August 2005: Atomic Bombs and Broken Hearts
Considering I just had an atomic bomb dropped on me, it seems strangely appropriate that we're coming up on the 60th anniversary of the end of WW II, which also means the anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Okay, I didn't really get nuked; at least not literally. It was that someone ripped my heart out and ate it. But I needed to use atomic bomb thing for this intro work; sue me. And it sure feels like I have radiation
Here's a bulletin: we DID need to do it, period, and we could not have won the war--at least not without raking up a huge toll in American lives--otherwise. And all you bleeding-heart white liberal revisionist bozos can kiss my ass. I'm not saying these weren't catastrophically horrendous events, both in light of the use of "atomic" technology since then and in general terms of the humanity, civilian lives, etc. I'm just addressing what I believe was the main issue at the time: the United States had to do this to win the war as quickly as possible, and with a few American lives lost as was necessary.
There were many factors at play here, chief among them the power of Japan's military, the fact that they considered the emperor to be a god, and the general Japanese mindset, i.e., win at all costs and they couldn't give a damn about the ramifications in relation to humanity. One of the best pictures of this mindset is Iris Chang's excellent book, "The Rape of Nanking," which explains the twisted mentality of the Japanese military. Jeez, the Japanese military didn't even surrender after both bombs were dropped. It was only after the emperor called for surrender, and the U.S. agreed to allow the emperor to remain, that it all finally ended.
I realize there are people who say if we had threatened the Japanese with Russian invasion, or offered them the chance to surrender and retain the emperor before we dropped the bombs, they would have caved. I absolutely disagree (really, read "The Rape of Nanking"), but you know what? It doesn't matter anyway;it happened 60 years ago and it's over. What's the point of even talking "shoulds" or "shouldn'ts" anymore? Whether we should or shouldn't have, we did. And there's no need for apologies; it was war, period.
Instead, I'd rather use this space to talk about the generation that fought and won World War II 60 years ago. Tom Brokaw calls them "the greatest generation," and while I agree, I think he's kind of a wanker so I don't want to use that term. But the fact is, this generation--my parents, who I spent much of my life disdaining--went through more, endured more, and did more for the world than I think any other generation has since then. Or may ever do.
The depression hits not long after most of them are born. So if they did have money all of sudden it's gone, and pretty much everybody's poor. (Except the robber barons and the creeps who profited from other people's misery like foreclosure lawyers, of course.) Things looked like they might be getting a little better, and then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. (Without declaring war first, the fuckers.) So after having eaten mayonnaise sandwiches for dinner much of their lives and many of them having to drop out of school and go to work full time at 13 to help their families get by, they now have to go fight and die in a long and brutal war, the last justifiable one, I might add, to rescue the world from, well basically from evil, as trite as that sounds.
I think I'm one of the few people who had parents who were both in the service in WW II. My mother was from a fairly wealthy family, who--even if her father hadn't dropped dead from a heart attack a few days before the depression hit--basically lost most of their money after the Crash. With college out of the question, she instead became a nurse. (Back then you didn't need a degree to be an RN.) The war broke out during her training, and as soon as she was an RN, she joined the Navy.
She served at Pearl Harbor from I think 1942 to the end of the War. Judging from her pictures (many are here), this wasn't what you'd call "hard duty" for her, for the most part. She spent a lot of other time going to parties and dances and getting engaged three times; the last time to my father. But she did work hard, and, more importantly, she had to find out men she knew, men that maybe she had danced with the month before, had been killed or were now missing.
My father went to the Naval Academy and graduated before (probably 1934 or 35) America entered the war. After graduation he joined the Marines and became a pilot. Unfortunately he died before I had a real interest in what he did when he was in the military so I never spoke to him about it. I have been able to piece together some facts from old photos, press clippings and his "souvenir" books.
I do know that back when America was supposed to be neutral (a result of the large isolationist movement after WWI) during the second Sino-Japanese War, my father was flying huge cargo planes in and out of China. Loaded with what? I have no idea, and seeing as the American military was not supposed to be helping the Chinese at all, I'm not sure this may even appear on his service record once I get it.
He spent WWII as a pilot, for the most part flying huge DC3 cargo planes. I know that in 1943 he was flying in and out of Henderson Field when and after the Allies had retaken the Solomon Islands. Cargo included everything from vegetables to casualties to hand grenades. (Yeah, I'd like to be behind the wheel of a flying behemoth loaded with explosives of any kind.)
Here's a quote from his hometown newspaper, a story dated June 24, 1943: "...His Marine group suffered heavy casualties in their first six weeks of operation in the war zone, but the survivors carried on. . .The group was the first ever to carry casualties from a combat zone in a commercial-type aircraft. Walsh flew 91 wounded out of Guadalcanal in a single day."
My father was only 28 years old, and he was flying wounded soldiers to safety while people were trying to shoot down his plane. Do you know what I was doing when I was 28? From what I remember, going to clubs, working crappy jobs to try to keep a band together and surviving partially on infusions of cash every now and then from my father. I would venture to guess that, except for people older than me who fought in Vietnam, most of my generation would have variations of this same fairly lame and non-earth-shattering answer.
I mentioned previously that I spent many of my teen/young adult years disdaining my parents, which I think was normal. (This whole thing today of kids liking their parents when they're teenagers? Totally creepy.) And while I did get over that a long time ago, and I started to understand more about them and what they did, I have still never thanked them. So on this 60th anniversary of the end of WWII, I'd like to thank the greatest generation. For what they did for me, and more importantly, for what they did for our country and for the world as a whole. (You can see more pictures of my parents in and out of the military here, in "Family Gallery.") Thank you.
So next time you find yourself whining (as I have this week) about having your heart broken or hating your job, remember to keep it all in perspective. Sure, maybe things aren't great, but at least you're not seeing your friends get blown up, you're not flying a huge plane while people are shooting at you, you're not on a death march from Bataan. Chances are you still have it pretty good. I mean, you're sitting at a computer wasting time on the Internet, right?
