Instead of invading Greenland, maybe they should fix the head.

 

The toilets on the Navy’s largest aircraft carrier keep failing

The USS Gerald R. Ford, currently taking part in operations in the Caribbean, sees some of toilets fail nearly every day.

Wednesday, January 18, 1911. First landing on a ship.

Eugene Burton Ely landed a Curtiss biplane on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania.

It was the first such landing in history.

Last edition:

Saturday, January 14, 1911. Bay of Whales.

Labels: 1910s, 1911, Antarctic, Art, boats and ships, Clothing, Exploration, Norwegian Antarctic Expedition, Roald Amundsen

Thursday, January 6, 1916. The Battle of Sheikh Sa'ad.

6,000 Montenegrans held back an Austrian force at Mojkovac, Montenegro.

A British relief force of 13,000 men seeking to relieve British forces at Kut ran into the Ottoman Sixth Army at Sheikh Sa'ad.

The battleship HMS King Edward VII was sunk by a mine.

Last edition:

Wednesday, January 6, 1916. GOP worries over Wilson intentions regarding Mexico. Helen Keller's Strike Against War. British Conscription.

Labels: 1910s, 1916, British Army, Helen Keller, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Montenegrin Army, Montenegro, Serbian Army, Socialism, United Kingdom, Venustiano Carranza, War, Woodrow Wilson, World War One

 

The Navy is struggling to build ships

Sunday, December 28, 1975. Conflict in the Third Cod War.

The Icelandic Coast Guard vessel ICGV Týr rammed the Royal Navy frigate HMS Andromeda which was escorting two British fishing trawlers in what Iceland claimed as its territorial waters in the first confrontation of the Third Cod War.

The Týr is still in service.  The HMS Andromeda went on to serve in the Falklands War and was decommissioned in 1983.

Argentine guerilla commander Roberto Quieto was captured by soldiers in Martinez, Argentina during a raid on a warehouse. He'd betray his confederates under torture.

Quieto was a lawyer by training and would disappear while in Argentine captivity in 1976.

Both Chile and Argentina went through a period like this, called the Dirty War in Argentina.

Down 14-10 with  32 seconds remaining on  the clock, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach threw a long pass to win the game.  Interviewed later, he'd say:

It's a play you hit one in a hundred times if you're lucky.  It's a Hail Mary pass.  You throw it up and pray he catches it.

Staubach thereby coined, unintentionally the phrase that's irreverently used to refer to such desperate passes in football today.  I dislike the phrase so much I thought about not posting it here, but it's so frequently used, I relented.

Last edition:

Tuesday, December 23, 1975. Going metric.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, 79th Congress, Cheesecake, Ethnicities, It was because of World War Two, law, Marriage, The Press, The relationship between men and women, Women, World War Two

Wednesday, December 26, 1945. Boxing Day.

Seagulls surround the USS Wisconsin after it dumping of Christmas meal leftovers.

Former Vietnamese Emperor Duy Tân, 45, (Nguyễn Phúc Vĩnh San) was killed in an airplane crash in Central Africa.

As Emperor, he had participated in an anti French rebellion while only 16 years old, an event which lead to the French removing him from his throne.  He thereafter went into exile on Réunion Island, where he retained pro independence views.  During World War Two he held anti Vichy views and entered the Free French Navy, and then Army, when the island was liberated from Vichy.  DeGaulle, realizing how desperate the situation in French Indochina was, was having  him returned to Vietnam where he would have been re-installed as Emperor, which would have amounted to deposing Boa Dai, who had sided with Vichy.  His untimely death left the Communist dominated Viet Minh as the only real functioning anti colonial force in the region.

Still highly regarded in Vietnam, most Vietnamese cities have streets named after him.  His remains were reinterred in Vietnam in 1987.

The Red Chinese won the Gaoyou–Shaobo Campaign in which the Nationalist troops were principally made up of units that had formerly collaborated with the Japanese.

Admiral of the Fleet Roger John Brownlow Keyes, 1st Baron Keyes, who in spite of his age saw some service in World War Two, died at age 73.

Last edition:

Tuesday, December 25, 1945. Christmas.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Cartoons, Cheesecake, Christianity, Christmas, Holidays, Imperial Japanese Navy, It was because of World War Two, Newspapers, religion, The Cold War, Wake Island, War, War Crimes, Women

The ghosts of Billy Mitchell and António de Oliveira Salazar visit Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, graduate of the Wharton School of Business, has no grasp of mathematics or history.  He's become the poster boy for questioning the intellectual value of an Ivy League education.

And very clearly, one of the things he doesn't understand is shipbuilding and naval warfare.

Fantasy class warship, probably in the cruiser class, maybe, which the Trump administration plans on building as part of a "Gold Fleet", some naval marketing genius' terms for a vanity suck up project that will never get built, but which appeals to Trump's edge of death vanity.  The artwork heavily resembles a Revell model box for one of their cheaper modells from the 1970s.

2025 is the 100th anniversary of the court marital of Billy Mitchell.  Mitchell, a World War One aviator, accused the Navy Department and the War Department (which was more or less the Army Department) of “incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the National Defense.”  He had more than one point, but his big point was that the biggest ship could be sunk by aircraft.  The battleship Navy was horrified.

The British attack on the Italian port of Taranto in 1940 proved Mitchell quite right.  Pearl Harbor proved him right beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Mitchell was convicted in his court martial and went on to retirement the following year, but by 1941 he had been proven so right that he was lauded as a hero and the U.S. Army Air Corps named a bomber after him, the B-25 Mitchell.

Mitchell is still right, there's only one thing that's really changed. Aircraft have evolved.

They've evolved from mannered bombers and fighters to a new class of aircraft, the unmanned drone.  This event has been anticipated since late World War Two, and by the 1950s the British already assumed that the day of unmanned aircraft was about to arrive. The predictions on the speed of the evolution of such craft were wildly off, but the Russo Ukrainian War proves the day is now here, and not just in the air, but on the sea.  The Ukrainians have sunk or damaged about 24 Russian ships through the use of drones during the war and pretty much rendered Russia's Black Sea Fleet a nullity.

For decades now military theorist have wondered if the pride of the US Navy, the supercarrier, is actually obsolete. The speculation began as early as the 1970s when really good long range air to surface and surface to surface anti shipping missiles appeared on the scene.  The viability of such missiles was proven during the Falklands War when Exocet missiles in Argentine hands sank the HMS Sheffield and the cargo ship Atlantic Conveyor and severely damaged the HMS Glamorgan.  The Exocet went into production in 1975, and while still around, it's undoubtedly the case that it's improved over the last 50 years and there are other missiles around that are just as good or better.  The U.S. Navy started worrying about such missiles just as soon as they were produced, but the Navy's large supercarriers have never had to encounter them.

That is, in part, because we have not fought a peer to peer conflict since World War Two.  In spite of that, it's worth noting that the U.S. military has not exactly shown itself invincible in wars less than that.  The North Koreans and Chinese, the former of which only had an army from around 1946 or so, and the latter of which had just come out of a largescale civil war and which chose to deploy, to no small degree, troops who were conscripted out of the losing side of that war, fought us and our UN allies to a standstill in Korea.  Starting about a decade later we fought and ultimately were defeated by an Army that was quite primitive in comparison to our own, although a lot of that defeat was a morale issue.  Since that time we've fought and beat Iraq twice, but we were never able to prevail in Afghanistan, in no small part due to a major strategic miscalculation by Donald Rumsfeld, and our current Oval Office occupant ended up surrendering to the Taliban.

Now, of course, there's been very little naval action in anything that I've mentioned, but that shouldn't really give us any comfort. What naval action that has occured since 1945 shows that long distance anti ship warfare had improved remarkably since 1945.  The Argentines, not wanting to be exposed to it, didn't evey deploy an aircraft carrier it had during the Falklands War.  

Now, of course, people are pointing out that the awkwardly named Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has the most combat ships in the world, although its not regarded as the most powerful. That would be the U.S. Navy.  The U.S. Navy, with its supercarriers, holds that title, and it should.  But it can't be ignored that Ukraine has proven that sinking ships is now pretty possible with air and sea drones.

That's where the future of naval warfare is, not with vanity "battleships".

Indeed, that was proven in 1941.

The Navy knows that, but senior military officers right now know that if they want to keep their jobs they have to feed the demented monkey in Trump's brain.  And that brain isn't pegging out on the smarts meter by any means.  Statements by Donald Trump show him to be in the full grasp of dementia and raise questions on whether he was every very sharp.  

He's also incredibly vain.

And more than a little scared.

Being vain and scared, he's quite easy to manipulate.  Given the chance to name something after himself, and believe that it will be around after his body is rotting in its grave, which will be quite soon, he'll take the bait.  And hence the Trump Class of "battleship".

It'll never happen.

It takes at least two year to design a warship, and often multiples of that.  And then it takes another two to five years to build it. Trump no doubt plans on being living at age 90, but he won't be, and his demented brain will be reduced to complete mush should he live that long.  The Navy knows that, but the Navy likes to have money and ship projects bring in money.  Every since World War Two the U.S. military has engaged in acquisitions of things it didn't need for one reason or another, and the Army has proven that even a simple project like designing an assault rifle can take so long that a person who entered the overall task early in his career can retire before its done.

And hence António de Oliveira Salazar.

Salazar was the Portuguese dictator who came into power in 1932 and who fell into ill health and suffered a stroke in 1968.  The Portuguese government replaced him and he died 1970. But they never told him.  He was simply given glowing reports on how well everything was going and assured he was still running the show.

I'm pretty convinced that's more or less what's going on with Trump right now.

The Navy is simply going to slow roll this project.  Glowing reports are going to be given to the Demented Dear Leader.  The entire project will go swimmingly.  Meanwhile, others will report the same on the White House Ballroom.  Neither will ever be built.

Indeed, already the palace intrigue is on.  J.D. Vance is gathering allies.  Mike Pence is scooping up Heritage Foundation defectors.  Congressmen and Senators who are too tainted with the stench of MAGA, or who don't want to be there when Trump falls and takes MAGA out with it, are abandoning their offices to go on to new pursuits, readying themselves to reemerge cleansed from the inevitable bunker scenes that are already beginning to happen.

Thursday, December 23, 1915. Villa defeated again.

 

The news reported a Villa defeat.

Henry Ford Abandons His Peace Ship

Last edition:

Wednesday, December 22, 1915. Hartmannswillerkopf ends.

Labels: 1910s, 1915, Alsace-Lorraine, Battle of Hartmannswillerkopf, Mexican Border War, Mexican Revolution, World War One

Monday, November 23, 1925. USS Wyoming commences an overhaul.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 23: 1925   The USS Wyoming commences an overhaul at the New York Navy Yard.

Not wanting that to be the only item for the day, we offer the following (note, this was in error, this is a paper from 1923):

The paper noted that it was for the whole family, clean, and unbiased.  It might have been all of those things, but what a bunch of horrible news.

Note the big collection of drug charges.

A surplus store in Casper was going out of business.

The building that business occupied is still there.  It's an office building today, right between the Rib & Chop House and the Ugly Bug Fly Shop, both of which occupy old buildings that were also there, but neither of which were in operation at the time.

Rib & Chop is going out of business with the conclusion of the year.  The most famous occupant of that building was The Wonder Bar which opened in 1937 and which was a Casper institution, with ups and downs, for decades.

Last edition:  

Saturday, November 21, 1925. Lava Beds.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art, Calvin Coolidge, football, Geology, Lava Beds National Monument, nature

Saturday, November 20, 1875. Winking at collision in the Black Hills and the Las Cuevas War.

Commanding General of the U.S. Army William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan :

I know that the matter of the Black Hills was settled in all events for this year. In the spring it may result in collision and trouble.. . . I understand that the president and the Interior Department will wink at it.

Cpt. McNelly.

Texas Ranger Captain Leander McNelly and his men crossed into Mexico to retrieve more than 200 stolen cattle.  He was backed by troops of the U.S. Army, but they did not cross.  The Rangers advanced on the stronghold of Juan Flores Salinas, local leader of the rural guard at the Rincon de Cucharras outpost of the Las Cuevas ranch and a  battle ensued in which about 80 Mexican militiamen were killed, and McNelly ordered a retreat back across the river.  The Army covered his retreat across the river with a Gatling Gun.

At that point, Major A. J. Alexander from Fort Ringgold arrived with a message from Colonel Potter at Fort Brown, which read:

Advise Captain McNelly to return at once to this side of the river. Inform him that you are directed not to support him in any way while he remains on Mexican territory. If McNelly is attacked by Mexican forces on Mexican soil, do not render him any assistance. Let me know if McNelly acts on this advice.

McNelly advised the Army that he would not comply.

At sundown, another message arrived:

Major Alexander, commanding: Secretary of War Belknap orders you to demand McNelly return at once to Texas. Do not support him in any manner. Inform the Secretary if McNelly acts on these orders and returns to Texas. Signed, Colonel Potter.

McNelly issued the reply, which was:

In less than a minute, Captain McNelly penned his now famous reply:

Near Las Cuevas, Mexico, Nov. 20 1875. I shall remain in Mexico with my rangers and cross back at my discretion. Give my compliments to the Secretary of War and tell him and his United States soldiers to go to hell. Signed, Lee H. McNelly, commanding.

Over the Rio Grande his force encountered resistance.  Up to 80 Mexicans were killed in the battle before he retreated.  A smaller force of Rangers would cross the border the following day and recover over 400 stolen cattle.

McNelly's troops crossed again on the 21st and proceeded to a customs house where the cattle had been moved to, and which were now promised to be returned.  The Mexican officer in charge refused to treat with him on a Sunday, which it now was and was taken prisoner. The prisoner was threatened with death and around 400 cattle were crossed into Texas.

McNelly died of tuberculosis in 1877 at age 33.  A liberty ship was named after him during World War Two.

Last edition:

Friday, November 12, 1875. Tacoma, Washington, incorporated.

Labels: 1870s, 1875, Washington, Washington (Tacoma)

Friday, November 16, 1945. UNESCO founded. USS Laramie decommissioned.

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, was founded.

The Azerbaijan People's Government, a puppet of the Soviet Union, began an uprising in Iranian Azerbaijan Province.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower testified before the House Military Affairs Committee that “Nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States.”   The NYT headline read:

Eisenhower Holds Training Essential to Safety of U.S.; General Says It Is Best Way to Avoid War, or if Sudden Blow Comes to Avert Disaster --Declares Russia Wants Amity EISENHOWER HOLDS TRAINING IS VITAL Says Russia Wants U.S. Amity Time Is of the Essence, He Says

Today In Wyoming's History: November 16: 

1945  USS Laramie decommissioned. 

 

Last edition:

Tuesday, November 13, 1945. "Man's material discoveries have outpaced his moral progress."

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Charles de Gaulle, Clement Attlee, Displaced Persons, French Third Republic, Harry S. Truman, It was because of World War Two, Palestine, the spoken word, United Kingdom, United States

Thursday, November 12, 1925. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five.

Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five (Lous, his then wife Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano, Edward "Kid" Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Johnny St. Cyr on guitar and banjo) recorded their first songs for Okeh Records.

The British submarine HMS M1 was hit by the SS Vidar and sank in the English Channel with the loss of all 69 hands.

Last edition:

Sunday, November 8, 1925. The Eagle.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, 1925 at the movies

Monday, November 10, 1975. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

 

The massive Great Lakes freighter went down with all 29 hands.

The storm.

The ballad commemorating the ships loss would come out the following year.

Italy and Yugoslavia signed the Treaty of Osimo resolving the long running dispute over Trieste.

The Communists forces of the MPLA  defeated the FNLA in a battle over the capital of Angola, Luanda.

The United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism.  The Resolution would be revoked in 1991.

Last edition:

Thursday, October 30, 1975. King Juan Carlos I of Spain became acting head of state of the country after Franco conceded he was too ill to govern.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Francisco Franco, Spain

Saturday, October 27, 1945. Navy Day.

 

Stamp issued on this day in 1945.

Today is Navy Day, and has been since the day was first established.  This was, of course, the first Navy Day since the end of World War Two and was a huge deal accordingly.

Ships anchored in the Hudson for Navy Day.

President Truman commissioned the new aircraft carrier the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt.  In so doing, he delivered this address:

Mayor La Guardia, ladies and gentlemen:

I am grateful for the magnificent reception which you have given me today in this great city of New York. I know that it is given me only as the representative of the gallant men and women of our naval forces, and on their behalf, as well as my own, I thank you.

New York joins the rest of the Nation in paying honor and tribute to the four million fighting Americans of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard—and to the ships which carried them to victory.

On opposite sides of the world, across two oceans, our Navy opened a highway for the armies and air forces of the United States. They landed our gallant men, millions of them, on the beachheads of final triumph. Fighting from Murmansk, the English Channel and the Tyrrhenian Sea, to Midway, Guadalcanal, Leyte Gulf and Okinawa—they won the greatest naval victories in history. Together with their brothers in arms in the Army and Air Force, and with the men of the Merchant Marine, they have helped to win for mankind all over the world a new opportunity to live in peace and dignity—and we hope, in security.

In the harbor and rivers of New York City and in other ports along the coasts and rivers of the country, ships of that mighty United States Navy are at anchor. I hope that you and the people everywhere will visit them and their crews, seeing for yourselves what your sons and daughters, your labor and your money, have fashioned into an invincible weapon of liberty.

The fleet, on V-J Day, consisted of 1200 warships, more than 50,000 supporting and landing craft, and over 40,000 navy planes. By that day, ours was a sea power never before equalled in the history of the world. There were great carrier task forces capable of tracking down and sinking the enemy's fleets, beating down his air power, and pouring destruction on his war-making industries. There were submarines which roamed the seas, invading the enemy's own ports, and destroying his shipping in all the oceans. There were amphibious forces capable of landing soldiers on beaches from Normandy to the Philippines. There were great battleships and cruisers which swept the enemy ships from the seas and bombarded his shore defense almost at will.

And history will never forget that great leader who, from his first day in office, fought to reestablish a strong American Navy—who watched that Navy and all the other might of this Nation grow into an invincible force for victory—who sought to make that force an instrument for a just and lasting peace—and who gave his life in the effort—Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The roll call of the battles of this fleet reads like a sign post around the globe—on the road to final victory: North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and Southern France; the Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, and the Solomons; Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf; Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Nothing which the enemy held on any coast was safe from its attack.

Now we are in the process of demobilizing our naval force. We are laying up ships. We are breaking up aircraft squadrons. We are rolling up bases, and releasing officers and men. But when our demobilization is all finished as planned, the United States will still be the greatest naval power on earth.

In addition to that naval power, we shall still have one of the most powerful air forces in the world. And just the other day, so that on short notice we could mobilize a powerful and well-equipped land, sea, and air force, I asked the Congress to adopt universal training.

Why do we seek to preserve this powerful Naval and Air Force, and establish this strong Army reserve? Why do we need to do that?

We have assured the world time and again—and I repeat it now—that we do not seek for ourselves one inch of territory in any place in the world. Outside of the right to establish necessary bases for our own protection, we look for nothing which belongs to any other power.

We do need this kind of armed might, however, for four principal tasks:

First, our Army, Navy, and Air Force, in collaboration with our allies, must enforce the terms of peace imposed upon our defeated enemies.

Second, we must fulfill the military obligations which we are undertaking as a member of the United Nations Organization—to support a lasting peace, by force if necessary.

Third, we must cooperate with other American nations to preserve the territorial integrity and the political independence of the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

Fourth, in this troubled and uncertain world, our military forces must be adequate to discharge the fundamental mission laid upon them by the Constitution of the United States—to "provide for the common defense" of the United States.

These four military tasks are directed not toward war—not toward conquest—but toward peace.

We seek to use our military strength solely to preserve the peace of the world. For we now know that this is the only sure way to make our own freedom secure.

That is the basis of the foreign policy of the people of the United States.

The foreign policy of the United States is based firmly on fundamental principles of righteousness and justice. In carrying out those principles we shall firmly adhere to what we believe to be right; and we shall not give our approval to any compromise with evil.

But we know that we cannot attain perfection in this world overnight. We shall not let our search for perfection obstruct our steady progress toward international cooperation. We must be prepared to fulfill our responsibilities as best we can, within the framework of our fundamental principles, even though we recognize that we have to operate in an imperfect world.

Let me restate the fundamentals of that foreign policy of the United States:

1. We seek no territorial expansion or selfish advantage. We have no plans for aggression against any other state, large or small. We have no objective which need clash with the peaceful aims of any other nation.

2. We believe in the eventual return of sovereign rights and self-government to all peoples who have been deprived of them by force.

3. We shall approve no territorial changes in any friendly part of the world unless they accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned.

4. We believe that all peoples who are prepared for self-government should be permitted to choose their own form of government by their own freely expressed choice, without interference from any foreign source. That is true in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, as well as in the Western Hemisphere.

5. By the combined and cooperative action of our war allies, we shall help the defeated enemy states establish peaceful democratic governments of their own free choice. And we shall try to attain a world in which Nazism, Fascism, and military aggression cannot exist.

6. We shall refuse to recognize any government imposed upon any nation by the force of any foreign power. In some cases it may be impossible to prevent forceful imposition of such a government. But the United States will not recognize any such government.

7. We believe that all nations should have the freedom of the seas and equal rights to the navigation of boundary rivers and waterways and of rivers and waterways which pass through more than one country.

8. We believe that all states which are accepted in the society of nations should have access on equal terms to the trade and the raw materials of the world.

9. We believe that the sovereign states of the Western Hemisphere, without interference from outside the Western Hemisphere, must work together as good neighbors in the solution of their common problems.

10. We believe that full economic collaboration between all nations, great and small, is essential to the improvement of living conditions all over the world, and to the establishment of freedom from fear and freedom from want.

11. We shall continue to strive to promote freedom of expression and freedom of religion throughout the peace-loving areas of the world.

12. We are convinced that the preservation of peace between nations requires a United Nations Organization composed of all the peace-loving nations of the world who are willing jointly to use force if necessary to insure peace.

Now, that is the foreign policy which guides the United States. That is the foreign policy with which it confidently faces the future.

It may not be put into effect tomorrow or the next day. But nonetheless, it is our policy; and we shall seek to achieve it. It may take a long time, but it is worth waiting for, and it is worth striving to attain.

The Ten Commandments themselves have not yet been universally achieved over these thousands of years. Yet we struggle constantly to achieve them, and in many ways we come closer to them each year. Though we may meet setbacks from time to time, we shall not relent in our efforts to bring the Golden Rule into the international affairs of the world.

We are now passing through a difficult phase of international relations. Unfortunately it has always been true after past wars, that the unity among allies, forged by their common peril, has tended to wear out as the danger passed.

The world cannot afford any letdown in the united determination of the allies in this war to accomplish a lasting peace. The world cannot afford to let the cooperative spirit of the allies in this war disintegrate. The world simply cannot allow this to happen. The people in the United States, in Russia, and Britain, in France and China, in collaboration with all the other peace-loving people, must take the course of current history into their own hands and mold it in a new direction-the direction of continued cooperation. It was a common danger which united us before victory. Let it be a common hope which continues to draw us together in the years to come.

The atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be made a signal, not for the old process of falling apart but for a new era—an era of ever-closer unity and ever-closer friendship among peaceful nations.

Building a peace requires as much moral stamina as waging a war. Perhaps it requires even more, because it is so laborious and painstaking and undramatic. It requires undying patience and continuous application. But it can give us, if we stay with it, the greatest reward that there is in the whole field of human effort.

Differences of the kind that exist today among nations that fought together so long and so valiantly for victory are not hopeless or irreconcilable. There are no conflicts of interest among the victorious powers so deeply rooted that they cannot be resolved. But their solution will require a combination of forbearance and firmness. It will require a steadfast adherence to the high principles which we have enunciated. It will also require a willingness to find a common ground as to the methods of applying those principles.

Our American policy is a policy of friendly partnership with all peaceful nations, and of full support for the United Nations Organization. It is a policy that has the strong backing of the American people. It is a policy around which we can rally without fear or misgiving.

The more widely and clearly that policy is understood abroad, the better and surer will be the peace. For our own part we must seek to understand the special problems of other nations. We must seek to understand their own legitimate urge toward security as they see it.

The immediate, the greatest threat to us is the threat of disillusionment, the danger of insidious skepticism—a loss of faith in the effectiveness of international cooperation. Such a loss of faith would be dangerous at any time. In an atomic age it would be nothing short of disastrous.

There has been talk about the atomic bomb scrapping all navies, armies, and air forces. For the present, I think that such talk is 100 percent wrong. Today, control of the seas rests in the fleets of the United States and her allies. There is no substitute for them. We have learned the bitter lesson that the weakness of this great Republic invites men of ill-will to shake the very foundations of civilization all over the world. And we had two concrete lessons in that.

What the distant future of the atomic research will bring to the fleet which we honor today, no one can foretell. But the fundamental mission of the Navy has not changed. Control of our sea approaches and of the skies above them is still the key to our freedom and to our ability to help enforce the peace of the world. No enemy will ever strike us directly except across the sea. We cannot reach out to help stop and defeat an aggressor without crossing the sea. Therefore, the Navy, armed with whatever weapons science brings forth, is still dedicated to its historic task: control of the ocean approaches to our country and of the skies above them.

The atomic bomb does not alter the basic foreign policy of the United States. It makes the development and application of our policy more urgent than we could have dreamed 6 months ago. It means that we must be prepared to approach international problems with greater speed, with greater determination, with greater ingenuity, in order to meet a situation for which there is no precedent.

We must find the answer to the problems created by the release of atomic energy—we must find the answers to the many other problems of peace—in partnership with all the peoples of the United Nations. For their stake in world peace is as great as our own.

As I said in my message to the Congress, discussion of the atomic bomb with Great Britain and Canada and later with other nations cannot wait upon the formal organization of the United Nations. These discussions, looking toward a free exchange of fundamental scientific information, will be begun in the near future. But I emphasize again, as I have before, that these discussions will not be concerned with the processes of manufacturing the atomic bomb or any other instruments of war.

In our possession of this weapon, as in our possession of other new weapons, there is no threat to any nation. The world, which has seen the United States in two great recent wars, knows that full well. The possession in our hands of this new power of destruction we regard as a sacred trust. Because of our love of peace, the thoughtful people of the world know that that trust will not be violated, that it will be faithfully executed.

Indeed, the highest hope of the American people is that world cooperation for peace will soon reach such a state of perfection that atomic methods of destruction can be definitely and effectively outlawed forever.

We have sought, and we will continue to seek, the attainment of that objective. We shall pursue that course with all the wisdom, patience, and determination that the God of Peace can bestow upon a people who are trying to follow in His path.

The Battle of Surabaya began in Indonesia.

Last edition:

Friday, October 26, 1945. Cowards.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Albert Einstein, Allied Occupation of Germany, Bulgaria, Communism, Nazi Germany, Nazi Party, Nuremberg Trials, War Crimes, Weapons