and as usual they were apologists. It's easy to say unless you look at Japan in 1945.
I told them that the bombing saved more japanese lives than it took by a factor of at least 1000. It's true. Schoolgirls were given pointed stick and told to kill the American/British invaders before dying gloriously for the Emperor. The people were being armed as best they could be and being trained. If the Americans and Brits invaded the mainland Japan would probably not exist, or nowhere as close as we know it.
MacArthur, who had an uncanny knack of estimating casualties before and action estimated 1,000,000 US casualties. No estimates I have heard of were made of Japanese casualties. They were damned well going to be a lot higher than that.
Deaths in both cities that were bombed were totaled at about 105,000. To put it into perspective the one night fire bombing of Tokyo killed over 100,000. The fire bombing was non-nuclear and put over a million people out of their homes.
Now had we not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki we would have pre invasion flattened every city we neared it to soften it up for the infantry and turned it into a smoking pile of ashes.
With armed civilians attacking in addition to whatever troops they had in Japan the GIs would have simply killed everyone they met over the age of about 7 and most likely, as seen earlier in the was in Saipan and Guam, the Japanese parents would have killed their children to prevent them from being taken captive by the Americans and Brits.
It would have been a blood bath of epic genocidal proportions.
The Japanese General Staff were wondering what to do about the (then) Soviets that were invading Manchuria and to at least the Emperor the bombings were the last straw.
You have to put things into the context of the time things happened to decide what is/was right and wrong. When you look into it the bombings saved a LOT more Japanese lives than they took.
You can say what you will, but there are one hell of a lot of GIs that owe their lives to the bomb. There are also a hell of a lot more than that in Japan that do, too. A LOT more Japanese. A large portion of the Japanese population owe their very existence to the bomb.
In 1989 I was at Arizona in Hawaii and took the tour. A Japanese couple overheard me yakking with a tour guide and were interested in what I had to say. They offered to take me to dinner and I accepted. They wanted to learn more about the war and overheard me telling the guide my father flew B-29s.
I agreed if they promised NOT to take me to an expensive restaurant because I could not dress for such a place. I was there to pick up a sailboat to deliver it to Tacoma and I was traveling somewhat light. In short I was a ragamuffin. That's not a new experience. I spend about 99.87% of my life dressed in work-type clothing still.
When I explained what I have written above I pointed out that it was pretty likely that had the United States been forced to invade that the pair of them would not likely have been born. I also said that the Emperor showed considerable courage and loyalty to the Japanese people by forcing the surrender.
(I seriously doubt our elected officials have the kind of moral courage displayed by Emperor Hirohito)
They looked somewhat stunned when I said that. The husband asked me how I felt about things now and I grinned.
I told him that because it wasn't 1945 anymore we could sit there and enjoy ourselves, enjoy each other and have a nice dinner together instead of trying to hack each other up. I also told them I was glad they were here for me to enjoy.
Meanwhile the apologists that have decided to rewrite history go on making their usual false claims because they don't understand the context of the times.
No comments:
Post a Comment