uncategorical

The Bomb that Ended Slavery: 58 Years Ago today

This week’s Carnival of the Vanities is up at Outside the Beltway.

Next week’s Carnival will be at Creative Slips, where I found this article about Hiroshima, which got me to thinking about how the numbers of POWs enslaved by the Japanese during the war (and saved as a result of the atomic bombs) would compare with the number of lives lost as a result of those bombs being dropped.

Obviously, there are no exact numbers for either group, but they seem to have been more or less equal: about 100,000 died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and about 100,000 allied POWs were saved as a result.

I won’t go into the details of the Japanese’ treatment of the prisoners. Here is an excellent site on the topic for those inclined to study further. But here’s one document that everybody needs to be familiar with: the Japanese order to murder all allied POWs, (Exhibit O, towards the bottom of the page) which was issued the day of Japan’s surrender, 58 years ago today.

Extract from the official translation:
(a) Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates.
(b) In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to amilhilate [sic] them all, and not to leave any traces.

More: It’s often said that nobody living in America today was ever a slave, but that is not true. We still have former slaves of all colors living among us today. They are the survivors of the Japanese death marches and the Japanese death ships and the Japanese death camps. But we don’t hear much about them, or even their children, demanding reparations. Some things can’t ever be repaired anyway, can they?

When I was a boy, my mother took me to one of the former slaves for a haircut. He was my Great Uncle Tom, a graduate of the Burma railroad who had a barber’s shop in Battersea. Today, around the corner from where the barber’s shop used to be, there’s a little park. While Uncle Tom was enslaved in Burma, a German doodlebug blew up his home on Tennyson Street and killed his two little boys. The site lay in ruins for decades until eventually the local government put the park there. The mother of the two boys was still alive last time I checked, although her husband is long gone now. I wonder how many of the people that now use that tiny park (perhaps I should say garden) know the story behind it.

I love the Japanese. I love Japanese culture. I can hardly make the connection between the Japanese whom I have known and the Japanese that enslaved, tortured and murdered so many of our countrymen sixty years ago. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a horrible tragedy. But they were also a job well done.

Correction 8/27/03: I incorrectly stated that the order was issued "the day of Japan's surrender." It was actually issued August 1, 1944. I took the date from the previous document in error.

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