Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • 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 Ho-Ho-Kus Jottings Douglas to discuss ‘Shutter Bug’ mission Ho-Ho-Kus resident Scott Douglas will present a program on his “Shutter-Bug” mission for underprivileged youth to the Women’s Guild of Ridgewood’s Old Paramus Church on Sept. 7 at 1:15 p.m. The program will be held in the church’s barrier-free education building at 660 East Glen Avenue, Ridgewood. A Christian layman, Douglas is a master photographer and founder of this mission. He will share his unique story of “Shutter-Bug” camera clubs in the New York City area, Uganda, and elsewhere. For more information, call (201) 444-5933. Seniors plan events The Ho-Ho-Kus Seniors will host a series of events, beginning with an afternoon of games in August. The group will play bingo or Triva on Tuesday, Aug. 23. On Sept. 21, the seniors will visit Adam Todd’s Restaurant in Andover where they will see “The Legend of Lanza.” Carol Greene, president of the Friends of the Hermitage, will present “Franklin Turnpike: 300 Years of Local and Through Traffic” on Sept. 27. Greene will draw from her award-winning book “The Ramapough Cronicles: A 300 Year History of Mahwah and its Surrounds.” On Oct. 11, Nancy Atkins Peck will present “Carl Kemm Loven: Designer of Dreams.” Loven was a well-known architect who designed homes in Glen Rock, Ridgewood, and Ho-Ho-Kus; local shopping centers; and planned communities such as Sterling Forest. On Oct. 25, the group will take a trip to Villa Roma in Callicoon, New York for Oktoberfest. Meetings of the Ho-Ho-Kus Seniors take place the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month in the Hermitage Education Building. Beverages and desserts are served at noon, and programs begin at 1 p.m. or as noted. Residents age 55 and up are welcome to attend. Contact Joan at (201) 444-4896 for program information. For trip information, contact Sue at (201) 444-7235. VFW seeks memorabilia Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 192 in Ho-Ho-Kus is seeking photos, newspaper clippings, post cards, maps, aerial photos, and similar items featuring Ho-Ho-Kus and the immediate area, including the Hopper-Zabriskie Cemetery on First Street in Ho-Ho-Kus, prior to 1966. These items will be used for the VFW Post’s history project. All materials will be returned after scanning and copying. Contact Stanley Kober at (201) 445-1121. ‘Hymn Sings’ open to public Saint Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church invites the public to its Hymn Sing every Thursday from 9:30 to 10 a.m. at the church located at 70 Sheridan Avenue in Ho-Ho-Kus. The sing is followed by a Eucharist healing service and Bible study. For more information, call (201) 389-6564. Library accepts exhibits The Worth-Pinkham Memorial Library, 91 Warren Avenue, Ho-Ho-Kus, wants to hear from area residents who want to display their original artwork or interesting collections. Items may be exhibited at the library for a month. Interested individuals should contact Library Director Sandy Witkowski at (201) 445-8078.