English Takes A Beating

Title: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Rating: 3 Stars

I’ve taken a couple of Great Courses taught by the linguist John McWhorter. They were two of my favorite courses. He takes the extremely complex subject of linguistics and makes it accessible. He takes examples from a breathtakingly vast array of languages. Beyond the sheer breadth of his knowledge, he has a dry wit that I find very entertaining. My enjoyment of his lecture series was the impetus for me to try one of his books.

Since the subject was English, the breadth of this book is much narrower than his lecture series. Even so, his lecture style translated quite well to the written word. He still inserts offbeat personal anecdotes for amusement. Although speaking of the development of English, he did manage to insert examples from such languages as Proto Indo-European, Icelandic, German, Old English, Welsh, Old Norse, Cornish, and, believe it or not, Phoenician. That’s not even a close to a complete list. 

The book is broken into five essays, some of which are more closely linked than others. He tries to answer two questions. One is rebutting the idea that English as it’s been recently morphing is going downhill. We no longer speak ‘proper’ English and we should feel bad about ourselves for this deficiency. The other (and related question) is how did we get from Old English to Middle English (which put us on the pathway to our current English) anyway?

He has his own ideas regarding how this happened, and in so doing, he kind of takes some shots at other linguistic theories. What he says makes perfect sense and perhaps the shots are justified, but I don’t have a horse in this race. One of the reasons that I didn’t give it a higher rating was because he spent, for me anyway, too much time trying to settle scores with these competing theories. It felt like a little too inside ivory tower office politics. 

Be that as it may, it’s an interesting question. How did Old English became Middle English? In some ways the language got more complex while in other ways it got much simpler. Especially compared to other Germanic languages, modern English appears almost streamlined. How did that happen?

Apparently one common theory is to blame the French. They conquered and took over rule of England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. In the span of about 150 years or so, they had such an influence over the development of the English language that it quickly morphed from Old English to Middle English.

McWhorter has several issues with that. First of all, that’s not nearly enough time for such significant changes to take root across the country. Secondly, the French pretty much kept to themselves. They were an small, insulated, ruling elite. Given the lack of anything approaching mass publishing and the nearly complete illiteracy of the country, even if they wanted, there was no way that they could have effected the change.

What’s misleading the conventional linguists (McWhorter believes) is their reliance upon the written record. It’s understandable why they do so since it’s not like there are audio recordings from the eleventh century. However, relying so heavily upon the written record is misleading because, as I just said, the people were primarily illiterate. Therefore, the people that were writing in Old English all of this time were the educated elite. As the educated elite, they continued to write in Old English even as the language was undergoing evolution.

I just read a history of WWII Japan. In Emperor Hirohito’s speech to the Japanese people where he announced that Japan was surrendering, he spoke in such a high style, royal, archaic dialect that the average Japanese actually had trouble understanding him. When reading Old English, it’s the same thing. What is being written on the page was not what was being said in the village.

In fact, the 150 year or so period of French rule had the effect of dislodging the elite writers of Old English. When English writing started again, it was a new generation of writers emboldened to write in a language closer to what was already being spoken. 

So McWhorter’s thesis is that Old English, like every language ever developed, was in a constant state of changes over the centuries. He sees two major events that had the largest impact.

One event brought about what he calls the ‘meaningless do’ and adding the ‘-ing’ present tense to verbs. For example, the question “Do you see what she is writing” is uniquely English. No other Germanic language has the equivalent of the word ‘do’ in this context. What does ‘do’ even do? What is its purpose? Secondly, no other Germanic language adds the -ing suffix to a present tense verb like writing. Languages just don’t randomly do this. How did it happen?

In the 5th Century AD, the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded England and basically took over. The current inhabitants, the Celts, were defeated. However, as McWhorter notes, it’s not like they were annihilated. The Celts were still there, living their lives. Not only that, but the Germanic and the Celtic tribes not only coexisted but intermingled. Over the centuries, the Germanic language of Old English was morphed by the Celtic languages of Welsh and Cornish. Interestingly, features of both of these languages, that are virtually unknown in other languages, include the equivalent of the ‘meaningless do’ and adding a suffix to the present tense of verbs.

A second question is regarding the simplicity of English. Along among the other Germanic languages, it is genderless (in fact, it’s about the only such language in Europe). In comparison to the other Germanic languages, its syntax is much simpler. Words like hither, thither, and whither disappeared and here, there, and whether are repurposed. How did this happen?

Starting in about the 9th century AD, the Vikings invaded England. Perhaps in the beginning these were primarily raids. Over time, Vikings came and stayed. They mingled and intermarried. As they did so, these Old Norse speakers were forced to adopt the languages of the much more numerous native inhabitants. As often happens when a group of non-native speakers adopt a new language, the resulting language that is actually spoken has some of its rough edges smoothed off. McWhorter believes that, over the centuries, this Viking influence resulted in a simplified English language.

This brings us to the present. We’re not getting dumber. We’re not getting less precise in our language. Instead, our language, as languages have always done, is undergoing change. Things that seem sacred to the English language will morph over time. Yes, there will be uptight prigs that will clutch their pearls and see in this the inevitable decline of our civilization.

However, I’m pretty sure that we’ll continue to carry on.

Crime Noir Hearts Of Darkness

Title: The Best Of Manhunt

Rating: 4 Stars

Manhunt was a pulp magazine started in 1953 that ran for about fifteen years. It positioned itself as a successor to the Black Mask magazine. Both specialized in hard-boiled crime noir fiction. The anthology that I read was probably about fifty short stories that appeared in Manhunt.

Usually, when I read a short story collection this large, the stories all kind of blend together. This did happen here, but I was impressed at the variety of stories that fell under the auspices of noir. I came in expecting that most of the stories would be the typical variety of the hard bitten detective being brought into a case by a femme fatale. After getting knocked on his head a couple of times, throwing down some whiskey, and shooting dead some bad guys, he would inevitably wrap up the case.

There were definitely cases like this here, but they were the minority.

There were stories involving gang members. In On The Sidewalk Bleeding, there was a teenager wearing a Royal gang jacket dying in an alley after being stabbed in a gang fight. We listen to his thoughts as he futilely tries to attract attention and confronts his fears of dying and death. In Pistol, a young new gang member, eager to prove his worth and masculinity to the other gang members, desperately tries to acquire a gun. In The Last Spin, two young members of competing gangs are forced to play Russian roulette. In so doing, they discover that they have a lot in common and establish a friendship, even as they keep adding bullets to the gun.

Many of the stories feature unexpected twists. Picture some bizarre combination of O Henry and Rod Serling. In The Quiet Room, a corrupt veteran detective makes a fortune by forcing underage women into prostitution and then blackmailing their customers. All goes well until his young daughter becomes ensnared. In Pigeon In An Iron Lung, a rich polio victim discovers that his wife is about to murder him. What can a helpless man in an iron lung do? You might be surprised.

There’s a number that are just dark and twisted. In The Day That It Began Again, a man decides that the only way to save his serial killing best friend is to become a serial killer himself. In Rat Hater, a man waits nineteen years to gruesomely avenge the gangland murder of his sister.

Femme fatales are a trope in crime noir. In a couple of stories here, the women move beyond the trope into the grotesque. In Hit And Run, a private detective witnesses a wealthy woman run over a man and flee. He tracks the woman down hoping to blackmail her. Instead, the woman, discovering that she has a decided taste for murder, pulls the detective into her web, and he has to take drastic actions to escape. Similarly, in Somebody’s Going To Die tonight, a man is being blackmailed by his partner. His wife convinces him to murder his partner. She enjoys it so much that the man comes home one day to discover her grooming another possible victim. He’s left with a choice. Who will be the next victim?

I wonder if the stories of these staid conventional women suddenly developing homicidal tendencies somehow speaks to the time in which they were written. In the early to mid 1950s, men have come home from war. Women who had experienced increased freedom during the war years were now supposed to be firmly ensconced in traditional family life and loving it. In this, what to all appearances, seems to be a stable society, could there have been lurking repressed frustrations?

Similarly, during post World War II, men were finding themselves in a new place. Yanked from the harsh realities of mortal combat and forced to find their way in the rigid, repressed society of the Eisenhower years (the film Best Years of Our Lives is still the best representation of this), could these stories have been an outlet? 

Looking on the 1950s from the point of view of the 2020s, even though I know better, I still think of them as being Leave it to Beaver and Happy Days. Reading these stories with their gothic plots, sexual freedom, extreme violence, and twisted morality, paints a very different portrait of the underbelly of the 1950s.

One final note. I’m now convinced that the ultimate noir author is David Goodis. Most famous for Shoot the Piano Player and Dark Passage, he is the master of the doomed protagonist. His stories are the darkest of noir. There really is no hope. The best case for the protagonist is a death with some kind of dignity. Here his work is well represented in Professional Man. A hit man moonlights as an elevator operator to cover his real job. He has a girlfriend. That is, until his crime boss orders that the hit man kills his girlfriend. He has a decision to make. Does he kill his girlfriend? If he does, how can he live with himself?

It is a grim story with a dark ending, as only Goodis can write it. As sometimes happens with him, if you squint carefully, you might see a very tiny sliver of light.

Noir at its best.

Tarantino Writes His Own Fanfiction

Title: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Rating: 3 Stars

Once I heard that Quentin Tarantino had written a novel called Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, I knew that I’d have to read it. I prepared for it by first re-watching the film (which I watched almost exactly two years ago and wrote about here).

What did I think about it? Well, my blog post kind of sums it up. It’s not original to me alas, it’s from a review of the novel written in the Evening Standard. It did read like fan fiction.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It did provide tight continuity between the film and the novel. Some situations and dialog were taken verbatim from the film. That in itself is interesting because some of the dialog quoted here was adlibbed by the actors. For instance, when Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt in the film) says to Rick Dalton (Leo DiCaprio), “Don’t forget that you’re Rick fucking Dalton”, that’s a Pitt adlib inspired by the time that a friend of his once told him that when he was in his doldrums that he was Brad Fucking Pitt.

The plot is pretty much the same between the two. In both cases, Rick Dalton is a once famed TV cowboy actor whose star has now faded. He’s reduced to taking heavy roles so that he can get his ass kicked by the current generation of TV stars. He’s not happy with his fall and is using alcohol to cushion it. His best (maybe only?) friend is his stuntman Cliff Booth.

There’s also the story of Sharon Tate, a young, beautiful and effervescent actor. She’s just emerging as a star and is just enjoying her moment. 

Finally, there’s the thread of Charlie Manson’s family living on a ranch that was once used as a setting for Western films.

These stories intersect when Cliff picks up the hitchhiking Pussycat, a young member of Manson’s family. He drives her to the ranch, a place that he knows well from his days working on Westerns. Another intersection point is that Dalton lives next door to Sharon Tate on the fated night that the Manson family decide to kill everyone at Tate’s house.

Since a novel can, by its length, provide more detail than a film, Tarantino does fill in some gaps.

For instance, we learn a lot more about Cliff Booth. It’s hinted in the film that he’s a war hero. This is explained in depth. He was basically a murdering machine, killing huge numbers of both Italians and Japanese. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, there were many times that he expected to die but he emerged from the war as a decorated war hero. In the film, it’s hinted that he might have killed his wife. In the book, he most definitely did kill his wife. Not only that, but there were a couple of low level Italian mobsters that were threatening him. He casually kills them and then gets away with it by playing the war hero card. In the film, he has a pit bull named Brandy. It’s extremely well trained. Here we get the backstory on Brandy as well. A fellow stuntman owed Cliff a lot of money. To help pay it off, he offered to set Cliff up with an unbeatable pit bull (Brandy) for dog fighting. Cliff agrees and he makes a small fortune having Brandy fight other dogs to the death. Only when it’s apparent that Brandy will probably die in her next fight does he finally stop fighting her (and kills his fellow stuntman in the process). So, although Cliff still has plenty of charm in the novel, it’s obvious that he’s not really a good man. It’s unclear whether the war changed him or if this was just his nature. 

Even more interesting is the fact that in the film, Cliff’s and Rick’s brutal killing of the Manson family members that originally intended to murder all at the Tate’s residence was the big closer. It was the last twenty minutes or so of the film and the extreme violence was reminiscent of the final Nazi death scene from Inglorious Basterds. It had the same feeling of fixing some historical wrong via extreme vengeance.

In the novel, this takes place, but it takes place in the middle of the novel and it is barely even described in an underwritten chapter.

Instead, the big finish is a scene between Rick and Trudi, the very adult eight year old actor that he’s working with on his TV show Lancer guest appearance. She takes acting very seriously, and in so doing, forces Rick to also take a closer look at his craft that he just takes for granted. The final scene in the book is them rehearsing a scene over the phone. In it, Rick, comes to an understanding and appreciation for the love that he has for acting.

So, instead of ending the film on some ultra violent act of vengeance, the novel ends with a sweet reckoning of acting professionals taking their job seriously and doing it well. The film felt like the depressing end of the peace and love sixties while the novel felt like a warm love of film.

I did enjoy reading the novel. It gets a one star demerit for being so self indulgent as to include an extended section involving Tarantino’s stepfather as well as an oblique reference to Tarantino himself. It didn’t add anything to include them. The second star demerit is because, when reading the novel, it is obvious that Tarantino is a screenwriter, not a novelist. 

Hollywood Sausage Making

Title: Pictures At A Revolution

Rating: 4 Stars

1967 was a pivotal year for Hollywood film making. Harris analyzes the year by taking a deep dive into the five Academy Award nominees of 1967.

By this time, Hollywood was in trouble. For decades, the industry had been run by what was called the studio system. There were a few major film studios. The head of each studio ran it with an iron fist. Actors, directors, and screenwriters had relatively little power. It was a hierarchical organization that stifled creativity.

They were also reeling from the aftermath of television. Since entertainment could be beamed into anyone’s homes, why would people even go out to movie houses? Deals were made to broadcast their movies on television, but it was no substitute for the movie box office.

For decades the film industry had been living under the Hays Code. Not only did the code forbid such seemingly obvious things like nudity but it also forbid topics like abortion and homosexuality. Criminals could not be portrayed sympathetically and all criminal actions must be punished. This was a further impediment to creativity.

Finally, desperate for a hit, a few years earlier they finally got one with The Sound Of Music. All of the studios instantly decided to make so-called road show movies. These were films that were at least two and a half hours long (to justify having an intro and an intermission) and were full of lavish scenes. Unfortunately they were very expensive to make so if the film flopped, the studios stood to lose a huge sum of money.

All of this put Hollywood films into a straitjacket. Besides the aforementioned spectacle musicals, about the only films coming out of the studio system were war movies and westerns.

Under no such constraints, European filmmakers blossomed. For example, the French New Wave films put out relatively low budget efforts that emphasized rich characters, morally complex situations, and adult situations containing sexuality. Freed from the Hollywood hierarchy, they also developed innovative film techniques.

These films showed up in the US in small art houses willing to show non Hays Code approved films. Young American film makers sat up and took notice. They began to clamor for the same artistic freedom that the Europeans had.

You see all of that in the best film nominees of 1967.

Representing the old way of doing business was the road show musical (and huge financial failure, a sign of things to come as other doomed musicals like Hello Dolly and Paint Your Wagon roll out) of Doctor Dolittle. Also in this category is Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, demonstrating Old Hollywood’s extremely cautious approach to race relations starring two products from the studio system Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn with Sydney Poitier reprising his standard (up to this point) role of the ‘Perfect Negro’ that only true racists could hate.

Representing New Hollywood was The Graduate and Bonnie And Clyde. The Graduate, starring the short, homely, and awkward anti-hero Dustin Hoffman, portrayed a generation coming of age with no interest or connection to the past. Bonnie And Clyde, with its explicit violence and glamorization of those consummate criminal anti-heroes, was even more rebellious than The Graduate.

Straddling the middle was In The Heat Of The Night. Once again, Sydney Poitier stars as a very professional police officer helping the local Southern sheriff (Rod Steiger), solve a murder. This is straddling the middle between New and Old Hollywood because even though Poitier, as in his earlier roles, is handsome (yet still essentially sexless) and radiating intelligence, is allowed to be angry and to show a more full range of emotions. In fact, in one scene, a white racist slaps Poitier’s character and he promptly slaps him back, shocking movie audiences.

This book talks about all of this. More interestingly, it talks about how these films were actually made. If you’re at all a film geek, you’ll find this interesting. Nearly all films took about five years to make. Watching producers going through the machinations of trying to find directors, only for them to drop out, trying to get funding, only for it to dry up, and trying to get actors, only for them to be not interested, is a fascinating process.

The sheer scale of Doctor Doolittle was amazing. Trying to corral all of these at best semi-trained wild animals in far away locations bedeviled by foul weather was a feat in of itself. On top of that, starring in the film was the severely alcoholic and emotionally volatile Rex Harrison. With Harrison was his wife at the time, Rachel Roberts, a person even more alcoholic and mentally unstable than Rex. A movie that was supposed to cost around six million dollars ending up costing closer to twenty. It seemed to be a disaster at nearly every step of the process.

Sadly, this year was to be the peak of Sydney Poitier. He was the top box office earner of the year. However, by this time his film roles that were more focused on assimilation as opposed to facing racism head on fell out of favor. Personally he became very active in the Civil Rights movement, but people just couldn’t see past his previous roles. He never reached that level of acclaim again.

Bonnie And Clyde made Warren Beatty very wealthy. Convinced that the film would flop, the studio gave Beatty a low salary but promised him 40% of the gross (yes, apparently the gross). The film grossed some 50 million dollars.

What happened in the years following?

By the late 1960s, the Hays Code wasn abolished in lieu of the ratings system that we still use today. Auteur filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Robert Altman, and Peter Bogdanovich were able to create films with their own unique visions. The era of complex, intelligent, and sophisticated films was upon us.

At least until Steven Spielberg created Jaws and George Lucas created Star Wars.

Oh well, it was good while it lasted. 

Telegraphed Plot Within A Telegraphed Plot

Title: The Plot

Rating: 3 Stars

The Plot tells the story of Jacob Finch Bonner. From a very early age, he always wanted to be a writer. His first novel received significant critical acclaim and positioned him as an up and coming young author. From then on, he struggled. His second effort was a collection of loosely linked short stories that was barely published with mediocre sales.

His third and fourth novels weren’t even published. Now in his later thirties, his writing career is at a standstill. No longer able to afford living in Manhattan, he’s taken a teaching position at a pretty low rent MFA program just to pay his bills. He barely even pretends to write anymore. It looks like his life path is defined for him. He’s going to be a second rate teacher working at second rate institutions.

One year, a student named Evan Parker appears. Rude and seemingly disinterested in writing, Bonner is confused why Parker is even attending the program. Parker claims that writing is irrelevant if you have a good enough plot. Bonner of course disagrees. In conversation, Parker, at first hesitantly, spells out the idea of the book that he wishes to write. Spellbound, Bonner, to his bitter chagrin, knows that the plot is a sure fire winner and that Parker, as obnoxious and uninterested as he is, is sure to be a best selling author.

Years pass by. Occasionally Bonner wonders why he hasn’t seen Parker’s book published. Bonner is at last inspired to do some research. He discovers that Parker actually died of a drug overdose a few short months after the they talked. He apparently has no family. There is no evidence that anyone knows about the book that Parker was planning to write.

After just a bit of hesitation, Bonner leaps at the opportunity. He takes Parker’s plot and makes it his own. As expected, the book becomes wildly successful. It goes through many printings. It has been optioned off to an A-List film director. Bonner is on a national book tour full of adoring fans. He has the life that he has dreamed about.

That is, until an e-mail pops up in his inbox accusing him of fraud. Someone out there knows about Parker and his plot and that Bonner has stolen it.

Who is this person? What are they capable of? Will Bonner’s secret be exposed?

At the same time that we are discovering this, excerpts from Bonner’s best selling book are included, so we have a book within a book.

This is far as I’m going to go, plot wise. As should be expected, there are plot twists both within the book as well as within the book within.

The book was well written. It was clever. I enjoyed reading it. I’d recommend that other people read it.

So why 3 stars?

There are a couple of reasons. First of all, Bonner’s not that great of a protagonist. He’s a pretty bland guy. He’s actually kind of obnoxious as well. Not quite obnoxious enough to be an anti-hero, but obnoxious enough that I didn’t really care what happened to him.

Secondly, the stakes just don’t seem all that high to me. So what if he wrote a novel based upon the plot that a dead guy told him? It’s not plagiarism. He didn’t steal his words. Writers are understandably paranoid about sharing their plots with others, but again, Parker is dead. He doesn’t care.

Bonner keeps referring to the real world case of James Frey. That’s a bad comparison because Frey was accused of fabricating chunks of his memoir. That is a completely different thing than what Bonner did.

It seems to me that, worse comes to worse, Bonner can say, yeah, this dead guy that never wrote a book told me a plot that I used to write my own book. Embarrassing sure, but not career ending. I just don’t see the hazard here.

Finally, and this is the big one. I enjoy reading mysteries with twists and turns. However, I’m not at all good at predicting these twists and turns. I’m OK with that because it makes my reading experience that much more enjoyable.

In The Plot, the twists, both within the Bonner plot as well as in his book plot, were so obvious that even I picked up on them well before they happened. Considering that the whole point of The Plot is that Parker had some sublimely insane plot that was a surefire gang buster, the fact that it seemed obvious did not work in its favor.

In my opinion, Parker’s plot would have been better handled as a MacGuffin. For those not familiar, a MacGuffin is a plot device that’s critical but fades in importance. I don’t think that Parker’s plot should have been ever spelled out. The reader should have been left wondering what this amazing plot could have been. Of course, doing so would have changed the entire book because knowledge of the plot is what drives the plot centered around Bonner. 

When a plot is sold so strongly, I would have liked it to have been a bit stronger.

The Price Of Unconditional Surrender

Here are some more thoughts about World War II that came up while reading The Rising Sun by John Toland. 

One of the more controversial decisions that was made during the war was the use of nuclear weapons. The fact that this decision was even contemplated shows how far all powers had moved to the concept of total war. In the early days of the war, believe it or not, there was a general understanding that civilian populations were not to be intentionally bombed.

That was certainly laid to rest when Nazi Germany bombed London during the Blitz. The English Bomber Harris and the American Curtis LeMay made sure that the Axis countries were more than paid in kind with the destruction of their population centers. It didn’t help matters that the Japanese, in response to having their manufacturing plants destroyed, decentralized their manufacturing into very small shops located in their citizens’ homes. This was the fig leaf necessary for LeMay to claim that all civil population centers were valid military targets.

By the time that LeMay was done, there was virtually nothing left of Tokyo. One of the reasons that Tokyo was not chosen as a nuclear target was because it was already devastated. 

The question was, did dropping the nuclear weapons shorten the war and save lives? 

On the one hand, it certainly appears so. If the Okinawa battle was a preview, it was going to be horrendous, especially if you consider that Japanese really didn’t consider Okinawa as part of the real Japan. There were millions of soldiers on the Japan islands ready to repel all invaders. There were tens of millions of other auxiliaries, sometimes armed with only bamboo spears. There were plans to sacrifice all one hundred million Japanese citizens in some grand heroic gesture. Although hundreds of thousands of people died in the two nuclear blasts, a credible case can be made that an invasion would have results in millions of deaths.

But…

The Japanese government understood that the war was lost. Except for some rabid lower officers, most of the military, especially the senior military officers, knew that the war was lost. Even the Emperor, who was steadfast about never interfering in the function of government, now was speaking up in meetings to demand (at least as much as a soft spoken man who only spoke in vague generalities could demand) to end the war.

The Japanese were actively sending out peace feelers. They tried to make contact with the Soviets (who had not yet entered the war against them) as well as neutrals such as the Swiss. The Japanese knew that they were going to suffer harsh peace terms and were willing to suffer them. They knew that they’d give up all of their territorial gains. They knew that they would have to effectively de-militarize. This they were all willing to contemplate.

There was one thing that they could not contemplate. They could never accept the removal of the Emperor. In fact, they were concerned (and according to some US survey results, rightly so) that the Emperor would be condemned as a war criminal and would be executed. Since the Emperor was the symbol of the state and of the Japanese people and was thought of as a living god, this was unthinkable.

At the Casablanca conference in 1943, the Allied leaders decided that unconditional surrender was the only way to end the war. They were trying to learn lessons from World War I. With the WWI Armistice, since essentially all of the fighting had taken place off German soil, German citizens never really felt that they lost the war. So, when the harsh terms of Versailles were delivered, Germans felt that their nation had been treated unjustly. With WWII, there would be no questions who were the victors and who were the conquered.

Unconditional surrender meant exactly that. When the Japanese sent out their peace feelers, their only real condition was that the Emperor still maintain his role. This condition was deemed unacceptable.

Mere days after this negotiation, the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. At that point, Japan had no choice but to surrender unconditionally.

Here’s the thing. Emperor Hirohito was never tried as a war criminal. He was never hung. He kept his throne. He ruled for 40 more years after WWII. In fact, his grandson is reigning as the current Emperor.

The one thing that the Japanese were holding out for was exactly the one thing that they ended up with. If you read about postwar Japan, you’ll see that Douglas MacArthur, the Allied occupation leader, never seriously contemplated treating Hirohito as a war criminal. He understood that Hirohito’s continuing role was critical for the successful rebuilding of Japan.

Given that Hirohito was going to continue in his role of Emperor anyway, what was the point of insisting upon unconditional surrender?

If dropping a couple nuclear weapons saved millions of lives, how many more lives could have been saved if the Allied powers hadn’t insisted on unconditional surrender?

How would our world be different today if the US had not dropped nuclear weapons on civilians?

Not All Histories Are Written By The Victors

Title: The Rising Sun

Rating: 5 Stars

I’ve read a couple of books about World War 2. Usually, they are written from the point of view of an American or British historian writing about British or American soldiers. John Toland was an American historian. However, for The Rising Sun, he interviewed hundreds of Japanese generals, politicians, soldiers, and civilians. He spent fifteen months travelling around the Far East researching his history. Although he does cover American politics and generalship, for the most part, this history is told through the viewpoint of the Japanese nation.

Just to be clear, it’s not a biased history trying to justify Japan’s actions. It discusses, among other things, the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, and what even some Japanese saw as the dishonorable attack on Pearl Harbor.

Even so, it does give the war a fresh perspective. You leave with a deeper understanding of what motivated the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor (this was discussed in my most recent blog post). You develop a deeper understanding of why Japanese soldiers were so motivated to fight to the last man and why even when defeat was inevitable, that there were plans being made to sacrifice the entire nation of 100 million.

This is a pretty mammoth book. It runs to some 1200 pages. My edition came in two volumes. Toland covers the tumultuous years before World War II, the fighting during the war, and its immediate aftermath. Understandably it’s difficult to sum up 1200 pages in one blog post, so if you have an interest in World War II or of Japanese history, I’d strongly recommend this book. Instead of summarizing, I’m going to describe some of the more interesting things that I read.

The war in the Pacific started with the Second Sino-Japanese War. This is way more complex than I ever imagined. At the time, Japan had already invaded Manchuria and Northern China. The Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek were trying to unify the country. The communists were trying to create a communist state. China still had local warlords that ruled over parts of the country. At any given point in time, two or three of these different entities would be battling each other in one part of the country while a different set would be fighting in a different part.

The Second Sino-Japanese War started with an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge. The Nationalists were facing a Japanese force. Shots were fired at the Japanese from the Nationalist forces. Hostilities died down. The Nationalists then fired on the Japanese again. Things died down again. This continued until the Japanese had enough and attacked the Nationalist force. This set off events that resulted in a full war between Japan and China. Even though China is much larger in both size and population, it was actually much weaker. This made Japan look like the aggressor nation (and once the war started, they were definitely the brutal aggressor). This provoked widespread global condemnation and was one of the key events that led to sanctions and embargoes on Japan. These in turn led Japan to believe that its existence as a first tier nation was in doubt and was a huge factor in striking unexpectedly at Pearl Harbor.

Here’s the thing. There’s a chance that it was Chinese communists that were firing on the Japanese. They fired on the Japanese hoping that the Japanese would react and destroy the Nationalists, paving the way for the communists to take over China. It could be said that the Pacific part of WWII was started by a couple communists trying to pull a fast one over on their Nationalist opponents.

Another reason why the Japanese felt the need to be more aggressive was its population. One of the side effects of its rapid modernization was a dramatic increase in its population. At the time of the war, it had a population of one hundred million living on a series of islands that were collectively about the size of California. The Japanese leadership felt a dire need to gain additional territory to meet its growing population. That was one of the reasons behind Japan invading and taking over Manchuria. I found that interesting because ‘Lebensraum’ (eg living space) was one of the key reasons that Hitler invaded Russia. Hitler wanted to have countries such as Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus emptied of their inhabitants and replaced with Germans because Germany needed that space for its growing population.

The Japanese military was almost obsessively offensive. Their credo was centered around fighting some great decisive battle. At the individual level, everyone was encouraged to great acts of valor and, if necessary, willingly go to your death in the name of the Emperor.

While this led to great success in the aggressive early stages of the war, it did lead to problems later. For a war of any duration (and the Japanese knew that the US wouldn’t easily surrender), logistics and supply become crucial. However, supply is not heroic. Protecting a transport ship isn’t going to lead a sailor to a great decisive battle. In fact, the Japanese didn’t do a good job of protecting transports and supply. Once the US regained its footing and was able to project an offensive force in the Pacific, these ships became easy pickings. It wasn’t until late in the war that supply ships traveled in battleship protected convoys. Japanese admirals looked upon such duty as being beneath them. Even more weirdly, Japanese admirals looked upon attacking unarmed Allied supply ships as also being beneath them. So, while Japanese supplies were under constant threat, Allied shipping was relatively much safer.

Given the supply problems that Japan was already facing, not protecting its supply ships was a terrible mistake. The Japanese troops never had enough men, weapons, and material (like food). This was especially true in comparison to the US. Once it cranked up its war economy, the US soldiers were, relatively speaking, abundantly supplied with material. The comparison between the two military supply situations is stark.

One final interesting side effect that I hadn’t previously read about was the result of Japan losing so many of its experienced pilots in the relatively early stages of war. Japan just wasn’t able to replace them as easily. They were so low on fuel that they couldn’t afford to give new pilots adequate training. While US pilots took years to train and entered battle for the first time with a lot of flight hours, Japanese pilots by contrast were trained in the 1940s equivalent of a simulator where they watched videos demonstrating how to fight and bomb. This made them less effective combat pilots than the US pilots. By 1943 or so, the US pretty much had command over the air.

I knew about some of that. What was new was the fact that since these pilots were so inexperienced, the pilots that survived and returned back to base, not knowing any better, would report wildly inaccurate details of the attack. The pilots would report numerous carriers, battleships, and destroyers sunk when in fact possibly one cruiser might have been sunk.

These reports were taken at face value. The Japanese press would publish great victories that were actually staggering defeats. The military leaders also took them at face value. In battles of the later part of the war, plans were made assuming that the US navy had been effectively neutralized. They would plan expecting to face one carrier group when in fact there were three carrier groups still in the area. Of course, such false assumptions virtually removed any chance of success. In particular, when the US was in the process of taking back the Philippines, the Japanese leadership there suffered from monumentally bad intelligence.

OK, I think that I’ve written enough right now. I might post on this subject again if I get time in the next day or two. If any of this sounds interesting to you, I’d strongly advise you to consider looking into Toland’s book.

Luckiest Unluckiest Man Ever

I’ve been reading a Japanese history covering the World War II period and I encountered the story of Calvin Graef. I have dubbed him the luckiest unluckiest man to ever live.

He was a soldier during World War II. Stationed in the Philippines, he was part of the defending force when Japan invaded in December of 1941. Captured, he was forced on the Bataan Death March. Surviving that, he then spent three years suffering in a Japanese POW camp. At that camp, many of the other prisoners died from malnutrition, malaria, dysentery, or torture. By the time 1944 came around, it was clear that Japan was losing the war. MacArthur, as promised, did indeed return to the Philippines. Facing defeat but still hoping to use the POW’s as a negotiating chip, the Japanese military herded 1,805 prisoners onto a transport headed for Japan. This ship was a death trap. The prisoners were stuck in overheated unsanitary cargo holds with very little food and water. Tragically, the Japanese ship was torpedoed by a US submarine and it sunk. Graef was onboard in the hold.

So far, Graef seems like a very unlucky guy, right? In fact, he seems to be tragically unlucky.

But wait.

Out of the 1,805 soldiers on the ship, only five survived. Graef was one of those survivors. It still looked pretty grim for him. He was adrift out in the middle of the sea. He managed to survive the first night by clinging onto wreckage.

When all hope seemed lost, Graef and his fellow survivors found a lifeboat. That’s good but when you’re trapped in the middle of the ocean, what use is a lifeboat without fresh water? Regardless, they swam to the lifeboat. Once they climbed in, they discovered that it had a keg of fresh water.

That’s really great news! However, they were still trapped in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean without food. The rudder on the lifeboat wasn’t working. Searching through the raft to try to repair it, they discovered a small compartment that contained a sealed tin of hardtack. From escaping from a sinking boat to a lifeboat that had both fresh water and food was hugely lucky.

Still, they were stuck out in the middle of the sea in a lifeboat with no way to get to shore. They were in a perilous situation. As they were contemplating this, a box floated near their lifeboat. They hauled it in. It just happened to contain pulleys and riggings that exactly matched their boat. That’s awesome but all of that would be pretty useless without a mast. Well, hours ago, someone had retrieved a pole. When they decided to check the pole, it turned out to be the very mast of the lifeboat that they were on!

There’s no way that their luck would continue to hold, right? Their luck changed when they were just about to hoist a sail on their mast to sail to China. A Japanese destroyer came within one hundred yards of their boat. Once again, they appeared doomed. For some unfathomable reason, the destroyer continued on without firing on the lifeboat.

Surviving that, they set sail to China. After a couple of days of sailing, their prospects again looked grim. They had no maps. How were they to find their way to China? Well, in that vast sea, they ran into a junk of Chinese fishermen. They were picked up by the fishermen and were taken back to the coast.

They still weren’t out of danger. By this time, China and Japan had been at war for many years. In 1944, most of the Chinese coast was in Japanese hands, so it looked like they were going to survive their journey just to be prisoners again.

However, the Chinese fishermen landed them on the only area along the coast held by Chinese nationals.

There you have it. After having been taken prisoner, enduring the Bataan Death March, been held prisoner for three years, been put on a prisoner ship, and then having that ship be torpedoed and sunk, Graef managed to survive the night, get a raft, get fresh water, get food, get sailing equipment, get a mast, avoid getting shot up by a destroyer, sail semi-randomly to China, get picked up by friendly fishermen, and was deposited on the only part of the coast that was safe for him to land.

Calvin Graef, the man who enjoyed some truly amazing good luck after enduring three years of catastrophically bad luck, not only survived this 1944 adventure but ended up dying in 1997 at the ripe old age of 84.