Lives Saved Forgotten in Fallout From Hiroshima

The Arizona Republic ^ | 27 July 2003 | Frank Sackton

[DuncanWaring]

Aug. 6 marks the 58th anniversary of the destruction by an atomic bomb of Hiroshima, a target selected because it was an industrial city. Some 80,000 Japanese were killed in the attack, and another 60,000 died of radiation wounds over the next 40 years.

[fqued]

You want replies to your three issues?

The first is clearly answered in the article and previous posts--read first, ask questions later. Whether Curtis LeMay thought that conventional weapons would end the war is over-balanced by the previously-stated fact that large quantities of conventional weapons had NOT succeeded.

Second question had already been addressed--again, read first, then ask questions. Re-read the article and posts. You will see that, in fact, your statement is not the case.

Third question. Ah, here you have an interesting question, one that can be argued for a long time. Let me start with the third part--that it was unacceptable under international law. Being a lawyer, and one who has studied international law, (and published in international law), tell me precisely how in 1945, this was a violation of then international law? It wasn't. remember this fact, International law is that which nations agree to. It is NOT like constitutional law or statutory law in the USA. And international law has significantly developed since WWII. given the concept of WWII as a total war, and the generally ignoring of anything remotely approaching civility in our enemies during that war, you will be hard pressed to demonstrate that we were in violation of international law. You know not of what you speak.
But again, your third question has already been addressed in the article and the previous posts, so, again
READ FIRST, THEN ASK QUESTIONS!!

[fqued]

Oops, sorry, My post 21 in reply to post 16 should have referenced you.

[Glock22]

How's this?
AUGUST THANKSGIVING

Hampton Sides, in his excellent book Ghost Soldiers, describes events of December 14, 1944 at Puerto Princesa Prison Camp in the Philippines. There 150 American soldiers, survivors of the Bataan Death March, were held captive as slave laborers. Japanese Lieutenant Sato herded the prisoners into their air raid shelters, telling them that a large force of American bombers was approaching. Mr. Sides describes the shelters:

"They were primitive, nothing more than narrow slits dug four feet deep and roofed with logs covered over with a few feet of dirt. There were three main trenches, each about a hundred feet long. On both ends, the structures had tiny crawl-space entrances that admitted one man at a time. Approximately fifty men could fit inside each one, but they had to pack themselves in with their knees tucked under their chins." One prisoner, James Stidham, injured during an earlier bombing raid and now paralyzed, was placed on a stretcher outside the entrance of one of the pits, to be dragged inside if necessary.

Once the Americans were packed in the shelters, Japanese soldiers appeared with buckets and flung the contents into the shelters. The smell told the Americans that it was high-octane aviation fuel, and seconds later the Japanese tossed torches into the trenches and they exploded in fire. Desperate prisoners, bathed in liquid fire, attempted to crawl out of the entrances. They were cut down with machine guns. As for James Stidham, "A soldier stepped over to him and with a perfunctory glance fired two slugs into his face."

The few survivors, badly burned and crawling desperately toward the jungle, were tortured and then bayoneted. Three or four, however, were overlooked and later escaped to tell the tale.

By December 1944 the tide of the war had clearly turned against the Japanese, and it has been argued that grisly mass murders like the one at Puerto Princesa were the acts of a cornered and wounded animal. How, then to explain the events at Nanking? When that Chinese city was captured by the Japanese, they were at the height of their power, victorious wherever they went. None of the Allies were at war with Japan, and no Japanese territory had felt the lash of bomber fleets. Yet, in Nanking, from December to March 1937, the Imperial Army embarked on an orgy of slaughter. At least 250,000 civilians were murdered. Tens of thousands of women and girls were raped and then murdered, usually brutally and slowly. Laughing Japanese soldiers tossed babies into the air and caught them on their bayonets. Brave international observers and aid workers, doing their best to check the bloodbath, confirmed the stories of barbarity.

Multiculturalists insist that all cultures are valid, and that it is bigoted to judge another culture in light of our own. I wonder how they would approach the Japanese culture of World War II, for it was one whose racism, brutality, and sheer sadism left the Nazis far behind. But in those unenlightened days, the minds of the West had not yet been emasculated by Multiculturalism, and so on Aug. 6, 1945 the most vicious culture of the 20th century was consumed by hellfire. Continued on page 2


AUGUST THANKSGIVING page 2

Imagine the Pacific world conquered by the Japanese. How many times would Nanking and Puerto Princesa have been repeated? What would have been the scene in Australia or Hawaii? Our only guide is the behavior of Dai Nippon up to the moment it was crushed; the leopard does not change its spots.

So every August we should thank heaven for Fat Man and Little Boy and what they did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In their terrible fireballs a truly monstrous culture vanished, hopefully forever, and certainly to the benefit of everyone, including Japan. The murderous philosophy of Bushido was deeply ingrained in the Japanese mind, and could not be educated out of them. There was no logic which would remove it; by August 1945 it was clear to all, including the Japanese leaders, that defeat was inevitable. Still they fought on fanatically, not for victory, but only to kill as many Americans as possible before they themselves went down. Nuclear fire vaporized Bushido and made possible the thriving, peaceful democracy which is modern Japan. If not for the mission of the Enola Gay, and the bravery and sacrifice of Allied soldiers in the years leading up to it, Japan would have continued unchecked in its descent into hell, for there was nothing at all in the Japanese world to stop it.

Winston Churchill famously said of such nations that "They are either at your throat or at your feet." A people who can do what Japan did are incapable of occupying a middle ground. They can either put the world to the sword, or, as today, renounce arms with the same pathologic intensity, but they cannot carry a sword to be drawn only in self-defense.


Each year at this time in America you can count on the appearance of self-righteous demonstrations lamenting the horror of August 1945. It's in our national character to be gnawed by conscience over our sins. It's part of what made us willing to spill the blood of so many of our young men to free Europe and Asia from worse than slavery, and, irritating though the ignorance of peaceniks may be, we must remember that they couldn't march or even exist if we weren't a fundamentally good nation. While we blush with shame over the internment of our Japanese-Americans, and rightly so, we should also take a moment to recognize the deafening silence in Japan today about Nanking and a thousand other atrocities. As the well-intentioned fools release their doves this year at Ground Zero in Hiroshima, let us remember that there would be no such peace demonstrations anywhere along the Pacific Rim if America hadn't rained destruction on the Japanese Empire.

What lit up the sky over Hiroshima on that August morning in 1945 was not the dawning of a new age of terror. It was the Rising Sun not of Imperial Japan, but of a new age of lasting peace, the completion of the world's emancipation from a racist horror, and the beginning of the liberation of the Japanese people from themselves.

[VOA]

They reported that it was a catastrophe but one that could not be repeated.
The high command ruled that the war would go on.

Citation please.
This would go a long way to explaining who was at least responsible for Nagasaki.

[Doctor Stochastic]

How many Japanese civilians would have died if conventional bombing were continued for several more months?

How many Japanese soldiers would have died fighting the US invasion forces? The Soviets destroyed the Japanese in Manchuria rather quickly so even more casualties must be added.

While the savings of US was the primary objective of the Truman administration (and correctly so), saving Japanese lives was a good idea too. Post war history has vindicated Truman's actions.

[uglybiker]

Bookmarked BUMP.

[Cyber Liberty]

That makes sense to me. I think they figured the Little Boy was no big deal, but the Plutonium in the Fat Man told them that a major rubicon had been crossed.

[Cyber Liberty]

I think the specifics of the scenario are conjecture, but the stuff about the relative complexsities of the bombs is true. U235 is hard to get, but easy to make a bomb. Plutonium is easy to get, but tough to make the bomb.

It could not have escaped the notice of the Japanese that the two bombs were totally different, and that the contrast was a perfect demonstration that the US had overcome not one, but both technical plateaus. That's as plausible as any other reason I've seen floated for the surrender after not one, but two bombs.

[skeeter]

The irony is we ended up agreeing to a conditional surrender anyway.

[livius]

History has indeed vindicated Truman.

But, speaking of Hiroshima, I almost had a stroke on Sunday when I read the idiotic words of the (Catholic) bishop of St. Augustine, FL, Bp. Victor Galleone, comparing 9/11 to US actions in Japan. Fortunately, a number of people in the diocese complained, pointing out that they are nowhere near the same, particularly since the good bishop seemed to have forgotten that there was a war going on with the Japanese.

He is an incredibly self-righteous little man who hates the US (I actually heard him give a sermon saying he could understand that Americans might feel angry about 9/11, because he felt angry once when somebody snatched his gold chain in Nicaragua, but when they thought about it, they would realize that it was really their fault, just as having a gold chain in a poor country had been his fault.)

Sorry for the digression - my original point was going to be that the peacenik and anti-American crowd doesn't care about the truth or about history. Facts are not even a minor bump in their road.

[Arthur McGowan]

Not fighting for Unconditional Surrender does not mean settling for piddling objectives, or the status quo. You have erected a false alternative.

[I. M. Trenchant]

Because donmeaker volunteered no response to my request for the source of his information, I conclude, with you, that his post was based on conjecture, and because Duncan Waring also volunteered no response, I have had to settle for the juvenilia offered up by the likes of fqued. Thanks for troubling to respond to my query -- and for the civility of your reply.

[Cyber Liberty]

It wasn't my theory, so I had nothing vested in it. I also noticed the dearth in commentary following your request.

[I. M. Trenchant]

I realized it was not your own conjecture, and was therefore all-the-more gratified -- and touched -- that you troubled to respond to my query when no one else, excepting a few chronic scolders -- with predigested agenda having nothing to do with my queries -- did their thing. I have posted in FR almost since its inception, much more extensively in the early years, and mostly in defence of Richard Nixon. This made me few friends, but I persist in thinking that the national obsession with the notion that Nixon invented 'sin' borders on the pathological. The upcoming 'anniversary program' by the lib-left sponsors at PBS seems to me to border on a persistent national hysteria. Whether he knew of the breakin in advance (and I think there is little chance that he did), Magruder's recent claim is so obviously nothing more than a 'promo' for the PBS program that it insults the 'general intelligence' to view his latter-day hallucinating as anything but PR.

If his information were bona fide, the publishers of Magruder's book, about a quarter-century ago, should sue him for not saying so then ! I live for the day when one of these anniversary programs will pause to reflect on Watergate in the context of Lyndon Johnson's order to J. Edgar Hoover to bug Nixon's election plane during his run against Humphrey in 1968. For me, LBJ's action was a far greater abuse of power, and more serious threat to the electoral system than 'Watergate'. I say something of this sort every year about this time in FR, so please forgive my waxing on about my own agenda. I was truly surprised yesterday when CNN, of all unlikely networks, showed extensive visuals of Nixon and Hope (their ski-jump noses were like bookends)-- with smiles that could light up a convention hall. CNN went on at length about Hope having been closer to Nixon than to any of the other U.S. presidents. That must have been hard for the lib-left to endure, but I loved it, if only because it stressed, above all else, their bond of patriotism.

[wjcsux]

It WAS immoral for us to fight for "unconditional surrender."
What would you have us do instead?

[donmeaker]

The source was "MAGIC" decrypts. The US has penetrated the Japanese diplomatic cipher very well, and used data from it throughout the war.

The Japanese ambassador to Germany was most helpful, reviewing the damage done to major air attacks, and describing in detail the new locations of the tooling that survived. The Germans and Japanese never did figure out that the diplomatic codes were hopelessly compromised.

In many ways MAGIC was even more useful to the US than the ULTRA decrypts were to Great Britain. MAGIC continued after the war, and messages to Japanese embassies explaining the reasons for accepting peace, and the attempts that would be made to blame the US for use of "inhumane" weapons, so that the loss could eventually be redeemed.

Alas, the book I read had MAGIC in the title, but it has been 15 years since I read it. I hope that you can help me recall it.

[donmeaker]

I beg your pardon for not responding earlier.

I am, alas, not clever enough to make that kind of thing up, being mildly familiar with the physics and chemistry for nuclear weapons, and having a passing aquaintance with military tactics and strategy, I was not able to put two and two together till I read it in a book some 15 years ago. That book had "MAGIC" in its name, which was the project that decrypted and translated Japanese diplomatic ciphers. Alas, I can not recall the name of the book, but it stated that MAGIC was probably more important than the vaunted "ULTRA" project.

I would appreciate your help, if you could jog my memory a bit. I usually buy such books, but this one I got from a library.

[Consort]

Precisely because the enemy, in such a case, cannot evaluate his options.

You don't give the enemy options. You select the option and then you impose it on them. Same thing with giving peace a chance. In order to give peace a chance, you have to first impose it.

[ThirdMate]

I had the great pleasure last year of visiting the museum and memorial in Nagasaki. The museum was very good in objectively and graphically displaying the horror of the bombing, but it failed to place it in any context. No mention was made of Japanese atrocities or the warrior cult which perpetuated those atrocties. I left feeling very sad, sad that the bomb couldn't have been produced much sooner and ended the earlier

[I. M. Trenchant]

It was good of you to respond. I'll surely get back to you if I manage to trace the book you have in mind. Having a dictorate in Biochemistry, and having taken several graduate courses in Statistical & Quantum Mechanics, Radiation Chemistry and Advanced Chemical Thermodynamics, my interest in what you said is more than a passing one. Thanks again.