Monday, August 15, 2005
Before we weep for Hiroshima
In February 1945, a woman now dying of lung cancer grabbed two of her children and jumped out the window to escape Imperial Japanese Marines crashing through the door intent on bayoneting everyone in the burning house. Finding no one, they went on to the next house to continue their massacre on a street not far from the Rizal Memorial ballpark, where Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth both played in sunnier days before the forgotten Battle of Manila. The 100,000 civilians who died in the largest urban battle of the Pacific War -- more than at Hiroshima -- are not remembered in beautiful candles floating down darkened rivers or in flights of doves soaring into the blue sky; there is no anti-American significance to their deaths. But they still live in the fading memory of that woman, who hid for two days in the smoldering ruins of the neighborhood until the first American patrols came into view.
I saw my aunt last as she stood in a window of a Sydney hotel and waved goodbye. I hope to see her again.
If we must remember the sacrifices made in the War in the Pacific, let's honor the Filipinos, the Chinese, the Thai, the Burmese, the Malaysians, the British, the ANZACs and, finally, the Americans. Those who memorialize Hiroshima and Nagasaki are either Japanese seeking to expiate their own guilt for that war or anti-Americans looking for another opportunity to twist history against American accomplishment.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Aug 15, 10:14:00 AM:
Good post, TH.
I highly recommend the book "Ghost Soldiers" to anyone interested in what happened in the South Pacific, or who doesn't understand the Bataan Death March. We spent way too much time discussing the War in Europe, and ignore the fact that Japan started and ended later for America.
A read of the Teddy Roosevelt books is also enlightening. He build our Navy over the protests of even his own Party, seeing the coming agression from the Japanese Navy.
Dropping the bomb was terrible, but the lives we lost leading up to that worse. It's said that it would've resulting in the loss of 1 million US soldiers to take Japan.
By , at
Thu Aug 18, 05:47:00 AM:
Good post. War is hell but you do what you must to win.
By , at
Mon Oct 10, 07:02:00 PM:
One of the worst results of widespread apologism that waves away the horrifyingly evil Japanese murder of hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean and other civilians, is a strong urge in some decent individuals to reflexively think badly of *all* Japanese, even today. After all, the thought goes, if the typical Japanese living today flatly refuses to forthrightly condemn the unthinkable crimes of his ancestors, then what might he do today if given the power?
This is somewhat similar to the deep distrust by many today of *all* Muslims, given that so very few Muslims will flatly condemn the terrorism and murder committed by their own, numerous, radicals. Mainstream Christians and members of other large religions seem to have no such difficulty with plainly condemning terrorism and the violent tyranny of religious minorities (for instance, Pakistani Christians are routinely beaten or murdered in Pakistan for the smallest imagined affronts to Muslims).
