Posted on 12/06/2016 2:07:11 PM PST by ColdOne
Pearl Harbor Published December 06, 2016 Associated Press Facebook Twitter livefyre Email Print
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Pearl Harbor survivor marks 75 years since attack
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won't apologize for Japan's attack when he visits the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor later this month, the government spokesman said Tuesday.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that "the purpose of the upcoming visit is to pay respects for the war dead and not to offer an apology."
Abe announced late Monday that he would have a summit meeting with President Barack Obama in Hawaii and visit Pearl Harbor. He will be the first Japanese leader to go to the site of the Japanese attack that propelled the United States into World War II.
The unexpected announcement came two days before the 75th anniversary of the attack and six months after Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima for victims of the U.S. atomic bombing of that city at the end of the same war.|
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Excellent! You can not legitimately apologize for someone else’s acts.
You may be spot on. Unfortunately.
This residency can’t end soon enough.
“Current people of Japan, Germany, the US, the UK etc have nothing to apologize for. They had no role in the national polices and the decision the political Leftist are demanding apologies for.”
Agree.
Anyway, Japan had been apologizing every year on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor attacks for as long as I can remember. Important thing is to learn from history and not repeat it. Otherwise an apology is can be meaningless.
I agree with him.
The Japanese Empire invaded French Indochina, replete with their usual atrocities and war crimes - powered by American oil, and using lots of American manufactured goods. Congress passed the law authorizing the President to restrict exports. Although the threat was very real, he did not actually cut off the oil.
I am pretty sure that the Japanese were sorry about Pearl Harbor though:
That pic makes me shudder———but it was necessary.
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I totally agree with you.
War is war and the past is the past. We do not apologies for defeating them in battle.
The USA and Japan are friends now. We were the victors. No sense in humiliating them further.
War apologies are for snowflakes.
Twice in 25 years the world fought wars that killed a significant portion of the worlds population.
Why did we not have a third one around 1970? Because every time politicians started making the mistakes that would lead to a third world war, the images of those mushroom clouds was stuck in the back of their heads.
Those bombs killed the notion of “total war” between groups of nations dead. We haven't figured out how to live in peace with each other yet but we have come a long way from the era of massive world wide slaughter that existed from 1914 to 1945
I’m sick of this apology crap. History is history. The PM isn’t responsible for the decision to bomb Pearl Harbor, and neither is anyone who is still alive. Let it rest.
Here’s a question for you: Should we (the US) apologize for slavery?
Oh? Should the US apologize for slavery? Is this the road you want to go down?
That's what Obama will apologize for.
Totally agree. Japan today is one of our closest allies, that speaks more volumes to me than any "apology" could.
When William Hanson joined the American army, imperial Japan was still largely unscathed. The closest American land forces to Japan were well over 2,000 miles away. Only a few planners like Curtis LeMay knew that thousands of enlisted civilians like my father in a few months of training could kill both brutally and efficiently, if given the proper equipment and leadership — and backed by the vast industrial capacity of the American nation. My grandfather, a farmer who twenty-seven years earlier had left the same forty acres, also served in a democratic army. Frank Hanson ended up as a corporal in the 91st Infantry Division and was gassed in the Argonne. He told my father that he should quickly get used to killing — and that he probably would either not come back, or would return crippled. Americans, my grandfather added, had to learn to fight fast.
A little more than a year after his enlistment, on March 9, 1945, a 400-mile-long trail of 334 B-29s left their Marianas bases, 3,500 newly trained airmen crammed in among the napalm. The gigantic planes each carried ten tons of the newly invented jellied gasoline incendiaries. Preliminary pathfinders had seeded flares over Tokyo in the shape of an enormous fiery X to mark the locus of the target. Planes flew over in small groups of three, a minute apart. Most were flying not much over 5,000 feet above Japan. Five-hundred-pound incendiary clusters fell every 50 feet. Within thirty minutes, a 28-mile-per-hour ground wind sent the flames roaring out of control. Temperatures approached 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The Americans flew in without guns, and LeMay was not interested in shooting down enemy airplanes. He instead filled the planes with napalm well over their theoretical maximum loads. He wished to destroy completely the material and psychological capital of the Japanese people, on the brutal theory that once civilians had tasted what their soldiers had done to others, only then might their murderous armies crack. Advocacy for a savage militarism from the rear, he thought, might dissipate when one's house was in flames. People would not show up to work to fabricate artillery shells that killed Americans when there was no work to show up to. Soldiers who kill, rape, and torture do so less confidently when their own families are at risk at home.
The planes returned with their undercarriages seared and the smell of human flesh among the crews. Over 80,000 Japanese died outright; 40,918 were injured; 267,171 buildings were destroyed. One million Japanese were homeless. Air currents from the intense heat sent B-29s spiraling thousands of feet upward. Gunners like my father could see the glow of the inferno from as far away as 150 miles as they headed home. The fire lasted four days. My father said he could smell burned flesh for miles on the way back to Tinian. Yet, only 42 bombers were damaged, and 14 shot down. No single air attack in the history of conflict had been so devastating.
Unfortunately for the Japanese, the March 9 raid was the beginning, not the end, of LeMay's incendiary campaign. He sensed that his moment — a truly deadly man in charge of a huge democratic force free of government constraint — had at last arrived, as the imperial Japanese command was stunned and helpless. All the old problems — the weather, the enemy fighters, the jet stream, the high-altitude wear on the engines, political limitations on bombing civilians — were now irrelevant. There was to be no public objection to LeMay's burning down the industrial and residential center of the Japanese empire — too many stories about Japanese atrocities toward subjugated peoples and prisoners of war had filtered back to the American people. To a democratic nation in arms, an enemy's unwarranted aggression and murder is everything, the abject savagery of its own retaliatory response apparently nothing.
Suddenly, all of Japan lay defenseless before LeMay's new and unforeseen plan of low-level napalm attack. To paraphrase General Sherman, he had pierced the shell of the Japanese empire and had found it hollow. LeMay had thousands of recruits, deadly new planes, and a blank check to do whatever his bombers could accomplish. Over 10,000 young Americans were now eager to work to exhaustion to inflict even more destruction. Quickly, he upped the frequency of missions, sending his airmen out at the unheard-of rate of 120 hours per month — the Eighth Air Force based in England had usually flown a maximum of 30 hours per month — as they methodically burned down within ten days Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka before turning to smaller cities. His ground crews simply unloaded the bombs at the dock and drove them right over to the bombers, without storing them in arms depots. Between 300 and 400 planes roared out almost every other day, their crews in the air 30 hours and more each week. Missions over Japan, including preliminary briefings and later debriefings, often meant 24 consecutive hours of duty. Benzedrine and coffee kept the flyers awake.
In revenge for the unprovoked but feeble attack at Pearl Harbor on their country, American farmers, college students, welders, and mechanics of a year past were now prepared — and quite able — to ignite the entire island of Japan. Their gigantic bombers often flew in faster than did the sleek Japanese fighters sent up to shoot them down. Japanese military leaders could scarcely grasp that in a matter of months colossal runways had appeared out of nowhere in the Pacific to launch horrendous novel bombers more deadly than any aircraft in history, commanded by a general as fanatical as themselves, and manned by teenagers and men in their early twenties more eager to kill even than Japan's own feared veterans. So much for the Japanese myth that decadent pampered Westerners were ill equipped for the savagery of all-out war. Even in the wildest dreams of the most ardent Japanese imperialists, there was no such plan of destroying the entire social fabric of the American nation.
I think we're more than even.
An apology is meaningless. However, they should not have the meeting at Pearl Harbor.
It is not the Battle of the Bulge, Gettysburg, Stalingrad, or Yorktown. At Pearl Harbor, they cheated, whether they meant to on not.
Why not meet at Midway? or DC at the WWII memorial?
Many of the US servicemen in WWII volunteered. Can you imagine anyone in the Obama White House volunteering? It is going to take a long time to remove the stain of Obama.
I have no problem with him not apologizing but stay away from Pearl Harbor site.
I want to apologize for the killing of Abel. Sorry Abel.
We really need to treat this “”apologies for historic wrongs” fetish of the political Left as the childish nonsense it is.
Current people of Japan, Germany, the US, the UK etc have nothing to apologize for. They had no role in the national polices and the decision the political Leftist are demanding apologies for.
It merely an intellectually infantile debate tactics.
The left wants to argument that because of this irrelevant historic fact (i.e. segregation, slavery, “war crimes” etc) you must embrace our radical Leftist political agenda now.
No we don’t.
Exactly!
And we won’t apologize for nuking them either.
Let’s move on.
Exactly! Besides, this apology nonsense is just that. What next, descendants of slave holders apologizing? That's a lot of democrat apology, right there.
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