Still, the Marines scarcely pretended to take prisoners (even when the Japanese wanted to surrender), while the score for Pearl Harbor was more than settled at Hiroshima.
A nation that converts its air force into a Kamikaze outfit is sending a clear message: “We will not surrender. We will die fighting.” And Hiroshima was not about “settling a score”. It was about winning a war. Let’s be clear: A Japanese city was vaporized out of a clear blue sky. No one saw it coming. No one had ever envisioned such a thing. AND THEY STILL WOULDN’T SURRENDER! We had to destroy Nagasaki before they changed their mind.
it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.
On the contrary, I find it quite easy. The Nazis bombed Rotterdam. The Nazi waged a blitz against London and killed 40,000 civilians. The Nazis rounded up 6 million Jewish civilians and killed them in cold blood. You think I’ll weep for “scores of thousands of women and children”?
Sherman said it: “War is hell.”
Americans know how to win and I’m proud of it.
ClearCase_guy:
A most excellent post.
Well said.
Not only did it take the Western Allies nearly three years after the German attack on Russia seriously to engage the German army in Normandy, but even then most of the fighting was still on the other side of Europe. In the campaign from D-Day to V-E Day, something like 110,000 American soldiers were killed, as well as about half as many from the combined British-Canadian armies.
Three years to go from a sleepy peace time military to fighting war on two major fronts and supplying the Russians with staggering amounts of arms and equipment? Not too shabby, IMO.
North Africa got a derogatory passing mention in another paragraph and there's no mention of Sicily, Italy or Southern France.
Anyone here ever hear of the Goettge Patrol?
Lt. Col. Goettge was the intelligence officer of the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal. In August 1942, a few weeks after the Marines landed, a Japanese warrant officer informed them that there was a large group of Japanese seeking to surrender.
Goettge, hoping for a debriefing of the prisoners, took a reinforced platoon to bring in the Japanese. The patrol was caught in a trap and annihilated; only two men survived.
The ability to trust the Japanese Army to fight per the rules of war was obliterated by that one action. Once the Marines realized that any offer of survival to a member of the IJA would result in an attempt to murder the offerer, asking for ANYONE to surrender was considered to be a particularly stupid way to get killed.
It may be unfair, but since mind-reading is not a skill taught in boot camp, to assume that a Japanese with his hands up is still trying to kill you helped many Marines come home.
The Pacific War was a take-no-prisoners affair from the get go. Both sides understood that.
The bombing of downtown Rotterdam was a mistake from confused orders, as was the initial bombing of civilian portions of London. Churchill, OTOH, ordered a deliberate attack on the citizenry of Berlin and then many other cities, with eager help from Bomber Harris. And the Allied attacks were not simply dropping bombs here and there, but the purposeful use of incindiary devices to create fire storms to destroy the city being attacked.
Its difficult to see the moral or historical difference between such bombing campaigns against civilians and the gas chambers, except that one side won and the other lost.
'You think I’ll weep for “scores of thousands of women and children”?"
Agreed, but boy, did I get flamed on an earlier thread/post about the Russian gang rapes for making the same point. I hope you fare better than I.
I've started noticing an undercurrent of Nazi sympathy...or at least more of a tone of "It wasn't really the citizens' fault" or "they had no choice but to follow orders" crap on the History Channel lately. I find it unsettling.
"With these truths in mind, this most holy synod makes its own the condemnations of total war already pronounced by recent popes,[2] and issues the following declaration.
"Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation. "
This quote is from a document called "The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World." It comes from the last (Catholic) Ecumenical Council and has the form of a teaching which is solemn and universal.
I quote it here, not because I think you have any particular ties to the Catholic Church (I don't even know you) but because anyone with any ties to "God" or "man himself" ought to seriously consider the moral evaluation of an act which indiscriminately kills noncombatants.
There are very few acts that can't ever be justified by context, pretext or precedent. The deliberate taking of an innocent life is one.
It doesn't matter whether something similar or 1000 times worse was done to you beforehand. It doesn't matter whether it's done by abortion, a bomb, or a baseball bat. It doesn't matter whether you think it'll have good consequences. It doesn't matter whether it's soon covered over with rubble or flowers or a brand-spanking-new city, democracy, free enterprise, and peace.
It's still putting your crosshairs on the innocent and pulling the trigger. It's still murder.
I agree with you on your basic point. The only perfect man was murdered on a cross. But our imperfections cannot become a self imposed impotence when obvious injustices are carried out in the light of day.
Everyone has broken SOME law in their life. Not everyone belongs in prison.
Here's some other views:
"What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world." .......... Robert E. Lee
"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)
"It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it." R. E .Lee
And, if I may humbly attempt to edit these words of this great man to bring them into concert with 21st century America:
It is well that war is unexperienced by the vast majority of citizens, so that we may grow fond of it without restraint.
And finally, a personal favorite:
"The devil's name is dullness." Robert E. Lee
Do thoughtful utterances like that ever leave a bad taste in your mouth?
Couple other points: the firebombings of Hamburg & Dresden (as Tokyo & other Japanese cities) came because both the Nazis and IJA/N were outsourcing munitions/materiel production away from easily targetted plants and into the midst of their civilian populations. In the case of Japan, Dunnigan of the Strategy Page estimates this production was about 30-40% of that nation's total. Put bluntly, these locations were targets - and inasmuch as the horror of war can be such that innocent civilians would die in conflict, still more horrible is the thought that to NOT have destroyed these production points would have meant a longer war at more cost in American and Allied lives.
Given the choice above, even a thousand times, my friend... I say we bomb 'em back into the Stone Age. Every. Damned. Time.