15 minutes of fame: rediscovering forgotten figures | HistoryExtra - "‘The past is not a sort of slightly dressed up version of the present with funny hats but actually a very different sort of mental world… this is just the 1940s but I've been reading the diaries of a young revolutionary woman called Yu Yuenjin [sp?] and she had a interesting and uh ultimately I think quite fulfilling life but it was quite turmoil written in the 1940s because she was simultaneously a young woman in her early 20s during the period when Mao's Revolution, the revolution that would lead to the Communist victory in in China was um uh going on, and she was a performer actually in an entertainment troupe attached to the Chinese Army at that time. And she did historians the great service of keeping a diary and it's absolutely fascinating. And lots of the things that are in there well I think sound very familiar to any teenager today. She worries about um the fact that she's you know she thinks she's overweight. She worries about the fact that she doesn't think her, you know she's got some body shame issues we would say today, she also used that phrase but you know all sorts of things but she's very frank in the diary about, she's jealous of certain other people who have nicer you know material goods than she does um and um all sorts of things that you know don't don't sound very out of place today. But the element that is singly most responsible for reminding any reader now that this is a different time is that she expresses almost all of these sentiments and emotions in language that is shaped almost entirely by Marxism. So when she complains to herself about the fact that she's spending too much thinking about makeup, she says what I need to do is make sure I develop a more proletarian point of view. Or when she thinks she might be sort of spending too long looking at you know magazines with pictures of movie stars which are a big thing in 1940s China as they were in 1940s America or Britain, she says I must try and get rid of my petty Bourgeois view of uh of of life. And some of these things are very homely and one of the examples from a different diary actually from a man, but it's such a great quote that I have to give it to you is at the end of a long session struggling with himself to see whether he can get that kind of um proletarian identity through working through the Communist party and the Communist Army, he says, this is the problem with Bourgeois thoughts. It's like the stinky stuff beneath your, between your toes. It's really hard to scrub it away. And the combination of the sort of the Holiness of a metaphor that we, well those who have cleaner toes than me probably wouldn't recognize but nonetheless you have some recognition of that, combined with a world view which is shaped by revolutionary Marxism in a way that's actually just very unfamiliar. Even today’s China which of course is a Communist country but people don't tend to talk that way in today's China and they certainly don't tend to in in most of Britain and America. That's the kind of thing that looking at that sort of Life Source, a diary in this case, can do for a historian to remind you about there's there's two conflicting elements: what's very familiar and what's very different’...
'Kit Heyam has a great new book coming out called before we were trans and they talk about how previously historians have taken essentially a straight lens to the past. So the assumption is that people are straight unless as *something* was saying you can definitely prove that they were something else and why should we assume straightness in the absence of evidence?'"
Why assume historical figures were human, had two hands with five fingers each and were not time travellers from the future? In the absence of evidence we cannot assume anything!
Pearl Harbor episode 2: America on the eve of war | HistoryExtra - "‘The US as a neutral in the two conflicts in Europe and Asia, up until the end of 1941. But that is absolutely not to say that it didn't have if you want, a dog in the fight. The US had great sympathy in the case of the European theater with Great Britain. And in the case of the Asian theater with China. There are some reasons that the United States has this strong sympathy for China. On the one hand, it's a little bit surprising, because Japan has a larger economy. And so the US and Japan are each other's third largest trading partners, they have really strong business ties. So there's really a good reason to think that there's a closeness between the two. But at the same time, there's really a groundswell of support from public opinion, but also from the government, for China. And some of that is because of the huge market potential of China, if China becomes more developed, think of all the things that we could sell, is a popular idea amongst American industry at the time. And then the idea of small r republicanism. So the idea that nationalist China is something like an early version of the United States, a country that's going to be independent of a monarchy, they hadn't thrown off the imperial system in 1911, and is really going to be something kind of as an American style democracy. And so that, and also, the success of American missionaries in China lead to all of these sentiments of the Chinese as being “kind of like us”, from an American perspective. For example, there's a woman called Pearl S Buck, and she wrote a book called The Good Earth, which was based on her experiences as an American missionary, and it's quite a sympathetic account of Chinese peasants. And that book got made into a movie in 1937, the year that a war between China and Japan broke out. And that movie won several Academy Awards. It was really popular, and it really drummed up a sense of public sympathy for the Chinese’...
'This allegiance with China left the US in a tricky position. Because despite wanting the Chinese to win the war, the Americans were a central trading partner supplying their enemies, the Japanese. In effect, US trade was enabling a war that it believed to be morally wrong. And in the end, this position became untenable'...
‘Was there any sense from the establishment, that if they did level, this, this oil embargo, that there was a risk that Japan might launch some kind of military action?’
‘Yes, but not against the United States itself, what American policymakers thought might happen, was that it might encourage Japan to push into other areas that might give it other sources of oil, in particular, what they were worried about, especially after the occupation of the Netherlands, by Germany in the European Theater, the Netherlands had a colony, which was what we now call Indonesia, which was a potential source of oil. So there was a concern that Japan might push south and expand its empire into Southeast Asia as a way of pivoting away from its reliance on American exports, and to feed that need for oil.’...
'When Americans thought about what kind of a threat Japan might be, they really minimalize that threat. So making the case that actually, even isolationists, saying we can be assertive against Japan, take a hard line, have an embargo, force a tough negotiating position, because on the one hand, Japan wouldn't dare attack the United States. This is a really common idea. And on the other hand, even if they did, it wouldn't matter, because the US is so much stronger than Japan. And you hear this really quite biased and racialized skepticism of Japan's military prowess. And so for example, in some of the planning documents, you read about discussions of the Japanese having a sort of Asian eye shape that causes nearsightedness and therefore makes for bad pilots. And so Americans oughtn’t be worried about an attack from Japan because they simply can't fight well. And these really ridiculous racialized ideas, even though they've been disproven by Japan's military successes in the 19th and 20th century, they're still very pervasive...
If the isolationists in the US, who had made the case that Well, none of America's interests in the Asia Pacific are vital, had held sway, then it would have been possible to have a negotiation and a resolution between the US and Japan. So, if the US were willing to back down from their support of nationalist China, and allow that war to go on without supporting the Chinese, then they would have been able to meet, to reach a diplomatic settlement. Certainly one can imagine a situation in which leaving the China question to one side, the Japanese and American leaderships could have looked at a map of the Asia Pacific and drawn lines. We think about Hawaii as being an American state and a part of the United States. But in 1941, it wasn't. It was just a territory. And it's halfway between the US and Japan... But American sentiment was so strong in support of China. And American sentiment was also quite strong in the sort of moral argument that aggression against neighbor states is wrong. It's hard to imagine the US agreeing to that, unless they had been more aware of the potential of a Japanese attack, and the US did have some intelligence information. This really was a bolt out of the blue from the American perspective, people simply didn't imagine a Japanese attack particularly not a coordinated Japanese attack, not only on a major American naval base at Pearl Harbor, but also simultaneously at Manila in the Philippines, at Singapore. People didn't see it coming, and wouldn't have imagined that it was possible.'"
Pearl Harbor episode 3: Countdown to the raid | HistoryExtra - "‘Should the US have known better?’
‘I think one of the things that people misunderstand about Pearl Harbor because we so often referred to it as a surprise attack. I think people are surprised to know that the entire country expected that it would be at war with Japan in a matter of days. The atmosphere at that time was really tense. And there were all kinds of warnings that, well, we're going to be at war. In fact, on November 27, Washington sent a memo a message to all military commands in the Pacific, which would include not only Hawaii, but Panama, the canal was under American control. And the Philippines, also under American control. All those commands got a message on November 27. The first nine words of which are some of the most memorable in American history. This is to be considered a war warning. So everyone knew there was a chance that war was going to break out. The surprise was where it did it, meaning Hawaii...
[Husband Kimmel] figured that to attack Hawaii would be insane. Just logistically, it would be impossible...
‘Arguably, the prospect of the Japanese launching a surprise attack shouldn't have been such a surprise after all.’
‘In 1904 and 1905, Japan and Russia went to war. The war began really with a surprise Japanese attack on the Russian Pacific Fleet. And the Russians were badly damaged, the Japanese won the war. So everyone knew that this was in their DNA, that they liked the idea of surprise. Kimmel knew it, he had been warned repeatedly about it and had even written notes about it to his own people… I'll give you a good example of of his mindset. Pearl Harbor is as harbors go shallow, at its deepest point. It's only about 45 feet, and that's enough for the draft of big ships, they they draw a lot of water, but it's really not that deep as harbors go. Why is that significant? Well, everyone knew that probably the most lethal threat to a ship at that time was the air dropped torpedo. I guess submarine torpedoes too, but a submarine torpedo hits below the waterline and that immediately causes problems. I mean, a bomb hitting you on the deck doesn't sink you necessarily but something that breaks through your hull, you're in trouble. And 45 feet is not or was not at the time deep enough for a plane to drop a torpedo and have the torpedo not bury itself in the mud of the harbor. Because a torpedo weighs like 2000 pounds and before it can actually begin its run underwater toward a ship it will dive quite deeply. Washington warned Kimmel that new tests indicate that while 45 feet in the past was kind of a guarantee you could not be torpedoed because the waters too shallow, it was no longer safe to assume that. Torpedoes were being redesigned so they didn't drop into the water as deeply. And the message went to Kimmel saying specifically you cannot assume that you're protected any more. Kimmel read the message, so did all these people and then they kind of said okay, and they forgot it. On December 7, it was torpedoes that did the, by far the most damage to the American fleet. So Kimball had a tendency to get bad information and reshape it to fit what he wanted to do, which was to sail out of the harbor in a grand march toward victory. But he wasn't terribly focused on protecting himself'...
'The United States had broken the Japanese diplomatic code… we had not broken their military codes… there was a strange exchange of messages in, I want to say September, August of 1941, in which Tokyo asked its consulate in Honolulu to report on which ships are leaving, which ships have arrived, and where they are anchored in the harbor. Oh, and also that you should divide the harbor into a grid, so that you can tell us that a battleship is in grid C2 or H5. This became known as the bomb plot message. It wasn't decoded until weeks later, it doesn't expressly say that the harbor is going to be attacked. And it certainly didn't give a date. And also, Japan was a meticulous gatherer of information. And they were asking similar information from their consulates in Seattle, in San Diego... Kimmel after the war, or after the attack argued that he was never told about this bomb plot message. It wasn't passed on to him. And he argued, there was the proof and you kept the proof from me. I think it's a stretch to say that a message that was sent in September would have kept them on alert in December more than, you know, three months later, and given Kimmel’s penchant for always reading information in the way that was least threatening. I'm not sure that he would have done anything about it. He would have said to him, Well, yeah, and they might want to know where our ships are, simply because if they know they're in the port, that means they're not sailing off Singapore, potentially hampering our plans. So I think a lot of emphasis has been placed on the ability to read the diplomatic traffic. They were reading it and it didn't tell them anything about what was about to happen in Hawaii...
The reasons I think that there was no conspiracy are overwhelming. And I'll just share a couple with you. This can, this could be the subject of an entire episode, but I would throw out two things. Franklin Roosevelt's number one goal in December 1941, was to keep Britain afloat and fighting. He and Churchill had had a mind meld and the United States knew that it had to help Britain win, even if the United States wasn't in the war technically, at that point. Allowing the Japanese to attack in the Pacific certainly didn't solve or help Roosevelt's aim of keeping Britain afloat. Why? Because if the United States went to war in the Pacific, it would immediately start withdrawing forces from the Atlantic in order to defend itself in the Pacific. That's number one. Number two, Britain was still relying on shipping from Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Empire was still sustaining Britain to some degree. Going to war in the Pacific, the Japanese would immediately begin attacking those places, and and hampering Britain's own supplies situation. Roosevelt would gain nothing and harm himself and the British and his country by just allowing an attack to happen. Let me offer the second reason why I don't think a conspiracy makes any sense. How would Roosevelt have known that the attack was coming? He didn't, didn't have an independent source of information, a hotline to some guy in Tokyo that, Franklin could pick up the phone and say, really they're about to attack, he was on the end of a long chain of people who provided intelligence. Top naval aides, top army aides, all the way down to cryptographers who would be listening to the Japanese, and try-, and putting messages down on paper. So the disinformation would reach Roosevelt after it had been in the hands or the ears of dozens, if not hundreds of people in Washington. In the 80 years since the attack, none of those people ever came forward and said, Oh, my goodness, I saw a message that said December 7, Pearl Harbor, and no one did anything about it. And that's one of the greatest conspiracies ever. And yet, that never happened. There were nine investigations of Pearl Harbor in the United States, including a massive, long Congressional investigation that took months. No evidence was ever produced, no witness ever came forward and said, I remember I gave that message to the Pentagon and and I know it got to the White House. I don't understand why they did nothing about it. So all these people went to their graves possessing the greatest secret in American history and not telling it...
Members of Congress had been told not to go home for Christmas holidays, because we were probably going to be at war and they would have to officially declare it. That's how much people thought a war was about to happen, and the only surprise was where it happened'"
Pearl Harbor episode 5: Chaos unleashed | History Extra - "‘Roosevelt chose his words well. By design or by accident, but they really did reflect the anger that Americans felt that someone could do this behind their back. The idea that the Japanese might force itself on America by the use of military action, and the deaths of several thousand young Americans was just lighting the touch paper, and it's very interesting in history to see that it's quite rare for these instances to happen. It never really happened in Britain during the war. There's terrible anger that, you know, the Germans were bombing us for the first time, there was much more of the stoical acceptance in Britain that this was almost inevitable, that it was going to happen. There was a sequence of events that made it more rational to Britons when they were considering the aggression of Nazi Germany. Not so America with Pearl Harbor. This really was a shot in the arm, an injection of anger and emotion that sustained the American public in all the sacrifices and trials that they were then going to subsequently be asked to sustain throughout the war. And it's important that we see this actually. Really, really interesting enough, war weariness never occurred in the American public. You never saw this expressed throughout the long years of the war. And it's a very interesting characteristic of societies when they've been at war for a long period of time. You even saw this in the First World War. And America hadn't been involved for very long, but in the Second World War, there was something really visceral about Pearl Harbor. And it was also visceral about the nature of the Japanese enemy who had committed this perfidy that resonated incredibly powerfully. I don't think there are any other examples. I might be persuaded that I'm wrong. But I can't think off the top my head of any other examples in the history of the United States, particularly where there's anger really hit everybody left and right, popular opinion, and all of a sudden to have Japan attacking American possessions preemptively. So dastardly, cannot be exaggerated. And I think in a sense, we often lose the sense of outrage as we, as we look back in time, but veterans, certainly all the newspapers, all the articles, I mean, it was one, that you can read now about from the time, are very, very explicit about the the anger that was felt. I mean it really unified American political opinion as well. And it also at a stroke, it removed the objections of the very, very large isolationist movement to the involvement of American troops in foreign adventures. I mean, that argument was dead, absolutely dead on the eighth of December, or the ninth of December 1941.’...
‘A lot of people often say, well, Pearl Harbor was the worst decision that the Japanese ever made. What would you say to that?’
‘I think it was, I think it was a disastrous decision. It was an unnecessary decision. The Japanese had a number of options that were open to them. If they had decided that they wanted to pursue the idea of creating by force, the co-prosperity sphere, which is what they had articulated publically for a number of years, they could have done it without actually involving the Americans. And it's very interesting, actually, I'm of the view that the Japanese could easily have invaded Hong Kong, Malaysia and taken Singapore and also the Dutch East Indies possessions as well without touching America at all. And therefore there is an argument that says, certainly I make the argument that the Japanese could have achieved their aims in the second world war without involving America.’
‘Is that a widely held field? Or do historians sort of debate that?’
‘Historians don't tend to debate. It's not widely held. But I think it's a, it's a valid view for this reason. We need to remember that America was focused and had just been persuaded to focus on the war in Europe. If America had been parked by Japan, in the Pacific, it's its forces not being touched, America could have focused its effort on fighting the war in Europe, and Japan could have got on with gobbling up Malaya, in particular, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies. There was a pretty strong argument that didn't win over in Tokyo, that actually Japan should leave America on its own and allow circumstances to then follow and be negotiated through with the Japanese saying, well, this isn't your war, stay out of it. And I think there's a very good chance of that actually working, because the Japanese at no time in their conversations in 1941, considered what might happen to American public opinion. And this is because America has a notoriously fractious culture, like all democracies, because we live in democracies where diverse voices are encouraged. That wasn't the case in Japan, and the Japanese high command never understood this. Whenever they saw an argument as a newspaper that said, you know, we should as Americans do X, Y and Z, they took it as read that that was policy, or that was the way all Americans thought. It wasn't the case at all. They'd never ever thought, there is no evidence, I've not found, having studied this for years, no evidence and no files of the Japanese actually considering what might happen in America as a consequence of this attack. They saw it all in operational terms. And that was a serious, serious mistake. So yes, it was a serious mistake, because without it, that touchpaper wouldn't have been lit. So just ask yourself the question, if Pearl Harbor didn't happened, would that anger towards Japan have been so resonant? Well, possibly, possibly not. Japan didn't understand that at the time, and they walked into a trap of their own making.’
‘So it sounds they're like they really miscalculated America's mindset. But do you think that they also miscalculated America's military strength or potential for military strength?’
‘Oh, absolutely. And it's very interesting that, the story I like to tell is that the size of the American army, at the start of the Second World War was was smaller than Portugal's. I mean, America did not have a large standing army. It didn't have significant military power. But as you say, use the word potential. It had enormous military potential as a consequence of its industrial capability. It also, its ability to organize very quickly. And I also often use the phrase that the war was won in Detroit. And in a very real sense, it was. It was able to be, to become the arsenal of democracy to use Churchill's phrase. And Japan never really understood that well. If they did understand it, and of course, many people did. I don't want to denigrate Japanese understanding of America at the time, they didn't appreciate its consequences, or certainly they thought that their tactical victory would be sufficient to persuade the Americans not to involve themselves in a long drawn out bloody war in the Far East. Remember, America was and had been since the 1850s, a pacific nation. It had undertaken a number of military expeditions in South America and the Philippines. But it wasn't seen to be militarily aggressive. It was seen to be pacific as a culture, it was more intent on making money and extending its global influence by trade and so on, rather than by by military might. And there was a sense in Japan, certainly in the the corridors of power in the high command that America didn't have the guts, or the willpower, or the commitment to take the next step, which was to engage in full scale, bloody, sacrificial war’...
‘It's remained a really important part of the American psyche since. It hasn't changed their attitude to Japan, they're very friendly with Japan, and they have every right to be, but in terms of our, their historic memory, it's one of the most pivotal things. You know, go to an American school now and ask them about Pearl Harbor. Everyone will tell you about it. There's a very different story in Japan. When I go to Japan, and I, say in recent years have interviewed veterans. They're the only people who are still interested in the war. Japan moved on very quickly from the war. There was a very, very visceral, had a very visceral impact on Japanese culture and society. And most people just turn their back on it. There's very little real analysis of the war, very few historians. I mean, someone was talking to me very recently about how Britain seems to be obsessed with the Second World War. I don't think that's entirely right. But we are very interested. And it was an incredibly important part of our national story. And there are lots of historians doing really serious work in the Second World War. And that's fascinating. You don't find that in Japan. It's actually really difficult to find anything published in Japan, about the war, apart from the memoirs of soldiers who fought there, which are written for the regimental associations and so on. It's not part of Japanese culture or public memory, as indeed it is in the United States and the United Kingdom...
the whole of the Second World War should really be a story about the utility of force. Why Japan felt it was necessary to create an empire by beating other empires rather than coalescing with them. We found ourselves in 1941, with states that believed in force as as an instrument of its of power for its own good. And those conversations always overstated what power what military power could achieve.’"
Japan keeps being slammed for not self-flagellating over World War II. But really they don't care about World War II
The Mary Rose: the Tudor heyday of Henry VIII’s warship | HistoryExtra - "‘It was a deeply personal rivalry and it remained so but of course because they were so similar. When they were getting on they were getting on spectacularly well but it only ever seemed to be quite temporary’
‘And when it came to 16th century alliances appearance was everything’
‘One of the greatest examples of Henry and Francis actually declaring they were friends now came in the summer of 1520 with a spectacular two-week meeting between these two kings known as the field of cloth of gold. Well it was held on neutral Territory between english-held Calais and French lands and it was a showpiece the like of which had never been seen before so Henry went with his Queen Catherine of Aragon and a huge entourage that included 3,000 soldiers and 500 Horsemen and hundreds of ships and it was like an invasion but a peaceful Invasion. And everything was so carefully stage managed by Henry's chief advisor Cardinal Woolsey to make sure that the the kings were strictly on an equal footing even down to would you believe remodeling the two hillsides from which each King rode down to meet the other. So they had to be of the same height otherwise one of the Kings would have the advantage. When the two kings did finally meet, the scene was described by Edward Hall who was one of the best chroniclers of the age and he said how they embraced with benign and courteous manner and sweet and goodly words of greeting and they went off arm in arm. But, this being Henry and Francis it wasn't going to stay very friendly for long. Because it was clear that this so-called sort of meeting of peace was really just a cover for each King to get one over on the other. So, they tried to outdo each other in the tournaments and the entertainments. Each king tried to be the most gallant with the ladies as it was described. And it all really fell apart a bit when Henry VIII got a little bit too full of himself and he also was a bit too full of wine and he challenged Francis to a wrestling match. Well this wasn't supposed to happen. It was just supposed to be their respective entourages who would fight each other. But Henry was sure of victory, he was a great sportsman and he very quickly got thrown to the ground by Francis. And to say things turned sour after that would be an understatement. Basically the meeting came to an end pretty soon after that and Henry promptly went and made peace with francis's greatest rival Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. So really this incredible showpiece, this cripplingly expensive masquerade of friendship was soon shown to be the real sham that it actually was’...
'He definitely needed a male heir. Now we tend to forget that the Tudors were still quite a new and fairly fragile dynasty and Henry really felt that. So it wasn't just vanity, his need for male air. He actually did genuinely, desperately need one'"
History of the sea: Mary Rose - "While only fragments of this anti-boarding netting were recovered, originally it would have been placed over the heads of the crew on the waist and castle decks of the Mary Rose, forming a roof of pitch-covered hemp. This was in place to prevent the ship being captured, enemy boarders would have to cut through the net to get on board, during which time they were at the mercy of the crew underneath, who would be stabbing and shooting at them. While it proved very efficient at keeping people out, sadly it was equally good at keeping people in. While a lot of people claim it was the crew’s inability to swim that caused them to drown, even the most proficient swimmer would be unable to get through this netting in time. Because of this, of five hundred men on board only the 30 or so working above the netting survived."
The Mary Rose: inside the Tudor treasure trove | HistoryExtra - "It was just after the Reformation. Using these rosaries to say your prayers was actually banned in the 1530s. You couldn't say your prayers by rote using a rosary. And just after Henry VIII died, they were completely banned. If you were caught using one, you'd be punished, because they were this sorta Catholic way of praying. And yet we had 8 or 9 of them on board... generally these beads are generally around the ship, as if they may have been with people when they died, they may have been hidden in their trouser pockets as it were. They weren't generally in the chests we found... if someone had been praying with a rosary for 20 or 30 years, they weren't gonna just stop praying that way because the King had become head of the Church of England and was changing his faith because of his marriage problems. Or maybe it was just a keepsafe or a memento or kept them safe'...
'Maybe these rosaries belonged to foreign crew members... many of the objects are the sort which would be lost to time. And that's what makes them so special'"
