... coming together............ 'circling-the-drain'...: Gmail Response

War should never be glorified in any way...
...and in war the innocent are always the most victimized.

We now make war a global business... and from all appearances will continue non-stop to chase the obscene profits being generated until something comes out of nowhere to prevent it.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: BJ Arias
Date: Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 4:00 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Tinian Island
To: Unnamed recipient

Once you go and visit the museums in both cities, standing right alongside the people of Japan, evidencing what in actuality took place there... it fully strikes home that this was (as described in the email below) as far from an act of 'humanitarianism' as could be in any way possible.

Massacring hundreds of thousands of civilians - women, children, the sick and the aged.. (all that remained in these cities, after all the men were off fighting the war)... many believed was completely morally reprehensible... and in fact truly unnecessary.

Dwight Eisenhower writing in his memoir 'The White House Years' states:

"In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one who felt there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression, and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."

And in an interview for Newsweek Eisenhower states;
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender... it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

There were many other high level U.S. military officers and officials who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings, they included:

-General of the Army Douglas MacArthur,

MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed. When asked about the decision to drop the bomb, all were surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. When asked what would his advice have been? He replied he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

-Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials)

"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it... we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs."

-Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet.

"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan."

-Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman....

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

-Herbert Hoover

"...the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945...up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; ...if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs."
"Use of the bomb had besmirched America's reputation, he [Hoover] told friends. It ought to have been described in graphic terms before being flung out into the sky over Japan."

And there are numerous others that had made similar statements, indicating it was totally unnecessry to drop the bombs to end the war.

Historical accounts indicate that the decision to use the atomic bombs was made in order to provoke an early surrender of Japan by use of an awe-inspiring power. These observations have caused some commentators to state that the incident was an act of "war terrorism".
Michael Walzer wrote,
"... And, finally, there is war terrorism: the effort to kill civilians in such large numbers that their government is forced to surrender. Hiroshima seems to me the classic case."

The second atomic bombing, on Nagasaki, coming only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, when the devastation at Hiroshima had yet to be fully comprehended by the Japanese... the lack of time between the bombings has led some historians to state that the second bombing was...
"certainly totally unnecessary"... "gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst."

And many believe it was an act of supreme racism and dehumanization:

Historian James J. Weingartner sees a connection between the American mutilation of Japanese war dead and the bombings. According to Weingartner both were partially the result of a dehumanization of the enemy.
"The widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human constituted an emotional context which provided another justification for decisions which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands."
On the second day after the Nagasaki bomb, Truman stated:
"The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast."

Developing and using these weapons of mass destruction set us off on a very undesirable path. Now there are tens of thousands of them (of even greater destructive power) spread around the world, and the list of nations in control of them is constantly growing.
(Forget about Iran... Pakistan should be scaring us all to wits end.)

There's a real moral delima with a 'whatever it takes' attitude when it comes to war... we've been fortunate that so far the US has had limited 'direct' involvement when it comes to acts of devastation of the magnitude inflicted on these two cities.

That might well change very quickly, and our cities and populations will be on the receiving end of the tragedy... making 9/11 look inconsequential in comparison.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 11:55 AM, > wrote:

I found this very interesting. After reading this I looked at these islands on bing maps to see what they both look like now.

WW II Pacific theater history follows.

Tinian Island, Pacific Ocean.

It's a small island, less than 40 square miles, a flat green Dot in the vastness of Pacific blue.

Fly over it and you notice a slash across its north end of uninhabited bush, a long thin linethat looks like an overgrown dirt runway. If you didn't know what it was, you wouldn't give it a second glance out your airplane window.

On the ground, you see the runway isn't dirt but tarmac and crushed limestone, abandoned with weeds sticking out of it. Yet this is arguably the most historical airstrip on earth. This is where World War II was won. This is Runway Able:

On July 24, 1944, 30,000 US Marines landed on the beaches of Tinian .... Eight days later, over 8,000 of the 8,800 Japanese soldiers on the island were dead (vs. 328 Marines), and four months later the Seabees had built the busiest airfield of WWII - dubbed North Field - enabling B-29 Superfortresses to launch air attacks on the Philippines, Okinawa, and mainland Japan.

Late in the afternoon of August 5, 1945, a B-29 was maneuvered over a bomb loading pit, then after lengthy preparations, taxied to the east end of North Field's main runway, Runway Able, and at 2:45am in the early morning darkness of August 6, took off.

The B-29 was piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets of the US Army Air Force, who had named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay. The crew named the bomb they were carrying Little Boy. 6 hours later at 8:15am Japan time, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima .

Three days later, in the pre-dawn hours of August 9, a B-29 named Bockscar (a pun on "boxcar" after its flight commander Capt. Fred Bock), piloted by Major Charles Sweeney took off from Runway Able. Finding its primary target of Kokura obscured by clouds, Sweeney proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki, over which, at 11:01am, bombardier Kermit Beahan released the atomic bomb dubbed Fat Man.

Here is "Atomic Bomb Pit #1" where Little Boy was loaded onto Enola Gay:

There are pictures displayed in the pit, now glass-enclosed. This one shows Little Boy being hoisted into Enola Gay's bomb bay.

And here on the other side of ramp is "Atomic Bomb Pit #2" where Fat Man was loaded onto Bockscar.

The commemorative plaque records that 16 hours after the nuking of Nagasaki , "On August 10, 1945 at 0300, the Japanese Emperor without his cabinet's consent decided to end the Pacific War."

Take a good look at these pictures, folks. This is where World War II ended with total victory of America over Japan . I was there all alone. There were no other visitors and no one lives anywhere near for miles. Visiting the Bomb Pits, walking along deserted Runway Able in solitude, was a moment of extraordinarily powerful solemnity.

It was a moment of deep reflection. Most people, when they think of Hiroshima andNagasaki , reflect on the numbers of lives killed in the nuclear blasts - at least 70,000 and 50,000 respectively. Being here caused me to reflect on the number of lives saved - how many more Japanese and Americans would have died in a continuation of the war had the nukes not been dropped.

Yet that was not all. It's not just that the nukes obviated the US invasion of Japan , Operation Downfall, that would have caused upwards of a million American and Japanese deaths or more. It's that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of extraordinary humanitarian benefit to the nation and people of Japan .

Let's go to this cliff on the nearby island of Saipan to learn why:

Saipan is less than a mile north of Tinian .... The month before the Marines took Tinian, on June 15, 1944, 71,000 Marines landed on Saipan .... They faced 31,000 Japanese soldiers determined not to surrender.

Japan had colonized Saipan after World War I and turned the island into a giant sugar cane plantation. By the time of the Marine invasion, in addition to the 31,000 entrenched soldiers, some 25,000 Japanese settlers were living on Saipan, plus thousands more Okinawans, Koreans, and native islanders brutalized as slaves to cut the sugar cane.

There were also one or two thousand Korean "comfort women" (kanji in Japanese), abducted young women from Japan 'S colony of Korea to service the Japanese soldiers as sex slaves. (See The Comfort Women: Japan 'S Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War, by George Hicks.)

Within a week of their landing, the Marines set up a civilian prisoner encampment that quickly attracted a couple thousand Japanese and others wanting US food and protection. When word of this reached Emperor Hirohito - who contrary to the myth was in full charge of the war - he became alarmed that radio interviews of the well-treated prisoners broadcast to Japan would subvert his people's will to fight.

As meticulously documented by historian Herbert Bix in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, the Emperor issued an order for all Japanese civilians on Saipan to commit suicide. The order included the promise that, although the civilians were of low caste, their suicide would grant them a status in heaven equal to those honored soldiers who died in combat for their Emperor.

And that is why the precipice in the picture above is known as Suicide Cliff, off which over 20,000 Japanese civilians jumped to their deaths to comply with their fascist emperor's desire - mothers flinging their babies off the cliff first or in their arms as they jumped.

Anyone reluctant or refused, such as the Okinawan or Korean slaves, were shoved off at gunpoint by the Jap soldiers. Then the soldiers themselves proceeded to hurl themselves into the ocean to drown off a sea cliff afterwards called Banzai Cliff. Of the 31,000 Japanese soldiers on Saipan , the Marines killed 25,000, 5,000 jumped off Banzai Cliff, and only the remaining thousand were taken prisoner.

The extent of this demented fanaticism is very hard for any civilized mind to fathom - especially when it is devoted not to anything noble but barbarian evil instead. The vast brutalities inflicted by the Japanese on their conquered and colonized peoples of China ,Korea , the Philippines , and throughout their "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was a hideously depraved horror.

And they were willing to fight to the death to defend it. So they had to be nuked. The only way to put an end to the Japanese barbarian horror was unimaginably colossal destruction against which they had no defense whatever. Nuking Japan was not a matter of justice, revenge, or it getting what it deserved. It was the only way to end the Japanese dementia.

And it worked - for the Japanese. They stopped being barbarians and started being civilized. They achieved more prosperity - and peace - than they ever knew, or could have achieved had they continued fighting and not been nuked. The shock of getting nuked is responsible.

We achieved this because we were determined to achieve victory. Victory without apologies. Despite perennial demands we do so, America and its government has never apologized for nuking Japan ... Hopefully, America never will.

Oh, yes... Guinness lists Saipan as having the best, most equitable, weather in the world. And the beaches? Well, take a look:

I find e-mails such as this one just plain fascinating. Although we do not forget, history fades into the shadows of our mind and we seldom think about it. But, we should remember and we should be constantly reminded of our history, where we came from and how we got here. Kind of interesting.