Monday, December 07, 2009
This Day in History: December 7
Also on this day in 1941, a very special young man awoke to receive a very unwelcome 21st birthday present--one that would send him and his brother to Guam and Guadalcanal with the Marines.
Happy birthday, Dad.
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i was born the sixth; i used to define it in relation to pearl habor: "forty years after and one day before." i've lightened up a little, since.
on d-day, my father's father landed at omaha in the afternoon, through france, then went on to saipan. in one of the lord's great ironies, the instantaneous, unjustified mass murder of hundreds of thousands of japanese civilians, which made a war criminal of truman who should have known better, also very likely secured my father's future birth, and thus my future birth: whether or not the japanese had actually surrendered, the marines were going to deploy, because that is what marines do. wars don't stop on a dime.
Today is also my youngest's (daughter) birthday.
Uh, John, Truman saved millions of Japanese lives as well as at least a million American lives by dropping those bombs. If you knew your history better you would know that Tokyo lost more people duringthe war than did Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together and we hadn't invaded at that point. Saipan and Okinawa revealed just how devoted the Japanese were to dying for the Emperor and showed us the likely cost in lives on all sides if a conventional invasion had been undertaken.
Although not meant as a humanitarian gesture, the Atom Bombing of Japan, ironically, was.
i felt the ironic part was that i don't have to answer for a mass murder even if it helped secure my birth because it was committed by an uninterested party that could not possibly know -- not that murder could be dressed up as "humanitarian." murder is still murder in god's eyes. i wouldn't go so far as to state it was an incorrect response in wartime, but it can never be morally right. there is no flag you wave at the start of a war that allows everything to happen afterward to pass muster without judgement.
truman knew that japanese surrender was imminent. what he proved is that the lives of perhaps 1,000 or even 10,000 soldiers -- who volunteered to fight and die, remember -- was not worth waiting to see for sure, before killing 200,000 otherwise innocent parties. 95% civilians. some REMFs, sure. oh, and, american POWs.
that is what i know of history.
american entry into the war, by the way, was no less graceful than her exit. wars neither stop nor start on a dime, it seems.
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