A minute silence for the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima Bomb? Fair enough, but let’s have a little balance in both the memories, and the memorials.
- How’s about thirty seconds for the 2,403 American dead through drowning, burns, explosions, bullets, shells and torpedoes: delivered care of the Imperial Japanese Navy at Pearl Harbour.
- How’s about a few seconds for those unfortunates who commenced the Death March from Sandakan: unfortunates because no British prisoners survived out of 800, and only six Aussies out of over 1000.
- Care to spend a few more seconds remembering the human skeletons who emerged from the P.O.W. camps in places like Changi after the end of the Japanese War.
- On that particular subject, of the humane treatment of Prisoners of War, let’s spend five seconds remembering my mate Ron, who went into Changi weighing 168 pounds, and weighed a mind-boggling 77 pounds on his release.
- To provide adequate balance, give about five milli-seconds to the knowledge that General Homma was shot by firing squad as he was the leader, in all respects, of the Bataan Death March.
As the Japanese Ambassador said only this morning on the BBC; ‘the vast majority of those Hiroshima dead were women and children’ which is a strange thing to state about Hiroshima, a major military staging area. But it is good that they be remembered, but equally important to remember why they died; which was to state to a military dictatorship, with a figurehead Emperor, that America could wipe out their cities one by one, killing vast numbers of Japanese; until they accepted that surrender was the only alternative: that America would protect Americans, and her Allies, in any manner available.
Fire, Pillage & Plague 