Joan Beck’s column headlined “You had to be there” (Op-Ed, Aug. 3), with its letters from veterans, perpetuates the simple-minded “us or them” state of mind of August 1945. Either you accept uncritically the idea that the atomic bomb brought a swift end to a just war or you are regarded as an “America basher” who overlooks Pearl Harbor and the rape of Nanking.
Well, I’m a World War II veteran, too, and I won’t be pigeonholed. I don’t hate America or defend Japanese militarists, but I know now that both sides launched merciless attacks on non-combatants and twisted the truth in their propaganda. And, thanks to “revisionist” research, I know that the bomb wasn’t the only possible alternative to a bloody invasion. There were other untried options for pushing Japan toward a negotiated surrender without exterminating the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I don’t condemn Harry Truman for thinking like a man of his time, but if historians can’t at least re-examine and question the choices 50 years later without being bullied by professional patriots, how are we ever going to advance beyond the cycle of endless violence that mars human history and threatens human existence itself since the introduction of nuclear superweapons that August morning?
Let’s make the anniversary a time for moving ahead together, not for locking ourselves into official mythology of any kind.
