The Royal Australian Navy suffered one of its worse losses in WWII on 19 November 1941, when the light cruiser HMAS Sydney II with all 645 men on board went down in action against the German auxiliary cruiser/raider Kormoran off the west coast of Australia. The Komoran was also sunk in the same action.

In August of 2005, the Australian Government approved a $1.3 million grant to fund a search for the sunken cruiser.

Reuters reports the latest strange plot twist in the search.

Australian defense officials said a navy team had this month exhumed the remains of an unknown sailor buried in an unmarked grave on Christmas Island, remains long thought to be those of a Sydney crewman.

Islanders have said the unmarked grave contained the remains of a man dressed in a blue boilersuit which washed up in a navy liferaft in February 1942.

A complete skeleton of what appeared to be a relatively young Caucasian male has been recovered along with other items and been sent for analysis.

“The most interesting find to date has been what appears to be a bullet wound in the skull and a small caliber round that is currently undergoing detailed analysis,” team leader Captain Jim Parsons said in a statement.

“This round appears to be from a low-velocity weapon, possibly a handgun,” he said.

Hat tip to John Ray.

Jules Crittenden in the Boston Herald identifies exactly the same mistake, which folly goes back to Lyndon Johnson and before him to Harry Truman: half-measures and the failure to mobilize the whole of the nation in the war effort, in a democracy like ours, will result in a continual erosion of public support, if victory is not achieved over a very short interval of time.

Prosecution of any war will always be opposed by a radical and pacifist fringe, who will quickly attract the support of the community of fashion, which is always in search of a cause. Once that alliance is organized and in operation, the general public will be subjected to an endless barrage of whingeing and anti-war propaganda, which in the end will demoralize the general public. Normal people will insist the war be abandoned, in the end, simply because they are so terribly, terribly sick of listening to the Left.

Five years on, some people remain unaware that this is war; that we are facing an enemy that will do anything in its power to destroy us.

The fact that on any given day we are free to fly around the world, drive our cars without restriction and buy as much food as we like in rich variety seems to have confused them.

The lack of U-boats attacking the shipping lanes has lulled some people into thinking this is not actually a war. Not a real war, certainly not a good war, not like World War II. They mock the very notion that it is a war, having fun with the name “Global War on Terror.” They put forward the notion that, like almost everything else in our American lives, this thing that has been called a war is a choice. A bad choice.

Who can blame them? Even fighting in this war, unlike most of the great wars our that threatened our existence in the past, is a choice made by a small percentage of Americans who have joined the Armed Forces.

George Bush, while announcing that we were at war five years ago, made a decision to encourage Americans to go about their business as usual. Rather than mobilizing the country for war, he decided he could fight this unconventional war by unconventional means, and with the forces already at hand. Normalcy had its uses as a weapon. It showed that our enemy could not hobble us.

In other respects, it was a mistake…

Bush chose not to treat this as total war, insisting it could be done with some finetuning of the resources at hand. His domestic opposition has taken that idea several steps farther, insisting Islamic terrorism is a police problem that does not require military force and certainly not the suspension of some legal niceties. After all, they do not consider it an actual war of the sort faced by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt when they destroyed cities and imprisoned anyone who threatened the security of the nation.

Ironically, Bush has been so effective with his approach, that there has not been an attack on the mainland United States since 9-11. That has allowed his opposition to maintain that all the unpleasant things Bush has had to do domestically and abroad are unnecessary, or the very least excessive. They’ve had the freedom to nitpick at the execution of the war, expressing indignation at every misstep, while ignoring major accomplishments, which they see after all as the accomplishments of an unnecessary war based on global intelligence failures that, in hindsight, they cast as lies.

Sisyphus imagines today’s left responding to the WWII D-Day Invasion:

11. No blood for French Wine!

10. It’s been two and a half years since Pearl Harbor and they still haven’t brought Admiral Nagumo to justice

9. In 62 years, the date will be 6/6/6. A coincidence? I think not.

8. All this death and destruction is because the neo-cons are in the pocket of Israel

7. The soldiers are still on the beach, this invasion is a quagmire

6. Sure the holocaust is evil, but so was slavery

5. We are attacked by Japan and then attack France? Roosevelt is worse than the Kaiser!

4. Why bring democracy to Europe by force and not to Korea or Vietnam? I blame racism

3. This war doesn’t attack the root causes of Nazism

2. I support the troops, but invading Germany does not guarantee that in 56 years we won’t have a President who’s worse than Hitler

1. I don’t see Roosevelt or Churchill storming the beaches — they’re Chicken Hawks

William G. Zincavage (25 Apr 1914 -2 Nov 1997)
USMCR 4 Sep 1942 – 16 Dec 1945.

Corporal, Third Marine Division, Special Troops

First Marine Amphibious Corps – Solomon Islands Consolidation, New Georgia Group Operation, 1943
Third Marine Amphibious Corps – Marianas Operation, 1944
Fifth Marine Amphibious Corps – Iwo Jima Operation, 1945

A story in the Observer reveals that Clint Eastwood has been directing two Iwo Jima films, both to be released later this year.

(Its author, Justin McCurry, is a seriously annoying pommy twit who applies a leftwing slant to every detail of the news story.)

The first film will be based on James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers, a history of the battle focused on the famous Marines’ flag-raisings on Mount Suribachi, one of which was captured in the famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal.

The second film, focusing on the Japanese point of view, will be titled Red Sun, Black Sand.

Japanese Iwo Jima veterans who met Eastwood say they are confident the films will honour their fallen comrades. ‘I asked him to make a human drama, not a war film,’ said 83-year-old Kiyoshi Endo, of the Japanese Iwo Jima Veterans’ Association. ‘I wanted him to show how the soldiers felt when they were fighting and, having read the script, I think he has done that. Who won or lost is not the point.’

The Japanese Iwo Jima Veterans’ Association must be a pretty small group.

Those of us on the Right often contrast the patriotism of the British and American intelligentsia and media during WWII with the open treason and defeatism which have since become de rigeur fashion accessories for the same classes of society.

The joke is on us. British philosopher A.C Grayling turns the WWII patriotism meme on its head by systematically applying to Allied war policies in WWII the same sort of scrupulous ethicism, combined with Olympian neutrality of personal perspective, today’s treasonous clerks customarily apply to current events.

Allied bombing attacks on enemy civilian population centers (surprise! surprise!) are judged unnecessary and wrong. He’s right, of course, but (though I have not yet received my copy, and therefore not read his book) I doubt very seriously that he has fully addressed the reasons for the adoption by civilized countries of that lamentable war tactic, or done justice to just how far beyond the same kind of standards Germany and Japan by deliberate and conscious policy proceeded.

Mr. Grayling has, undoubtedly, also scanted the attention due to the interesting question of the ethics of publishing a monograph of this kind, addressing these kinds of issues and reaching these conclusions, in time of war, when his countrymen are fighting overseas.

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height.

–Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1.

Victor Davis Hanson imagines WWII, as reported in the manner of today’s American MSM.

The Present Debacle

May 21, 1945 — After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on Okinawa, we are asked to accept recent losses that are reaching 20,000 dead brave American soldiers and yet another 50,000 wounded in these near criminally incompetent campaigns euphemistically dubbed “island hopping.”

Meanwhile, we are no closer to victory over Japan. Instead, we are hearing of secret plans of invasion of the Japanese mainland slated for 1946 or even 1947 that may well make Okinawa seem like a cake walk and cost us a million casualties and perhaps involve a half-century of occupation. The extent of the current Kamikaze threat, once written off as the work of a “bunch of dead-enders,” was totally unforeseen, even though such suicidal zealots are in the process of inflicting the worst casualties on the U.S. Navy in its entire history.

Worse still, our sources in the intelligence community speak of a billion-dollar boondoggle now underway in the American southwest. This improbable “super-weapon” (with the patently absurd name “Manhattan Project” — in the midst of a desert no less!) promises in one fell swoop to erase our mistakes and give us instant deliverance from our blunders — no concern, of course, for the thousands of innocents who would be vaporized if such a monstrous fantasy bomb were ever actually to work.

We are only now coming off even more terrible losses in Europe, after being surprised by a supposedly defeated enemy in the Ardennes where another 20,000 Americans were killed and another 60,000 wounded or missing — again, due to our continued strategic incompetence and abject intelligence failures. Macabre reports of American bazooka shells bouncing off German Tiger tanks and our Shermans ablaze like Ronson lighters have only now come to light as we plow the Belgium countryside for yet another new American war cemetery. Tragically, this is not the first, but the fourth year of this war, when victory rather than endless bloodshed has been long promised.

A number of issues arise. Why is Henry Stimson (“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”) still Secretary of War? After the debacles at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines tragedy, the Kasserine Pass disaster, the unforeseen bocage in Normandy, the Falaise Gap escape, the Anzio mess, the fatal detour to Rome, the surprise at the Bulge, the bloodbath at Tarawa, and now the Iwo Jima and Okinawa nightmares, is not five years of his incompetence and arrogance enough? A number of our retired generals seems to agree, who have recently bravely come forward to remind us that Sec. Stimson long ago tried to dismantle key elements of our intelligence services, attempted to curtail the operational command of our Army Air Corps generals in conducting bombings of Europe, and has on more than one occasion intervened to remove targets from Gen. LeMay’s campaign over Japan.

As we see thousands of Americans dying and our enemies still in power after four years of war, it is also legitimate to question the stewardship of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall. The Sherman tank tragedy, the daylight bombing fiasco, the absence of even minimally suitable anti-tank weapons and torpedoes — all these lapses came on his watch, and the man at the top must take full responsibility for mistakes that have now cost thousands of American lives. Indeed, it is not just that America has worse tanks and guns than our German enemies, but they are inferior even to the rockets and armor of our Soviet allies. The recent publication of “The Sherman Tank Scandal” follows other revelations published in “Asleep at the Philippines,” “The Flight of Gen. MacArthur,” “Gen. Patton and the Atrocities on Sicily,” “Do Americans Execute P.O.Ws?” “Torture on Guadalcanal,” “Incinerating Women and Children?” and “Civilian Massacres in Germany” — publications in their totality that suggest a military out of control as often as it is incompetent…

Recently we have learned that President Roosevelt, the former law school dropout, once again has violated basic freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. Supposed German suspects were subject to military tribunals, tried in secret, and then executed. Tens of thousands of Italians, Germans, and Japanese war-captives are detained in hundreds of American prison compounds, without charges and often in secret. How many were truly captured in uniform, and under what conditions, is never disclosed.

Unfortunately this violation of American values comes not in isolation, but on the heels of the unlawful internment of thousands of American citizens in Western concentration camps, the cover-up of the Cobra disaster in Normandy and the criminally negligent killing of General McNair, and still more rumors that hundreds of American soldiers perished in secret in training exercises on the eve of the Normandy invasion. Yet, the American people to this day have no precise idea how many of their enlisted men and officers have been killed, much less where they perished or how.

Indeed, what little we know comes to light only due to the brave efforts of a few unnamed operatives in the Office of Strategic Services who have in secret provided such information concerning patently illegal activities to the responsible news organizations.