"Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger" - - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
This is coolbert:More extracts from isegoria.net with my commentary:
"A Whole Generation Rushing to Volunteer"
Perhaps better worded as "Rushing to Volunteer" QUESTION MARK!
"I wouldn’t call the US a nation of cowards, but Bryan Caplan would — after calculating how few young men volunteered after Pearl Harbor"
America a nation of yellow-bellied gutless cowards? Just at that exact moment in that period immediately after 7 December and the attack on Pearl Harbor the number of military age young men willing to volunteer for the military and doing so quite small indeed? Far less than what might be imagined!
"According to the 1940 Census (table No. 11), the U.S. had 6.2 million males ages 15-19, 5.7 million males ages 20-24, and and 5.5 million ages 25-29. That’s 17.4 million men of combat age. Let’s use David’s high figure of 140k [140,000 volunteers] for all three months. This means that during the first three months of U.S. involvement — a period where our national mythology describes a whole generation rushing to volunteer — just 2.4% actually did."
Volunteering for service in the U.S. Navy and specifically asking for duty on submarines as done by young men during WW2 an opportunity to see combat and at the earliest moment possible. NOW and not later. Some hardly shirking their responsibility but comporting themselves with unmistakable honor!!
The nation on 7 December in "grave danger" but to the vast preponderance of American young men that situation not perceived as so dire?
Does the adage "those with the loudest voices are normally found furthest from the scene of the action!" apply here?
You the devoted reader to the blog decide for yourself.
coolbert.
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1 comment:
But given that conscription was already in place for more than a year, wouldn't it be reasonable for someone patriotic to think that the army would call them up as soon as training facilities were ready? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Training_and_Service_Act_of_1940. The us sent most of its modern equipment overseas early in the war and many of the early trainees were training with wooden guns etc. Also when reading biographies of volunteers in ww2, I was struck by how picky the services were in the early months - I seem to remember many volunteers writing about how they were initially rejected by multiple service s
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