Will Obama apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Tom Smith

That is a very hard question.  One would have to be able to figure out whether, all things considered, it would be to his political advantage to do so or not.  If you take that out of the equation, I think the answer would be, of course he would.

Me, I wouldn't be here but for the atom bombs.  My dad was in the 77th infantry division which fought on Okinawa and was scheduled to be among the first in in the planned invasion of Japan.  He frequently said Truman saved his life and he was probably right.  My dad and Truman both.

(Okinawa:  My dad simply refused to talk about it much.  What little he would say was pretty horrifying.  I know I have blogged about this before but this "funny" experience helps capture it.  He said one time some sailors came to look around after one of the battles.  At one point they complained about the terrible smell.  One said (I use the vernacular of the time) "it must be that Jap body back up the road."  "No," one Army grunt replied. "It's that pile of Jap heads behind you."  Sailor turns, looks, begins to vomit violently.  Ha ha ha.  The lighter side of Okinawa.)

This one bears linking to again.  Fussell's lack of experience point applies triply to our young President. I found his reference to himself as our first "Pacific" president unbearably pretentious given that there are many alive today who bled there or left their fathers, friends, brothers or sons buried there in graves marked and unmarked.And some are still just missing.  Let them tell you about the Pacific.  The implication that Obama uniquely has something to teach us about the Pacific and its special ways is insulting.  But what is really troubling is that he is apparently surrounded by people who are so clueless and tone-deaf to our national history that they think that was a remotely appropriate claim to make.  I think nearly drowning in Pacific during wartime, as both JFK and Bush 1 did, gives you a better claim on the title than having been born in Hawaii and gone to prep school there.

Comments

[dearieme]

Me too. My father was in Germany, mustering to invade Japan.

[Mike]

Maybe we should have let Japan continue with Unit 731?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

The Japanese, a few years before running its torture lab, gave the world the Rape of Nanking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre

Germany gets all of the attention for being evil. Japan has become completely debased as a culture. Japan had to be stopped.

[unhhyphenatedconservative]

Why would he apologize? Everyone knows it was the cows and chickens!

[Lou Gots]

This is the most shameful thing that this ongoing clown show has produced thus far. We have absolutely no sense of "on" with respect to those murdering barbarians. Much more time must pass before they have lived down their treachery and cruelty.

Furthermore, such time as they have to like down their crimes is a donation out of our mercy and forebearance. Had we measured out to them as they had measured to their neighbors they would not be there to honor their dead war crimonals in elaborate "shrines."

[Larry]

My father was also in the 77th Division in that campaign. He fought in the landing on Ie Shima, an island close to Okinawa. He often said the same thing your father said: he wouldn't be alive if we hadn't dropped the atomic bombs. His unit would have been in the invasion of Japan and the fighting and the carnage would have been horrific.

I detest those people who casually say that dropping the atomic bombs was a crime against humanity, that we wouldn't have dropped them on Germany, etc. Total war is brutal. We didn't start the war, but we would have done anything we had to do to win it. And rightly so.