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Howard's Views |
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by Howard E. Morseburg |
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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, even though tthey were forced to make a complete and unconditional surrender; it is how they were treated in the aftermath that made the difference. A victorious Japan would have meant the continued occupation of many Pacific Rim nations, enslavement of millions, and death to those who opposed their masters, the Japanese military, and that was what made the difference, the outlook, the Democracy that granted them Democracy! Is this pointed out in school to young boys and girls studying history? If this made clear to 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, a hundred to one. The second bomb affirmed our ability to deliver and proved that there was no alternative to those in Tokyo who may have opposed an absolute surrender of the Japanese empire, built year after year by conquest, invasions and conquest. It was our job to make the enemy realize the futility of any further struggles, any resistance, to bring them to a point where even insurgency is futile, that surrender and peace becomes the only alternative. That is what the Atomic Bombs accomplished for us. That first mushroom cloud got their attention; it took the second to make them realize that immediate and total surrender was imperative, because the third might be directed at Tokyo itself. War may be terrible, but if you're in a war, then it must be won or the consequences are too horrible to even guess. 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 we felt, personally, that it was 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 those who had sacrificed to much, yes, even to avenge if necessary, but certainly it was also our nation's duty to defeat the Axis powers. Our troops, whether by land or by sea, or by air, did so. We owed no apologies for our actions at the time. And our Nation owes none today. Repetitive perhaps, but again, the Japanese of that time in history were a militaristic nation that 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 of that day, of that period, deserved neither mercy nor consideration. |
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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 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. 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 atrocities by offering an official apology that I know of, and it is long overdue. 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. 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. A FEW JAPANESE ATROCITIES TO RESEARCH IN ORDER TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THEIR BRUTALITY, INHUMANITY AND SAVAGERY. History books today tell little of the barbaric atrocities committed by the Japanese military during World War II. In Japan, it is my understanding, that they eliminate all reference to the horrendous deeds of their fathers and grandfathers, as if it never happened. Soldiers were deliberately hardened in their training to such deeds of savagery by their officers that full descriptions of it would tighten the muscles of your stomach. They even trained them by forcing their soldiers to bayonet captured enemy, with the live prisoners bound to poles while they were stabbed them repeatedly and they were thereby inured to the blood and screams of dying men To properly understand the reason for the use of Atomic bombs
against Japan, one has to first know what type of enemy we were fighting,
their ferocity, their cunning, their willingness to die for their Emperor,
and that the Allies simply could not risk what might be a failure in an
invasion, or simply the vagaries of warfare, the suddeness that the tide
of battle might turn on a simple error, a change in weather, or quite
simply--chance.They observed none of the conventions of warfare,
condoned the most brutal of acts, and used the same brutality on a daily
basis against the people of the lands they seized as they did in
battle. Barbaric Occupation Forces in ManchuriaKorea, from the turn of the Century until the end of the war in 1945. There is hardly a day goes by that we are not reminded of the atrocities of the Germans during World War II, mostly the Holocaust. However, there is seldom anything said about the horrible treatment and almost inhumane conduct of the Japanese troops during the war. While I harbor no ill-will towards the Japanese people today, when it
comes to any reference to the use Atomic Bombs I believe that it is
necessary to take everything in historical context and for those who
question our use these weapons, for them to understand the very nature of
the war we were fighting at the time. They don't seem to do so. They're
always ready to condemn their own country first, for some misguided reason
or other. One has to examine the Japanese attitudes and the actions of their military forces in occupied territories. Prisoners and subjugated people were often used as slave laborers, beaten, robbed, raped, starved, beheaded, bayoneted as a part of military drills, subjected to all manner of torture, summarily executed, a litany of horrors so extensive that no history could ever cover them in an adequate manner. The Japanese military, in almost all instances, were inhumane in their treatment of conquered nations. It's a historical fact, and we should not allow apologists to rewrite or ignore it, and attempt to make us feel guilty. On the other hand, I believe that General Douglas MacArthur's treatment of the defeated Japanese nation was the correct course to follow, and that as a result of his humane policies we now have an entirely different attitude on the part of the Japanese people, and that today we are seeing them at their very best. If it was not for our demanding an unconditional surrender, and keeping an occupation force in Japan while they set about making a democracy out of the country, they would not be where they are today. They are an interesting and dynamic people. Today's generation of Americans owes no apologies for the actions that we, as a nation, took in those days, nor does anyone who was responsible for the development and use of Atomic weapons. There is nothing for us to apologize for, nor to forgive; all is in the past and should remain in the past. For those who criticize our generation, let them examine the full story of the Japanese army from the turn of the century up until their surrender. In the year 2001 our government stupidly, I believe, spent more than $60 million to raise a Japanese fishing boat, accidently struck and sunk in Hawaiian waters, by a U.S. submarine (right off Pearl Harbor), in order to recover six bodies of fisherman aboard her.. Our cost was roughly $10 million for each body! It was sheer lunacy. Those of us who went to sea understood that death at sea meant that the sea became your burial ground. What kind of reasoning is this that our tax dollars go to bring such bodies to the surface? When did that change? It is ludicrous that our government would waste millions to raise a fishing boat in order to recover six bodies! That's beyond comprehension, or understanding, and it has nothing to do with race, or the fact that they were Japanese, because even to do it for American bodies would be just as ridiculous. What a precedent to set! It's not because they were Japanese and this is some sort of a belated vengeance or anti-Japanese or hateful thinking; it is because spending millions in that manner is inane. What's next, searching for every ship that sank and bringing swollen sodden bits of flesh to the surface only so that we can bury them again? |
| The use of the Atomic Bomb stopped the war earlier by at least 30 days, or it may have dragged on for another year or more, meaning tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands more deaths and a longer period of suffering on both sides. A delay might also have led to Japanese deveopment of their own bomb, unbeknownst to us. There is not a doubt in anyone's mind that they would have used it first, had they had it first. |
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Then, there was also the danger that Russia might have developed it firrst and used it to dominate the far east, then Europoe and the United States as well. No matter how mcuh intelligence is gathered, there are no certaintities that it is either complete nor accurate. INNOCENT LIVES? Is a soldier any more guilty for a war than those who back him up at home? What about the young men and women, the older men and women, at home, who build the weapons of war? What about those who feed those who make those weapons? What about those who support them? It isn't easy to assess guilt, blame, or even innocense. The Victor can always take the Vanquished to task.
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