Re: OT: debian-beer (was Re: wrapping [was: Re: disable paragraphflows in mozilla?])
On Sun, 2002-05-26 at 19:05, John wrote:
> 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 the
> >>
> >
> >It'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...
Flame war? I've seen no vituperation or mean-spirited invective,
and I don't intended to start one.
> 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.
(A _continent_ got the crap bombed out of it????? It took
10 years for the US to do that in Viet Nam, and the IJN
didn't have B-17-sized planes, much less B-29s or B-52s.
Germany barely bombed the crap out of London, much less the
rest of England.)
Very strong internal isolationist sentiments allowed even
Lend-Lease to only pass Congress after major arm-twisting by
Roosevelt. The only reason the the USN was able to help
with GB in the BoA before 07-Dec was by not making it public
knowledge.
If FDR _had_ followed US neutrality laws, .uk would now be
.de.
> 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
I didn't know that, but am _not_ surprised. Not because I
don't like Oz, or do like Nippon. It's because the US war
economy wasn't even in 1st gear yet, not to mention that
most of the PacFlt was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, The
Philippines, Burma _and_ Singapore had fallen.
Thus, I presume that pragmatic military planners did not
think that we could save Australia by shipping enough men+
material all the way from Hawaii in the face of the "unstopp-
able" Imperial Japanese Navy.
Fortunately, those pragmatic military planners were wrong.
> 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.
If we (along, of course, with help from Coastwatchers and RAN)
hadn't been able to hold on to Guadalcanal, it would have been
impossible to support ANZ even after Coral Sea.
> 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
Does the rest of the world think we've been a super-power since
1776? Up until _late_ 1941, the US _never_ever_ had anything
but a _tiny_ standing Army.
> 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)...
Is that some veiled reference to some hypothetical Indonesia-
of-the-future?
--
+---------------------------------------------------------+
| Ron Johnson, Jr. Home: ron.l.johnson@cox.net |
| Jefferson, LA USA http://ronandheather.dhs.org:81 |
| |
| "I have created a government of whirled peas..." |
| Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 12-May-2002, |
! CNN, Larry King Live |
+---------------------------------------------------------+
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