Re: [pf] Memorial Day

At 16:03 28/5/2001 -0400, Ronald Hands wrote {at:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001II/msg01525.html } :-

>> ... Maybe one had to be alive at the time, as I was, though thankfully
too young to be involved, but at the time the atomic bombs were dropped,
the only feeling I can recall is immense relief.  We had watched the
newsreels and saw the Life magazine pictures of the savage, to-the-last-man
battles ...
>>.. arguments in recent years that the Japanese were ready to surrender,
or that a "demonstration" of the A-bomb could have been staged to persuade
them that their cause was doomed.  Based on what we knew at the time, I
don't think either of these arguments is viable.
>>

At 17:13 28/5/2001 -0400, Molly Williams wrote {at:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001II/msg01526.html } :-

>I saw a several-hour show on Harry Truman on PBS ... 
>
>I think what I reacted to was that I didn't hear anyone on this show say
that dropping the bombs saved /lives/, just that they saved American lives.
To me, it seemed that the Japanese deaths and suffering were discounted as
trivial compared with the lives of Americans. Maybe this is how some people
feel.
>I wasn't alive then, and my dad was 10 when the war ended. I know very
little about WWII. I'm trying to catch up!
>

· I too remember the end of WW-II: listening to the crossing of the Rhine
(the first time there was a feeling of relief, of hope that the war /could/
be won), having people come out in the streets in Lower Sackville, Nova
Scotia on VE (Europe) day to celebrate, and my mixed feelings when we heard
of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And my disbelief that the
American Government /could/ be so callous, bullying, thoughtless about
anything but their own power, as to drop the Nagasaki bomb. I was 9 at the
end of the war, but quite observant and thoughtful, even then.

· The demonising of the Japanese was very intense, and had the effect that
Ron says (and still has an effect: my mother will never consider buying a
Japanese car), so I too paid very little heed to the people killed and
damaged by radiation (which we knew nothing about, then) in Japan. They
were just numbers; only a decade and more later, when the long-term effects
were made public, did many in Canada and New Zealand (that I knew) start
being critical of, or even having second thoughts about, the rightness of
dropping the Bomb.
  However, I do remember wondering about the various possible reasons for
the fanaticism that we were told about - thinking that maybe they were
defending land they felt strongly about, in the same way most British felt
strongly about any invasion of Britain.
  
· I myself knew no East-Asians personally, until my new-wife and I met
another graduate-school couple from Korea, and I found to my surprise that
they were people _very_much_like_us_; similar humour and energy,
disparaging of authority, hopes for the future for themselves and their
kids (2, in both families, then).

· One more thing: "Based on what we knew at the time, I don't think either
of these arguments is viable."
  People who've been watching TV only during and since the Vietnam war have
_no_ idea what censorship was like before then.
  So "what we knew at the time", as far as 99,999 people out of 100,000 was
concerned, was very little, and much of that was untrue (or at best, had a
slant, a spin). There was no pretence of democracy in the prosecution of
those wars.

· Also; Ron's: "arguments in recent years that the Japanese were ready to
surrender, or that a 'demonstration' of the A-bomb could have been staged",
worded to imply ("in recent years") that this is revisionist history and
that the reasoning at the time was different, isn't my opinion. The "recent
years" part refers, IMO, to the declassification of evidence from the
political decisions made in the mid-40's showing that those arguments were
indeed being raised then. And dismissed.
  We had virtually no idea that such alternatives were being considered.
Except for the one about Allied lives lost in the invasion of Japan itself.
And by the way; the laying-waste of Hiroshima was very little different
from what would have happened with bombing raids and shelling from ships,
prior to such an invasion. If not Hiroshima itself, then _at_least_ one
other similar city. Ruining the enemy's economic ability to continue
producing war materiel has been an essential feature of recent wars.

David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html#top
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