Sebastian P. Breit's Blog, page 9

In what I can only describe as an interesting insight into the Japanese psyche and that nation's continued self-denial about its past actions in the face of irrefutable evidence, there seems to be a minor shitstorm brewing between the U.S. State Department and Japan after Hillary Clinton reportedly corrected a
State Department official who referred to women drafted into
prostitution by the Japanese during World War II by the widely used term comfort women, asking that the Department instead call it like it is
and say enforced sex slaves.





Yasukuni Shrine, Japan


Unsurprisingly Japan isn't quite happy with that development should it be proven true. "If that is confirmed, I will tell her that it is an incorrect
expression and explain to her the steps that we have taken, including an
apology by the prime minister and the creation of a fund to support
women in Asia in order to help comfort women," Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba was cited in reaction.




On which I call... bollocks, good sir! Japan's stance towards its past crimes in general seems to have been and continue to be to largely act as if they've never happened in the first place. It's the behavior of an ostrich. And just like with that bird that can't fly sticking their heads in the sand doesn't mean the issue will go away! Worse, the whole business feels more like they're apologizing - very grudgingly - because others expect them to do it and not because they think it's the right thing to do. 




What actually bothers me the most here is this stubborn determination to stick with euphemisms on the side of Japan. It's disgraceful. It's not like people wouldn't know what you're talking about either way! Kim Dong-hee, secretary general for a Seoul-based civic group Korean
Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sex Slavery by Japan, said
that in Korean, the euphemism carries the connotation that they are the
victims of forced sex slavery - which they were. Quite frankly, stomping your foot and insiting on these women to be called comfort women - indicating this was something done in mutual consent - makes you look like giant douche bags. It's the equivalent of calling the imprisonment and forced relocation of people to the concentration camps "booking a survival trip".


I'm all for developing a positive and steadfast relationship to one's national past and identity, accepting the bad things and cherishing the good ones. But there's something genuinely wrong when that turns into war criminals being enshrined at Yasukuni and you throwing a hissy fit when people call a spade a spade. Can you imagine the kind of outcry it'd create if we Germans put the names of Reinhardt Heydrich or Adolf Eichmann on some military memorial

I haven't found any Chinese-based sources on this so it may very well be just the perception of the Indian side. What seems to be the case however is that with the 50th anniversary of the brief border war of 1962 between India and the PRC approaching tensions seem to rise. The war of 1962 - the Sino-Indian War - was largely fought in terrain higher than 14,000 feet under harsh conditions and ended in a rather obvious Chinese victory.




Representing the larger trend represented in my research, two Indian news sources approach the topic from the point of view of Chinese aggression being an imminent threat. Both ZeeNews and India Today reported that

India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)
informed the government in a secret note accessed by Headlines Today
that there was a possibility of a skirmish or an incident triggered by
China on the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Beijing, the input stated,
was contemplating such an action to divert attention from its own
domestic trouble.


The assessment, shared with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, senior
national security officials and the brass of the armed forces, is now
being discussed at the highest levels of the government and has raised
concern.

The RAW note substantiated its claim by pointing to increased Chinese
activity along the LAC. For the first time, China had stationed fighter
aircraft in the Gongga airfield in the Tibet Autonomous Region
throughout the winter months. It also activated new surveillance and
tracking radars in the Lanzhou Military Region bordering India as well
as in Tsona to monitor Indian activity, the RAW said.

ZeeNews went on to state that

James Clapper, Director of
US National Intelligence had said in February that Indian Army is
strengthening itself for a "limited conflict" with China - suggesting
that India has been in the know of the brewing trouble on its eastern
border for some time and has been quietly preparing to meet any
eventuality.

Quite frankly, I don't buy it. China may be a dictatorship, but it's been a highly rational one for the past decades, one that isn't prone to these types of Gulf of Tonkin type shenanigans. For a great power the country's been rather reserved to employ it's military since 1949 (compared to the US and USSR/Russia), even under Mao's rule. Today's PRC isn't exactly known for its military adventurism, and I somehow don't see it's technocratic leadership falling for that worn-out pair of shoes-mantra of 'a short victorious war to quell domestic unrest'. Because that one's really never worked out so far. More so, I don't see a rational government like Beijing's risk a massive moneysink for no great gain at this point in time when it's busy modernizing its forces and establishing its global presence - certainly not against India! Despite lingering animosities there's been a rapprochement between the two nations and they trade quite extensively with one another. A war there and now simply goes against what China's leadership has represented so far, in my opinion.

Peter Hitchens


The following is a piece by conservative British columnist and author Peter Hitchens, the great late Christopher Hitchens' brother. In the wake of the unveiling of the RAF Bomber Command memorial Hitchens takes a critical stance towards the myth and reality of the British bombing campaign. I can't say I completely agree with him - it may surprise a few of you that I'm not quite as damning in my assessment - but it's a rather lengthy piece that I though worth featuring here. Enjoy (or don't^^).




It is a great pity, but it is probably true, that by the time the
Churchill cult of ‘The ‘Finest Hour’ and ‘plucky little Britain’ has
finally faded from the national mind, it will be too late. These
illusions are one of the main reasons why we have sunk not merely from
the first to the second, but from the second to the third rank of
nations. My distinguished colleague Dan Atkinson, together with the
Guardian’s perceptive Larry Elliott, has just published a book ‘Going
South – Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014’,
illustrating the terrible national peril we are in.




I attack our
horrible national blindness over the bombing of Germany because it is
the key to this fantasy of Britain as a mighty, moral world power which
saved the planet from evil in 1940. That fantasy has led us down many
foolish paths, and continues to do so – our moves towards an unhinged
intervention in Syria still echo the same deluded view that we can do
good with bombs.




I know that by raising this question I will
anger many of my readers. Why should I consciously do this? I like my
readers. For the most part we share a deep concern for our nation, its
merits and its morals. Partly it is because I can do no other. I know
that what I say about this is the sober truth. Partly it is because my
own unwilling recognition of the truth was one of the key steps along
the road to serious thought.




Arguments for the Bombing: 1. Germany was supremely evil

Let
us examine some of the arguments ranged against me, in many cases by
people who have read the headline but not the  article, and are plainly
not prepared to think rationally about the subject.  One is ‘we were in
confrontation with the most evil regime the world has ever known’ (Glenn
Newlands). Indeed we were. But we were also , from the summer of 1941
(before the area bombing began)  *in alliance* with the second most evil
(opinions vary as to which was worse, but for the sake of argument I’ll
concede that it was this way round) regime the world has ever known,
the slavery and murder empire of Josef Stalin.


In that case, the
fact that we were fighting *beside* one evil empire *against* another
evil empire robs our war of any general moral purpose. This is
particularly important when you remember that, by treaty and secret
agreement, we then aided Josef Stalin in imposing his blood-dabbled rule
upon Bulgaria, Romania, Poland,, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and eastern
Germany.  We also confirmed his annexation by invasion of eastern Poland
and the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (though we
pretended, to salve our consciences to refuse recognition to the Baltic
annexations). We also, in a shocking episode, handed back many people
who had fought on our side in the war to Stalin, knowing perfectly well
that he would murder or imprison them. We knew what we were doing.





The
sad truth is that we were fighting – not very competently, in my view –
for our national interests, not in a moral crusade. We had been
perfectly happy to maintain good relations with Hitler’s Germany from
the beginning of National Socialist rule in 1933 until the outbreak of
war in 1939 (a period slightly longer than the war itself). We made
major treaties with the Hitler government, notably the Anglo-German
naval treaty. We continued these relations after it became clear that
the Hitler government was intent on cruel and bloody persecution of
German Jews (though the policy of extermination did not begin until
after the war and may, rather horrifyingly have been a by-product of the
war). The fantasy that we went to war to save the Jews, or because we
didn’t like Hitler’s dictatorship is just that, a fantasy.  We never
bombed the death camps or the railways leading to them, though we knew
where they were,  and we were reluctant to believe the truth about them
after very brave men risked their all to get the information to us. We
went to war with Germany because Germany invaded Poland,  to which we
had promised aid in the event of war. This, as discussed here before,
was an act of amazing diplomatic incompetence and dishonesty. When it
came to it, we did nothing to help Poland at all, except declare war on
Germany without having the means to wage it.




And therein lies
the problem. Because of our vainglorious declaration of a war we
couldn’t fight in September 1939, and because of France’s equally
shameful unpreparedness, mixed with bombast, we found ourselves on the
losing side of a swift and humiliating conflict in May 1940.  France was
beaten and occupied, and ceased at that moment, to be a great power,
forever. We were beaten,  and bankrupt into the bargain, but not
occupied, and also ceased at that moment to be a great power, forever.
Some of us have yet to realise this.




Which leads me to…




Arguments for the Bombing: 2. It was the only way we could strike at Germany

This
is partly true. We certainly couldn’t fight Germany in the only way
that actually wins wars, with troops and tanks on the soil of Europe. 
Our tiny, ill-equipped army having been expelled from the European
continent (how did we ever imagine we could confront Germany, with its
huge, well-trained, and well-equipped conscript army, with this little
force, which was still training with broomsticks as late as 1939 because
it hadn’t enough rifles?), we simply couldn’t engage with the main body
of the enemy. We like to exaggerate our importance to Germany at this
stage of the war, with fantasies about a planned German invasion, an
idea which never really left the drawing board. I have said it before,
and will say it again. There is no evidence that Hitler ever seriously
contemplated an invasion of this country, or was interested in such a
thing.  He was baffled to find us fighting him,  as he couldn’t see why
we would do such an odd, self-defeating thing. What did we care who
ruled in Danzig or Prague? (As we proved during the Soviet empire, we
didn’t care at all. From 1945 till 1989 these cities and many others
lived under the most appalling secret-police terror and despotism, and
we never lifted a finger to help them).




If he had wished to
invade us, then he would have done so in 1941, by which time he had
built up a war machine of huge size.  Does anyone seriously imagine that
we could have resisted the forces which he threw instead at the USSR?
But his interest was elsewhere, in the East. Had he won in the East,
then I suspect we would have been forced to make peace. One shudders to
think what sort of peace that might have been (and to think how very
close we came to it). But if you declare war on someone, and you lose,
then you are much worse off than if you had not declared war in the
first place. Actually, if we (and France)  had never declared war on
Hitler in 1939, and never made our worthless guarantees to Poland, we
would have been much more of a restraint on (and danger to) Hitler. Has
anyone stopped to imagine what might have happened if Hitler had got
Danzig by threats instead of by war in the summer of 1939? It is a very
interesting speculation, especially if you can read a map.




But
the fact that we could not meet his army in the field did not mean that
we were reduced to deliberately burning women and children to death in
their homes. Bizarrely, supporters of Harris often cite the Butt report,
which showed that our initial night bombing raids on Germany were
wholly useless. This was because we couldn’t see what we were doing, and
hardly ever hit the target.




Now, there are several possible
responses to this. One of them might be to develop long-range fighters
and heavily armoured bombers (as the Americans did) so as to bomb German
military and industrial targets accurately by day.  A.C. Grayling’s
unanswerable book on this subject ‘Among the Dead Cities’ points out
that this sort of bombing would have diverted just as much strength away
from the eastern front as the bombing of civilians. It also points out
that it had a much more rapid and definite effect on German war capacity
than killing civilians ever did.




The sad truth is that killing
civilians was easier.  You set fire to a huge city, and the flames
showed your bombers the way to drop more bombs on it.

And nobody saw the writhing, dying humans, or heard their screams.




Which brings me to




Arguments for the Bombing: 3. You weren’t there at the time. We had to hit back. They deserved it.

I
will quote Mr Newlands here again : ’You are terribly naive if you
think the German population was anti-Hitler. Just watch the newsreels of
his triumphant return to Berlin following the fall of France:-fanatical
crowds strewing garlands of flowers before his Mercedes car and the SS
Leibstandarte "Adolf Hitler" having to pick up swooning women!! The
population only started to doubt Hitler when they looked at the face of
defeat.’

Well, pardon me, but who is ‘naïve’ here? Mr Newlands
apparently believes Dr Goebbels’s own propaganda films to be the
uncomplicated truth. I prefer to look elsewhere. How do we read the
minds of millions of Germans living in a secret police terror state?
Does Mr Newlands know how? No doubt in such a state he would have been
first into the street to stand against the Gestapo, writing angry
letters to the Voelkischer Beobachter to complain about Mr Hitler’s
policies. Or perhaps not.  Here is what we do know:




In the last
free elections in Weimar Germany, on 5th March 1933, the National
Socialists won 17,277,180 votes (43.91%). The Social Democrats,  
divided from the Communist Party largely because of Stalin’s crazed
policy of treating the Social Democrats as the main enemy, scored
7,516,243 votes (20.43%) and the Communists 4,848,058 (16.86%)




So
the combined Social Democrat and Communist vote (about as anti-Hitler
as you could get) was 12,364,301 ,  a percentage of more than 37%. Then
there were the Roman Catholic Centre Party ( 4,424,905, 11.25%). I’ll
leave out Hugenberg’s DNVP ( another three million, and the BVP, with
just over a million) to bend over backwards and accept that perhaps
these parties weren’t unsympathetic to Hitler at that time.




Note
that these votes were cast *after*  Hitler had become Chancellor, and
when the National Socialists had already begun to unleash the Brownshirt
terror on the streets, smashing the offices and newspapers of their
opponents, and physically attacking and killing individual opponents, or
cramming them into lawless secret prisons.  Many had already fled
abroad before the poll. Not all could.




It took a lot of courage
to stand up against that, and I wonder how many of those who are happy
to approve (with much swagger and machismo about ‘total war’ and ‘guts’)
of civilian Germans being burned to death in their name,  would have
shown the bravery against Hitler that many Germans did in those horrible
times.




Even assuming that every one of those National Socialist
voters truly willed the ends their leader sought, and bore direct guilt
for them, rather than voting (as many modern Tory and Labour supporters
do) out of naïve emotional spasms,   and so in this strange calculus
deserved to be burned to death in their homes, with their children,  how
could Arthur Harris’s notoriously inaccurate bomber squadrons be sure
that they were only targeting the 17,277,180?




Difficult, I should
have thought. How would my critics like it if (say) a government they
didn’t vote for bombed Iran, and Iran then killed them or their families
with retaliatory missile strikes on British cities, and then said in
its defence  ‘ they asked for it!’ . And that’s an example of people in a
democracy being killed on the pretext that their government is bad. In
National Socialist Germany, dissent from the government led to
intimidation, murder, imprisonment and death.




Anyway, it is not
disputed that  a large number of those who died from our bombs were
women and children, including babies. What sort of moral decay does one
have to undergo to find this acceptable?




A Mr Richard Jan more or
less shouts ‘ All those killed by Nazi bombing and doodlebugs in the UK
not to mention the U-boats?? THAT’S OK THEN – the only way to defeat
the Nazis was total war – we had the wherewithal to conduct total war
and the gust to carry it out – the memorial to Sir Arthur Harris is a
fitting tribute to a man who was dedicated to defeating our enemy – Mr
Hitchens wants to win but without the necessary ruthlessness, rather
pathetic’.




Well, I am actually far more ruthless than Mr Jan.
That is why I tend to think we entered the war far too early, guided by
policies which were sentimental and emotional rather than rational and
cool. And for suggesting that, like the sensible USA, governed by that
ruthless cynic Franklin D. Roosevelt,  we should have lingered on the
edge of war waiting for the main participants (Germany and the USSR)  to
tear each other’s guts out, I am accused of all kinds of rubbish from
cowardice to being some sort of covert Hitler sympathiser.




Also I
do not think that the German bombing of British cities was ‘OK THEN’.  I
think it was a morally disgusting form of warfare.  That is why I
cannot support it when we did it, either. What exactly is Mr Jan saying?
He appears to be having it both ways. If bombing civilians is right,
then why is he so angry about ours being bombed by the Luftwaffe. If it
is wrong, then why isn’t it wrong when we do it?




I am more
equivocal about submarine warfare. After all, the Royal Navy had and
used its own submarines to torpedo enemy ships (and very effective they
were in denying supplies to Rommel). This is very nasty but seems to me
to be within the borders of legitimate warfare if it is directed at
ships carrying troops or warlike supplies, or even goods necessary for
the enemy’s economy. I am not so sure about the blockade (which as
Harris himself pointed out killed many more Germans in 1914-18 than his
bombs did in 1939-45), but that is a subject for another debate. All
these things, of course, are arguments against war in general, a
horrible thing to be avoided at almost all costs and only to be entered
into when absolutely unavoidable for national survival.




Mr Jan
also speaks of having the wherewithal to conduct total war, and the guts
to carry it out. I don’t dispute the guts, either of Harris ( an
undoubtedly brave man with a fine war record) or of the aircrews (as I
make clear in the article). But the wherewithal? We certainly didn’t
have the wherewithal for total war when we , of our own free will
declared war on Germany in September 1939. Wouldn’t it perhaps have been
wiser to wait until we did?




The army was tiny and ill-equipped.
Much of the air force was still flying biplanes. Our bomber force was
pitifully ill-equipped and had very poor tactics, a truth which led to
horrible losses for no gain during the Battle of France. Our fighters
turned out to be sufficient, but only just. Our navy, as my father could
have told you, was obsolescent, dependent on elderly ships or ones
designed by the Treasury (or by diplomats) to save money (under cuts
made by…Winston Churchill) ,  to keep them cheap or to keep them within
the provisions of the Washington naval treaty.




That’s why, in
the following few years we would be expelled from the continent at
Dunkirk, in one of our greatest national military disasters (still
somehow spun as a sort of victory) , almost defeated in North Africa,
almost starved to death by U-boat warfare, and utterly destroyed in the
most hideous fashion in the far East at Singapore. I’ll forget Greece
and Crete for now, but remind me to mention them if this bragging tone
returns.




The ‘total war’ of which Mr Jan speaks did not get
going until after the main forces of Germany were engaged in a
death-struggle with the main forces of the USSR. Readers here will know
that I am not in any way an apologist for Stalin. That I why it is
necessary, though difficult,  for me to admit unequivocally that it was
the Soviet armies which defeated Hitler. They would have done so if we
had not bombed German civilians in their homes. They might have done so
more quickly if we had instead bombed oil refineries, railway
marshalling yards and chemical works.   *If The Soviet Union had been
defeated by Hitler in summer 1941 then our surrender would have
followed*.  I do not think this grim fact is widely enough realised,
though I think it safe to say that every Jewish refugee in Britain,
whose personal fate was rather intimately linked with the matter, did
not breathe easy until Hitler lost at Stalingrad. It is debatable as to
whether the USA would have done very much for us if we had continued to
stand alone after a Soviet defeat. It is hard to see how D-day could
have been mounted if Germany had faced no major foe to the east. 




We,
having no army capable of getting ashore on the continent until 1944
(and then only in alliance with the USA and Canada) could not engage in
‘total war’ but in a curious form of half-war. There were several ways
in which we could have fought that war. We chose, mainly because it was
easier than the alternatives, to bomb civilians in their homes. There
was a secret high-level debate about this, in which many brave and
intelligent people argued hard against the plan. I might add, since Mr
Jan mentions U-boats, that the bombing of German civilians took
badly-needed resources away from Coastal Command, which has as a result
much less effective against German submarines than it ought to have
been.




A few figures here. As far as I can discover, German
bombing of Britain killed around 60,000 civilians and badly injured
87,000 more. For comparison, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reckoned
that allied bombs (mainly British) killed 305,000 German civilians and
injured (I do not know how badly) 780,000.




Bomber Command lost
7,700 aircraft and 55,000 men. Much of its heaviest bombing took place
after the war was plainly won ( Between January and April 1945 it
dropped 181,000 tons of bombs on Germany.




Mr Durand argues that I
am (once again ) ‘naïve’ for assuming that Arthur Harris had any
voluntary role in the campaign. Well, if he was just an obedient
automaton without any part in the matter, why put up a statue to him? As
it is, and  in this and in all things to do with this subject I must
urge all who are interested to obtain and read A.C. Grayling’s concise
and powerful book ‘Among the Dead Cities’  ( and an earlier posting on
this can be found here).
Grayling shows that Lord Portal picked Harris for the job, for his
attitudes and qualities. Harris was a considerable person, an individual
of great personal force and decisive views, and he was wholly committed
to the policy which he pursued. Harris was (as I say in the article)
impatient with Churchill for not acknowledging the true purpose of the
raids. Perhaps that’s why he never got a peerage. He was too keen.




Arguments for the Bombing: 4. You’d have sung a different tune at the time

By
the nature of things I cannot say for certain how I would have behaved
in such times. I was not there. The person who is me could not have been
there. But I have come to admire those who have swum against the stream
at any time, and I have swum against one or two small streams in my
life. So I can only hope that if a similar situation arises in my
lifetime, I will behave as a just man should behave.




Some people
did. My favourite (and the one who will give the noisy jingoes the most
difficulty) is the splendidly named Sir Richard Rapier Stokes MC. Most
readers will know that the MC is not a medal awarded to pacifist
milksops ( I believe he won it twice). He was also a successful
businessman and a Labour Member of Parliament, which covers all bases.
It was in that role, as Labour MP for Ipswich, that he criticised the
area bombing policy in Parliament. One of his few allies was the equally
remarkable George Bell, Bishop of Chichester and one of the most
impressive clergymen to grace the Church of England in modern times (a
veteran priest of my acquaintance still remembers meeting him, and being
struck by the power of his presence) .




I might insert here a small detail, for those who say that retaliation was necessary for morale.




Grayling,
(on page 186 of the paperback) cites an opinion poll published in the
News Chronicle of 2nd May 1941. It asked ‘Would you approve or
disapprove if the RAF adopted a policy of bombing the civilian
population of Germany?’ .




In heavily bombed areas , 47%
disapproved of such reprisals, and 45 % approved. In areas that had as
yet escaped bombing76% approved.

I would say again that those who are
keenest on this form of warfare are often (though not always) those who
cannot imagine what it is like, or who have not been on the receiving
end of this filthy, maddening, indiscriminate thing. 




I will
leave it at that for the moment. I do not think my critics are trying
very hard to argue the actual facts of the matter. I said it was
difficult to argue this question now, and I knew it would be. But the
opening of the Bomber Command monument seemed a good time to start.  I
would be grateful if my critics would assume my motives were as
patriotic as theirs.

From time to time I try to do something different with this blog than just giving you aggregate posts of news stories dumped into my Google Alerts. This is one of those efforts, and I do make it with the flimsiest of excuses to make it fit within the overall theme of this blog: the background that gets the story going is the War on Terror. That's a war, which means I can cover it here, hah!




Alpha Protocol is an espionage-themed action-RPG developed by Obsidian Entertainment for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC released on May 28, 2010 in Europe and June 1 in North America. The story follows Michael Thorton, a field agent for a secret program called Alpha Protocol. When things take a turn for the worse, Thorton decides to take it upon himself to uncover a conspiracy that could have worldwide implications. His journey takes place across a variety of cities, including Moscow, Rome, and Taipei (Taiwan).




The best $5 you've spent in a long time.


 The game upon release received a varied bag of review scores, with most praising the story and damning the unpolished feel of the game, various broken game mechanics like sneaking, and the deficient enemy AI. While the complaints are certainly true, these have been persistent issues with releases by Obsidian Entertainment during the past years and are largely the result of publisher demanding premature releases. As a basic rule games developed by Obsidian feature superb stories and equally superlative bug issues. If their publishers actually gave the studio 6-12 months more time to polish and de-bug their products they would have had guaranteed bestsellers at their hands. 



The way it is, Alpha Protocal quickly landed in the bargain bin. Ironically, the game's bugs are mostly fixed now and you can purchase it for less than $5. And still, the gameplay mechanics aren't anything special. The sneaking and covert actions? The Splinter Cell series does that better. The combat? Even the first Modern Warfare outshines it in every category. The graphics? In 2010 I had alrady seen better.




And yet, I love this game. I'm usually not the type of player who replays this kind of games time and again. After all, it's not like Heart of Iron 2 where you can effectively play every country on the world, which gives you almost infinite variance. But Alpha Protocol I've replayed four times, sinking almost a hundred hours into the murky world of Mike Thornton. The reason for this is simple: the story and the characters are rich, mature, and full of facets that have game-changing consequences.

You are Michael Thornton, recently introduced into the top secret Alpha Protocol, and off the books US agency doing the hard and dirty work on frontline against international terrorist organizations. Or so you think. You can chose from pre-determined backgrounds locking your abilities into certain paths or you can build your own character perks as a "freelancer", which usually is the better choice.






Mike Thornton, or rather: you. You can of course customize

your appearance, though I'd advise against Hawaii shirts

on shooting missions. Those blood stains never wash out...


After familiarizing yourself with the controls and meeting some of the prime characters back in the Alpha Protocol compound - your boss Yancy Westridge, comm specialist Mina Tang, Agent Darcy - you get your first objective: your initial mission is to assassinate the leader of the terror group Al-Samad, Sheik Shaheed,
after an attack on a passenger aircraft in the Middle East. You fight and search your way through Saudi Arabia, gathering intel until you've got enough to track Shaheed down (somehow I doubt Obsidian knew what shaheed means...). But once you've
captured the sheik, the terrorist leader claims that Halbech, a defense
contractor, sold him the missiles and gave him all of the necessary
information to carry out the attack. After relaying the information, your position is attacked by a missile strike, and you are presumed dead. You get contacted by Mina and are told that
the group has been infiltrated by members of Halbech who want you
dead to cover up the fact that Halbech provided the missiles to
Al-Samad.





That's the setup for a the story: you've been forced to go rogue, not only to survive but also to unravel the mystery behind Halbech and Alpha Protocol. The way it's told is the key to Alpha Protocol's strength: the clues you uncover give you the base to progress, to make decisions, to buy intel and equipment. They also open up opportunities within the missions you play through: a weapon's cache placed here, a door opened there. But it's the dialogue and the ingame-decisions that truly excell this game above the sea of average titles. It's unique in the sense that it allows the player to choose from three different attitudes or "stances" when speaking to an NPC, and these stances determine those NPCs reactions and ultimately standing towards the player. Besides the characters in the game naturally being fun to talk to, what
you say and what you do affects the game in ways that are really
refreshing. In the short term, you can see the impact of your choices
immediately felt; in the long term, stuff you might have forgotten about
suddenly become an issue or affect you in a positive way. Losing
influence with factions and characters isn’t inherently a bad thing
either, because that comes with its own set of branching paths that beg
to be explored. You can gain powerful allies - or you can act like the worst psychopath if you want!







The story has twists - good ones, not the sort M. Night Shyamalan would use - and within its framework it allows you character an maximum of freedom. To clarify why this is so great we have to look at what gamers usually do: we play the good guy. The moral crusader who saves kittens, helps old ladies across the street and happily waves the flag in the end. Alpha Protocol lets you do that. As the video above shows it also allows you to play a deranged psychopath. And you can play everything in between. Being good is what we want to do as players. It's almost as if we're programmed to do so. And in a broader social context we probably are, as good behavior is rewarded while bad one is shunned. 




At least, that's the ideal. And very few game developers manage to safely tread the sort of ground where player behavior is not a shining white or deep black. The Mass Effect series with its Paragon and Renegade system tried it and largely failed, in my opinion, by slowly degrading the Renegade option to, in effect, "acting like an ass" whereas it ought to have been an amoral "the end justifies the means" choice.




Only Alpha Protocol manages to give you the options to play in the setting and story and make it feel right. Oh, sure, the game gives you plenty of means to play the virtuous hero type of character, including a very damsel-in-distress type of romance that very obviously was meant to serve as an emotional hook by the developers. And I did. "Good boy Michael Thornton" was my character on my first playthrough. I never made that mistake again, and let me tell you something: the next playthrough was a lot more rewarding!




[image error]
It's SteveN Heck, not Steve. Remember that!


Let's face it: the setting and story of the game create a narrative where everybody stabs everybody else in the back, lies, betrays, omits and generally works to his or her own ends. Once you realize that loyalty and trust are the only things that count in Alpha Protocol, once you realize that winning is more important than being "Boyscout Mike Thornton" the game begins to truly shine in all its glory.



Disgraced and disowned by your own country, do you do the moral thing and unearth the whole conspiracy? Do you accept an offer to become Halbech's lead enforcer? Or would you rather like to take over yourself, using the massive influence and vast ressources and connections you've gathered during the game? Do you kill Sheik Shaheed, or do you save him to call in favors later? What do you do if you find out the one you've been trusting all along only used you, even if only with the best intentions? Will you hold back despite being betrayed by a contact because he's worth more alive than dead? How about the mission in Taipeh and the assassination (attempt) of the Taiwanese president which brought the region to the egde of war - will you feel merciful once you find out who worked behind your back there? What about...




I could go on and on and on here. The changes and differing paths the multitude of choices in the game open up are not always directly obvious, their results hitting you often way down the path. That means you need to think about your choices, which isn't easy because the dialogue system is fluent: you can't wait too long with your answer.




In my first playthrough I waltzed into the Madison Saint James romance (the damsel-in-distress; this seems to be the "default" option Obsidian wants to push you in), and it ended with me making the whole Alpha Protocol/Halbech affair public, hooking up with my most trusted contact and forgiving the person who brought about the Taipeh situation. Boyscout Mike Thornton drove off into the sunset on a boat, Mina Tang cuddling up to him.




My second playthough was quite different. Madison Saint James was an asset, nothing more, nothing less. I sent my most trusted contact away after realizing I had been used by her all the time, but not without warning her never to cross me again. The person responsible for Taipeh received a bullet to the head in mid-sentence. And in the end the person on the boat was a joking Steven Heck, and Mike Thornton was the new big player in the world of espionage and covert operations, an independent force much like Black Flag's General Sanderson.




To summarize my love for the game: within the confines of the great story I can do almost whatever I want. And so can you. If you love the espionage genre and stuff written by Ludlum, Flynn or Konkoly and have $5 to spare this game is an investment you won't regrett.

In 1945, the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic
Services researched Japan’s newest secret weapon of the time: Suicide. The most familiar of these suicide attacks are those of the infamous
Kamikaze pilots. These pilots would fly planes into allied vessels
during World War II. The planes, loaded down with explosives, would explode severely
crippling the target vessel and killing the pilot. However, the
Kamikaze was not the only suicide attack the Japanese had in their
arsenal. In a report produced by the Office of Strategic Services titled,
“Japan’s ‘Secret’ Weapon: Suicide”, researchers discuss several types of
suicide attacks. Below is a summary of each one.


Japanese Suicide Attacks


Antitank/Close Combat Units. These anti-tank units would march into
battle with what was essentially a bomb on a stick. Better known as
Lunge mines, these explosives were mounted on the end of a five-foot
pole. When faced with an Allied tank, the Japanese soldier would thrust the
bomb mounted stick at the tank causing it to explode. The explosion
would destroy or, at the very least make the tank unusable. The explosions would also kill the soldier. Although this method was very low-tech, it was highly-effective. The
lunge mine provided about six inches of penetration more than any other
anti-tank bomb used in World War II.





Suicide Swimmers/Divers. Known as Fukuryu, these were frogmen version of the close combat troops. These men would swim toward allied ships with more than 30 pounds of
explosive material on the end of a 16 ft. pole. The idea was to have
the soldiers in dive gear and weighted down so he would sink. As the allied ships passed near the diver, he would thrust the stick
into the hull of the ship, causing the bomb to detonate, destroying the
vessel and the Fukuryu. The diver was able to remain underwater for 6 hours, if necessary.






Suicide Boats and Flying Bombs


Suicide Boats. The boats, known as Shin’yo to the Japanese, functioned very similarly to the Kamikazes, except on the water. These boats were capable of reaching speeds of 30 m.p.h and carried a
load of explosives, usually in the bow of the boat. The lone captain of
the suicide vessel would then slam his bomb-laden boat into the allied
ship. When it came to suicide attacks, the Shin’yo had a better chance of
surviving. However, finding any survivors after an attack was rare. It is estimated that the Japanese had 400 of the boats ready if an invasion occurred on the Japanese mainland.



Suicide Flying Bombs. These were similar to the kamikaze planes,
except these were built for the sole purpose of suicide missions. The
kamikazes were normally planes that were loaded down with explosives;
whereas the flying bomb was nothing more than a missile that was piloted
by a human. One such craft was the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka. The aircraft was about
20 ft. long and could carry over 2,600 lbs. of explosive material,
normally made up of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder.







Empty


Suicide Submarine. Though not mentioned in the Office of Strategic
Services report, the Japanese also had a suicide submarine in their
arsenal which they called Kaiten. Similarly to the flying bombs, the Kaiten was nothing more than a
man-driven torpedo. Yet, this packed a punch. These suicide submarines
often carried a 1,100 lb. warhead. It has been noted that the Kaiten was designed with an escape hatch
that could have been used after the final acceleration. However, to
date, no documentation has been uncovered to indicate that this hatch
was ever used.

It seemed that the Kaiten pilots completed their mission to the very end. Toward the end of World War II, the Japanese realized they were
losing the war. In a desperate effort to regain some momentum, they
implemented their Special Attack Units, known as shimbu-tai.


Their specialty was suicide attacks. It seems that right up to the
end of the war, the Japanese had a suicide attack ready for land, seal,
and air.

I just stumbled over this gem and wanted to share it with you: an Allied (most likely US) cartoon summarizing the WW2 up to and including the Battle of Britain. The animation's top notch and the narration is pretty solid on the facts, too (as solid as you can get in that short period of time). Enjoy!

Today I've got two stories related to Japan for you: one sad and alarming, the other one offering the hope of closure.




The first one concerns an apparent rise in Japanese extreme rightwing activity, or at least a rise in its public profile. Titled Japan’s extreme right getting nastier, the South Korean newspaper article states:

On June 18, a Japanese right-wing extremist tied a stake with the slogan “Takeshima belongs to Japan” to the statue of a young comfort woman in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. It has since emerged that Japanese right-wingers have been continuously threatening the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (KCWDMSSJ), a group that works to help former comfort women.

On June 22, KCWDMSSJ team leader An Seon-mi stated, “For several years now, every Wednesday morning, when we hold a rally outside the Japanese embassy with former comfort women, unidentified people have been calling our office and harassing us, saying, in Japanese or English, 'I hate Korea, why are you doing this?' Worse still, a package containing photos of women's genitals was delivered to our office last year, which shocked the elderly women.” The council believes the package was sent as a threat by Japanese right-wing activists, but they did not ask the police to investigate at the time because it contained only photographs.

Japanese right-wingers have continuously used threats and intimidation regarding the comfort women issue. According to the KCWDMSSJ, these have recently grown stronger. The threats appears to be connected to incidents such as building of a memorial to comfort women in New York in October 2010, the installation of a statue of a young comfort woman outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul in December 2011, and the building of a human rights museum focused on women and war in May 2012. “Japanese right-wingers never used to issue specific threats, but in the last one or two years such threats have been increasing,” said An. The KCWDMSSJ presumes that a Japanese group campaigning to “not allow special privileges for ethic Koreans in Japan” was involved in the recent incident outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul.

In March this year, the group left a stake of similar size in a flowerbed in front of the Korean embassy in Tokyo. The June 18 stake was left by 47-year-old Japanese man Suzuki Nobuyuki, known to be the leader of a right-wing party called Ishin Seito Shimpu. Suzuki once served as a representative of the volunteer organization that cleans the Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrimes a number of Japanese war criminals from the Second World War.
Read the rest here.

The second article sheds some light on the fate of Allied POWs in the hands of the Japanese.

It is one of the most enduring and painful of wartime mysteries - what exactly happened to more than 1000 Australian soldiers and civilians captured by the Japanese after the fall of Rabaul, New Guinea, in 1942.

Most were herded aboard the ill-fated prison ship the Montevideo Maru, which was torpedoed by a US submarine while on its way back to Japanese territory.
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No definitive passenger list has ever surfaced, with relatives left to agonise over the fate of the missing, who included the grandfather of Gillard government minister Peter Garrett and the missionary uncle of the former Labor leader Kim Beazley.

But on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the ship's sinking, official Japanese records have added some certainty as to the identity of the 845 soldiers and 208 civilian internees who are said to have perished.

The records are among the many thousands of POW documents handed over by Japan earlier this year that are being translated and catalogued by the National Archives of Australia.

A key to unlocking the mystery of the Montevideo Maru may well be an original list written in Japanese script purportedly of those on board, which is to be unveiled by archivists and Veterans' Affairs Minister Warren Snowdon on Tuesday.
Read the rest here.

The 2012 election marks the first time in nearly 70 years that neither presidential candidate has served in the military. Since the election of 1944, when Thomas Dewey challenged President Franklin Roosevelt, every mainstream presidential candidate boasted a stint in the armed forces. Even in 1944, President Roosevelt had at least served as assistant secretary of the Navy. But is military experience necessary to be an effective commander-in-chief during wartime? How did military service influence Lincoln in the Civil War, Johnson in Vietnam, or Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan?

These leaders and other wartime presidents have led our troops into a wide range of battles since our country's founding. War has shaped the executive office itself, particularly when it comes to the power available to a wartime President. While the nature of war has changed dramatically since Lincoln led the North to victory in 1865, Presidents from Wilson to Obama have faced similar challenges in wartime.

Andrew Polsky is a professor of political science at Hunter College. In his new book "Elusive Victories," Polsky illustrates the impact of war on sitting presidents, the most notable example being Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the American Civil War.

"Lincoln has no military experience, and learns on the job," Polsky says. "He learns very well, and does a good job as a wartime president." He at first failed to gain the respect of his generals, but Lincoln realized that the officers under his command had about as much experience with large-scale war as he did.

"He realized that he would have to actively intervene and steer his generals, and that worked for him in the first part of the war. Later in the war he stepped back and let his generals, like [Ulysses S.] Grant, take on most of the responsibilities for conducting campaigns."

Polsky also discusses Lincoln's keen sense of political timing. "He spoke plainly to the American people, and he didn't hide from the critics."

Lincoln's experience differs from that of Lyndon B. Johnson, whose key mistake, Polsky says, was that he lost his freedom of action. He did not manage the ground war in South Vietnam very closely, and failed to stay in tune with how well the conflict was progressing.

"He was prepared to defer too much to the military on the conduct of the war," Polsky says. "Johnson never had a clear, coherent strategy for the Vietnam War." The historian faults Johnson for not looking closely enough at alternate political and military strategies, instead giving the military too free a rein.

In preparing for the Iraq War, George W. Bush examined President Johnson's handling of Vietnam and came away with a different conclusion: "George W. Bush looked at Johnson and thought that he had made a mistake in micromanaging the war." Johnson had indeed handpicked bombing targets, but was out of touch with the ground war. President Bush, then, turned matters over to the Department of Defense under Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"Delegation is not necessarily the wrong approach for a president to take, but if you're going to delegate responsibility, you have to also have accountability, and that's something he never demanded of Rumsfeld," Polsky says. "They were not on the same page."

The historian has mixed feelings towards the wartime policy of President Obama, the custodian of two wars, but agrees with the President's strengthening of ties with Kabul, even as troops are scheduled to withdraw at the end of 2014. "One of the most important things the United States can do as it tries to draw itself out of a war is to establish some kind of long-term security partnership with the government it wants to support."




Source.

Ouch. That one was a downer. And I know, it's the Daily Mail, but still it's a representative sample and that makes it... discouraging. And I doubt it's a specifically British problem. It's unlikely that German or American teenager would've scored better with comparable questions.

 It was a turning point in the war, when
only the bravery of The Few who took to the skies to defend their
country stood between Britain and the might of Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe. But less than half of today’s secondary school pupils know the Battle of Britain was fought in the air, a poll has revealed.

Only
62 per cent could correctly identify a photograph of Sir Winston
Churchill, it found – but 92 per cent recognised a picture of Churchill
the insurance dog.

Over 90 per
cent recognised the dog from the Churchill Insurance advertisements yet
only a measly 62 per cent of the students polled could identify Sir
Winston Churchill. More could identify Jedward, Wayne Rooney and Katie Price than their country’s wartime leader.Only
a third of 11 to 18-year-olds know the Second World War began in 1939,
according to a poll by former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lord
Ashcroft, while only one in five knows what happened on D-Day.



















 The survey of 1,000 children at
secondary schools across Britain was commissioned to mark the unveiling
of the Bomber Command Memorial in London later this week. Its results will heighten concern about the quality of history teaching in our schools.




It
found that only 34 per cent of pupils – including 45 per cent of those
aged 17 and 18 – knew the Second World War began in 1939. Only 39 per
cent knew it ended in 1945, again including only 45 per cent of 17 and
18-year-olds.














 The RAF Bomber Command Memorial which will be
unveiled in a ceremony attended by the Royal Family, including The Queen
and the Duke of Edinburgh in London's Green Park on Thursday. Forty-three per cent knew the Battle
of Britain was fought in the air, 29 per cent believed it was fought on
land, and 8 per cent at sea. Twenty per cent admitted they did not know. Just
34 per cent correctly said the Battle of Britain took place in the
1940s, and only 11 per cent of these – about one in 27 of the whole
sample – knew it happened in 1940. Only a fifth of children had any idea of what happened on D-Day, with the most frequent answer being the day the war ended. Eighty-six per cent correctly said there had been two world wars – but one in 20 thought there had been three. Nearly a third were unable to give any unprompted explanation of why Britain fought in the Second World War. And while 89 per cent identified Germany as an adversary during the conflict, only 15 per cent could name Japan unprompted. Nearly a quarter thought Britain’s enemies had included Russia, France, China, the USA, Australia or New Zealand. Only 61 per cent correctly named the USA as an ally of Britain’s in the
Second World War. One in ten thought our allies had included Italy,
Germany or Japan.

More people could identify Jedward and Katie Price than Sir Winston Churchill. When
the children were offered four different explanations for what Bomber
Command is or was, only 36 per cent correctly said it had been part of
the RAF. There was some
encouraging news, however - 95 per cent correctly identified the Royal
British Legion’s poppy, and 84 per cent knew what it signified.





Lord
Ashcroft, who made a £1 million donation towards the new Bomber Command
Memorial, which is being unveiled on Thursday, said: 'It is sobering to
find that so many children of secondary school age simply do not know
important facts about crucial events in Britain’s recent history.

Documents containing information about 1996 Poles believed to have been executed in Soviet Belarus as part of the WWII Katyn crime have been hailed as “a ground-breaking discovery.” Dr Andrzej Kunert, secretary of Poland's state-backed Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, welcomed the news on Thursday. “The fact that these documents exist, provides hope not only with regard to discovering a list of victims, but also for the disclosure of the burial place of Polish victims of the NKVD, [the Soviet secret service],” he told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily

Historians estimate that approximately 22,500 Poles, largely reserve officers, were executed on Stalin's orders by the Soviet Secret Police in the spring of 1940. The murders took place at various points across the Soviet Union, including the Katyn forest near Smolensk.

A question mark has hung over the fate of over 3000 Poles on the so-called Belarusian list. However, Russian historian Natalia Lebedeva, a leading expert on the Katyn massacre, has tracked down documents in Russia's Military Archives, providing information about 1196 missing Poles.

The documents, hand-written by one functionary, include a list of names of the internees, and information on the prisoners deportation to Minsk, with details concerning from where the Poles were transported from. Historians believe that the Poles may have been buried in the Kurapaty woods, near Minsk, a site where many Soviet victims were interred.
 

The legacy has provided a thorn in Polish-Russian relations since Nazi Germany announced the discovery of several thousand bodies of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, on 13 April 1943. Moscow blamed Berlin for the killings, and Russia only formally admitted guilt in 1990, following the fall of the Iron Curtain.

In April 2012, a landmark case at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, concluded that the Katyn affair was “a war crime,” and that relatives of the victims had suffered “inhumane treatment.” However, the court was unable to rule on whether Moscow's broken off 1990-2004 investigation into the crime has been an effective inquiry.

“Feelings are mixed, but there is relief that an influential institution like the Strasbourg court recognises the injustice done to the Katyn families,” said Izabella Saryusz-Skapska, head of Poland's Federation of Katyn Familes, in April. She also stressed that “people who were arrested and detained in prisons in Belarus have yet to be found,” she said. Owing to today's revelations, there is renewed hope that progress will be made in finding the final resting place of the missing Poles.




Source.