Happy Hiroshima Day!

Every August 6th I get my blood up over, on one side, the Japanese who think we have something to apologize for, and the other, people in the west who think we should apologize. Honestly, look up the Rape of Nanking, or the Burma railway, or the Battle of Manila, or... You get the point. The western ninnies will usually comeback with some boilerplate about stooping to the levels of our enemy, or we destroyed our conscience and morals in winning the war. As if feeling comfortable with the means of victory was most important. War is hell folks. Its real nice and comfortable here in the 21st century and one of the reasons for that is because we annihilated imperial Japan and Nazi Germany with biblical determination and fury. Watch a movie like The Last Bomb, available on YouTube and Netflix. It is an Army Air Corps doc about Curtis Lemay and the 14th Air Force. Its a very technical film, showing the ins and outs of all aspects of an air raid, weather, fuel, target selection, etc. It's fascinating, and terrifying. 95% of the men in this film, the pilots, mechanics, weathermen - weren't even in the military a few years before. The 14th Air Force was an army of civilians. To that point, there's a great moment in Colonel Kurtz's final monologue in Apocalypse now which talks about doing evil:

I’ve seen horrors, horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face. And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces, seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms. And I remember, I, I, I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love, but they had the strength, the strength, to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment, without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

The will to do that. In our case the 14th Air Force was the Vietcong, as Kurtz would say, 'dropping fire on people from the sky'. Men who had families, who had children, who were filled with love. The men of the 14th Air Force, in the raid depicted in The Last Bomb, killed tens of thousands in that raid. Veterans of the great raids of that war reported the paint seared off the bottom of their B-29s, reported the smell of burning meat from 10,000 feet. The 14th Air Force did evil, true evil against evil. The army of good, serving a good nation rained biblical destruction upon an enemy that started a war that the United States did not want. And those men went home and did things like desegregate the military, pass the Civil Rights Act and create Medicare. Some in the comfortable 21st century are uncomfortable with the acts of those men. Fools