Screw John Hersey.
He actually covered (as a war correspondent, Hersey wasn’t a combatant) both theaters during World War II, yet his much lauded New Yorker article describing the aftermath of Little Boy on Hiroshima is steadily transforming the conflict’s concluding factor into a war crime against the victors.
When did commemorations for Hiroshima and Nagasaki become more noteworthy than Pearl Harbor remembrances? And why is this?
How have foreign revanchists and native revisionists alter just punishment into crimes perpetrated by the victims?
2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the United States’ necessary and correct decision to open the present Nuclear Era by dropping two a-bombs above Japan. These weapons brought rapid conclusion to a conflict the Imperial Japanese Empire imposed upon the West starting the morning of December 7th, 1941.
An increasing mob of apologists conveniently forget the instigation. Their tears for the criminals must blind them to the initial and further injuries the Japanese inflicted throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean.
It certainly helps their skewed cause those who endured and survived injuries wrought by the Japanese are succumbing to time. Fewer living participants mean the story can be massaged. Don’t believe me? Look at the mounting number of Holocaust deniers. They gain voice and veracity as the years pass and camp survivors die.
While video recollections we may summon with a few taps on touchscreens are fine, what beats hearing the facts from someone who can recall the stink and describe the depravities witnessed?
Although Eisenhower insisted on extensive photographic records of the liberated concentration camps, correctly intuiting that somewhere down the line some bastard would claim the facilities and the horrors that occurred inside them inventions, even he couldn’t have seen our current readiness to reward diminishment.
Poor Ike. He suffered a massive failure of imagination. The then supreme allied commander and future president missed seeing how disbelieving of irrefutable events Americans would become and the ease we’d increasingly accept patently insistent falsehoods as “new truths.”
Or worse, we’d accept “equivalence.” That is subsequent incidents could somehow mitigate past horrors by lessening earlier degradations thus making them comparable, or, given our heightened awareness, lessen the past’s severity.
To squash that nonsense in the most colloquial terms possible: “Ain’t nothing happenin’ today that’s worse than yesterday.” Our “suffering” cannot compare. If you’re reading this and self-absorbed enough to believe otherwise, please, disabuse yourself of such selfish narratives.
Yet let’s say for shits and giggles the nuclear devices failed. The July 1945 test blast at Alamogordo, New Mexico, fizzles and Oppenheimer doesn’t quote the Bhagavad Vita.
So the million-man allied invasion of the Japanese home islands must proceed. Again, disabuse yourselves of the canard that the Japanese were making peace entreaties; that they sat on the verge of capitulation.
Bullshit.
A militarist society such as theirs had become wouldn’t have yielded. They would’ve looked upon the defeatists seeking peace at any price as traitors. To expunge such weakness, as well as ruthlessly contain that sentiment, Japanese leadership would’ve easily inflicted the same level of barbarism on their own citizens they’d amply practiced on conquered populations.
Western invasion forces would’ve needed subduing and utterly crushing the islands’ civil inhabitants, not just the army. The militarists had succeeded making their people commit body and soul to sacrifice themselves if necessary to repulse the invaders. Whipped up so, the Japanese weren’t going to meekly submit to the West.
In performing the sole decisive deed of his life, Emperor Hirohito clearly understood Japan’s predicament. Without unconditional surrender, the allies intended scouring Japan from the earth. Reprehensible as the emperor likely found round-eye subjugation, he doubtlessly saw Japan’s extermination far worse fate.
Two atomic bombs rather than the tons of conventional ordnance pummeling Japan as well as the home islands being bled white by the West’s naval mastery drove the belligerents to their knees.
Oh, sure, the militarist bunch who ran Japan’s day-to-day efforts venerated the emperor. Nonetheless the godhead was only a figurehead. Despite the endless endgame destruction the allies imposed upon Japan too many blinded fanatics wielded real power. These men were locked into victory or death.
A la the Romans regarding numerous Caesars, the truest of true homicidal believers would’ve found some way of getting around the emperor’s deity and deposed him for some more amenable godhead.
Therefore, the invasion of the Japanese home islands would’ve proceeded.
Not only American troops would’ve comprised the invading waves. Expect Commonwealth forces to have been included. No Soviets. Oh, the Red Army would’ve been too occupied containing phantom threats in Manchuria. Same way it cooled heels on the outskirts of Warsaw while letting the Wehrmacht liquefy the Poles during their uprising. Besides, the Nazis had bled the Soviets dry. Think nobody in the Kremlin, especially Koba, wouldn’t have minded seeing Honshu streets steeped in blood from Merseyside men or corn-fed Midwestern boys?
If not, your naivety is galling.
Official Soviet dispatches from Manchuria would’ve reported depleted Japanese forces there putting up such ferocious defense that the anticipated Red Army assault on Japan’s home islands couldn’t possibly take place until, oh, say, middle 1946. Um, maybe 1947.
1947.
For any bleating about Japanese civilian deaths, that was a populace, like their brown or black-shirted European counterparts who swallowed the same fascist claims, weren’t they just as culpable for rampages ostensibly conducted on their behalf?
Yes. They were. They paid.
Let us extend the non-nuclear concluded war to 1947. For those readers old enough, did your father, if young enough, grandfather, reach 1947? Thanks to the weapons too many today despise, these made it possible for the man who sired you or the fellow who sired the guy who sired you to exist.
See, despite feminist counterclaims men do serve a purpose.