KINDER'S COMMENTARY: TO THE VETERANS OF WWII: THANK YOU

I don't know about you, but I long ago had a bellyful of the revisionist historians listing all the reasons why we are guilty for having dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is interesting to note that most of these revisionists are too young to have lived through the war. Thus I would argue they are altogether lacking in the vivid historical perspective that having done so gives the World War II generation. Fortunately, on the occasion of this year's 50th anniversary of the end of that conflict and this week's 50th anniversary of V-J Day, much history has arrived that revises the revisionists. More about that shortly.

Thanks to hard-won American victory in that war and the subsequent American occupation, the Japanese are now our prosperous friends, allies and trading partners. The American occupation, led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, transformed that nation from a garrison state governed by aggressive, fascist war criminals into a peaceful, democratic member of the world community. In all the history of the world, there really is no precedent for a nation victorious in war having so treated its vanquished foe. Gen. MacArthur's successful occupation and transformation of Japanese society was an astonishingly brilliant episode in world history. To any who would dispute those claims, I answer: Show me a parallel.

I have been among those who have resisted the tendency so common among many in public life -- Dick Gephardt and Pat Buchanan come to mind -- to bash the Japanese for whatever unfairness they are guilty of in today's trade disputes. Building walls and bashing each other is no answer. I believe we need more understanding, communication, cultural exchanges and commerce between the two countries.

None of this, which I like to think of as a more enlightened approach, should blind us to the nature of the Japanese enemy confronting the civilized world between its aggressive conquest of Manchuria (1931) and their unconditional surrender 50 years ago last Monday. By the way, most Americans probably don't even know that the Japanese had occupied the entire Korean peninsula in a 35-year rein marked by casual brutality, rape, murder and utter lawlessness. In their failure to observe the internationally recognized conventions of war, this was as fierce, brutal and unrelenting a foe as the world had ever seen. It isn't just the way the Japanese fought to the death on Iwo Jima (cost in American lives: over 5,000) or Okinawa (total casualties on both sides, military and civilian: 300,000). It isn't even just the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, which entombed so many Americans who barely had a chance to begin fighting for their lives.

A partial litany of Japanese war crimes would include savagery so widespread and carefully planned and executed as to rank them as among the worst butchers in history. The rape of Nanking, China, with its 300,000 civilian casualties. The Bataan Death March, which saw routine murder of American and Filipino prisoners of war and the systematic starvation of and brutality toward the defenseless survivors. The tossing of babies into the air, gleefully bayoneting them as their mothers watched. The slaughtering of 100,000 civilian residents of Manila as MacArthur's forces landed on the archipelago in September, 1944. Today's revisionists, with their ivory-tower approach and their dubious assertions of moral equivalence, seem ignorant of the fact that every defenseless Filipino welcomed the returning allies as the liberators they unmistakably were.

But the revisionists have had some new information to answer for in 1995. This year it has been conclusively established that the Japanese were aggressively planning germ and biological warfare against their American and other enemies. The evidence is all there for anyone to see: scatter bombs filled with fleas infected with bubonic plague to destroy whole populations. Anthrax and other deadly diseases. The only question for them was the most efficient delivery mechanism. They were planning the use of these weapons on American cities. And, had they not been near defeat, the war's last days would have seen their more widespread use. As it was, they didn't get much beyond the testing of these weapons. But that testing included, we now know, their experimentation on defenseless American and other prisoners, including the actual dissection of live prisoners of war. Had an American invasion of the home islands been launched, the Japanese order had already issued: murder the 400,000 American prisoners of war.

Sir Winston Churchill has a great line from one of his wartime speeches in which he poses for his countrymen their choice: They could lose and see the world cast into "a thousand years of darkness." Or they could summon the moral courage to prevail, and the world could be led into "... broad, sunlit uplands."

Fifty years of relative peace and prosperity have validated the Churchillian eloquence. My generation has known his "broad, sunlit uplands." I thank the World War II generation.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.