Uncle Bob's Letter to the Editor

August 20, 2007

To the Editor:
Former Marine Jerry Copeland (ltrs Aug 18) claims that in August 1945, the Japanese had “totally evacuated their large cities, gathered in their mountainous caves and redoubts and were willing and able to begin a bloodbath of historic proportions.”

Immediately thereafter, he remarks: “Please, please, please. Whoever you are, wherever you are, don’t continue spreading such foolish nonsense!”

I’m not sure what is going on here, but let’s blame it on cognitive dissonance..

I too am a former Marine with a slightly different perspective than Mr. Copeland’s. I was a prisoner of war on the island of Honshu at the time of the Japanese surrender.

Until the day the atom bombs were dropped, all of us POWs who were able to do so were marched out of camp on daily working parties just as we had been for the past three and one half years.

For months we had seen signs in the countryside that the Japanese were reaching the end of their rope and that the war would soon be over. We saw ordinary Japanese citizens suffering from the same dietary deficiency diseases, such as beri-beri, that plagued us. Before moving to our present location, we had seen shipbuilding supplies dwindle to zero on the docks of Osaka and the city itself become a smoking wasteland from American firebombing.

On the day of the Emperor’s surrender speech all work ceased and we were herded into our barracks while our Japanese guards stood at attention in the courtyard and bowed many times to the voice emanating from the loudspeakers. We assumed from the demeanor of the guards (some of them wept) that the Emperor was telling the citizens of Japan that the war was over and knew that our assumption was correct when our sadistic guards disappeared that very day and our nice new “guards” bowed to us and gave us their rifles.

Mr. Copeland’s letter is symptomatic of the myth that has been constructed to justify the atomic bombing of Japan. According to that myth, most Japanese men were fanatic Samurai warriors who would charge American invaders on the invasion beaches to the last man, accompanied by pitchfork-wielding peasants and their wives, all committing glorious national suicide for the Emperor. Accordingly, so goes the myth, it was necessary to unleash the most terrible weapon in the history of mankind, the nuclear bomb.

The 1945 reality, which Mr. Copeland disregards, was that the Japanese government was desperately seeking an end to the war. Even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, all major cities were in smoking ruins from incendiary bombing with the toll of civilian casualties therefrom at least twice that of the atomic bombs. Because of the naval blockade, not only war supplies but crucial food imports had dwindled to zero.

The evidence is overwhelming that the atomic bombs were not dropped to end the war, but just to prove that they could do what they were designed to do.

Zipeedoodah from 1945 to 2007 and we read in the papers that the threatened “first use” of nuclear weapons remains the cornerstone of U. S. national security policy.

I feel much safer now.

ROBERT E. WINSLOW
Eugene, OR