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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 9, 1985
PAGE 9
"If the people of Japan approach the decisive battle for our
homeland with determination to show their full measure of patri
otism, and to fi�ht until � of
.!!!
survives, �h�n, Y�ur
Majesty, I am convinced that Japan can overcome the crisis facing
her," Japan's war minister, Gen. Korechika Anami, told the
emperor that night. "Would it not be wondrous for this whole
nation to be destroyed like� beautiful flower?" the war minister
asked.
Americans were not privy to the wrangling in the Japanese cabinet
that night of Nagasaki. But they knew about Bushido, the code of
the samurai warrior to which Gen. Anami appealed•••• During the
entire war, not a single Japanese unit surrendered.
And on
Saipan, which had come under Japanese rule in 1919, thousands of
Japanese civilians threw themselves off cliffs rather than accept
American control.
Those experiences led Gen. MacArthur to
project
1
million American casualties in the invasion. Estimates
of Japanese killed and wounded ran from 1 million to 10 million.
"We were terrified" at the thou � ht � invading Japan, Mr. Man
chester says. "If you're fighting with� man who relishes the
prospect of death, it puts you at� certain disadvantage."
Unknown to the Americans at the time, a group of dissident Japan
ese Army officers began conspiring to overthrow the government to
thwart its surrender plans.
And not until Aug. 28, when the
emperor's younger brother had to stop kamikaze pilots from dive
bombing the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, did the plotting stop.
Mr. Manchester uses these events to buttress his point that Japan
would not have given up were it not for the atomic bomb. "The
fact is, of course, we all wish there were no bomb," he says, but
Japanese scientists were working as hard on it as the Germans and
Americans; the Americans simply got there first. Science was
moving inexorably toward atomic power and would have found it
even if there had been no World War II, he thinks••.•
The defense of history's most terrible weapon comes strangely
from a man who gets depressed to see boys playing war with toy
pistols....
At heart he is pacific.
Military glory is a
monstrous deception, Mr. Manchester recalls telling a buddy on
Guadalcanal. Ban medals and you'll eliminate all war.••• "It
wasn't until my son had passed the age of military service that I
told the members of my own family that I had been awarded the Navy
Cross and the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts."
While much is correctly made of the awesome destruction and loss of life
wrought by two powerful (yet puny by today's standards) weapons, too little
is drawn to the far greater loss of life and suffering that could have been
brought· about by conventional warfare on Japanese home soil.
The very
future of the Japanese race was at stake.
How would today's reporters and TV "anchorpeople" have covered World War
II? Dorothy Rabinowitz, a nationally syndicated columnist, and oftimes
media critic, thinks she knows. In her column in the August 5 WASHINGTON
TIMES, she wrote: