Originally Posted by
Denflnt
I have always been a lurker on here. Not an ATP, used to fly single engine Cessnas.
First of all, I wan't to apologize for my country for inconveniencing you. To ask you to ID yourself while being escorted by fighter aircraft in an area that, evidently, required you to have a fighter escort must have been a real boredom breaker for you. To their defense perhaps they may have either seen three aircraft on their radar or picked up transmissions from the fighters that alerted them to a potential threat. Thank God they communicated with you rather than doing the "American" thing of "shooting first and ask questions later." You know, we Americans are all cowboys by heart.
As to why we are there, many Americans ask the same question. We fought in two European wars in the last century, lost a lot of men and women in the process. Take a trip over to Normandy if you don't believe me. From what I understand they still like us "Yanks" in that region. Our integration into WWII kept most of Europe from having to speak German, despite the fact that we were actually attacked by Japan. Many Americans didn't want to involve ourselves in another European war, that is, until Pearl Harbor. My grandfather went to the theater we weren't trying to actively win, defending Europe was out priority and those who fought in the Pacific suffered from that policy. We helped a lot to win the battle in Europe and we stayed afterwards to ensure the peace. I'm not saying other countries didn't contribute, they did, but it wasn't "our war" at the time. We even spent billions after the war rebuilding Europe, so ya'll wouldn't do it again. We continued to stay so ya'll didn't have to learn Russian, with us picking up most of the tab. Now, few countries in NATO meet their, rather low defense spending expectations in assuming that cost of their own for the defense against the Russians. The Brits do, as well as those countries who fell on the wrong side of the iron curtain after the last "great war."
Now we ask our young people to go thousands of miles away to ensure Europe can have the oil they want so that you can fuel your plane to do your job. No oil, no Jet-A. No Jet-A, no job by the way. We've lost people in the process. Anyone remember the Stark? That captain lost his command and was court martialed for not defending his ship. The USN doesn't allow skippers to make mistakes. No other Navy has the ships to do what we do. You can thank the American taxpayer for that.
As an American, I don't want your thanks. But I sure as hell don't need the insults. We do the best we can do, more than any other country can say. To be honest, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Oh, and my grandfather has his carrier sunk beneath him defending Australia, some thousands of miles away in the Battle of the Coral Sea. He wasn't defending America at the time and I can say that my mother and grandmother never knew if he was alive or dead, they only got a heavily redacted letter months after it was sent.
I want to apologize to others on here for my first post being as it is. I stewed a bit about the post I am responding to and finally decided I had to respond.
Its all about perspective, so here is ours
1. You sat back and allowed UK to do the heavy lifting until 1942.
2. If Hitler hadn't declared war on the US in support of Japan you probably would have continued to do so.
3. You sold us billions of dollars of equipment and profited while we were fighting and slowly bankrupting. We made the last loan payments sometime in the 1980s.
4. UK and commonwealth forces were on parity with the US in numbers and casualties in the European campaign despite having much smaller populations
5. Roosevelts aim was to take over from the British as leader of the "free world". At the end of WW2 while all other fighting parties, Allies and Axis were broke and ruined, the US was intact and in profit, using their strength at that time to seize control of UN, IMF, reserve trading currency and other such international bodies and conventions , which are now used, particularly the financial ones for mafia like control of the global financial system in Americas favour
6. The US has never fought a single war that has not been in its financial interests.
Its all about perspective, depends where you are looking from