Berlin and Potsdam 1945 - Aftermath

stock footage of Germany in ruins

after the end of World War II

 

The Endless Culture War In the Pacific

My Hero Academia is one of the recent breakout hits of Japan’s anime and manga industry. Created by Kōhei Horikoshi and inspired by Western superhero comics, it’s been ongoing since 2014. However, the ghosts of the past risk overshadowing its global acclaim and many accolades

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Book Review

The Naked and the Dead

by Norman Mailer

     Readers expecting Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead will, almost inevitably, be disappointed if they expect it to be a conventional war novel. It is not a story of combat operations, gritty heroism, tough guy fearlessness in the face of danger, or a patriotic celebration of American greatness. Instead, World War II functions as a setting for portraying the lives of the men who enlisted and fought. Going into this sprawling novel with the right expectations will make it a more meaningful reading experience.

     Mailer was heavily influenced by Marxist thought in his younger days and this shows in his treatment of the army; there is no lead character and in the forefront of the writing are the men who make up a platoon of recon soldiers sent to invade a fictional Filipino island called Atopopei. After landing on the shore, they build a bivouac, do menial chores, engage in some minor combat, and get to know each other as they do a lot of waiting. Rather than portraying the army as a conglomeration of faceless troops who march to any orders they receive, Mailer makes each one an individual with their own hopes, fears, dreams, anxieties, and individual personalities. We are reminded that each soldier is a human being. Many of these men are uneducated, lower class, and only once or twice removed from the lumpenproletariat. They are not magnanimous superheroes of combat; they are ordinary people that would probably be considered mediocre by most people’s standards. But they are still men and despite their flaws, offensive habits, and lack of ambition, Mailer does not want us to forget that. Most of the novel is dedicated to building them up as characters. Just as Melville described all the intricate aspects of whaling in Moby Dick so the reader could easily visualize what was happening during the final hunt, Mailer thoroughly acquaints us with the inner workings of each character’s mind so we can make sense of how they react during the fruitless detail they get assigned in the end.

     Another Marxist theme that permeates The Naked and the Dead is that of class conflict. While the lower ranking soldiers are crude and uncouth, the officers they despise are painted in unflattering colors. The Texan Croft acts as the sergeant leading the platoon; he is a sadist and a psychopath. His desire is to get promoted but, a lot like Captain Ahab, he leads them on a mission that is futile and insists on carrying it through even when it is obvious they need to stop. Croft is incapable as seeing other people as people and Mailer exemplifies him as the type of leader the American military depends on.

     What little plot there is revolves around the relationship between Lieutenant Hearne and General Cummings. Hearne is a white, upper-class liberal with a wishy-washy personality. He wants to feel comradeship with the enlisted men he commands but has trouble relating to them. He is naive and can not make up his mind about what he believes. Cummings takes interest in him but the interest is ambiguous. He feels a sense of paternalism towards Hearne and possibly even a physical attraction to him. Their relationship is an echo of Billy Budd, though, and the mixed emotions Cummings feels cause him to send the lieutenant on what might be a suicide mission.

     Cummings is a complex character and one that is hard to sympathize with. He calls himself a reactionary, sympathizes with fascism while engaging in a war to defeat Hitler, and thinks of himself as a genius trying to attain the powers of a god. He clearly states that America’s purpose in fighting World War II is not to save the Jews but to assert American hegemony. He is motivated by deep insecurities though. Mailer drops hints that he has repressed homosexual cravings. His marriage is failing. He has memories of being mugged and beaten nearly to death during a business trip in Rome. His subordinates do not obey his orders and his superiors snub him when he asks for a back up ship for an operation to penetrate the Japanese lines from the rear of Atopopei. True to Mailer’s form, the suggestion of anal penetration is probably deliberate; even in his early works, Mailer had an obsessive tendency to write about anuses. Cummings writes journal entries because he thinks of himself as an intellectual heavyweight but in reality his philosophy is little more than generic Freudian descriptions of guns as phallic symbols, battlefields as wombs, and the trajectory of shells following the arc shape of a breast or a man’s ass.

     When Hearne defies Cummings’ orders, he is sent out to lead the recon troops through the jungle to attack the Japanese from behind while the other units attack from the front. The mission is pointless, though, since the Japanese are backed up against Mount Anaka and have nowhere to go if attacked from the front. The platoon is too small for the mission anyways and they are sent without adequate supplies. Even after they leave, Cummings can not decide if he sent Hearne on the detail because he wanted him to get killed.

     The Naked and the Dead is a great book if you catch on to what Mailer wanted to accomplish. The characters are easily understood and realistically drawn. The portrayal of the commanding officers makes a poignant point about the psychological nature of powerful men. Every character is naked because the narrative strips them all of their outer facades and they are all dead because the military dehumanizes them, treats them like machines, and sends them off to die without regard for who they are as people. The idea that human life is confusing and fragile is expressed well. The novel’s biggest flaw is that Mailer sometimes spends too much time describing things that do not need to be exhaustively described. This flaw does not ruin the book though.

     While The Naked and the Dead is not a protest novel, it does portray war and the military in a negative light. It is no surprise that Norman Mailer went on to become a leftist and a participant in the anti-war movement of the 1960s. It is also interesting to see what kind of writer he was before he had his psychotic breakdown in the 1950s. The roots of the older Norman Mailer are here. 

Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead. Picador/Henry Holt and Company, New York: 1998.

The Crime of Being Ethnic: Japanese-American Concentration Camps During World War II

      Racism and hatred of immigrants has been a disease ever since the founding of the United States of America. Every immigrant group not originating from northwest Europe has suffered persecution from a small minority of ignorant citizens who think of themselves as the only true Americans. At the time of World War II, when Japan joined forces with the Axis powers of Germany and Italy, ethnic Japanese people gained first hand experience of the bigotry and hate that remains a chronic sickness in American society to this day.

     In the mid-nineteenth century, Meiji era Japan opened its doors to international trade and commerce in a bid to modernize their kingdom. An economic recession resulted and many Japanese people fled to America in search of work and economic opportunity. Most of them were peasants and farm laborers and the majority of them relocated to Hawaii and California. The Japanese immigrants were highly successful as agriculturalists and businessmen; farmers in California brought with them a new irrigation technique that made raising crops in difficult terrain much easier. They lived in quiet communities, spoke their own language, and practiced their own traditions. The white farm owners, many of which were less successful financially than the Japanese immigrants, were not happy about their presence on American soil.

     But the Japanese people remained. Then on December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and public sentiment turned from quiet resentment to open hatred. Fearing the possibility that the ethnic Japanese community would rise up to fight the USA on its own shores, possibly even building espionage networks to assist their Asian ancestors, became a fear of the American military. The government began a clandestine investigative committee and surveillance program to spy on the Japanese people and assess their level of loyalty to the United States. The committee found that they were deeply committed to their adopted nation with little to no sympathy for Japan. No anti-American propaganda was found in their communities, no pro-Japanese sentiment was heard of, and no spy networks were uncovered. Despite these positive findings, the military leaders insisted that Asian people were incapable of being true Americans and in the end their loyalty would go to the Japanese aggressors. Empirical evidence counted for nothing and racist hatred counted for everything. When it came to bigotry in politics, nothing could penetrate the thick fog of stupidity that clouded the vision of white Americans of that time.

     Franklin D. Roosevelt, long considered a champion of the poor and oppressed people of the USA, passed Executive Order 9066. The forced relocation and imprisonment of Japanese-Americans had begun. At first, zones of exclusion were drawn up. Territories in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona were demarcated on maps and Japanese people were informed that they were not, under any circumstances, allowed to leave those areas. Next a curfew that only applied to Asian people was put into effect, making it illegal for them to be outside their homes after dark. Then the military ordered all Japanese people to voluntarily bring whatever they could carry to the train stations; they were put on trains, and transported to redistribution centers in the desert northeast of Los Angeles. Finally they were transported to concentration camps located throughout the country; all of them were on the most inhospitable land in deserts, swamps, and Indian reservations. People who were thought to be potentially dangerous were sent to a high-security facility in Nevada.

     About sixty percent of the detainees were legally naturalized American citizens, mostly second and third generation people who were born in America. The government defined a Japanese-American as anyone being 1/16th Japanese, meaning having one great-great-grandparent of Japanese ancestry qualified the individual as being a potentially criminal ethnic minority. Elderly Japanese people as well as little children and the mentally disabled were deemed too dangerous to be allowed to live freely in American society. Ethnic Korean and Taiwanese people were also imprisoned because the Japanese had once conquered and colonized those respective nations, thereby making them potentially suspicious communities.

     Obviously, life in the internment camps was not easy. Most were located in high desert regions and the weather was hot and extreme in all of them. Surrounded by barbed wire fencing and monitored by guards armed with rifles, the barracks style houses were cramped and uncomfortable. Hastily constructed, they were little more than mosquito-infested wood boxes with tarpaper roofs. Families were kept together but 25 people were forced to sleep in houses that were made to hold only four. The beds were small cots and having so many people crowded together in small confined spaces led to outbreaks of illnesses and disease. Physically-fit adults were put to work doing manual labor to maintain the camps; they were paid 49 cents a day so that they could buy food from their captors to feed their hungry, malnourished families. Children and teenagers were forced to go to school where conventional curriculum was not taught; instead they were force-fed a steady stream of pro-American propaganda making the schools look uncomfortably like the communist re-education camps that were later to be set up in China and Vietnam. In the evening, men and women were forced to play baseball in an attempt to use the sport to make them more “American”.

     Some of the Japanese prisoners were given chances to prove their loyalty to their country, even though none of them had ever been anything but loyal. Questionnaires were distributed asking the people their opinion about how much they loved their country. Being worded in complicated and confusing ways, some people, especially those who were only moderately fluent in English, had trouble answering the questions correctly. Some, infuriated over their unnecessary imprisonment, sarcastically answered that they felt no admiration for the USA. Those who gave the wrong answers were shipped off to the high-risk concentration camp and eventually deported back to Japan. Many of them were old or uneducated people who did not understand what they were doing. But some young people who proved themselves to be intelligent were sent to progressive colleges on the east coast. Others were allowed to enlist in the army; these Japanese soldiers formed the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team and went on to become some of the most decorated fighters for America in World War II since they assisted in the liberation of Dachau and were involved in a major operation to disrupt trains taking Jews to concentration camps in southern Germany.

     Very few prisoners tried to escape. The ones who did were either shot and killed or sent to the maximum security camp in Nevada.

     In 1944, World War II began to wind down. The Japanese-American prison camps were starting to closed. Most inmates were given $25 and a train ticket to return to their former homes. Most of them found their houses and possessions to be stolen or vandalized. Some of their property was burned or destroyed. Many American citizens treated them with hostility and contempt. A group of white supremacists petitioned the government to permanently remove all people of Asian descent from California. Otherwise Americans mostly remained silent on the issue for many years.

Then during the 1960s, young Japanese-American college students, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, began agitating for reparations. Eventually both Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter gave speeches condemning the internment camps. By the 1980s bills were passed through Congress with bipartisan support and the Civil Rights Act of 1988 was ratified by Ronald Reagan, giving $20,000 in reparation money to the survivors of the concentration camps. The disbursement of the money was overseen by both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton during their terms of office. Bush gave a speech proclaiming that the forced imprisonment of innocent ethnic minorities will never be allowed to happen again. As we pass into the 21^st century, it is obvious that some Americans have refused to learned this historical lesson.

     Ultimately, reparation money and the building of monuments is fine. However, one has to ask if these gestures are really enough to heal the psychological damage that has been done to American society because of sadly idiotic mistakes made in the past.

References

Kelly, Edward H. and Harbison, Winifred A., The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development. W.W. Norton & Company, 1946.

Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Revised Edition. Back Bay Books, 2008.

Kilroy Was Here: The Cryptic Graffiti of World War II

      The design was simple. A straight line with a bald egg-shaped half head with two pinpoint eyes on the top, a long nose resembling a load of French bread hanging down below the line like a flaccid phallus, and four fingers hanging down over the line as well on either side. That was all. Scrawled on the side were the words “Kilroy Was Here.” During World War II this simple graffito appears in theaters of war all across rhe world. It mostly came to be associated with the American military, though in actuality it was scrawled on walls by soldiers from all the countries of the allied powers. No one knows who, where or why Kilroy began appearing but most likely this famous graffiti did not originate in America.

     So what could be the possible origins of Kilroy? England is the most plausible answer. The English people themselves do not call Kilroy by his American name but actually refer to him as Chad, among other names. If we were to trace the simple figure of Chad back a few thousand years, we could plausibly note its resemblance to the Greek letter omega, a symbol used by Great Britain’s Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers; they used the omega symbol as shorthand for an alternating current which can also be written as a straight line with a sine wave through it. It is rumored that engineers at that particular institution used to draw the omega letter with plus and minus signs for eyes, indicating a positive and negative charge. This would sometimes be drawn with the words “Wot no leave?’ beside its head. The Chad figure also resembles Alice the Goon, a cartoon character in the Popeye comics of the 1930s, drawn by a comic artist named George Edward Chatterton; people called him “Chat” for short and this nickname could possibly have transmuted into “Chad.”

     The link that takes Chad into the heart of World War II goes directly into Britain during the time of food rationing. The round-headed and long-nosed figure began appearing on walls throughout London with the caption saying “Wot no bread?” or other gripes against the insufficient diets being forced on the English people.

     At some point American servicemen, as well as troops from other nations, took on the practice of leaving their territorial mark of graffiti wherever they went. The figure of Chad began appearing on bathroom walls, sides of ships, public buildings and anywhere else you might imagine. As a symbol taken on by Americans, the captioned complaint written besides the man’s head was replaced by the phrase “Kilroy Was Here.” What was especially perplexing was the way the drawing appeared in places before American troops actually arrived as if some joker snuck off the ship and scrawled the doodle on something to greet them. It was as if the artist wanted to prank the fighters by saying “look I got here before you did.” One notorious sighting located Kilroy on a giant rock on Bikini Island; the air force arrived there to test their nuclear bombs before moving on to Nagasaki and Hiroshima and there it was to welcome them ashore. Kilroy also showed up in other inaccessible places like inside sealed off sections of ships’ hulls, inside air ducts, or on the bodies of airplanes which were only accessible to people with high security clearances. During the Potsdam conference of 1945, Joseph Stalin came out of the bathroom and asked who Kilroy was; apprently someone had written a Kilroy Was Here in the stall of the VIP men’s room, giving the dictator something to wonder about while he sat on the toilet.

     Historians of the war have tracked down the name of “Kilroy” and come up with two possibilities as to who he was. An American shipyard inspector named James J. Kilroy is one culprit. The all-too-obvious conclusion is that he wrote the words and symbol on the sides of ships to indicate that he had completed his inspection and the boat was ready to go. Another suspect is one Sgt. Francis J. Kilroy who came down with the flu when he was scheduled to arrive at an air force base in Florida. To indicate his delayed arrival, somebody wrote “Kilroy will be here next week’ on the barracks wall. Kilroy later died in the hospital and his grief stricken friend from the bed beside him was sent off to sea on a warship. He began writing “Kilroy was here” with chalk on walls to commemorate the death of his comrade. Then the graffiti spread like wildfire, probably being written by people who had no idea what it meant.

     Historians appear not to have every found anybody who claims to have drawn the symbol during wartime.

     Did it mean anything? Adolf Hitler convinced himself that the Kilroy/Chad figure was being used as code by spies since it kept showing up on the allies’ equipment seized by the Germans. He sent a couple too many men to search out information about what message it intended to send, only to have them come back without any useful theories. Maybe that is why the graffiti caught on; the human mind has an unrelenting capacity to see patterns where they do not actually exist. Many hard thinkers have spent countless hours of time pursuing the meanings of fruitless mysteries that lead them to dead-ends, the tortured logic of conspiracy theories or goofy conclusions that do not make any sense to anyone but themselves.

Reisner, Robert. Graffiti: Two Thousand Years of Wall Writing. H. Regnery Co., 1971.

Adolf Hitler paintings: Berlin police seize 'fake' works at auction

Three watercolour paintings attributed to the former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler have been seized by German police.

Read the full article here.

Cracking the Enigma Code: The Disproven Myth of Nazi Superiority

Until the outbreak of World War II, Hitler and the Third Reich had convinced a significant part of the German people that they were a superior race, destined to conquer and control the world. The German made Enigma Machine proved to be one of the cracks that caused their whole edifice to come crumbling down.

    As the level of technological sophistication grew after the Industrial Revolution, the role that computers played in warfare and espionage also took on a higher level of significance. The Nazi military leaders used the Enigma to send commands to commanders in the field. Since radio was the most efficient form of communications technology at the time, instructions were broadcast over the airwaves. The obvious problem is that radio transmissions could easily be intercepted and analyzed by enemy spies so that military maneuvers can be easily predicted. The Enigma Machine changed the whole game by encrypting information which could be decrypted by the officers who needed it. Supplied with a one time pad that was discarded and replaced on a monthly basis, codes were made clear for the possessor of this key while to an outside observer the codes were nothing but a meaningless jumble of random letters.

    The Enigma Machine was invented by Arthur Scherbius; originally its purpose was for the exchange of banking and business information. As Hitler rose to power and the Third Reich began the saber rattling that signaled the coming of war, he sold them the patent to be used as a tool for the military. The Nazis naively believed their new toy created codes that were impossible for the enemy to break.

    The Enigma Machine worked by sending battery-powered electrical currents through a circuit. The operator typed the code into a keyboard and each key stroke sent an electrical charge through a plug-board which was the key to the encryption; it was necessary for the sender and receiver of each command to have this part wired in exactly the same way so the encryption and decryption would be identical. With one plug out of place, the entire procedure would fail. The plug-board arrangement pattern was the key sent out to officers every month. After passing through the plug-board, the current went through three rotary scramblers which had a notch for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. The wheels rotated to alternate letters using a polyalphabetic substitution cipher called the Vigenere Code and complicated  further with a caesar shift. Each current passed through three wheels so it would be encrypted three times using a separate alphabetic cipher each time. The wheels were set so that a letter could not possibly encrypt as itself.   Finally the current ended in a series of lamps with letters on them that provided the encrypted message which was then read over the radio to operators stationed far away. Thus the word “attack” might encrypt as “tygksh” and without the key, the patterning of frequencies would be too complex to be easily or quickly detected. The receiver of the command would type the message into their own Enigma Machine after wiring the plug-board according to their one time pad. The electrical currents would pass through the rotary scramblers and connect with a reflector placed at the rear of the machine; the reflector reversed the whole process and an easy to read message would be displayed on the lamps at the head of the device. The Enigma Machine was a hand-carried gadget with roughly the same dimensions as a medium-sized suitcase.

    Fortunately, some Polish espionage agents were able to seize an Enigma Machine. They handed it over to the Polish secret service where a mathematician and cryptanalyst named Marian Rejewski was able to replicate the Enigma and solve the puzzle of how it worked. Building one replica-Enigma was difficult enough, but figuring out how to crack the transmitted codes was an entirely different problem. Using a polyalphabetic substitution cipher with a caesar shift meant that, although the number of possible encryptions was less than infinite, there still would be enough of them to make running each one a daunting and inefficient task that would take too long to be of use. Rejewksi came up with the idea of building multiple replicas of the Enigma and running them simultaneously until a legible code was produced. An entire room full of replicas was built by assistant engineers and a computer was used to list every possible combination of plug-board arrangements. Intercepted messages were run through the battery of machines until one produced the properly decrypted command. The replicas were called Bombs because they made bomb-like ticking noises as the rotary scramblers turned. Decrypting a ciphertext took about 24 hours.

    The Polish military’s use of these Bombs worked well for a span of time. Nazi tactical maneuvers were sometimes unsuccessful but they believed this to be chance; they obviously did not know that replica Enigmas had been made as the Polish espionage agency kept this information strictly secret. Then the Nazis began adding additional rotary encryption wheels to their machines so that each Enigma had five, six, or seven scramblers instead of the older models with three. These were used more by the German navy when fighting in the Atlantic. The Polish military decided it was time to coordinate their intelligence with the British so they brought them one of their Bombs and showed them how it worked. It was taken to the highly-secretive Bletchley Park where scientists set to work on building a computer that could run more complicated ciphertexts in a shorter amount of time. Eventually they succeeded but the process took such a long time that the deciphered commands were sometimes outdated.

    Then a stroke of luck occurred. A French spy who worked as a double agent for the Aixs and the Allies, not knowing what it was he had found, passed a one time pad key to the British intelligence agents. They rewired an Enigma plug-board using the key and found it worked. The British navy then set out to intercept the keys which were distributed at the beginning of every month. They raided German weather boats stationed in the Atlantic and retrieved the one time pads. They did not want the Germans to know they were raiding the ships to get the key so they bombed and sunk each one every time they finished a siege to make it look like a routine military attack. Soon the British navy, working in coordination with the American navy, were able to attack German warships and submarines before they began their operations. The Germans still did not know that the Enigma code had been cracked and they interpreted their failures as bad luck.

    Of course, the Nazis eventually lost the war. The biggest weapon the Allied powers might have had was the fascists’ own hubris, the belief that their superior intelligence and military prowess made them invincible. Blinded by their own delusions of grandeur, the Germans, yet again, started and lost another war.

Singh, Simon. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to  Quantum Cryptography. Anchor Books, 1999.