Tuesday 31 August 2010

Cruel Necessity


This is a piece I wrote on the anniversary of VJ Day- Victory over Japan Day – posted on another site. I’m adding it here for Quiet_Man.

It’s VJ Day today, the sixty-fifth anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender on 15 August 1945, more generally the final end of the Second World War. It was a sudden stop to a conflict that may have gone on well into 1946, perhaps even longer, at an incalculable human cost. This was prevented, thankfully, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which brought and fanatics in the Japanese government rapidly to some sense of reality.

Thankfully, did I really write that; am I truly thankful for such a terrible event, the curtain raiser to the atomic age? Yes, I am, and I offer no apology whatsoever for my frankness. What I will say is that the atomic bombings were the last act in a dreadful tragedy, one that I personally wish had never happened. But it did. Even God can’t change the past.

The great and terrible paradox is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more lives than were lost. I do hate this kind of calculus, this calculus of mortality, balancing the dead against the probable dead. But it still has to be done. My grandfather served in the East during the war in the Fourteenth Army under Bill Slim. He was one of the first to enter Singapore after the Japanese surrender; one of the first to see the liberation of Changi Prisoner of War Camp, the liberation of men who would not have survived if the war had gone on many weeks longer.

There were so many other men, so many other camps right across the lands still held by the Japanese, so many other men who would have died. But it wasn’t just men. There were women and children, too, held in internment camps where conditions were not much better.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that the atomic bombings saved the Japanese themselves, saved them from the last ditch lunatics who were willing to contemplate the extermination of a whole nation. After the war Kido Koichi, a high Japanese official, estimated that the surrender may have saved as many as twenty million Japanese lives. I would urge those who think this an exaggeration to look at the details of the Battle of Saipan, where the wretched Emperor Hirohito, the one major war criminal to escape retribution, sent out a message to the civilian population ordering them to commit suicide, afraid that people may be favourably impressed by their treatment at the hands of the Americans.

The above thoughts were really brought on by the fact that this year, for the very first time, the United States sent a representative to the annual commemoration of the Hiroshima bombing. On Obama’s initiative John Roos, the ambassador to Japan, laid a commemorative wreath, the closest the country has ever offered to a formal apology for the attack. This is just another empty gesture by PPP, the Peace Prize President, a gesture rightfully condemned by Gene Tibbets, the son of Paul Tibbets, the pilot who dropped ‘Little Boy’ from Enola Gay on August 6, 1945. It was an attempt, Mr Tibbets put it, to rewrite history.

There is one other thing I have to say about rewriting history, or perhaps forgetting history might be better. The Japanese are very good when it comes to remembering their own suffering, remembering events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are not so good when it comes to remembering the suffering they inflicted on others, the suffering their militaristic regime inflicted right across Asia and the Pacific. Earlier this year I saw City of Life and Death and John Rabe, two movies which drew my attention to the Rape of Nanking, the greatest war crime of the twentieth century prior to the Holocaust.

Nanking, now Nanjing, was capital of China when it was occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937. Thereafter they began the wholesale massacre and rape of tens of thousands of civilians, a crime still denied today in Japan. John Rabe, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party then living in the city, was so horrified by events that he was instrumental in building his own Schindler’s Arc. It comes as something of a shock in John Rabe to see Chinese civilians sheltering under a huge Swastika flag in the grounds of his factory, a banner of salvation, not something one normally associates with that symbol. So, yes, when I look over the whole history, the hypocrisy, dissimulation and self-pity of the Japanese disgusts me.

20 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Tokyo fire bombings actually killed more people than the atomic bombs. The Japanese miltary cared nothing for casualties, evidenced by what happened on Saipan. Your last point is therefore particularly valid - it was the shock and awe of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought the war to a quick end more than anything else.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Adam, you might care to look at the details of the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. Conventional bombing on its own would never have brought the war to an end. Harris was wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  5. great thoughts and writing! i have to quote from a interesting movie "Flawless":
    "What's that old phrase about two wrongs a right do not make? That's nonsense! Sometime to make something right you have to do something just as wrong. ...oh yes, my cost it's worth 100 life times in jail."
    i don't know if you watched this movie but he (the man in the movie) didn't end up in jail anyway, instead, he got the money ans spent it in some nice way.:-) just like atomic bombs saved millions of lives.

    ReplyDelete
  6. ana, do you know about the notorious 731 troop? the one that was located in northeast of china during ww2 operated chemical experiments on live human being (mostly chinese, some korean i guess)? i assume you know because i am convince you know everything:-)

    ReplyDelete
  7. An interesting read I thought you might like Ana:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Castle

    ReplyDelete
  8. Most of the Japanese I've talked to know this as well as you and I, and they accept it, and the funny thing is, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is something that their culture would've (even if it hadn't been needed in such mortal calculus) considered perfectly acceptable, far more in fact then Pearl Harbor which was seen by many Japanese even at the time as a cowardly and distasteful act against their nations honor. But you know, the folks in Hiroshima have rebuilt, and despite the scare stories that people always seem to recite about the horrible radiation, waste, and supposedly near permanent results of atomic explosions, there is a population of 1.17 million living on the very site that the previous city occupied, under where the mushroom cloud was, today, rebuilt, vibrant, and open for business, and you can visit it. A friend of mine did, and he hasn't grown additional eyes yet.

    ReplyDelete
  9. @Ana & MGON: More to the point, conventional bombing was completely understood, and it takes more then one surviving plane in a raid to destroy a city that way. Thus, it lacks the scare factor that nuclear weapons possess.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Yun yi, yes, I do know about that, but I assure you I don't know about everything. That's just an impression I give. :-))

    ReplyDelete
  11. Jeremy, thanks, I'll have a look. You are quite right: the atomic experience is not one that is easily absorbed, though aside from the radiation factor, not fully appreciated at the time, it's just one helluva bang. Psychology is claerly quite important here.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Couldn't agree more with you, but the thing is that demands of an apology by the Americans are mostly fueled by blind anti-Americanism and butthurt, so there's little that can be done to show them they're wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  13. "The Japanese are very good when it comes to remembering their own suffering,..."
    i agree. they share a common character with chinese people - when it comes to individual, they seems to be complete altruist even self destructive, but when it comes to their nation, they appear to be extreme patriotic.
    history has been always rewritten. had japan succeeded in ww2 most people would still not know about nanking massacre, and i would certainly speak 3 different languages.
    sigh!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Yun yi, I always try to look at these things in as broad a context as possible. It's all very well to remember one's own suffering; it takes courage to recognise the suffering one has inflicted on others.

    ReplyDelete
  15. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  16. You overestimate him, Adam. He's pathetic rather than monstrous.

    ReplyDelete
  17. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Then you have the same problem as with the use of the word 'evil' - it adds a depth that was simply not there. It's the sheer mediocrity that strikes me. Or if there is evil, if Blair was monstrous, then there is no better illustration of Arendt's thesis on banality.

    ReplyDelete
  19. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete