Mikeb302000: Admiral Yamamoto

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

WWII on the US mainland?

The fake quote about Japan not attacking the US because of all the American guns is exactly that: fake. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour brought the US into the war, but that was not in the 48 States. The Japanese had their own version of the Doolittle raid, but they used a submarine instead of using an Aircraft carrier. Unfortunately, the type of plane and navigation system meant that the submarine based raids were more a morale booster for the Japanese than a significant action.

Likewise, There were things like the Bombardment of Ellwood, CA by submarine. And the Japanese firebomb baloon programme which were also dismal failures. The bottom line was that most WWII bombers did not have the range to attack the mainland US. The Germans did have their Amerika Bomber programme, which fortunately didn't get anywhere. Even more fortunately, the German rocket and heavy water programmes never got anywhere either.
So, it was primarily logistics and inability to hit the US mainland which is far more of a reason the US was never attacked.

Still, there was also a sea war off the coast of the US. The period from January to around August 1942 was called the Second Happy Time, or American Shooting Season, by German U-Boat Commanders. US Anti-submarine defense measures were weak and disorganized during
that period The U-boats were able to inflict massive damage with little risk. During this period, Axis submarines sank 609 ships totaling 3.1 million tons and the loss of thousands of lives, mainly those of merchant mariners, against a loss of only 22 U-boats. This was roughly one quarter of all shipping sunk by U-boats during the entire Second World War.

The German submarine U-869 was found off the coast of New Jersey in 1991. The U-550 was found off the Coast of Massachusetts in 2012. The latest find is in North Carolina. Unlike the other two U-boats I mentioned, this one also has one of its victims nearby.

A research team using sonar found the wrecks of U-boat 576 and the freighter Bluefields on 30 August in waters off Cape Hatteras, just 240 yards apart. The U-boat had attacked the Bluefields, which was operating under the flag of Nicaragua and was part of a convoy of 19 merchant ships.

There are at least another 19 of these German submarines lying off the US Coast.

The reality is that North America was attacked during WWII, but most of those have been forgotten due to the ineffectiveness and relative insignificance of the attacks on the US Mainland. The reality was that it wasn't guns that kept the US from being attacked as much as other strategic considerations which made a large scale attack, like that at Pearl Harbour, unlikely.

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Monday, December 3, 2012

Misquoting Yamamoto

One thing you can count on, the gun rights crowd usually gets stuff wrong, or just plain off bullshits you with things like "more people die from fists than rifles".

There are a couple of sites that show the quote "You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." attributed to Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto are bogus--except for the pro-gun sites that go around quoting it...

Anyway, beside the fact that invading the US would be a logistical nightmare (just look at all the work that went into D-Day), they would like to think that a nation that invaded China during the "age of War Lords" (which as Matthew White points out should clue you in that it was a pistol packer's paradise). So, they offer some serious nonsense as to why they didn't attack the US mainland as an argument for unrestricted access to firearms...

From FactCheck.Org,

Home • The FactCheck Wire • Misquoting Yamamoto

Misquoting Yamamoto

Posted on May 11, 2009

Advocates of gun rights often argue that in World War II Japan was deterred from invading the U.S. mainland by a fear of American citizens with guns in their closets. They frequently quote Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as saying: "You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass."

But this quote is unsubstantiated and almost certainly bogus, even though it has been repeated thousands of times in various Internet postings. There is no record of the commander in chief of Japan’s wartime fleet ever saying it.

How do we know? We contacted Donald M. Goldstein, sometimes called "the dean of Pearl Harbor historians." Among his many books are "The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans" (1993) and the best-selling "At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor" (1981). He is a professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He told us the supposed Yamamoto quote is "bogus."

In an exchange of e-mails he said:

Prof. Goldstein: I have never seen it in writing. It has been attributed to the Prange files [the files of the late Gordon W. Prange, chief historian on the staff of Gen. Douglas MacArthur] but no one had ever seen it or cited it from where they got it. Some people say that it came from our work but I never said it. … As of today it is bogus until someone can cite when and where.
We included this in an update to an Ask FactCheck item we posted May 10, debunking an error-filled "gun history lesson" circulating by e-mail.

We make no argument either for or against gun ownership. But we do object to fabricating quotes and passing them off as historical fact.

Posted by Brooks Jackson on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 2:50 pm Filed under The FactCheck Wire. tagged with social issues.

Of course, the pro-gun side is pretty good at fabricating quotes, or just plain misquotation, since that forms the bulk of their argument that the Second Amendment applies to anything besides an Article I, Section 8, clauses 15 & 16 militia.

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