Ron Johnson wrote:
On Sat, 2002-05-25 at 08:37, Paul Johnson wrote:On Sat, May 25, 2002 at 04:46:29AM -0700, Craig Dickson wrote:[snip]To make an observation, Americans have this bizarre superiority complex. Oregonians, and to a lesser degree, Idahoans, tend to look in from theIt's not a "bizarre" superiority complex. May not be valid, but certainly not "bizarre". I can list 1,000 US accomplish- ments, not the least of which is making sure that Aussies aren't not speaking Japanese, and the Brits now speaking German. (Yes, you fought the Battle of Britain, but without the US Navy , for all intents & purposes fighting the Battle of the Atlantic with the Royal Navy well before 07-Dec-1941, Admiral Doenitz _would_ have starved you all into submission...)
Hmmmm, OK, flamewar started...Actually, the USA was asked to help Australia in 1939. We had the crap bombed out of us. After Pearl Harbour the USA decided that Oz was a great place to base a lot of Operations.
The main US base in Oz was at Tweed Heads, which is pretty close to halfway along the eastern seaboard. The US plan was to let the Japanese have the northern part of Oz, to a line that passes through where Brisbane is. It was only after major pressure from Great Britain that the USA abandoned the plan of letting the Japanese take AND KEEP about half of Australia and started to support our troops in Papua New Guinea. This change of tactics was instrumental in bringing about the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of the Bismark Sea, which were pretty much the turning point of the Pacific war.
There's a lot of Aussies still pretty bitter about how hard it was to get the Yanks to abandon the idea of giving nearly half the contenent to the Empire. We sometimes wonder if that's what our allies are like what would we expect in say an invasion from Cimmeria (an imaginary archipelogo somewhere to the north of Australia with a Military dominated expansionary Government)...
John P Foster (who is NOT the guy who makes Foster's Lager) --To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org