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hahaha no,i was backing @JWPepper in what he said...
Have I hit some kind of nerve ?
Retired Lt. Col. Richard Cole, the last survivor of the Doolittle Raid, the first U.S. strike on the Japanese islands during World War II, died Tuesday in Texas. He was 103.
Cole was one of 80 men sent to target factory areas and military installations in Japan on April 18, 1942. The daring raid stunned Japan and is credited with boosting U.S. morale and helping turn the tide of the war in the Pacific.
“There’s another hole in our formation. Our last remaining Doolittle Raider has slipped the surly bonds of Earth, and has reunited with his fellow Raiders,” General David Goldfein, chief of staff of the Air Force said Tuesday. “The Legacy of the Doolittle Raiders – his legacy – will live forever in the hearts and minds of Airmen, long after we’ve all departed.”
Cole, born in Dayton, Ohio, was mission commander Jimmy Doolittle’s co-pilot in the all-volunteer attack which took place less than five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
After bombing targets in northwest Tokyo, Cole's plane turned toward China with plans to land at an airfield. But things went awry when authorities at the airfield heard their engines, assumed it was Japanese and turned off the lights. Cole and Doolittle couldn't find a place to land at night.
Shortly before running out of fuel, everyone bailed out; Cole gave himself a black eye when he pulled his parachute ripcord. He landed in a tree where he spent the night, climbing down in the morning, and walking the whole day before finding a couple of Chinese students who eventually took him to Doolittle, who said, "Boy, am I glad to see you."
Of the 80 men who flew from the USS Hornet deck, three died in the raid, and four who were captured by the Japanese were executed or starved to death. Two others who survived the raid were later killed while flying the China-Burma-India route over the Himalayas known as the "Hump."
After the raid, Cole went to India, helped establish the dangerous Hump flying route and flew more than 100 missions carrying cargo, earning three Distinguished Flying Crosses.
The Doolittle Raiders received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015, and donated it to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Ohio.
Cole, who often attended Raider-related events and air shows, told The Associated Press last year that since he was older than many of the other Raiders, he didn’t expect to be the last.
“I figured that Mother Nature and the good man upstairs would pick the time, and I wouldn’t have any control over it,” he said.
Cole will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the Air Force Times reported, and memorial services are also being scheduled at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph in Texas.
Not at all, don t worry about it. I just find it a peculiar expression. You never see the DDR referred to as "Commie Germany", for instance.
I suppose it's an historical term looking back at it. I'm not sure if people referred to it as Nazi Germany at the time or whether it was a later term. Fascist Italy would be another example. It simply demarcates a particular era in a country's history for easy reference.
Weimar Germany would be another example. I suppose it could be seen as a pejorative term by some (outside of the obvious negative associations) though I've never seen it that way myself. It is a historical fact that the Nazi era lasted between 1933 and 1945 in Germany. Any responsibility for negativity surrounding the Nazis of course lies firmly at their own door, given their aggressive military actions and mass crimes against humanity. I know that the victors write history, but when it comes to the Nazis I think that's only fair.
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Interesting figure, Vidkun Quisling.
As a historian id Nazi-Germany not only to make clear the time period, but also the governments intentions and strictly speaking I'd say current day Austria was part of it too. So it is a helpful distinction. Moreover as nazism is an ideoligy with followers in more countries, especially in that timeframe. So if you're talking about nazi-Germany in, say, 1943 that would incorporate all the occupied territories and all the supporters it had in that area. Writing this at the 79th anniversary of the invasion of my own country.
Yes, and I believe it was called the Greater German Reich after the Anschluss with Austria in 1938 and it also included the Sudetenland and parts of Czechoslovakia.
@JWPepper sorry about that.
Me too. :-)
As a historian, should you not decline using derogatory slang about political movements, regardless of personal bias?
There is nothing ambivalent about Nazis, and treating them as just another political movement is false equivalency from the start. Nazis have adequately proven that their ideology is criminal and murderous for all time to come. And I'm saying this as the son of a father (and even one very fondly remembered) who on closer inspection fought for those Nazis in WWII in the Soviet Union as an army officer, and an equally fondly remembered mother who in her 20s was a local leader of the BDM, the Nazi young women's organisation. From both of whom, by the way, I never heard a positive word about the Nazis (and my father did call them that) in my lifetime.
Besides, the term "Nazi" in itself is not derogatory. It came about because people called socialists "Sozis" anyway, and was an obvious choice when Hitler's gang started calling themselves National Socialists (besides, they weren't socialist in the first place, but that's another story). The only thing that actually made that term derogatory today was the fact that they will forever be tainted with being the most mass-murderous movement ever. Fact, not opinion. So no need to spare them in one's choice of words.
As a racist, industrially-organised, and unfortunately in their immediate goals very efficient genocide machinery they were indeed exceptional. And while it may be that Stalin and Mao Zedong were responsible for even more killings, and the Khmer Rouge also if you see it in relation to population, the Nazis' planned extermination of certain other "races" (not just Jews, but also "gypsies" and others deemed inferior in the Nazis' voodoo genetics), "life unworthy of life" and homosexual "enemies of the people" (and...you name it) remains singular. Simply because exterminating certain groups of individuals (unless you count political opponents or "enemies of the working classes" as such) is just not part of any other ideology in modern times. The Nazis don't get any less singular just because there have always been pogroms and witch-burning in the dark ages as well.
It was you who claimed the nazis were special, wasn t it? You make no sense.
It was you who said 'nazi' was a derogatory term, which it isn't. It stands for national socialismus. A term coined by the nazi party. You then said they were not 'special" considering the groups of people and leaders who were set on killing others. @j_w_pepper rightfully claimed they were as it's the only political organisation in history to make industrialised plans to destroy systematically groups of other people. Then you came up with Islamic jihad. Saying @j_w_pepper hadn't heard of them. This implies you think 'they' operate at the same level. Then @j_w_pepper asks if you do this to troll as you seem keen on mentioning this 'jihad'. Perhaps you don't know this but there's no political organisation or ideology called 'Islamic jihad'. It's a term used in the quoran which means something like 'holy war', but it's also been translated as 'holy struggle'. Neither refer to industriised killings. These days some extremist groups use this term to identify a reason for their terrorist attacks. Still, no industrialised planning or execution. Now if you'd pointed to the 'Islamic state' which is indeed the same mixture of 'state' and 'ideoligy' we might have had a discussion. Instead you used a random term from the Islamic rulebook. The question is hence; were you accidentally ignorant or trolling?
For the record, I don t hate anyone. Live and let live is a good motto, we all strive towards becoming better people.
Ah, I see you're obsessed with Islamists. In my country, this is mostly true for those people who live in areas with a tiny fraction of the population being Muslim at all. It's usually those who never met any of their nemesis groups who resent them. Everyone else is quite relaxed. We've had six million Turks or so for decades, and nobody even worried about their religion until about 9/11. I prefer moderate Muslims to fundamentalist Christians any time.
But as I said before, whatever the veracity of the numbers you cite, Christianity probably killed just as many people or more - but, to get back to the subject, over centuries and not over a paltry twelve years. And not because they were "inferior" races or "unworthy" of living in a biological sense, but because they refused to accept the religion (aka superstition) of the respective party. They could have saved themselves by pretending to adopt the aggressors' religion. Bad enough. Alas, the Nazis didn't leave even that choice to their victims. Jews that were non-observant or had long ago converted to Christianity were nevertheless sent to Auschwitz, simply because they had Jewish "blood".
Sounds lovely but those are empty numbers. Islam is a religion and I'd guess Christian expansion would amount to at least the same amount over now more than 2000 years. But Islamic state has nothing to do with Islamic expansion in the 16th century. So why add it up?
Even more so, for most Muslims Islamic jihad is the struggle through life to follow its teachings. Not many deaths there....
As for their good traits, I remember reading that Ike Eisenhower privately despised the idiotic Joe McCarthy. He didn’t exactly like his crooked Vice President either. Tom Selleck apparently played Ike in some television movie I’ve never seen. Inchon, which was directed by a certain Terence Young, deals with MacArthur in the Korean War but is a terrible movie. That said, Patton is a helluva movie, one I plan on watching again soon.
@j_w_pepper I'm right wing and Christian and don't have those disgusting fantasies stop being stereotypical.