, Spencer Warren writes about the Bomb. In passing he touches on Peter Jennings’s role in advancing the most anti-American possible interpretation of that event.
Please allow me to make a few observations about the 60th anniversary, August 6th and 9th, of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Remembering the war is the least we all can do for those who gave their futures for our todays.
1) A point I have never seen made is that by ending the war so quickly, it not only averted the need for an invasion of the enemy home islands but also mercifully brought to an abrupt end the unspeakable suffering being inflicted on the thousands of American, British, Australian, New Zealand, other Commonwealth and Dutch prisoners of war, held captive in Japan and elsewhere. If you see pictures of our POWS, you will see they were treated as the Nazis treated concentration camp inmates—their bones protruding from the skin, barely holding up their frames. In this connection, the acclaimed film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), about the construction by British and Commonwealth POWS of the Burma-Siam railway, gives a highly sanitized portrait of Japanese treatment of POWS. They look much too healthy! A few years ago the History Channel broadcast a documentary, in which the survivors denounced the film and the book on which it is based for minimizing their suffering (and also being totally false in depicting their commander, Col. Nicholson, as cooperating with the Japanese captors in organizing construction of the railway bridge). In reality, this famous film is like presenting a sanitized Hollywood view of Auschwitz.
2) Japan never ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on treatment of POWs. They considered surrender to be cowardly, and our forces had to kill their beaten troops who would not give up. They beheaded POWs, as one can see in one of the most infamous photos from the war—an Australian POW on his knees, blindfolded, as the Japanese soldier stands over him, samurai sword lifted high above his head, making ready for the murder. In one instance the Japanese failed to identify a cargo ship carrying POWS as required by the convention, and it was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine, with great loss of life. The Bataan Death March following Japan’s conquest of the Philippines was so ghastly that even our own government sought to keep it secret, out of concern it would inflame the U.S. public beyond control. Nazi Germany generally abided by the Geneva Convention in treatment of U.S., British, and Western Allied POWs (not Russian) and the vast majority returned home unharmed after the war. Well below one-half of the POWs seized by Japanese forces survived the war.
Like the Muslim view of dogs, man’s best friend, this sheds light on the idea of “multiculturalism”—that all cultures are “equal.”
3) Basically, there are three historical views of the atomic bombings:
a) the standard view that they were dropped as weapons to end the war as quickly as possible and to avert the invasion of Japan planned for November 1945 (Kyushu, the southernmost of the home islands) and March 1946 (Honshu, the main home island). We had just lost 6,000 dead on Iwo Jima and 12,000 on Okinawa, plus 19,000 and 36,000 wounded, respectively, in three months of the most ferocious fighting of the Pacific war. It was anticipated we would lose up to many hundreds of thousands dead in a fight to the finish invading Japan.
b) another view that our government also wanted to show our new rival, Soviet Russia, the immense power of the bomb, although this was secondary to the overriding aim of ending the war ASAP.
c) the revisionist view, that our government knew Japan was moving toward surrender and used the bombs anyway in order to demonstrate our superior power to Stalin.
The left-wing revisionist view (Gar Alperovitz, Martin Sherwin are the two most prominent historians of this view) is not accepted by a majority of historians, who favor a or b above. Despite this, an ABC documentary in 1995, on the fiftieth annniversary, presented only the third, revisionist view, as fact, without explaining the wide disagreement among historians. This was typical of the career of the late Peter Jennings, arrogantly (and most likely ignorantly) distorting and slanting history, as well as the news, which he did every night. Do any readers recall his criticism on the air of President Bush on 9/11, for not returning immediately to Washington, before the scope of the attack was understood? Any person’s death is sad, but professionally, this man, like so many in his business, was not qualiifed for his responsibilities and did a huge disservice to his viewers for many years.
Had the war not ended when it did, Japan was planning to send balloons over the Pacific to drop bubonic plague weapons on the West Coast of the U.S. The enemy’s Unit 731 in Manchuria developed plague and anthrax weapons—using Chinese and Western POW’s as guinea pigs—and Japan used plague and anthrax against the Chinese during their almost fifteen-year war in that country, during which they killed perhaps 10 million Chinese, mostly civilians. In the battle for Manila in January 1945, the Japanese Army went on such an orgy of rape and destruction that it left Manila more devastated even than Warsaw at the hands of the Nazis.
Finally, let me close with these words from speeches to Congress by Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt shortly after Pearl Harbor. Would a leader speak today with such force and passion?
Churchill:
“Don’t they [Hitler and Hirohito] know that we’re going to teach them a lesson that they and the world will never forget?”
Roosevelt (on Dec. 8, 1941), asking for a declaration of war:
“… the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.… we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” In his penultimate paragraph, the President said “we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.” I have read that the words, “so help us God,” have been excluded from the quotation engraved at the WWII memorial.
Postscript:
Germany has made lavish apologies for its atrocities in the war, having paid (and I believe is still paying) billions of dollars in reparations to victims of the Holocaust and their families. Its news media, books and TV have been filled with examinations of the war—some seen on the History Channel.
Yet to this day Japan has made only grudging apologies, and only under outside pressure. It prefers to focus on the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. China and Korea especially have found its apologies to be devoid of true repentance. The Japanese Army enslaved many thousands of Korean women as “comfort women” for its troops and I believe the government may have paid some compensation to the survivors, only after decades of pressure. British POWs, for their part, have demanded compensation for their appalling treatment, without success. U.S. POWs have been paid nothing. Yet the U.S. government paid $20,000 apiece to Japanese-Americans who were interned during the war (the justice, or injustice, of which I discussed in my last message).
The Japanese prime minister, whoever he may be, makes an annual visit to the Yasukuni shrine, where fallen soldiers—including those who rampaged through Nanking in 1937, Manila in 1945, who oversaw the Bataan Death March and tortured POWs and Chinese civilians—are honored. Since the 1970s, 14 Class A war criminals executed in the postwar Tokyo War Crimes Trials, including the wartime leader and one of the instigators of Pearl Harbor, Tojo, have been honored there. Here is another point to consider in the debate over the multiculturalist view that one cannot make “value judgments” about one culture relative to another.
In recent decades the Japanese have published many editions of school textbooks that whitewash or cover up their manifold atrocities in WWII. Last spring several anti-Japanese riots broke out in China after publication of new textbooks seen as playing down Japan’s atrocities against China.
Politically, Japan of course, with Germany, is a model of pacifism today. Horrible as were the deaths of the 200,000 plus resulting from the atomic bombs, seen in light of the unparalleled nightmare their country brought to East Asia and the Pacific, who is not to say they had to be taught an awful lesson—one their modern pacifism demonstrates they have learned very well indeed?
Disclosure:
My father fought in the Pacific in WWII and his best friend was killed. The experience was so terrible he always claimed he didn’t remember his friend’s name or anything about his experiences—other than details I pried out of him from time to time. But reading the superb book about the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers, I now know he remembered it all too well.
Spencer Warren, who is a lawyer, served in the State Department in the Reagan administration and as counsel to two Congressmen and a Senator. He is president of the Insider’s Washington Experience, a public policy seminar program. He’s also a great movie fan, particularly of the films of John Ford.