Last year, on my dad’s 100th birthday, Marines, both retired and active duty, celebrated his life and service. It was a grand day. As a surviving WWII veteran, my dad is already in rarified air. Few people reach 100. If you are a vet, reaching 100 is even rarer. There are about 119,000 WWII vets still alive, with a fair number of those veterans not yet centenarians. And, with each passing day, an estimated 130 vets die.
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Just over 16 million Americans served in uniform during WWII. Of those, about 580,000 men were Marines (3.6 percent). Assuming an equal share of the branches across the surviving vets, about 4,200 WWII Marines are still with us. An even smaller number of those surviving Marines saw combat.
My dad joined in 1943, and from the moment his boots touched wet sand, he saw death. On his first assault landing, the man next to him took a bullet to the chest and went down. His Captain (Captain Blood) was killed next to him while they were still on the beach. That was his first five minutes of combat. Four more assault landings to go.
While on Okinawa he was part of the assault on Sugar Loaf Hill – one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War.
He lived through all of it.
While he was crisscrossing the Pacific, he got his “Dear John” Letter. The woman he was engaged to, his high school sweetheart, met and fell for a pilot. Half a world away, my mom was a Kappa at the University of Idaho. She saw my dad’s photo on the desk of an upperclassman and asked, “Who is that boy?”
My aunt was the upperclassman and said: “That’s my brother, Donn. He’s a Marine. You should write him.” And she did.
My Mom and Dad corresponded for the rest of the war.
When Truman approved the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my dad was preparing for the final assault on the Japanese mainland. It would have been his sixth assault landing. And his last.
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Two atomic bombs finally put an end to the Emperor’s resistance and the resistance of his war cabinet. Japan capitulated. The formal surrender was yet to come. My dad was part of the occupation force. When the ship he was on entered Tokyo Bay, he saw a sea of white. There were white flags on all the gun emplacements. My dad thought, “We would have been cut to ribbons” if he and his fellow Marines had assaulted the Japanese homeland.
A conservative estimate of KIA Americans was placed at over a quarter million, with a total of about a million casualties. An equal number of Japanese would have died defending their country, with twice that number wounded. Japan would have been left in ruins with perhaps a million casualties.
But the war was ended when two nuclear bombs shattered the Emperor’s resolve.
After being part of the occupation force in Japan and China, my dad came home.
He finally met my mom and they married. My dad attended 6th Marine Division reunions for several years. He attended until there was no one left. Like my dad, all his fellow Marines had built lives and had families.
Tucker Carlson recently was on the Joe Rogan Show and quipped that dropping nukes on Japan was “prima facie evil.” He said:
I love, by the way, that people on my side — I’ll just admit it, on the Right — have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Like, are you joking? That’s just, like, prima facie evil. If you can’t — ‘Well, if we hadn’t done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings’ — like, no. It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people, and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. Like, it’s not a tough one, right? It’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, like, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s like just a mindless, childish sort of intellectual exercise to justify, like, ‘Oh no, it’s really good because someone else could get’ — how about, no? How about spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening?
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Carlson is fond of moral absolutes. One of his favorite tactics is to monologue, make a point, and end it with a laugh and say, “Obviously.” Or, like his appearance on Rogan’s show, claim that a group has taken a position that they never have taken. He claimed that people on “the right” have said that nuking two cities was a “good thing.” That’s false. Allow me to speak for “the right.” War is bad. Ending a war is good.
Carlson’s moral myopia avoids the obvious. Far more civilians died during conventional bombings than died as a result of atomic bombs. On March 9 and 10, 1944, Tokyo was firebombed. It was called the “Night of Black Snow,” and it killed about 100,000 people – most of them civilians. Like Dresden, people fled to water and were “boiled.” WWII was but 50 years removed from men on horses attacking entrenched combatants, often with swords in hand. Bombs, in WWII, were “dumb.” Gravity took them to the earth and killed people – noncombatants and soldiers alike. War 80 years ago was very messy.
Carlson and Rogan didn’t moralize over Hamburg, Dresden, or Tokyo. Instead, they bobbed their heads and lamented the use of a particular type of weapon, not the death toll or civilians roasting alive from firebombs.
Even with that horror, Japan was not moved to surrender after Tokyo was set on fire 17 months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan didn’t surrender after a half million of her civilians had died from conventional bombs. Japan only surrendered when Truman bluffed and assured Japan that her cities would be leveled with more atomic bombs.
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When Truman ordered Fat Man and Little Boy to drop on Japanese cities, he saved countless lives, both civilians and combatants. When Emperor Hirohito ordered his country to stand down, he saved countless lives – both civilian and combatants. Both decisions saved the lives of Marines like my father. Men who came back to build lives and raise families. The deaths of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were regrettable, but the lives of Americans and Japanese were spared because of it. That act was “good” in that the resulting surrender and peace clearly were.
More lives were spared when Japan surrendered than had America been forced to invade Japan. The lives of countless Marines were spared. The lives of countless Japanese were spared. When my dad saw innumerable white flags on gun emplacements, he knew the odds of him surviving another year of combat were slim to none.
That fact might be uncomfortable, but it is nonetheless a fact. Am I sorry that my dad survived the war because two atomic weapons were used?
No, Tucker. I am not the least bit sorry that my dad didn’t die on a Japanese beach. Sorry, not sorry.