blume357 said:
On Monday I watched the history of the War in the Pacific on the History Channel.... I don't think most folks, and I'm included, can truly imagine what actually happened in that conflict and how many people lost their lives.... three times they mentioned 100,000.... when the Japanese abandoning Manila that is how many civilians were massacred.... when we invaded Okinawa there were something like 100,000 Japanese soldiers there to defend the island... when it was finally taken we had captured 7,ooo. And finally just a few months before dropping the big ones, we fire bombed Tokyo and two other cities and killed over 100,000 citizens. and the amazing thing is Japan was still not willing to surrender.
Near the end of the war to support the bombing of Japan Bowing was producing 300 B29s a month.
Hi,
I'm finishng James Bradley's book
Flyboys right now. In particular, it's the story of eight flyers captured by the Japanese in the South Pacific in a series of raids on a single island which included the one in which former President George H.W. Bush was shot down but rescued. In general it's a story of aerial warfare throughout the Pacific starting with Billy Mitchell's predictions and I'm at the end of the war (though the book goes further), as papers are being signed on the deck of the USS Missouri. It's especially interesting for me in that my brother in law's Dad was a Marine pilot down there, flying Corsairs. He never talked about the war, and it wasn't until almost 25 years after his death I learned he'd been shot down, captured, and escaped from the Japanese. The book probably explains a lot about why so many guys came home from there and never spoke of it again.
Joe Rosenthal's picture immortalizes the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, but it's actually the second flag raised atop Mt. Suribachi. The author's father, John Bradley, was one of the guys who'd raised the smaller first flag, maybe 90 minutes earlier, and was misidentified for years as being one of the six in the picture we know. He was a Navy corpsman attached to the Marines in that invasion. The author's gone thru a lot of the background of that Japanese spirit, its history and misapplication, which was seen everywhere, not just on Iwo Jima. It was first explained to me when I was about 16 by one of my earliest bosses, who'd been a Seabee in the South Pacific, and told how they'd be driving their bulldozers, setting up a landing strip on the latest island they'd captured, and Japanese soldiers would come running out of the jungle trying to kill them. Everybody had an M-1 on his dozer, and they'd lift the blade for protection, then shoot the guys. After killing them all, they'd scoop the bodies off to the side and push on until the next wave came out. He said it was impossible to fathom a mentality that would drive these guys to WANT the Americans to kill them.
In talking about the bombs, the author gives a lot of numbers, and said two things that stuck in my mind. First, I've heard for many years we killed more people in just the Tokyo firebombings than both the A-bombs did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and he backed that up with numbers for all the cities we bombed. And second, he said more people were killed by the samurai sword than those two bombs, as well. What Gen. Sherman described when he said "War is hell" roughly three quarters of a century earlier only touched the edge of the abyss that was to become the Pacific war. It's a good read--they also did a movie but I have no idea what it's like. Many things in the book just couldn't make it on screen...
Rick C
