The Legacy of War

This is one reason why Europeans understand war differently than Americans:

An Allied bomb left over from World War II has exploded in Germany, killing three military engineers who were trying to defuse it. The blast occurred in the central city of Goettingen on Tuesday after construction workers building a sports stadium discovered it in a densely populated area.

Bomb disposal experts were called to the scene to defuse the 500 kilogramme device, which police said was likely to be British. But it exploded before they could neutralise the device. Another six members of the bomb disposal team were injured in the blast, but all were expected to survive.

The legacy of war remains written into the landscape of Europe in a way that’s not really understandable to Americans. This legacy doesn’t provide a full explanation for why Americans and Europeans tend to view military adventurism differently, but there’s no doubt that it’s a factor.

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Netherlands Okay, But We Ain't Surrendering to New Zealand...

Your Sunday morning surrender ceremony:

I still look forward to the day that Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar surrender on board the USS Ronald Reagan...

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Struggle for the Middle Sea

I have a review of Vincent O'Hara's Struggle for the Middle Sea up at ID.

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FDR Sick?

This is kind of interesting; the argument is that FDR may have been suffering from cancer during the 1944 Presidential campaign. The evidence of illness, they suggest, was covered up by his doctors in order to make his run for a fourth term possible.

If Lomazow and Fettman are right, Republican Thomas E. Dewey or a different Democrat should have been elected president in 1944. In that case, Harry S. Truman, FDR's vice president, would almost certainly not have been commander-in-chief from 1945 to 1952. The Cold War and subsequent American history might have taken a very different path.

Two questions:

1. If this is true, and if FDR's illness had become widely enough known to preclude a fourth run, who would have taken the Democratic nomination in 1944? I suspect that it would have been very hard for FDR to campaign anyway, given the general undesirability of having a dying President during wartime.

2. If this were true, why would FDR have chosen Truman as his VP? The two men weren't close, and even allowing that FDR had a cavalier approach to his VP choices, it would be odd that he would select Truman if he knew he was quite likely to die in the short term.

The argument is hardly concrete, but it does open up some interesting avenues of discussion.

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