We do not need to apologise for dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was necessary to force Japan’s surrender and save hundreds of thousands of Allied lives a land invasion would have cost, but more to the point, Imperial Japan deserved it.
If you watch the BBC and Sky News coverage you’d swear America was the aggressor, not the nation reluctantly goaded into WWII by a sucker-punch attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour which cost the lives of thousands of Americans. By war’s end in 1945, the fight to defeat fascist Imperial Japan had cost the lives of up to a quarter-of-a-million Allied soldiers, and almost double that number wounded. It was estimated that a land-invasion to secure Japan’s surrender would double these figures.
None of this context – not even an allusion to it – was provided by either TV news teams. No reason was given for bombing Japan. The viewer is left to conclude it must have been some kind of ‘evil; on the part of the Americans. The Japanese are presented as victims. Don’t take my word for it, watch the BBC coverage here and here, and the Sky News coverage here.
Sky News even appropriate the “Never Again” pledge typically connected with the Holocaust, as if the Japanese join the 6 million Jews as victims of a Crime Against Humanity. As a further slap in the face to Jews, a parallel is drawn with Gaza – another case where the context of the unprovoked aggressive attack (on October 7th 2023) is conveniently left out of what followed from it. To underline their imagined parallel, Sky pans its cameras over to a large banner festooning the banks of a canal next to the ceremony with a large “Free Gaza” message.
We are cautioned to never forget.
I agree. The bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki should always be in the back of the minds of dictators and despots who lead their countries into disastrous wars against democracies. “Let that be a lesson to you,” should be our message, or to put it more crudely in modern parlance, “FAFO”.
But in all this casting of Japan as the victim, there are things we should not forget, and Japan should not be allowed to forget if this silliness persists. Here is my Top Ten of Imperial Japanese wickedness:
- The biological and chemical warfare experiments of Unit 731, which included rape and vivisection, and other experiments that would make Dr Mengele blush.
- The Nanjing Massacre in which an estimated two-hundred thousand civilians, non-combatants and surrendered soldiers were murdered.
- The Manila Massacre in which a hundred thousand civilians were massacred by the Japanese advancing on Manila in the Philippines in one month.
- The Bataan Death March in which about 75,000 American and Filipino POWs were forced to march cross country to a camp. A quarter of them never made it. Hundreds were simply executed along the way.
- The Three Alls , in which a scorched earth policy of “Kill All, Burn All, Loot All” was adopted. Some estimate a death toll of almost three million Chinese civilians, and two million Vietnamese.
- The Burma-Thailand Railway, and other forced labour projects in which POWs were used as slaves. Thousands of POWs were worked to death, alongside tens of thousands of civilian slaves.
- The Sook Ching Massacre in which up to seventy thousand civilians were murdered following the fall of Singapore.
- The Kalagon Massacre in which an entire village of up to a thousand inhabitants, including women and children, were beaten or raped, and then put to death for apparently aiding Allied commandos.
- The Parit Sulong Massacre, in which a hundred and fifty wounded POWs were summarily executed. By no means an isolated incident.
- The Comfort Women, tens, if not hundred of thousands of women taken from occupied countries and who were forced into sexual slavery to ‘service’ Japanese troops.
The number of Imperial Japanese war crimes is exhaustive and exhausting to review. Can anybody have any doubt that if they had acquired an atomic bomb first they would not have used it? Together with Nazi Germany, they were certainly trying to build one.
I have no idea what weird anti-Western mania has gripped our broadcast media prompting them to cast the Japanese as the sympathetic victims of an Allied atrocity. A similar thing occurs every so often when someone complains about the supposed “inhumanity” of interning Japanese nationals during the war, when the risk – and consequences – of espionage was very real and could be catastrophic. It is always presented as if it is a unique blot on our moral fabric and as if the Japanese themselves did not do the same – or worse, as I catalogued above. We did not subject internees to forced labour and starve and brutalise them.
Possibly the warm-fuzzy-feeling brigade in charge of TV news have neither the experience of an existential war nor the imagination to conceive of what is necessary to win one, but let us be frank: it was better that more Japanese died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than more allied soldiers died in a prolonged war. Soldiers are people too. They are someone’s son, or brother, or father, and they should not be sacrificed to prolong a war in the interests of “better optics” for people with different sensibilities in the next century.
The same people on the same networks fret about “the women and children of Gaza” (though not their counterparts in Syria, Yemen or the Sudan) while completely ignoring that it was the people of Gaza who instigated an unwelcome war with another nation and then too reaped the whirlwind.
Our only defence in the Free World (which, thanks to the atom bomb now includes Japan) is the fact that we can – and likely will – unleash unspeakable horror on our enemies if they attack us and draw us into wars we do not welcome or want. It is what keeps us free, and if we forget that, we will not be free for much longer.
Remember Hiroshima.
