Saturday, January 7, 2012
[1891 - Zora Neale Hurston, novelist, folklorist, anthropologist, born in Eatonville, Florida]
[1908 - Estée Lauder (Josephine Esther Mentzer), cosmetics mogul, born in Queens]
[1912 - Charles (Samuel) Addams, cartoonist, born in Westfield, New Jersey]
[1913 - Johnny (John Robert) Mize, Hall of Fame
first baseman, born in Demorest, Georgia]
[1922 - Vincent Gardenia (Vincenzio Scognamiglio), Tony & Emmy Award-winning actor, born in Naples, Italy]
[1922 - Jean-Pierre Rampal, flautist, born in Marseille, France]
[1942 - Vasili Alexeyev, weight lifter (Olympic gold 72,76), born in USSR]
[1955 - Marian Anderson debuts at the Metropolitan Opera]
[1990 - Bronislau "Bronko" Nagurski, Pro Football Hall of Famer, dies at age 81]
A quick google will reveal that william is not the first to see the parallels between 9-11 and the Japanese employment of Kamikaze suicide bombers at the end of WW-II. In the later stages of WW-II when it became evident that Japan was losing the war and the US and its allies were preparing to invade the Islands, the Japanese leadership devised a strategy of attacking the allied fleet with guided missiles using human beings as their guidance systems. Some of the chosen are shown below.
The young men who "volunteered" to become Kamikaze pilots were assigned to the Special Attack Force, and they were trained to take-off, fly their bomb laden aircraft to the target, and crash it into an allied ship. This new weapons system was more effective than is generally realized. More than fifty allied ships were sunk by Kamikaze attacks in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, and hundreds more were damaged. As many as four thousand Kamikaze pilots may have flown to their death in these suicide bombing missions, killing more than three thousand allied sailors and wounding another six thousand. Take a look at some of the destruction.
But, you observe, the Japanese suicide bombers attacked only military targets while the present day Kamikaze strike at civilians. One assumes, however, that had the US mainland been in range of their aircraft, the Japanese would not have hesitated to bomb our cities with one-way aircraft. After all, we hit plenty of civilian targets with US air power in Japan, and destroyed large parts of Tokyo causing civilian casualties in six figures. The atom bombs that dropped from US aircraft onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made in the USA, and remain to this day the most successful terror weapon ever employed on this planet.
Poor William's Whimsical Words:
Terrorism is a tactic that you make war with, not on.
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