Posted on 05/27/2016 10:47:27 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
...So I crawled in the total darkness, and I got to the opening. And by the time I got there, the building was on fire. That meant most of the girls were burnt to death. Although that happened in the morning, it was already very dark, like twilight. And the two other girls managed to come out, and three of us looked around. And in the darkness, I could see some dark moving object approaching to me. They happened to be human beings shuffling from the center part of the city to where I was.
They just didn't look like human beings. I called them ghosts, ghost-like people because their hair was standing up. They were covered with blood and burned and bludgeoned and swollen, and the flesh was hanging from the bones. Parts of their bodies were missing, and some were carrying their own eyeballs in their hands. And as they collapsed, their stomach burst open, intestines stretching out. Everybody was slowly shuffling. Nobody was running. And the shouting for help. Nobody had that kind of physical and psychological strength left.
Well, we three girls were reluctantly in good shape. We could walk. We could carry. So we went to the nearby stream and washed off the blood in the dirt from the bodies. And when the darkness fell, we just sat on the hill, and all night we watched the entire city burn.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve
I’ve seen the movie but I haven’t red the book
Barry would have waited to apologize but couldn’t pass up this Memorial Day weekend.
6 of my mother’s 7 brothers fought in WWII..
One died in Italy in 1944 the rest were in the Pacific..
at least 3 were coast watchers in the Solomon Islands..they would tell us stories of their experiences..
One convinced me that the Army/Navy would parachute hot baked potatoes down to him complete with lots of butter...I was so concerned that he had got enough to eat that he told me that tale and I believed him for years LOL
Dad’s youngest brother was only 14 and Nana wouldn’t sign for him to go so he went to Australia and signed up there under a different name...
as he couldn’t write home in case he was found out she never knew what had happened to him for the whole 6 years or that he was in the war until he came home again..
Why are you “sorry” for having your opinion?
In the early 1970s I was stationed on Okinawa and learnt some of the history..
at the south end of Okinawa there are caves where people hid from the Allies in those final days of the war..
there was a group of young school girls who were told if the Americans caught them they would be raped so they killed themselves and their bodies were found in one of the big caves...
another group were Japanese generals etc who threw themselves over the cliffs ...
When we visited the spot there were Japanese people in the cave worshiping the girls or saying silent prayers at the cliff top ...
It was eerie to say the least...
The United States should offer the following apology:
“We are very sorry that the actions of the Japanese government in launching a surprise attack on America, including American civilians, at Pearl Harbor, its pursuit of an unjust, aggressive war of expansion, its unreasoning pursuit of that war, its inhumane treatment of its enemies, military and civilian alike, and its decision to defend itself after the point where Japan had clearly lost the war for no apparent end than to vindictively inflict millions of needless casualties upon America and its allies, put President Truman in a position where he felt the most reasonable and efficient option for ending the senseless slaughter was to drop atomic bombs.
I have watched some of the great Akira Kurasawa’s earliest movies - propaganda films designed to booster the morale of the Japs. (He would later write that he was totally against Japanese imperialism, but who knows?) Anyway, his propaganda movies are the most depressing, ludicrous examples of good filmmaking in advance of an evil cause. The characters are the very definition of mind-numbed robots, worker-bee drones like something out of a Yellow Peril comic book. How this cheered up the Japs is beyond me but they were crazy at the time.
The question I continue to have is why didn't she die of radiation poisoning and how was it that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were able to rebuild so fast if nuclear bombs were to rend such sites uninhabitable for hundreds of years?
Not using the bombs would have resulted in at least a half million American dead and three million or more Japs, plus millions more hurting. Outside of a few individuals who deserve to suffer, I prefer quick, clean kills, so I guess I'm humane.
No argument from me on that. The bombing was the right thing to do, absolutely.
Airburst vs. groundburst, maybe. The fireball probably didn't contact the ground, so less contamination.
My uncles would rarely talk about the war to anyone, much less the family. But they did share some of their stories with my father as they grew older. He's told them to me numerous times but I never tire hearing of their exploits.
I couldn't imagine going six years not knowing where my son was or if he was still alive. What a time that was.
Should the war have continued there would have been waves of B-29s firebombing their cities every night. And by day the onslaught of the well fed and well armed American soldiers.
Thank your emperor for bombing Pearl Harbor to get the ball rolling.
Those poor girls, too bad Japan turned all those Korean and Chinese girls into military whores, crushed and/or barbecued whole cities throughout Asia, tortured US servicepeople, murdered thousands in "medical" experiments...
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