Helped who?

The international rainbow coalition, assisted by the soviet transgender brigade, retakes guam, july, 1944

Our tax-dollar-supported national radio propaganda organ, NPR, broadcast a segment on Guam this morning. Nothing surprising about that: the little island has been in the news lately, but I was struck by the reporter stating that "in 1944, the U.S. military 'helped' liberate the island".

"Helped"? We certainly weren't the only nation fighting in WW II, but I'd always been under the impression that the battle of Guam was a strictly U.S. Navy/Marine operation, so I wondered at the NPR reporter's insistence on diminishing the role of the American kids who did the job. Who else was there?

I checked, and I can find no reference to any allies showing up on the beachheads. Not that Wikipedia's the final word on anything, but USMC articles, and everything else a brief search of the internet produced, shows no one else being killed and wounded, not even the young women of NPR.

It's a tiny issue, and one I wouldn't bother bringing up were it not a slow Saturday morning in August, but I think it reveals the basic, underlying hostility towards their own country held by our modern reporters, who are the product of our current educational model. A country founded on genocide, and sustained by centuries of exploitation and suppression of women and negroes should be credited with nothing, because all its accomplishments are tainted by its past.

Sad.

Speaking of sad, I see that Riverside's own, Chuck Standard, has died at 98. I had the honor of knowing Chuck for several decades, and admired him hugely. He served as a Navy dive bomber pilot in the Pacific during the war, and was awarded the Navy Cross (second only to the Medal of Honor) for the "extraordinary heroism" he displayed in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, which, not coincidental to this post, was an integral part of the retaking of Guam.  My condolences to his daughter, my classmate Patti, and the family.