Saturday, August 06, 2022
Happy Hiroshima Day!
"He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword." Happy Hiroshima Day! Seventy-seven years ago today the United States Army Air Corps B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, helping to bring World War II to a close. In doing so, the crew, and the people who sent them, saved many lives and finished off an evil regime. This is something to be celebrated.
Many lives were saved, of course, because the estimates were that the invasion of Japan would result in one million casualties for the Allies. That the Japanese regime was evil is beyond question. At the Japanese concentration camp Unit 731, the Japanese engaged in brutal medical experiments that rivaled the worst of the Nazis. The Japanese also tortured prisoners of war to death as "medical experiments. Early in the war (1937, before the war had spread to in Europe) the Japanese committed the "rape of Nanjing" in which 300,000 some Chinese civilians were slaughtered for sport, tens of thousands of women raped before being butchered, and all sorts of unspeakable horrors were perpetrated by the Japanese. Back in Japan, the events were covered in the news. In her book The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang documents how a major Japanese newspaper kept daily box score on a competition between two Japanese officers to see who could murder more civilians.
Seventy-seven years ago today, this kind of evil received a justified response. Those who whine that the civilians of Hiroshima weren't responsible are wrong. The Japanese people knew their regime. They weren't fighting to overthrow it. For Curtis LeMay, Harry Truman, and the other decision makers, it was far more urgent to save American military lives and end the war than to worry about enemy civilians in Hiroshima. They were correct.
My father was a USN pilot who commanded a PBY-6A. My Aunt Johane was a U.S. Army nurse who had landed on Normandy Beach and had helped victims of Nazi concentration camps. Both had received orders to start packing for the invasion of Japan when the news came of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father and Aunt were thrilled with the news. Now take a look at the photos on this site. You too should be thrilled this regime was brought to an end.
Celebrate!
