Free Republic

TOKYO (AP) -- Japanese are welcoming President Barack Obama's decision to visit the atomic-bombed city of Hiroshima, and those interviewed Wednesday said they aren't seeking an apology. Even those who want one realize that such a demand would have ruled out a U.S. presidential visit.

On April 11, John Kerry became the first Secretary of State to pay his respects to at Hiroshima’s memorial to those who died when the atomic bomb was dropped on that city on August 6, 1945. That event, and the dropping of a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, brought a victorious and rapid end to World War II, and a Japanese surrender 6 days after Nagasaki, saving potentially millions of casualties on both sides if the U.S. had been forced to invade the Japanese home islands. Kerry’s statement during the visit, as reported by...

Japan's role in World War II gets a whole new perspective in this consisting entirely of full color footage, including color films from Japan that were recently discovered. As the visuals of the world war take on a new vivid immediateness, the story of the rise of the militarists in Japan is told through the personal writings of the Japanese themselves. From the first overconfident tastes of victory, to the devastating losses that led to an unthinkable defeat amidst the ruins, the Pacific Theater of World War II is told through the Japanese's eyes. It was assumed no color films...

Should the United States apologize for the nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of World War II? The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 70 years ago this month, killed as many as 250,000 people, most of them civilians. For many of the victims, it was a horrible, excruciating death, and for many others, the effects of burns and radiation, although not immediately lethal, produced years of agony. Should we say we’re sorry? My answer is no, but I do not dismiss the question out of hand. It is, after all, naggingly relevant, raising issues of proportion, race and culture....

On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, shortly after 8:00 a.m. local time, a lone American B-29 was conducting what seemed to be a reconnaissance flight at high altitude over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. At about 16 minutes after 8:00, the aircraft released an object over the centre of town. Attached to parachutes, the object floated down slowly enough to give the four-engine Boeing Superfortress time to turn and lumber out of the airspace. The atom bomb exploded at about 1,900 feet above the centre of Hiroshima. The devastation was cataclysmic. Immediate casualties, dead and injured, numbered approximately 115,000....

MOSCOW, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- An international military tribunal should be formed to examine the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russian officials suggested at a roundtable discussion at Moscow State University. State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin said historians and military science specialists have long argued whether nuclear weapons should ever be allowed in war. A tribunal would examine international law as it relates to wartime practices. In May, Naryshkin labeled the bombings in Japan at the end of World War II a "crime against humanity, which still has not been correctly assessed." At the time, he was speaking...

The title of this short piece is actually the title of an essay by Paul Fussell, the writer, literary and cultural critic who just passed away at the age of 88. His New York Times obituary notes his “withering scorn for the romanticization of war,” which was due, in part, to his own experience of battle in World War II as an infantryman wounded in southeastern France. His most well-known book is probably The Great War and Modern Memory (about World War I), of which Steven Hayward at Power Line says: Fussell managed the extraordinary feat of weaving together a...

Seventy years ago, the B-29 Enola Gay, piloted by Paul Tibbets, Jr., dropped an atomic bomb, Little Boy, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The blast and ensuing radiation killed an estimated 150,000 people. Though the devastation from the bombing was astounding, it did not bring American’s war with Japan or World War II to an immediate end. Three days later, the United States dropped another atomic bomb, Fat Man, on Nagasaki, and the Empire of Japan’s leaders finally capitulated.

I'm going to comment on the ethics of nuking Japan. This is one of those perennial issues that America-bashers constantly raise. There are two extremes we need to avoid: "my country right or wrong," and "blame America first." For me the war has a personal dimension. My late father was a WWII vet who served in the Pacific theater. He was radio operator in the Air Force. His squadron conducted reconnaissance over Japan. He had some interesting stories to tell: i) He trained on B-17s in Alaska, then flew on B-29s in Florida. ii) Our pilots discovered the jet stream....

A hotel staffed by ten multilingual robots is set to open later this year in Japan. When the Henn-na Hotel opens in July, it will be run by robots that can greet guests before carrying their luggage to their rooms. When guests leave, the robots will be able to clear their rooms, ready for the next human to come and stay. The robots are styled to look like a young Japanese woman. They can speak fluent Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, and can respond to guest’s body language, eye contact and tone. …

By May of 1945 an exhausted and overrun Germany had surrendered. The war in Europe was over. The United States, aided by Great Britain, moved closer and closer to Japan. Massive suicide attacks by the Japanese caused great losses to the Pacific Fleet, but did not deter its drive. Japan, thinking the Soviet Union was a friendly neutral in the war in the Pacific, submitted unofficial peace feelers to the United States through them. The Soviet Union, secretly wanting to join the war against Japan, suppressed the feelers. Ironically, the Japanese military made it impossible to pursue peace directly, as...

Saturday marks the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima – devastating acts that helped bring World War Two to a close. (Three days after Hiroshima, Nagasaki was similarly battered). The attacks – the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in world history to date – killed tens of thousands of people and shocked the planet with the scale of their destruction. There has been much controversy over the decision to bomb Japan and some speculation that it might have been racially motivated (given that the U.S. military did not drop such weapons on European civilian targets)....

Today marks one of the United States’ most important – but least celebrated – anniversaries. It is remarkable not only for what happened on this date in 1945 but for what did not happen subsequently. What did happen was that the “Enola Gay,” an American B-29 bomber from the intentionally obscure 509th Composite Group (a U.S. Army Air Force unit tasked with deploying nuclear weapons), dropped “Little Boy,” a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That dramatic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week after the August 9 detonation of “Fat...

There's a museum in Tokyo dedicated to Japan's ample history of warfare. But if you visit the plainly named Military Museum, you'll find no reference to the grotesque medical experiments the Japanese army conducted in World War II or the sex slaves it kidnapped.

into the Bockscar plane on the island of Tinian, August 9th, 1945 Posted February 7th, 2014 by Alex Wellerstein Teaching and other work has bogged me down, as it sometimes does, but I’m working on a pretty fun post for next week. In the meantime, here is something I put together yesterday. This is unedited (in the sense that I didn’t edit it), “raw” footage of the loading of the Fat Man bomb into the Bockscar plane on the island of Tinian, August 9th, 1945. It also features footage of the bombing of Nagasaki itself. I got this from Los...

The sinister surprise attack against the naval base at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Imperial Military is recognized by historians as one of the most successful sneak attacks in military history. While many Americans initially thought the Empire of Japan intended to attack the United States mainland – Californians along the coastal areas felt especially vulnerable – the real targets were in Southeast Asia: Hong Kong, Siam, Malaya, Thailand, and the Philippines, as the first of many. The attack upon the naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, shocked America and the world. While Americans were still reeling,...

JERUSALEM – A senior Israeli government official has posted online comments on Facebook saying he is “sick” of commemorations for the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, a local newspaper reported. “I am sick of the Japanese, ‘Human rights’ and ‘Peace’ groups” over holding their “annual self-righteous commemorations for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims,” the Haaretz daily quoted Daniel Seaman, a deputy director general at the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, as writing in his Facebook post. Seaman, a key Israeli online public relations official, also wrote on the social networking site: “(The bombings of) Hiroshima...

Monday, August 12, 2013 Hiroshima's Lessons for the War on Terror Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog In the summer of '45, the United States concluded a war that had come to be seen by some as unwinnable after the carnage at Iwo Jima, with a bang. On August 6th, the bomb fell on Hiroshima. And then on the 9th, it was Nagasaki's turn. Six days later, Japan, which had been preparing to fight to the last man, surrendered. For generations of liberals, those two names would come to represent the horror of America's war machine, when...

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.That was a conclusion of the 1946 U.S. Bombing Survey ordered by President Harry Truman in the wake of World War II.Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said in 1963, “the Japanese were...

August 6, 2013 marks the 68th anniversary of the first use of an atomic bomb, and August 9th the last. Japan did not surrender for five days after Nagasaki was bombed, during which time the Soviet Union declared war and the Americans conducted additional, conventional firebombing raids on a Japanese city. Emperor Hirohito was asked to break a deadlock in the imperial cabinet that had blocked an unconditional surrender up to that point. To this day, Harry Truman is viewed by ardent critics as a war criminal and the United States is deemed as being stained by a sin as...