Thursday, August 6, 2015

70th Anniversary of Hiroshima

On this, the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, (and our national moralizing over it) I would commend Paul Fussell's Thank God For The Atom Bomb to you. It's a short read.
When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that “Operation Olympic” would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all. The killing was all going to be over, and peace was actually going to be the state of things.
Go read the whole thing. Afterwards, tell me if you would still send young American men to charge fortified positions with only rifles and bayonets, against an enemy with suicidal intensity.

Yes, it's horrible that we had to drop nuclear bombs on Japan. However, it's also possible to say that, while it was horrible, it was the right thing to do. You don't have to like it, but you do have to respect that hard men made hard decisions.


1 comment:

  1. not horrible at all - that was war and they were savages. thank goodness we employed the bomb - and for that you can thank your neighbor Jimmy Byrnes.

    and thank Bernard Baruch as well

    "In any war between the Civilized Man and the Savage, support the Civilized Man"

    ReplyDelete