Japan and World War II

My friends and I went to the movies yesterday to see "The Great Raid." It's based on the book, Ghost Soldiers, by Hampton Sides. The movie was excellent, as was the book when I listened to it a few months ago during my commute to work.

It's one thing to hear the story and have my imagination picture the brutality, superimposed over the reality of daily traffic. It's an entirely different thing to see images of what the Imperial Japanese Army did to the American military and the Philippinos left behind on Batan.

Just last week was the sixtieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was surprised to see the results of the WorldNetDaily poll asking (paraphrased) if it was a good or a bad thing that we used the bomb on Japan. Even though WorldNetDaily's readers are predominantly conservative, the overwhelming response on the poll was that dropping the bomb was bad. Things sure have changed.

My understanding of public opinion in 1945 was that the nation supported Truman's decision and welcomed the surrender of Japan. The notion that public opinion could have changed so much is a testimony to a combination of anti-American propaganda and the dying off of first-hand memories.

Mark Steyn wrote a column last week for the Jerusalem Post, marking the anniversary of the bomb, and he addressed a lot of the questions surrounding this issue. In particular, he touches on the abject brutality of the Imperial Japanese Army.

There's no doubt the atomic bomb wound up saving lives – American, Japanese, and maybe millions in the lands the latter occupied. The more interesting question is to what degree it enabled the Japan we know today. They were a fearsome enemy, and had no time for decadent concepts such as magnanimity in victory. If you want the big picture, the Japanese occupation of China left 15 million Chinese dead. If you want the small picture, consider Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. It fell to the Japanese shortly after Pearl Harbor, when the 22 British watchkeepers surrendered to vastly superior forces. The following year, the Japanese took their British prisoners, tied them to trees, decapitated them, and burned their bodies in a pit. You won't find that in the Geneva Conventions. The Japs fought a filthy war, but a mere six decades later and America, Britain and Japan sit side by side at G7 meetings, the US and Canada apologize unceasingly for the wartime internment of Japanese civilians, and an historically authentic vernacular expression such as "the Japs fought a filthy war" is now so distasteful that use of it inevitably attracts noisy complaints about offensively racist characterizations. The old militarist culture – of kamikaze fanatics and occupation regimes that routinely tortured and beheaded and even ate their prisoners – is dead as dead can be.

Mark Steyn is right about that. Japan is now our ally and our supplier of fabulous technological gadgets. But one atomic bomb wasn't enough to destroy Japan's old militaristic culture. It took two.

When the credits started to roll on "The Great Raid," I thought about several things: How well-planned the raid was, especially considering the fact that the Army Rangers had not yet seen combat. How much we owe the Philippinos for their help with the raid. And underlying it all is a certainty that we were right to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.