| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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They are doing some sort of construction across the way. This motel may have been economy but it still was no bargain.
They had a continental breakfast. Crispy Creme doughnuts, coffee, and choice of three kinds of juice: orange, apple, and grapefruit. They have pineapples in their logo and you see a lot of pineapples all around. Guess what kind of juice they do not have.
As we leave I see two cigars that someone has thrown on the ground next to our car. On the curb someone has left a beer bottle. Why is it that what people litter is so heavily correlated to vices? When is the last time you saw somebody leave a book on a street curb? Have you ever seen a necktie blowing down the street? Do these people think they cannot take these things home and throw them out because they will look bad? Or is it they figure that if they don't respect their bodies they don't have to respect the environment?
We headed out for Fort Sumter but for the first time had to rearrange plans for the weather. It looks like we have a rainy morning. Let's hold Sumter off for tomorrow. Instead we drove into Charleston to Beth Elohim Congregation.
Beth Elohim Congregation was founded 1750. They had their first synagogue on the same site 1780-1792 in a converted cotton gin. A second was built in 1792 and burned in 1838. This building was built 1840, the second oldest in the United States. It is the oldest in continuous use and the birthplace of Reform Judaism.
Well, this isn't our day. The synagogue is closed for renovation. Apparently when Hurricane Hugo came through it lifted the top off the synagogue, then put it right back in just the same place. Nobody knew it had happened. But water gets into the cracks. So they are doing repairs.
After a quick visit to the souvenir counter of Beth Elohim we headed out to Patriots Point. We did not look at Charleston in any real detail, but it has a surprisingly tropical look. There is extensive use of palmetto trees and a building style that would almost remind you of a place like Barbados.
After touring the U. S. S. Alabama Patriots Point may have been a bit redundant. Patriots Point, called the largest maritime museum in the world, has four boats to tour. There is the destroyer Laffey, the submarine Clamagore, the Coast Guard cutter Ingham. But the centerpiece is the aircraft carrier Yorktown. There was a carrier Yorktown that was sunk at Midway. Almost immediately a carrier being built was given the name. (There have been five different Yorktowns.) This is that carrier. It was used extensively in the remaining Pacific war. It helped to sink the Yamato. A documentary was shot of its action, The Fighting Lady, and it won the Oscar. The carrier also picked up Apollo 8 out of the water when it landed.
There are certain obvious differences between a battleship like the U. S. S. Alabama and a carrier like the U. S. S. Yorktown. Obviously the latter has to have a hanger deck and a flight deck. It does not have guns. But beyond that the two are fairly similar. The galley's look a lot alike. So do the captain's quarters.
A carrier has even more posh Admiral's quarters. But the galleys are very similar. So are the engine rooms. They may not be in the same place, but they are much alike.
They had a carrier veteran, Ed Fellabom, not from the Yorktown, give us a guided tour. I asked who named the ships and made the decision to reuse the name Yorktown. 'The Navy Department.' (I was hoping for something more explicit.) I asked if they were responsible to keep the names of all boats unique. 'Yeah, pretty unique.' (I think he didn't understand the question.)
Well, he took us around the ship. It is divided into seven tours that cover about 40% of the carrier. It is just as well they do not cover the whole thing, because it would take forever. We saw how there was a coordinate system that told exactly where on the ship each room is. I guess if you know that the tailor is in a compartment at a given address you then know how to find it.
More so than on the Alabama, there are a lot of little one-compartment museums. One will be momentos of the Destroyer Escort Service. That is not what it sounds like, those are ships. You go through the torpedo workshop and the machine shop and the butcher shop. There is a little display of women in the armed services. There is a tabletop model of a scene from the battle of Leyte Gulf.
Every few minutes they announced that you could get a taste of original war years by going to the ship's galley and buying lunch. Evelyn asked if the food as they served it really was accurate to the period. He said that it was much more cooked to modern tastes. Probably that means it had less fat than it would have in the war years. It did look like the vegetables were overcooked.
When the tour was over Ed said that he was pleased that people were attentive and asked lots of questions. Then he said something interesting. He said spoke of veterans and said that veterans want people to know about what the war was like. 'We are fearful a lot of history has been... revised.' It is true that we have relatively recently had new interpretations of World War II. The Smithsonian was going to have an exhibit on the bombing of Hiroshima that would brand the crew of the Enola Gay as war criminals. There was an uproar over that and the exhibit was canceled. I have my own thoughts about Hiroshima and nuclear weapons. Or at least I have reserved judgment on a subject that most of the rest of the world has no doubt about.
Before I take a point of view, particularly if it is one of these things that just about everybody knows and agrees on, I occasionally like to play this little game with myself. I am a lawyer and I am arguing for the opposite point of view. I am being the Devil's Advocate. Now I grew up in the nuclear era. Everybody lived under the Sword of Damocles of nuclear weapons. I went through the old 'duck and cover' exercises in grade school. Like everybody else I hated nuclear weapons. But I play the Devil's Advocate role with nuclear weapons and I am not sure they have been the curse that we all think of them as being. In fact my best arguments have been in favor of nuclear weapons. So I am not telling the reader what to believe, but I would like to list some of the arguments in favor.
The first shock argument is that using nuclear weapons against the Japanese was like a slap in the face to someone hysterical. It shook them out of a mind-set that was hurting them. These days you hear arguments all sorts of ways but I think the best arguments say that the Japanese would have kept fighting until a lot more were dead than were killed by the bombings. The bombings were a slap in the face to say you will not win and you will destroy yourself playing out the game. In a way the bombings may have even given the Japanese an honorable way out of the war, but I am convinced that more Japanese survived the war because of the bombing and it left more latitude for friendship between the two countries since there were not hundreds of thousands killed on both sides. So this adds up to saying the admittedly weird statement if taken out of context that Japan ended better off because of the bombings.
Then nuclear weapons remained around convincing us that if we fight too much with the communists we could be in for some real trouble in the form of nuclear retaliation. There probably would have been another world war over something like Russia arming Cuba. There was not because it was all played out with nuclear weapons that never were used. Again nuclear weapons probably saved lives, this time in the millions.
And certainly our standard of living is better because countries have not had to field huge armies. Nuclear weapons have meant that people have not had to disrupt their lives for national defense.
Nuclear weapons have slowed our movement to biological and chemical weapons. We have not needed them because we have had nuclear weapons. And frankly they are a lot scarier. One of the nice things about a nuclear bomb is that it is not subtle. You see that mushroom cloud and you have a really good idea that somebody had it in for you. If you and most the people you know come down with a cold that just gets worse and worse, and soon your whole country is debilitated, at what point do you decide you have been attacked? But of course if you develop such a germ, there is always the danger that the news will get out and you will be threatened with nuclear weapons.
Finally there is this nice discovery that if you actually use nukes, it will trigger nuclear winter. It is a weapon you dare not use because it is as destructive to the person wielding it as it is to the person attacked.
I am not telling anyone that they should love nuclear weapons. I am not even saying that I have decided that they were a good thing, though admittedly I am starting to lean that way. But I do think it is worth looking at the possibility that they have gotten a bad rap. I think there are good arguments that the world is better off for their presence. The causes of World War I to me have always looked like a sort of immaturity on the part of nations. It was nations acting a lot like children. Nuclear weapons have taught the lesson that major powers cannot behave like children. And we may be better off for the lesson.
Well, enough of that. We had lunch at the snack bar. Polish sausage and Pepsi. I wanted to go back and see what was said about the super-battleship Yamoto. This and the sister ship Musashi were the largest battleships ever built. 843 feet long, 128 feet wide, 34 foot draft, displacement of 64,170 long tons, nine eighteen-inch guns. It must have been pretty amazing. Not really useful but pretty amazing.
Well, we continued our tour. We finished up the Yorktown. We went to the submarine. We returned to the Yorktown at 4 PM for their showing of the documentary The Fighting Lady. Now it had rained a little in the morning, but not much. That turned out to be a good thing since we would have killed ourselves trying to do Sumter and Patriots Point in one day. But had it not rained a whole lot, we would have been able to see Sumter. Anyway sitting in the theater we heard booming. We didn't think it was guns on the soundtrack. I guessed that the sky had really opened up while we were watching the movie. When we came out at about 5:15 PM the ground was wet everywhere outside and the crowds had mostly gone. We probably missed a good storm. It took about an hour to tour the destroyer and the coast guard cutter. By the time we were done we were sweaty and exhausted. The gift shop had nothing of interest. We considered going back to the room and taking showers before dinner. But then the evening would be gone by the time we were done eating. On the way back we stopped at a place called Toucan's and I had a tuna steak sandwich. Mediocre.
We got back to the room and the history channel had a documentary on samurai tying in to our last trip. It extended to Kamikaze so it fit into earlier in the day. The next hour was about the German rocket program and the slave labor to build the V-2. I would have like to see what they said about the forced labor, but I fell asleep. The previous night they had a piece on the Scopes Trial. Everything seems to fit into everything else. I watched 'Law and Order' at 11 PM and then went to sleep.
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09/17/97--Charleston, South Carolina: Forts Sumter and Moultrie:
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I was up about 6 AM, and worked on my log until about 7 AM. We went for the continental breakfast and then sat in the lobby working on our logs.
From there we headed out to Fort Moultrie. Perhaps it is due in large part to the location, but Fort Moultrie is a really pretty place to be. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
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