Hiroshima.

I just read where President Obama is going to visit Hiroshima, Japan.

For those of you that have gotten out of school recently you may not know what happened there. I hear they gloss over WW2 in school these days. 

Anyway, in August, 1945 the first atomic bomb used in warfare was dropped there. A few days later another one was dropped on Nagasaki. It ended WW2 pretty much right then and there. Of course the casualties were pretty horrendous. However the casualties of the night the Air Force firebombed Tokyo were higher.

Still, the atomic bomb ended the war.

Now there is one interesting thing President Harry Truman said years afterward. He wanted the war to end so as to preserve human lives. That included Japanese lives and from all I can tell it did save lives on both sides.

I have read where Douglas MacArthur estimated Allied casualties to exceed one million in the invasion of Honshu. That's just one island in Japan. It doesn't include Japanese casualties.

Japanese casualties were estimated to be well over 20,000,000. That was an estimate made by the Japanese. They anticipated that many if there was an invasion. It would have been a bloodbath of epic proportions.

The bomb shocked the Japanese to the point where they saw resistance was futile and that as a people the Japanese would have come damned close to extinction.

Of course, many Japanese lost friends and loved ones in these two bombings. As a people they seem to have been somewhat resentful.

Still, the United States did not start the war, the warlords of the Japanese empire did. The Japanese people were nothing more or less than victims of a government gone bad. The warlords started the war and, as usual, the little guys paid the price.

Anyway many Japanese have felt that the United States owes Japan an apology over what was nothing more or less than a military decision made in a war between two belligerents. I say no apology is in order. It would be an insult to any American that ever wore a uniform.

However it seems that there is a pretty good possibility that the president is going to get all blubbery in Hiroshima and apologize for the United States winning a war we did not start.

Any human being with any sense of humanity is damned sorry that there was a war like that to begin with. I can see the President making a statement like that. It's a truth.

However, I can not see apologizing for a strictly tactical decision made by a head of state during a conflict. Especially a decision that in the long run saved millions of (then enemy) Japanese lives.

From my reading and having grown up with innumerable WW2 veterans I have come to the conclusion that dropping the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not only the correct thing to do tactically and strategically as a belligerent in a war, it was ultimately the most humanitarian thing to do. It saved countless lives.

Apologizing for this would only stand to make the United States look stupid and weak. Then again in the past seven years of the Obama administration the has gotten the country noticeably stupider and weaker.

Then again I read where a B-29 called 'Doc' is getting ready to fly after being refurbished. If Obama wanted to do his trip to Hiroshima he could borrow hat and give it the Air Force One call sign, greeting the Japanese officials with a smug look.

Maybe if he did that I would at least know he had some balls. I would consider it as tacky as the rest of his administration but would recognize he at least had a little moxie.




To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY