Hiroshima: the 'White Man's Bomb' revisited
On the 62nd anniversary of Hiroshima, read Mick Hume's essay on how the dropping of the A-bomb was the final act of a bitter race war in the Pacific.
<http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/printable/3708/>
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For those who're interested in a comprehensive treatment of the topic of racism and the Pacific War I strongly recommend John W. Dower's War Without Mercy:
<http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=0394751728>
Drawing upon captured and declassified official documents, pop culture artifacts and forgotten propaganda campaigns Dower examines how racism shaped both Anglo/American and Japanese perceptions of the war's meaning and intensity.
As war approached in the late 1930s British and American 'experts' assured their publics that the Japanese were sub-standard pilots and laughingly inept soldiers: something to do with allegedly poor eyesight and, perhaps even more absurdly, fear of the dark.
Soon enough, events would sweep these fictions away and provide the template for new delusions.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was only one part of a much broader assault conducted during early December,1941. These strikes not only left much of the US Pacific fleet in flames, but also destroyed Britain's HMS Repulse near Singapore and drove American forces from the Philippines, among other actions.
After this stunning advance, the image of the Japanese as timid, superstitious and incompetent was updated with a new caricature: the Japanese superman, often depicted as a rampaging, slavering guerrilla in Japanese military dress.
By 1945, the Imperial Navy was a shadow of its former glory and Japanese tactics were becoming spectacularly desperate (i.e. Shimpu or 'kamikaze' tactics). The 36 day battle for Iwo Jima - which left almost 7,000 Americans dead, between 20 and 30,000 wounded and rained incredible destruction upon the invading US fleet - brought already virulent racist ideas to a dark apotheosis.
Surely these Japanese were simultaneously less and more than human? Nearly all of the 22,000 forces defending the island perished rather than surrender. What sort of monsters were we dealing with?
Life Magazine and other popular American media sources of the time asked this question again and again; in their private chambers, American military and political leaders were asking themselves the same thing with the appropriate gravitas.
Once the Manhattan Project's work was complete and the Trinity test proved that fission weapons were quite real, it was only a matter of time before this new device - a weapon of extermination - would be used against an enemy who was deemed to be an insensate, subhuman killer.
.d.