Posted on 08/12/2015 4:16:55 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
Flash! Never mind! (0:50)
The News of the Week in Review
Historic Headlines of the Pacific War – The Start and the Climax – 20
Fifteen News Questions – 21
“---Why We Are Determined There Shall Be No Next War” – President Truman (cartoons) – 22, 26
The Story Behind the Atomic Bomb (by Waldemar Kaempffert, first-time contributor) – 23-24
What the Atomic Bomb Means – A Digest of Opinion – 24
Pattern of Future War is Changed (by Sidney Shallet) – 25
“He Must Never Rise Again” (cartoon) – 25
Atomic Power in War and Peace (charts) – 26
Answers to Fifteen News Questions – 26
Twenty-Five Highlights in the History of the War with Japan (map) – 27
The Pacific War: From Bare Defense to Overwhelming Victory (by Hanson W. Baldwin) – 28-29
http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/7/12.htm
August 12th, 1945 (SUNDAY)
FAR EAST: Soviet forces advance towards northern Korea and land on Sakhalin Island.
KURILE ISLANDS: The USN light cruiser USS Concord (CL-10) and three destroyers bombard Suribachi Airfield on Paramushiru Island for 20 minutes beginning at 0046 hours local. The last shot fired by a USN vessel is fired by the USS Concord. Four US Eleventh Air Force B-24s make a combined visual and radar bomb run over Kataoka on Shimushu Island; three more bomb Suribachi Airfield on Paramushiru Island, hitting runways and buildings; one B-24 flies a radar-ferret mission; all of these missions are in support of the naval bombardment. USN PB4Y-2 Privateers of Patrol Bombing Squadron One Hundred Twenty (VPB-120) based on Attu attack Kurabu Airfield on Paramushiru Island.
JAPAN: US Far East Air Force B-25s and A-26 Invaders hit Chiran and Kanoya Airfields while other A-26s and A-20s and P-47s hit the towns of Kushikino, Akune, and Miyazaki; more B-25s and fighter-bombers hit shipping and communications targets on Kyushu, the northern Ryukyu Islands, and between Japan and Korea; the aircraft claim several small merchant ships sunk and damaged, and numerous bridges, railroads, factories, and other targets of opportunity hit.
On this quiet Sunday, junior Army officers meet with War Minister Anami at his house, attempting to enlist his assistance in their plans for a coup.
Okinawa: A Japanese submarine sinks the destroyer USS THOMAS F NICKEL and the landing craft USS OAK HILL.
The battleship USS Pennsylvania is torpedoed and damaged by a Japanese plane in Buckner Bay while lying at anchor. Hit well aft, PENNSYLVANIA suffered extensive damage. Twenty men are killed and ten injured. Many compartments are flooded and PENNSYLVANIA settles heavily by the stern. The flooding is brought under control by efforts of Pennsylvania’s repair parties and the prompt assistance of two salvage tugs. Tomorrow she will be towed to more shallow water where salvage operations will continue. (Randall Steigner) (military.com)
PACIFIC OCEAN: Aboard destroyer escort USS Levy, Capt. H.D. Grow negotiated and accepted the surrender of Mille Atoll.
CANADA: Destroyer HMCS Algonquin departed Halifax for Far East.
Destroyer HMCS Chaudiere paid off Sydney, Nova Scotia.
MEXICO: Douglas DC-2-243 (ex USAAF C-39, USAAF serial number 38-518), msn 2075, registered XA-DOT by the Mexican airline Cia Mexicana de Aviacion SA, crashes in poor weather near Ixtaccihuati. All four crew and 12 passengers are killed.
Thank you for these great posts- it is amazing to read history as it happened day by day
Did I see pics of Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl?!?
“Arnold Puts Bong Above Atomic Bomb.”
That could have been better phrased ...
Canada Ping!
As a Christian, I especially enjoy seeing human traits and behaviors such as you described arising in such disparate cultures, because once again they demonstrate the universality of man's basic nature.
Thank you.
I come at this with a perhaps unique perspective: I am a Yank on my mother's side, with my gggrandfather an Irishman who got off the boat in 1860 and immediately joined the Union army like so many Irish-off-the-boat; but I am a Reb on my father's side, who was born in TX and raised in OK, and my ggrandfather fought for AR. Moreover, I moved to FL and eventually married Mrs. C, who is pure-bred rural Southern and would have felt very much at home with my father, though he died 20 years ago.
So there's no animus in my analogy of the Japanese to the CSA. To prove this, the analogy breaks down at a significant point: the CSA, unlike the Japanese military, was made up primarily of Christians.
One of the precursors to the Civil War is the Second Great Awakening, a massive revival that swept America in the 1830s and 40s, the end of which coincided with the Panic of 1837. Since this is a WWII thread I won't go into this too deeply, except to say that the concepts of honor and respect that existed in the CSA were based on Christian principles, so that the South generally did not engage in war atrocities as the Japanese did.
The Japanese concept of honor and respect stopped at its shores: the Japanese called it kokutai 国体, the essence of Japanese-ness that no other people deserved to share, so that slaughtering or torturing or raping Chinese or Filipinos or Americans or Brits was no different than a meatpacker slaughtering cattle or chickens--it was as perverse a sense of humanity as the Nazi's belief in Aryan purity.
Southern Christianity, by contrast, only made one error (though a huge one), the error of not seeing African slaves as fully human. But it would never have occurred to Southerners that Northerners weren't fully human. As a result, there was no Rape of Gettysburg, no Baltimore Death March. Moreover, the Southerners did not want to conquer the North and rule it with an iron fist, the way Japan wanted to conquer everyone around them and rule them with an iron fist; the South just wanted to be left alone, to form its own society.
But there was Andersonville.
This is chock full of implications, I could spend all day writing them out, except that I don't have all day :-) so I'll try to pick the big ones.
1) This is a story that the Japanese readers would have immediately recognized. There was a Japanese belief, based on Chinese writings from maybe 1800 years ago, that the Japanese are descended from the original ruler of Wu, Taibo. So the story isn't just some ancient Chinese history that completely loses the American reader of the NYT; rather, this is something that the Japanese would have seen as almost a part of their own ancient prehistory, much as some Americans might see the Norman/Saxon battles in medieval England as part of their ancient prehistory.
2) Wu was located in the east of China, where today's Nanjing and Shanghai are located. Its area is part of the area that is still occupied by Japan as of this date in '45, and where the Rape of Nanking occurs. Yueh, further south, is in the part of China that is not conquered by Japan.
3) Confucius' quote is significant in three ways. First, the Japanese leadership sees Confucianism, combined with State Shinto, as essential to kokutai: Shinto is the religion that keeps the Emperor divine, and Confucianism is the ethical system that keeps the Japanese tied together as a unit.
Second, Confucius is alive during the Wu/Yueh back-and-forth, so the implication is that his quote was specifically referring to Wu/Yueh. Confucius himself was advisor to the Lu kingdom, which is on the northern border of Wu, and his teachings would have spread to Wu in his lifetime.
Third, quoting Confucius would be like an American in WWII quoting the Bible: to the Yomiuri reader it would carry some weight.
4) Now to the backstory. The Zhou dynasty lasts 800 years, from around 1000-200 BC. Early on, a brother of the Zhou emperor, Taibo, establishes his kingdom of Wu within the dynasty. Over centuries the kingdom becomes the big dog in eastern China, taking over kingdoms to its west and north. In 494 BC, Wu subdues, but not quite conquers, Yueh to the south. Eight years later, when Wu's army is tied up in the north, Yueh rises up, conquers Wu's capital, and by the end of the next decade, becomes the ruler of Wu.
Can you see what's coming? Yomiuri is telling its readers that the allies, like Wu, are about to subdue Japan, like Yueh. But, according to the Yomiuri quote of Confucius, that's the easy part: "it is the maintaining of victory and not the winning of it which is difficult." IOW, the Japanese will give up for the moment, bide their time, wait for a future moment when the Allies are occupied elsewhere and not watching...and then strike back and conquer the allies, just as Yueh did to Wu.
That's the "political and military farsightedness" that Yomiuri is referring to. The Japanese will look like they're surrendering, they'll act like they're surrendering, but they'll wait a generation--or two, or three--and then catch us off-guard.
At least that's what Yomiuri is telling the people. But it doesn't happen. And the reason it doesn't happen, I think, is as we've discussed before, the American occupation does the last thing the Japanese ever expected it to do: it treats the Japanese, not as subdued people to be conquered, but as, well, sinners who need to repent. The Japanese think like conquerors; the Americans think like Christians.
did they really think there would be no more war.
wow.
But in 5 years they’d be fighting in Korea.
That word or name means something totally different in America right now.
It’s a regular family name in Korea too
“”so that slaughtering or torturing or raping Chinese or Filipinos or Americans or Brits was no different than a meatpacker slaughtering cattle or chickens””
everybody forgets the Koreans. Nobody saw that war coming at all
Hundreds of thousands of Koreans were killed and hundreds of thousands were enslaved by the Japanese including “comfort women” (sex slaves)
death march
but there was Sherman destroying everything in his path
When you first explained that concept/belief-system several days ago, I was astounded to learn of it. Not astounded that an island nation might develop it, but astounded at its raw heathen (or, perhaps better, Godless) arrogance--indeed, at the time you pointed out it existed in the absence of a Judeo-Christian worldview.
I mentioned it, in my astonishment, to my wife, and I likened it to the Jews' resolute disdain and abhorrence of Gentiles. How resolute? Even the Apostles, who had lived with and learned from Jesus, retained it fully well after His ascension. They were incredulous finally to learn that the Gospel applied also to Gentiles! Numbskulls and knuckleheads...just like the rest of us.
May one presume, with the great increase in international contact and continuing Christian missionary efforts since 1945, that kokutai has lessened substantially?
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