Tomorrow is the sixty-seventh anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and I will have a post examining the decision of Truman to use the atomic bomb. This week I have been watching a three-hour DVD of a movie, Hiroshima, which originally appeared on Showtime in 1995. I found it very well done. The movie has a striking period feel. The actor who played Truman, Kenneth Welsh, gives an uncanny on target performance, looking, sounding and even moving like Truman. The film flips back and forth between the United States and Japan, showing the US development of the bomb, and the decision to use the bomb on Japan, and the refusal of the Japanese Army and Navy chiefs to countenance surrender, even as the civilian leadership recognized that the situation of Japan was beyond hopeless.
The dialogue is taken from what the actual historical figures said. There appears to be no axes being ground, but rather a straight forward presentation of the event that ended World War II and ushered in our nuclear age. One of the best dramatizations of a historical event I have ever watched.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
This piece of polemic might interest you: http://fpb.livejournal.com/570852.html . It has something to say about the decision to bomb Hiroshima. The premise to the polemic, in case you want to go deeper into a rather discreditable episode, is here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/570522.html , with a link to the review in question.
“Well. Thank you, sir. Thank you for informing me that when my father and his fellow-Romans turned out in their hundreds of thousands, young and old, men and women and children, hysterical with joy and relief, to welcome the Americans as “liberators”, they were working under a delusion; that there was no reason to believe that those young men from across the ocean, brutalized as they must have been by war, would behave any better than the Nazi monsters whose tails they had driven out. But you see, you are just plain wrong. The Americans did not abduct or murder any of my great-uncles; the Americans, and the English along with them, did not reduce my grandfather to tears of terror, shame and loss, in front of his own young child, who had never seen his father cry before, and who was never to forget it as long as he lived; the Americans and the English did not make themselves such a by-word for brutality and horror that people revolted against them even without any hope, finding it better to die fighting than to live under such creatures. (There was, in fact, one Moroccan unit in the French Gaullist forces that became notorious for rapes; but they stood out just because of the contrast.) The goodwill the Americans had gained in Italy simply by not being German, they kept by their collective behaviour through the war; generous, friendly and humane in the mass, both black and white, free-handed with the obviously enormous stores of goods they carried with them, feeding the hungry and protecting the helpless, while the Germans murdered and stole up to the very last minute, even after they had been defeated and had no hope. No, sir, war does not brutalize everyone equally.”
Bravo Fabio!
That is not to say that the Americans were angels. There were elements in and out of the administration that were not concerned with the good of Europe (such as those elements in the Treasury who insisted on a disastrously misguided policy of floating the pound which reduced Britain to hunger), war criminals, and interests and persons who were less than honourable. But the difference was so vast that the worst of American occupation did nothing to change the popular perception that American occupation was liberation.
Yes, thank you for that encomium on the American and Allied soldiers in Italy. I have tears in my eyes.
As do I Adam!