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How the US has hidden its empire

theguardian.com

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Re: How the US has hidden its empire

#11

Post by blowski »

hanging wrote: post #3

"Contrary to popular memory, the event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on US and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the US territories of Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island and Wake Island." This is horrendously sloppy journalism. The first attack on Wake was three days later and was repelled. The successful attack was a…

Perhaps you’re thinking of the Battle of Midway where the US defeated Japan, and which was indeed six months after Pearl Harbour. However Midway was attacked just two hours after Pearl Harbour.

Re: How the US has hidden its empire

#12

Post by NeedMoreTea »

yellowapple wrote: post #9
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia disagrees with you, and confirms that both Midway and Wake were attacked on the day of Pearl. In the case of Wake, 8 of the 12 Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters were destroyed. In the case of Midway, the attack that day was repulsed.

I'd argue that the Pearl Harbor attack specifically was the primary attack (at least on that front, i.e. excluding the Philippines), and that the Wake and Midway attacks that happened were incidental (or at most in support of) that attack. While I hate the idea of quantity of lives lost being any sort of metric for the "importance" of an attack (every American life lost matters), Pearl Harbor took the brunt of it. If…

It was definitely the primary attack. That's where First Air Fleet was going and they only had so many carriers. Spread them around and they might have all failed. Midway and Wake were much smaller attacks, but I'm not sure they were quite incidental, weren't they both significant oiling bases? They were certainly both part of Yamamoto's first phase strategy. So were the Philippines, Malaya, and Borneo. Malaya and Philippines were attacked and invaded the same day. Phase 2 would have turned south across territories toward Australia.

His strategy was not too dissimilar to China's today. Loosely to create a huge space of Japanese air space by taking those far flung outposts to ensure any enemy was stretched across thousands of miles of hostile Pacific.

The Battle of Midway, six months later, was one of the most famous and strategically important naval battles of the entire war. As they lost that naval battle it is never really called an attack on the islands, least not in what I've read. They didn't make it that far.

Re: How the US has hidden its empire

#13

Post by WA »

> Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and a handful of minor outlying islands, the US maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases around the world.

Germany has a few US military bases. It’s a bit of a micro cosmos. People pay in USD and can buy American products there. I think even the VAT is added on checkout to the price (whereas in Germany, prices in stores always show VAT included).

I was on one a couple times when they played a theatre play (Christmas Charol or so). Quite interesting.

Re: How the US has hidden its empire

#14

Post by rusk »

WA wrote: post #13

> Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and a handful of minor outlying islands, the US maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases around the world. Germany has a few US military bases. It’s a bit of a micro cosmos. People pay in USD and can buy American products there. I think even the VAT is added on checkout to the price (whereas in Germany, prices in sto…

I lived in Stuttgart a number of years ago, and used to drink with some guys who had a business exclusively selling American cars to American servicemen (in dollars; taxation deferred; big money). In fact, I spent a good bit of time drinking with American servicemen ... they were a large segment of the Anglophone community around there.

Re: How the US has hidden its empire

#17

Post by golergka »

> On this to-scale map, Alaska isn’t shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps.

I'm pretty sure it's usually "scaled down" because that's how map projection works. Does this writer also think that Greenland and Africa are of comparable size?

Re: How the US has hidden its empire

#18

Post by acqq »

WA wrote: post #13

> Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and a handful of minor outlying islands, the US maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases around the world. Germany has a few US military bases. It’s a bit of a micro cosmos. People pay in USD and can buy American products there. I think even the VAT is added on checkout to the price (whereas in Germany, prices in sto…

2015: "Despite recently closing hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad"

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-...

Additionally, I must admit haven't thought much about the actual status of the "territories" before.

Re: How the US has hidden its empire

#19

Post by nikbackm »

golergka wrote: post #17

> On this to-scale map, Alaska isn’t shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps. I'm pretty sure it's usually "scaled down" because that's how map projection works. Does this writer also think that Greenland and Africa are of comparable size?

Wouldn't Alaska be scaled up on maps being far to the north?

Have only really seen maps using Mercator myself though.

Re: How the US has hidden its empire

#20

Post by SiempreViernes »

golergka wrote: post #17

> On this to-scale map, Alaska isn’t shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps. I'm pretty sure it's usually "scaled down" because that's how map projection works. Does this writer also think that Greenland and Africa are of comparable size?

One example map, and to me a pretty typical example of the genre, shows Alaska on a about half the scale of the contiguous states. Compare the by the scale markings:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Map_of_U...

This is not simply projection effects, this is explicit downscaling.

Another comparison, Wikipedia lists the area of Alaska as 1,717,856 km^2 and that of the contiguous United States 8,080,400 km^2, so on a map with only projection correction Alaska should be around 1/4 of the size of the lower 48, this is clearly not true on the wikipedia example shown above, and for any other map in the same style.

So no, Alaska is not scaled down for the sake of accurately depicting its size.

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