Howard's Views

by Howard E. Morseburg

SINKING OF THE SS PAUL HAMILTON - PAGE 3

IT WAS INCUMBENT UPON OUR LEADERS TO END THE WAR QUICKLY:

Any failure on our part to do as much damage as we could in order to shock the Japanese military into an immediate and unconditional surrender, executed as quickly as possible, would have been foolhardy. If it had come out later that we had had the bomb and not used it, it would most certainly have been viewed as a betrayal by the hundreds of thousands of men massing for the final assault, as well as the tens of thousands of Allied military men who had already sacrificed their lives since the attack on Pearl Harbour. It would also have put us at risk of the possibility of a sudden momentous and calamitous quirk of fate, or unforseen successful development by Japanese scientists, which could have quickly overturned all of our victories and led to our defeat, instead of the unconditional surrender by the Japanese military to Allied Forces.
There are no absolutes in war, there are no plans so certain that success is guaranteed, and there is no end to the battles and the casualties until our enemies lay down their weapons in final surrender...and the last gun falls silent.
You have to think about the men who returned home horribly wounded, who would spend the rest of their lives paying the penalty of war. You have to think about the families at home waiting and praying for their soldiers, sailors, marines, and merchant seamen to come home to them. You have to consider a nation at war, tired of war, wanting a Victory and an end to it all. Something miraculous, something decisive, somthing that would end it all quickly had to be done at that point and there was no way out of it. We believed we had found the answer, and: It was. Thank God it was!

People like Richard Gere (to me he is "an abysmal jerk" or even "an abysmal Hollywood jerk") are sadly misdirecting their energies, as well as betraying the sacrifices and memory of their fellow countrymen, especially of those who served and lost their lives in the Pacific war. While the main purpose was to bring an end to the war, if it also served to avenge the atrocities they committed against us and the rest of Asia, I can live with that.

A study of the Japanese military machine is filled with incidents of horrible atrocities, beginning with the attack upon Pearl Harbour, and then the Bataan Death March. There were thousands of such atrocities. You have to read and study them. They'll make your stomach churn.

One atrocity repeatedly done, merchant seaman, adrift in lifeboats, were often machine gunned by Japanese crewmen of the submarines that sank their ships. In at least one instance, captured seamen were brought aboard the submarine, tied together, and there on the deck many of them were beheaded by Japanese officers of the sub, before the others were cruelly thrown into the sea...still tied together with the headless corpses and dragged behind the submarine as it submerged. By some miracle two seamen managed to free their hands and find a life-raft, and were eventually rescued so that they could tell their story. Imagine the horror of being forced to watch as your friends and shipmates were beheaded one by one, a brutal inconceivable act.

Again, let me stress that a careful study of the Japanese military from early in the century, beginning with their invasion of Manchuria and Korea, their invasion of China, and up to their actions in World War II, will show a history of such moral depravity and absolute senseless brutality, mistreatment and slaughter of surrendered armies and citizens of conquered nations that have long been completely ignored, that it shocks the senses.

The Signifigance of the S.S. Paul Hamilton to the Atom Bomb

The lessons the military learned from the loss of 763 men of the 66th Infantry (Panther) Division when a sub torpedoed the S.S. Leopoldville in the English Channel, and the later loss of S.S. Paul Hamilton by German aircraft, with 580 lives, should be simple enough for anyone to understand. Every single day that a war of that magnitude continued, there was the risk of sudden severe losses that could have brought about reversals that potentially could have led to our defeat. A victorious Japan would never have granted us the terms that the Allies gave them.

After the defeat of Germany and Italy, we were faced with the task of invading Japan and bringing that nation to the point of complete and unconditional surrender. By that time we, who were to be involved in that final episode of the war, had read a great deal in the nation's newspapers of the planned invasion, and the military analysts were estimating that our casualties would run as high as half a million men in the Allied forces alone, not counting the numbers of both Japanese military and civilians who would fall to in these actions, just in gaining a foothold on the Japanese homeland. That, many analysts felt, was a conservative figure.

In facing the Japanese armies we knew from experience that they had a much different philosophy than the Germans, and that suicide attacks would be the norm. We expected that thousands of Japanese soldiers and airmen would willingly make a one-way trip, sacrificing their lives by charging directly into our guns, or diving their aircraft right into the side of one of our ships. That was the nature of the enemy... and for their officers, to ignore casualties. They had a propensity for Banzai attacks on the ground, two-man subs in suicidal attacks in the sea, and Kamikazi planes in the air. It was not going to be a picnic for any of us.

Disasters of this proportion brought the Allied command to understand that the invasion was not going to be easy, and that the loss of a single troopship might cost hundreds, if not thousands of lives, in an instant. None of the men in those days, the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, or Merchant Marine, would have refused to go and fight those final battles, no matter what the risks. Many may not have wanted to go, for all knew and fully understood the risks involved, but Americans in those days were both patriotic and courageous, and we did not have the political dissension that we have suffered all too often in recent years.

It was the Atom Bomb at Hirishima that began the resolution of our problems the instant it ignited, the same type of instantaneous explosion that the S.S. Paul Hamilton disintegrated and vanished!

For each man lost aboard the S.S. Paul Hamilton, the first Atomic Bomb wiped out a little more than 100 lives at Hiroshima. It seemed to us a good ratio and a fair payback, and in wartime, there is nothing wrong with a payback of this type, or of this proportion.

The second bomb affirmed our ability to deliver and proved that there was no alternative to those who may have opposed absolute surrender. It was our job to make the enemy realize the futility of any further struggles, to bring them to a point where resistence is futile and surrender and peace becomes the only alternative. That is what the Atomic Bombs accomplished for us. The first got their attention; it took the second to make them realize that immediate and total surrender was imperative.

For those of us who saw the horrors that are a part of war, the dropping of the Atom Bomb was not only justified, but necessary. It was the one and only course to pursue. We had no guilt to feel nor to share. It was the nation's duty to avenge if necessary, but certainly to defeat the Axis powers. Our troops, whether by land or by sea, did so. We owed no apologies for our actions. And our Nation owes none today.

The Japanese of that time in history were a militaristic nation which was fully committed to warfare and conquest, as they had been from the turn of the century. In their string of victories, they had been notorious for their inhumane treatment of prisoners of war, as well as the complete, brutal and arrogant subjugation of the citizens of the occupied nations. Their history is filled with a continuous string of atrocities, some so barbarous that the Japanese nation deserved neither mercy nor consideration.

Instead of a revealing study of these atrocities, we have nothing but continuous stories and references to the Holocaust. The Germans are blamed over and over again.

No such blame is ever, ever assessed against the Japanese, either by Hollywood's film industry or the national press. Japan has never admitted to its war crimes and those terrible atrocities by offering an official apology that I know of, and it is long overdue.

Instead, we have to suffer the indignity and stupidity of actor Richard Gere making obiescense to them at the memorial for those who perished at Hiroshima, another example of how America is constantly belittled and berated by Hollywood's Leftist stooges.

A fanciful and almost ludicrous movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai, about British, Australian and American prisoners of war who barely existed in a living hell for more than two years, almost glorifies their Japanese captors. It is full of lies and deceit, and disrespectful of the men who suffered and died there. Historically, this history is just as important to tell, and the people who perished and those who lived through it deserve to have their stories told, and their suffering, terror, executions, and the unremitting brutality told in all the same detail and extensive coverage as the horrors that went on in Europe. Are the Philippine, Chinese, British, American, and other victims of less importance than those in the European theatre? Hollywood makes it appear so.

THE COOKIE MONSTER WITHIN ME.
 
3/20/07  Excerpt from a Letter to a Friend:
In late 1944 our ship was docked in New York and we were loading war supplies* to carry overseas, so I went home to New Haven, Ct. for a few days.  When it was time to leave, Dad had saved enough gas coupons to drive me to New York, and as we packed to go, Mom brought out five cake tins full of chocolate chip (Toll-House, we called them) cookies.  When we got to the ship, somehow I was able to take them aboard without any of my buddies seeing them, perhaps I'd wrapped them somehow, I don't remember how, and I stored them away in my stateroom.  Well, every couple of nights I'd take out a tin, open it, and eat a couple and think of home.
 
Well, I did not share them with anyone except the Naval Gunnery Officer, Ens. Steve Carson, on Christmas eve.  That's the first and last he saw of them.  I made them last for most of the trip, eating the last one a couple of nights out from New York on the stormy North Atlantic.  Yes, I was selfish, but I figured that no one aboard would appreciate them as much as I did.  On that trip those cookies traveled across the North Atlantic to Scotland, then around the end of the English Isles up through the Artic Sea, above the northern end of Norway, the Artic Circle to Murmansk, Russia, and then back again.  It was winter time, the ship rolling so much all the time that at night your stomach seemed to move from left to right and right to left as you lay in your bunk at night.  At meal time your plate would slide away from you if you didn't hold onto it, or if you waited, it would return to you some seconds later.  We spent Christmas up there in the furthermost part of Russia, Murmansk, and it was night about 23 hours out of every 24.  The one hour of daylight meant that you saw light over the horizon for a half hour or so, then it disappeared rapidly and it was dark again.
 
There was only one place in town we could go for a drink.  The Russian women were not supposed to talk to foreigners, and most of them wore such big heavy sheep-skin coats that you never knew what was likely to come out from under that coat.  It was a wind-blown bleak, bomb-damaged city, machine gun holes in some of the buildings where German planes had straffed the street, but before I went to bed those Toll-house cookies brought me close to home whenever I took them out and ate one.  You'd have thought I was only eight years old sneaking a cookie from the jar, rather than an experienced twenty-year old merchant seaman.
 
Our cookies were much smaller, fairly thin and crisp, but those chocolate chips made them special.  Now one day I'll tell you about the banana cream pies she made me and how they were sitting on the back seat of the car when. . .well, that's another story.
 
*No one was supposed to know where we were headed, but they loaded Locomotive engines on deck with Russian markings on them, and then came large boxes full of heavy winter clothing, sheepskin linings, calf-skin vests, lined hats for heavy weather, etc.