Very few big things in history are totally misunderstood. Hitler did indeed hate Jews. America was indeed a British colony. Thomas Edison indeed invented the incandescent light bulb. But the biggest bit of history that's the most totally misunderstood is the relationship between the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and Japan's surrender.
The popular notion goes like this: America develops the A-bomb. America drops two of them on Japan. Japan beholds the smoking remains of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrenders.
Here follows an attempt to present the authentic story before President Obama wakes up and finds himself at a podium in Hiroshima apologizing for this "irredeemably shameful American act."
Bear in mind the Japanese were all reconciled to die for the emperor, a mindset demonstrated hundreds of thousands of times as America dismantled the Japanese empire, island fortress by island fortress. Remember also that the number of lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was far from the most lives lost in a single air raid in World War II. Remember Dresden and even Tokyo itself. Japan did not surrender merely because the "The Bomb" was so awesome.
This and similar tittles of truth will never overcome the easier-to-believe narrative that the A-bombs were so frightening that the Japanese simply gave up after taking two of them. Still, it's important to try, especially since the truth absolves America of all the moral guilt that accompanies the extermination of so many defenseless civilians.
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Laurens van der Post, a native South African, was in the Dutch East Indies (now the independent nation of Indonesia) when war broke out in December 1941. He spent the war as a prisoner of the Japanese, and he describes the unspeakable cruelty of the Japanese in his book, "The Prisoner and the Bomb," published in 1971. Van der Post spoke fluent Japanese and served as interpreter between the Japanese captors and their English-speaking prisoners. That role didn't exempt him from being beaten senseless by a Japanese guard for no reason whatever except they happened to pass each other within the grounds of the concentration camp.
One day in August of 1945, the Japanese commandant's limousine screeched to a halt at the prison camp's gate, and van der Post – filthy, bloody, dressed in rags and wearing sandals crudely carved out of discarded truck tires – was ordered to get in. Up the hill they sped to the commandant's mansion within which unfolded the most spectacular sight of van der Post's life. The entire Japanese officer corps, attired in impeccable white summer dress uniforms complete with samurai swords, rose when this emaciated captive entered the ballroom, whereupon the commandant shouted, "Congratulations on your victory!" and bowed deeply after a sip of ritual sake.
Various pieces of the story found their place. Even after the Nagasaki bomb there was tremendous determination to fight on. Why, then, the surrender? Certainly not just because of the horror of the A-bombs. Don't forget, the very underpinning of the Japanese mentality was to fight to the end.
Here's why Japan surrendered: The fact that the A-bombs were so radically different from anything that preceded them was interpreted as the "Flash from Heaven" that released the Japanese people from their pledge to fight to the end. A fire-bombing of a Japanese city that claimed twice as many lives as were lost to the A-bombs would have led to no change, no surrender. It was the "Flash from Heaven" that now permitted them to surrender with honor.
Where, then, is America's moral absolution for an act of war almost universally considered reprehensible? Japan was thoroughly beaten, by any metric, at the time of the nukes. When Germany was at the same stage of impending defeat, the Nazi empire that once stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the gates of Moscow and from above the Arctic Circle to Africa had been shrunk to a few city blocks in downtown Berlin.
With Japan, it was a different matter altogether. Despite the loss of its once-formidable navy and its rings of protective islands, and unbelievable losses in troops and planes, Japan nonetheless occupied almost as much territory as it held at the height of its power. Japan controlled Manchuria, Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, what is now Malaysia and a huge hunk of China. And as Japan's military fortunes further declined, its food supply was insufficient to feed its own military and civilian population, much less the millions, of over two dozen nationalities, held captive across that vast Asian empire.
Hence the moral justification for using the A-bombs against Japan. Speak not of all the American military lives that would have been lost in the invasion of Japan itself, or the Japanese military lives or the Japanese civilian lives. That war had to end right then and there!
We don't need to include the potential loss of one American military life or one Japanese military life or one Japanese civilian life to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Van der Post estimates that if the war had lasted only six weeks longer, more lives would have been lost in those Japanese concentration camps sprawling across Asia than were lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
How about letting them apologize to us this time, Mr. President?
Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].
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