Seventy Years Ago: Wasp Sunk; North Carolina Torpedoed

The afternoon of September 15, 1942,  Wasp (CV-7), Hornet (CV-8), North Carolina (BB-55) and 10 other warships were escorting a convoy carrying the 7th Marine Regiment from Espiritu Santo to Guadalcanal as reinforcements. As duty carrier, Wasp had been launching and recovering aircraft to support the operation.  At about 2:45 in the afternoon, while she was rearming and refueling aircraft with gasoline and munitions exposed, a destroyer spotted three torpedoes headed right for the carrier. Japanese submarine I-19 had fired a spread of six 21-inch type 93 torpedoes at Wasp. At least two hit their target. Of the torpedoes that missed Wasp, one hit North Carolina and one hit the destroyer O'Brien. 

The Japanese submarine torpedo had a range of 5 miles at a speed of 50 knots or 6 1/2  miles at 46 knots. It was the best World War II torpedo of any navy.

Two torpedoes struck Wasp's starboard side almost simultaneously, one near the gasoline storage tanks and the other near the forward bomb magazine. About twenty seconds later, another explosion occurred. Gasoline fires broke out near the athwartships gasoline main on the second deck and low in the ship near ruptured gasoline tanks. Another major fire started forward in the hangar. Gasoline poured freely from ruptured tanks onto the surface of the water. When that gasoline ignited, the forward part of the ship was engulfed in flames. One 5"/38 ready ammunition locker ignited followed by internal explosions. 

 The Captain maneuvered the ship to keep the wind on her starboard quarter to blow the fire away from the undamaged portion of the ship. The Captain attempted to back the ship into the wind for to escape the gasoline fire on the water's surface, but this proved unsuccessful, as gasoline kept pouring from the tanks. 

After a series of heavy explosions of gasoline vapor, loss of fire main pressure and failure of every attempt to bring the fire under control, the Captain ordered "abandon ship" at 3:20 p.m. Abandon ship was completed by 4:00 p.m., by which time Wasp was completely enveloped in flame. 

193 sailors died and 366 were wounded in the attack. 45 planes went down with the ship.

Wasp stubbornly continued to float and was sunk by her escorts that night.
North Carolina returned to Pearl Harbor for repair of a 20 foot hole and was out of action for the rest of the year. O'Brien was temporarily repaired, but her damaged seams opened up a month later and she sank while returning to San Francisco for permanent repair.

With Enterprise (CV-6) damaged by bombs at Eastern Solomons, Saratoga damaged by a torpedo, and Wasp sunk, Hornet was the only carrier left in the South Pacific for six weeks.  Hornet, too, was to be lost in the Battle of Santa Cruz Island on 26 Oct 1942 from air attack. Enterprise was damaged, again, and there were no active fleet carriers in the Pacific until Enterprise returned 12 Nov for the Naval Battles of Guadalcanal with repair parties still aboard and one elevator out of service.

Meanwhile, back on Guadalcanal, Japanese Major General Kawaguchi launched an attack with 3,000 soldiers of his brigade against Marine Lieutenant  Colonel Edson's Ranger force of 850 marines. Kawaguchi lost 850 killed and the marines lost 104.

On September 15, Imperial General Headquarters in Japan  learned of Kawaguchi's defeat and convened an emergency session. The top Japanese army and navy command staffs concluded that, "Guadalcanal might develop into the decisive battle of the war." The results to date began to have a strategic impact on Japanese operations in other areas of the Pacific. Army commanders realized that in order to send sufficient troops and materiel to defeat the Allied forces on Guadalcanal, they could not at the same time support the major ongoing Japanese offensive on the Kokoda Track in New Guinea. General Hyakutake, with the concurrence of General Headquarters, ordered his troops on New Guinea, who were within 30 miles of their objective of Port Moresby, to withdraw until the "Guadalcanal matter" was resolved. He prepared to send more troops to Guadalcanal for another attempt to recapture Henderson Field.

Seventy Years Ago: Guadalcanal

US Marines on Guadalcanal learned that Japanese forces were regrouping along the Matanikau River, threatening the beachhead and Henderson Field. On September 14, Major General Vandegrift moved a battalion from Tulagi to Guadalcanal and ordered the 7th Marine Regiment from Espiritu Santo to Guadalcanal.

More than 4,000 marines embarked September 14 in a convoy of transports, escorted by 13 warships, including the carriers Hornet and Wasp and the battleship North Carolina. Marines fought along Bloody Ridge in defense of the beachhead.

Politics Stops At The Water's Edge

At least that's what Republican Senator, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan said in 1947. It was early in the Cold War, and Vandenberg had renounced isolationism and had become chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. He played a helpful role in forging bipartisan support for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO.

A few years earlier, the 1940 Republican candidate for president, Wendell Willkie, assisted President Roosevelt by supporting Lend-Lease and other Roosevelt programs supporting internationalism and Civil Rights.

 It is a truism, especially in international relations, that we only have one president at a time. An earlier generation understood that.

National Income: Where Does It Go?

Today's Census report shows both hopeful news and less hopeful news.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has done an analysis of the income figures by quintiles (dividing the country into fifths), adding a bar chart for the top 5%:



The chart shows that unless you are in the top 20 percent of households, your share of overall income has decreased since 1967. The top 20% now receives more than half of all household income. The top 5% receives nearly a fourth of all income.

The era when "a rising tide lifts all boats" seems to have ended.

Some say the system is rigged.

Aleksei Grogorievich Stakhanov - Hero of Socialist Labor

In August, 1935 Soviet newspapers reported that a twenty-nine year old miner, Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov (Алексе́й Григо́рьевич Стаха́нов) in the Donbass region mined 102 tonnes of coal in five hours, forty-five minutes. The output was fourteen times his quota. Less than a month later, he mined 227 tons in a single shift.

These heroic accomplishments were held up as a model for others to follow. Workers who exceeded their quotas were known as "Stakhanovites." The movement inspired others to follow suit. The government's goal was to exhort individuals to ever greater efforts at productivity.

Several curious things about the Stakhanovite movement.
1. The Soviet Union had just completed a bloody collectivization campaign, collectivizing every industrial and agricultural activity, yet Stakhanov's accomplishment was to exceed a personal, piece-work goal;
2. Central planners also established output goals for enterprises, but managers apparently saw no way to achieve those goals except to prod individual workers;
3. Central planners were heavily engaged at the time in mechanization of production, but management methods followed pre-revolutionary hierarchical and authoritarian models of management;
4. Management focus was on gross output, not quality;
5. Exhortation was a major instrument of motivation - this instrument almost never works well;
6. Seeds of later failure of the Soviet economic model were sown in the late twenties and early thirties.

My main conclusion: Soviet economic shortcomings resulted from poor management methods - methods handed down from at least the time of Peter the Great.

The failure of the Soviet Union as a political system, however, stemmed from the difficulty of incorporating more than 120 nationalities, with as many languages and at least that many cultures.

It was a pretty impossible task. The breakup of the Soviet Union has not completely played out to this day.

Though the experiment failed, it accomplished some amazing things.

Romney Killed Bin Laden?

Very interesting post by Dylan Matthews in yesterday's Washington Post about a recent Public Policy Polling report from Ohio. The most surprising response to polling questions was that 15% of Republicans polled expressed the opinion that Romney was responsible for the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

How could that be?

Matthews examines some relevant scholarly analysis of polling and presents some possible explanations. He summarizes the analysis: "....voters have trouble crediting politicians they don’t like for policy outcomes they do like. And killing bin Laden is a policy outcome they do like. And so partisan effects have led some Republicans to argue that Obama was not primarily responsible for killing bin Laden or, even more absurdly, that Romney was responsible."

I recommend the whole article. It is also worthwhile reading the referenced scholarly articles as well.

It explains why a campaign operative might say "we won't let our campaign be driven by fact checkers."

Democracy In America

Last May I came across a blog titled Middle Class Political Economist.  The post that caught my eye was an examination of over representation of rural areas in the US Congress. I thought it was a good discussion of an issue I had long pondered.

So I offered the following comments:

Some of the ills of congress are built into our constitution. The US Senate, for example, which likes to characterize itself as "the world's greatest deliberative body" is arguably the "free world's" least democratic body. That is, first of all, a consequence of the constitutional arrangement that each state, regardless of size or economic output, have an equal number of senators. This is compounded by the increasingly inexplicable commitment of the senate to the requirement of a supermajority of senators to pass any legislation at all. My solution to that: get rid of paper filibusters imposed by the cloture rule. Let's go back to "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" style of filibuster. Filibusters would become more rare because voters could see what was happening and better understand what it was about.

Some republicans want to fix the senate by repealing the seventeenth amendment providing direct popular election of senators. What, we have too much democracy?

A common complaint about the House of Representatives is "My representative doesn't listen to people like me."

Some advocate term limits to fix this. I say, we already have term limits. Elections. What we don't have is enough representatives.

We are going through redistricting right now. This is the process after every decenniel census (except for the 1920 census - there was not a reapportionment after that census). First congress reapportions seats in the House of Representatives to the states according to population. District boundaries are then redrawn by state legislatures and in some cases by courts.

Contrary to popular opinion, the number of seats in the House of Representatives is not in the constitution. But the number has not changed since it was set at 435 in 1911. At that time, each member of the House represented about 216,000 citizens. Since then, our population has more than tripled, but the number remains the same. Now each member represents about 708,000 constituents.

My suggestion: enlarge the House so that each member represents about 216,000 citizens. With modern communications systems, that would allow the members closer communication with constituents. It would also lower the financial and organizational barriers to running for office. It might reduce the influence of money in politics and even create opportunities for more political parties to become competitive.

How many representatives would we have? About 1,426. Admittedly, that might make the body even more unwieldy, but it might force more cooperation. It would certainly induce representatives to be more responsive to constituents.

How could we accommodate so many representatives? Replace the desks on the floor of the House with benches. Reduce representatives' personal staffs. Currently, members are allowed to hire as many as eighteen personal staffers. Reduce that to five per member. Representatives might have to study bills themselves, possibly answer phones and write some of their own correspondence. But they wouldn't have to raise so much money.

Originally Posted May 29, 2012

Football - A Liberal, Collectivist Enterprise

Conservative columnist George Will has uncovered a liberal, elitist plot - the introduction of football into higher education. Football teams, after all, succeed because of effective teamwork, planning and organization. They don't succeed because of stars, who can't score without blockers.

If Will had any direct personal experience with military operations, he would know that the military is a collectivist enterprise as well.

I guess that's why George Will is so fascinated with baseball. Still, there's a disturbing amount of teamwork there as well. Hard to imagine a triple play or a hit and run play without teamwork.