Saturday, March 21, 2009
In response to a comment left on my blog about Hiroshima
I'm fully aware of the atrocities committed by Japan before and during WWII. They were both aggressors and victims, my blog before was by no means to justify any act of war on any side but to relate my personal experience with someone who lived through one of the many tragedies of war. Take it for what it was. I left out a lot about the history of Japan because I wasn't writing a book I was writing a blog about Hiroshima and I wanted to include so much more but I left a lot out for a reason. There's no point to argue who was right and who was wrong because fact of the matter is both sides made huge mistakes. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and started a war they couldn't finish and the U.S. dropped atomic bombs to end a war that seemed to have no end in sight. Japan knew who they were targeting and so did the U.S. so who is right? No one.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The fact that you need to clarify your point is indicative of just how asinine the public forums have become.
ReplyDeleteBelieve when I write I know full well about the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese government and military during and before our involvement in WWII. I've seen the photos of butchered Chinese people on operating tables and body pits.
That has no bearing whatsoever on the decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America will always bear the mark of the nation that used the nuclear weapon, and on civilians who had no say over their destiny, first. For anyone to act as if there's no cause for any criticism of this strike, the whole "well they bombed us first" scenario, all I've got to say is look to the context. Our leaders did not HAVE to do what they did. They used some pretty slippery justification that history has not born out. And to say that ignorance of Japan's ability to fight back was an issue bellies the fact that the US military saw nothing in the way of any real defensive action to protect mainland Japan during the fire bombings the US military inflicted (again on mostly civilian targets with a higher mortality rate than both nuclear attacks yielded even when combining the two).
Too many people American, Japanese, Russian, German, French, English, Jewish, African, Arabic, etc... died over that war. Those who instigated it were wrong but even their reasons were more complex the simplistic tale tellers love to use to placate criticism of our own actions. From every perspective on either side, it doesn't take long to understand the term, "War is Hell".
As one vet from the Italian push put it, "I'll always wonder about the families of those I killed. In too many ways those I fought were no different than me". He and another vet I knew growing up hated John Wayne war movies. Now they leave a sour taste in my mouth too.