MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-01-22 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] well,
|
>
> And, Rubin, in addition to just being roundly annoyed that someone
> epically, astonishingly incompetent and tempermentally disastrous ended
> up in the highest office in the Executive Branch, here's the thing that
> I wonder about: Just a single day of his presidency has motivated a
> totally unprecedented number of women to mob D.C. and start getting very
> serious about impeding his expected misrule -- and this is a guy who
> lashes out against the _tiniest_ perceived insult, who can never let the
> tiniest thing go, ever. So, what's he going to be like after a year of
> this? Because it all looks to get a whole lot worse from here. The
> orange clown is going to go absolutely _nuts_.
>
Yeah, I agree. He will not survive if he doesn't learnt to shut up and
let things be. Let them protest until they turn blue and burn themselves
out. He should understand that their protesting is a good thing. It
means he is getting things done.
BTW - it is not going to get worst from here. The sky is blue and
sanity has taken hold in Washington while the crazy people protest.
One more thing. Your long and intersting post on US defenses after
Pearl Harbor is all 20/20 hindsite.
There was a real threat of an attack on the West Coast, although I
agree that the attack on Pearl Harbor sealed the fate of Japan, but it
was at a huge coast to the US (and the rest of the world). The same was
true in the Civil War. In the end, the South had no means of winning,
even from the start, as long as the North chose to remain in the
conflict.
I'll quote this source, because I don't feel like typing the details
from Seymour Friedmans text by hand:
Until the Japanese attacked in the Pacific, the United States had
counted on its Hawaiian bastion and on the Pacific fleet to provide a
secure barrier against any serious attack on the continental west coast.
After Pearl Harbor it seemed, at the outset, that this barrier had been
broken and that the 1,300-mile length of the west coast could be
attacked by the Japanese in strength and almost at will. The most vital
installations along this coast were military aircraft factories that had
sprung up during the prewar years at Los Angeles and San Diego in the
south and at Seattle in the north. In December 1941 nearly half of the
American military aircraft production (and almost all of the heavy
bomber output) was coming from eight plants in the Los Angeles area. The
naval yards and ship terminals in the Puget Sound, Portland, San
Francisco Bay, Los Angeles, and San Diego areas, and the California oil
industry were of only slightly less importance to the future conduct of
the war. In the first two weeks of war it seemed more than conceivable
that the Japanese could invade the coast in strength, and until June
1942 there appeared to be a really serious threat of attack by a
Japanese carrier striking force. These calculated apprehensions were
fanned in the first few days of war by a series of false reports of
Japanese ships and planes on the very doorsteps of the Pacific states.7
[82]
This was the outlook that persuaded the War Department to establish the
Western Defense Command as a theater of operations on 11 December and
that led it to concentrate its first attention after Pearl Harbor on the
rapid reinforcement of the Army's ground and air garrisons along the
west coast. When the war started, the Fourth Army had available fairly
adequate harbor defense forces, 11 of the 12 infantry regiments allotted
to it under the current RAINBOW 5 plan, and about 5 antiaircraft
artillery regiments which lacked two-thirds of their equipment. The
Second and Fourth Air Forces had only a fraction of their assigned
strength in planes, and they were critically short of bombs and
ammunition. During November and early December General DeWitt had
requested more ground troops for defense purposes, but these were denied
until the Japanese struck.8
On and after 7 December General Marshall and his staff worked feverishly
to strengthen the west coast defenses as rapidly as they could. A
pursuit group from Michigan began to arrive in the Los Angeles area on 8
December, but it was the reinforcement of antiaircraft artillery
defenses that received the most attention during the week after Pearl
Harbor. By 17 December nine additional antiaircraft regiments had been
rushed from various parts of the United States to the west coast, and,
with some assistance from Marine Corps units, the vital installations in
the Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego areas
were thereby provided with at least some antiaircraft artillery
protection. The Army also moved two additional divisions and many lesser
types of ground combat and service units to the west coast before the
end of December and made the 3d Division, already there, available for
defense use. As a result of these moves the Western theater's major Army
combat units in January and February 1942 included six infantry
divisions, a brigade of cavalry, about fourteen antiaircraft regiments,
and the equivalent of three pursuit and three bombardment groups. The
troop strength of the Western Defense Command numbered about 250,000 at
the beginning of February, and of these nine-tenths were ground troops.
Approximately 100,000 of the ground forces were actively engaged in
manning harbor antiaircraft defense equipment, in maintaining a beach
and forward patrol along the coast line, in patrolling the
etc
http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/Guard-US/ch4.htm
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