Bede’s scholarship and importance as a Christian thinker were recognized on November 13, 1899 when Pope Leo XIII named Bede a Doctor of the Universal Church. He is the first and only Englishman to be named doctor ecclesiae.
735AD: Death of The Venerable Bede (b.672), English historian and theologian, whose many scholarly works include the first comprehensive history of the British Isles, titled Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People).
1332: Birth of Ibn Khaldun (d.1406), the Arab polymath whose theory of business cycles and the rise and fall of nations remains a foundational text for sociological study.
1431: In the final act from her February trial, Joan of Arc is this day burned at the stake for heresy. In the years that follow her execution, the French peasantry attribute scores of miracles to her and she is eventually canonized as Saint Jean d’Arc.
1521: Concluding the process of the Imperial Diet that began in mid-April, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V issues the Edict of Worms, formally declaring Martin Luther a heretic and outlaw, subject to arrest and punishment. The edict reads in part: “For this reason we forbid anyone from this time forward to dare, either by words or by deeds, to receive, defend, sustain, or favor the said Martin Luther. On the contrary, we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic, as he deserves, to be brought personally before us, or to be securely guarded until those who have captured him inform us, whereupon we will order the appropriate manner of proceeding against the said Luther. Those who will help in his capture will be rewarded generously for their good work.” Disregarding prior negotiations that promised safe passage, Luther’s friend and mentor Prince Frederick III, Elector of Saxony captured him enroute to his home and spirited him away to safe haven in Wartburg Castle, where he began work on his German translation of the Bible. The Edict was temporarily suspended in 1526 but was put back in force in 1529. Although it was never enforced against Luther himself, it was used as justification for arrests of Lutheran agitators in the Low Countries under Charles’ direct control.
1541: Death of French religious reformer John Calvin, one of the key figures of the Protestant Reformation, whose insights and writings on Christian doctrine remain the foundation of the Presbyterian and other Reformed churches. Much of his work occurred in Geneva, where his church became a center for a group of English dissidents under John Knox, among other groups dealing with the intellectual and religious ferment of the time.
1588: The Spanish Armada, a fleet of 130 ships loaded with over 30,000 men, sets sail from Lisbon enroute to the English Channel on a mission to invade Britain, de-throne Elizabeth I, and restore a Catholic monarchy on the island. Under King Philip II, Spain was the unquestioned superpower of its day, having grown rich exploiting the gold and silver of the New World. For its part, England had recently welcomed back the explorer and privateer Francis Drake from his Spanish-bashing circumnavigation, and between him and Sir Walter Raleigh (with an assist from the weather), the Armada was defeated.
1896: In Moscow, the thirty year old Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov is crowned Czar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias
1896(a): In New York, James Dow publishes his first index of key industrial stocks, 12 companies with an index value of 40.94.
1738: The English colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland sign a peace treaty, ending Cresap’s War, also known as the Conojocular War. The boundary dispute arose out of an imprecise description of Pennsylvania’s southern boundary in its 1681 charter- or more exactly, a very precise description based on incorrect geography: the start point was the town of New Castle, Delaware, and from thence “…a circle drawn at twelve miles distance from New Castle Northward and Westward unto the beginning of the fortieth degree of Northern Latitude, and then by a straight Line Westward..” Without going into gory detail, the dispute reared up in 1730 when Maryland began to enforce its territorial claims after ten years of settlements and counter-settlements by Pennsylvanians in the lands west of the Susquehanna River. The flash point became dueling ferry services established by the two colonies. In 1730 two Pennsylvanians attacked the Maryland ferry run by Thomas Cresap. No-one was injured, but Cresap began a harassment campaign against Pennsylvania settlers, eventually leading sporadic violence against both parties, and ultimately to the militias of both colonies marching across each others’ claims. King George II ordered the Royal Committee for Plantation Affairs to settle the dispute, and the agreement was signed on May 25th. The territorial definition was conclusively settled after the 1767 survey completed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.
1759: In the opening battle of the French and Indian War, the Virginia Militia, under the leadership of 22 year old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, defeats a French surveying party in western Pennsylvania.
1787: The Constitutional Convention, under the leadership of General George Washington, convenes in Philadelphia to write a new governing document to replace the inadequate Articles of Confederation.
1819: Birth of American poet Julia Ward Howe (d.1910), who wrote the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic
1863: The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the nation’s first all-black regiment, leaves Boston to begin fighting for the Union.
1907: Birth of John Wayne
1913: A peace treaty is signed ending the First Balkan War. The conflict aligned Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece against the Ottoman Turks in a successful attempt to separate Macedonia and Albania from Turkish control. A second Balkan war began a month later with Russian support. In response to Austrian moves designed to counter Russian influence in the region, Serbia increased its agitation against Germanic rule in favor of a pan-Slavism promoted by Russia. Strategic cooperation treaties begin to align the Great Powers into blocs. Serbia’s strategic planning for a third Balkan war looked to the summer of 1914 for its beginning.
1914: Bosnian Serb anarchist Gavrillo Princip leaves Belgrade on a conspiratorially secret 10 day journey to Sarajevo.
1927: In Dearborn, Michigan, last day of production of the Ford Model T, as equipment on the assembly line is changed out to produce the new Model A. The Model T was the first car to be mass-produced, beginning in 1908. With over 15,000,000 produced, it was the best-selling car in the world until surpassed by the Volkswagen Beetle in 1972. Interestingly, as part of its centenary celebrations in 2003, Ford produced six new Model Ts using long-warehoused original components and other parts made from original drawings.
1937: Opening Day of the Golden Gate Bridge, linking San Francisco with my actual hometown in Marin County.
1940: Completely overrun by the Wehrmacht, the Belgian King Leopold III capitulates to the Germans after 18 days of bitter fighting. Rather than fleeing to lead the government-in-exile, he remains in Belgium under house arrest for five years, including a forced deportation into Germany in 1944. The split between the king and his government remained bitter, even after the war ended, leading to his abdication in 1951 in favor of his son Baudouin, who reigned until his death in 1993.
More than 300,000 Allied soldiers were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940 (Image Owlcation.com)
1940: Opening of the 9-day Battle of Dunkirk, where British and other Allied forces were surrounded on the French beach by two German armies which swept across the Low Countries and burst out of the “un-passable” Ardennes Forest to overwhelm the defenses of France. Inexplicably, rather than destroying or capturing the fleeing forces, Hitler ordered a ceasefire that lasted three days, during which the British were able to establish a defensible perimeter and set conditions for a somewhat orderly evacuation under fire, which rained down primarily from the Luftwaffe. The eventual evacuation of 338,226 men via a flotilla of “the little ships of Dunkirk” became the stuff of legend, and the nucleus of the army that would return to the Continent at Normandy four years later.
1961: President John F. Kennedy gives his famous speech committing the United States to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back by the end of the decade.
1967: After two years of PLO attacks and a continuing buildup of conventional forces along Israel’s border, King Hussein of Jordan and Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt sign a joint defense agreement. At the signing, Nasser was characteristically blunt: “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight.”
1971: Death of Audie Murphy, the most decorated U.S. soldier in history. Awards include: Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star (2), Legion of Merit, Bronze Star (2), Purple Heart (3), French Legion of Honor, French Croix de Guerre (2), Belgian Croix de guerre (2). At 5’5” and 110 pounds, he was rejected for service by the Navy and Marines. The Army initially slated him for cooking school, but he insisted on going into the infantry
1972: President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonoid Brezhnev sign the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The landmark agreement limited the parties to a single fixed site (Moscow and Grand Forks, ND) and for practical purposes enshrined Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as a viable basis for the relationship of the two nuclear superpowers. The United States withdrew from the treaty in December, 2002, per the provision requiring six months notice.
1987: 19 year old German pilot Mathias Rust flies a Cessna 172 unscathed through hundreds of miles of Soviet air defenses and lands the machine in Moscow’s Red Square.
Re Dunkirk, there was nothing inexplicable abou the armestice that let the Btits escape, the Germans intended it as a show of good faith, that they wanted the war to end. Chutchill chose to ignore it and keep up the fight.
As always, a lot of history in here to ponder, especially with respect to Dunkirk, from 26 May to 4 June 1940, which set of events came sixteen (16) days after the Battle of France began in earnest on 10 May 1940, which ended that period known to history as the “Phoney War,” a term probably coined by US Senator William Borah, who, commenting in September 1939 on the inactivity on the Western Front, said, “There is something phoney about this war.”
And my reading of history has it that Hitler approved a “halt” order for Von Runstedt’s Panzers, not a ceasefire, with that “halt” order intended to protect Von Runstedt’s tanks because the terrain around Dunkirk was thought unsuitable for armor.
As I understand it, Generalobersten Gerd von Rundstedt and Günther von Kluge suggested that the German forces around the Dunkirk pocket should cease their advance on the port and consolidate to avoid an Allied breakout and Hitler sanctioned the order on 24 May with the support of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW).
The Luftwaffe under commander Hermann Göring was given the task of destroying the British, but bad weather prevented him from doing so.
Just a year and five months earlier, on Monday, Jan. 02, 1939, that same Adolph Hitler was Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1938, to wit:
Greatest single news event of 1938 took place on September 29, when four statesmen met at the Führerhaus, in Munich, to redraw the map of Europe.
The three visiting statesmen at that historic conference were Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain, Premier Edouard Daladier of France, and Dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy.
But by all odds the dominating figure at Munich was the German host, Adolf Hitler.
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The important, overlooked statement in that article is the statement that the greatest single news event of 1938 took place on September 29, when four statesmen met at the Führerhaus, in Munich, to redraw the map of Europe.
Hitler wasn’t out there conquering territory in the beginning – to the contrary, the British and the French were handing it to him, on a silver platter, as we shall shortly see in the case of the Sudetenland.
The Time puff piece continued as followed:
Führer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years.
He had torn the Treaty of Versailles to shreds.
He had rearmed Germany to the teeth— or as close to the teeth as he was able.
He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world.
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That was to lead to refrains later heard in Washington, D.C. with respect to Viet Nam about “no more Munichs.”
Getting back to the puff piece:
All these events were shocking to nations which had defeated Germany on the battlefield only 20 years before, but nothing so terrified the world as the ruthless, methodical, Nazi-directed events which during late summer and early autumn threatened a world war over Czechoslovakia.
When without loss of blood he reduced Czechoslovakia to a German puppet state, forced a drastic revision of Europe’s defensive alliances, and won a free hand for himself in Eastern Europe by getting a “hands-off” promise from powerful Britain (and later France), Adolf Hitler without doubt became 1938’s Man of the Year.
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A “hand’s off” promise from powerful Britain!
But is that surprising, given the historical ties between England and Germany?
King George III, the one we got shut of in the American Revolution, was a German, afterall, as was his father and grandfather before him.
As to the Sudetenland being handed to Hitler on a silver plate, we have this from “World Wars and Revolutions – The Course of Europe Since 1900” by Walter Phelps Hall, Ph.D, Dodge Professor of History, Princeton University, copyright 1943, to wit:.
It is very difficult to fathom what lay behind French and British policy in the crisis of 1938.
Mile by mile the two governments gave way to Hitler’s threats and bombast, until finally there was nothing left of Czechoslovakia except a completely disillusioned and discouraged little rump of a country, which could not fight if it wanted to, and which was occupied without a shot by the Fuehrer the following spring.
Czechoslovakia was told by England and France that she must deliver “the districts mainly inhabited by the Sudeten Germans” to Germany.
If this was done there would be guarantees of her future independence.
This was selling the pass, for the districts to be ceded lay along the frontier where the Czechs had their fortifications.
England and France were now offering Hitler all that he demanded.
Runciman, meanwhile, made his formal report.
It proposed not only to give Germany all that Hitler had demanded but a little more, for he suggested not only that parts of Czechoslovakia be ceded Germany but also that the rump which remained should renounce all treaties of defense with other countries, suppress all anti-German agitation, and enter into close economic relations with the Reich.
The Runciman report was followed by sharp insistence at Prague on the part of the French and British ambassadors that Benes agree to the Anglo-French proposals.
The Germans took what they wanted, marched to within forty miles of Prague, and absorbed about 750,000 Czechs in the new Germany.
As they did so the Poles invaded Teschen, annexing about 80,000 Poles and 120,000 Czechs.
Hungary then advanced on the helpless Czechs from the south, crossed the Danube, took Bratislava, and would have divided Ruthenia and perhaps Slovakia with Poland had she been permitted to by the all-powerful Germans.
All French and British guarantees vanished into thin air.
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The mention of the Runciman Report refers to the Runciman Mission to Czechoslovakiam which was a British Government initiative aimed at resolving an international crisis threatening to lead to war in Europe in the summer of 1938.
The Mission, headed by a former British cabinet minister Lord Runciman, was sent to mediate in a dispute between the Government of Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten German Party (SdP), representing the radicalised ethnic German minority within the country.
The British mediators were active on the ground in Czechoslovakia during the late summer, issuing their report shortly before the Munich Conference in September.
That then takes us to the Phoney War, which preceded Dunkirk.
The Phoney War was an eight-month period at the start of World War II, during which there was only one limited military land operation on the Western Front, when French troops invaded Germany’s Saar district.
The Phoney period began with the declaration of war by Great Britain and France against Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939, and ended with the German attack on France and the Low Countries on 10 May 1940.
While there was no large-scale military action by Britain and France, they did begin economic warfare, and shut down the German surface raiders.
They created elaborate plans for numerous large-scale operations designed to swiftly and decisively cripple the German war effort which included opening a French-British front in the Balkans; invading Norway to seize control of Germany’s main source of iron ore; and a strike against the Soviet Union, to cut off its supply of oil to Germany.
Only the Norway plan came to fruition, and it was too little too late in April 1940.
In the Saar Offensive in September, the French attacked Germany with the intention of assisting Poland, but it fizzled out within days and they withdrew.
The Allied discussions about a Scandinavian campaign caused concern in Germany and resulted in the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in April, and the Allied troops previously assembled for Finland were redirected to Norway instead.
Fighting there continued until June when the Allies evacuated, ceding Norway to Germany in response to the German invasion of France.
On the Axis side, the Germans launched attacks at sea in the autumn and winter against British aircraft carriers and destroyers, sinking several including the carrier HMS Courageous with the loss of 519 lives.
Action in the air began on 16 October 1939 when the Luftwaffe launched air raids on British warships.
There were various minor bombing raids and reconnaissance flights on both sides.
The Battle of France then began in earnest on 10 May 1940 when to the east, the German Army Group B invaded the Netherlands and advanced westward, and in response, the Supreme Allied Commander—French General Maurice Gamelin—initiated “Plan D” and entered Belgium to engage the Germans in the Netherlands.
The plan relied heavily on the Maginot Line fortifications along the German–French border, but German forces had already crossed through most of the Netherlands before the French forces arrived.
Gamelin instead committed the forces under his command, three mechanised armies, the French First and Seventh Armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), to the River Dyle, but on 14 May, German Army Group A burst through the Ardennes and advanced rapidly to the west toward Sedan, then turned northward to the English Channel, using Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manstein’s plan Sichelschnitt under the German strategy Fall Gelb, effectively flanking the Allied forces.
A series of Allied counter-attacks—including the Battle of Arras—failed to sever the German spearhead, which reached the coast on 20 May, separating the BEF near Armentières, the French First Army, and the Belgian Army further to the north from the majority of French troops south of the German penetration.
After reaching the Channel, the German forces swung north along the coast, threatening to capture the ports and trap the British and French before they could evacuate to Britain.
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And there is the lead-in to Dunkirk.
It is interesting when thinking of these battles between the English, French and Germans in WWII to drop back in time a bit to the Battle of Crécy on 26 August 1346, which was an English victory during the Edwardian phase of the Hundred Years’ War.
According to records related to that famous battle near Crécy, in northern France, roughly 65 miles west of Arras, where the battles of the Dunkirk period were being fought 26 May to 4 June 1940 between the allied French and British against the Germans, and about one hundred fifteen miles south of Dunkirk itself, the English army led by Edward III in that battle was mainly comprised of English and Welsh troops along with allied Breton, Flemish, and German mercenaries.
So there we have the Germans and English on the same side against the French.
Then we go to the Battle of Poitiers, which was fought on 19 September 1356 in Nouaillé, near the city of Poitiers in Aquitaine, western France.
In that battle, an army of English, Welsh, Breton and Gascon troops, many of them veterans of Crécy, led by Edward, the Black Prince, defeated a larger French and allied army led by King John II of France, leading to the capture of the king, his son, and much of the French nobility.
The French army in that battle was composed largely of native French soldiers, though there was a contingent of German knights, and a large force of Scottish soldiers.
The fighting in that battle began with a charge against the English by 300 German knights, led by Jean de Clermont, which attack was a disaster with many of the knights shot down or killed by English soldiery.
There we have the French and Germans on the same side, this time against the English.
So in both battles, we have the English fighting the French, with the Germans first on one side, and then on the other.
It seems to have been a sort of sport for them.
WWII was that same contest, just on a larger scale with more elaborate killing toys like tanks and planes to use, instead of arrows and lances.
I think that is why George Washington warned us in his farewell address to stay clear of the Europeans and all their many squabbles.
As to “Dunkirk” entering the lexicon as a result of the British evacuation, the term was used during the Korean war after the dramatic breakout of the lst Marine Division from Chosin Reservoir when Time magazine remarked that it “was a battle unparalleled in U.S. military history,” possessing “some aspects of Bataan, some of Anzio, some of Dunkirk, some of Valley Forge, some of the ‘Retreat of the 10,000’ (401-400 bc) as described in Xenophon’s Anabasis.”
The Marines, however, derided the comparison, noting that they did not leave behind all their supplies to succor the enemy the way the Brits did at Dunkirk, and besides, since the Marines were surrounded, they weren’t retreating the way the Brits did at Dunkirk – they were attacking to the rear.
Another reference to Dunkirk as a military fiasco can be found at p.334 of “U.S. Marine Operations in Korea 1950-1953, Volume III, The Chosin Reservoir Campaign” by Lynn Montross and Nicholas A. Canzona, as follows:
By reading contemporary press accounts it is possible to recapture the mood of the American public upon realization of the disaster which had overtaken the Eighth Army (it had just been overrun and decimated by the Chinese in western North Korea in 1950 as it was pushing north to the Yalu River per command of General Douglas MacArthur in Japan, while the Marines were to the east near the Chosin Reservoir).
“It was defeat – the worst defeat the United States ever suffered,” reported Time in the issue of 11 December 1950.
“The Nation received the fearful news from Korea with a strange seeming calmness – the kind of confused, fearful, half-believing matter-of-factness with which many a man has reacted upon learning that he has cancer or tuberculosis.”
“The news of Pearl Harbor, nine years ago to the month, had pealed out like a fire bell.”
“But the numbing facts of the defeat in Korea seeped into the national consciousness slowly out of a jumble of headlines, bulletins, and communiques; days passed before its enormity finally became plain.”
Newsweek called it “America’s worst military licking since Pearl Harbor.”
“Perhaps it might become the worst military disaster in American history.”
“Barring a military or diplomatic miracle, the approximately two-thirds of the U.S. Army that had been thrown into Korea might have to be evacuated in a new Dunkerque to save them from being lost in a new Bataan.”
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With respect to that military debacle, which is a part of our modern American history, although we hear nothing about it today, as if it never happened, the Brookings Institute has an article on it entitled “Catastrophe on the Yalu – America’s Intelligence Failure in Korea” by Bruce Riedel on 13 September 2017, where we learn as follows:
Faulty Intelligence
(General Douglas “I shall return”) MacArthur had always understood that if you “control intelligence, you control decision making.”
He had built an intelligence community in his area of command that listened attentively to what he wanted and gave him intelligence that reinforced his already held views.
MacArthur wanted total control of the war and its execution, not second-guessing by his subordinates or outside interference by Washington, especially by the White House and the Pentagon.
If his Tokyo command headquarters were solely responsible for collecting and assessing intelligence on the enemy, then MacArthur alone could decide how big the enemy threat was and thus what to do about it.
MacArthur’s authority put America’s relatively new civilian intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, in an awkward position.
It was not permitted to have a representative in Tokyo or participate in preparing intelligence estimates for the Eighth Army.
MacArthur, who never spent a single night during the war in Korea, preferring to sleep in his headquarters in Japan, wanted no outside intelligence challenger.
As one historian of the war wrote later, “Only after the great and catastrophic failure on the whereabouts and intentions of China’s armies would the CIA finally be allowed into the region.”
MacArthur’s intelligence chief, or G2, was General Charles Willoughby, who had been with his commander since serving in the Philippines in 1939, before World War II.
A self-styled admirer of the general, Willoughby later wrote a sycophantic biography of MacArthur that was more than a thousand pages long.
In June 1950 Willoughby assured MacArthur that North Korea would not invade the South, despite alarms raised by then-CIA director Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter.
In the fall of that year Willoughby’s office refused to believe or confirm reports that thousands of CCF troops were in North Korea.
Even when Chinese prisoners were captured, Willoughby dismissed them as a few experts or advisers, not as group of soldiers.
The G2 in Tokyo recognized that some Chinese divisions had entered the North, but argued that they were not full-strength combat units.
Willoughby “doctored the intelligence in order to permit MacArthur’s forces to go where they wanted to go militarily, to the banks of the Yalu,” with no contrary or dissenting voices heard in Tokyo or Washington.
The Tokyo estimate of the number of CCF forces in Korea was less than one-tenth the reality.
On October 15, 1950, MacArthur had meeting with President Truman on Wake Island in the mid-Pacific.
The general told the president that the war would be over by Thanksgiving and most troops would be home by Christmas.
When Truman asked, “What will be the attitude of Commie China?” MacArthur said it would not intervene.
Even if China tried, it could not get more than 50,000 troops across the Yalu River, MacArthur promised, citing his G2’s intelligence estimate.
In fact, by October 19, 260,000 CFF soldiers had already crossed into Korea.
Even the first encounters with Chinese forces on the battlefield did not shake the faulty intelligence estimate.
In late October the Eighth Army fought a bitter and costly battle with CCF forces at Unsan in the North.
The Americans were routed, but then the Chinese pulled back.
They wanted to entice the Eighth Army northward to trap it far from its supply lines and to isolate it near the Chinese frontier.
Willoughby dismissed the Unsan battle as unimportant and continued to claim that the Chinese would not intervene in force.
So did MacArthur.
The Chinese decision to trap an American unit in Unsan, then stop and regroup, would be unerringly similar to the Chinese invasion of India twelve years later in 1962 in which they used the same tactic—attack, halt, and then attack again—to defeat the Indian army.
MacArthur made one of his lightning quick trips to Korea from Tokyo on November 24, 1950, telling the U.S. ambassador in Seoul there were only 25,000 Chinese troops in Korea.
Then he had his return flight to Tokyo fly along the Yalu River, making possible a personal reconnaissance intended to impress the media.
His report to Washington dismissed the danger of Chinese intervention.
Three days later Peng’s armies struck the American forces as they were driving to the Yalu River.
The result was a disaster.
The Eighth Army was routed again and its South Korean allies destroyed.
Thousands of allied troops died and were wounded.
As the British military historian Max Hastings described later, the total disintegration “resembled the collapse of the French in 1940 to the Nazis and the British at Singapore in 1942 to the Japanese.”
By December 31, 1950, the Americans had been driven 120 miles south back to the 38th parallel and were still retreating.
Seoul would fall to Peng’s armies in early 1951.
It was by far the worst military debacle the U.S. armed forces suffered in the entire twentieth century.
A new American commander, General Mathew Ridgeway, took over from MacArthur in Korea.
One of his first acts was to bring the CIA into theater to provide an alternative intelligence viewpoint from that given by Willoughby’s Tokyo headquarters.
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And thus is history made – often by complete idiots and morons and fools in positions of high authority in our military or government.
Too often, it seems.