Posted on 08/11/2010 7:19:41 AM PDT by nuconvert
WASHINGTON: Some 25 years ago I was asked to speak at a ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of the death of the famous war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, who had been killed by a Japanese sniper on a small island off Okinawa in the last days of World War II. The memorial was held in the Punch Bowl, the national military cemetery overlooking Honolulu.
It was a mid-morning affair that attracted more than a thousand spectators, most of them veterans of the bloody campaigns in the Pacific from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima and Okinawa ― all of them "Ernie's boys.'' In the mist and sunshine of a glorious Hawaii morning with the weathered faces of America's best generation surrounding me in campaign hats and medals, it was one of the most humbling experiences I have ever had.
I recalled that day and the memories of loved ones lost during that bleak time of my boyhood as I read that Barack Obama had deployed the American ambassador to Japan as an official delegate to the 65th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, a decision that at best can only be described as insensitive to the feelings of millions of Americans who still remember vividly the pain and anguish caused by the Japanese Empire in World War II.
How surprising that Obama, who grew up not far from the sacred ground of Pearl Harbor and the cemetery where the victims of Japanese treachery lie, would become the first American chief executive to do so since the conflict in the Pacific ended in August of 1945 with the only two atomic detonations in anger in history.
(Excerpt) Read more at koreatimes.co.kr ...
You ARE second-guessing history!If you had taken the requisite amount of time to study the War in The Pacific,you wouldn’t make such foolishly quaint references such as”children playing in the streets”etc.,etc.,The Japanese believed in TOTAL WAR.Those children would been armed to the teeth(as would every other japanese)had we chosen to invade.It was estimated that we might very well have suffered a million casualties(dead and wounded),and the japanese millions more!!!
Sure. We'll allow you to be swayed by "feelings" detached from reason and reality.
But is that a good thing...?
the Japanese had no such reservations about their killing of civilians during their brutal butchery throughg China prior to our entry. Sure Fat Man and Little Boy took out many civilians in a single blast but tha Japanese probably killed just as many during their tour of China.
Personally, I had nothing to do with World War Two but I admire and applaud Harry Truman for doing what he did. He looked at the alternatives and didn’t like them. The shortest way to win the war was to send the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car to do what they had to do. Well done President Truman, 65 years on.
My Dad was on Okinawa awaiting the invasion of Japan. So, pardon me if I take your statement above and have the luxury of being able to remember those things for myself.
It is good to think about such things. Only thing I would add is that in 1945 the line between military and civilian in Japan was impossible to discern.
Regarding jihadis, there is no point in taking a moral stance when dealing with an existential threat that rejects our notions of morality.
Regarding activities of WW2: WWI was waged exclusively against enemy troops. Germany was back for a re-match within 20 years. WW2 brought the war to the ENTIRE populace: the wealthy, the poor, the women, the children. We convinced the entire population that going to war against us was a terrible idea, and we haven't heard a peep out of Germany OR Japan in several generations.
The best way to pacify a country is to have it be the case that when a man speaks approvingly of war, his women scream at him in rage and terror.
Going back to the Global Jihad, they can send suicide bombers against us forever, as long as their money people keep financing the jihad. If you want to stop the jihad, it's necessary to go against the people who finance it, and the clerics that preach for it.
WWII was total war. At least as many people - including “children happily playing in the streets, the moms reading books to thier children, and all those kinds of things” - were killed during the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo.
War is H#ll
If the A-bombs hadn’t been used, even more of those people - FAR more - would have suffered and died just as horribly.
My Dad was on Okinawa awaiting the invasion of Japan. So, pardon me if I take your statement above and have the luxury of being able to remember those things for myself.
Not only did your father sacrifice but your entire family did as well. It is so easy for others to dismiss your feelings. I sincerely appreciate my wonderful country and if it were not for your father and all of the other heroes of that time I would not be a free man.
God Bless and Thank You
Perhaps you should think of the young men that had been plucked off the streets of the United States to fight in far away lands who would never get the chance to father young children or to return to the wife and children they had.
I’m rather certain they would have rather been watching their children play in the streets at home, rather than suffer the brutality and indignity of having their body parts strewn across the ground of some South Pacific atol.
We can all think of an idyllic setting with a nuke going off overhead, and mourn the loss of life. We can also face what happened knowing that other life was preserved by this act.
How many U. S. citizens are alive today because their dads returned home to father them? How many of their offspring are out there?
I’d venture to say we’re talking about tens of millions of people in all. Focus on them. Focus on them playing in the front yard, or carrying on their activities in idyllic settings.
And mourn for the tens of millions who do not play in these idyllic settings, because an empire decided to conquer other nations, and be as brutal as it could be in the process.
Cry for our own tens of millions who do not exist, before you cry for their hundreds of thousands who ceased to exist.
“I am not 2nd guessing history and I’ve heard all the arguments for and reasons why we dropped the bomb. Yet, even so, I think of the children happily playing in the streets, the moms reading books to thier children, and all those kinds of things as a bomb comes falling down from the sky. Rather than fight army to army, we chose to drop hellacious bombs on civilians, it just doesn’t sit well with me, and I hope it never happens again. I’m proud to be an American and greatful to the Good Lord that I was born here, and my children, nonetheless, when I think of those bombs, I think of those things.”
It’s okay to feel that way, any life lost in war is a tragedy. But remember, too, our citizens, military and civilian, who were bombed and killed one sunny morning in Pearl Harbor, when no state of war existed. We had to drop those bombs, because hundreds of thousands of more lives would be lost trying to invade the island of the nation that would never surrender. It was probably one of the hardest decisions to make, to drop those bombs, in the history of the world.
I was behind a car yesterday with the “survivor of Pearl Harbor” plate on it. Ask them, if we did the right thing. Ask them if your feelings are okay - and I think you’ll find that they agree with you, but also know from being there, why we had to do it.
It’s something that will never reconcile itself for anyone. We didn’t start the war, but we HAD to end it, to stop the killing of millions of our people, and theirs.
The Purple Hearts we award today were made for the anticipated casualties of Operation Coronet. The Japanese killed 14 million people. That society of Paper Houses also put daggers in the hands of eight year old boys.
Japan was a Warrior nation!
All parties understood actions taken and the consequences of those actions.
No argument here, Scythian, my FRiend. I just have a different view of what war is. I don’t make a distinction that includes ‘total’ war. I also don’t think war has any subsets, e.g., Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., whether they’re declared by Congress or not. The compartmentalized thinking of politicians and ‘rules of war’ or ‘rules of engagement’ concepts don’t work for me, either. At all.
And yes. War is freaking ugly. The Japanese, IIRC, have a saying that business is war. Interesting thought there.
I have thought we have been actively engaged in Holy War with Muslims since 1979 at least. I hardened my conclusions after 9/11. From a certain perspective, it is all inclusive, yes.
While croos teaching in high school ( I normally taught engineering tech, but for a day I taught a history class on the technology we use today that started development in WW2)
When we got to nuclear energy, Hiroshima and Nagasaki came up, as the normal teacher of that class had taught that already. I aske the class if they had covered the Rape of nanking and the japanese occupation of china... Of course not. We got online, and covered the 1 million plus deaths around nanking, and the rape of all females 8 -80 in the province. I then asked them what they deemed worse, 1 million dead over 4 months, or 200,00 dead in an instant. They all agreed the rape of nanking was worse. I then asked if you were the president faced with lsing 1 million US soldiers and 10 million japanese, which would you choose, the bomb or the invasion... 100% went for the bomb. At the end of the day they wondered why their textbooks didn’t cover the subject the way I had... go figure
A lot of discussion on this topic in a thread from yesterday — Commemorating a Major U.S. War Crime — http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2568320/posts
Its fine with me.
I love American troops (and want them to come home safe...) and their families far more than I care for enemy civilians. I think about all the children who grew up with their fathers, all the wives and girlfriends welcoming their men home, and I think - “Good call, Harry.”
We did the same to Dresden and Tokyo, only without Nuclear weapons. Those “Moms” worked in factories building weapons that killed Americans. Those “children” could have become soldiers who killed Americans. The soldiers who were killing Americans were children of those “Moms”. Those civilians allowed their country to be taken over by madmen and those madmen survived only as long as the public allowed them to. They brought that on themselves, but don’t worry, we are in the process of doing the same thing right now.
Your desire to see Americans suffer will soon be quenched. We are electing madmen and encouraging them to destroy our country. When the end comes, and it will be awful, people, supposedly innocent people will suffer and die, and it will be our own fault. We will have no one to blame but ourselves. Trust me no German or Japanese person will feel one bit sorry for us.
The bombs were good. I like my japanese hifi and plasma tvs made by hard working conquered japanese people. So less of them died and we got Sony. Win win.
And we got some good baseball players, too.
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