Blog #60 History: America’s Wars and Our Independence
America's Wars and our Independence
By Harold Strunk, July 2026, Retried Navy Captain, PhD, Public Health, Epidemiologist, Historian
Do you know that in the 250 years since 1776 we have been at war for 225 of them? Let’s talk about some of the major ones.
While there were skirmishes, our revolution to break away from King George and Mother England cost us twenty-five thousand lives along with the lost lives of our allies, such as France. I had three ancestors who served for seven years with General Washington’s Continental Army and were given 55 Acres of Soldiers Land and all died poor in old age in a wilderness that would become Kentucky.
At the time of our Revolution, there were 195 countries in the world and Great Britain had invaded and colonized 172 of them. The sun never set on the British Empire, they would say.
The British sulked over losing that war and came back thirty-six years later and burned down our White House. That cost fifteen thousand more American lives.
Then in 1847 we sent our soldiers to drive the Mexicans off the land that was rightfully theirs. Thirteen thousand American soldiers died for that land grab.
I have other ancestors who fought in our Civil War, when six hundred and twenty thousand Americans murdered each other? If you laid their bodies head to foot, they would stretch from San Francisco to Ensenada. That is more Killed in Action than the total of all our wars since.
And then President Andrew Jackson wrote the Indian Removal Act which ordered the extermination of the American Indians so that we could settle their ancestral lands. Those that were left were herded onto worthless expanses of land to be governed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They never prospered. I have ancestors who served in the US Cavalry that carried out those orders. Several hundred men died in dozens of Indian Wars across the continent. As bumper stickers used to say, “Custer had it coming.”
And we sent troops to Cuba to fight in the Spanish American War. That cost us about two thousand more.
Marines will remember the name of Major General Smedley Butler. Twice awarded the Medal of Honor. But few know that after serving thirty-three years in the Corps and fighting in countless battles that history hardly records, he wrote a book, “War is a Racket” and said, “I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914, I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. Looking back on it, I could have given Al Capone a few hints.”
If you look back to August of 1914, much of Europe was posturing for war. It started with a Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, assassinating the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sofia. There were strong alliances that would come into play.
Austria-Hungary had an alliance with Russia, and Russia had one with France. France had an alliance with Great Britain, and Great Britain had one with Belgium. Attack any one of these countries and you had to fight their big brothers.
Moreover, Kaiser Wilheim of Germany, Czar Nicholas of Russia, and King George of Great Britain were first cousins. Queen Victoria of England was their Grandmother and her husband Albert was a German.
It seemed that no one really wanted to go to war except Germany. Germany had the war machine and they had been planning for two years. They wanted to add land. Germany wanted Austria-Hungary to attack Serbia which would bring Russia in. Then Austria-Hungary would have to fight Russia. With that diversion, Germany could cut through a corner of Belgium and invade France. But when they did, Great Britain had to honor their alliance with Belgium. So, the first shots fired were by the British against the invading German Army on August 22, 1914. By war’s end, the British Army had 995,000 soldiers killed in action. Almost a generation of the best and brightest..
Now then, with that history behind us, we move on to Germany’s war against what you might call our Mother England. Great Britain is an island nation and everything came in by sea. In three years, the German submarine fleet sank hundreds of ships trying to reach England to supply the British Army.
Great Britain needed help, and they especially needed financial help. John Pierpont Morgan and his Morgan Bank had loaned $ 3.7 Billion dollars to England, and $ 1.9 Billion dollars to France and they were losing the war. A loss of that magnitude would bankrupt the Morgan Bank.
Almost all of a generation was wiped out. In fact, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, twenty-one thousand British soldiers were killed. Not wounded. Killed. In one day. Never in modern times had such a massacre occurred. Trench warfare, heavy artillery, machine guns, poison gas and egotistical, stupid generals. Clearly the only solution to save the bankers was for America to enter the war. And that was the last thing Germany wanted to see happen. So, they began to conspire to keep us out.
Germany’s first action was discovered by British cryptoanalysts in what became the Zimmerman Telegram. The Foreign Secretary of the German Empire, Arthur Zimmerman, sent a telegram to the German Ambassador in Mexico saying that if it appeared likely that we would enter the war, he was to approach the Mexican Government with a proposal for a military alliance with funding from Germany. With Mexico’s attack upon the United States, Mexico was promised Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The British saw to it that the word got out, but it failed to inflame American public opinion against Germany. It was 1915.
However, polls were ten to one against going to war in Europe. Europe was always at war. That news did not set well with the Morgan Bank. Clearly more must be done to get America ready for war.
The next step to bring us into the war was the sinking of the British cruise liner Lusitania. The Lusitania was listed in Jane’s Book of Fighting Ships as an armed auxiliary cruiser and was crewed by British Naval Reservists. She passed as a cruise ship, but the Germans were watching her being loaded and they knew she was carrying guns, ammunition, and explosives for the British Army.
So, the German Embassy paid for ads in fifty American newspapers warning Americans not to book passage on the Lusitania as a state of war existed between Germany and Great Britain. Those ads were cancelled in forty-nine newspapers. The notice appeared only in the Des Moines Register. Who in the American Administration had the power to do that? Most likely our President Wilson who wanted to preside over the League of Nations after the war…a war we were not even in …yet.
Well, as you know, the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine, the U-20. Captain Turner’s orders were to sail on only three of four engines and stop zigzagging, thereby reducing her speed.
Furthermore, she was to rendezvous off the coast of Ireland and be escorted to port by the British cruiser, HMS Juno. Two merchant ships had been sunk in that area that week. It was known that the Germans had twenty-nine submarines operating in that area. But when the Lusitania arrived in the rendezvous area, HMS Juno was not there. She had been ordered back to port in Queenstown the day before by order of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Eleven hundred and ninety-eight souls died that day. Among them, there were a hundred and twenty-eight Americans, including Alfred Vanderbilt. But it would still be two more years before America would declare war. It is interesting to note that the Assistant Secretary of the Navy at that time was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Twenty-five years later, Churchill would be the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Roosevelt would be our president.
On March 7, 1917, German submarines sank three American merchant ships. With that, President Wilson pushed and Congress declared war on Germany. Strangely enough, after taking us to war he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three years later.
America was now at war. World War One. The British soldiers called us “Johnny Come Latelys” but we turned the tide and an armistice was signed ending the war on the Eleventh month, on the Eleventh day, at the Eleventh hour. We lost a hundred and sixteen thousand soldiers, sailors and Marines in World War One to save Europe and the Morgan Bank. They are buried all over Western Europe. The British, the Germans, and the French lost most of a generation. They said it was the war to end all wars.
Today we of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion remember them as we hand out Buddy Poppies. “In Flanders Fields, where poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row.”
At war’s end, the Great Powers convened and hammered out the Treaty of Versailles. The Germans had brought about this war, this carnage, and the treaty was so punishing to the German people that it gave rise to Adolph Hitler and a second World War.
Germany wanted to add land so it wasn’t much of a surprise when Hitler used the excuse in 1938 to annex the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to save the three million Germans living there. Actually, this was a cause for war, but everyone had disarmed.
Great Britain would be the country most counted on to stop this annexation, but they were not ready. Great Britain had some responsibility for what happened on the Continent, and so their Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had to buy time. Few know that he had questioned the British generals and all had told him that it would be at least a year before they could fight a war in Europe. So, he met with Adolph Hitler at Berchtesgaden and they signed the Munich Pact. Hitler agreed to take no more land. Chamberlain knew that it was not worth the paper it was written on, but he returned to Great Britain proclaiming, “Peace in our time”. But he bought the year that the generals needed. He would resign and Winston Churchill would succeed him. Chamberlain died in 1940, unfairly thought of in his last days as a loon.
Let’s fast forward to August 14, 1941. Roosevelt is now our president and Winston Churchill is the Prime Minister of Great Britain and again they are at war. Churchill is responsible for conducting the war against the Axis powers; Germany, Italy and Japan. Japan has taken much of China and captured Singapore. Great Britain has been at war for two years and the German Army had pushed the British into the sea at Dunkirk. The British people feared a German invasion. They asked the American people to send them our guns and we did. At war’s end, the guns were not returned, they were destroyed.
So, in August of 1941, a top-secret meeting was held between Roosevelt and Churchill in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. Roosevelt arrived on the USS Augusta and Churchill on the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. They met for three days and nothing of their private conversations were recorded for history.
But out of their meeting came the Atlantic Charter which outlined how we and the British would cooperate after the war… a war we were not in. Yet.
Great Britain was again in desperate need of our help, our participation in what was now World War Two. Germany had overrun Western Europe and would soon break the neutrality agreement and invade the Soviet Union.
However, the mood in America was not what you might imagine. In 1938, Hitler was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. Hitler had awarded his highest civilian honor to Henry Ford, the Order of the Golden Eagle, for building a factory for him. Our ambassador to England was Joe Kennedy who was openly praising Hitler. So was Charles Lindberg. And the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor were so embarrassing that Churchill had them banished to the Bahamas.
Standard Oil of New Jersey, owned by John D. Rockefeller, was fueling U-boats and tankers in the Canary Islands. Rockefeller’s Chase Bank was one of Hitler’s banks. Many American businesses were secretly trading with the enemy.
In the ‘thirties I lived on 85th Street in Manhattan and the neighborhood was entirely German. In 1939, American Germans filled Madison Square Garden in a rally supporting Hitler. And, needless to say, they were rooting for Max Schmelling when he fought Joe Lewis at the Garden.
Roosevelt’s problem was that he had promised, while campaigning in August of 1941, that no American boys would be sent again to fight in European wars. And Roosevelt knew that Germany was not about to attack us. They wanted us to stay neutral. After all, Hitler had seen Americans in combat before.
However, Roosevelt knew of a way. Germany had signed a three-way pact with Japan and Italy, and so war with one was war with all. So, a plan evolved to force Japan to attack us. The American Public was very isolationist in those days, so it would have to be something that would enrage us and take us into war.
Roosevelt came into possession of an eight-point memorandum written on October 7, 1940, by Navy Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Implementation of these eight points would provoke Japan to attack us. It was economic strangulation and humiliation.
Commander McCollum had grown up in Japan, spoke fluent Japanese, and knew the Japanese people well.
So, President Roosevelt then set our course in History. There are those that still say that we never broke the Japanese codes. Listen closely to this…there was no intelligence failure. Fact is, the Japanese diplomatic and naval codes were being broken years before Pearl Harbor.
All Tokyo diplomatic messages intended for Japanese missions passed through the RCA radio communications systems. Voice telephone service to and from Japan went through American Telephone and Telegraph’s offices near Market Street in San Francisco. Radio messages for Japanese merchant marine ships originated in San Francisco at Globe Wireless.
US Navy radio stations in Corregidor, American Samoa, Dutch Harbor, Point St. George California, Hawaii and British-owned Makay Radio and Telegraph station at Half Moon Bay, California were all intercepting the Japanese five-number codes and forwarding them to Station US in Washington, DC to be decoded.
On November 25th, 1941, a decoded message from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto ordered Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo to depart Hitokappu Bay with orders to attack Pearl Harbor on December 8th, Tokyo time.
On December 1st orders from Admiral Yamamoto were decoded and read “Climb Mount Niitaka”, the start of war message in Japan’s naval code.
When these messages were decoded by Station US in Washington, DC, only thirty-six people were cleared to read them. Among them were President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark, Director of Naval Intelligence Captain William S. Anderson, Commander US Army Forces Philippines General Douglas MacArthur, Commander Joseph J. Rochefort who was the commanding officer of the Navy Radio Station HYPO at Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, and several others. Only they knew the attack was set for Sunday morning.
However, the two officers who would most need this warning were not on this distribution; Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, the commanders of forces on Hawaii.
Notice of an impending attack Sunday on Pearl Harbor was sent to them on Routine Priority and arrived AFTER the attack.
President Roosevelt quickly assigned blame to Admiral Kimmel and General Short and they were relieved for Dereliction of Duty, reduced in rank, and discharged in disgrace from the service they loved so well. Both officers demanded a Court Martial, but they were denied, most likely because the Court would call witnesses and reveal facts damning to President Roosevelt and many senior officers. Like treason.
So, still in the minds of many, the myth of a surprise attack lives on.
When news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached Churchill, he immediately realized what that meant; the United States would now have to go to war. In his own words, written in his book, ‘History of World War Two’, Churchill said he “went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved” that night.
By the end of World War Two, our deaths from all causes would exceed four hundred thousand. Had President Harry Truman not dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, an invasion of the Japanese homeland might have cost a million allied lives.
Even before the end of World War Two, we realized that the Soviet Union was not our friend. We were allies, but never friends. Not many people know that in the Russian Army’s push to Berlin, they were ‘liberating’ German Prisoner of War camps, Stalags, and taking our men under gunpoint and putting them on trains to the gulags, or work camps, in Siberia. In all, they took twenty-five thousand six -hundred Americans and an equal number of British POWs.
General Patton knew this and wanted to go into Russia and get them. He felt we would have to fight them someday, so let’s do it now.
That brought down the order from on high to General ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan of the OSS to get rid of Patton. In 1994, I met the man who did it, Major Douglas Bazata, but that’s another story.
The Russians already had three million German prisoners. None of the American or British POWs were ever released. Within two years, our government would write them off as PFOD, a Presumptive Finding Of Death. You need to understand that the Red Cross knew these men, they had sent and received mail, and the Germans kept meticulous records. But our government stonewalled the questions to avoid World War Three. That would be our President, “The Buck Stops Here”, Harry Truman.
Most of our soldiers, airmen and Marines are buried in cemeteries all over the world. But there are no burial grounds nor tombstones for sailors for families to visit. They are at the bottom of the oceans, unmarked and forgotten. ‘In Oceans deep, no poppies blow. No crosses stand in ordered row…’
So, with the end of combat, the Marshall Plan kicked in and we set about to rebuild Germany and Japan. There would be no more wars, so the millions of Americans in uniform were discharged and returned to civilian life to pick up where they left off.
A few would sign on to the Reserves and the National Guard and then in 1950 and to their surprise, they would be activated and ordered to a place few had ever heard of. Korea. And many would die there holding the line while the United States began the Draft and had to have time to train a fighting force to once again, go to war. Three years and thirty-six thousand lives later, a cease-fire was ordered and Korea was divided at the 38th Parallel.
Today the South is a booming economy lit so well that it can be seen from space. North Korea is dark and the people are starving under a repressive dictatorship. To them, grass is a vegetable.
After Korea, General Douglas MacArthur warned us to never again get involved in Asian wars. Unfortunately, our leaders ignored his advice.
Soon after our war in Korea ended, the French Army and the French Foreign Legion were defeated by a people’s army in their colony of French Indo China, or as it soon would become known, Vietnam.
Our political and military leaders were most concerned about the spread of Communism, or the Domino Effect. If you let one country fall to Communism, its neighbor would soon follow. After all, we had seen China fall to the Communists and most of Eastern Europe was still under the control of the Soviet Union. With the help of some of our Allies, we were the ones seen as the World’s policeman. Only we had the armed forces and the industrial might sufficient to keep the peace.
Vietnam is the perfect example of what is known as “Mission Creep”, or how we are drawn, inch by inch, into a violent war. There is something worth remembering that Pope Francis said, “Many powerful men do not want Peace because they live off War”.
President Eisenhower, who was a five-star general, warned us of the Military-Industrial Complex.
A lot of money changes hands when all of the machinery of war must be built. Stockholders profit as soldiers die.
Vietnam was a proxy war for the Russians. They were backing the North Vietnamese Army against us.
So, what started off in 1954 as our US Army Special Forces teams who were there to train the indigenous people how to defend themselves soon became hundreds of thousands of ground troops to fight the North Vietnamese Army. Over the nineteen ensuing years, two point seven million men and women served in Vietnam. Sixty thousand were Killed In Action.
You were never told about ‘Rolling Thunder’, President Johnson’s plan to bomb the North Vietnamese into surrender. If you wondered why nine hundred and twenty-two planes were shot down and the pilots and crews killed or were captured it was because our president Johnson personally selected the targets and sent the Secretary of Defense with tomorrow’s target list to the Swiss Embassy to pass to the North Vietnamese. This, to avoid killing civilians.
Also, you were not told that in our haste to end this war, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met secretly in Paris with representatives of North Vietnam and promised to give them Three Point Nine Billion dollars for reparations and they would return ALL of our Prisoners of War.
But our Congress refused to give them that much money, so at Operation Homecoming in 1973 we got only five hundred and ninety-one men back. We know that on that day they were holding 1205 men in eleven prison camps, and there were an unknown number under their control in Laos and Cambodia. Notice also that there were no amputees nor psych cases released. Nor were any who were whipped and scarred with strips of tires by the seventeen Cuban Intelligence Officers at the Zoo released. We know that they beat LtColonel Earl Cobeil to death.
Seventeen were taken to the Villa Marista prison in Cuba. They were never released. Some were taken to the Soviet Union.
President Nixon knew all of this and when he said that all of our men were now home, he lied.
Our troops had the war won in 1973 and a Peace Agreement was signed and we came home.
Then, two years later in 1975 after all of our troops were gone, the Russians ordered the North Vietnamese Army to break the treaty and invade. The South Vietnamese Army lost and then the Communists got it all. Sixty thousand good men and women all died for what? Hundreds of thousands of good Vietnamese soldiers and civilians as well.
Don’t let anyone tell you any different. OUR TROOPS DID NOT LOSE THE WAR, CONGRESS DID. And if you were disrespected and spit on when you came home, you can blame LT John Kerry who threw someone else’s medals over the White House fence and then told Congress you were baby killers. Thank God the Swift Boat veterans kept him from becoming our president.
One more thing, the Pulitzer Prize photo you saw of Napalm Girl and the Vietnamese on the roof trying to get on a helicopter was two years later. A South Vietnamese general ordered a napalm attack on a village he did not like.
Then came the preparations for wars in the deserts of the Middle East. All the signs of a coming conflict were there. It wasn’t just the Israelis versus the Palestinians; it was Iran, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. And it was the radical Islamist terror groups such as Fatah, Black September, Islamic Amal, HAMAS, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hezb Allah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and then al-Qaida.
Then the Shah of Iran died and the Ayatollahs took over. The Red Guard seized our embassy in Tehran and held the staff and Marine guards for four hundred and forty-four days. They were released on the day when Carter left office and Ronald Reagan was sworn in. There is another story there, but for another day.
I lived and worked in Saudi Arabia then. First for Arabian Bechtel and then as an Administrator for Saudi military hospitals in Dhahran and Taif. As a Navy Reservist I was assigned to US Central Command.
Beirut, Lebanon was once the Paris of the Middle East and I often flew their national carrier, Middle East Airlines. But everything changed there on April 18th of 1983 when a truck bomb was driven into the front of our embassy killing sixty-three innocents. The floor above the blast was the offices of the CIA and It killed our Chief of Station, Bob Ames, and all of the other agents. Hezb Allah under the orders of Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Motashimipour, did it.
The Iranians were also behind the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beiruit, Lebanon. Two hundred and forty-one fine young men were murdered that day, and they were never avenged. Because they were there on a peacekeeping mission, they were not allowed to carry loaded weapons. The bomb maker was Ibrahim Safa and he was a member of Hezb Allah, the Party of God and financed by Iran.
The driver of the truck was an Iranian, Walid Asmail al-Askari, that would be Walid the Soldier, acting on the orders of the Iranian ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Motashemipour.
(BTW, he died last year from a book bomb the Israelis sent him. Blew his hand off and he died of complications)
So, as you can see, Iran has been at war against us for forty-three years and it continues even to this day.
Although we supported Saddam Hussein and Iraq in their war against Iran, we were activated to free Kuwait after the Iraqis invaded and occupied Kuwait. Few know that we were conned into Desert Storm.
Recall the stories of Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and leaving them on the floor. A hospital worker named Nayirah told us. The ruling al-Sabah family paid an American Public Relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, Eleven and a half million dollars to free Kuwait. Turned out that Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir al-Sabah. We had four hundred Killed in Action and we probably killed a hundred thousand Iraqis. For what?
As you remember, nineteen young Arab men flew four planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fifteen were Saudis. Three weeks later we invaded Afghanistan. We were there for twenty years and lost twenty-four hundred troops. Then our president gave it all to the Taliban.
As to our invasion of Iraq in 2003, we were deceived by misinformation and disinformation. In 1999, an Iraqi named Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi walked into the German BND, their federal intelligence agency, asking for asylum for information regarding Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. The BND agreed only if what he had to tell was worth it.
He claimed that he had worked as a chemical engineer at a plant that manufactured mobile biological weapons laboratories. It was located at Djerf al-Nadaf near Baghdad and disguised as a birdseed processing plant. Further he said he worked for Doctors Huda Ammash and Rihab Taha. The BND deemed this factual but never let our intelligence people talk to him. We got only written reports. The Germans code-named him “Curveball”.
Both of these microbiologists were educated here. We called Taha ‘Doctor Germ’ and Ammash ‘Mrs. Anthrax’. Things going on inside Iraq began to be noticed and of concern to neighboring countries and Saddam’s emissary Tariq Aziz told Saddam that President George W. Bush was going to invade Iraq.
Then on the fourth of June, 2002, an earthen dam broke in Homa, Syria and President Hafiz Assad put out the call to the Red Crescent and anyone who could help to come to their aid. Saddam seized the opportunity and ordered Iraqi Airways to reconfigure two 727s and a 747 for cargo and they made fifty-six flights hauling out WMDs to Dawr az-Zawr, Syria. And who told us this; the officer in charge, Iraqi Air Force General Georges Sada, a Christian, who we brought to Oklahoma. He wrote the book, "Saddam's secrets". Then fifty trucks came down from Russia and emptied the ammo bunkers and took it all to Syria. Our National Reconnaissance Office had to have a thousand photographs of that activity.
President Bush and his staff bought the lies and sent former general and now Secretary of State Colin Powel to the United Nations with a Power Point presentation prepared by the CIA to rally other nations to support us.
We invaded on the twentieth of March, 2003 and four and a half thousand troops were killed. And for what? Very little of WMDs were found.
Al-Janabi’s motive was that he wanted Saddam overthrown and he had also stolen equipment and money from Babel TV, owned by Uday Hussain, and knew Uday would beat him to death.
Last we knew, the Germans gave him amnesty and he was living on the dole in Karlsruhe, watching his six.
In closing, I’ll leave you with this timely poem as we remember those who served on this Veterans Day and remember our friends who died in the service of our country.
“They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old; age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”
Harold K. Strunk, MSW, MPH, DrPH
Captain, United States Navy, Ret.