Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima

DBKP has the reminder that today's the 63rd anniversary of the dawn of the nuclear age. The United States launched history first's nuclear attack on August 6, 1945, at Hiroshima, Japan:

The attack on Japan has become the basis for one of the leading claims by antiwar activists that the U.S. is the imperial-racist abomination of the world.

DBKP rebuts this meme:

To all those who sit in comfort in [2008] and render judgment on those who lived and made decisions sixty-three years ago, a few reminders.

1 - Those in [2008] do not have husbands, brothers and sons who would have faced certain death in an invasion of Japan in 1945.

2 - Did not have to live through the preceding four years of nearly total war.

3 - The U.S. was finishing a war which began on December 7, 1941, when it was attacked, without warning, by Japan.

Unfortunatly, the further that memory of World War II fades into history, the more likely is the second-guessing of the antiwar crowd to become the dominant narrative.

In 2005, on the 60th anniversay of Hiroshima, Richard Frank addressed the historical record:

What if the United States had chosen not to use atomic weapons against Japan in 1945? ...

An impressive list of American naval and air officers said after the war that the conflict could have been ended without the use of atomic bombs. They believed bombardment and blockade would have forced Japan to surrender. We know now they probably were correct.

Had the war continued for two weeks or perhaps only a few days, the destruction of the rail system would have brought about the mass famine that probably would have prompted the Japanese to capitulate. But this also means that Japanese would have died by the millions.

What history without Hiroshima illustrates is that there was no alternative happy ending to the Pacific War. When realistic consideration is given to the alternatives, atomic bombs stand as the worst way to have ended the war - except all the others.

That won't go over too well with the left's antiwar establishment, who throughout the Iraq war called on movement activists to "support the resistance."

That's an interesting concept in the context of America and World War II. Were human shields on the scene in 1945?

Photo Credit: Seattle Times

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UPDATE: I just finished reading Hideko Tamura's, "The Challenge of Hiroshima," at the Japan Times.

Tamura's a Hiroshima survivor and her essay is a moving testament to the quest for humanitarian peace.

I'm deeply sorry for the loss of her mother in the bombing, yet, observe: She describes the United States as the "country that took away my mother," but not once in her essay does she mention the Imperial Japanese Government that took her country to war as part of it's plan for establishing a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. She does not discuss the atrocites committed by Her Majesty's Government nearly fifteen years prior to 1945 at Nanking (the "Forgotten Holocaust of World War II"), nor does she discuss her government's refusal to surrender, despite the knowledge of an impending total, unconditional defeat that awaited it after four years of Kamikaze warfare.

Most of all, Tamura does not explain why she moved to the U.S.

We might surmise that she embodies an existential personal paradox, in that for her to achieve her mission of achieving international disarmament and world peace, she would find the ultimate freedom to do so in the very country that occassioned her quest.