Wendell Willkie, early COMMENSALIST...

Michael Marshall

In my last blog entry I mentioned that many inter-continental attacks were launched by both sides in WWII.

I deliberately brought in ICBMs (and inter-continental attacks in general) to this blog on commensality to re-emphasize that commensality can be a two-edged sword: all life on Earth can just as easily die - as dine - at our planet's common table.

WWII brought this fact home to many people the world over --- but not in some highly dramatic - instant - fashion, but in a sort of slow drip manner throughout the six years of war.

People tend to forget that Japan and Germany did not just sink ships right off North America public beaches and lob a few deadly shells at coastal harbour facilities and personnel - they actually invaded and held  bits of North America for years.

Greenland held German weather stations and westernmost Alaskan islands of Attu and Kiska were held by the Japanese.

Two thousand men died on the Allied side alone in the campaign to remove the Japanese from North America.

In turn, the Americans used the western Aleutian islands to raid the northern and westernmost islands of Japan by bomber and ship - well before the much better known B-29 attacks of almost 2 years later.

The island by island by island by island hop from Seattle or Edmonton to Fairbanks Alaska onward and onward to Siberian Russia or northern Japan, island by island, reminded North Americans that this trip cut both ways and Asia could invade the Americas as easily as we could do the reverse.

Similarly the island-hopping ferrying of Allied bombers from mid west America  via Gander-Greenland- Iceland -Orkneys- Faroes- Shetlands to the mainland of the UK and Europe reminded us that the ocean safety we had imagined would protect the new world from the wars of the old was not as vast and safe as we had thought.

Wendell Willke, the unexpected presidential candidate of those arch isolationists the Republicans, (deluding themselves that they could isolate themselves from Nature as well as from other humans), travelled around the world by plane ,in wartime, to publicize his theme "Its All (One World) Now."

I count Willke very much as an early commensalist.....