August 15th and Beyond

On August 15, 78 years ago, Japan's Emperor Hirohito broadcast to his subjects "that our empire accepts the provisions of their [the Allies] Joint Declaration [of the Powers, Potsdam Declaration]." The fighting was to stop. Whether he believed this was a surrender or not, is still subject to debate. What the Japanese people heard that day was a recording of his statement made the night before. The Emperor's voice maintained its divine distance from his subjects as he explained "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest." He concluded by asking the nation "to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable."

Memories have faded and most Americans are surprised to learn that Japan was an enemy during WWII. One result of this fugue is that governments East and West find little opposition to their rewriting of WWII history and its aftermath. Generally, this has not been for the better and always for personal political gain. Worse, Washington counts many of these countries as allies and remains silent.

These revisionist histories have undermined the values that have shaped the postwar "liberal democratic order."  Authoritarian regimes now erode individual freedoms, human rights, and humanitarian cooperation. Glorifying strongmen, dismissing war atrocities, identifying perpetrators now as victims, and co-opting the victor's history as one's own is upending the legacy and lessons of WWII. A new "glorious history" is being promulgated in Poland, Hungary, China, Japan and other places. Unashamedly, the Polish government claims that Poles were uninvolved with the persecution of Jews and a Japanese diplomat praises the "Bushido Spirit" of the famed Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team to their sons.

Thus, it is welcome that this fall there are a number of seminars and conferences examining the immediate postwar period. 

In Japan, the revisionist, denialist history has become normalized by two decades of conservative nationalist governments. Western Alliance Managers consequently do not recognize that nationalist populism has consumed the body politic and they have concluded incorrectly that Japan is "stable" and "unscathed from the populist wave" around the world. Little attention is given to how Japan's official war apology has been diminished, voting districts are unconstitutional, or to Japan's well-funded history disinformation campaign. 

Prime Minister Kishida's address at the Seventy-Eighth National Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead yesterday repeated his predecessor Abe's 2015 statement that makes no mention of apology or remorse to Japan's victims. He, like Abe and Suga before him, promises only: "We will not forget, even for a moment, that the peace and prosperity that Japan enjoys today was built atop the precious lives and the history of suffering of the war dead." Ceremony photos and documents. Kishida marks 78th anniversary of World War II end without mentioning Japan's wartime aggression, Associated Press, Aug. 15, 2023.

As a new book by a Brookings scholar supports this celebratory view of contemporary Japan, The author sees the Japanese government as having reinvented itself to encourage more political engagement with the world and a greater military presence in the region. This is a new self-confidence that will award Tokyo with credibility and global leadership. To be sure, I have not read the book (then again neither have the folks who recommend it on the dust jacket). I have, however, heard this argument repeatedly over the decades that Japan has changed and it is in our image. Someone once observed that Western efforts to "fix" Japan always result in the tutor being broken-hearted.
See: Japan’s Quiet Leadership Reshaping the Indo-Pacific by Mireya Solis, (release August 24, 2023).

Or watch the book talk: Japan's Quiet Leadership: Reshaping the Pacific, Wednesday, September 6, 89:30-10:30am EDT, Washington, DC, Hybrid. Sponsor: Brookings Institution. Speakers: Mireya Solís, Director - Center for East Asia Policy Studies, Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for East Asia Policy Studies, Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies; Kurt W. Tong, Managing Partner - The Asia Group (grandson of Philippine internee Rev Walter Curtis Tong); Yuichi Hosoya, Director of Research, API & Professor, Keio University; Demetri Sevastopulo, U.S.-China Correspondent, Financial Times.

But not everyone forgets: Memorial service for POWs in Yokohama passed down to next generation, August 12, 2023, Mainichi Shimbun

Here are a number of talks and conferences this fall that examine Japan's Pacific War and its aftermath. I hope you can attend in person or virtually. 

A. Friday September 8

MJHA Distinguished Annual Lecture

Tessa Morris-Suzuki on Writing War: History in Occupied Japan and its Echoes for Today

Hosted by The Modern Japan History Association

Speaker: Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Professor Emerita of Japanese History, Australian National University https://researchprofiles.anu.edu.au/en/persons/tessa-morris-suzuki . 

Date/time and registration information:

Online, free.
Saturday, September 9, 2023 | 9:00-10:30 AM Australian Eastern Standard Time
Friday, September 8, 2023 | 7:00-8:30 PM (EST)
https://mjha.org/Distinguished-Annual-Lecture 

As the world edges into a new Cold War, rising political tensions in East Asia are reflected in growing conflict over memories of history, and particularly of the history of the Asia-Pacific War. Increasing nationalism in all the countries of the region finds expression in rewritings of that history. In Japan, a central feature of recent waves of historical revisionism has been a focus on the shaping of historiography in the post war occupation period. The period from August 1945 to May 1952 was the era when historians first struggled to give meaning to the disastrous events of the war which had ravaged East Asia during the previous decade or more. The diverse ways in which they did this has had an enduring effect on the way in which the war is remembered to the present day. In the context of contemporary controversies over history, it is important to return to that occupation era and to reassess the possibilities and limitations of the way in which the history of the war was written by those who had just experienced it in their own lives.

B. Saturday September 16
Annual Symposium
Occupation: The Legacy of the Asiatic Pacific War 

Hosted by The Admiral Nimitz Foundation.  
Speakers: Richard B. Frank, internationally recognized leading authority on the Asia-Pacific War; Dr. Xiaobing Li, professor of the Department of History and Geography and the Don Betz Endowed Chair in International Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO); Ricardo Trota Jose, professor of history at the University of the Philippines, Diliman; Mindy L. Kotler is founder and director of Asia Policy Point. Special guest, Marie Vallejo, author of Dauntless, a book about the First and Second Filipino Regiments.

Date/time and registration information:
In person and online. Fee.

Saturday, September 16, 2023, 9:00am-5:00pm (CDT)
https://www.pacificwarmuseum.org/event/2023-admiral-nimitz-symposium

The Admiral Nimitz Foundation is excited to welcome you back to this year’s Annual Symposium. The focus this year will be on Japan's occupation of Asia. Titled, “Occupation: The Legacy of the Asiatic Pacific War,” the symposium will explore the nuanced ramifications of the Japanese occupation.

C. Saturday September 23

6th Annual Conference on WWII in the Philippines

War Crimes - From WWII Until Today

Hosted by: Bataan Legacy Historical Society in partnership with the University of San Francisco's Philippine Studies Program, Memorare Manila 1945 and USF Kasamahan

Speakers: James Zarsadiaz, Director, Philippine Studies Program, University of San Francisco; Prof. Mark Hull, Professor of War Crimes, U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, Ft. Leavenworth; Philippine Consul General in San Francisco Neil F. Ferrer; Father Paul Fitzgerald, S.J., President, University of San Francisco; Benjamin Hall, Fox News State Department Correspondent, Eyewitness to War Crimes Today (Via Zoom); Jose Custodio, Fellow, Consortium of Indo Pacific Researchers; Christopher Capozzola, Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Frank, Pacific War historian, author, Tower of Skulls; Marie Vallejo, author of Dauntless, a book about the First and Second Filipino Regiments; Kate LaFerriere, daughter of Frank Innis, former civilian POW in Los Banos; Cynthia Bonta, survivor of the Los Baños massacre, mother of California Attorney General Rob Bonta; and Richard Foye, author of Foye And The Filipinos Bailout, Escape, And Rescue Of A Navy Fighter Pilot In World War Two Luzon, is the son of Ensign William Foye, an F6F Hellcat Pilot and a member of the Air Group Twenty assigned to the USS Enterprise (CV6).

Date/time and registration information:

In person, Facebook Live, Taped, fee
Saturday, September 23, 2023 | 10:00am - 4:00pm (PDT)

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/war-crimes-from-wwii-until-today-tickets-636013321967

The conference aims to present the war crimes the invading Japanese perpetrated upon soldiers and civilians in the Philippines. A compelling discussion on war crimes in the Philippines and its effects on subsequent generations as well as similarities in today's world.

D. Thursday December 7 to Saturday December 9
16th International Conference on World War II
Finding Hope In A World Destroyed: WWII Liberations & Legacies

Hosted by National WWII Museum, New Orleans.

Speakers: [there are no affiliations listed on the website and your editor simply did not have the energy to track everyone down]: Jason Dawsey  ; Francine Hirsch  ; Robert Hutchinson  ; Günter Bischof  ; John Curatola, Military Historian at the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy; Rana Mitter, University of Oxford; Yuma Totani, University of Hawaii; Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University; William Hitchcock  ;Blanche Wiesen Cook  ;Jeremi Suri  ;Lizabeth Cohen   ; Krewasky Salter, Pritzker Military Museum & Library; Marcus Cox  : Kara Dixon Vuic  ; David Davis  ;Jeremy Black   ; Robert Citino, National WWII Museum; Richard B. Frank, Pacific War historian, author, Tower of Skulls;  Craig Symonds, Distinguished Visiting Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History for the academic years 2017–2020 at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island; Trent Hone, a Vice President with ICF and an award-winning naval historian, author of Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945; Allan R. Millett   ;Keith Lowe   ;Ronald Spector, professor emeritus, George Washington University; John McManus  : Conrad Crane  ; Steph Hinnershitz  ; Catherine Musemeche  ;Dave Gutierrez  ; Jim McNaughton  ; Gordon H. “Nick” Mueller, PhD,   ;William Hitchcock  ;Jeremi Suri  ;Major General Peter Gravett  ;Cameron McCoy  ;Robert Edsel  ;Alexandra Richie  ;Wendy Lower  ; Paul Hilliard  ; Kirk Saduski   ;Donald L. Miller  ; John Orloff

Panel of particular interest (December 7):
Aftermath in Asia
Chair: John Curatola, Military Historian at the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy
“The War That Never Really Ended: WWII’s Long Legacy”: Rana Mitter, University of Oxford
“Justice in Asia and the Pacific Region, 1945-1952: Allied War Crimes Prosecutions”: Yuma Totani, University of Hawaii
“Japan’s Decade After Defeat: Occupation and Democratization”: Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University

Date/time and registration information:

In person only in New Orleans, LA, fee
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/programs/16th-international-conference-world-war-ii

The International Conference on World War II is the premier adult educational event bringing together the best and brightest scholars, authors, historians, and witnesses to history from around the globe to discuss key battles, personalities, strategies, issues, and controversies of the war that changed the world. The agenda, speakers, and times are not yet set.

The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and The Defeat of Japan

click to order

“Mr. Straight Arrow,” John Hersey, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb: A Book Review

by D. M. Giangreco

D. M. Giangreco is the author of 13 books including Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947(Naval Institute Press, 2017) and The Soldier from Independence: A Military Biography of Harry Truman. Vol. I: 1906-1919(Potomac Books, 2018). His Journal of Military History article “Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasions of Japan: Planning and Policy Implications” was awarded the Society for Military History's Moncado Prize.

First published in History News Network, August 4, 2019

click to order

Roy Scranton’s ”How John Hersey Bore Witness” (The New Republic, July-August 2019) is an insightful look at a new book on one of my favorite authors. It touched all the right notes and has prompted me to add Mr. Straight Arrow to my “Christmas list.” Sadly, in the midst of this otherwise fine review, author Scranton repeats the discredited old chestnut that President Harry S. Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki even though he knew Japan was trying to surrender. Truman’s real reason for using the weapons, according to Scranton, was to employ them as a diplomatic club against the Soviet Union. This allegation was popular in some quarters during the 1960s and 70s, but was only sustained by a systematic falsifying of the historical record and it continues to pop up even today.

Underscoring this sad fact is the link Scranton provides which takes readers to a 31-year-old letter to the New York Times from Truman critic Gar Alperovitz purporting that “dropping the atomic bomb was seen by analysts at the time as militarily unnecessary.” Presented in the letter is an interesting collection of cherry-picked quotes from a variety of diary entries and memos by contemporaries of Truman, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower. All are outtakes and have been long rebutted or presented in their actual contexts. Even key figures are misidentified. For example, FDR’s White House chief of staff Admiral William D. Leahy, who chaired the meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is elevated in the letter to the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

As for the notion that Japan was trying to surrender, this is not what was beheld by America’s leaders who were reading the secretly decrypted internal communications of their counterparts in Japan.

In the summer of 1945, Emperor Hirohito requested that the Soviets accept a special envoy to discuss ways in which the war might be “quickly terminated.” But far from a coherent plea to the Soviets to help negotiate a surrender, the proposals were hopelessly vague and recognized by both Washington and Moscow as no more than a stalling tactic ahead of the Potsdam Conference to prevent Soviet military intervention --- an intervention that Japanese leaders had known was inevitable ever since the Soviets’ recent cancellation of their Neutrality Pact with Japan.

Japan was not trying to surrender. Even after the obliteration of two cities by nuclear weapons and the Soviet declaration of war the militarists in firm control of the Imperial government refused to admit defeat until their emperor finally forced the issue. They had argued that the United States would still have to launch a ground invasion and that the subsequent carnage would force the Americans to sue for peace leaving of much of Asia firmly under Japanese control.

The war had started long before Pearl Harbor with the Japanese invasion of China, and millions had already perished. That Asians in the giant arc from Indonesia through China --- far from Western eyes --- were dying by the hundreds of thousands each and every month that the war continued has been of zero interest to Eurocentric writers and historians be they critics or supporters of Truman’s decision. As for the president, himself, Truman rightfully hoped, after the bloodbaths on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, that atomic bombs might force Japan’s surrender and forestall the projected two-phase invasion which would result in “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”

Hersey understood this well. Fluent in Chinese (he was born and raised in China), Hersey was painfully aware of the almost unimaginable cost of the war long before the United States became involved and, after it did, observed the savagery of battle on Guadalcanal first hand. Yes, he understood it quite well and it will come as a surprise, even shock, to many that neither Hersey nor Truman saw Hiroshima as an indictment of the decision to use the bomb.

Those were very different times and the prevailing attitude, according to George M. Elsey, was “look what Japanese militarism and aggression hath wrought!” (Truman also made similar observations when touring the rubble of Berlin during the Potsdam Conference.) The president considered Hiroshima an “important” work and, far from being persona non grata, Hersey would sometimes spend days at a time in Truman’s company when preparing articles for The New Yorker. This level of access was not accorded to other journalists and circumstances resulted in Hersey sitting in on key events such as when Truman learned that the Chinese had just entered the Korean War and a secret meeting with Senate leaders over the depredations of Joe McCarthy.

click to order

Although exceptions can be found in the literature, Hersey’s Hiroshima was simply not viewed in the postwar period as an anti-nuclear polemic and Elsey, who served in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations before going on to head the American Red Cross for more than a decade, remarked to David McCullough that “It’s all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.”


Scranton, himself, gives a brief nod to this fact, admitting that the midnight conventional firebombing of Tokyo earlier that year killed even more people, approximately 100,000, yet one shudders to think what he teaches to his unsuspecting students. The “revisionist” Japanese-were-trying-to-surrender hoax prominently recited in his review of Mr. Straight Arrow has long been consigned to the garbage heap of history by a host of scholarly books and articles* including, ironically, a brilliant work by one of Scranton’s own colleagues at Notre Dame.

Father Wilson D. Miscamble’s The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and The Defeat of Japan(Cambridge University Press, 2011) is a hard hitting, well researched effort that is especially notable for its thoughtful exploration of the moral issues involved. Though Scranton and Miscamble share the same campus, a colleague of mine maintains that the two scholars have never met. Perhaps they should get together for coffee some morning.

--------------------------
* Six particularly useful works are: Sadao Asada’s award winning, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender -- A Reconsideration,” Pacific Historical Review, 67 (November 1998); Michael Kort, The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) and “The Historiography of Hiroshima: The Rise and Fall of Revisionism,” The New England Journal of History, 64 (Fall 2007); Wilson D. Miscamble C.S.C., The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Robert James Maddox, ed., Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2007); Robert P. Newman, Enola Gay and the Court of History, (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004)

Corregidor, MacArthur, and the Japan’s New Emperor

This article first appeared in Medium on May 6, 2019.

Staged picture of the Surrender of Corregidor

The 77th Anniversary of the day Corregidor fell was May 6, 1942. It is a history that shadows every Japanese Golden Week and especially last week’s imperial succession ceremonies.

From December 29, 1941 to the end of April 1942, despite incessant Japanese aerial, naval, and artillery bombardment, the men and women on the fortress Island of Corregidor in Manila Bay, which consisted of the 4th Marine Regiment and combined units from the United States Army, the US Navy, and Filipino soldiers, resisted valiantly, inflicting heavy enemy losses in men, ships, and aircraft.

The last week on Corregidor was brutal. The Japanese celebrated Emperor Hirohito’s April 29th birthday by intensifying their shelling. By week’s end, the island’s infrastructure was destroyed, bombing incessant, water scarce, and the invasion begun. The siege of Corregidor had succeeded.

Fearful of a complete annihilation of the more than 12,000 Americans and Filipinos on Corregidor and the three nearby island forts, Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered all on May 6, 1942. The rest of the Philippines were surrendered over the next month after the Japanese threatened to massacre all the POWs and civilians on Corregidor.

Seventy-seven years later, the 1942 fall of Corregidor still matters. It set the timetable for the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan General Douglas MacArthur’s punishment of Japan’s militarists. And thus, it set the Abe Government’s timetable the abdication for Emperor Hirohito’s son, Emperor Akihito, on April 30, 2019 and the ascension of his son, Naruhito, to the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1, 2019. Abe wanted to expunge an ugly history that MacArthur wanted to embed.

As noted, April 29th was Emperor Hirohito’s birthday. It was a sacred day in wartime Japan. General MacArthur ended that practice and humanized the Emperor. After the War, this date became a holiday to appreciate nature called Greenery Day. In 2007, soon after anti-Japanese riots in China, Greenery Day was replaced by Showa Day to again remember Emperor Hirohito and his reign called Showa. Greenery Day is now held on May 4.

It was no coincidence that General MacArthur chose the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to begin and the indictments for Tojo and other war criminals to be read on April 29, 1946. MacArthur, commander of all US Army Forces in the Far East, forced to escape Corregidor, remembered bitterly his abandonment of his troops and the fall of Corregidor. MacArthur wanted the Japanese also to feel his loss and to forever associate Hirohito with war crimes. In turn, the Tribunal proceedings began on May 3, which in 1947 the new Japanese Constitution came into effect.

It was also the same thinking that led MacArthur to have General Hideki Tojo and six other Class-A war criminals hanged on December 23, 1948. This day is now-former Emperor Akihito’s birthday and long celebrated as the national day for Japan with Embassy parties worldwide. Akihito, however, is forever reminded of the date’s other history.

MacArthur did not want the Japanese to ever forget what they suffered from their loyalty to their monarchs. And he did not want the emperors to forget the consequences and responsibilities of this power. MacArthur wanted to translate the reverence the Japanese had for their emperors into a deep respect for peace.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has different goals. By sandwiching the Imperial abdication and ascension in between the important dates of April 29 and May 3, Prime Minister Abe hopes to diminish if not erase their historical significance. This is what he means when he declares that he wants to “end Japan’s postwar regime. Abe believes he must and can free Japan from these embedded reminders of the war and all that it wrought. The Prime Minister believes the Japanese people should remember the war years as a happier, simpler, and prouder time.

Yet, in his hubris and revisionist history, Abe misses that MacArthur is still setting down the markers and forcing the timetable in Japan. By maneuvering around MacArthur’s touchstones, Abe simply emphasizes them. They are now the brackets sanctioning imperial succession and the rule of law.

MacArthur’s war history will again loom large over the October 22nd formal coronation of Emperor Naruhito. October 20th, will be the 75th Anniversary of MacArthur’s promised return to the Philippines and the beginning of its liberation from Japanese rule. The last, largest and finally decisive naval battle between the US Fleets in the Pacific and the Japanese Combined Fleet was fought in the Philippines’ Gulf of Leyte from October 23–26, 1944.

Emperor Naruhito, who studied history at Oxford, is likely aware of this history. His father, Emperor Akihito, held his coronation on November 12, 1990, 42 years to the day that General Tojo was sentenced to death. Naruhito’s challenge is to be true to the MacArthur’s lessons and to administering the peace, which is the literal, albeit not official Abe government, translation of the Reiwa Era.

The end of the Japanese Illusion

The moment the sky over Nagasaki lighted up, 

I made a bet with my fellow POW that we would soon be set free. I was right.

By 

LESTER TENNEY

The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2015 

 
What does it mean to fight to the end? In April 1942, it meant fighting until my tank battalion and I were forced to surrender at the Battle of Bataan. For everything else that followed I only fought to survive: the Bataan Death March, brutal transport aboard a “hell ship” to Japan and slave labor in a Mitsui coal mine.

For my imperial Japanese enemy, in contrast, to fight to the end meant to give his life in a presumably noble and glorious fashion. He would die for the emperor—who ruled by divine right—confident that he would be enshrined with his ancestors for his efforts in defense of a mythic civilization. There could be no surrender and no negotiated peace. Death itself was beautiful, and death alone was honorable.

click to order

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, upended this belief. The bombs showed the Japanese the devastating and ultimately inglorious outcome of their fight. The bombs offered no true opportunity for confrontation and no chance of death with honor; they promised only obliteration.

Like its erstwhile ally Nazi Germany, Japan was fighting an ideological war. A superior race was destined to guide those less graced. Death for the empire earned a blessed afterlife in their emperor-god’s eternal favor. For a loyal subject, surrender was a betrayal of everything that sustained the empire’s system of patriotic values. The only option in the face of certain battlefield defeat was to fight to the death.

Japan tried to keep fighting long after any chance of victory was gone. On the mainland, women, children and the elderly were armed with sharpened bamboo sticks. Beginning in May 1945, schools for disabled children were ordered to organize military units and women ordered to serve in volunteer combat units. Young men were recruited by the hundreds for kamikaze missions aboard wooden gliders or small boats.

The country’s infamous biological-weapons research program was hard at work concocting flea-borne plague agents to float by submarine and balloon towards populated American shores. By late-spring 1945, some incendiary explosives called fugo had already landed on the West Coast.

On Okinawa during the 82-day battle from early April to mid-June 1945, the Japanese military instructed civilians to fight and die rather than surrender to the advancing U.S. forces. Civilian households, comprised almost entirely of women and children, were given grenades and encouraged to destroy themselves along with any Americans they might encounter. Many did.

In late spring 1945, I saw that the cruelty with which we prisoners of war were treated was only increasing. Our guards told us that Japanese units facing attack had received orders to kill all military and civilian POWs in their custody. They were to unburden themselves to focus on the fight. The executions were to begin Aug. 17*.

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No Japanese soldier or civilian was preparing to surrender that August.

Early** on the morning of Aug. 9, from the POW camp where I was held some 30 miles across a bay, I saw the sky over Nagasaki change. It glowed red and the air turned warm against my skin.

Until then, red was the color of my subjugation. My Japanese guards were certain that red had a uniquely Japanese meaning. It wasn’t just the central color of their flag, it was viewed as emotionally representative of their pure spirit and sincerity. The red sky over Nagasaki ended those illusions.

At that moment, I made a bet with a friend that soon we would all be set free. I was right.

Japan’s surrender saved us. The dropping of the bombs, as Emperor Hirohito himself acknowledged, was the only thing that made that surrender possible. As he explained to his subjects, “Should we continue to fight, it would only result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation.” The bombs’ indiscriminate, total devastation, as no battle or bombing before it, showed the consequences of trying to fight to the end. The bombings destroyed hope and glory, past and future.

It’s also true that the bombings were acts of tragic and unprecedented violence. The bomb—this “cruel weapon,” as the stunned emperor recorded in his surrender message on Aug. 15—ruined two cities, brought suffering and death to many tens of thousands of people and drastically altered landscapes and ecologies. Its use also transformed the nature of modern warfare and erased the last faint lines separating civilian and military, illegitimate and legitimate targets.

We POWs—men who were starved and tortured, who suffocated in the holds of hell ships, who were beaten at will, who died for lack of medical care and who saw friends worked to death—have no doubt that the atomic bombs ended the war. The bombs took away all the justifications for Japan to continue to fight.

The visual obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that Japan could soon cease to exist. Or as the emperor concluded, “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.” There would be no glorious end.

Mr. Tenney served in the 192nd Tank Battalion of the U.S. Army.

*a number of dates are associated with a number of documents for the start of the Kill Order, it is difficult to assess the correct one. It was thus clear that orders did exist and that POW camp officials were all aware that something was to be done. Starting in 1944, as the Americans advanced across the Pacific, a number of dramatic massacres of POWs, Korean workers, Comfort Women, and others were carried out that alarmed Allied officials as to Japanese intentions.

**actually late morning, 11:01am in Nagasaki.

Does the Japanese PM have remorse?

Digger History

In July 2014, Prime Minister Abe traveled to Australia and gave a speech to the country's parliament. His words were well received and viewed as thoughtful and healing. Thus, there is a focus on Abe's speech Down Under as a model for his upcoming address to a joint meeting of Congress on April 29th, Emperor Hirohito's birthday.

Will Americans and America's Pacific war veterans be satisfied with the same sort of statement? To understand why this is problematic, we reprint and analyze the relevant sections here:

Our fathers and grandfathers lived in a time that saw Kokoda and Sandakan. How many young Australians, with bright futures to come, lost their lives? And for those who made it through the war, how much trauma did they feel even years and years later, from these painful memories?

I can find absolutely no words to say. I can only stay humble against the evils and horrors of history.

May I most humbly speak for Japan and on behalf of the Japanese people here in sending my most sincere condolences towards the many souls who lost their lives.
I can find absolutely no words to say. I can only stay humble against the evils and horrors of history.
May I most humbly speak for Japan and on behalf of the Japanese people here in sending my most sincere condolences towards the many souls who lost their lives.

Many people believe that the Prime Minister used the word "remorse" in the speech. This is not true. It is not in the document.

Instead, he sends” his “condolences towards the many souls who lost their lives." It is a general expression of empathy without any hint of responsibility. Who was responsible for the dead?

Abe merely mentions “Sandakan." It dangles out there without explanation or reflection. It is associated with distant time, not tied to a series of human decisions. He does not say that “Sandakan” was a series of senseless death marches in 1945 on Borneo for approximately 2,400 Australian and British POWs. Only six Australians survived. Of those who died, most were never found.

He did not say that Sandakan was a callous, premeditated war crime perpetrated by an incompetent and fanatical leadership. He did not say that it was an atrocity perpetrated by Imperial Japan. He did not say there was any justification to march to death or murder these sick and defenseless men.

Americans should insulted if Abe mentioned the Bataan Death March in as off-handed a manner. No former POW of Japan will be satisfied to only receive a condolence for his suffering and the deaths of his buddies. They do not want a promise to do better and they certainly do not want condescending pity. They want the assurance that comes with acknowledgment of responsibility. They want to hear remorse.

Prime Minister Abe objects to his country’s past war apologies. He walked out on the vote for the 1995 war apology. He now shuns apologies and never mentions who was responsible for his country's most fatal mistakes.

Abe will squander his grandest opportunity to show that Japan has learned from 70 years of peace if he fails to say that Imperial Japan was responsible for the War. Americans want less an apology than an affirmation that what happened was wrong, very wrong.

Liberation and V-J Day

Omori-POW Camp that held Louis Zamperini

On August 15, 1945, Japan's Emperor Hirohito took to the radio to tell his subjects that the "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" and he had agreed to accept the conditions of the Potsdam declaration. His Gyokuon-hōsō (玉音放送), lit. "Jewel Voice Broadcast" made it clear that ceasing the war was an act of international humanity. He had concluded, "Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."

To the Allied POWs, it was the end of depravation, torture, abuse, and capricious orders. Chicago Tribune journalist, George Weller, one of the first to interview liberated POWs, recorded their first thoughts and descriptions of experiences. His son published his uncensored and unedited reports in 2006 in First into Nagasaki.

Generally, the POWs talked about their beatings and starvation. In Omuta, one Texas POW who slaved in a Mitsui coal mine camp, Fukuoka 17-B, as one of the "cooks" maybe used his down-home honesty to sum it up best:

Navy Cook Laurel Whitworth (Boerne, Texas): "Leaving Japan for me means not having to cook any more dogs to eat. One day I had to cook sixty-nine, another seventy-three, another fifty-five. I hate cooking dogs." (p. 94)