Blood on Our Hands?

[Mike Irwin]

Revisionist history is a wonderful thing.

Veterans groups in the 1990s just about went off the deep end, and with good reason, when someone finally thought about consulting them regarding the Smithsonian's proposed exhibit commemorating the end of World War II.

It had been written by revisionists, and the overriding theme is that the United States was the criminal agressor throughout the war, ending in the ultimate unpunished war crime, the dropping of the atomic bombs.

The fighting between the two groups got so bad that the Smithsonian finally scrapped its plans for what would have been a very grand, and very flawed, exhibit.

Revisionist historians are largely, in my experience, people whose politics are to the left, and whose sense of self-worth can only be defined as the desire to be guilty, and spread guilt.

A lot has been made about Japanese plans to surrender, that the atomic bombs weren't necessary because Japan was trying to open negotiations.

The historic record simply doesn't bear that out. Even after the atomic bombs were dropped, and the Emperor decided that he would order the nation to submit, elements inside the Japanese military planned a coup to prevent the Emperor from making the announcement.

It is clear that they had no qualms about destroying the Japanese nation while killing as many Americans as possible, and they were prepared to overthrow and even kill the Emperor if necessary.

The Japanese, as a nation, have NEVER come to terms with the crimes that they perpetrated in the name of Asian hemogeny. Japanese history books, if they address the issue of WW II at all, normally mention only the atomic bombings and the firebombing of Japanese cities, but conveniently leave out Japanese atrocities in China, Korea, the Philippines, and other nations which they supposedly "liberated" from Western imperialists.

In many ways, in my mind, the Japanese are even more reprehensible than the French in that sense.

 

[Mute]

Mute,

I thought that his point was "revisionist history is bull"...

Yes. I was referring to those who actually believe that the atomic bombings were great atrocities.

 

[Khornet]

Posted last year at America's Voices:

AUGUST THANKSGIVING

Hampton Sides, in his excellent book Ghost Soldiers, describes events of December 14, 1944 at Puerto Princesa Prison Camp in the Philippines. There 150 American soldiers, survivors of the Bataan Death March, were held captive as slave laborers. Japanese Lieutenant Sato herded the prisoners into their air raid shelters, telling them that a large force of American bombers was approaching. Mr. Sides describes the shelters:

"They were primitive, nothing more than narrow slits dug four feet deep and roofed with logs covered over with a few feet of dirt. There were three main trenches, each about a hundred feet long. On both ends, the structures had tiny crawl-space entrances that admitted one man at a time. Approximately fifty men could fit inside each one, but they had to pack themselves in with their knees tucked under their chins." One prisoner, James Stidham, injured during an earlier bombing raid and now paralyzed, was placed on a stretcher outside the entrance of one of the pits, to be dragged inside if necessary.

Once the Americans were packed in the shelters, Japanese soldiers appeared with buckets and flung the contents into the shelters. The smell told the Americans that it was high-octane aviation fuel, and seconds later the Japanese tossed torches into the trenches and they exploded in fire. Desperate prisoners, bathed in liquid fire, attempted to crawl out of the entrances. They were cut down with machine guns. As for James Stidham, "A soldier stepped over to him and with a perfunctory glance fired two slugs into his face."

The few survivors, badly burned and crawling desperately toward the jungle, were tortured and then bayoneted. Three or four, however, were overlooked and later escaped to tell the tale.

By December 1944 the tide of the war had clearly turned against the Japanese, and it has been argued that grisly mass murders like the one at Puerto Princesa were the acts of a cornered and wounded animal. How, then to explain the events at Nanking? When that Chinese city was captured by the Japanese, they were at the height of their power, victorious wherever they went. None of the Allies were at war with Japan, and no Japanese territory had felt the lash of bomber fleets. Yet, in Nanking, from December to March 1937, the Imperial Army embarked on an orgy of slaughter. At least 250,000 civilians were murdered. Tens of thousands of women and girls were raped and then murdered, usually brutally and slowly. Laughing Japanese soldiers tossed babies into the air and caught them on their bayonets. Brave international observers and aid workers, doing their best to check the bloodbath, confirmed the stories of barbarity.

Multiculturalists insist that all cultures are valid, and that it is bigoted to judge another culture in light of our own. I wonder how they would approach the Japanese culture of World War II, for it was one whose racism, brutality, and sheer sadism left the Nazis far behind. But in those unenlightened days, the minds of the West had not yet been emasculated by Multiculturalism, and so on Aug. 6, 1945 the most vicious culture of the 20th century was consumed by hellfire. Continued on page 2


AUGUST THANKSGIVING page 2

Imagine the Pacific world conquered by the Japanese. How many times would Nanking and Puerto Princesa have been repeated? What would have been the scene in Australia or Hawaii? Our only guide is the behavior of Dai Nippon up to the moment it was crushed; the leopard does not change its spots.

So every August we should thank heaven for Fat Man and Little Boy and what they did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In their terrible fireballs a truly monstrous culture vanished, hopefully forever, and certainly to the benefit of everyone, including Japan. The murderous philosophy of Bushido was deeply ingrained in the Japanese mind, and could not be educated out of them. There was no logic which would remove it; by August 1945 it was clear to all, including the Japanese leaders, that defeat was inevitable. Still they fought on fanatically, not for victory, but only to kill as many Americans as possible before they themselves went down. Nuclear fire vaporized Bushido and made possible the thriving, peaceful democracy which is modern Japan. If not for the mission of the Enola Gay, and the bravery and sacrifice of Allied soldiers in the years leading up to it, Japan would have continued unchecked in its descent into hell, for there was nothing at all in the Japanese world to stop it.

Winston Churchill famously said of such nations that "They are either at your throat or at your feet." A people who can do what Japan did are incapable of occupying a middle ground. They can either put the world to the sword, or, as today, renounce arms with the same pathologic intensity, but they cannot carry a sword to be drawn only in self-defense.


Each year at this time in America you can count on the appearance of self-righteous demonstrations lamenting the horror of August 1945. It's in our national character to be gnawed by conscience over our sins. It's part of what made us willing to spill the blood of so many of our young men to free Europe and Asia from worse than slavery, and, irritating though the ignorance of peaceniks may be, we must remember that they couldn't march or even exist if we weren't a fundamentally good nation. While we blush with shame over the internment of our Japanese-Americans, and rightly so, we should also take a moment to recognize the deafening silence in Japan today about Nanking and a thousand other atrocities. As the well-intentioned fools release their doves this year at Ground Zero in Hiroshima, let us remember that there would be no such peace demonstrations anywhere along the Pacific Rim if America hadn't rained destruction on the Japanese Empire.

What lit up the sky over Hiroshima on that August morning in 1945 was not the dawning of a new age of terror. It was the Rising Sun not of Imperial Japan, but of a new age of lasting peace, the completion of the world's emancipation from a racist horror, and the beginning of the liberation of the Japanese people from themselves.

Michael R. Bowen M.D.

 

[HBK]

Every year a buddy of mine has an essay question asking whether or not we should have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. THe kids that I work with all usually get the point that we savd a lot of lives by dropping those bombs. I don't know about the others. The sad thing is that sometimes when I'm talking to a kid, he's never heard what the price of invading Japan could have been in American lives.

 

[atk]

Mute,

I apologize: I completely misunderstood your point. Thanks for clearing it up

 

[roscoe]

People sure were quick to misunderstand the article! Prickly bunch!

NPR had a story a few months ago about how a recent study concluded that the cancer rates were no higher in Nagasaki and Hiroshima than any other Japanese city. Despite this fact, it is official Japanese government policy than ANY case of cancer in those two cities is a result of the bombing.

 

[DF357]

Revisionists....

demorcraaps - the same thing.


Scenario,

It's August 1945, you are President. The bombs are ready and can end the war. Nearly a half a million Americans have already died since Pearl Harbor, in Europe, the Pacific and else where.

You'd probably look at it this way - "One more dead American or thousands more dead Japs? mmmmm let me see, which will it be ?? "

 

[Deepdiver]

Seems to me the real, true, "unrevised" history has documented how brutal, vicious, inhuman, and barbarous the Japanese were in their treatment of their enemies (combatants, non-combatant civilians, and POW's alike).

...what ultimately happened to them as a result of their attacks on the US, was FAR LESS than they deserved.

Gar Alperovitz, Nelson Mandela, and the rest of these slack-jawed "revisionists" are just trying to re-write history according to their own wish-world, to make up for their own inadequacy.

If we Americans have blood on our hands, then we have a lot to be proud of, because it shows that we are one of the few nations on this earth that is willing to make a stand for what is morally right.

 

[Dorrin79]

did any of ya'll actually read the article?

He's basically saying that, as terrible as using nuclear weapons against the Japanese was, it was the best option we had, and saved numerous lives.

I can't find much to disagree with there, personally.

 

[T.Stahl]

Argh, this annual Japanese moaning is really getting on my nerves.

 

[longeyes]

NANKING.

What goes around comes around.

Mandela should worry about the baby rape in his own country.

 

[DaveB]

Paul Fussell's "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" (1988) is recommended reading.

db

 

[Standing Wolf]

I think I can simplify the entire discussion: we won.

It was a war between a totalitarian régime that trampled on and terrorized much of Asia and a freedom-loving republic on another continent far across the world's largest ocean. Japan started the war without provocation or just cause. Japan lost the war after considerable bloodshed.

If revisionist self-styled "historians" want to snivel and whine about it at this late date, that's their right; it's my right, however, to be glad my father remained in defeated Germany instead of being shipped halfway around the world to fight and perhaps die in Japan.

Never start a fight you can't finish.

 

[HankB]

In college, when I was satisfying my "fuzzy subject" requirement, I had a history professor who made the preposterous argument that

. . . the U.S. could have demonstrated the bomb on an uninhabited island . . .

He got really upset - but had no reply - when I said words to the effect of "Professor, dropping the first bomb on Hiroshima killed 80,000 people and destroyed virtually all the infrastructure in a modern industrial city. Yet it wasn't until two more events - Russia's declaration of war and the second atomic bomb - that Japan surrendered. How can you keep a straight face and claim that roasting a few coconuts on some desert island would cause Imperial Japan to surrender, when nuking a major city wasn't enough? Are you saying Imperial Japan valued coconuts more than their own people?"

BTW, my father fought the Japs in WWII, and was part of the early occupation forces. They weren't nearly as beaten as some would claim . . . they had caves, enlarged into tunnels, that you could drive a deuce and a half into for half a mile, with side tunnels absolutely FILLED with munitions. Consensus is that Japs on other islands were running short of supplies not just because of U.S. naval and air interdiction efforts, but because the Imperial Japanese Government was stockpiling supplies for a "last man" defense of the home islands. A Honshu invasion would've made Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal look like a cake walk.

 

[4v50 Gary]

I enjoyed the article. The author doesn't condemn what we did and brings out the viewpoint that the bombs empowered the peace faction to prevail. I've always maintained that dropping those bombs count as the greatest acts of humanity we showed to the Japanese.

We saved countless lives - Japanese, American and Allied by giving Japan an opportunity to surrender. The alternative would have been starvation or invasion; both of which would have resulted in millions of casualties.

Dropping the bomb cut the war short, allowed the Japanese to save some face and brought a lot of our boys (and our PoWs) home alive. God Bless Truman for having the balls to help the Japanese see the light!

BTW, good point HankB. Betcha only got a B 'cuz you reddened the Perfesser's face.

As a sidenote, both bombs were transported by rail to SF Hunter's Point shipyard where they were loaded onto ships for the Far East. I guess that makes SF an Atomic Age City and a participant of those noble deeds.

 

[Drjones]

Friz:

Shame on you!

You should know better than to take seriously anything the NYT says!!!

If you didn't, well, now you do. The NYT is a liberal rag, unworthy of even toilet paper duty.

 

[Waitone]

A few random thoughts

--Hiroshima=bad, Nagasaki=bad
--Tokyo firebombing=good? Dresden=good?
--US planners of the invasion of Japan estimated initial troop needs at 800,000 trooops.
--Closer we got to Japan in island hopping the higher the casuality rate.
--The last major engagements approached 25% US casualties and virtually 100% Japanese casualties
--800,000 X .25 = 200,000 US casualties
--God alone knows how may Japanese would have died in a ground assault.
--By the time of the assault on Berlin the US was in serious personnel shortages.
--Japanese casualties in Tokyo's firebombing and Germany's Dresden firebombing are about the same as the two Japanese cities we nuked.

--Now why is morally wrong to die via heat and blast effect from a nuclear device but it is ok to die from heat and blast effect of firebombing?
--Theologians call it "selective depravity."
--I just love it when contemporary moralists impose 21st moral frameworks on historical events. In my view that is just as hypocritical as having two current standards.

Fewer people on both sides died because of the nuclear devices than would have died had we used blowtorches and corkscrews.

Ergo, nuclear weapons are morally superior.

 

[Mike Irwin]

A little aside....

In preparation for the invasion of Japan, the United States churned out a HUGE excess of military decorations, including Purple Hearts, a number that was sufficient to cover awards to those wounded in Korea, Vietnam, and right up through to the first Persian Gulf War.

I think they finally ran out around 1993.

 

[telomerase]

Personally I find it bizarre that bombing of millions of civilians is OK but bombing God-Emperors (or dictators of any sort) is not.

However, if you're looking for US WWII atrocities, civilian bombing is not the place to start. Look up Operation Keelhaul. The US rounded up millions of Russian ethnics from Western Europe, using troops and flamethower tanks, and shipped them to the Gulag to die. Now, that's a war crime! (Another proof that FDR and his ilk were truly the greatest generation).

BTW, if you never heard of Operation Keelhaul before the Google search that you're about to do... ask yourself why not.

 

[13A]

It took TWO nukes. The first didn't convince the Japanese to surrender. Thank God the second DID. As far as I'm concerned, the nukes were required. BOTH of them.

 

[Butch]

Let us see , the Japs started the war , They raped & murdered women & children, they executed POW's from every country they fought . We should show them mercy. THE MERCY OF GOD!!!!! THE ONLY THING WE DID WRONG WAS NOT WAITING UNTIL WE HAD ENOUGH BOMBS TO COMPLETLY ANNIALATE THE WHOLE NATION

 

[Deepdiver]

did any of ya'll actually read the article?

I admit - I got pissed off before I finished the first paragraph.

Why couldn'd he just come out and say what the rest of us have said in this thread, with only a handful of words. Instead we had to wade through his "vomitus" to get to what we all knew.

 

[Dilettante]

He didn't write it for us -- he wrote it for NYT readers. Pretty different group.

I've got a different question for y'all. Was it worth invading Japan in the first place?

We hit them extremely hard between 1941 and 1945. We, with the Brits and Russians, eliminated their (stronger) ally. We destroyed most of their Navy and Air Force and ended any possibility of an East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Nobody else was going to be pulling any surprise attacks on the USA after that.

The point of "unconditional surrender" was to make sure that Japan wouldn't rise again as a threat, the way that Germany did after WWI. But we still fought two pretty big wars in places that used to be part of Japan's empire.

Many years ago a guy from Taiwan told me a story about how Mao Tse-Tung came to power. It seems that Chiang Kai-Shek had a shortage of manpower to fight the rebels and patrol the countryside--so he started to use some of the former Japanese troops, many of whom were still in China, since they had never been forced to go back. People hated this so much that many of them went over to Mao.

As everybody knows, we spent most of the next forty years fighting Communists in Asia in one way or another. We're still dealing with Kim Il-Sung's demon progeny in Korea (but not as much as the North Koreans have to).

I have to ask if we really had our priorities straight. :banghead:

 

[444]

You mess with the bull, you are gonna get the horns.

 

[Erik]

"Revisionist historians..."

Yup.

The world was a different place, and we owe nobody much of anything, least of all apologies for H&N.