Death Fell From the SkyIt is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you. It’s the helplessness and terror of sudden visions of a ripping sensation in your back, shrapnel coursing through your chest, total blackness, maybe death.
In the morgue, the bodies were laid on slabs in the grotesque positions in which they had died. Fear contorted their faces. Their clothes were blue-black from incendiary bombs. One little girl in a red sweater, barefoot, still clutched a piece of jump-rope in her hand.
These statements are from the reporting of Elizabeth McIntosh, from an article she penned in December 1941, though it wasn’t published until seventy-one years later, as editors thought the account too graphic and morbid for publication at the time.
On Friday, our arrogantly ignorant, anti-American president spoke in Hiroshima, Japan, calling the dropping of the atomic bomb an unjustified act. The full text of his speech may be found here. This article is my response to the Traitor-in-Chief, whose treacherous anti-Americanism, immoral collaboration with America’s enemies, and his continuing contempt for facts, history, justice, and reason, must be refuted.
On December 7th, 1941, the United States came under attack by the forces of Imperial Japan at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Somehow, the President of the United States, himself a native of Hawaii, apparently managed to grow up for some part of his childhood without bothering to learn the history immediately available to him. Somehow, he managed instead to adopt an alien sense of justice and moral standard that are in direct conflict with the facts, and the historical record. I am ashamed that this man is and has remained president for the last seven-and-one-half years. I am disgusted by his moral equivocation. I am not going to permit his lies, delivered in Hiroshima, to go on unanswered. Barack Obama is a treacherous arrogant enemy of the United States. He ought to be removed from his office for his high crimes and misdemeanors, and if our government was not populated by malingering charlatans, if not before, certainly after his remarks in Hiroshima, his removal would be under way.
When the B-29 bomber opened its bay doors high over Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, its pilot Paul Tibbets at the controls, releasing its revolutionary and deadly payload on an unsuspecting city below, it was not an act of even questionable morality, never mind evil, but instead, the unmistakable response to an act of cowardice and evil that has provoked it less than four years before. It was an act in the name of morality, the morality of the most generous people on the planet, who had been attacked, watched their countrymen killed, and who finally responded with the ultimate weapon mankind had yet produced. That moment, when the searing flash of the first atomic weapon deployed in combat exploded over the city of Hiroshima, Japan, was the instant at which America fully realized its creed of defending the unalienable rights of mankind, beginning with those of her own citizens.
By the accounting of my moral standards, it is never justifiable to initiate the use of coercive force or to levy its threat unless and until the credible threat or enactment of same is introduced against you. For this reason, the American doctrine has always been imbued with the notion of self-defense. By tradition and the philosophy that guides it, Americans do not go out into the world looking for fights in which to engage, instead generally waiting until somebody initiates a fight with us. This doctrine is thoroughly represented in our criminal code, our military doctrine, and our history as a nation. It is not to say that America has ever been a perfectly faithful practitioner of that position, but it is to say that it remains the dominating idea in our culture and our government, despite many attempts to reverse or to change it. On August the 6th, and again on August the 9th of 1945, America applied the moral exclamation point to this ethical premise.
Barack Obama has attacked America’s moral foundation with the assertion that the dropping of the atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of those who he deems to have simply rationalized the violence of nuclear weapons.
How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.
The cause of justice is a higher cause. The purpose of defense of one’s life, one’s property, one’s family and neighbors, along with one’s country is a higher cause. To suggest that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was less than fully, morally justified is to proclaim that a United States President ought to unnecessarily prolong wars and make wasteful use of the lives of the men and women of the Armed Services. Had they been ready sooner, we’d have been equally justified in using them on Germany as well.
There are several facts that Obama and other anti-Americans ignore in their shrill contempt for the use of the atomic bombs. One is that estimates suggested that an actual invasion of Japan would cost America the lives of more than a million additional service-members, and that the cost in total deaths to the Japanese people, their soldiers, sailors, airmen, and civilians, may have been as many as ten times that number. Ending the war rather more quickly actually saved millions of lives.
As a practical matter, the United States Government had produced exactly three bombs, one of which was tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico, of the implosion type that was eventually used on Nagasaki. The “Little Boy,” dropped on Hiroshima was of the simpler “gun type” device, basically propelling a plug of Uranium-235 down a short gun barrel into a sphere of Uranium-235, the two combining to achieve a super-critical mass and thus cause the nuclear fission chain-reaction. Little Boy contained almost all of the U-235 we had managed to produce by that point at the Oak Ridge facility. The “Fat Man” device dropped on Nagasaki, and its test-twin at Alamogordo, New Mexico, was a Plutonium 239 device, and it was tested because it was a highly complex device using shaped explosive charges to compress a collection of Plutonium wedges inward toward a central point, where the Plutonium would likewise achieve super-critical mass to begin the chain-reaction resulting in the detonation. In short, it was not as though we had manufactured a stockpile of these weapons at the time, because it was very difficult to refine the Uranium in sufficient quantities to provide enough for a gun-type device. Plutonium was easier to produce, although production of the substance still took time, and was still being ramped-up. After “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki, it would be a month or more before the United States would be able to employ another, had it become necessary. Thankfully, Japan finally surrendered after realizing they could not prevail against such an awesome weapon.
There are other facts often overlooked or ignored by modern historians and folks with a political agenda to their appraisals of our use of the atomic bombs. These mustn’t be left out, because out of context, the atomic bombings are not so easy to understand. The question is often asked, for instance, “Why did we not bomb Tokyo rather than Hiroshima, since Tokyo is the capital city, from which leaders directed the war effort, and where Emperor Hirohito had his seat of power?” The answer to this question ought to be obvious, but apparently, our education system does a poor job of making such things understood: If we destroyed Japan’s leadership and hierarchy of command, who would surrender? Who would be in charge? Who would effectively “turn off” the war from their side? Instead of an orderly surrender, we might have faced instead the prospect of uncontrolled, disorganized resistance that would go on for years or even decades. By permitting the command structure of Japan to survive, we preserved the ability to have their own hierarchy issuing the orders to surrender to all the forces and ordinary citizenry of Japan.
Another fact ignored by political propagandists is that Japan had conducted atrocities far in excess of anything ever done to Japan by American forces. Millions of people, primarily Chinese, were butchered under the auspices of the Japanese high command. To suggest that the atomic bombings had been “inhumane” demands that we ignore the incredible cruelty inflicted upon millions of people by the Japanese.
Another sickening premise argued by ludicrous leftists like President Obama, and indeed touched upon in his Hiroshima speech, and it is the idea that all civilians are “innocents” in war. This is nonsense. Civilians are not innocent if they support the activities of a cruel, despotic, war-making government. If those civilians feed the machine of unjust war, they are parties to the injustice. Civilians who are actively opposing the evil regime in question are as close as one gets to “innocents in war.” For instance, if during WWII, we bombed a site in France, in the process killing inadvertently a number of members of the French Resistance, that would be the unfortunate killing of innocents. On the other hand, when our bombers dropped thousands upon thousands of bombs upon Germany, hitting their factories, but in the process killing a number of civilians, those civilians were not “innocents” because they were active participants in the operations of the oppressive regime. “Innocents” in a country being commanded by brutal dictators, irrational thugs, and other forms of human vermin have a responsibility as humans to participate in their own salvation and their moral responsibility for making war upon the regime is manifest.
Naturally, the leftists currently running the United States are interested in defaming the long-standing American concepts of morality with their own broken standard. Obama’s assault in Hiroshima on the philosophy that has under-girded American foreign and defense policies for centuries is a clue and a key to the bankruptcy of leftists generally. Indeed, our entire society had been framed by these moral concepts, so that when Obama and his surrogates in media undertake to demolish them, it is fundamentally an attack on the United States of an ideological as well as philosophical character.
As the nation marks Memorial Day, remembering our dead, let us go forth in solemn remembrance and embrace the moral underpinnings of our nation that had made it the greatest and most free in the history of man, knowing and fully understanding the moral superiority of Western values, and knowing with certainty that we had been right, logically and morally, in dropping the atomic bombs on Japan to hasten the end of a war that claimed many millions of lives around the globe, and many at the hands of the cruel Imperial Japanese leadership, who had no problem whatever with starving and torturing prisoners, marching them into oblivion, skewering babies like sausages with their bayonets, and murdering civilians in conquered territories as they pleased.
Most importantly with respect to the United States, the Japanese launched a sneak attack against us at Pearl Harbor, killing thousands of Americans, sending large portions of a battle fleet to the bottom, like the USS Arizona, that is still visible beneath the waves if you visit the Memorial bearing its name. From that moment, when Japanese strike aircraft and fighters appeared over Hawaii that morning, the morality of what the United States would ultimately do in August of 1945 had been answered and endorsed, by the ignominious Japanese who had precipitated it. Responsibility for the deaths of those at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and indeed everywhere anyone else died in combat with Imperial Japan rests solely and forever with that regime, and those who empowered it. Death indeed “fell from the sky,” and when it first fell was on American territory, on December 7th, 1941. Everything that followed was the rightful answer to that day.
As we remember the fallen, it is appropriate that we likewise remember the nature and circumstance in which they perished: They died in defense of a moral premise, observed uniquely in America among all other nations, that Justice must prevail, and that the evils which attack it must be opposed by all those worthy of its standard. May we remember them, and remember that ours is a nation founded upon a moral premise unlike any before it, that we may preserve that moral standard long into an uncertain future.
