#sam muses

Having been fed the propaganda myself, I conceded to my mother that maybe Hiroshima had been a necessary evil, but that there'd been no need to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki. I would not be moved from this point- Hiroshima was bad enough. If Truman had waited only a few days longer for Japan to catch its collective breath after that blow, surely they would have surrendered without needing to incur so many more casualties.

My grandfather, who was usually quiet about things that weren't food or temple, then spoke very angrily. "What about our loss? What about what they did to us?" He had been 8 when Pearl Harbor happened and 12 when the bombs were dropped.

I pointed out that Pearl Harbor had been a military target, and that I was unaware of massive civilian casualties. Grandpa stayed firm, angry. It had been an unprovoked attack that left so many servicemen to drown right in the dock, and had drawn America into a brutal war. The war in Europe took years to win, should we have risked another year of war? He kept coming back to what the Japanese had done to us, and he said that Hiroshima had been a military target.

Unaccustomed to arguing with my grandfather, and conceding to the worried/angry looks my mother kept shooting my way as he got more agitated (Grandpa had congestive heart failure, and between he and Grandma [who had passed 3 years earlier from heart disease] mom and I were on a first name basis with a LOT of staff at the local hospital), I backed off. Mom made a joke about my not being suited to the position of wartime president (we'd visited FDR's house in Hyde Park earlier that year, and there had been little kiosks where you could say what your decision would be when faced with certain situations FDR was faced with. My brother and I consistently Made Things Worse) and the topic changed.

I didn't do a lot of research into the matter after that, beyond what I learned naturally/at school. My focus was always on the European theater, being a Jewish child going through a morbid fixation on the Holocaust. But my opinion remained largely unchanged for a long time- that maybe, MAYBE you could excuse Hiroshima, but that Nagasaki had been a crime against humanity.

Now, a full 15 years later, I realize that neither bomb was necessary. That both were a crime against humanity. But there's a part of me, the part that was indoctrinated in the US, that whispers the excuses that my mother and grandfather offered. Because that's not just what I was taught in school, it's what my loved ones believed. It's what is shown on TV and in movies. And as long as it remains that way, the public perception of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the US will be slow to change.