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Remember Hiroshima? What about Nanking and Hong Kong?

GO!!!

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With all of the hoopla of the passing of the 60th anniversary of the nuking of Hiroshima, I was quite upset that there was no recognition of the reasons that Japan was bombed in the first place.

While these are numerous, and easily argued, another point came to mind.

Why are we not making other canadians aware of exactly what happened to Canadians who were captured by the Japanese, and how that paled in comparison to what happened to Chinese and Korean civilians caught by the Empire of Japan?

Japan was bombed in order to end WWII, and save hundreds of thousands of allied lives, why is this never mentioned? Why are we more concerned about the deaths of our mortal enemies than the deaths of our own soldiers?
 
The Globe and Mail ran an article today on Japanese atrocities from Unit 731.  Having said that, I agree with your assessment of media attention on the "bad" Americans and the innocent defenseless Japanese.

Never mind about allied fire bombings on Dresden, Tokyo, etc, etc ...
 
Because soldiers are expendable to our political masters.  We do the jobs, take the blame, and get screwed over.  Besides people don't remember Nanking or Hong Kong because the Japanese are our friends now.  It's only good to think of the "big bad Americans" and all the "bad things" that they do. >:(

Case in point, our PoW's from Hong Kong got almost nothing in terms of reparations from the Japanese govt. (who later on demanded that the US apologize for dropping the A-bombs claiming it was a crime that demanded reparations)  The Canadian govt. actually signed a treaty with Japan in 1954 that forbade our former soldiers from seeking reparations from the Japanese for their being used as SLAVE LABOUR during the war.  (Note my disgust at both our govt. and the Japanese govt.)  I believe most of the PoW camp commanders either committed suicide or were tried as war criminals, I've heard some even tried to make nice with the PoWs, after Japan's surrender, saying that "War over, we can be friends again." Not bloody likely.

On a side note, PoW's were supposed to be given packages from the Red Cross, which included food, medicine and clothes.  During the war the Japanese govt. took the packages but did not distribute them to the PoW's.  They were stockpiled for the use of the Japanese military, and in the event of an invasion of Japan itself.  There are reports of American troops finding huge caves that were filled with these packages.

Anyway rant over. :salute:
 
not to mention the torture and cannibalism in Japanese-run POW camps.
 
okay....here I go, wandering into the minefield :P

the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, and it's remembrance, is not, nor should it be, about Japanese conduct during WWII.

please do not misinterpret what I am saying as trying to diminish the disgust expressed above.

this remembrance is about the use of an atomic devise against fellow humans. full stop.

in this light, I do not see this as "forgive and forget" reference Japan, or America bashing.....but the use of what most folks would now recognize as a horrible weapon.

I will now cower under my desk, as I prepare for the incoming barrage!!

Cheers!
 
60 Years Later
Considering Hiroshima.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

For 60 years the United States has agonized over its unleashing of the world's first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima on August 6, 2005. President Harry Truman's decision to explode an atomic bomb over an ostensible military target - the headquarters of the crack Japanese 2nd Army - led to well over 100,000 fatalities, the vast majority of them civilians.

Critics immediately argued that we should have first targeted the bomb on an uninhabited area as a warning for the Japanese militarists to capitulate. Did a democratic America really wish to live with the burden of being the only state that had used nuclear weapons against another?

Later generals Hap Arnold, Dwight Eisenhower, Curtis LeMay, Douglas Macarthur, and Admirals William Leahy and William Halsey all reportedly felt the bomb was unnecessary, being either militarily redundant or unnecessarily punitive to an essentially defeated populace.

Yet such opponents of the decision shied away from providing a rough estimate of how many more would have died in the aggregate - Americans, British, Australians, Asians, Japanese, and Russians - through conventional bombing, continuous fighting in the Pacific, amphibious invasion of the mainland, or the ongoing onslaught of the Red Army had the conflict not come to an abrupt halt nine days later and only after a second nuclear drop on Nagasaki.

Truman's supporters countered that, in fact, a blockade and negotiations had not forced the Japanese generals to surrender unconditionally. In their view, a million American casualties and countless Japanese dead were adverted by not storming the Japanese mainland over the next year in the planned two-pronged assault on the mainland, dubbed Operation Coronet and Olympic.

For the immediate future there were only two bombs available. Planners thought that using one for demonstration purposes (assuming that it would have worked) might have left the Americans without enough of the new arsenal to shock and awe the Japanese government should it have ridden out the first attack and then become emboldened by a hiatus, and our inability to follow up the attacks.

As it was, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General Tojo's followers capitulated only through the intervention of the emperor. And it was not altogether clear even then that Japanese fanatics would not attack the Americans as they steamed into Tokyo Bay for the surrender ceremonies.

These are the debates that matured in the relative peace of the postwar era. But in August 1945 most Americans had a much different take on Hiroshima, a decision that cannot be fathomed without appreciation of the recently concluded Okinawa campaign (April 1-July 2) that had cost 50,000 American casualties and 200,000 Japanese and Okinawa dead. Okinawa saw the worst losses in the history of the U.S. Navy. Over 300 ships were damaged, more than 30 sunk, as about 5,000 sailors perished under a barrage of some 2,000 Kamikaze attacks.

And it was believed at least 10,000 more suicide planes were waiting on Kyushu and Honshu. Those who were asked to continue such fighting on the Japanese mainland - as we learn from the memoirs of Paul Fussell, William Manchester, and E. B. Sledge - were relieved at the idea of encountering a shell-shocked defeated enemy rather than a defiant Japanese nation in arms.

About a month after Okinawa was finally declared secure came Hiroshima. Americans of that age were more likely to wonder not that the bomb had been dropped too early, but perhaps too late in not avoiding the carnage on Okinawa - especially when by Spring 1945 there was optimism among the scientists in New Mexico that the successful completion of the bomb was not far away. My father, William Hanson, who flew 39 missions over Japan on a B-29, was troubled over the need for Okinawa - where his first cousin Victor Hanson was killed in the last hours of the battle for Sugar Loaf Hill - when the future bomb would have forced Japanese surrender without such terrible loss of life in 11th-hour infantry battles or even more horrific torching of the Japanese cities.

Hiroshima, then, was not the worst single-day loss of life in military history. The Tokyo fire raid on the night of March 9/10, five months earlier, was far worse, incinerating somewhere around 150,000 civilians, and burning out over 15 acres of the downtown. Indeed, "Little Boy," the initial nuclear device that was dropped 60 years ago, was understood as the continuance of that policy of unrestricted bombing - its morality already decided by the ongoing attacks on the German and Japanese cities begun at least three years earlier.

Americans of the time hardly thought the Japanese populace to be entirely innocent. The Imperial Japanese army routinely butchered civilians abroad - some 10-15 million Chinese were eventually to perish - throughout the Pacific from the Philippines to Korea and Manchuria. Even by August 1945, the Japanese army was killing thousands of Asians each month. When earlier high-level bombing attacks with traditional explosives failed to cut off the fuel for this murderous military - industries were increasingly dispersed in smaller shops throughout civilian centers - Curtis LeMay unleashed napalm on the Japanese cities and eventually may have incinerated 500,000.

In some sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only helped to cut short the week-long Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria (80,000 Japanese soldiers killed, over 8,000 Russian dead), but an even more ambitious incendiary campaign planned by Gen. Curtis LeMay. With the far shorter missions possible from planned new bases in Okinawa and his fleet vastly augmented by more B-29s and the transference from Europe of thousands of idle B-17s and B-24, the 'mad bomber' LeMay envisioned burning down the entire urban and industrial landscape of Japan. His opposition to Hiroshima was more likely on grounds that his own fleet of bombers could have achieved the same result in a few more weeks anyway.

Postwar generations argued over whether the two atomic bombs, the fire raids, or the August Soviet invasion of Manchuria - or all three combined - prompted Japan to capitulate, whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a stain on American democracy, or whether the atomic bombs were the last-gasp antidote to the plague of Japanese militarism that had led to millions of innocents butchered without much domestic opposition or criticism from the triumphalist Japanese people.

But our own generation has more recently once again grappled with Hiroshima, and so the debate rages on in the new age of terrorism and handheld weapons of mass destruction, brought home after an attack on our shores worse than Pearl Harbor - with more promised to come. Perhaps the horror of the suicide bombers of Japan does not seem so distant any more. Nor does the notion of an extreme perversion of an otherwise mainstream religion filling millions with hatred of a supposedly decadent West.

The truth, as we are reminded so often in this present conflict, is that usually in war there are no good alternatives, and leaders must select between a very bad and even worse choice. Hiroshima was the most awful option imaginable, but the other scenarios would have probably turned out even worse.

©2004 Victor Davis Hanson
 
on guard for thee said:
but the use of what most folks would now recognize as a horrible weapon.

Yes it is true that nukes are horrible weapons, and should never be used, and we must not forget those killed.  But I think it is wise to remember that the Allies, including Canada, was preparing for a Jan. 1946 invasion of Japan itself.  Assuming the bombs were not dropped, the invasion itself would have cost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives, on both sides, many would likely have been Japanese civilians as well.

It is also a good idea to think of what the public would have said if they found out that the US had A-bombs but did not use them.  I remember reading about Adm. Chester Nimitz, he recieved hundreds of letters from mother's who lost son's at Tarawa, due to the fact that the US gambled and lost when it came to the tides and Japanese strength.  Imagine for a moment what Truman would have had to deal with.

I'll leave who ever reads this to draw their own conclusions.  I have my own.
 
on guard for thee said:
okay....here I go, wandering into the minefield :P

the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, and it's remembrance, is not, nor should it be, about Japanese conduct during WWII.

please do not misinterpret what I am saying as trying to diminish the disgust expressed above.

this remembrance is about the use of an atomic devise against fellow humans. full stop.

in this light, I do not see this as "forgive and forget" reference Japan, or America bashing.....but the use of what most folks would now recognize as a horrible weapon.

I will now cower under my desk, as I prepare for the incoming barrage!!

Cheers!

That's a well thought out (and courageous!) post.  I think you are correct, as far as it goes.

However (isn't there always a G.D. BUT!!), the Japanese Government needs to stop politicizing the event, making the event about American (and allied) conduct during the war, claiming to be "innocent victims" - THEN, perhaps, the event can be SOLEY (and in my opinion, appropriately) about "the use of an atomic devise against fellow humans. full stop."

Unfortunately, as human beings are political animals - I don't see that happening any time soon.

Regards
 
I've never really heard of the Japanese goverment politicising the nukings, other than simple rememberance ceremonies amongst themselves. People in Asian countries are still incensed over the fact that the Japanese emperor was allowed to remain in power after the war, while the Nazis were destroyed so utterly in Europe. Most see it as simple American racism. Considering the brutality that they had to endure under Japanese occupation, the very thought that the nuking was somehow "inhuman" or "uneccesary" must sound absolutely ludicrous.
 
I've never really heard of the Japanese goverment politicising the nukings



http://www1.city.nagasaki.nagasaki.jp/na-bomb/npt/mayore2.html
 
Britney Spears said:
I've never really heard of the Japanese goverment politicising the nukings, other than simple rememberance ceremonies amongst themselves. People in Asian countries are still incensed over the fact that the Japanese emperor was allowed to remain in power after the war, while the Nazis were destroyed so utterly in Europe. Most see it as simple American racism. Considering the brutality that they had to endure under Japanese occupation, the very thought that the nuking was somehow "inhuman" or "uneccesary" must sound absolutely ludicrous.

From the San Francisco Chronicle.  The entire article (which does discuss many other aspects of the ceremony), can be found here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/06/MNG96E45601.DTL

In his annual peace declaration, Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba spoke of the hibakusha, the A-bomb survivors, as the living evidence of the evils of war. Their legacy, he said, is to remind the world to redouble efforts to abolish nuclear weapons and end war. The mayor also spoke critically of the United States and other nuclear countries, saying they follow the dogma that "might is right."

That last sentence doesn't sound like a Japanese government official politicising the nukings??
 
Well, I'm also convinced that there are some Japanese municipal leaders who are just plain nuts. The mayor of Tokyo, guy by the name of Ishihara (don't know if he's still mayor, I don't really follow the politics of the city of Tokyo), his year isn't complete without causing some kind of international incident with, well, pretty much anyone. One year he'll officially deny the rape of Nanking happened, the next year he'll extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan(by the city of Tokyo?), and the list just goes on. He's basically a kind of running joke throughout Asia.The guy is basically a holocaust denier, and yet somehow he's also the mayor of Tokyo.... 

Not really sure where the *actual* goverment of Japan  stands on this stuff, but I highly doubt that he was speaking with any kind of official sanction from Koizumi. Just remember, every country in the world has their Carolyn Parish.....
 
Britney Spears said:
Well, I'm also convinced that there are some Japanese municipal leaders who are just plain nuts. The mayor of Tokyo, guy by the name of Ishihara (don't know if he's still mayor, I don't really follow the politics of the city of Tokyo), his year isn't complete without causing some kind of international incident with, well, pretty much anyone. One year he'll officially deny the rape of Nanking happened, the next year he'll extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan(by the city of Tokyo?), and the list just goes on. He's basically a kind of running joke throughout Asia.The guy is basically a holocaust denier, and yet somehow he's also the mayor of Tokyo....  

Not really sure where the *actual* goverment of Japan   stands on this stuff, but I highly doubt that he was speaking with any kind of official sanction from Koizumi. Just remember, every country in the world has their Carolyn Parish.....

I hear ya, and I can't answer your questions regarding Japan - but my original point stands - until these ceremonies are NOT politicized by the Japanese, then "on guard for thee"'s wish for a non-political memorial will not materialize.
 
My point when I started this thread was not that the Japanese government bemoans their bombing, it's that WE do.

Maybe I was'nt as clear as I could have been.

WHY in god's name are we here in Canada holding ceremonies for a hated, despicable enemy, who was thoroughly (and rightly) thrashed at the hands of our strongest and best ally?

The bombings of Japan were good for Canada and Canadians, and should be celebrated for what they were - VICTORY!!

 
GO!!! said:
My point when I started this thread was not that the Japanese government bemoans their bombing, it's that WE do.

Maybe I was'nt as clear as I could have been.

WHY in god's name are we here in Canada holding ceremonies for a hated, despicable enemy, who was thoroughly (and rightly) thrashed at the hands of our strongest and best ally?

The bombings of Japan were good for Canada and Canadians, and should be celebrated for what they were - VICTORY!!

Oh.

Well, if that's the question - then the answer is easy.  Because it promotes Canadian values - just ask Ms. Parrish, Mr. Martin, et al!!

 
WHY in god's name are we here in Canada holding ceremonies for a hated, despicable enemy, who was thoroughly (and rightly) thrashed at the hands of our strongest and best ally?

I'm looking everywhere, but I cannot find where such a ceremony was held in Canada.
 
Britney Spears said:
I'm looking everywhere, but I cannot find where such a ceremony was held in Canada.
Montreal held something because they are twinned with Hiroshima.
 
For those that have little or no knowledge of the Imperial Forces of Japan. from1935 until 1945
go to "The Knights of the Bushido", by Lord Russell of Liverpool, the definative history of the
atrocities committed by the military of Japan, in the name of their Emperor, and the Bushido
Code - a brillant, well documented history by a former British Army Officer, (World War II),
and a well established British barrister. If memory serves me, Lord Russell was a prosecutor
in the Allied cause of war criminals - in any event the book, which has been reprinted is noted
on the net, and is in most Canadian libraries. The use of nuclear weapons to end the Pacific
War, or World War II, was necessary because of the code (the Bushido Code) of Japan of
the period which required fighting to the death, no surrender. The definative battle which
prompted President Truman's decision was the battle for Iwo Jima, with over 6,000 dead
US Marines, losses unacceptable in the post European war termination period - the war had
to be finished, and quickly. MacLeod
 
Britney Spears said:
I'm looking everywhere, but I cannot find where such a ceremony was held in Canada.

As did Edmonton - at city hall no less.

 
jmacleod said:
For those that have little or no knowledge of the Imperial Forces of Japan. from1935 until 1945
go to "The Knights of the Bushido", by Lord Russell of Liverpool, the definative history of the
atrocities committed by the military of Japan, in the name of their Emperor, and the Bushido
Code - a brillant, well documented history by a former British Army Officer, (World War II),
and a well established British barrister. If memory serves me, Lord Russell was a prosecutor
in the Allied cause of war criminals - in any event the book, which has been reprinted is noted
on the net, and is in most Canadian libraries. The use of nuclear weapons to end the Pacific
War, or World War II, was necessary because of the code (the Bushido Code) of Japan of
the period which required fighting to the death, no surrender. The definative battle which
prompted President Truman's decision was the battle for Iwo Jima, with over 6,000 dead
US Marines, losses unacceptable in the post European war termination period - the war had
to be finished, and quickly. MacLeod

Even more to the point was the battle of Okinawa, where the Americans were required to kill virtually every single defender on the island, and defend against waves of suicide attacks by soldiers, sailors and airmen before being able to secure the place. Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle. American and Allied planners were appalled at the ferocity of the fighting and the immense losses on both sides. There were still field armies, local militias and even civilians armed with nothing more than spears waiting on the Home Islands; Allied planners were estimating up to one million casualties as the cost of "Operation Olympic" (the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands).

Frankly, if the atomic bomb was not available, General Curtis LeMay was prepared to launch a round the clock firebombing offensive against Japan, literally incinerating the entire nation if required. Perhaps we should give a moment of quiet contemplation for the men who had to choose the least horrible of several nightmarish possibilities for ending the war.
 
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