A commanding sense of duty

When in my early teens, I lived in Europe and was particularly fascinated with World War II with many people I knew having personal or familial stories to tell of a titanic event that was still within living memory. Because of that fascination, I remember the news reports from 1974 of the last Japanese soldiers of World War II surrendering from their hidden mountain outposts. Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany provides a little more detail.

Hiro Onoda became a Japanese soldier when he was eighteen. In 1945 he was on Lubang Island in the Philippines when United States troops overran it. Most of the Japanese there were captured or killed. Onoda was in a group that fled into the mountains and hid out.

When the war ended, the U.S. and Japanese governments knew that holdouts remained on the island. Expeditions were sent to find them; leaflets were dropped, urging them to surrender, without success.

For years the holdouts survived by raiding native villages, earning the nicknam "Mountain Devils." As years passed, Onoda's comrades died off from disease and exposure, until only he remained.

In 1974, a university student named Norio Suzuki spent months on Lubang Island looking for survivors. While Suzuki was drinking from a stream, Onoda approached him. Informed the war was long over, Onoda still refused to surrender unless ordered to do so by his commanding officer.

Suzuki returned to Japan, found the officer, and brought him back to the island. Twenty-nine years after hostilities ended, Onoda returned to Japan, at age fifty-two. He was greeted by a crowd of 4,000 at the airport. His memoirs became a bestselling book in Japan. He used the money to retire to Brazil, where he bought a 2,800 acre ranch and lived out his life in quiet solitude.

That thought of being the lone survivor is not dissimilar to the story of Ishi, told in the book, Ishi in Two Worlds. Ishi was the sole surviving member of the Yahi indian tribe in California and made contact with the outside world in 1911.

Seems like a good way to spend ones' time

From Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany. Describing how small the US Army was in the years immediately preceding World War II, Ayres lists the following.

* General Douglas MacArthur was the nation's only four-star general. There were no three-star generals.
* As Army Chief of Staff, MacArthur rode around Washington, D.C. in the army's only limousine.
* MacArthur had only one aide - a young major named Dwight Eisenhower.
* Although MacArthur had a limousine, when it was necesary for Eisenhower to get around town, he had to fill out a requisition form for trolley tickets.
* Eisenhower came close to resigning his commission because of boredom. He later admitted he spent his time reading adventure pulp magazines.

Back when the government was small . . .

From Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany.

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, the U.S. Navy consisted of a few aging warships and no one wanted the job of Secretary of the Navy. After being turned down by several potential appointees, Jefferson advertised the position in newspapers. He received only one response, that being from Robert Smith of Maryland. Jefferson hired him, and Smith served as Secretary of the Navy for nine years. In that time, he built the navy into a force that demanded world respect.

Translating Beowulf

H/T to Megan McArdle of the The Atlantic Monthly for bringing attention to this quite interesting site by Victoria Poulakis. Her site explores the challenges of translating ancient texts into modern vernacular. Fascinating. I was in particular taken by the five page section on Beowulf. My youngest son has always been especially enamored with ancient stories such as Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and Beowulf. He enjoyed each of these being read to him at a relatively young age, probably six to eight years old. I think the primordial nature of these stories is particularly captivating for young children.

Poulakis uses short passages to explore all the considerations that a translator must consider when converting ancient language to modern.

We campaign in poetry . . .

From a speech by Mario Cuomo at the Chubb Fellowship Lecture at Yale University on February 1, 1985, New Haven. While our run of the mill politicians don't excite much except disdain, we have been fortunate to have such a tradition of gifted speakers, from all philosophical angles of the compass, to speak in a fashion that arrests ones attention and makes one think.

We campaign in poetry. But when we're elected we're forced to govern in prose. And when we govern - as distinguished from when we campiagn - we come to understand the difference between a speech and a statute. It's here that the noble aspirations, neat promises and slogans of a campaign get bent out of recognition or even break as you try to nail them down to the Procrustean bed of reality.

Watch out for the booksellers

From Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany.

Following the Battle of Bunker Hill, Washington's Continental Army held the heights outside Boston, placing the British Army under siege. From out of the ranks, a young man came to Washington with a plan to fortify the position. The commander was so impressed he placed the soldier in charge of fortifications.

Next he told Washington that, without artillery, the British still might overrun the position. He reminded Washington that the abandoned fort at Ticonderoga in upstate New York had plenty of cannons just sitting there. He volunteered to lead an expedition to bring them to Boston.

Washington was doubtful that the guns could be moved in the dead of winter, much less all the way to Boston. His aides also were skeptical that an overweight city boy could brave the rugged wilderness and accomplish the task. With nothing to lose, Washington approved the expedition. What Washington did not realize was that this was no ordinary city boy.

Everyone called him "Fat Henry." He weighed almost 300 punds and was something of a klutz. He even had two fingers missing from his left hand, the result of a hunting accident. He was a bookworm and, in fact, owned a bookstore. Well read on many subjects, his favorite topic was military history. He had studied all of the great battles of Europe and knew the most minute details about them.

Henry and several volunteers reached the fort in early December 1775. They strapped forty-three cannons and sixteen mortars on hurriedly built barges to float them down Lake George. They had barely departed when a blizzard descended on them. They abandoned the lake, built sleds, and purchased horses and oxen to tug the cannons over the snow.

Through dense wilderness, across frozen streams, and over the rugged Berkshire Mountains they moved southward, sometimes covering no more than a few hundred yards a day. Two more blizzards came, dropping temperatures below zero. Still they trudged on, defying the elements. Finally, two months after they set out on their journey, the party limped into Framingham, Massachusetts.

In the dead of one of the worst New England winters ever, Henry and his men delivered fifty-five artillery pieces weighing 119,000 pounds. Once the cannons were placed in the hills overlooking Boston, the British abandoned the city and sailed for Canada.

Fat Henry's real name was Henry Knox. He was twenty-four at Bunker Hill. By the time he was twenty-five he would be a brigadier general and Washington's artillery officer. He became the nation's first secretary of war, and Fort Knox would be named in his honor. He retired from public life at forty-three. Of all his accomplishments, the least known might be his most important. During the war he started an artillery school that later became the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

True of many traditions and adages

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried - G.K. Chesterton