COWBOY'S CORNER

Today is August 6, 1999, the 54th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As usual, a lot of bleeding heart types will be moaning about what nasty people we Americans are for using this weapon. They'll tell you how cruel, inhuman racist, and immoral it was to use the bomb against innocent civilians. And it's all a bunch of (manure).

If you want to know about cruelty and inhumanity, talk to a survivor of the Bataan Death March. Of course, that'll be pretty hard to do, as nearly all of them are dead, most of them prematurely. There are, however, several excellent books on the subject, many of which contain extensive interviews with survivors. I've seen pictures of my father's buddy, a heavy-set man, after his liberation at the end of the war. After four years of starvation and slave labor, he made the prisoners in the German concentration camps look obese. He died many years ago while only in his mid-fifties, one more victim of the Japs.

As for the 'innocent civilians', Hiroshima was a legitimate military target, an industrial center, home of an Army division, and an important part of the Japanese war effort.

The major thing the bleeding-hearts ignore is the number of lives saved by using the atomic bombs. It was estimated that invasion of the Japanese home islands would cost the U.S. a million dead. The Japanese anticipated ten times that many soldiers and civilians would die defending their homeland. Against eleven million dead, and probably several times that many wounded, the hundred thousand or so killed (mostly instantly) by the bombs seems like almost nothing. And remember, all the casualties were inflicted on the side that started the war.

There's one more thing many of these people forget. Many of their fathers or grandfathers were, like my father, slated to take part in the invasion of Japan. If the invasion had taken place, they might never have had the opportunity to bitch about the bomb. They would never have been born.

Cowboy
Columnist & Contributing Editor
City2 e-news
(Boy, don't that sound official!)

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