Once the direct witnesses are gone, the history revision will start.
Within a few decades, schools will be teaching that Japan was trying to surrender but Richard Nixon demanded atomic testing on live human subjects.
The story will be that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because those two cities had the largest populations of orphaned children.
“Once the direct witnesses are gone, the history revision will start. ...”
It’s been going on already. For a generation and more.
In 1994 - 21 years ago - staff at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum were completing the restoration of the B-29 _Enola Gay_, from which the first bomb had been dropped in anger. Someone leaked the script of the upcoming 50th-anniversary exhibit, for which the restored bomber was to be the centerpiece.
Read by an indifferent student of history (that is to say, the average American), the script conveyed the definite impression that employment of atomic weapons in combat was a uniquely cruel and irreducibly racist act, perpetrated unprovoked by the neocolonialist American nation, unjustly, against the unoffending populace of an already-prostrate foe.
No mention of Imperial Japanese expansionism could be found. Nothing about various Japanese adventures across China, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma etc; nor attendant atrocities either.
Led by the Air Force Association, various veterans’ groups made common cause and by spring 1995 succeeded in attracting media attention and precipitating Congressional inquiries. The Smithsonian staff evaded, prevaricated, dissembled, and deflected complaints. In sum, they lied about what they were up to: time after time.
A few whistle-blowers helped get the truth out, and NASM superintendent Martin Harwit was forced to resign.
The revisionist claptrap was jettisoned, and the restored _Enola Gay_ went on display with the simplest, barest explanatory placards.
To this day, Harwit cannot admit the truth of what was going on. He still purports to have no idea what the fuss was about.
Through it all, and in the aftermath, any number of revisionist academic historians voiced this refrain: “You did not win. We gave in, out of respect for the WWII veterans, and in deference to their view of events: a slanted view, understandably. But we’re right and you are wrong; we are patient, and we will wait until after the last veteran passes on. Then our view will prevail.”
I was explaining to kids at a recent event that the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were a mercy. Fewer than a million Japanese died. And we expected five million Americans and millions of Japanese to die during the invasion of Japan. The kids said nukes were still evil, and we were wrong to drop it.
I said Japan wouldn’t surrender because of military ethical codes. And that’s why we had to drop TWO bombs on them before they surrendered, and they only did so because of a POW who said we had a dozen more. And even after they surrendered, thousands of military men committed suicide instead of surrender.
These kids had heard that we’d dropped bombs, but not the facts that we HAD to for their sake and ours.
I also explained that if we were after the biggest number dead, we wouldn’t have dropped it on Hiroshima but TOKYO, which was a city of millions even then.