The country was better off going through all the trauma of Watergate and ultimately winding up with Gerald Ford than it would have been if George " I will crawl on my knees to Hanoi" McGovern had been elected....
Brezhnev would have had him for lunch....
Steele Crazy
-
Sue U
- Posts: 8905
- Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2010 4:59 pm
- Location: Eastern Megalopolis, North America (Midtown)
Re: Steele Crazy
Of course your "what if" game is pure conjecture and speculation. But I don't think the country was "better off" for being repeatedly lied to by the President and executive branch officials, for the illegal slush funds, for the nation's Executive authorizing crimes and subversion of the Constitution in a paranoid frenzy, for the cover-ups, for the stonewalling, for the "enemies list," for the corruption and abuse of the Justice Department, for the divisiveness of the impeachment hearings ON TOP OF the divisiveness of the war, which dragged on for another three years DESPITE Nixon's secret plan to end the war promised in the previous election. And most of all, for the convention of adding "-gate" to every freakin' political scandal name ever since.
Feh.
Feh.
GAH!
Re: Steele Crazy
Both Sue and Guin are painting a portrait of Romney as a substantial proportion of the Republican base would see him. Are you denying that a LOT of Republicans had a BIG problem with the fact that Romney is a Mormon? If so, then you are the one being thick.Crackpot wrote:He's "supported" leftist agendas which some in his own party refer to as commie. Gay Marriage IIRC passed in Mass while he was Gov. (which oddly is a example of the former)
I had no Idea you were this thick
Re: Steele Crazy
You know, it's kind of funny...Both Sue and Guin are painting a portrait of Romney as a substantial proportion of the Republican base would see him. Are you denying that a LOT of Republicans had a BIG problem with the fact that Romney is a Mormon? If so, then you are the one being thick.
42 years ago, when his father ran in '68, at a time when bigotry of all varieties was much more prevalent and virulent in this country than it is today, his religion wasn't even an issue....
(George Romney's campaign self-destructed because of a gaffe he made where he said he had been "brain washed" by Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam...)
The polls definitely indicated in the last election that there was a percentage of the primary voters (and the larger electorate, beyond the Republican Party) that viewed Mitt Romney's religion with suspicion, but I am certain that it isn't large enough that this would alone be enough to prevent him from being nominated or even elected.
At the moment he has to be considered the favorite. (My party is also big on nominating people who have made an earlier attempt for the nomination....And Mike Huckabee is probably finished because of the way his pardons and commutations as Governor of Arkansas have blown up in his face.)
But as I saw Karl Rove correctly observe this week, in political terms there are "at least two geological ages" between now and the 2012 election...
Re: Steele Crazy
McGovern was a real mans man. No Republican since Eisenhower has been his equal:
-----------------------------
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
George McGovern as a B-24 pilot
I just finished reading Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue about the 741st Squadron in the 455th Bomb Group of the 15th Air Force (whew - AAF designations are a bitch) - particularly the crew of the Dakota Queen - George McGovern's crew. It's a helluva story guaranteed to leave the reader in awe of the young men that won the war, a great companion piece to Ambrose's Band of Brothers. The following passage wasn't the only one that stuck with me, but I thought it was worth sharing. After a bomb run over the railway marshaling yards at Wiener Neustadt, Austria. One of the bombs in the plane did not drop (if you plan on reading the book anytime soon you might want to avoid the two excerpts below):
---------------
The crew left the bomb bay doors open and Sergeant McAfee and Lieutenant Cooper went to work, trying to trigger the little steel catches on each end of the bomb, hoping to pry them open so the bomb would drop. McGovern remembered: "It was scary as hell. If the plane suddenly made a lunge when the 500-pound bomb dropped..."
McAfee and Cooper were doing their work standing on the catwalk, less than a foot wide, hanging in the center of the bomb bay. McGovern looked behind him to see how they were doing, "but about all I could see was the top of their heads and their back."
...
As McAfee and Cooper labored, McGovern throttled back to slow down the Dakota Queen and they began to lose altitude. "I didn't want to drop a bomb in front of other airplanes," he explained. "Also, I wanted to give McAfee and Cooper undivided time. I didn't know how long it would take to get rid of the bomb..."
The Dakota Queen descended to 12,000 feet, several thousand feet below the formation, which was pulling ahead in any case. Then Cooper yelled something "and all of a sudden the plane jumped and I knew the bomb had been cut loose." They were approaching the Austrian-Italian border. McGovern watched the bomb descend, "a luxury you didn't have at 25,000 feet. It went down and hit right on a farm in that beautiful, green part of Austria. It was almost like a mushroom, a big, gigantic mushroom. It just withered the house, the barn, the chicken house, the water tank. Everything was just leveled. It couldn't have come in more perfectly. If we had been trying to hit it we couldn't have hit it as square. you could see stuff flying through the air and a cloud of black smoke."
Sergeant Higgins watched the bomb descend. He commented, "It just blew that farm to smithereens. We didn't mean to do that, we certainly didn't try to do that."
McGovern glanced at his watch. It was high noon. He came from South Dakota. He knew what time farmers eat. "I got a sickening feeling. Here was this peaceful area. They thought they were safely out of the war zone. Nothing there, no city, no rail yard, nothing. Just a peaceful farmyard. Had nothing to do with the war, just a family eating a noon meal. It made me sick to my stomach."
...
After the bomb fell, McGovern closed the bomb bay doors and headed home. On the intercom, he and Cooper talked. McGovern asked, "What's the highest elevation between here and where we are going?"
Cooper looked at his map, did his calculations, and replied, "Eight thousand feet, George. Eight thousand feet." In an interview he admitted, "Actually, it was only 7,000 feet, but I added another 1,000 feet because I was engaged to get married." Cooper grinned, then added, "As George was expecting his first child, he added another 1,000 feet on top of that."
Back at Cerignola, it was an easy landing. There had been no flak on the milk run over Wiener Neustadt. There was not even a scratch on the Dakota Queen. No one had been hurt. McGovern jumped into a truck and rode over to the debriefing area, where the Red Cross women gave him coffee and a doughnut. An intelligence officer came running up to him - the same officer who had handed him a cable back in December that told him his father had died. This time, however, the officer was grinning from ear to ear. As he handed a cable to McGovern, he said, "Congratulations, Daddy, you now have a baby daughter."
...
"I was just ecstatic," McGovern said. "Jubilant." But then he thought, Eleanor and I have brought a new child into the world today - at least I learned about it today - and I probably killed somebody else's kids right at lunchtime. Hell, why did that bomb have to hit there?
He went over to the officers club and had a drink - cheap red wine. He was toasted and cheered. But, he later said, "It really did make me feel different for the rest of the war. Now I was a father, I had not only a wife back home but a little girl, all the more reason why I wanted to get home and see that child." He returned to his tent and wrote Eleanor a long letter. He did not mention the farmhouse but he couldn't get it out of his mind. "That thing stayed with me for years and years. If I thought about the war almost invariably I would think about that farm."
---------------
Pretty rough baggage to carry for years and years and a key passage in the book. However, (again: spoiler alert) the story finds a happy resolution at the very end of the Epilogue (pages 262-3):
---------------
In 1985, McGovern was lecturing at the University of Innsbruck. A director of Austrian television's state-owned stationed contacted him to ask if he would do an interview for a documentary he was producing on Austria in World War II. He wanted McGovern to talk about what it was like bombing Austrian targets. McGovern was not inclined but finally let himself be talked into it. A woman reporter did the interview. She said that Senator McGovern was known around the world for his opposition to the war in Vietnam, and especially the bombing of South and North Vietnam. Yet he had been a bomber pilot in World War II. The reporter asked, "Senator, did you ever regret bombing beautiful cities like Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck, and others?"
McGovern answered, "Well, nobody thinks that war is a lovely affair. It is humanity at its worst, it's a breakdown of normal communication, and it is a very savage enterprise. But on the other hand there are issues that sometimes must be decided by warfare after all else fails...I thought Adolf Hitler was a madman who had to be stopped.
"So, my answer to your question is no. I don't regret bombing strategic targets in Austria. I do regret the damage that was done to innocent people. And there was one bomb I've regretted all these years."
The reporter snapped that up. "Tell us about it."
McGovern told her about the bomb that had stuck in the bomb bay door and had to be jettisoned, on March 14, 1945. "To my sorrow it hit a peaceful little Austrian farmyard at high noon and maybe led to the death of some people in that family. I regret that all the more because it was the day I learned my wife had given birth to our first child and the thought went through my mind then and on many, many days since then, that we brought a young baby into the world and probably killed someone else's baby or children."
When the documentary appeared on Austrian TV, the station received a call from an Austrian farmer. He said he had seen and heard McGovern. he knew it was his farm that was hit, because it was high noon on a clear day and exactly as McGovern described the incident.
"I want you to tell him," the man went on, "that no matter what other Austrians think, I despised Adolf Hitler. We did see the bomber coming. I got my wife and children out of the house and we hid in a ditch and no one was hurt. And because of our attitude about Hitler, I thought at the time that if bombing our farm reduced the length of that war by one hour or one minute, it was well worth it."
The television station called McGovern and told him what the farmer had said. For McGovern, it was "an enormous release and gratification. It seemed to just wipe clean a slate."
_______________________________________
yrs,
rubato
-----------------------------
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
George McGovern as a B-24 pilot
I just finished reading Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue about the 741st Squadron in the 455th Bomb Group of the 15th Air Force (whew - AAF designations are a bitch) - particularly the crew of the Dakota Queen - George McGovern's crew. It's a helluva story guaranteed to leave the reader in awe of the young men that won the war, a great companion piece to Ambrose's Band of Brothers. The following passage wasn't the only one that stuck with me, but I thought it was worth sharing. After a bomb run over the railway marshaling yards at Wiener Neustadt, Austria. One of the bombs in the plane did not drop (if you plan on reading the book anytime soon you might want to avoid the two excerpts below):
---------------
The crew left the bomb bay doors open and Sergeant McAfee and Lieutenant Cooper went to work, trying to trigger the little steel catches on each end of the bomb, hoping to pry them open so the bomb would drop. McGovern remembered: "It was scary as hell. If the plane suddenly made a lunge when the 500-pound bomb dropped..."
McAfee and Cooper were doing their work standing on the catwalk, less than a foot wide, hanging in the center of the bomb bay. McGovern looked behind him to see how they were doing, "but about all I could see was the top of their heads and their back."
...
As McAfee and Cooper labored, McGovern throttled back to slow down the Dakota Queen and they began to lose altitude. "I didn't want to drop a bomb in front of other airplanes," he explained. "Also, I wanted to give McAfee and Cooper undivided time. I didn't know how long it would take to get rid of the bomb..."
The Dakota Queen descended to 12,000 feet, several thousand feet below the formation, which was pulling ahead in any case. Then Cooper yelled something "and all of a sudden the plane jumped and I knew the bomb had been cut loose." They were approaching the Austrian-Italian border. McGovern watched the bomb descend, "a luxury you didn't have at 25,000 feet. It went down and hit right on a farm in that beautiful, green part of Austria. It was almost like a mushroom, a big, gigantic mushroom. It just withered the house, the barn, the chicken house, the water tank. Everything was just leveled. It couldn't have come in more perfectly. If we had been trying to hit it we couldn't have hit it as square. you could see stuff flying through the air and a cloud of black smoke."
Sergeant Higgins watched the bomb descend. He commented, "It just blew that farm to smithereens. We didn't mean to do that, we certainly didn't try to do that."
McGovern glanced at his watch. It was high noon. He came from South Dakota. He knew what time farmers eat. "I got a sickening feeling. Here was this peaceful area. They thought they were safely out of the war zone. Nothing there, no city, no rail yard, nothing. Just a peaceful farmyard. Had nothing to do with the war, just a family eating a noon meal. It made me sick to my stomach."
...
After the bomb fell, McGovern closed the bomb bay doors and headed home. On the intercom, he and Cooper talked. McGovern asked, "What's the highest elevation between here and where we are going?"
Cooper looked at his map, did his calculations, and replied, "Eight thousand feet, George. Eight thousand feet." In an interview he admitted, "Actually, it was only 7,000 feet, but I added another 1,000 feet because I was engaged to get married." Cooper grinned, then added, "As George was expecting his first child, he added another 1,000 feet on top of that."
Back at Cerignola, it was an easy landing. There had been no flak on the milk run over Wiener Neustadt. There was not even a scratch on the Dakota Queen. No one had been hurt. McGovern jumped into a truck and rode over to the debriefing area, where the Red Cross women gave him coffee and a doughnut. An intelligence officer came running up to him - the same officer who had handed him a cable back in December that told him his father had died. This time, however, the officer was grinning from ear to ear. As he handed a cable to McGovern, he said, "Congratulations, Daddy, you now have a baby daughter."
...
"I was just ecstatic," McGovern said. "Jubilant." But then he thought, Eleanor and I have brought a new child into the world today - at least I learned about it today - and I probably killed somebody else's kids right at lunchtime. Hell, why did that bomb have to hit there?
He went over to the officers club and had a drink - cheap red wine. He was toasted and cheered. But, he later said, "It really did make me feel different for the rest of the war. Now I was a father, I had not only a wife back home but a little girl, all the more reason why I wanted to get home and see that child." He returned to his tent and wrote Eleanor a long letter. He did not mention the farmhouse but he couldn't get it out of his mind. "That thing stayed with me for years and years. If I thought about the war almost invariably I would think about that farm."
---------------
Pretty rough baggage to carry for years and years and a key passage in the book. However, (again: spoiler alert) the story finds a happy resolution at the very end of the Epilogue (pages 262-3):
---------------
In 1985, McGovern was lecturing at the University of Innsbruck. A director of Austrian television's state-owned stationed contacted him to ask if he would do an interview for a documentary he was producing on Austria in World War II. He wanted McGovern to talk about what it was like bombing Austrian targets. McGovern was not inclined but finally let himself be talked into it. A woman reporter did the interview. She said that Senator McGovern was known around the world for his opposition to the war in Vietnam, and especially the bombing of South and North Vietnam. Yet he had been a bomber pilot in World War II. The reporter asked, "Senator, did you ever regret bombing beautiful cities like Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck, and others?"
McGovern answered, "Well, nobody thinks that war is a lovely affair. It is humanity at its worst, it's a breakdown of normal communication, and it is a very savage enterprise. But on the other hand there are issues that sometimes must be decided by warfare after all else fails...I thought Adolf Hitler was a madman who had to be stopped.
"So, my answer to your question is no. I don't regret bombing strategic targets in Austria. I do regret the damage that was done to innocent people. And there was one bomb I've regretted all these years."
The reporter snapped that up. "Tell us about it."
McGovern told her about the bomb that had stuck in the bomb bay door and had to be jettisoned, on March 14, 1945. "To my sorrow it hit a peaceful little Austrian farmyard at high noon and maybe led to the death of some people in that family. I regret that all the more because it was the day I learned my wife had given birth to our first child and the thought went through my mind then and on many, many days since then, that we brought a young baby into the world and probably killed someone else's baby or children."
When the documentary appeared on Austrian TV, the station received a call from an Austrian farmer. He said he had seen and heard McGovern. he knew it was his farm that was hit, because it was high noon on a clear day and exactly as McGovern described the incident.
"I want you to tell him," the man went on, "that no matter what other Austrians think, I despised Adolf Hitler. We did see the bomber coming. I got my wife and children out of the house and we hid in a ditch and no one was hurt. And because of our attitude about Hitler, I thought at the time that if bombing our farm reduced the length of that war by one hour or one minute, it was well worth it."
The television station called McGovern and told him what the farmer had said. For McGovern, it was "an enormous release and gratification. It seemed to just wipe clean a slate."
_______________________________________
yrs,
rubato
Re: Steele Crazy
More on a real man who would have been a far better president than the moral and intellectual midget we got instead.
_________________________
McGovern was assigned to Liberal Army Airfield in Kansas to transition school to learn to fly the B-24 Liberator, an assignment he was pleased with.[27] McGovern recalled later: "Learning how to fly the B-24 was the toughest part of the training. It was a difficult airplane to fly, physically, because in the early part of the war, they didn't have hydraulic controls. If you can imagine driving a Mack truck without any power steering or power brakes, that's about what it was like at the controls. It was the biggest bomber we had at the time."[4] Eleanor was constantly afraid of her husband suffering an accident while training, which claimed a huge toll of airmen during the entire war.[28] This was followed by a stint at Lincoln Army Airfield in Nebraska, where McGovern met his B-24 crew.[29] The traveling around the country and mixing with people from different backgrounds was a broadening experience for McGovern and others of his generation.[29] The USAAF sped up training times for McGovern and others due to the heavy losses that bombing missions were suffering over Europe.[30] Despite, and partly because of, the risk that McGovern might not come back from combat, the McGoverns decided to have a child and Eleanor became pregnant.[31] In June 1944, McGovern's crew received final training at Mountain Home Army Air Field in Idaho.[29] They then shipped out via Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia, where McGovern found history books to fill downtime, and overseas on a slow troopship.[32]
A B-24 Liberator of the Fifteenth Air Force's 451st Bombardment Group (not McGovern's group, but also stationed in Italy), on a March 1945 mission over Germany
In September 1944, McGovern joined the 741st Squadron of the 455th Bombardment Group of the Fifteenth Air Force, stationed at San Giovanni Airfield nearby Cerignola in the Apulia region of Italy.[33] There he and his crew found a starving, disease-ridden local population wracked by the ill fortunes of war and far worse off than anything they had seen back home during the Depression.[33][34] Starting on November 11, 1944, McGovern flew 35 missions over enemy territory from there, the first five as co-pilot for an experienced crew and the rest as pilot for his own plane, known as the Dakota Queen after his wife Eleanor.[35] His targets were in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and northern, German-controlled Italy, and were often either oil refinery complexes or rail marshalling yards, all as part of the U.S. strategic bombing campaign in Europe. The eight- or nine-hour missions were grueling tests of endurance for pilots, and while German fighter aircraft were a diminished threat by then, his missions often faced heavy anti-aircraft artillery fire that filled the sky with flak bursts.
On McGovern's December 15 mission over Linz, his second as pilot, a piece of shrapnel from flak came through the windshield and missed killing him by only a few inches.[36] The following day on a mission to Brüx he nearly collided with another bomber during close-formation flying in complete cloud cover.[37] The day after that he was recommended for a medal after surviving a blown wheel on the always-dangerous B-24 take-off, completing a mission over Germany, and then landing without further damage to the plane.[38] On a December 20 mission against the Škoda Works at Pilsen, McGovern's plane had one engine out and another in flames after being hit by flak. Unable to return to Italy, McGovern was able to land his plane on a British airfield on Vis, a small island off the Yugoslav coast controlled by Tito's Partisans. The short field, normally used by small fighter planes, killed many of the bomber crews who tried to make emergency landings there, but McGovern successfully landed, saving his crew and earning him the Distinguished Flying Cross.[39][40]
________________________________
yrs,
rubato
_________________________
McGovern was assigned to Liberal Army Airfield in Kansas to transition school to learn to fly the B-24 Liberator, an assignment he was pleased with.[27] McGovern recalled later: "Learning how to fly the B-24 was the toughest part of the training. It was a difficult airplane to fly, physically, because in the early part of the war, they didn't have hydraulic controls. If you can imagine driving a Mack truck without any power steering or power brakes, that's about what it was like at the controls. It was the biggest bomber we had at the time."[4] Eleanor was constantly afraid of her husband suffering an accident while training, which claimed a huge toll of airmen during the entire war.[28] This was followed by a stint at Lincoln Army Airfield in Nebraska, where McGovern met his B-24 crew.[29] The traveling around the country and mixing with people from different backgrounds was a broadening experience for McGovern and others of his generation.[29] The USAAF sped up training times for McGovern and others due to the heavy losses that bombing missions were suffering over Europe.[30] Despite, and partly because of, the risk that McGovern might not come back from combat, the McGoverns decided to have a child and Eleanor became pregnant.[31] In June 1944, McGovern's crew received final training at Mountain Home Army Air Field in Idaho.[29] They then shipped out via Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia, where McGovern found history books to fill downtime, and overseas on a slow troopship.[32]
A B-24 Liberator of the Fifteenth Air Force's 451st Bombardment Group (not McGovern's group, but also stationed in Italy), on a March 1945 mission over Germany
In September 1944, McGovern joined the 741st Squadron of the 455th Bombardment Group of the Fifteenth Air Force, stationed at San Giovanni Airfield nearby Cerignola in the Apulia region of Italy.[33] There he and his crew found a starving, disease-ridden local population wracked by the ill fortunes of war and far worse off than anything they had seen back home during the Depression.[33][34] Starting on November 11, 1944, McGovern flew 35 missions over enemy territory from there, the first five as co-pilot for an experienced crew and the rest as pilot for his own plane, known as the Dakota Queen after his wife Eleanor.[35] His targets were in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and northern, German-controlled Italy, and were often either oil refinery complexes or rail marshalling yards, all as part of the U.S. strategic bombing campaign in Europe. The eight- or nine-hour missions were grueling tests of endurance for pilots, and while German fighter aircraft were a diminished threat by then, his missions often faced heavy anti-aircraft artillery fire that filled the sky with flak bursts.
On McGovern's December 15 mission over Linz, his second as pilot, a piece of shrapnel from flak came through the windshield and missed killing him by only a few inches.[36] The following day on a mission to Brüx he nearly collided with another bomber during close-formation flying in complete cloud cover.[37] The day after that he was recommended for a medal after surviving a blown wheel on the always-dangerous B-24 take-off, completing a mission over Germany, and then landing without further damage to the plane.[38] On a December 20 mission against the Škoda Works at Pilsen, McGovern's plane had one engine out and another in flames after being hit by flak. Unable to return to Italy, McGovern was able to land his plane on a British airfield on Vis, a small island off the Yugoslav coast controlled by Tito's Partisans. The short field, normally used by small fighter planes, killed many of the bomber crews who tried to make emergency landings there, but McGovern successfully landed, saving his crew and earning him the Distinguished Flying Cross.[39][40]
________________________________
yrs,
rubato
