakers who have failed shows what a competitive disadvantage is created when the company becomes cash-starved, whatever the cause: the lack of cash, after meeting expenses, to design, test, and build new products results in cosmetic facelifts of the old ones, and the company slips further behind the competition. When word of this gets out, the public is loathe to buy them because a) it's really last year's model, and b) the company may not be around to honor the warranty. I do think that much of the criticism of Detroit during the past 10 or so years fails to take this into account.


So it will be interesting to see if meddling by politicians in the auto industry will yield a better result than has been obtained by those who have spent their careers in it.

The Old Slippery Slope

We're on thin ice here. Not to mix too many metaphors, but this rush to give private companies public money to keep them afloat is another example of allowing what seems necessary and logical at the time to obscure the long-term consequences and precedents. The camel's nose is under the tent.

Let's take AIG. Too big to fail, so we give them a chunk of public money to keep them in business. But then, of course, we don't like what they did with the money, and since it's our money, we should have some say about it, right? So now, unable to recover the bonuses given to AIG executives under pre-existing contracts of which those in Congress were aware, Congress has passed what amounts to a (unconstitutional) Bill of Attainder to, in essence, confiscate them thru taxation directed specifically at them, and after the fact, to boot. This is purely and simply Congress covering their own behinds after having granted the money in the first place. All the posturing about protecting the public's money is just that -- the dollars don't amount to a hill of beans in the overall, but it makes those who voted for it look bad. Some in Congress are probably too dumb to understand that there is no way this will hold up to the legal challenge which is certain to be forthcoming, or at least think their consituents are (the Speaker of the House comes to mind, who I suspect generally understands little of what's going on these days).

This is the kind of thing that goes on in Third World countries and is part of what continues to keep them there: ad hoc, arbitrary disregard for laws and due process when convenient or attractive at the moment. Who's going to invest in a system the fruits of which can be expropriated at will? So now we're going to have a legal fight (with additional public money) over what is clearly an illegal action by Congress passed purely as a sop to public outrage to cover Congress' own mistake.

Same thing with the banks and auto manufacturers. It seems reasonable that, if the government gives them money, the government should have a share in how the money is spent or, in other words, how the company is run, right? So this puts the government directly in the banking and auto business, competing with those not yet taken over? Hello? I'm sorry, but it's a short step to total government takeover of both. If you don't like Detroit products now, have a look at the Lada or the ZIL to see what your government-designed and built ride of the future will be. You may need the camel whose nose is under the tent for transportation, so give him a treat.

Now you know who's buying up all that sprinkler pipe

One of the requirements of having a free market capitalist system is that you must be willing to take the bad with the good. This requires the belief, borne out by history, that the good will overall outweigh the bad. You cannot wish, legislate, or buy you way out of the bad when the system has given you a cushy life which makes you unable to bear any downturn. If you want to go down this path, you must be willing to also give up the good.

This is but the latest example of what I discuss in "A Brief History of Panic" elsewhere on this Blog; like adding cannon to the Vasa, each step taken is seen as logical and necessary (even urgent) at the time, but the sum total of them sinks the ship.

The Other Reasons Japan Lost the War

This is the text of a talk I gave to veterans of the Pacific War. It was given as a distillation of 40 years of studying the subject and was given "off the top" without reference to books, notes, internet, etc, so there are no footnotes. While the reader may take issue with some of the positions, he will presumably forgive any incidental, non-substantive errors.



THE OTHER REASONS JAPAN LOST THE WAR

Let's just start by saying that there was simply no way Japan could have "won" WW 2 militarily but that, from their perspective, they pursued the only course that offered any hope of success: that of a relatively short war, with the US becoming demoralized and suing for peace, aka "cutting and running". Unfortunately Japan was [ahem] about 65 years too early for that strategy to work. If they were to avoid the fate of China who, from Japan's perspective, had lost their independence to foreign influence (read: European/American), Japan needed resources to build up their economy and military. The roots of Japan's involvement in WW 2 go back to 1621 when Japan had expelled all foreigners, which included primarily Jesuit missionaries and European trading companies. 250 years of resulting self-imposed isolation had seen them fall far behind the West technologically. Visits by western naval units in the mid-19th Century made it clear to them that, without a crash course in industrialization, they they were doomed to China's fate. Thus the 250 year reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate ended with the 1868 Meiji Restoration, putting the Emperor Meiji on the throne with the charge of getting Japan up to speed militarily and, by implication, industrially and economically.

In the Mahan-dominated days before WW 2, a nation's (and especially an island nation's) military strength was directly related to its navy, which implied re-fueling (be it coal or oil) bases, which implied colonies, which meant an empire. Of course, while the Japanese were looking inward 1625 thru 1868, the world's major powers were claiming as possessions the very island bases the Japanese now needed. The Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, minor involvement in WW 1, etc, all went pretty favorably to Japan. But the Japanese were on a mission and thought, in view of their status as an ally on the winning side in WW 1, they had been unfairly treated by the Western nations at the Washington Naval Conference and later at the League of Nations and London Naval Conference, where Japan had lost "face" by accepting relegation to an inferior position of naval strength relative vis a vis Britain and the US. The Japanese thought their involvement in WW 1, along with having proven themselves versus Russia 1904-05, should have entitled them to more than the few former German mandates they got (Marianas, Carolines, Palaus, etc) . . . so they got a chip on their national shoulder.

The most important and portentous manifestation of this chip was the division of the Imperial Japanese Navy during the 1930's into the Treaty Faction, who believed that Japan's best bet was to achieve her goals thru cooperation with the international community, and the Fleet Faction, basically a group of "hot blooded young officers" who wanted Japan to take a more aggressive military posture, hadn't a clue what they were getting into, but were anxious to get into it nonetheless. As the perceived slights continued at the mid-1930's London Naval Conference, the Treaty Faction lost credibility along with the civilian government, and the Fleet Faction gained the ascendancy, which led directly to the attack of December 7, 1941.

The late 30's-early 40's aggression of Mussolini and Hitler in Europe encouraged Japan to think that now might be the time to attain her goals militarily, especially since the European powers had their hands too full to defend their colonies. With the US having cut off export of raw materials to Japan in an effort to end Japan's China escapades, not to mention moving the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Hawaii, Japan's military build-up and protracted rape of China was becoming more and more difficult to sustain. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan had roughly an 18 month supply of oil with which to fuel their fleet; oil was on the US embargo list, so this was additional pressure. Given their interests in the area (Philippines and China), the Japanese viewed it as unlikely that the Americans would stand by and watch Japan colonize East Asia. So, to the Japanese way of thinking, if their contemplated grab at SE Asian resources was going to have any chance of success, they had to "defeat" the US before it had a chance to mobilize. What better way than to take out the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, which should give Japan a year or two to consolidate its holdings before the reconstructed US fleet began the long journey across the Pacific to fight the Decisive Battle (as tho one would do it), whittled away en route by Japanese submarines. Better yet, the surprise strike would result in a peace offer of status quo from an over-stretched and "soft" US -- or, as Knute Rockne would have said, go for the "Hail Mary" with no time left on the clock versus a time-consuming drive. Time was a luxury the Japanese did not have. So went the insular Japanese thinking.

The fundamental problem was that most Japanese simply had no idea what they were up against. The few who did knew that a) the US was unlikely to throw in the towel immediately, and that b) the resulting long war with an industrial powerhouse like the US was a guaranteed loser. Knowing that, it's possible that many of Japan's seeming mistakes may have been intentional expedients, or at least worked out for the best as events proved. Interestingly enough, Isoroku Yamamoto, having spent time in the US in the early 1920's and being familiar with the character and industrial power of the US, was identified with the Treaty Faction but, as a good soldier, resolved to make the best of what he viewed as a bad decision.

The most obvious and largest cause of Japan's defeat in WW 2 was that she was simply outclassed by the industrial production capacity of the United States who, with roughly 20% of its war effort allocated to fighting the Japanese, originally conceived simply as a holding action until Germany could be defeated, drove Japan to utter and unquestionable defeat. Even without any other causes, this would have guaranteed Japan's demise. Japan, however, contributed to her own defeat in a number of ways which are not often discussed:

1) Bushido. The Japanese warrior mentality of "fighting to the death" and being willing to give up one's life "for the Emperor", while admirable in itself had, in the passion of the militarist Japanese regime, mutated from "willing" to "anxious", which led to much useless sacrifice of life. The Banzai Charge is the most well-known example, but many thousands of Japanese when trapped in their caves or wherever, rather than suffer the ignominy of capture, would put their Arisakas under their chin and pull the trigger with their big toe, hug a grenade, or whatever. In Japanese culture (and this is true even today), much more importance is placed on the appearance of things than the result than is the case in more results-oriented Western culture. It was extremely important to the Japanese soldier to appear to have done his best and died gloriously in battle which, along with saki, aided in recruitment for banzai charges into dug-in heavy machine guns. The fact that everyone knew the thing was futile was immaterial. The alternative of returning alive to face the scorn of family and community was unthinkable.

Another provision of Bushido was that the defeated Japanese officer should die in battle so that the appearance of maximum effort was maintained. The problem here is that, rather than surviving and learning from defeat, the defeated are dead and cannot either benefit later from what they learned or pass it on to others. Japanese tactics changed little during the War, and this is a major reason why. Banzai charges, by the way, were generally led by a company or field grade officer conspicuously wielding an officer's sword (the "appearance" thing again), thus aiding the Americans in helping him be first to die for the Emperor, and leaving the unit leaderless. Unlike the Americans, the Japanese did not have a tradition of NCO's and other lower level ranks assuming command when the ranking officer went down so, rather than take cover and reassess the strategy, the survivors simply continued on to their deaths.

2) Defense. Relatively easy victories prior to WW 2 seems to have lulled the Japanese military planners into the denial that anyone competent would actually be shooting back at them. This paradigm filtered its way down thru all aspects of the Japanese military. Japanese battle plans, for example, were exceedingly complex and depended upon the enemy (and the weather) doing
exactly what was anticipated. Midway, Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, and the Marianas are good, big examples of this. The idea was that with sufficient feints and nuanced attacks, the enemy could be thrown off-balance or lured into an intricately-contrived trap. The problem, in addition to lack of enemy cooperation, was that this required a division of force that often left any one fleet element incapable of dealing with the unanticipated and unable to support any other. With limited resources to deal with the huge empire which fell into their laps during the first 6 months of 1942, the multiple deployments were often of the shoestring variety, even when Japan had overwhelming control of the sea. The battles around Guadalcanal/Tulagi amply illustrate this, but each of the islands in Japan's newly won empire had to be garrisoned and supplied lest the enemy set up on one, fragmenting their forces and fatally complicating the problem of re-supply. However, if the assumption is that the enemy is too incompetent to meaningfully shoot back, all of this isn't a problem. Bloody Ridge Today

The lack of defensive thinking carried thru to their hardware. Most Japanese equipment was very lightly built, the most well-known example being the A6M Zero fighter, which sacrificed self-sealing fuel tanks, armored pilot seat, etc, for lighter weight and thus greater agility. Early in the war the Brewster Buffaloes, P-40's, and Grumman Wildcats had a tough time getting a bead on them, especially as they were dealing with veteran Japanese pilots battle-hardened from years of war in China. But as the American pilots' skills and equipment improved, the Japanese were shot down in droves. Japanese lack of defensive foresight also led them to deny their pilots parachutes, thinking that it would make them too willing to bail out. Thus Japan lost most of its best pilots during the first 7 months of US involvement. Also suffering from a lack of robustness was the G4M "Betty" medium bomber, on paper the rough equivalent of the US B-25 Mitchell. The Betty became known at the Ronson Lighter as one .50-cal into a [non-self-sealing] wing tank caused it to burst into flames. The Japanese lost Adm Yamamoto due to exactly this cause, aided by knowing his schedule, as discussed later. The US, on the other hand, chose the path of greater armor and defensive features, preferring survivability over improved maneuverability. American planes were therefore relatively tough for the Japanese to bring down

G4M Betty Bomber

and many of the latter were shot down while pumping round after round into a Hellcat or Corsair with little effect. Many of the American pilots who were shot down ditched or bailed out, were rescued, and were able to put their experience to use in the next fight

The Arisaka rifle is another example. A variant of the turn-of the century German Mauser, and whereas the Americans were generally equipped with the semi-automatic M-1Garand, the Arisaka was a single shot, bolt action rifle which was longer than the average 5'3" Japanese soldier was tall, especially with bayonet fixed for banzai charge. Again, these cumbersome, slow-firing weapons were fine if you had no serious enemy shooting back, and they looked great on the parade ground, but suffered in collective firepower against an enemy actually providing some opposition. In fact, the Nambu light machine gun was the only Japanese infantry weapon that could be considered on a par with its Western equivalent, the Browning air-cooled light machine gun

It is also interesting, given that a major motivation for moving into SE Asia was to obtain resources Japan sorely lacked and needed to defend the empire she was conquering while doing it, and that those resources would have to be brought back to Japan via ship, no one seems to have realized that Japan's merchant marine wasn't up to the task. Again, the unwritten assumption (hope) seems to have been that the Americans would sue for peace following 12/7/41, rather than send them pesky submarines over hunting Marus. It did begin rather slowly, as the Mark 13 torpedoes of the Americans were famously unreliable (depth mechanism and detonator were defective on over half), to the immense consternation of the sub crew who had risked their lives to line up a shot only to have the torpedo either go under the target or bounce off. This problem was solved by 1943 and the lightly escorted Japanese freighters went down in bunches.

There was also a huge contrast between the average American soldier/sailor and that of the Japanese with regard to the practical ability to fix things mechanical/electrical. The US had been an industrialized society far longer than the Japanese, who still really weren't. There were many more men in the US ranks who knew how to repair internal combustion engines, rifles, wheel bearings, etc, than there were in the Japanese or, for that matter, the German military. As a result, whereas the Americans could frequently devise a field expedient to get their hardware working, the Japanese were forced to wait for a specially trained contingent, hoping that the guy who had the training hadn't run into a bullet.

3) Ships. The Imperial Navy was, on paper, the third most powerful in the world at 0755 7 December 1941, behind Britain and the US respectively. This was deceptive, however. It is well-known that Japan had never lost a war prior to WW 2 -- that's the good news. The bad news is that, whereas the Japanese did the US the "favor" of sinking most of her overage capital ships at the outset, Japan was left with her ships of generally older design, some refitted, some not. Most of her capital ships were in this class (Haruna, Kirishima, Hiei, Fuso, Kongo, Yamashiro, etc), notwithstanding a relatively few well-known exceptions such as Yamato, and some very good heavy cruisers (Mogami, Mikuma, Chikuma, Aoba, etc, made better by Japan's disregard for London Naval Treaty, provisions of which Japan had renounced), etc. So most of her heavy units were basically of WW 1-era design. The crucial difference here is that naval Japanese Battleship Kirishima

warfare had changed in a couple of critical areas in the intervening time: 1) fire direction and control had improved drastically so that long-range gunnery actually had a chance of hitting an opposing ship. This implied what is known as plunging fire, where the trajectory of the shell was much closer to vertical upon impact, thus making deck armor much more important, versus the relatively flat trajectories of WW 1 naval gunfire. Plunging fire had not been of much concern in WW 1, but the WW 1-era HMS Hood's demise at the hands of freshly-minted Bismarck in 1941 provided a traumatic demonstration of the advances that had been made. 2) Airplanes were now able to carry enough ordinance to effectively attack ships, which was not the case in WW 1, so armored decks were doubly important. 3) Damage control was also given relatively short-shrift. The most obvious example is comparing the fates of Japanese carriers at the battles of Coral Sea and Midway with those of the US carriers, while Japan was still clearly in the ascendant. Simply stated, with the overwhelming superiority of ships, planes, and battle experience the Japanese had April thru June of 1942, they still managed to lose 5 carriers (Shoho, Akagi, Soryu, Hiryu, and Kaga) to the Americans' 2 (Lexington and Yorktown, with the latter requiring both battles to sink). Even granting that a certain amount of luck was with the Americans at Midway with regard to timing, with the Japanese superiority in nearly every category (at least on paper) luck shouldn't have mattered. Yorktown took at least as much damage at Coral Sea as did any of the Japanese carriers at Midway, yet Yorktown was patched up and under way to Pearl for repairs that would have taken the Japanese a year (witness Shokaku after Coral Sea), were supposed to take the Americans 3 months, and actually took 3 days. By the way, that's me in front of the power station on Midway Island.

Additionally, in the area of ship design and battle doctrine, the Japanese don't appear to have thought thru the consequences of battle damage. Again looking at Midway, the combination of leaking fuel lines due to battle damage (hardly unforeseeable) and sealed hanger decks essentially created a bomb; not filling those fuel lines with CO2 prior to entering battle was just asking for it. Add to that sloppy ordinance storage procedures and a relatively small proportion of the ship's company trained and assigned to damage control and with very little cross training, so that if the guy who knew how to counter-flood was hit by the first bomb, and the gig was up. There is a long list of such oversights that appear attributable to the Imperial Japanese Navy never having really been tested in battle. Dumb stuff like small carrier elevators, making it take forever to get a flight into the air while the first launchees burned up fueling circling. But it is also true that, as discussed elsewhere, the Japanese put heavy emphasis on the appearance of things and doing things correctly according to their rather insular doctrine. Spending too much time training damage control parties or taking other measures that would only matter if the ship was hit by the enemy would be construed as defeatist. Rather, lets make sure the Emperor's portrait is straight and the chrysanthemum polished.

The Japanese saw no requirement for radar either on ships or in planes, so convinced were they of their visual prowess especially in night fighting. They got some initial encouragement in the naval battles around Guadalcanal when the Allies didn't yet understand how to make best use of radar, but clearly they chose the losing path in that area.

4) Hubris: In the early days it took the form of what the Japanese themselves called Victory Disease, assuming that, based upon the first 6 months after the Pearl Harbor attack, it was going to be a quick and easy victory. But in the larger sense it was related to the previously-discussed notion that the enemy was too incompetent to provide any meaningful resistance. The most serious manifestation of this was their refusal to consider the possibility that the US had broken their codes, primarily Purple (diplomatic) and JN-25 (naval). By the Pearl Harbor attack, as is well-known now, the US was reading Purple well enough that Cordell Hull had a copy of the Japanese 14 part message to their Consulate breaking off diplomatic relations in his hands prior to meeting with Nomura and Kurusu, who were supposed to deliver it 30 minutes before the attack.

In the early stages of the war when the situation was still in doubt and the Japanese had their best chance for a favorable negotiated settlement, no Japanese who mattered thought the US capable of breaking the higher-level Japanese codes. It is also unlikely, by the way, even if the US had offered to settle at this point, that the Japanese, flush with an unbroken string of victories, would have agreed . . . but that's another subject. The codes were progressively broken from the months before the Pearl Harbor attack thru 1943. By Midway we were reading their messages sufficiently well to uncover the identity of Midway in a flurry of messages clearly indicative of big naval doings. Ingenious codebreaker Joe Rochefort had a hunch that the code name AF in Japanese transmissions was probably Midway Island and came up with the idea of having Midway transmit in the clear about a week before the operation was to begin that their desalination plant had broken down -- right on schedule, the Japanese advised the Striking Force to bring extra fresh water because AF was short of it. Knowing that Midway was the objective, Admiral Nimitz was able to place the puny US fleet (Enterprise and Hornet, with Yorktown arriving in the nick of time after the above-discussed repairs) just northeast of Midway, ahead of the screen of Japanese submarines meant to sink some of them, out of range of the Japanese Striking Force until the last minute, and ready to pounce on the unsuspecting Adm Nagumo.

The story of the battle is too well-known to bear repeating here, and the US was the beneficiary of a certain amount of luck especially as regards timing, but none of it would have happened had the US not broken the Japanese codes. Midway would have been taken and Hawaii would have been next, forcing the US fleet back to the US West Coast, with all that that implied. Revisionists notwithstanding, Midway was certainly the turning point of the war in the Pacific (Japanese defeat being inevitable, there was certainly going to be some turning point), as the Japanese did not have the ability to recover from the loss of 4 heavy carriers within the space of the short war they required for victory.

The other important advantage the US gained thru reading Japanese codes, especially in the first 18 months or so, was that it allowed Nimitz to concentrate his relatively meager resources where they would do the most good. This advantage was unwittingly enhanced by the Japanese tendency to divide their forces so that the entire theater could be covered with the intricate ballet of their battle plan. It's almost comical to imagine the Japanese, sailing confidently into battle, supremely confident in their navy and elaborate battle plans, chagrined time after time when the US navy invariably just happened to show up at absolutely the most inconvenient time and place to thwart them. Think of Professor Fate in the movie The Great Race.

With hindsight, it is easy to ask "how could they not have known their codes had been broken", as it is easy with hindsight to second-guess many historical events. The overconfidence brought on by nothing but victory (the "draw" at Coral Sea was seen as an aberration) did not make changing the codes a priority while it could still be done; later, when the US controlled the seas and Japan was in full retreat, there was simply no way to physically deliver new code books to all the islands Japan still held.

But back to Midway: there are a couple of instructive facts concerning the battle that get little notice. Contrary to what you may read, aircraft carriers at this point in the War had just advanced beyond the status of "Fleet Auxiliaries" such as tankers, mine sweepers, etc. For proof of this one need look no further than Adm Yamamoto's decision to keep his battle line, including Yamato, at a safe distance behind the battle, not wanting to risk losing any of his capital ships. Had the entire Japanese fleet participated in the battle, the outcome would almost certainly have been different. This is also yet another example of the Japanese tendency to divide their forces to achieve several objectives via nuanced feints, etc, leaving them unable to deal with the unexpected. Simultaneous with the Midway attack, not realizing the US was reading their messages, and trying to lure the US Fleet away from the battle, Yamamoto sent Adm Hosogawa to take the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska, thinking the US would have to defend "home" soil and send the fleet north, to be ambushed by the Japanese Main Body. While the Japanese were successful in taking Attu and Kiska, Nimitz knew the real objective, and this ended up being a meaningless dead end as the Japanese hadn't the resources to capitalize on it. It was, incidentally, the thing that caused the building of the Alaska Highway.

The now-well-known facts surrounding the shootdown of Adm Yamamoto over Bougainville in the Spring of 1943 again illustrate the importance of knowing where the enemy will be, and when. In fact, the ramifications of the code breakers' activities are only now being fully appreciated.

Speaking of cause and effect, the Doolittle Raid of April, 1942 led directly to the Battle of Midway. The Japanese military leadership was horrified that the Emperor had been put in danger via US bombers directly overflying the Imperial Palace (Tokyo, not Vegas) though, unbeknownst to them, Doolittle's pilots had specific orders not to bomb it. The Japanese assumed that the Mitchell bombers, being land-based planes, must have taken off from land. Since the closest US base capable of mounting such an attack was Midway, the plan was hatched to insure the Emperor's safety by "annihilating" that base, along with the rest of the US fleet, which would feel compelled to defend it -- Japanese battle plans, by the way, always included "annihilating the enemy", as if repeating it enough times would bring it about. Western logic leads one to question who in Tokyo thought the Mitchell had such stupendous range, but I suspect it was more the need to appear to be striking back after such a public display of vulnerability. In any event, after Midway was "annihilated" the Japanese would take Hawaii, forcing the US back to the West Coast. Only by the most fortuitous series of events did the US win the Battle of Midway. Hawaii was certainly wide open to invasion and mounting an operation to re-take and supply it would have set the US war effort back at least a year.

One other interesting event: immediately after the Battle of Midway, the Chicago Tribune got wind that the victory was made possible by the US having broken the Japanese codes and was going to run a front page story on it. FDR sent George Marshall and a few others to meet with the publisher and he was dissuaded, in the national interest, from running the story. Of course, this was in the days when the US press was actually rooting for the US to win. Later, in 1943, the NY Times did run a story about how the US had been reading the Japanese codes since before the Battle of Midway, so their recent revelations about wiretaps demonstrate (as if further proof were needed) that things haven't changed all that much there. By that time, however, Japan was incapable of changing their codes, as it required physically transporting new code books to each of their island bases over seas increasingly controlled by the US Navy.

I suppose Japan's lack of any pilot training program that approached adequate could also be chalked up to hubris; after all, if you don't think anyone will actually be shooting back, you don't plan to lose many pilots. And if you know that a long war is a loser for you, no point in wasting resources on a big pilot training program, by implication taking some of your better pilots off the
front lines to train new ones. May as well have your best out there in the beginning when the issue must be decided if it is to go your way. But it is a fact that, whereas US pilots got progressively better during the war, Japanese ones got worse and worse. Apart from simply needing bodies in those cockpits as soon as possible, Japan could ill-afford simple things like fuel to "waste" on training. The OJT thus forced on them guaranteed a short career for most Japanese pilots.

Japan's lack of investment in radar research was brought on by their overconfidence in the night vision of their lookouts, and the IJN's experience around Guadalcanal did nothing to shake this. It is important to note that early radar, like many technologies that greatly improved over time (the firearm being another prime example), was not all that reliable or accurate in the beginning, as famously illustrated by Lt Kermit Tyler 30 minutes before the Pearl Harbor attack. So the difference between radar and eyesight at that stage wasn't as great as it might now seem. Unfortunately for the Japanese, before long US radar was demonstrating that Japan had chosen the wrong path.

5) Rigid, top-down command and control: Japanese field commanders were given very little tactical leeway when compared to the Americans. So while at Midway John Waldron intuitively deviated from his assigned flight plan and found the Japanese fleet, Adm Nagumo plowed ahead with the Yamamoto (who was far in the rear)-devised battle plan, dithering only between high explosive and anti-ship ordinance, depending upon the latest incomplete and conflicting report from his scout planes. And on Guadalcanal Col Ichiki, leading one of the best units in the Imperial Army, could think of nothing better than leading them into emplaced machine guns -- all roughly 1000 of them, who died to a man.

My personal distaste for hindsight requires me to say that, with regard to the Japanese fondness for overly complicated battle plans requiring division of their force, we now have the benefit of hindsight in knowing that, as things worked out, that probably was not such a wise course; however, had Japan consolidated their forces and won at Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, and other battles that took place while they still had a chance, but had lost the war as was inevitable, historians would likely now be saying that "heck, with the tremendous advantage the Japanese had in almost every category at the start of the war, and with their enemies focused elsewhere, the Japanese certainly had the ability to tackle several objectives at once and could have won Midway with half the force while taking a foothold in the Aleutians, thus maximizing their advantage while they had it and optimizing the chance for a negotiated settlement", etc, etc. This is a pet peeve of mine that carries right thru to today: those charged with making the decisions - make them on the information at hand and, if things don't work out satisfactorily, it is then easy to suggest other options that "should" have been taken without consideration to the one that was, even tho that may indeed have been the best one with the information available at the time (think Iraq). J F C Fuller touched on this when he famously said "History is not the history of what happened; it is the history of what happened in the context of what might have happened".

A few other thoughts:

1) There is utterly no evidence that Franklin Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor tho some have tried to make that case. The temptation to go back thru the record with benefit of hindsight and cherry-pick circumstantial evidence that seems to support the pre-drawn conclusion that he must have known (after all, how could we miss something that big?) ignores a couple of factors: no one really expected, or thought the Japanese even capable of mounting, such an attack, notwithstanding Hector Bywater and a few other predictions and war games in the 1920's and '30's that seemed to both predict it and demonstrate its feasibility. If one studies enough history, one can find seemingly prescient predictions for every otherwise unexpected event in history; in other words, there is always someone somewhere who has predicted just about everything imaginable, is wrong 99% of the time, but is dredged up after the "unexpected" event and held up as a visionary. The problem for those in power is that they must sift thru myriad intelligence and other indicators, 99.9% of which is worthless and, without knowing the future, figure it out.

It is true, of course, the FDR was convinced that the US would end up in the War and was trying to maneuver the Japanese into committing causus belli. Takeover of the Philippines on the way to S E Asia probably would have been sufficient when added to years of abuse of China and other misdeeds, but the proposition that he was willing to risk losing the Pacific Fleet as the price of public support for war, not to mention the number of people who would have to have been complicit in such a massive conspiracy, fails the logic test. In this case, and if he had such precise knowledge, why would he not give the Fleet 12 hours or so warning and either be prepared for the attack or, better yet, catch Kido Butai red-handed 250 miles from Pearl with the air strikes staged and ready? The fact is that US cryptanalysis was sufficiently advanced by December 1941 that intelligence knew something was afoot, but a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was pretty far down the list of probabilities.

2) Which bring us to Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the two US commanders at Pearl Harbor 12/7/41. The short version is that they were clearly scapegoats when scapegoats were clearly needed. Absent scapegoats, the American public was liable to question the entire US intelligence operation and/or condemn US leadership, which was not at fault and whose public reorganization and censure, respectively, was not something we had the luxury of in the bleak months of early 1942. There is no way, except with the crassest hindsight, to say that Kimmel and Short should have known an attack was coming, let alone when. Sure the British attack on the Italian base at Taranto now looks like a clear demonstration of feasibility, but the difference in logistics (distance and scale of attack) makes such a comparison weak at best, and to say that it should have served as a warning is pure hindsight. It is also true that Washington did not pass on to Pearl Harbor some very crucial pieces of intelligence motivated, at least in part, by an extreme desire to keep secret the fact that they were reading the Japanese codes. Since the attack, it has been fashionable to cite the bunching of aircraft to facilitate guarding against sabotage as evidence of Short's incompetence, but if you'd asked 100 officials in a position to know in Hawaii and Washington 12/6/41, 99 of them would have said that sabotage was easily the biggest danger, especially given the large ethnic Japanese population on Oahu. In this respect, one must give the Japanese high credit for pulling off, in total secrecy, one of the most amazing feats of projecting military power in human history.

3) Speaking of large ethnic Japanese populations, the detainment of Americans of Japanese descent has settled into the minds of most Americans as a major blot on our history. I would like to suggest that it was a good idea at the time and makes sense today if the facts are known. As previously discussed, the US had been reading the Japanese Purple (Diplomatic) Code with increasing precision in the months leading to war. It is important to make a distinction between Purple and JN-25, the most common code used by the Japanese Navy, which was a much higher level (meaning difficult to break) code, lest the reader ask the obvious question of how we were reading Purple with enough precision to have translated and put in Cordell Hull's hands almost the entire 14-part message declaring war prior to his famous meeting with Nomura and Kurusu. The US was, in fact, enough better than the Japanese Embassy at decrypting and translating Purple that Nomura and Kurusu were hours late for the meeting (scheduled for 30 minutes before the attack) because their own staff couldn't produce it in time, which gave Hull time to formulate one of the most delicious tirades in diplomatic history, and cast the Japanese as the treacherous villains most Americans were prepared to believe they were.

But back to the detention camps: Executive Order #9066 provided that those of Japanese ancestry be rounded up and detained for the duration at camps located in remote regions of the American West. After Pearl Harbor most Americans, who had little personal contact with ethnic Japanese, were in complete support. Ethnic Germans and Italians were also rounded up on the East Coast, tho here the line between American and German/Italian became blurred, as the ancestors of many had immigrated far earlier than those of the generally first and second generation Japanese. It is also true that the world (not just the US) was a virulently racist society during the first half of the 20th Century which, combined with the obvious physical differences between Japanese and those of European extraction, retarded whatever assimilation might otherwise have occurred.

Much of the information surrounding US cryptographic operations during the War (in which my father was a minor cog) was classified for 50 years following 1945, so much information has only recently come to light. Here's the kicker: in the months leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese had established an organization to conduct sabotage against the many US defense industries primarily on the West Coast, and been recruiting (with some success) Japanese living in the US to carry out these operations. This the US knew from reading Japanese diplomatic traffic to and from their US Consulates. It wouldn't have taken too many individuals bent on wreaking havoc to seriously affect US war production. In the heat (not to say panic) of the moment, the Administration understandably didn't feel it had the luxury of individually evaluating each ethnic Japanese to determine loyalty, so they were rounded up en masse. The cooperation of the vast majority of Japanese-Americans with this order is one of the more poignant chapters in US history, but way down deep most understood the necessity and viewed it as their contribution to winning the War. Next to the Manhattan Project, the fact that the US had broken the Japanese codes was the most closely guarded secret of the War and saved countless American lives, so there was no way the Administration could reveal their source. Had the Japanese really suspected that their messages were being read by the Americans and changed their codes early in the War when it would have been relatively easy to do, the battles of Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, etc, plus the shootdown of Yamamoto, would not have turned out as favorably to the Americans as was the case. The War would have lasted at least a year longer, with many more casualties on both sides, albeit with the same result.

So in summary Japan, caught in the pincers of expanding population, desire to be strong enough to fend off Western influence, while oil, steel, and other resources had been cut off, figuring that her odds would never be better than when her incipient enemies were distracted elsewhere, and having tried negotiation and still smarting from what she perceived as unfair treatment, reached the conclusion that military action in late 1941 offered the best hope for achievement of her goals. Looking at it strictly from Japan's viewpoint, and knowing the outcome, it is easy now to say that diplomacy would still have yielded a better result; however, given the international situation in 1941, and lacking a crystal ball, it is difficult to make the case that Japan's actions in going to war when and how she did were completely irrational.

Copyright: Dana Graham -- January, 2007

The California State Lottery

This is the kind of thing that makes you cynical about politics. Every time a California State bond measure comes up, it is this sort of thing that keeps me from voting for it. Maybe I'm the only one who is exercised about this, but if the following is true, I do not understand why this is not a huge scandal:

Remember when we all voted on the State Lottery in in 1984? Do you remember what the appeal of it was? Apart from a one in a billion chance to be rich, the primary sales pitch was that it would provide extra money for the schools without raising taxes. Am I the only one who remembers that? Am I the only one who wonders, in light of that, why the schools are still continually starved of money? Even if I am, here's what I understand happened:

When the Lottery was passed, somewhere between the ballot and the budget, the money that the Lottery was projected to raise was extracted from the State schools budget and (presumably) blown on other stuff! Welfare perhaps? Maybe making sure illegal aliens have all the benefits they're entitled to? Whatever, the effect was that there was no net additional revenue for the schools. And this was almost the entire argument for voting for it in the first place. To make it worse, the Lottery money came with the attached string that it could only be used for "educational purposes", meaning not on facilities. So the old school budget could be used as appropriate, but it was supplanted with money that was "earmarked", to borrow a term currently in vogue. Am I the only one who remembers the constant lament over the condition of school buildings over the past 25 or so years? Gee, I wonder why. Clearly there's no extra money now, but think of all the money that was supposed to go to the schools during the flush times and all the repair, updating, and construction that our students would now have the benefit of.

So how does Sacramento get away all these years clearly and cynically subverting the wishes and intent of the voters without so much as a peep from anyone? If there wasn't the constant moaning and wailing about how badly the schools need money, I suppose it wouldn't be as bad; but, in view of all the school fundraising drives, ballot initiatives, etc, we've seen over the years, isn't anyone else the least bit worked up over what clearly looks like the torpedoing of the solution?

If I'm wrong about this, I sure would appreciate someone setting me straight.

A Brief History of PANIC

I am reminded of 17th Century King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden's flagship Vasa. In those days, the more cannon a ship carried, the more powerful she was. This being Adolphus' flagship, she had cannon in every available spot. While the addition of each cannon made sense on its own as it made the ship more powerful, the aggregate of them made it unstable, and the whole mess went to the bottom in a light breeze 5 minutes after launch in August, 1628. This is a pretty good metaphor for government intervention in the economy.

The Short Version:

I'm no economist, but Karl Marx was right about one thing: "Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction", though not for the reasons Marx thought. If you want to see how Capitalism devours itself, look at the history of the United States. Briefly, the advance of living standards makes the population less and less tolerant of hardship, and makes them look more and more to the government to smooth out the economic ups and downs (especially the latter) that are a necessary part of Capitalism. With each government intervention and its accompanying new bureaucracy, regulations, and taxes, a bit of the advantages of Capitalism that created the prosperity is surrendered. This is an insidious process mind you, and each government intervention, each new law, each new tax, each government infusion of capital in exchange for partial control of the company, is seen as logical and necessary at the time in view of the then-impending inconvenience or calamity (which always looks worse at the time than it does in retrospect); however, taken in aggregate over time, there is a relentless drift toward government control by which the country, in exchange for having avoided or minimized prior recessions, progressively surrenders the prospect of greater and greater prosperity.

The Rest:

In the early days of this country people were happy to put food on the table and live to 60. Such luxuries as indoor plumbing, vacations, private bedrooms, savings accounts, a box full of toys for a kid, multiple outfits and pairs of shoes, and other stuff that most Americans today take for granted, were unknown to 99% of the population -- and I'm not even counting stuff that technological developments have made possible. The infant mortality rate was horrendous by today's standards, which is the major reason couples had so many children -- that and there just wasn't that much else to do for entertainment. The vast majority of people never traveled more than 30 miles from their birthplace during their lifetime. Generally, expectations by today's standards were exceptionally low. If this is at odds with what you thought, it is important to understand that the vast majority of history is written by and about the upper classes, and does not reflect the condition of 95%+ of the populace -- one thing that makes Tocqueville so unique and interesting. One cause of the notion of the "good old days" is the misapplication of the condition of the few to the many.

History has pretty much proven that Capitalism is the best economic engine for achieving prosperity. It's not perfect, and that's where it runs into trouble. Throughout US history there have been repeated recessions and depressions -- 1792, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, 1921, 1929, 1958, 1974, 1980, 1990, 2001, and [ahem] 2008. You will notice a pattern of one occurring about every 20 years, give or take, except that the frequency is greater later. We could discuss each of them, but suffice for now to say that, while the immediate causes of each varied, they generally involved the lack of availability of credit. Sound familiar? The 1837 one was really serious and unfairly tarnished the Presidency of Martin Van Buren, but most people don't remember it . . . or Martin.

The basic point is that, prior to the Great Depression, they generally lasted 2-4 years, the exception being 1837, which the economy didn't really come out of until 1843. But the most important lesson is that recovery from all of them preceding the one in 1929 was driven by the private sector. The stock market crash of 1929 was the first that elicited massive government intervention in a vain attempt to end, or at least mitigate it. And, son-of-a-gun, that was the longest one of the bunch. Coincidence? Historians and economists (including FDR's Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau) now generally agree that the massive government spending programs did little to end the Great Depression. We can thank the Japanese on 12/7/41 for that.

In the days when people didn't even have indoor plumbing and they were actually self-reliant, there was the expectation that if they wanted to improve their lives, they would have to do it -- the government wasn't going to do it for them. People in the cities and countryside had no expectation that the government would help them out in the event of natural disasters, crop failures, financial hardship, or pretty much anything else. The Federal government didn't help re-build Chicago after the spasm of Mrs O'Leary's cow, Galveston after the 1900 hurricane, San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire, not to mention countless other smaller disasters. Can you imagine the havoc wrought by Civil War battles waged on private property (which most were)? Those property owners were on their own. The general attitude was that the more government stayed out of the way, the better. In fact, the US has historically enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world (indoor toilets or not), and the single biggest reason is the historically unfettered capitalist system it enjoys . . . or used to.

I suppose it's human nature that, as prosperity increases and sight is progressively lost of the relative hard times of our ancestors, standards naturally rise and our tolerance for hardship decreases. The size of government grew considerably as a result of the Civil War -- the first military draft, the first income tax, and a general expansion which, in the heat of the moment, was deemed necessary. After the Civil War the economy was still largely unregulated and boomed with industrialization, westward expansion, etc. By the 1880's industrialization had created distasteful by-products such as child labor and bad working conditions for low wages. There had always been this sort of thing, but by now the populace was well-off enough that they no longer wanted to put up with it . . . even tho these conditions were largely borne by recent immigrants happily fleeing even grimmer ones and (by their standards) happy just to have a shot at the American Dream. So we began to have laws establishing labor standards (wasn't any longer good enough that if the workers didn't like it they could quit and take another job), anti-trust laws, etc.

By the time the 1920's rolled around and folks had a taste of unprecedented prosperity, there was no way they could tolerate the slide into Depression that ensued. While one cannot objectively fault FDR for most of what he did to help alleviate the suffering, it was ineffective in ending the Depression, and there is no doubt that the growth of government, regulation, and the birth of the nanny state had a long-term dampening effect on free, entreprenurial enterprise. The lesson is that we are better off taking our medicine and getting over it, than paying the long-term negative economic price.

Among the alphabet agencies creating by the New Deal were the FHA and FNMA (Fannie Mae), the purpose of which was to allow people to buy homes who otherwise couldn't qualify. The reason they couldn't qualify is that bankers, lending the money their depositors had entrusted to them, didn't find them to be a good credit risk. Hello? This was really the beginning of the credit economy and the problems we're having today. Thru FHA and FNMA the taxpayers, in effect, guaranteed those less-than-credit-worthy loans and, with several steps in between, it is now the taxpayers who are being whacked by them. "Big Government" essentially absolved the lenders of the risk as an inducement to them to make loans they wouldn't otherwise make, thus throwing the controls of the free market out of whack. I discuss the current crisis elsewhere, but this was the ultimate root . . . just like the Japanese kicking the Europeans out of Japan in 1621 was the ultimate root of the Pearl Harbor attack (see my article "The Other Reasons Japan Lost the War"). As Abe Maslow postulated, as standards rise, problems needing attention that have always existed, now appear serious enough to be addressed, mostly for lack of comparison with the previously-solved ones. Current examples that come to mind are "affordable health care for all" (the affordability problems with health care began with the government intervention of Lyndon Johnson), elimination of poverty, and "a college education for all" (a dumb goal on several levels). At some point, this implied pursuit of perfection becomes counter-productive. The US is past that point.

The United States has morphed into something approaching what the Founders would consider a nanny-state, where the Federal Government is expected to make everything nice -- hurricane in New Orleans, fires, floods -- heck, if you wake up with a hangnail you can probably get a Federal Disaster Declaration. In fact, the Founders would wonder why we think we have any problems, except that the taxes and regulations that result from a sprawling Federal government, which has its tentacles into every aspect of life for the ostensible purpose of eliminating the risk we run by being alive and driving to zero every perceived imperfection, are like a wet blanket on entrepreneurship, investment, risk, and free enterprise generally. After all if, having risked it all to produce that new invention and the thing actually succeeds, you're going to have to give half of what you make to the government to coddle those who have risked nothing, why bother?

As I pointed out earlier, I'm not sure that this progression is avoidable. For one thing, when the crisis arises, it always seems much more serious and “unprecedented” than it does in retrospect, and the addition of yet another cannon seems an obvious remedy; secondly, the politicians must be seen as "doing something about it". The notion of letting the system work itself out is anathema to them, as they must be in a position to take credit when the crisis ends (which it probably would sooner without them), in addition to which the public no longer has the patience to let the system work. It isn't clear to me that the public understands that the eventual price for the instant gratification of government tinkering with the Golden Egg is the death of the Goose.