” The President is CIC and directs the overall war strategy at the highest level. Generals follow orders.”
Know a lot of general officers do you?
The “Generals follow orders” part makes me think that you are a bit unfamiliar with the breed. Hollywood may like to portray American generals as men who obediently follow orders, but then Hollywood is largely populated by fools and leftists. You shouldn’t follow their example.
To be accurate you should have said something along the lines of “Generals are obliged to follow lawful orders and have a duty to disobey unlawful ones”, but even that doesn’t capture the world as it is.
One of the generals involved in this discussion is MacArthur. And MacArthur openly defied President Truman during Korea. If we are to believe your version of history MacArthur was too shy in 1945 to speak up when this same Truman and a bunch of Harvard eggheads were ordering him around. This is amusing in its naivete. MacArthur wasn’t convinced that God outranked him.
Another officer, this one senior even to MacArthur, was William Leahy. Leahy opposed dropping the atomic bombs, he thought it was immoral. If we are to believe you he was willing to openly condemn American strategy, but somehow neglected to mention the cabal of Ivy Leaguers responsible for ordering it.
There have been other senior military officers who have openly defied and openly criticized the Presidents they worked for. General Singlaub said that Carter’s Korea policy was going to lead to war. Admiral US Grant Sharp bashed Lyndon Johnson and his advisors during Vietnam. Admiral La Rocque spent the 1980s attacking Reagan.
You expect us to believe that the senior Generals and Admirals who dropped the bomb didn’t think it was necessary, but did it anyway because they were ordered to by an Ivy League cabal. And yet none of them ever bothered to mention it, except somehow you know about it.
Well I don’t have much use for Ivy Leaguers but I still say ‘prove it’. I don’t believe you have psychic powers so you are going to have to provide evidence. Show us the orders. Show us who gave them. Show us where these senior generals and admirals say that they were ordered by Truman and his advisors to drop the bombs against their better judgment. The closest you will ever come is Admiral Leahy’s objection to the bombs but he never claimed anyone forced the decision on his fellow officers. The story you are expecting us to accept is just conspiracy nonsense if you can’t cough up some evidence.
Know a lot of general officers do you?
I know a few folks in the military, one of which has been to the White House, another of which spent a lot of time under water.
They tell me that its pretty rare for someone to tell their superior that an order is unlawful and they're not going to follow it. I think pretty much everyone on FR knows about only lawful orders, etc.
Please let's dispense with the all-too-frequent practice of determining who "wins" according to who has better military connections.
This is where the typical neocon misses the point when it comes to this type of discussion. Yes, by and large, the American military conduct was exemplary during WWII. Phenomenally exemplary. Almost all of those men (aside from the typical few bad apples which were typically flushed out very well) performed with honor, did their duty and "followed lawful orders".
When us "conspiracy wackos" talk about conspiracies, we're not talking about the military per se (if we know what we're talking about). The tricks are played at the top. That's the easy way. Get a screwy President and Secretary of War (Defense) in place, and you get what you want if you're a global elite.
FDR - Harvard, old money New York families, run horribly amok. Grandfather Warren Delano made his fortune in the Chinese opium trade. FDR was classmates with future OSS leader William Donovan at Columbia Law School in NYC. Etc., etc.
Henry L. Stimson - Yale, Skull and Bones, friends with Elihu Root who was the close confidant and attorney of of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
If you actually do a background on the men who were the top advisors to FDR, you find a tiny "incestuous" little world of high finance / old money focused in NYC, with some of the most significant players actually having played similar roles for President Wilson during WWI. It's like the "old ivy league rich boy war boys club", that loves war, rations, national debt, rule by administrative decree, massive government contracts, etc. That is what the Federal government became after 1913.
Actually, it's fantastic that you bring up good old MacArthur, in relation to "wacky conspiracy theories". As he was aware that OSS was filled with communists, he refused to let them operate in the Pacific theatre.
http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/70-42/70-424.html
"The Office of Strategic Services never played a major role in the Pacific. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the overall commander of the Central and South Pacific theaters, limited OSS activities to an intelligence and liaison office in Honolulu. Donovan's envoys were even less successful in their negotiations with the Southwest Pacific Theater. MacArthur and his staff intended to conduct their own brand of special operations in the theater without any interference from a semi-autonomous organization that had its own command channel to Washington. Although the OSS periodically attempted to "penetrate" the theater, MacArthur was able to close his command to Donovan's agency until the last days of the war.1"
OSS leadership - coincidentally (????????????) also had the core ties to that old money eastern establishment.
Now ain't that weird ?
I may be a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but how can "insider, always in the right place at the right time, slick, privileged east coast ivy league boys" have their espionage operation filled will communists ?????? They're too smart for that to happen by accident. Wait, we see their fathers generation of Wall Streeters helped finance the Bolshevik revolution. Hmmmm...
Yes, Generals, due to their rank, while they publicly try to show the decorum and respect of their rank, certainly they do have considerable latitude in how they execute the operations they are tasked with.
And good ol' cranky MacArthur leaves us a historical breadcrumb - to me, it is amazing that he did what he did. And the implications of the matter - sit there like a big old fat pimple on the buttocks of the pure-as-the-driven-snow history that we are fed by the mainstream sources. ESPECIALLY GIVEN THAT THE PRESIDENT WAS A CLASSMATE OF WILLIAM DONOVAN AT COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL. If a theatre commander kicks the official government intelligence agents out of his theatre, something is rotten in Washington, DC, IMHO.