How the US has hidden its empire
theguardian.com
How the US has hidden its empire
1–10 of 106 posts
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#2The historiography [1] of this article is interesting. The author talks about how the drafts of FDR's speech changed throughout the day after the bombings. Presumably this means that the author had access to the various drafts of the speech. Pretty clever way to try to glimpse into what he was thinking.
[1] The study of the methods used when writing history.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#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 another 12 days after that.
And the Midway attack was six months after Pearl.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#4"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…
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.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#5"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…
My understanding of the initial attacks (which largely comes from what I was taught in school) lines up with the timeline presented in the article, and every source I've been able to find in the last few minutes after reading your comment supports that. Can you point to any additional material we might have missed?
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#6"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…
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.
Popular memory strikes again!
It's interesting though that in this case both Wikipedia and "Joe H. N. Internet" could be called popular memory. :P
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#7I’ve lived in Hong Kong for some time and even though I’ve been to Guam a few times, in my mind the US is a country that is a 12 to 16 hour flight away when in fact its really only a 4 hour flight away.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#8The historiography [1] of this article is interesting. The author talks about how the drafts of FDR's speech changed throughout the day after the bombings. Presumably this means that the author had access to the various drafts of the speech. Pretty clever way to try to glimpse into what he was thinking. [1] The study of the methods used when writing history.
Not just the author has access; the drafts of the Infamy speech are public: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/winter/c...
You can view the handwritten edits by Roosevelt in the archival drafts.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#9"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…
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 anything, Pearl Harbor (and other surrounding targets) was the target specifically to tie up American efforts in the Northeast Pacific and keep them out of the way of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. That much the article seems to get correctly, and is arguably the article's main point.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#10The US also had a practical reason for disliking traditional imperialism.
By the time the US became substantial enough for real international trade, vast swathes of the planet were under other nation's empires leaving fewer trading partners than could be desired. Commodore Perry's somewhat invasive trip to Japan was to try and add a few trading partners from unclaimed nations.
So I suppose it's not too surprising that the colonies gained in the pointless glory seeking of the Spanish American war led to a bit of schizophrenia.