I just realized...

it's August 6th, almost August 7th, 61 years after Hiroshima, and I haven't heard any of the normal whining about it at all. Are they finally over that stupid shit, or are people just too distracted with the current unpleasantness? Probably too busy protesting Israel. I get their point, about Hiroshima and the other things too, but I have personal reasons to feel defensive whenever some bleeding heart goes on and on about the poor Japanese.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that it was wrong to kill all those civilians in the bombing campaign during the war (about 600,000 in Germany and maybe 1.5 million in Japan). Most historians concede today that the bombing had a very limited strategic value. German war production actually peaked at the height of the bombing, for instance. If anyone did that sort of thing today we'd all call it a war crime. Ok, I got that, but my dad was headed for the island of Quajelain in August of 1945. He'd been trained to fly a low level attack bomber called an A-26, and was probably going to fly air cover for the invasion of the main islands if those went off as scheduled.

The Japanese generals had secreted away about 10,000 planes in preparation for the invasion, so their pilots could launch Kamikaze attacks against the invasion fleets, as well as attacking allied planes like those my dad would be flying. We scoff about the desperation of the Kamikaze phenomenon, but few realize that the Japanese sank more ships and killed more of our people with Kamikazes than they did with any other weapon system in the war. They were busy in early August of 1945 training women and little kids to strap bombs on their backs and run under our tanks. They were handing out bamboo spears to people, determined that their sacred homeland would never be disgraced by invaders. They would all die rather than live through such a disgrace.

The Japanese people, those poor civilians, were following these leaders like sheep, and while I do seel sorry for them, they weren't completely innocent ether. While the Germans did their best to hide the most horrific crimes they committed in the occupied countries from their own people, the Japanese press covered the atrocities of the Japanese army as it rolled through Asia from 1931 on as if it were covering a sporting event. They had so thoroughly dehumanized the other people of Asia that they could unflinchingly report contests held in China by soldiers who competed to see who could kill more people with a sword in a given time. If you doubt, google The Rape of Nanking. They show the whole story.

The Japanese general staff and Emperor thought that if they defended Okinawa, an outlying island in the Japanese chain, with savage fury, we would think twice about invading the home islands and agree to make a deal. They were right. We lost about 12,000 troops killed taking that place. Maybe 50,000 killed and wounded in a battle that lasted 3 1/2 months, from April to July. They suffered over 200,000 casualties defending it, including civilians who threw themselves off cliffs and blew themselves up to avoid capture. What the general staff didn't realize was that we had a few more options than just the ones they knew about.

We didn't just have one atomic bomb in August of 1945. We'd invested about $2 billion dollars in the Manhattan Project since about 1940, and now had two different versions of the bomb. When our leaders faced the issue of what to do, they made their decision from the standpoint of men who had already spent years steadily killing more and more enemy civilians every day. There had been a raid over Tokyo on July 10th, 1945 by over a thousand B-29s, perpetrating a fire storm that probably killed about 140,000 civilians. Thing is, every time we did that the Japanese managed to shoot down about 15% to 20% of the planes, each of which had about a dozen of our guys in it. So, within the context of the time, facing the option of doing essentially the same level of damage with only one plane and one bomb, the decision to use the weapon becomes much easier to understand. Six days after that thousand plane fire bomb raid, the first atomic bomb was exploded at Alamagordo, New Mexico, and our leaders options became much more interesting.

Of course, at that time, the scientists had not figured on the radiation poisoning that extended the death toll from both bombings into the next decade. And much has been made of the fact that some of the scientists protested the possible use of the bomb, thinking that they had been building it only as a deterrent to a possible German bomb. All those points are well taken, but I still feel a personal gratitude to the people who made that decision. We really don't know what would have happened if the Japanese had not had it made clear to them that they really, really needed to quit.

The first bomb went off over Hiroshima on the 6th, after which the President sent out a message to the Japanese government that they had better quit or they would "suffer a rain of ruin from the air." We heard nothing back. Realize, if they'd gotten accustomed to fire bomb raids that regularly killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of their people, it may have taken them a while to get their mind around the fact that the enemy could now do the same damage, which used to take days, in an instant. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria on the 8th, as per the deal made with F.D.R. at Yalta (There were still 700,000 Japanese troops in china), and Nagasaki went up on the 9th. The Japanese government sued for peace on the 10th. Some people like to think that it was the Soviet invasion that convinced them, and that the bombing was a needless attrocity. To me the time line says it all. Add to that the fact that the Emperor claimed in his taped address to the nation on the 15th, listing the reasons why they needed to quit, that "the enemy had begin to deploy a new and most cruel bomb."

I'll never really know what would have happened to my father if they hadn't used the bomb, but I have a hard time getting all wrapped around the axel about it. After all, the fact that we dropped it allowed America and the world to see what the use of such a thing really means. I think the fact that we used it in 1945 contributed to the fact that it hasn't been used since. Not to mention the fact that It has basically given the Japanese a pass on a lot of the shit they did in the war. They can fixate on their victim status and forget that all the other stuff happened at all.

I saw a Japanese movie on cable a while back, with Richard Gere in it. There's a scene in it in which a group of Japanese kids go to visit the monuments at Nagasaki. When one of the young kids asks an older one why there isn't an American monument there, the older kid says "because they did this." When I hear that, and when I hear about the fact that Japanese people don't learn much about the war in their schools, and that many Japanese think the stories about atrocities are made up, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.

Of course, every people have perpetrated crimes of one sort or another, at one time or another. We are certainly not innocent, as many groups in the country will forcefully attest. Thing is, it's a regular thing in our schools to turn the teaching of history into a slobbering guilt trip, relating one ugly incident after another. That's what my college experience was like anyway. I'd like to know that the same sort of soul searching is going on elsewhere. I think the Germans are pretty honest about it. I think we are, for the most part. I know that there are a lot of people in Japan who know about the history and acknowledge it. No one else in Europe or Asia has forgotten, I assure you.

Anyway, dad's 84 now, and he's convinced that he'd probably be dead if it weren't for the bomb. A lot of his buddies feel the same way. That's good enough for me. They don't hate the Japanese anymore, but they haven't forgotten ether. We've moved on to completely different struggles and victories since then. We've got a totally new brand of suicide nutcases coming after us now, but we should never forget what the old geezers did for us. I have a problem with people slobbering all over them as "the greatest generation", but that's a whole 'nother thing. Anyway, I'm spent. Enough is enough. Later, FHB.