Even president truman's bigotry Long antedated reports of japanese savagery. As a young man courting his future wife, he wrote: I think one man is as good as another, So long as he's honest and decent and not a nigger or a chinaman. Uncle will says that the lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a chinaman.
This racism prevailed when president roosevelt in February 1942 signed an executive order calling for the evacuation of over 110,000 Japanese and japanese-americans from california oregon and washington on the grounds that they "represented a threat to national security." 70% of them were american citizens.
By this time the Korean police action had become a 2.5 year nightmare and endless maneuvers for useless hill sides as elusive as the jungles of south Vietnam 15 years later. Battling Soviet trained and equipped North Koreans, WW2 hero general Douglas MacArthur had pushed north towards the Chinese border, despite repeated warnings from Beijing ensuring Truman that the Chinese would never enter the war. In the late fall of 1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops streamed across the Yalu river, sending US and allied forces reeling backwards in a frantic retreat. The marines who spearheaded the breakout did not consider it a retreat. "Retreat, hell!" said their commander. "We're just advancing in a different direction". Time magazine called it the worst defeat the US had ever suffered. Truman wrote in his diary: WW3 is here.
Reagan defended the covert war by saying in 1984: The Nicaraguan people are trapped in a totalitarian dungeon by a dictatorship made all the more dangerous by the unwanted presence of thousands of Cuban, Soviet block and radical Arab helpers. He went so far as to call the Contras the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. His moral equivalence were responsible for most of the deaths of the 20 to 30,000 Nicaraguan civilians during the war.
US troops invaded Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island with 100,000 inhabitants. Reagan claimed it was a Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. As in one of his old Westerns, he sent 7,000 american soldiers into battle. Then in media, supposedly for their own safety, he offered government footage instead. The entire op was bungled from the start. 19 soldiers died and more than 100 were wounded, as a small force of poorly armed Cuban construction workers resisted. 9 helicopters were lost. The invasion from a military POV was a farce.
