The Revisionists

The always interesting Betsy Newmark recently noted that military history is frequently taught as social history.

...The textbooks will usually have a brief summary of the military progress of the war. But there are several obligatory sections for every war: how the war impacted women, blacks, and other minorities. For World War II, the section on Japanese internment is always a major curriculum point. The military history is a minor point in comparison...

Several years ago, my daughter came home from school. She was visibly upset that America had dropped the A-bomb on Japan. It was obvious the teacher's agenda included a careful rewrite of history to villify Truman and the U.S. Military as utter monsters, without a thimble's worth of historical context.

Reading Flags of Our Fathers or Flyboys provides a bit more perspective.

It is hard to overstate the strength of indoctrination programs with which Japanese soldiers were inculcated with a barbaric philosophy of "no surrender".

The battle for the island of Attu in the Aleutians illustrated [the philosophy]... in May of 1943, after two weeks of fighting, only eight hundred Japanese troops remained. [They] had no ammunition left, and there was nothing they could do militarily. Troops of any other nation would have surrendered. On... May 29, 1943 the surviving troops were ordered to attack. Fewer than thirty survived.

On island after island, the Japanese employed these same "tactics" of senseless suicide attacks. Iwo Jima, the first component of territorial Japan invaded by the Allies, took a horrible toll on both sides: 21,000 defenders and 6,821 Marines perished, all for a patch of volcanic ash in the Pacific. In fact, the last Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima did not emerge from the fortified depths of the island until 1949.

Nearing the end of the war, the Japanese Imperial Headquarters -- in official communiques -- referred to 'Gyokusai of the One Hundred Million'... the "shattered jewel" (suicide attack) deaths of the entire population of Japan. Put plainly, the Japanese leaders were willing to sacrifice every man, woman and child on the island in the belief that divine winds (kamikaze) would prevent any invader from conquering Japan.

The result was the sober assessment by American military planners that utter devastation of the Japanese homeland was required, because surrender was untenable for the population.

A War Department report concluded that, "defeating Japan would cost [the Japanese] five to ten million deaths and the United States between 1.7 and 4 million casualties, including 400,000 to 600,000 fatalities." A postwar analyis indicated that these estimates were incorrect: they underestimated Japanese defenses.

To put this in perspective, D-Day required 175,000 invading troops. 7,000,000 American troops were in the Pacific by 1945 preparing for Operation Olympic, the first phase of invasion.

Put in these terms, there is no question but that the atomic attacks saved millions of lives on both sides.

The revisionists who discard history have no business teaching it.

Betsy's Page: Military History.