Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 2, 1995 TAG: 9508030003
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As the anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, they are reaching back a generation and demeaning their parents' sacrifice, patriotism and decisiveness, saying there was no need and no excuse for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even The Washington Post was offended by a purely propagandistic program narrated by Peter Jennings on ABC. Reviewer Ken Ringle called it ``an ingenue's stroll down the narrow tunnels of academic revisionism with only occasional intimations that larger truths may lie outside.''
Ringle critiqued the portrayal of President Truman - popular these days among the revisionists - as ``an intellectual and moral dwarf, propelled by ambitious militarists and politicians to a nuclear slaughter of the innocents.''
The real intellectual and moral dwarfs are those who can't see beyond their own comfort and for whom sacrifice was sitting still long enough to listen to a lecture from their parents about why they should love their country.
There is nothing on television and too little in the history books about a decade of Japanese aggression in Asia and the numerous atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers before the United States entered the war to stop them. Nothing about death marches or beheadings of prisoners and many other violations of the Geneva Convention's mandate on the treatment of POWs. And then there was Pearl Harbor, which became a rallying cry for those then alive and those yet to come, not to forget. How soon they actually did forget.
Thankfully, Parade Magazine last Sunday published a story by former Navy Secretary James Webb, who interviewed retired Air Force Gen. Chuck Sweeney. Sweeney was the only pilot on both atomic bomb runs over Japan.
He dismisses the revisionist contention that the bombs weren't necessary (pointing out that numerous firebomb attacks - which killed nearly as many as the nuclear bombs would later do - had failed to persuade the Japanese to surrender). He then expresses his contempt for critics who weren't there and who wouldn't fight when their turn came because of self-professed purity.
Sweeney said he has had to endure numerous interviews by ``young reporters who don't even know the dates World War II was fought.'' He refers to the ``cultural ignorance'' of many when it comes to the important issues of American history.
The people who risked dying had a land invasion of Japan been ordered were pleased that the bomb was dropped. President Truman had been told that as many as 600,000 Americans could die in the first 30 days of a land assault. The loved ones of those who would return home alive and not in a box with a telegram from the president as their only comfort are grateful the bomb was dropped.
On ABC, however, Jennings chided veterans groups who pressured the Smithsonian Institution into dispensing with its revisionist view of the Enola Gay exhibit, calling them censors and suggesting that Americans were fighting for freedom of speech. They were, in fact, fighting for truth, not the kind of propaganda that the original Smithsonian display conveyed; the kind that, as Webb notes, ``provided more narrative space to anti-Asian racism in the United States than to the attack on Pearl Harbor ... and 49 photos of suffering Japanese and three of Americans.''
Do you suppose it's reversed in Japan? Are the Japanese telling their people how horrible they were and portraying their fellow Asians and the Americans as victims of Japanese aggression? Not a chance. This is a view held exclusively by some Americans who see no evil, will fight for no good and whose cowardice ought to qualify them to do nothing more than keep their mouths shut when they are confronted by some of the greatest heroes who ever lived - the veterans of World War II - and a courageous president who knew what it meant to lead.
- Los Angeles Times Syndicate
by CNB