Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • August 24, 2011 forward and discovered no one was home. The whole British force had vanished in the night. Churchill got the sack and his reputation didn’t completely recover until World War II, but the British military had carried out a masterpiece of disengagement – getting out of a battle you don’t need and can’t win without further unacceptable losses. Given their obsession with “saving face,” the Japanese of World War II pulled off two masterpieces of disengagement. Guadalcanal, the first battle where the Japanese met the U.S. Marines when both sides had air and naval support, was a memorable saga of valor on both sides. Richard Tregaskis, author of “Guadalcanal Diary” was a witness to the first encounter in the jungle, where it seemed that neither side wanted to shoot. Amity went downhill from there. Whole battalions of Japanese were wiped out charging Marines whose crews stuck to their guns. “We soon discovered we were not fighting the Chinese,” one Japanese colonel said. Even the Melanesian natives got into the act. Contrary to Marine propaganda, the Japanese did not exterminate the Melanesians; they recruited them. Christian Melanesians served with the Americans and their Australian guides. Pagan Melanesians served with the Japanese. Having heard Allied propaganda broadcasts urging them to rise up and kill “the yellow dogs,” the Melanesians proudly proclaimed themselves “the black dogs” and fought “the white dogs” and captured women and crops from Melanesians on the Allied side. Eventually, the Marines, worn down by battle and disease, were relieved by U.S. Army troops in superior numbers. Early in 1943, two U.S. Army combat groups coming from opposite sides enclosed -- no one. The Japanese had slipped most of their survivors onto transports and vanished into the night. The Melanesian combatants who fought for the emperor were mostly forgiven if they even admitted whose side they had been on. Squabbles lasted for years, and stray Japanese came out of the jungle for years, shaking their shaggy heads and scratching their long beards at finally having encountered people who were as scary as they were. The Aleutian Islands were the scene of another World War II disengagement. Ravaged by the Russians before orthodox priests came to their rescue and saved some of them, the Aleuts had been reduced from 20,000 to about 2,000, with thousands of additional mixed-bloods, by 1910. As the war began, the Americans rounded up 880 Aleuts from the islands closest to Alaska and detained them for safe keeping in dank, unsanitary camps, where about 90 Aleuts died from contagious diseases caused by extreme crowding. The Japanese rounded up 84 Aleuts from the eastern islands and took them back to Hokkaido for safe keeping. Half of these Aleuts died of the same causes. With the Aleuts being “safe,” the Americans and the Japanese went at it. The Americans wiped out the Japanese on Attu, literally to the last man – and were stunned to encounter soldiers who fought to the death or preferred suicide to surrender. Taking no chances, they kept Kiska, the other Japanese-held island, under regular bombardment and tight blockade. When the Americans landed, they found two huskies, a Japanese cemetery where an American pilot had been respectfully buried, and no garrison whatsoever. When the Aleuts returned home, they found that the Americans had looted their church and exterminated their 500 domestic reindeer for target practice. They have not since cultivated a tourist industry with either Pacific power. Putting the problem in a nutshell: How do we disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan? Do we do what the failed predators of Britain and Japan did, cutting their losses and winning a modicum of professional military respect by stealthy escapes? Do we do a Vietnam type of thing where we neither win nor elude, throwing away brave young Americans and making enemies of the surviving relatives of those we kill year after year after year? Here is some abbreviated advice from Thomas Edward Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), who was on hand when the Arab Revolt engineered by Britain formed the modern Middle East. In a letter to the London Times in 1920, he wrote, “The Arabs rebelled against the Turks during the war not because the Turkish government was notably bad, but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects or French citizens, but to win a show of their own…. “A remedy? I can see a cure only in immediate change of policy. The whole logic of the present thing looks wrong. Why should Englishmen (or Indians) have to be killed to make an Arab government in Mesopotamia (Iraq)?…I agree with the intention but I would make the Arabs do the work. I would raise two divisions of local volunteer troops. I would entrust these new units with the maintenance of order, and I would cause to leave the country every British soldier, every Indian soldier. These changes would take 12 months and we should then hold of Mesopotamia exactly as much (or as little) as we hold of South Africa or Canada. “Of course there is oil in Mesopotamia, but we are no nearer that while the Middle East remains at war, and I think if it is necessary for us, it could be made the subject of a bargain. The Arabs seem willing to shed their blood for freedom; how much more their oil?” At the end of the First World War, Britain had a conundrum. The British and the French, eager to knock the Turks out of the war, had backed both the Arab independence movement and the Zionist movement to establish a new Jewish homeland with promises that seemed like a good idea at the time. Both movements were promised that at the end of the war they would benefit from the collapse of the Turkish Empire which, like the British and French Empires, consisted of large numbers of people who were not of the ruling race, but unruly outsiders. Winston Churchill had one of his brainstorms. The Turks, despite a ferocious reputation, were badly equipped and their various ethnic minorities were unhappy after centuries of intermittent misrule. Churchill decided that a brisk amphibious assault on the Dardanelles, the opening of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean where Troy once stood, would cause the Turks to collapse, leave Germany and Austria-Hungary minus an ally, and provoke revolts from the Arabs and other groups who didn’t like the Turks. The fact that such an assault would also take pressure off the Suez Canal and boost Russian morale after some staggering defeats by the Germans in eastern Europe may also have come into Churchill’s thinking. The landing in April of 1915 was a heroic fiasco. Stumbling out of whaleboats or down the dual gangplanks of a landing ship improvised out of an old collier, the British, Indians, Australians, and New Zealanders were machinegunned in detail and had to advance up steep cliffs. The Turks fought back with greater toughness than Churchill had anticipated. British battleships hit underwater mines and sank. A German U-boat slipped into the Dardanelles and sank two more battleships, and a Turkish torpedo boat also sank one. The Turks, fighting for their own territory, proved far tougher than they had during the Crimean War 60 years before, when they were British and French allies against Russia. When the ethnic revolt seemed about to materialize – how militant the rebels were is still controversial – the Turkish troops’ police and Turkish and Kurdish irregulars massacred a million Christian Armenians and thousands of Greeks and Christian Arabs, staining the whole campaign with horror. Some Armenians were admittedly plotting a revolt, but the majority of victims were non-combatants, including women and children who were driven into the desert to die of hunger and thirst when they weren’t murdered outright, like their men and boys. The British commander was relieved and his successor saw the way out after 20,000 casualties including 6,000 dead: disengagement. On the night of Dec. 19-20, 1915, British soldiers quietly left their trenches and shuffled down to the beaches and the waiting boats. Men in each company had set up rifles tied to stakes and pointed at the Turks, with water dripping from larger buckets into smaller buckets that were suspended from the triggers of the rifles. Every few minutes, a rifle would go off and a .303 Enfield bullet would whiz over the Turkish trenches or hit the sandbags. When the simulated sniping stopped around dawn on Dec. 20, the curious Turks crept Techniques for disengagement Area In November 2008, Allison Jackson of Mahwah ran the Philadelphia Marathon for Cure International, a charity dedicated to eradicating the birth defect “club foot,” since Jackson had suffered a severe case when she was born. This November, she will again run 26.2 miles in the New Marathoner raises funds for Fred’s Team Allison Jackson participating in a previous event. York Marathon as part of Fred’s Team, a cancer research fundraising group. Since 1995, Fred’s Team has raised $42 million for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center through events such as the New York Marathon. “Cancer has impacted so many of my family members and friends. Most recently, my mother-in-law courageously fought breast cancer throughout this year. I want to honor her and everyone who has battled any form of cancer,” said Jackson, who is among several hundred runners bearing the signature orange Fred’s Team jersey. Jackson, mother of two and communications manager at Hertz Corporation, needs to raise $3,500 with Fred’s Team to qualify for the marathon. As of Aug. 11, she had raised $1,255, or 35 percent of her goal. “Any donation helps, and brings us one step closer to a world without cancer. When you make a donation, e-mail me the name of someone who has battled cancer who you would like to honor. I will proudly wear their name on my racing jersey. I’m running for all those men, women, and children who have valiantly fought this devastating disease.” Businesses donating $1,000 or more can also have their logo prominently displayed on Jackson’s running gear, offering exposure to the nearly 35,000 New York Marathon runners, 12,000 volunteers, and two million spectators. The easiest way to donate is to go to the www.fredsteam.org website and click on “Donate Now” and type in Allison Jackson’s name. Donors may also fill out a written form and donate by check. Contact Jackson by e-mail at allisonrjackson@hotmail.com or call (973) 534-7343 for additional information.