Sailors Quotes
At the time veterans would have to wait for up to a year till they could get their records and their benefits from the Veterans Administration which had insufficient budget while the Defense Department had as much money as the Military-Industrial complex could lobby for.
Captain W.W. Polk, commanding the Coast Guard revenue cutter Florida, wrote Treasury Secretary asking permission to employ a young Negro on board. Existing regulations prohibited such. The Negro in question was a free Black born in New York who was an “expert sailor for his age and competent to the duty of a boy of the first class.” Polk had hired the boy as a servant after he had worked at sea for another Captain. Good seamen were hard to come by, decision was extremely contentious. Ingham “compromised” by limiting the allowable role of Negroes at sea—a practice that lasted till the Second World War.
For those military personnel who are assigned overseas, their children vary often are living in the country to which their parents are assigned. For those military children in the United States, our foreign policy largely determijnes whether their parent or parents may have to leave for an overseas assignment for a year or more. So foreign policy very much influences the lives of military children moreso than other youngsters.
During the meltdown of the Japanerse nuclear reactors at Fukashima, American sailors were deployed to provide critical assistance fram an American aircraft carrier in the area. They played a significant role in getting the reactors under control. Many of the Japanese at the emergency area had suffered serious illness from the radiation exposure abd a number died. The crew of the aircraft carrier had developed a highly unusual prevelance of serious illness assocated with radiation exposure. The U. S. Defense Department was "styding the matter" but had not decided that the unusual illness patern was related to their assignment assisting in th emergency. A number of the sailors had come to japan and asked for damages from the Raactor company which like most American Corporations would not do or say anything. The Japanese government also was silent on the issue when the sailors came to Japan, However, this former prime minister felt so strongly that he visited the Sailors and took up their cause in letting the Japanese public know what had happened and how the government and the electic company were acting. This was Koizumi's tearful response to the press covering the saolors and their request.
Two of the major issues of the War of 1812 were the right of American ships to trade in Europe. The British were at war with France and boycotted all ports controlled by the French. They would seize American ships bound for or having traded with French areas. In addition, many American merchant seamen had formerly served in the British Navy and British warships would stop American merchant ships and remove “suspected” deserters and force them into British military naval service. Captain Lawrence was mortally wounded in this battle. See {625136}.
The president had publicly stated that two American ships—Turner Joy and Maddox—had been attacked off the coast of North Vietnam. The ships returned fire an “drove the attackers off”. This incident was the justification of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorized the American military to bomb Hanoi and the rest of North Vietnam. The NSA had issued a secret report stating that there was no evidence of any attack at all even though the ships had fired their guns. One theory was that the very sensitive radar the shipps carried had detected a large school of flying fish, many of whom were out of the water at any one time. The President, who had escalated the war to respond to this “attack”, privately gave this explanation.
The U. S. Navy had Black sailors even before the Civil War. Blacks had shipped out on Northern merchant vessels and whaling ships starting in colonial times. Many Blacks had nautical experience and were welcomed by the Northern Navy and treated very well. The Union Army in contrast was much more ambivalent about Blacks serving. Ironically the Navy was disbanded to save money and when it was reconstituted it was on a racially segregated basis completely foreign to American Naval history. It was the last of the American armed services to integrate and its officer corps has not desecrated as much as the other services.
This quotation gives us a concept of the WWII home front effort where virtually everyone in American society was personally involved on a daily basis in the war. See also {637437}. This was so dramatically different from the home fronts for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where most of the American public had no direct contact with the war effort and was not called upon or even needed to do anything.
He was wrong. The protesters were general including merchants, lawyers, politicians, shopkeepers, sailors and other occupations. The Privateer Captains were no more or less involved as other occupations.
